It is generally believed that Jewish-American fiction began among others with Abraham Cahan's Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Mary Antin's From Plotzk to Boston (1899) and The Promised Land (1912), Anzia Yezierska's The Bread Givers (1925) and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934). This paper studies the evolution of Jewish-American fiction written by women from its earliest phase—the first generation of Jewish writers to the present time third generation of Jewish-American writers. In order to better understand how this fiction has evolved throughout its more than a century of existence, I will focus on the significance of Mary Antin's The Promised Land, Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl (1989) and Allegra Goodman's The Family Markowitz (1996), the three key novelists who, respectively, represent first-generation, second-generation and third-generation Jewish-American women writers.

What is commonly known as the `First Generation' of Jewish writers appeared after the mass wave of Eastern European immigrants at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century. Abraham Cahan's Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Mary Antin's From Plotzk to Boston (1899) and The Promised Land (1912), Anzia Yezierska's The Bread Givers (1925) and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934) are at the centre of this new kind of literature.

One thing this first generation of Jewish writers has in common with one another is that, although their primary language was Yiddish, they all chose English as their vehicle of expression. This helped them give voice to their immigrant experience. As a consequence of the effort made by these writers—the true originators of Jewish-American literature—to express themselves in English, there emerged a new variety of American English infused with Yiddish inflections, syntax and words. As will be shown in Mary Antin's The Promised Land, linguistic assimilation, a central issue in the fiction of these immigrant writers is the importance of education—and especially of literacy and English language education as the surest way to climb the social ladder.

Another aspect of these first-generation Jewish writers share is how they approach the issue of orthodoxy. This is most significant in Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky and Yezierska's The Bread Givers, two large autobiographical novels whose respective protagonists, while rejecting orthodoxy, somehow recognize it as a bulwark of the authentic Jewish experience. For decades, the preoccupation with orthodoxy became something secondary until a novelist like Chaim Potok in The Chosen (1967) and The Promise (1969) took up this issue again. (And, as explained below, the interest in returning to orthodoxy is probably clearest in third-generation Jewish-American novelist Allegra Goodman).

English Studies Journal, Jewish-American Women Writers, English Language Education, Linguistic Assimilation, Social Ladder, Autobiographical Novels, Thematic Constraints, Jewish-American Culture, Psychological Ruptures, Secular Education, Psychological Instability, Jewish Tradition, Orthodox Judaism, Contemporary American Secularism.