Accidents of Influence

Norma Rosen currently teaches at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the author of the novels Joy to Levine!; Touching Evil; At the Center; John and Anzia: An American Romance; and a collection of short stories, Green.

• Foreword1. A Holocause Mentality The Holocaust and the American-Jewish NovelistSimone Weil—A Dissenting ViewThe Bird Has No Wings: Letters of Peter SchwiefertBernard Malamud and the Accidents of InfluenceThe Literature of ContemptThe Second Life of Holocaust ImageryOn T. S. Eliot: Geniuses and Anti-SemitesHunting Metaphors and Nazis"I Had the Distinct Impression Death was Jewish": E. L. DoctorowNorman Mailer's Holocaust-Poisoned JewsThe Fate of Anne Frank's DiaryJustice for Jonah, or, A Bible BartlebyMinority Writers and the American Mainstream: Telling Stories in the Houses We CreateNotes Toward a Holocaust Fiction 2. Life Notes On Living in Two CulturesWriting as a Woman and a Jew in AmericaFriday Night FeverA Women's ServiceWomen? Writers?On the Dearth of Female IntellectualsHer Price Above RubiesLow Thoughts Among the High-MindedSons and MothersBaby-MakingChild-AbuseThe World's First CropSometimes I Feel Like a Siblingless ChildAn Immoral TaleWilliam Faulkner and the Art of RuthlessnessThe Luck of the Trip 3. Celebrations "Wadja Geffa Christmas, Li'l Boy?"Reclaiming

"Norma Rosen is a first-rate writer and thinker. The Holocaust, women's consciousness, ideas of the self, literary ciriticism, multiculturalism: Rosen's topics read like a list of crucial agenda items for the last decade of the twentieth century. Rosen is a crisp writer of great probity, in whose work moral tension is taut and palpable." — Alan L. Berger, Syracuse University."What I like most is the sound of this particular human voice in the act of thinking and feeling on the most excruciating subject of our age: what was done and suffered in the Holocaust. It is interesting and impressive that this preoccupation with — this immersion in — unmanageable events is seldom of a personal or egotistical nature. It is not her own, it is her husband's and a people's suffering and loss with which Norman Rosen wrestles." — Lore Segal, University of Illinois at ChicagoThese essays stand as important reflections both on the bleakest period of modern history and on the creative artist's approach to historic phenomena. They offer an enlightening complement to the work of historians and social scientists." — S. Lillian Kremer, Kansas State University