The Jewishness of the contemporary gentile writer: Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man.

What is a Jewish book? I invariably begin my undergraduate class on Jewish American Literature by broaching this conundrum. Does any book written by a Jew qualify? No way. Even my most glassy-eyed sophomores reject this hopelessly baggy definition. Herman Wouk, after all, is a Jew (an Orthodox Jew to boot) but, other than a few exceptions, his sweeping historical novels hardly engage Jewish characters or concerns. The flip-side of the question, however, has proven far more vexing, both for my students and for me. That is, what to do about a novel written by a non-Jew that does forcefully engage Jewish characters and concerns?

Invariably, half of my students will claim that it shouldn't make a difference whether the writer is Jewish or not, only whether the work is Jewish. The other half wriggle uncomfortably in their seats while their peers articulate this argument. These are usually Jewish students--those who feel their identities somehow encroached upon by such literary ecumenicism. One's Jewishness, to their mind, should count for something, shouldn't it? Isn't there such a thing as the Jewish imagination? If a non-Jew can access this voice and vision, then, well, what's the point? This is usually when I, in effect, punt and move on to less problematic issues (paper due dates, my attendance policy, etc.). "Well," I'll say, "we're obviously not going to answer this question today. The important thing is that we recognize the controversy and revisit it."

We never do.

I have managed, thus, to project an air of professorial evenhandedness, to remain, at least ostensibly, above the fray. My syllabus tells a different story. While it has undergone extensive revisions over the past ten years--the inclusion of additional works of poetry, a decreasing emphasis on the celebrated immigrant and post-immigrant generation of fiction writers, and more class hours devoted to contemporary writers such as Thane Rosenbaum, Dara Horn, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein et. al.--nary a writer on my many syllabi would have much of a problem meeting the criteria of Israel's Law of Return. I've never taught, say, John Updike or William Styron or Gish Jen, gentile writers who have written some of these arguably "Jewish" books. Which is simply to say that through my syllabi--those most politicized and polemical documents of any literature course--I have clearly sided with the defenders of the faith, that second cohort of students uncomfortable with the idea of considering non-Jews as legitimate creators of Jewish books.

If I have been guilty of an intellectually untenable anxiety of encroachment, I am in good company. In one of her early essays, "Bech, Passing," Cynthia Ozick delivers a blistering attack on Bech, A Book (1970), John Updike's first novelistic foray onto Jewish territory. "[I]t is already well-known that John Updike is a crypto-Christian, a reverse Marrano celebrating the Body of Jesus while hidden inside a bathing suit," Ozick notes early in her essay, outing Updike in a sense, fairly stripping him of his credentials (115). In the essay, Ozick painstakingly exposes Updike's Jewish protagonist as the "failure of invention" that she takes him to be (115). In creating Bech, Ozick argues, Updike had derivatively duplicated the commercially viable yet, to her mind, already shopworn formula for the ethnic Jewish novel. Perhaps most compellingly, she constructs a reductive outline of Bech: A Book, replete with the predictable categories of Vocabulary, Family, Historical References, Nose, Hair, and Sex to emulate the reductiveness of the novel itself. "Being a Jew," Ozick declares toward the end of the essay, "is something more than being an alienated marginal sensibility with kinky hair" (123).

What, exactly, we might ask, is it to be a Jew? What is a Jewish text, and why is it important to establish a working definition in the first place? What accounts for Ozick's apparent anxiety? To address these questions--and to situate Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man within this conversation--it might be useful to consider briefly the thematic trajectory of the Jewish novel in America over the last fifty years or so. The post-immigrant writers responsible for bringing a degree of prominence to the Jewish novel in the 1950s and 1960s (often referred to as the Golden Age of the Jewish American novel), did so at least partly by creating protagonists with whom the mainstream reading public could identify. While these characters, like their authors, were nominally Jewish and carried with them certain unmistakable ethnic markers (their yiddishisms, their semitic features, etc), their more salient qualities of alienation and marginality were qualities with which non-Jews could readily identify. That is, readers could empathize viscerally with the saintly suffering of Bernard Malamud's Morris Bober, a grocer struggling against the twin ravages of the Depression and sheer age; Moses Herzog's existential debates with the ghosts of Heidegger and Nietzsche might have eluded several readers, but his domestic crises and his painful childhood memories resonated with Jewish and Gentile readers alike, as did the sexual angst of Roth's Alexander Portnoy, emblematic of the cultural turbulence of the post-Vietnam era. The protagonists of Bellow, Roth, and Malamud were introspective, often brainy--especially Bellow's protagonists--but they were anything but parochial. If not always worldly (as in the case of Malamud's grocers and bakers), they were clearly out in the world, subject to the slings and arrows of the broader society and grappling to establish their place in it. "I am an American, Chicago born," Augie March claims audaciously to begin Bellow's picaresque and ambitious third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (3).

To be sure, Jewish American writers had something of a good run in the 1950s and 1960s, owing to various factors (not least of all the prodigious artistic talent of individual Jewish writers of this era). But as Jews gained material success and cultural confidence in America, the post-immigrant ethos and artistic sensibility of cultural marginality and alienation naturally waned, as did the cultural currency of such Jewish novels. Simply put, the genre, as it had existed, had ceased to feel fresh. Works that were plainly derivative of Bellow, Roth, and Malamud (written by Jews and non-Jews alike) continued to appear, and seemed increasingly hackneyed, as Ozick and others recognized. All of which caused several critics--most notably Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler--to sound the death knell of the Jewish novel in America. As the immigrant experience faded from memory, Howe argued, the Jewish novel would "suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning-out of materials and memories" (16). One thing was for certain: if the Jewish novel in America were to survive, it would have to change.

Ozick, more volubly than any of her peers, called for such a change explicitly in a series of early essays (most notably in "Toward a New Yiddish," first published in 1970) and tacitly in her own early fiction. Essentially, she called for a new literature actively engaged with Judaic concerns and actively exerting a Judaic--or "liturgical," in her words--vision to supplant what she decried as mere ethnic fiction. If Jewish writing were to last, Ozick believed, if it were to make a contribution, it would have to be fiercely, implacably Judaic. "If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far," she argued. "But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all" (177). To her credit, Ozick inspired (or at the very least anticipated) a new wave of Jewish writers, who followed her lead to create post-assimilated protagonists--observant Jews often living in insular Orthodox communities--overtly grappling with issues of Jewish history and theology. Biblical narratives, in fact, increasingly informed the narrative are of these contemporary works. The novels and stories by Tova Reich, Allegra Goodman, Tova Mirvis, Nathan Englander, Ehud Havazelet, Steve Stern, Melvin Bukiet, Thane Rosenbaum, Dara Horn, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and the work of countless other contemporary Jewish writers, all owe a debt to Ozick's brazenly unapologetic artistic exploration of the second commandment in her early story collection, The Pagan Rabbi, and Other Stories (1971).

This literary revolution, which Ozick heralded in the 1970s and 1980s, has been aptly described by many critics--invoking the decidedly Judaic concept of t'shuva--as a Jewish literary movement of return. The Jewish magazine Tikkun, in fact, published a symposium entitled "The Jewish Literary Revival" in the Nov/Dec 1997 issue of the magazine, which focused, the magazine claimed, upon the "willingness of a new generation of writers to address distinctively Jewish themes." The revolution continues apace today. "It does appear," Mark Krupnick recently noted, "that Cynthia Ozick's program for Jewish writing has been in the process of being carried out" (304). While I have joined the strong majority of Jewish book critics to celebrate this artistic mode of literary retrieval, which has done much to revitalize the Jewish novel, it seems increasingly to me that the realm of Jewish letters has suffered a concomitant loss with the advent of these ever more "Jewish" Jewish novels. Specifically, as Jewish novelists look increasingly inward for their inspiration, their protagonists increasingly seem in retreat from the larger, secular society--a realm about which their Jewish predecessors like Moses Herzog and Augie March and S. Levin and Nathan Zuckerman had so much, and so much of value, to say. Bellow, Roth, and Malamud may not have created many Orthodox Jewish characters, but they created fully-realized Jewish characters nonetheless, characters beset by traumas particular to their experiences as Jews at specific points in history, which brings us closer to the more inclusive definition of Jewish literature that I advocate. They were novelists who fixed their eyes on the broad, usually urban, cultural scene, and brought the news to an eclectic readership. Most young contemporary Jewish writers these days have little or nothing to say about this realm and have, thus, ceased to seem central to our cultural conversation.

Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, to my mind, marks a welcome return of the Jewish novel actively engaged with the pressing cultural crises of our day, specifically the complexities involved in claiming a viable identity in our increasingly multiethnic, multiracial, and transnational world. Smith burst upon the scene in 2000 with the publication of her first novel, White Teeth, which won a plethora of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. The daughter of a white English father and a black mother originally from Jamaica, Smith set out, in this very first novel, to interrogate the problematics of contemporary identity formation, as a sampling of the reviews of White Teeth suggests. It is a "multicultural, multiethnic, somewhat zany novel" (Hoover 1436), "a restless hybrid of voices, tones and textures" (Quinn 7), "a sprawling, polyvoiced comedy about the struggles of second-generation immigrants in a recognisable multicultural London" (Cowley 57).

As early as White Teeth Smith recognized the fruitfulness of creating Jewish characters, and imagining what Jewishness represents, to explore the nature of "Englishness," as Sander Gilman argues in a recent article. In The Autograph Man, however, Jewishness moves from the periphery to the center. The novel, in short, explores the peregrinations of its half-Jewish, half-Chinese protagonist, Alex-Li Tandem, an autograph collector, as he flits between the multicultural metropolises of London and New York to secure the rare and coveted autograph of a now aged Hollywood starlet, Kitty Alexander, and, more importantly, as he attempts to achieve some primal point of balance in his vertiginous romantic and spiritual life. Through Tandem's travails, Smith, as I have suggested, explores the difficulty of claiming a viable identity given the increasing slipperiness of racial, ethnic, religious, and class boundaries.

The opening of The Autograph Man betrays Smith's sensitivity toward her subject position as a gentile writer of an arguably Jewish text. Perhaps anticipating the quagmire in The Autograph Man, she quotes at length Lenny Bruce's famous Jewish/Goyish shtick to open her novel, which begins, "Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish." The extended rift, of course, defines Jewishness not along inviolate racial or even religious lines, but as a sensibility, both permeable and dynamic. Permeable enough, that is, for Ray Charles to opt in to Jewishness, while Eddie Cantor, according to Bruce, had clearly opted out. Surely, then, a non-Jewish writer like Smith, the logic goes, can opt to write a Jewish book. Just in case we were unsure of this implicit argument, Alex-Li Tandem, we discover early on, has been working on an encyclopedic manuscript, Jewishness and Goyishness, replete with "essays and explanations, footnotes, marginalia"; and, one of the distinctions he pursues in the book, naturally, are "Jewish books (often not written by Jews)," and "Goyish books (often not written by Goys)" (75, 77). (1)

To substantiate Tandem's hypothetical claim vis-a-vis The Autograph Man, specifically, one could cite its plethora of Jewish qualities: the half-Jewish Tandem and his distinctively and uniquely Jewish friends, variably engaged with Talmudic and Mystical Judaic thought, the palpable effects of the Holocaust on Tandem's psyche, the significant role of the Kaddish in the narrative, Smith's subtle allusions to classic Jewish novels ... the list goes on and on. Cataloguing the Jewish qualities of the novel to make a case for its inclusion in the Jewish canon, however, is to descend into absurdities, absurdities that we do not impose upon works written by authors with less impeachable Jewish pedigrees. Indeed, the pressing point to be made about The Autograph Man is not so much that it is a Jewish novel (it clearly is), but that it is a profoundly important Jewish novel, and that our benign neglect of this particular Jewish novel written by a non-Jew simply will not do. For to allow The Autograph Man to slip our critical nets would be to lose the most thoughtful recent artistic exploration of the problematics of Jewish identity in our broader post-ethnic contemporary culture.

The novel opens with an extended Prologue as Tandem's mother encourages her husband to take their twelve-year-old son, prone to moping around the house, to a wrestling match. She would like to see their introverted son "going up to the world, going into it, and, you know, sort of engaging it, getting that vital interplay ..." (5). Tragically, the father suffers a stroke and dies at the carnivalesque event, all of which reinforces Tandem's depressive, reclusive inclinations. Smith flashes forward to begin the novel proper as we encounter Tandem as a young adult experiencing great difficulty mustering up the courage to rise from his bed and face the world. "'You're either for me or against me,' thought Alex-Li Tandem, referring to the daylight and, more generally, to the day.... He saw no purpose in leaving his bed for a day that was against him from the get-go" (39). Importantly, Tandem does rise from his bed, takes physical stock of himself, and goes up and into the world, onto the streets of London and his hometown suburb of Mountjoy, and, later, onto the streets of New York and Brooklyn in search of the elusive Kitty Alexander. One of Tandem's friends, in fact, an insurance broker, envies him because he's "in the world, with things" (279).

The picaresque quality of the novel, indeed, hearkens back to Bellow's finest novels, and Smith, perhaps in homage, makes a rather pointed allusion in the novel to the first line of Bellow's Herzog (1964), "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog" (1). The dizzying cultural landscape with which Tandem must reckon, however, differs markedly from Herzog's Chicago, which is what makes The Autograph Man such a flesh contribution. Whereas Herzog, suffering a personal crisis, could fall back on memories of a culturally rich, if materially poor, Jewish upbringing on Napolean Street in Montreal, Tandem's multiracial identity (and the identities of an increasing multitude, Smith suggests) is far more attenuated. His father largely jettisons his Chinese heritage when he marries Tandem's mother, Sarah Hoffman, and even Tandem's identification with Judaism and Jewishness seems second-hand, owing largely to the ravages of the Holocaust. His knowledge of his extended family on his mother's side is derived wholly from "Trinkets and photographs and facts" that his mother delivers to him in a box (78). "Their heads are pitched at various melancholy angles," Tandem dolefully observes as he gazes upon one of these photographs. "Only their lean Afghan hound looks at the camera, as if he knows the future secret of their terrible deaths, the location and order" (79). The eradication of Tandem's extended Jewish family, and the eradication of Jews in the Holocaust, generally, accounts for his difficulty in writing the Jewish half of his manuscript, Jewishness and Goyishhess. "In the book, as in his life, Jewishness was seeping away," he laments (78).

Interestingly, the slipperiness of Tandem's cultural identity reflects the increasing fluidity of racial and ethnic boundaries in contemporary society at large, a fluidity which belies Horace Kallen's earlier multicultural model of cultural pluralism, which he famously invented and defined in his landmark book, Culture and Democracy in the United States. Studies in the Group Psychology of the American People (1924). As David Biale has argued, "The problem with identity politics is that it sees categories like race and ethnicity as static and essential: we are nothing more than who are grandparents were, as Kallen's most extreme formulation had it" (29-30). A post-ethnic construct of identity increasingly holds sway, according to Biale, given a growing multiracial and multiethnic citizenry and our complementary vision that races and ethnicities, in any case, were never as "pure" as we had once believed. It is possible today, Biale notes, for a "multiracial or multiethnic person to identify at one and the same time as both Irish and Italian, or both black and white, or even Jew and Christian.... one can imagine multiple identities held simultaneously and chosen as much as inherited" (30). While Biale and others acknowledge that ongoing prejudices restrict the ability for some individuals to "choose" their identities (a reality which Smith illustrates, as well, through her depiction of the antiblack racism that confronts Honey Richardson, an infamous former prostitute turned autograph collector), we do seem to be in the midst of a paradigm shift regarding the politics of identity, one in which terms such as black, white, minority, majority, and mainstream seem increasingly obsolete, or at least problematic. Indeed, this emergent post-ethnic construct of identity challenges earlier binary configurations of race--on which, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of "double consciousness" is predicated--aligning itself more closely with Gloria Anzaldua's "mestiza consciousness," which affirms the productivity of multiple and ambiguous cultural identities (Anzaldua 79).

Social theorists, of course, are adept at charting the broad social changes limned above. Evoking the new burdens that such changes impose upon the interior lives of those with most at stake, however, is decidedly beyond the purview of academics. This is where novelists--and, in this case, Zadie Smith--come in. For some individuals, Smith suggests, the new post-ethnic possibilities of contemporary society prove empowering. Consider Tandem's reflections upon the ease with which his Black Jewish friend, Adam Jacobs, adopts and eschews identities:

   Handsome, bright, enlightened, thin-what happened to that fat weird
   freak Black Jew kid? Who lurched from one ill-fitting "identity" to
   another every summer, going through hippiedom, grunge, gangsta
   lite, various roots-isms (Ebonics, Repatriation, Rastafarianism),
   Anglophilia, Americanization, afros, straightened, corn-rowed,
   shaved, baggy jeans, tight jeans, white girls, black girls, Jew
   girls, goy girls, conservatism, Conservatism, socialism, anarchism,
   partying, drugging, hermiting, schizing, rehabbing--how did he get
   from there to this? How did he get so happy? (Smith 109)

As heady as the post-ethnic possibilities may be for Adam (who finally adopts the values of Jewish mysticism as an ethos), realizing a viable identity at the end of the day is hardly unproblematic for other multiracial individuals, like Tandem. He would rather eschew all potential categories of identity. "His instinct," Smith writes, "was to detest grouping of all kinds--social, racial, national or political; he had never joined so much as a swimming club" (141). Yet, as Tandem learns, one must at the very least reckon with the often bewildering post-ethnic landscape of Smith's contemporary London and New York. The slipperiness of identities complicates some of Tandem's most quotidian human encounters, as Smith illustrates during several comic scenes in The Autograph Man. It perplexes Tandem, for example, that his black "Milk Operative," Marvin, echoes his statements in falsetto. He wonders, in particular, if he seems effeminate "to black men or just to Marvin in particular," so consults Adam Jacobs, who tells him that he's too bulky and hairy to be effeminate. "And he does that to me too, anyway. And I'm the black guy," Jacobs continues, then speculates, "I think it's probably more of a class thing" (45).

Tandem's most essential wish is to "be a person of substance himself' (151). One senses, however, that his inability to accept life on its own terms impedes him from achieving what we might call, in Judaic terms, this covenanted existence. Adam, a student of Kabbalah, encourages Tandem to "deal with things as they are" (149). Through the course of the novel, Tandem makes significant progress. First, he recognizes that Lenny Bruce's rigid categories of Jewish and Goyish cannot accommodate--cannot make sense of, in any substantive way--the host of complex individuals, ideas, and items that he encounters each day. "Life is not just symbol, Jewish or goyish. Life is more than just a Chinese puzzle. Not everything fits" (151). While Bruce's rift allows for a type of post-ethnic identity choice (or "consent," to use Werner Sollors's terminology), Smith, through her protagonist, ultimately rejects the model for its reductiveness. Beyond the sheer slipperiness of Tandem's racial and ethnic identity, his inability to cope with his father's early death represents the greatest obstacle preventing him from realizing a life of substance. Tandem's unresolved grief, for example, precludes him from achieving meaningful relationships with others, including his mother, Sarah, and Esther Jacobs, his girlfriend (and Adam's sister) to whom he cannot fully commit. It is for this reason that his closest friends, Adam Jacobs and Mark Rubinfine, a rabbi, press him throughout the novel to observe his father's upcoming yahrzeit, a tradition which forces mourners to enter the public sphere on the anniversary of their loved one's death by reciting the Kaddish with a minyan of at least ten adult Jews. Smith's novel, indeed, might be seen as an extended and eloquent meditation on grief, similar in spirit to Leon Wieseltier's nonfiction book, Kaddish (1998), to which Smith acknowledges a debt.

Tandem's self-destructive refusal to accept the inexorable mutability of life--his father's death representing the most painful embodiment of this law--is everywhere evident in The Autograph Man. Tandem not only wishes to retrieve the irretrievable (his father, his additional significant dead from the Hoffman side of his family, etc.), he wishes for stasis, which is why he considers any change to his suburban Mountjoy neighborhood--the disappearance, say, of Levinsky's Bakery--a tragedy. The scrupulous care Tandem takes to replicate his Mountjoy home when he travels anywhere, in this case to New York, also illustrates his impossible desire to arrest both time and place. "The only way he could travel this kind of distance," Smith writes, "was to make wherever he went as much like Mountjoy as possible. To this end, when he packed to leave, he took what everybody takes--clothes and essentials-but he also placed his extended arm upon his desk and swept whatever was there into a carrier bag, which he emptied now onto his hotel bed with the intention of spreading the items around the place.... Receipts, bills, unread books with snapped spines, pushpins, Post-Its" (194). Tandem, to be sure, becomes a collector of vintage autographs--an autograph man--in no small part to preserve something essential in a world in which Jewishness, and so much else, constantly "seeps away" (to use his own terminology). He comes to realize in New York, however, the futility of such efforts to stave off change and, ultimately, death. Kitty Alexander, whom he meets and befriends, is now an elderly woman leading a rather banal existence; people, Tandem learns, cannot be preserved "like the swirl of color in a marble" (227). Yet, "they just keep on collecting!" Tandem marvels at his competitors. "As if the world could be saved this way! As if impermanence were not the golden rule! And can I get Death's autograph, too? Have you got a plastic sheath for that, Mr. Autograph Man?" (207).

Despite Tandem's gains through the course of the novel, the death question continues to plague him upon his return to London, and he still resists his friends' plans for his father's upcoming yahrzeit. When one of Rubinfine's colleagues, Rabbi Burston, encourages Tandem to embrace the vision of the Kaddish-"Instead of Cursing God for our loss, we rise and praise him.... We gave, he took away"--Tandem replies glumly, "But I don't. I don't accept it" (337). Too many of our actions and reactions today, Tandem recognizes, utterly lack authenticity, owing largely to the ubiquity of media images. As he covertly tails a man, for example, whom he hopes will lead him to Kitty Alexander, he reflects, "It is impossible these days to follow a man or quit a job without an encyclopedia of cinematic gestures crowding you out" (225). The same principle, Tandem discovers, obtains for any number of his human interactions, especially with regard to his romantic entanglements. Tandem cannot bear to have his father's yahrzeit likewise reduced to charade. "To me," he confesses to Adam of the Kaddish, "it's just a gesture, you know? Nothing more" (340). Tandem, thus, performs a secular Kaddish of sorts, "without gesture or formality," which takes the shape of a post-inebriated regurgitation into his hands (325).

Importantly, however, Tandem participates in a Judaic Kaddish to close the novel. An epigram to these final few pages instructively implies that gestures, perhaps, just might be enough to sustain us in the end. What Smith means to suggest, I believe, is that for her grief-stricken protagonist, rising from bed on the anniversary of his father's death, walking to synagogue, joining a minyan of fellow Jews, and reciting the Kaddish is a meaningful (rather than a cinematic) gesture--an act of will, if not faith, that transcends the realm of cliche to which so many of our daily actions have been reduced. In Alex-Li Tandem, Smith creates a fully-realized Jewish character, one beset by traumas particular to his experience as a Jew at a specific point in history, and one who ultimately relies upon his Judaic legacy, both inherited and adopted, to grapple with these traumas.

One might legitimately question whether fretting over the multiethnic categorization of Smith's novel, or any novel, represents a constructive avenue for our scholarly efforts. I would only argue that as long as scholars and laypersons seek out writing with certain multiethnic designations, as long as secondary education teachers and university instructors organize courses of study around these rubrics, and as long as journals, like MELUS, undertake to study certain works (and, by implication, not to study other works) that adhere to these rubrics, it will be continually important to revisit and revise our definitions of these categories. With regard to JewishAmerican fiction, specifically, the bar determining what "counts" as Jewish, as I have already suggested, continues subtly to rise with the advent of ever more theologically informed work. My reading of Smith's The Autograph Man, I hope, challenges this critical tendency to narrow our definition of the genre.

Interestingly, critics of Jewish literature a generation ago worried about the pervasive Christological vision of celebrated "Jewish" writers, such as Bernard Malamud and Henry Roth. As Morris Dickstein recently noted of this generation of Jewish writers, "They brought real Jews into modern American literature but left Judaism out" (34). Fiedler, in fact, wrote an essay entitled, "The Christian-ness of the Jewish-American Writer." Smith's The Autograph Man just might signify the beginning of a trend toward the converse, toward the Jewishness of an increasing number of gentile writers. Given the "instability and multiplicity of Jewish identity," as Biale has noted, Jews are uniquely and tenuously positioned somewhere in between our increasingly problematic and contested categories of racial and ethnic identification (31). Small wonder, then, that Smith creates a Jewish protagonist to interrogate these increasingly problematic categories. More non-Jewish writers, I suspect, might begin to create Jewish characters to evoke our "complicated world of multiple identities" (Brettschneider 7). (2) This increased competition may pose a problem for individual Jewish writers struggling to be heard, but such a trend, in my view, can only invigorate the realm of Jewish books.

Beyond the Jewish question, The Autograph Man poses additional intriguing questions for critics and scholars of multiethnic literatures. We might explore, for example, whether or to what extent Smith's novel--which so forcefully scrutinizes the leveling force of Hollywood upon our global culture and which so vividly evokes the gritty streets of Roebling Heights in Brooklyn--might be considered "American." While we're at it, we might also revisit the essentialist assumptions that currently inform our definitions of African American, Latino/a, American Indian, and Asian American literatures. Reading Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) in an African American literature course alongside, say, Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000)--like reading Bellow's Herzog in a Jewish American literature course alongside Smith's The Autograph Man--just might encourage students to begin their own interrogation of and negotiations with the complex multicultural world to which they belong.

Notes

(1.) Ross's Oreo (1974) deserves mention here as a precursor to Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man. Ross, like Smith, challenges essentialist notions of cultural identity through creating a half-black, half-Jewish protagonist, who energetically, and alternatively, claims and rejects linguistic patterns and values of two minority cultures. As Mullen argues in her Foreword to the novel, "More eccentric than Afrocentric, Ross's novel calls attention to hybridity rather than the racial or cultural purity of African Americans" (xiii). Ross, like Smith, also demonstrates an apparent self-consciousness about her subject position as a non-Jew writing an arguably Jewish book through her copious use of Yiddish and Jewish literary and cultural references throughout the text.

(2.) Works by non-Jewish writers, which precede Smith's The Autograph Man and examine the instability and multiplicity of contemporary identities through the prism of Jewishness, include, most notably, Ross's Oreo (1974) and Senna's Caucasia (1998). See also Walker's memoir, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001).

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking, 1953.

--. Herzog. New York: Viking, 1964.

Biale, David. "The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity." Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Ed. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. Berkeley CA: U of California P, 1998. 17-33.

Brettschneider, Marla. "Multiculturalism, Jews, and Democracy: Situating the Discussion." Introduction to The Narrow Bridge." Jewish Views on Multiculturalism. Ed. Marla Brettschneider. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996. 1-24.

Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. New York: Harper, 1917.

Cowley, Jason. "The Tiger Woods of Literature." New Statesman 29 January 2001: 57.

Dickstein, Morris. "Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing." Tikkun 12.6 (1997): 33-36.

DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon, 1965. 207-389.

Fiedler, Leslie. "The Christian-ness of the Jewish-American Writer." Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991. 59-71.

Gilman, Sander L. "'We're Not Jews': Imagining Jewish History and Jewish Bodies in Contemporary Multicultural Literature." Modern Judaism 23.2 (2003): 126-55.

Hoover, Denise. "White Teeth." Booklist 96.5 1 April 2000: 1436.

Howe, Irving. Introduction to Jewish American Stories. Ed. Irving Howe. New York: NAL Penguin, 1977. 1-17.

Kallen, Horace. Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American People. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924.

Krupnick, Mark. "Jewish-American Literature." New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage. Ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1996. 295-308.

Mullen, Harryette. Foreword. Oreo. By Fran Ross. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2000. xi-xxviii.

Oates, Joyce Carol. The Tattooed Girl New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2003.

Ozick, Cynthia. "Bech, Passing." Art & Ardor. New York: Knopf, 1983. 11429.

--. "Literature and the Politics of Sex: A Dissent." Art & Ardor. New York: Knopf, 1983. 284-90.

--. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1971.

--. "Toward a New Yiddish." Art & Ardor. New York: Knopf, 1983. 154-77.

Quinn, Anthony. "The New England." The New York Times Book Review 30 April 2000:7

Ross, Fran. Oreo. 1974. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2000.

Roth, Henry. Call it Sleep. New York: Ballou, 1934.

Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Senna, Danzy. Caucasia. New York: Riverhead, 1998.

Smith, Zadie. The Autograph Man. 2002. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Updike, John. Bech: A Book. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Walker, Rebecca. Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. New York: Riverhead, 2001.

Wieseltier, Leon. Kaddish. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

Yezierska, Anzia. Hungry Hearts. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920.

Andrew Furman

Florida Atlantic University