Anxieties in the “Modern Context”: Fantasies of Change in Allegra Goodman’s Fiction

Abstract

Allegra Goodman’s fiction—two collections of short stories, Total Immersion (1989) and The Family Markowitz (1996), as well as her novels, Kaaterskill Falls (1998), and, somewhat less prominently, Paradise Park (2001)—reflects a distinct Jewish presence, one that shapes the central tension in the lives of her characters. Much of her fiction revolves around the preoccupations of middle-class, postwar American Jews and the attendant anxieties about constructing an ethos that balances what for Goodman are the two often-competing identities of “American” and “Jewish.” In this split between the two defining conditions of their lives, Goodman’s characters would seem to be deeply divided. They are divided in generational and familial terms among themselves. But they are, too, “divided selves.” All grapple to one extent or another with the place of and possibilities for Judaism in their lives. Often critical of one another, Goodman’s characters focus on Judaism as the site of their divide. Goodman’s characters are preoccupied with their place in Jewish history and collectivity, a Judaism they either embrace fervently, intellectualize into ersatz forms of cultural exchange, or deny, a denial that takes the form of flight, running from the very legacy that shapes them still. With characteristic ironic distance and understated pathos, Goodman draws from the collective memory of a distinctly Jewish narrative, “a memory, real or imagined,” to contextualize the paradoxes of con-temporary Jewish life (“One Down,” 251).