One of the more interesting questions about Jewish culture after October 7 is: What will the future of American Jewish fiction look like? It will be particularly interesting to see how Israel is portrayed in the imaginations of Jewish writers of the Diaspora.
Conveniently, two recent books, both just named finalists at next month’s National Jewish Book Awards, can shed some light on the topic. The best way to describe Israel in American fiction before October 7 is by conjuring the film trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Coined by Nathan Rabin in 2007, the term refers to the female character who “exists solely… to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
American Jewish novelists have just gone through a period in which Israel appears as the national version of this archetype: Call it the Manic Pixie Dream Country. In the books, American Jews are assimilated and spiritually adrift, while their Israeli counterparts are tan and fearless. The Americans are outwardly dismissive of the Israeli machismo but inwardly captivated by it. The Diaspora Jew and the New Sabra look at each other the way one imagines the Flintstones and the Jetsons might, as if their co-presence represents some kind of tear in the fabric of the universe. And if the American characters end up in Israel, it is at the end of a redemption arc, a moment of salvation and fulfillment.
In the most extreme versions, the plot involves Israel’s literal destruction, as if a non-Israeli Jewish future can only be imagined if there is no Israel, so strong is the Jewish state’s gravitational pull. As the novelist David Bezmozgis once said: “The Jewish future is to be found in Israel. The Jewish past in Europe. Where in this equation is North America?”
The apotheosis of this genre is, unfortunately, Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2016 novel Here I Am, an absolute chore of a book. In it, an earthquake hits the Middle East, devastates Israel and leads to a mass invasion of it by regional powers. Even with Israel on the edge of the abyss, the U.S.-based Jewish family remains unable to find its own identity. (Like many of the books in this genre, it owes something of a debt to Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.)
A much better version of the disaster storyline plays out in 2024’s Next Stop, by Benjamin Resnick, in which a supernatural phenomenon that makes people disappear also makes Israel disappear. The Jews are blamed for the anomaly and in the U.S. they are herded into ghettos.
The Manic Pixie Dream Country version of Israel turns up in one form or another in Bethany Ball’s 2017 novel What To Do About the Solomons, in which Israelis leave for America’s greener pastures, get in trouble, and go scrambling back. It’s there in 2018’s The Family Tabor, by Cherise Wolas, in which secular American Jews finally accept the inevitability of Israel once it seems too late to save them.
Nathan Englander gave readers a version of this Israel the following year in Kaddish.com, a strange but endearing tale of absolution, Start-Up Nation-style. In 2023 there was Hope by Andrew Ridker, which is reportedly being adapted by Noah Baumbach into a series for A24—a fascinating test of whether Israel-related subplots can survive in a post-October 7 entertainment industry.
Can American Jewry, especially its more secular creative class, still imagine Israel as some kind of judgmental but beautiful savior? One of this year’s shortlisted novels for the Jewish Book Awards suggests the answer is, surprisingly, yes.
The plot of Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation, by Sarah Yahm, takes place well before October 7, so in some ways the question is not fully confronted. But it is notable that this book is an expression of nostalgia—it begins in the 1970s—and that nostalgia includes Israel.
The book is about a family in which the women pass down a genetic disease that begins to disable them in middle age and leads to an early, undignified death. It is also one of the funniest books in years. The disease is meant to be understood as a Jewish inheritance, and the book’s humor is quintessentially Jewish; at one point the family of three does a riff on the classic Lenny Bruce bit about things being naturally Jewish or Goyish, this time with condiments. The plot is built around the disruption caused by the protagonist’s mother’s decision to run away to a relative in Israel so her daughter won’t have to watch her die as she watched her own mother die. The burial draws her husband and daughter to Israel, the latter of whom decides that in the game of “Jewish or Goyish,” the state of Israel is extremely Goyish.
Unfinished Acts is essentially a comic novel about pain and death, crushingly sad and uproariously funny. And it strikes me as deeply significant that this picture of American Jewish life is so faithful to its subject that Israel plays its assigned role yet again, like a relative always included in family photos.
What’s interesting is that Unfinished Acts will be competing at the book awards against a remarkable Holocaust novel that does not treat its subject in conventional ways. 33 Place Brugmann, by the Wisconsin-based Alice Austen, is a portrait of an apartment building in Brussels and how its residents—some Jewish, some not—navigate the Nazi occupation. Nazis are spoken of openly in the book, and so is the resistance. But the atrocities, the concentration camps—these are out of the frame. The characters acknowledge this. “We don’t speak about it. What’s happening,” a father who has fled to Scotland says to his son who has joined the Royal Air Force. “We can’t,” the son responds. The father asks: “Why on earth not?” His son’s answer: “We don’t need to talk about it. We’re in it.”
Only the Nazis and their toadies are portrayed as one-dimensional. Everyone else is fully alive. The novel is a striking portrayal of a society as it is slowly leeched of the social bonds on which it is constructed, but oddly optimistic in how many of the characters try to hold onto those fading social bonds with all their strength. The Jews also have a bit of a welcome edge to them. When a shopkeeper won’t let a Jewish woman redeem her father’s rations for him so she can spare him the trip, she snaps: “When this is over, and it will be over, we will remember everything.”
Perhaps that is the confidence with which the Jewish imagination will emerge from the latest war. Whatever this is, at some point it will be over. And we’ll still be here.
