“I don’t identify myself with Jewish writers,” he told an interviewer an in 1975. Stanley Elkin was ambivalent about being known as a Jewish writer. The question is what that could possibly mean. To be considered a Jewish writer-for the title to have any meaning at all-a writer must write Jewishly. If his choices are unrelated to how a writer writes it is beside the question whether he is a Jew. With a writer, though, the game is not so easily separated from being. For a ballplayer it’s simply a matter of being a Jew. Army Air Force in response to antisemitic insinuations about his patriotism, Sandy Koufax’s decision not to pitch on Yom Kippur) are entirely unrelated to how baseball is played.
The choices that identify ballplayers as Jewish (Hank Greenberg’s enlistment in the U.S. But if on the other hand he is a Jew only by accident of birth what difference does it make? A writer isn’t Jewish in the same way as, say, a ballplayer. If Jewish images or ideas are vital to a writer’s work categorizing him as a Jewish writer would be superfluous. It may seem harmless-an occasion to shep a little nakhes, to feel a twinge of pride-but it may also betray a creeping anxiety over the whole question of Jewish identity. Whether a writer is Jewish, however, is a little more complicated. The dinner-table game of Guess Who’s Jewish is so popular that two different books by that title have been published to answer the question. Dougherty (Chicago: Dalkey Archive, 2003). Originally published in A Casebook on Stanley Elkin’s Dick Gibson Show, ed.
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