Toward A New Utopia: A Study Of The Novels By Saul Bellow,Bernard Malamud,and Cynthia Ozick

Jewish-American literature is an inalienable and important part of American literature. Jewish-American writers, especially those who publish after the 1950s, dazzle readers and critics with their amazing achievement and become one of the focuses of interest and attention. They carry off important national and international prizes. What's more important, they write not exclusively for a certain ethnic group, but for all of humanity in modern life. They depict the suffering, marginality, victimization, alienation, and redemption of common people under modern conditions.Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Cynthia Ozick are among those who are most noteworthy. Through a description of the experiences of the second generation American Jews to which they belong and through a discussion of their novels, the purpose of this dissertation is to find out how they resort to the essence of both the Jewish and American dominant cultures in order to search for a new Utopia as a remedy to the problems of the American society.By the 1950s and 1960s, the assimilation process had made great changes to the mind and concerns of the second generation American Jews, especially the writers as artists. In cultural assimilation, American Jews had sufficiently absorbed American dominant values and democratic principles and their adherence to Judaism, Jewish cultural values and behavioral patterns had decreased to the so-called "symbolic Judaism''. In structural assimilation, so many years of efforts had led most American Jews to a middle-class status as the professionals and they were socially, economically and politically comfortable compared with the previous generation. As a result, changes occurred to their attitudes to the identity issue. As far as the educated and middle-class American Jews are concerned, they believe themselves to be first of all Americans, and then Jewish, and so their Jewishness has decreased to the comfortable minimum. Since they are not totally exempt from family and educational influences from the Jewish culture and tradition, surely they are concerned with affairs associated with Jews, but they are more concerned with American issues. This is the case especially with the Jewish-American writers. They touch on typically Jewish questions, such as Jewish assimilation, identity problems, and marginality, but such themes are endowed with more universalistic values than ethnic importance.As they are Americans with a sense of Jewishness, Bellow, Malamud, and Ozick devote their attention in their novels to the problems in the general American society, but their Jewish influence endows them with a strong awareness of suffering and offers them archetypal perspectives in explaining people's sufferings in modern American society. Although suffering is common to all peoples alike, the long history of suffering in exile and Diaspora in Jewish culture makes it possible that the ideas of suffering as expressed by Bellow, Malamud, and Ozick can be comprehensive enough to speak for all humanity.First of all, they disclose that people suffer from the disillusionment of the United States as the model of democracy, which is part of the American Dream. TheyAdventures of Augie March and alludes to the .fact that the hopes that American intellectuals put on the Soviet Union model during the 1930s and 1940s failed the intellectual expectations. He also proves in To Jerusalem and Back that the nation-state of Israel is a territorial home for the world Jewry to find security in rather than an ideal land. In addition, Ozick makes Puttermesser try to build a Utopia through civic uprightness in The Puttermesser Papers, and Malamud has Cohn building an ordered world that is based on reason and intellect and exempt from all evils of the modern world in God's Grace. But both Utopias end in failure because of the destructive forces of unbridled human desires. In fact, as Ozick demonstrates, the bliss of the Paradise can only be imagined in the afterlife where desires are moderate, satiable and well balanced with intellect and...