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'Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today's mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O'Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can't do this all by herself!) But there doesn't seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. On the contrary, a surprising number can't seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists. If today's literary fiction can't be accurately described as "post-Jewish" the way Elie calls it "post-Christian," that may be because in Judaism, faith itself is largely built on the concept of preserving memory. And the urge to stop time - to freeze the fleeting moment and thaw out its meaning later - is what drives many writers to write.... 'Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past.... The belief that we are just re-enacting history persists into the modern era, even among the nonreligious. To give only one example, last fall the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, as "a modern-day Haman," a biblical Persian official who plotted a genocide against the Jews. ' This seeking out of patterns straddles the line between fantasy and our desire for real transcendence. It is the very stuff of literature. As Yerushalmi describes it, "What was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn." '...That existential possibility makes Judaism into a religion unusually friendly to writers. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record-­keepers, forever s

'Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today's mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O'Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can't do this all by herself!) But there doesn't seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. On the contrary, a surprising number can't seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists. If today's literary fiction can't be accurately described as "post-Jewish" the way Elie calls it "post-Christian," that may be because in Judaism, faith itself is largely built on the concept of preserving memory. And the urge to stop time - to freeze the fleeting moment and thaw out its meaning later - is what drives many writers to write.... 'Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past.... The belief that we are just re-enacting history persists into the modern era, even among the nonreligious. To give only one example, last fall the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, as "a modern-day Haman," a biblical Persian official who plotted a genocide against the Jews. ' This seeking out of patterns straddles the line between fantasy and our desire for real transcendence. It is the very stuff of literature. As Yerushalmi describes it, "What was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn." '...That existential possibility makes Judaism into a religion unusually friendly to writers. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record-­keepers, forever s