Abstract
Graphic novels, becoming increasingly popular, are by their very nature episodic, with visible cellular boundaries, but even in prose fiction today pastiche prevails, quilting together dissonant experiences, revealing the seams and fault lines, and sometimes shining a spotlight on them. "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Elie the Fanatic" (1959), for example, painted the assimilatory hunger of American Jews in broad but dazzlingly accurate strokes, and Portnoy's Complaint (1968) farcically captured a moment in time when Jews were both inside and outside American culture but were still acutely aware of what values and behaviors lay on either side of that binary dividing line. With just this attitude, Roth's protagonist Coleman Silk - an ambitious African American passing as white by passing as an assimilated Jewish classics professor - attempts to construct his own identity and his own destiny, until history catches up with him and destroys him.\n (Connecfions, pp. 121-122) These American preoccupations testify to the coalescence of American values and concerns within even putatively sealed American Jewish communities.