Jewish Fictions
This chapter looks at the characteristic genres in which British-Jewish writers have worked in the post-war period. Beginning with the Jewish writers of the 1950s and 1960s, the chapter considers the ways that they use the form of the realist novel to document, mythologize, or lament social mobility. The impact of the Holocaust was increasingly part of public discourse from the 1970s. Jewish writers turned to satirical or comic fiction to confront the taboos and silences associated with this history. By the 1980s, when, for many Jews, links to Jewish history had been lost, Jewish fiction drew upon a new desire to recover the past, not in geographical but in genealogical terms.