‘A work in progress’: the Contemporary Jewish-British Family Saga.

JEWISH women authors; BRITISH literature; ASHKENAZIM; FAMILIES in literature; 20TH century American literature; FEINSTEIN, Elaine, 1930-2019; BROOKNER, Anita, 1928-2016

This paper analyses Jewish family sagas published in Britain, 1979-85, as ethnicity in progress. They were best-sellers written by Ashkenazi women born in Britain between the wars: Anita Brookner, Elaine Feinstein, Maisie Mosco, Claire Rayner and Bernice Rubens. Whereas family sagas usually stress rootedness, these evince anxiety and alienation due to their cultural memory of pogroms, migration and the Holocaust. Despite the feminism of their era, these novels are conservative, both ideologically with regard to the family and aesthetically. However, they counter their emphasis on persecution and displacement by images of a vibrant community life and hope for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]