The same conflicts between the universal and the particular informed postwar Jewish American fiction. Many writers, like Heller, Mailer, and Salinger, worked within this tradition only implicitly, borrowing elements of Jewish intellectual life (especially its sardonic humor) without attention to their cultural origins. Those writers selfconsciously examining Jewish life in America faced specific problems of audience and accommodation. Among Jewish American writers Saul Bellow stood, like Ellison among African Americans, as the novelist most interested in representing his cultural tradition through the literary conventions of modernism and the American faith in liberal humanism. In a large body of work from the early picaresque The Adventures of Augie March (1953) through the valedictory Humboldt's Gift (1975), Bellow explored the tensions between individual self-expression and social responsibility, often focusing on a hyperbolic Emersonian individualist at odds with his environment. Yet Bellow was not always able to balance ethnic themes with a more universalizing humanism. In his most powerful novels — like Seize the-497- Day (1956), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) — philosophical debate took place within the carefully delineated context of Jewish culture in America. In others, like Henderson the Rain King (1959), the range of address became so broad and the issues so cosmic that the narrative fell victim to the very cultural imperialism and tourism it critiqued.
If Bellow rehearsed humanist issues for the widest possible audience, other writers limited their focus (and readership) to allow for greater cultural particularity. Isaac Bashevis Singer's decision to publish both his stories and novels in Yiddish made unlikely any widescale commercial success. Yet by narrowing his audience, Singer was able — in such novels as The Family Moskat (1945-48) and Enemies: A Love Story (1966) — to draw extensively on the historical, religious, and folk traditions of East European Jewry, material alien to a general readership in postwar America. The position of Bernard Malamud was more vexing; he was pronounced both the least 'Jewish' writer of the postwar period and the most. Not all his work had Jewish themes or even characters, although the mature novels — especially The Fixer (1966) and The Tenants (1971) — located the narrative within specific sociological and historical situations. Some readers regretted his tendency to reduce Jewishness to passivity and victimization. Yet in its flirtations with the supernatural, its dark vision of the redemptive dimensions of suffering, and perhaps even its late preference for the actual over the mythic, his work embedded characteristics of Jewish American culture deep in narratives whose focus was superficially universal.
In the controversial work of Philip Roth the Jewish American novel reached a turning point, both for its pursuit of universalizing truths and for its representation of the subculture. A generation younger than Bellow or Malamud and less aligned with modernism than with the experimental techniques of postmodernism, Roth rejected the older writers' attempts to filter general issues of high moral seriousness through the lens of Jewish culture. He focused instead on phenomena specific to the culture, especially its particular problems with familial strife and upward mobility. In early works like Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and the notorious Portnoy's Complaint (1969), his negative evaluations were read as a form of Jewish antiSemitism. As reformulated in the later, self-reflexive Zuckerman -498- saga — The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983); collected with the epilogue The Prague Orgy as Zuckerman Bound (1985) — these criticisms juxtaposed the limitations of middle-class Jewish American experience against the thorniest characteristics of Freud, Kafka, and the Holocaust writers to offer a broader (and finally more positive) account of his cultural inheritance.
The debates within the traditions of African American and Jewish American literature were comparatively sophisticated. For less established ethnic literatures, the problems were the more preliminary ones of finding publishers and an audience. The autobiographical character of previous Asian American literature reflected its readers' need to imagine Asians as isolated individuals within American culture. In the postwar years fictional representations of a more complex communal experience began to appear, perhaps in response to soldiers' growing interest in these cultures encountered during the war. As a result of Chinese war efforts against Japan, Chinese American authors were given greater freedom of expression. Yet what these novelists could say was limited by the preconceptions of their audience. The most popular novels, like Lin Yutang's Chinatown Family (1948), viewed Chinese society with anthropological remoteness and condescension. Names were Anglicized and cultural traditions stigmatized as 'charming' and 'exotic.' Anti-Communist and assimilationist, such accounts celebrated America as a land of economic opportunity and minimized problems of employment, racial discrimination, and social readjustment. Not until Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) did a book address the psychological and sociological implications of ghettoization and immigration quotas. The first accurate account of the Chinese American community, Chu's exploration of marital problems resulting from the 'bachelor' society in New York's predominantly male Chinatown received poor reviews and passed silently from sight until its reprinting in 1979.
Although before the war Japanese American writers were more prolific than Chinese Americans, anti- Japanese feeling severely limited their audience throughout the 1950s. Familiar problems of assimilation — often represented through the generational conflict between foreign-born issei and their American-born nisei children —499- were intensified during the war by the internment of Japanese Americans, a policy that disrupted community structures and made ethnic identification a public issue rather than a personal one. Scheduled for publication in 1941, Toshio Mori's Yokohama, California did not appear until well after the war in 1949. Despite good reviews this collection of interconnected stories depicting a Bay Area community was even then commercially unsuccessful, and some of Mori's novels still remain unpublished. John Okada powerfully portrayed the aftermath of internment, imprisonment, and ambiguous wartime patriotism in No-No Boy (1957). Yet his grippingly honest account of strife within the postwar community was treated harshly by critics and his remaining unpublished manuscripts were destroyed after his death in 1971. Only since the novel's republication in 1976 has he begun to receive the critical attention he deserved.
In such a climate of surveillance and implicit censorship, Asian American writers in the postwar period still managed to offer significant critiques of American cultural imperialism. Even the most accommodating accounts asserted the literary value of ethnic materials, educating Anglo audiences and reinforcing in Asians a sense of group identity and pride. C. Y. (Chin Yang) Lee's popular The Flower Drum Song (1957) exoticized San Francisco's Chinatown in a way that modern readers find offensive. Yet the novel's apparent proAmericanism was subtly undermined by its oblique references to the problems of bachelor society and its use of generational conflict to characterize the cultural sacrifices attending assimilation. Similarly, despite its tone of passive acceptance, Monica Sone's autobiography Nisei Daughter (1953) actually inverted the traditional themes and structure of the second-generation narrative of assimilation, established in Jade Snow Wong's more conventional Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950). By detailing her discovery of a racial identity in the very process of repressing it, Sone turned an apparently upbeat account of Americanization into a mournful record of the destruction of the Japanese American community, symbolized by the narrative's progression from the opening hospitality of her parents' hotel to the final isolation of the camps.
Like other minority writers, Mexican American authors experienced problems with publication and audience. Not until the formation of the Quinto Sol publishing house in 1967 did authors have a -500- means of addressing directly readers knowledgeable about and sympathetic to their culture. During the postwar period, most found it easier to place short stories than novels. Focused on the Mexican experience, Josephina Niggli's Mexican Village (1945) intertwined ten stories about a small community to depict her American-born hero's attempt to integrate himself into this culture without losing his American qualities, especially his individualism and skepticism. The strengths of the work lay in its combination of a romantic depiction of the folk traditions with a realist recognition of the sociological limitations of the community, especially its racism and sexism. Mario Suarez examined with power and dignity the 'Chicano' experience in a series of short stories. The sole Chicano novel of the period, José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959), sympathetically portrayed the sacrifices necessary for cultural assimilation. Yet, to win an Anglo audience, Villarreal felt the need for extensive explication and a final rejection of Chicano culture. As a result Pocho, like the more assimilationist of Asian American novels, seems today a necessary but preliminary stage in the delineation of Chicano experience.
In the postwar period, gay men and women did not experience social and economic discrimination so directly as other persecuted groups. Those gay men willing to mask their sexuality, in fact, were afforded relatively
