| Martin Buber, in his landmark philosophical work I and Thou, while creating a new terminology and philosophy of dialogics, also essentially captured what is inherent in traditional Judaism; Jews have a cultural habit of external orientation, an expectation that meaning is found in conversation with an Other. In a post-Holocaust world, after having received no answer and no deliverance from God, many Jewish American writers and their characters find themselves still believing in the importance of finding meaning relationally, but no longer believing in a personal God. Buber's Hasidic conceptions of God and of evil, which underlie his dialogic categories, do not hold up for these largely secularized American Jews after the Holocaust. They are faced with the choice either to accept that all relationships are I-It or acknowledge that, without God to stand as Thou, there can be no real meaning.;Having taken the center out of Judaism, that is taken God, the ultimate Thou, out of the equation, these writers, and their characters, are lost and so attempt to form a new kind of relationship, the I-I relationship. The characters created by each of the writers who will be discussed in this study, struggling Jewish American men and women, haunted by Shoah but still seeking meaning and relation, find different ways to externalize themselves so as to allow for conversation and for relationship as they attempt to find meaning. The four authors chosen for study---Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Cynthia Ozick---have been chosen by virtue of their literary prominence in postwar Jewish American Literature, and because they each use very different techniques to achieve this new dialogic category, with very different results. |
