I and I: The Breakdown of Buber in Post-Holocaust Jewish American Literature

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.