In American literature and movies, the reigning Jew is still the meek scholar or the mild family man, although I’ve lately noticed a growing cinematic population of tough Jews, surprising hero soldiers, rebels, kickers of Nazis ass, the occasional gangster. But the Anglophilic, artsy, bohemian Jew is a rarer bird, assimilating into the Gentile world not from any desire to blend in but because he is too florid to prune himself to fit available Jewish types. This, somewhat, was my father: not bookish, as Jews in his day were meant to be, but flamboyantly literary. Not self-hating, but self-creating. Not interested in himself as a Jew at all, but by no means interested in anonymity.
The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
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