When I first read Fear of Flying, in 1988, I didn’t like it at all. Looking back, there are several plausible explanations. I was 12 at the time: too young to find anything amusing about the novel’s abundance of amorous psychoanalysts, and taken aback by the armies of stiff cocks standing at attention on nearly every page. Expecting terrific masturbatory material, I was saddened to see the smut diluted by so many thoughts of wounded egos. Above all, I could sense that the book’s author, Erica Jong, was engaged in some strange activity that seemed a lot like writing but was, in fact, not.

What was it? In the free spirit of Fear, a book that frequently borrows from cinema whenever mere words fail it, allow me the following anecdote: It was 1975, and John Schlesinger was shooting Marathon Man in midtown Manhattan. The film revolved around one particularly effective scene, in which the sadistic Nazi dentist, played by Laurence Olivier, tortures the intrepid doctoral student and amateur sleuth, Dustin Hoffman, with a large drill. Schlesinger, Olivier, cast, crew, were all ready to begin shooting, but Hoffman was nowhere in sight. An hour passed, then two. Finally, late in the afternoon, the young actor emerged, hair unkempt, eyes enflamed. Briefly, he explained that, being a Method actor, he needed to work himself up to the frenzy demanded by the scene. Hearing this, Olivier snickered. “My dear boy,” he’s rumored to have said, “I suggest that you drink a nice cup of tea, take a nap, then wake up and start acting.”

I wished I could say the same to Jong, whose prose is to literature what method acting is to Hollywood, namely an exuberant but ultimately erroneous conviction that one cannot do better than to reach deep within oneself for pure emotion, and that when said emotion is discovered, it needs no further refinement en route to becoming great art.

Take the way the book’s heroine, Isadora Wing, reacts shortly after meeting the charismatic British analyst Adrian Goodlove:

“My name is Isadora Zelda Stollerman Wing,” I write, “and I wish it were Goodlove.”

I cross that out.

Then I write:

Adrian Goodlove

Dr. Adrian Goodlove

Mrs. Adrian Goodlove

Isadora Wing-Goodlove

Isadora White-Goodlove

And on it goes for an entire page. Not for Jong this business about the right words in the right order. Instead, Fear operates on two principles: first, that an emotionally honest novel is a novel dedicated to revelation and that any suppression of puns, asides, or even sophomoric scribbling of maiden and married names is therefore oppressive and unwelcome; and, second, that demands for order or structure or commitment—from heroine and author alike, in the novel or in real life—are likely motivated by male desire to classify and control. “I started out being clever and superficial and dishonest,” Isadora confesses midway through the novel. “Gradually I got braver. Gradually I stopped trying to disguise myself. One by one, I peeled off the masks: the ironic mask, the wise-guy mask, the mask of pseudo-sophistication, the mask of indifference.”

Such a sentiment should appeal to anyone at 12—an age in which fidelity to the authentic self stands alone atop the heap of desirable virtues—but I never bought it for a moment. I knew then, as I know now, that art is artifice, and that we admire the writers and the sculptors and the musicians we single out for posterity not for their candor but for their craft, and that craft requires discipline and the sort of self-inflicted deprivations that are anathema on the therapist’s couch but indispensable in the artist’s studio.

Revisiting the novel this month, I expected to dislike it all over again. I didn’t. I found it charming, through no fault of its own. While Jong’s prose has not risen to new heights in the nearly four decades since the book’s 1973 publication, the literary landscape around her has sunk. Graded on a curve, Fear of Flying is today a delight.

Which, of course, invites commentary on the curve. Jong herself is fond of such sport. “Sex is discombobulating and distracting,” she wrote in a recent op-ed in the New York Times. “It makes you immune to money, politics and family. And sometimes I think the younger generation wants to give it up.” Jong is right for lambasting the youth, but mistaken in her reasoning; one need only occasionally glance in on the joyful antics of the Kardashian sisters to know that fucking is alive and well in America. The real problem is metaphysical and far more profound. It involves an utter lack of anything remotely resembling a self, a condition afflicting our young, ravaging our literature, and jeopardizing our future.

Like all far-reaching statements, this one, too, will be best served by an example. Among Fear’s most potent chapters is the one in which Isadora, living in Germany with her second husband, stumbles upon an abandoned Nazi-era amphitheater, an architectural wonder that’s been scrubbed from the town’s official tour guides and allowed to fall into disrepair. Intrigued, she researches its history and ends up publishing a scathing essay denouncing Germany’s inclination to repress its past. The discovery transforms her; it’s shortly after publishing her essay that she sounds the aforementioned cri de coeur about peeling off masks and becomes a writer in earnest. In a book so enchanted by thumping cunts and playful ids, it’s terrific to witness a moment in which the world is once again drawn to scale and the inherent insignificance of individuals once again recalled.

The passage put me in mind of another instance of a fictional young American visiting the old continent, in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Foer’s narrator is a writer named Jonathan Safran Foer, who travels to Ukraine to search for the woman who saved his grandfather during the war and to write a bombastic work of magical realism about her village, pieces of which are strewn throughout the book. Foer’s other narrator is Alex, a local tour guide with a compromised command of the English language and American popular culture. Both men are hyperverbal, yet neither is capable of communicating clearly and honestly. Everything is a conceit.

Here, for example, is Alex boasting of his sexual prowess: “Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper.” Even if one overcomes the character’s incurable monotone—Alex is not so much a person as a book-length misnomer or the world’s longest ethnic joke—one is still left with little more in hand than ribald names for preposterous sex acts, the sort of stuff college freshmen love discussing shortly after perusing Internet porn and just before beer pong.

Compare Alex to Isadora. Here she is on the occasion of finally having sex with the dashing doctor Goodlove: “Adrian was like a new country. My tongue made an unguided tour of it. I started at his mouth and went downward. His broad neck, which was sunburned. His chest, covered with curly, reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy—unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth. His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time.”

This is not great prose, but it’s not a gag, either. It’s a straightforward description of the great discoveries and the small disappointments we stumble upon when exploring a new lover’s body for the first time. To feel this way, to write this way, a writer must be present, unafraid of embarrassment, eager to connect. In other words, she or he must possess a true self, must be a human subject reluctantly seeking out other human subjects, craving love but ready for rejection. There’s none of that in Foer’s work, a tiring and heartless torrent of wit and whimsy. There’s none of that in most contemporary young writers, Jewish or otherwise.

How we got this way is a longer, more complex question. Technology is one culprit. As computer scientist Jaron Lanier argues, we live in the information age, but we don’t always understand that we, human beings, are more than information; we contain multitudes, most of which contradict each other. “You have to be somebody,” Lanier wrote, “before you can share yourself.” But we’re nobodies, and not in Emily Dickinson’s gloriously reticent sense. We’re nobodies because a piece of software now remembers our friends’ birthdays for us, and because we see so many virtual, perfect pricks and tits and cunts that the real things, so beautifully imperfect, no longer thrill us so much. We’re nobodies because most of us sext before we ever get to know real intimacy, which means that we’ll never get to live life like Isadora Wing and make the sort of sweetly ruinous mistakes that helped her soar. We’re nobodies because we took from Erica Jong all of her stylistic affectations and none of her warmth.

And the warmth’s the thing. Decades after its publication, young readers are still turning to Fear of Flying to understand what it’s like to be human and female, confused and in love, hopeful and afraid. The answers they find there aren’t always perfect, but they’re a start.

According to a 2004 paper by Sam Kliger, one of the foremost experts on Russian Jewish immigration, there are approximately 700,000 Russian Jews living in America. Estimations of the precise number of Israelis living in the United States vary from 200,000 to nearly three-quarters of a million. Both waves of immigration, from Israel and from the former Soviet Union, mostly took place over the past two decades, each not a trickle of individuals but two massive waves of Jewish immigration that are reshaping American Jewish society.

It seems that everywhere one looks, former Israelis like Bar Refaeli, actress Gal Gadot, and producer Haim Saban, and Russians like Keith Gessen, Gary Shteyngart, and Sergey Brin, are becoming the most visible side of Judaism in America. Whereas the first generation of Israeli and Russian arrivals have, in the time-honored tradition of immigrants, toiled in gray and grinding professions—shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and so on—their sons and daughters are rapidly rising to cultural prominence. The Moscow-born Brin co-founded Google. The Israeli-born, New York-based Yigal Azrouël is one of the fashion world’s trendiest designers. On HBO, In Treatment—a television show based on a popular Israeli series and produced by the Tel Aviv-born, Los Angeles-based actress Noa Tishby—is a hit. Gossip Girl’s Michelle Trachtenberg reportedly speaks Russian with her parents; so does Black Swan’s Mila Kunis. And the list goes on.

While there are large differences between Russian- and Israeli-born immigrants, both groups subscribe to a complex web of allegiances, no longer Israeli or Russian, and not yet purely American, keeping in touch with their home cultures on the web and subscribing to satellite television services that allow them to keep up with their favorite singers and sports teams. Consider, for example, the young men sitting in a New York restaurant on a recent weekend, eating hummus. The way they ordered it—im galgalim, with wheels—reflected a certain level of connoisseurship; the wheels are cooked chickpeas, a way of serving Israel’s favorite food that’s customary in some of the Jewish state’s more discerning hummus joints. They drank Israeli beer and talked loudly about the Hapoel Tel Aviv soccer team over the restaurant’s loudspeakers, which were blasting the latest by Moshik Afia, a popular Israeli crooner of sticky love ballads. It was about as quintessentially Israeli as a scene could get, but the restaurant was on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Scenes like this are not uncommon in New York, Los Angeles, Miami: young Israelis, with or without families, congregating together and living life as if they’d never left Tel Aviv, Haifa, or Jerusalem. Recent research shows that Israeli-Americans maintain a far tighter connection to their Jewish identity than do American-born Jews. A survey released by the UJA Federation of New York last year, for example, put the number of former Israelis living in the metropolitan area at 81,000, the majority of whom strongly identify as Jews. Nearly all respondents, for example, said they celebrated Passover and Hanukkah; 87 percent said that they fasted on Yom Kippur; 61 percent lit Shabbat candles regularly; and 60 percent kept a kosher home. In contrast, according to the latest National Jewish Population Survey of 2001, only 59 percent of all American Jews fast on Yom Kippur, 28 percent light Shabbat candles, and 21 percent keep a kosher home.

The disparity between Israeli-Americans and their native-born Jewish counterparts doesn’t surprise Joel Kandy. Born in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, he moved to New York nearly a decade ago to pursue his bachelor’s degree at Columbia University. In Israel, he said, he would’ve been considered secular, spending most of his Shabbats with friends at the beach. In New York, however, he strongly identifies as Jewish, lighting candles every Friday evening and throwing raucous bashes for fellow young Jews each year on the first night of Hanukkah. When I asked him to describe his identity, he seemed baffled by the question.

“I’m a Jew,” he replied, as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about being male, say, or a biped. “It doesn’t matter where I live. As long as I remember my roots, as long as I keep my traditions, I’m a Jew. Why would I try to hide away from it?”

According to most available data, the influx of Jewish immigration to the United States has not led to a groundswell in synagogue attendance. Instead, Israelis and Russians choose to congregate with their own, in new and dynamic groups like Generation R at the JCC in Manhattan or the nationwide Dor Chadash. And for both former Israelis and former Russians, Judaism is central and robust: According to Kliger’s survey, nearly 70 percent of Russian Jews in America strongly adhere to their Jewish identity, preserving practices and traditions. The comparable number for the Jewish community at large, according to the 2001 population survey, is a much-lower 52 percent.

Natasha Mozgovaya belongs, in a sense, to both groups of immigrants. A Russian-born Israeli, she now serves as the Washington bureau chief for Haaretz. She can understand, she said, the forces that drive the formation of the Russian-Jewish community in America. “There are many people striving for a sense of identity they were denied in the Soviet Union,” she said. “Many Russian Jews reject the Soviet system, but they are still fond of the Russian culture and the Russian Jewish culture.” And whereas in Israel, she said, Russian Jews “tried to conduct their absorption from a position of strength, as a group with a distinct culture and awareness that their unique identity is valuable,” in the United States “it couldn’t work the same way because the numbers weren’t as impressive in comparison to the total population.” As a result, while Russian-born Israelis still remain an exclusive group often seeking to limit contact with the population at large, Russian-born American Jews have no choice but to integrate faster into the community.

Still, Mozgovaya added, many Russian Jews living in the United States want to integrate on their own terms, and, in so doing, discovered that the official institutions of the American Jewish community weren’t always on their side. “I might guess some were simply disappointed that the Russian Jews they fought to let go chose to settle in the United States and not in Israel.”

There is, of course, no way to prove any institutional animosity on the part of the American Jewish establishment toward Russian and Israeli immigrants. On the contrary, one can find numerous initiatives reaching out to the newly arrived and seeking to integrate them into the community. But Mozgovaya is not wrong for claiming that a certain uneasiness hovers above any instance of Jewish immigration to the United States: According to the existing paradigm, those who identify as Zionists—including, according to most surveys, the majority of American Jews—believe that Jewish immigration should be a one-way street, Israel-bound. The two recent, massive waves of Jewish immigration to America, the first of their kind since Israel’s establishment in 1948, call that paradigm into question. This, in part, was what propelled Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua to express what many Israelis already think, namely that Zionism is the sole purview of Israelis.

“The concept of Zionism is dear to us,” Yehoshua recently wrote, “and therefore it is important that it find expression only in its rightful place: in the difference between us and the Jews of the Diaspora or the exile.” In other words, to truly be a Zionist, one must choose to live in Zion. If it chooses to truly embrace Russian- and Israeli-born Jewish immigrants, the American-Jewish community will have no choice but to directly challenge this assertion, leading it into a head-on ideological collision with Israel. The Jewish state seems to be aware of this conundrum: Recently, Israel reversed its decades-old policy and began encouraging Israelis who had immigrated abroad to return home by offering them the same financial benefits given to any foreign-born Jew wishing to make aliyah to Israel.

“We don’t look at these people like we did before,” Sofa Landver, Israel’s minister of immigrant absorption, told me in a recent interview. “Before, we always said [that returning citizens are] traitors who left the state. Now, the government of Israel approved funds to bring people back home and give them the same conditions as olim,” or the people who make aliyah.

Those Israeli- and Russian-born immigrants who choose to stay in the United States, however, are challenging the community’s existing infrastructures. Primarily constructed around religious denominations, much of the organized American Jewish community has little place for people who, like Israelis, have grown up divorcing Jewish identity from religious practice, or who, like Russians, have grown up in societies that forbade the study and practice of religion. But the strongest apparent explanation for the gap between the recent immigrants and the established American Jewish community has little to do with institutions and a lot with intuitions: For American Jews, being Jewish is a complicated undertaking woven into a long history of fear and pride and doubt and desire. For Israelis, and for Russians, it’s simply something that you are, something that you do, something that requires less thought than action.

This strong and largely unquestioning embrace of Judaism as ethnicity is part of why a host of organizations catering to Russian-born American Jews—from the growing youth movement Ezra to a dedicated Birthright trip designed for American-Jews of Russian origin—are thriving. Limmud—the worldwide organization of Jewish learning that gathers young Jews for annual weekends of interdenominational, interdisciplinary study—has its own gathering, in the United States, for Jews born in the former Soviet Union, or FSU. Meeting in the Hamptons this summer, it attracted 800 people, none of whom, presumably, would have felt comfortable attending a similar Limmud conference intended for Jews of all stripes. As Haaretz’s American correspondent, Mozgovaya was on hand to cover the Limmud FSU conference last year. There, she interviewed 27-year-old Yevgeniy Zingman. “I am American Russian Jew,” he told her, “because I am no longer a real Russian Jew and I am definitely not an American Jew.”

Marks of this distinction are also visible in the new wave of novels by young Jewish writers. While there are, of course, exceptions, it is nonetheless interesting to note that many of the acclaimed American-born writers focus their work on Jewish protagonists living outside of the United States. Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, sent its narrator in search of ancestors in Ukraine, while Great House, the new novel by his wife, Nicole Krauss, roots its plot in Chile, Jerusalem, and Budapest. Nathan Englander, another American-born literary superstar, wrote his most recent novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, about an Argentinean-Jewish lowlife struggling during that country’s Dirty War period. It is not a coincidence that all three chose as their subject the tragedy-tinted lives of Jews in places far away and times far gone; Jewish life in Budapest or in a village in Ukraine is far more monolithic than Jewish life in Washington, D.C., where Foer, for example, grew up. It is, to use a fraught word, Jewish life at its most authentic.

In contrast, the Russian-born Jewish writers seem to relish turning their attentions on their American lives. Both Gary Shteyngart and Keith Gessen, to name the most obvious examples, have produced debut novels featuring Russian-born Jews doing their best to machete their way through the thicket of American, intellectual, often Jewish life. Neither writer bothered looking any further than his own biography for traces of authenticity.

This confidence may also be a revealing lens through which to examine the rightward shift of the American Jewish community: The number of Jews who vote Republican has grown more or less steadily since 1992 and now hovers around the 25 percent mark. Rather than assume that Jews, traditionally Democratic voters, have become more amenable to lending their support to Republican candidates and ideas, a different explanation can be found by looking at the numbers: Out of the 5.2 million Jews living in the United States (the number posited by the most recent population survey), 700,000 are Russians and 500,000 Israelis, a total of 1.2 million, or nearly a quarter of the total Jewish population in this country. The Russian population in Israel, according to a study released last week by the Israeli Democracy Institute, tends to support harsher measures against the Palestinians and tends to support strong leaders, and there is no reason to believe Russian Jews in America, overall, adhere to radically different ideas. Israeli-born Jews living in America are even simpler to decipher: With most still intricately connected to their homeland, they overwhelmingly tend to see support for Israel as the sole criterion by which to measure American politicians.

The absence of even the most basic research on both communities means that there is still a relative dearth of statistical evidence to verify the above hypotheses; yet they may serve to explain, at least in part, a cultural and political shift that is visibly occurring in Jewish centers across America. With so many American Jews now foreign-born, we’re likely to see their values become ever more prominent in the community at large. This means a greater affiliation to foreign culture—Israeli television, say, or Russian music, both recently hits in screenings and concerts around New York—but also a deeper adherence to Jewish values and certain practices. Anyone concerned with the future of the American Jewish community would do well to take the latest generation of Jewish immigrants into consideration.

First, here’s who won’t. Jonathans Ames, Lethem, and Rosen (the last is also Nextbook Press’s editor) miss the age-related cut. So does Sam Lipsyte, author of the new The Ask—New Yorker editor David Remnick said he was especially dismayed to learn that Lipsyte is 41. Finally, young Jewish novelists Nathan Englander and Allegra Goodman will presumably not appear, because they were on the equivalent list that the New Yorker came up with in 1999.

Below the jump, the 15 young Jewish novelists most likely to appear in the June 7 June 14 & 21 New Yorker. They won’t all make it, but at least three or four will.

Naomi Alderman
Shalom Auslander*
Joshua Cohen
Jonathan Safran Foer
Rivka Galchen
Keith Gessen
Jen Gilmore*
Myla Goldberg
Dara Horn
Sana Krasikov
Nicole Krauss
Lucinda Rosenfeld
Gary Shteyngart
Dalia Sofer
Adam Thirlwell

*Born 1970, and we can’t find their birthdays! They may be just barely ineligible.

What’s that? You want the five most likely? Foer, Galchen, Krasikov, Krauss, Shteyngart. (But none of them are quite the shoo-in Wells Tower is.)

Tablet Magazine has featured several of these bright young things:

• Auslander is a Tablet Magazine columnist.

• So is Cohen.

• Dara Horn wrote about Civil War re-enactments and Pesach.

• Dalia Sofer sat for a Vox Tablet podcast.

• So did Keith Gessen.

• And so did Alderman.

America’s Next Top Novel [NYO]

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, it’s clear that two literary styles were created in the Soviet Union: one was the official style of Socialist Realism, the other the Underground response. By order of the State (though those orders changed by decade and by country), Socialist Realist literature in the Eastern Bloc had to be about, and for, the proletariat; it had to depict the daily life of that population; that depiction had to be in a realist style, which is to say it had to be accurate to the ideal of proletarian life, and contain no experiments, or formalisms; and, finally, it had to support, but not independently further, the objectives of the Communist Party (these were the four dictates decided upon at the first meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934). What resulted was a literature of direct language, of direct address—an anagogical, or fabling, literature in which no story could be told without a moral in mind, explicit or implied. The goal of this literature—this literature had goals—was not to entertain but to instruct, to make a new type of man by making a new type of writer: not a poet of inky individuation, but, as Stalin put it, “an engineer of human souls.”

It is this tautology that enabled that other style: a Socialist Realist writer must write about reality in a realistic style, but he must also remain partisan, and at all times reinforce the party line. When these two impulses become contradictory, the writer risks shading into the realm of irony, or satire; and suddenly what had been didactic and simple becomes complex, or “subversive.” This, of course, was the literature of those writers who wrote for oblivion, or for the drawer, for a dimly free future, or for a cynically regarded, because illegal, posterity. The writers of the Underground, who remained (mostly) unpublished under Communism, who, if they published, did so (mostly) in samizdat—a Russian word meaning “self-published,” either copied by hand, or by carbon on a typewriter—comprised the only authentic style under Communism, but only in retrospect. In its day its practitioners were scattered among too many countries, and too many languages, with each responding both to a general Soviet politics and, too, to the particular censorships of their home cultures (it appears to have been easier to get away with writing subversively in Yugoslavia than in Russia, for example).

Socialist Realist novels were occupied with the outside, the surface: a man is discharged from the Red Army as a hero and returns to his village, becoming a town, currently occupied with its reorganization around a new, nationalized cement factory (the novel Cement, by Fyodor Gladkov)—this is all exterior, a series of events or plot points supposed to demonstrate fate, outlining a life lived by political calling. By contrast, Underground literature—which we should instead call “real literature,” the only true literature of its time and places—was absorbed with the inner life, with the thoughts and so the psychology of characters. Show a Red Army veteran working productively in a cement plant and you have propaganda, but tell us the thoughts of this man and you have an artwork, and a dangerous one at that.

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain is an anthology jointly produced by a website that focuses on literature in translation, Words Without Borders, and a new press, Open Letter, similarly tasked with publishing translations, based at the University of Rochester. The roster of contributors is immense and impressive, including Mircea Cărtărescu (Romania), Péter Esterházy (Hungary), Durs Grünbein (Germany/East Germany), Zbigniew Herbert (Poland), Paweł Huelle (Poland), Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland), Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia/France), Dorota Masłowska (Poland), Victor Pelevin (Russia), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia), Andrjez Stasiuk (Poland), and Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatia/Yugoslavia). All these pieces—stories, novel excerpts, poems, essays, memoirs—have appeared before (with the exception of a fine introduction by Keith Gessen), but it is good to have them in one volume, both for purposes of comparison and also because each is so short and potent that when one is finished another becomes immediately necessary.

Kundera exposes the origins of Underground style in Kafka’s response to technological bureaucracy; Pelevin remembers drinking wine under the stars as a teenager, being fascinated by the idea of a collapsed society managing to put a cosmonaut in orbit; Cărtărescu recalls losing his virginity (read: innocence) to a girl who’d later work for Securitate, Romania’s secret police; while Ugrešić offers a manifesto on writing about Communism for the free market—on the commodification of the Eastern experience for the satisfaction of Western readers (and, too, for the enrichment of formerly Eastern writers).

Indeed, Ugrešić’s essay, “The Souvenirs of Communism,” is simultaneously a perfect end to, and perfection of, the style that was the Underground. She writes: “The literature of the post-communist showdown with communism was just as clichéd in its ideological strategies and artistic achievements as the literature of Stalinism had been. And for that very reason, all the more penetrating. The authors of these works managed to find the pressure points in the imagination of the Western reader. It turned out that the pressure points are not the inconceivable absurdities of communism, but simple, understandable things: poor dental hygiene and empty shops.”

One might add to her list: also disaffected, angry scribblers. Ugrešić’s rage at the rude selling of the Eastern narrative is nothing but her disappointment at being denied, in midcareer, her style. Having survived the fall of the Wall, Ugrešić—along with the majority of the writers in this anthology—had only retrospection left. However, it is because she has to chosen to reveal to us not the Socialist Realistic surface of retrospection, but instead its deeper, inward consciousness, that she remains a writer of necessity and power.

Sam, one of the frustrated antiheroes of Keith Gessen’s new novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, spends most of his twenties attempting to write “the first great Zionist epic.” His peer Mark is stuck in Syracuse, stymied by his efforts to finish a dissertation on the Russian Revolution. The novel’s third protagonist, Keith, is preoccupied by the outcome of the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Set in the first years of this century, Gessen’s debut novel began as a series of short stories, and it is garnering great reviews. Nextbook spoke with Gessen, a founder of the intellectual culture magazine n+1, about his satirical take on these intellectually voracious but often pathetic characters, his (and Sam’s) troubled relationship with Israel (about which you can read an excerpt here), and his admiration for the men who founded Dissent and Partisan Review.

Photo © Anne Diebel.