T HE J EWISH Q UARTERLY R EVIEW, Vol. 103, No. 4 (Fall 2013) 556–579 Acts of Assimilation: The Invention of Jewish American Literary History MICHAEL P. KRAMER W E ALL OWE I RVING H OWE a debt of gratitude. Not only for his groundbreaking Treasury of Yiddish Stories, which almost single-handedly rescued the literature of Eastern Europe’s Jews for the postwar Ameri- can audience, or the nearly epic World of Our Fathers, the sine qua non of Jewish American immigrant studies, or for his countless other books and essays—not only for these, each of which surely demands of us a grateful dayenu, and not even primarily for these. 1 Those of us who study and delight in contemporary Jewish American literature have to thank Irving Howe most of all for the meager two pages with which he closes the introduction to his 1977 mass market paperback anthology Jewish- American Stories, those few oft-referenced paragraphs in which he boldly predicts the impending demise of his subject: There remains the question, worth asking if impossible to answer with certainty: What is the likely future of American Jewish writing? Has it already passed its peak of achievement and influence? Can we expect a new generation of writers to appear who will contribute to American literature a distinctive sensibility and style derived from the Jewish experience in this country? My own view is that American Jewish fiction has probably moved This essay originated in a paper I delivered at a conference on Modern Jewish Literatures held at the Universities of Antwerp and Ghent in November 2006. I would like to thank the conference organizers, and in particular Philippe Codde and Vivian Liska, for their generosity and encouragement. 1. See Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York, 1954); and Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York, 1976). For a recent biography of Howe, see Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York, 2005). The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2013) Copyright  2013 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved.