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American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction.

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American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction. By Ezra Cappell. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. x + 233 pp.

After decades of critical argument about the place of Jewish American fiction in the larger canon of American literature, Ezra Cappell, a specialist in American and Jewish American literature, proposes a system of codification that situates this modern literature within an ancient tradition. Educated in the yeshiva and its methods, Cappell examines the staples of Jewish American writing through the lens of Talmudic interpretation. Just as the Talmud honors "radical rethinking, even about its foundational concepts" (2), so too does the Jewish American fiction under examination in this book celebrate "radical rethinking" through methods such as open-endedness and multiple perspectives that question the foundations of literary tradition. The deconstructive nature of both traditions is just one analogue that Cappell catalogues between the Talmud and Jewish American fiction....

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