Well there goes my idea then

Because someone else beat me to it:

Recent Columbia MFA grad Elisa Albert's WHEN YOU SAY YOU'RE A JEW, a short story collection that details with black humor the modern-day dilemmas of disaffected Jewish women, for publication in summer 2006, and an untitled novel, for publication in 2007, to Maris Kreizman at Free Press, in a pre-empt, by Jennifer Lyons at Writers House (NA).

All kidding aside, this is a collection I'm certainly looking forward to. Albert's earlier work includes a story published in Pindeldyboz, an essay about her then-upcoming nuptials for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles,  and an essay featured in BODY OUTLAWS, a collection focusing on image issues.

Comments

[Alina Adams]

This is going to sound snotty and I'm really not trying to be... I'm more confused. But all this navel gazing about Judaism... When my parents were growing up in the Soviet Union under Stalin, I just can't imagine them worrying too much that the worse reaction to someone learning they were a Jew would fill them with a sense of being disaffected. American Jews have it easier in the 21st Century than Jews have ever had it anywhere at anytime. Why all the angst, black humor or not?

[Sarah]

I think it's an absolute vs. relative concept. Jews in the Soviet Union worried about survival and persecution -- it didn't matter how "Jewish" they were because just having that label was going to get them ostracized, exiled or killed. Or as my grandfather put it, a Jew was the person who was alongside you as you both ran away from a pogrom in progress.

But in North America (Israel, too) there are so many definitions - and so many people claiming their way is the right way -- that it makes for confusion, as well as contradiction. Both things which can make for good fiction.