内容简介：
These essays are true to the form's definition as an attempt or experiment rather than a credo. Wohlgelernter defines the author's "excited imagination" by thoroughgoing analysis of the work's constituent parts, with particular emphasis on the author's own words and expressions. Wohlgelernter finds a passionate love of words and language forging a powerful link between Jewish and Irish literature. Both literatures engage the human struggle with life and death, virtue and weakness, success and failure, dreams and nightmares, all under the constant surveillance of tradition.Wohlgelernter divides his book into four general categories: the Holocaust, Jewish-American writers, Irish writers, and memoirs and autobiography. His chapters on Holocaust literature engage a range of literary perspectives reflected in the writings of Ladislas Fuks, Lucy Dawidowicz, Sabine Reichel, and Primo Levi. Chapters on postwar Jewish writers including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth explore the ambivalences of assimilation with encroachments of a provincial past and dissatisfactions with mainstream culture. Wohlgelernter notes how all these authors yoke street raciness and high cultural mandarin in a distinctive contribution to American prose style. A similar richness of language and preoccupation with the political and cultural claims of the past characterize chapters on the great short story writer Frank O'Connor, the playwright Brendan Behan, and the Irish-American journalist and novelist Pete Hamill.The last decades of the twentieth century have seen prolific outpouring of autobiographical writing. In the concluding section Wohlgelernter treats representative examples that amplify orreflect on the personal and historical themes encountered in Jewish and Irish fiction: assimilation, personal ambition, intermarriage, and political allegiance. He reviews Norman Podhoretz, Calvin Trillin, James McBride, Ari Goldman, and Howard Shack. Wohlgelernter's emphasis on the timeless, recurring themes of literature is matched by a lucidity of style and soundness of method that yield what is central to all criticism, namely insight. Jewish Writers/Irish Writers will be of interest to literary scholars, Jewish studies specialists, and cultural historians.