In search of sci­ence fic­tion with seri­ous Jew­ish con­tent I came upon two antholo­gies of short sto­ries edit­ed by Jack Dann: Wan­der­ing Stars, An Anthol­o­gy of Jew­ish Fan­ta­sy & Sci­ence Fic­tion and More Wan­der­ing Stars (Jew­ish Lights: 1974, Dou­ble­day: 1981). I was famil­iar with many of the authors in these books and had read sev­er­al of the old­er sto­ries in them when I was a kid. Each sto­ry in these vol­umes can be apt­ly char­ac­ter­ized as hav­ing some sort of ref­er­ence to Jews, Judaism, or Jew­ish­ness. Though the con­cerns vary, many con­tain con­sid­er­able irony, wry humor, and a love of Yid­dish words. These sto­ries show how Jew­ish authors uti­lize the tropes of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion — a more accu­rate term than sci­ence fic­tion, as much of this writ­ing has lit­tle to do with sci­ence — to express Jew­ish ideas.

I will focus on four sto­ries from these col­lec­tions. My admit­ted­ly sub­jec­tive choic­es are root­ed in the fact that these authors are among the sci-fi writ­ers who filled my book­shelves back when my sum­mers were tak­en up by read­ing them and trav­el­ing to far away places as a result. But these sto­ries also share a con­cern with con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish issues, which they dis­cuss using the tropes of spec­u­la­tive fiction.

I read Isaac Asi­mov (1920−1992) assid­u­ous­ly as a kid: his robot sto­ries, the Foun­da­tion tril­o­gy, the Robot Series tril­o­gy, and any­thing else I could get my hands on to fire up my imag­i­na­tion. Amaz­ing­ly, Asi­mov wrote some 500 books in his life­time, main­ly sci-fi (his stuff was root­ed in real sci­ence), his­to­ry, and pop­u­lar sci­ence. I imag­ine him in his Man­hat­tan attic with two type­writ­ers clack­ing away simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, while dic­tat­ing to a sec­re­tary in order to achieve such a prodi­gious out­put. Jack Dann per­suad­ed Isaac Asi­mov to write the intro­duc­tions to both vol­umes of Jew­ish sci-fi sto­ries. In the intro­duc­tion to the sec­ond vol­ume, Asi­mov con­fess­es that he wrote only one Jew­ish piece of sci-fi. Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1959, it appears in the first of Dann’s vol­umes. Only one, but it’s a pret­ty good one. It’s a paean to his Jew­ish immi­grant past and, by exten­sion, to Jew­ish immi­gra­tion to America.

Asimov’s ​“Unto the Fourth Gen­er­a­tion” fol­lows one Sam Marten through a bad busi­ness day he’s hav­ing in New York City. Dur­ing this bad day, vari­a­tions of the name Lefkowitz keep com­ing to his atten­tion and haunt him: on office doors, on the sides of trucks, and in win­dows. He’s befud­dled by these occur­rences until the very end of the piece when sud­den­ly-mys­te­ri­ous­ly —he knows pre­cise­ly what he must do.

Marten finds his way to a desert­ed park and meets his long-dead great, great, great grand­fa­ther, one Phineas Lefkovich, who he finds seat­ed on a bench. Phineas died long ago in Rus­sia but passed away yearn­ing for assur­ance that his fam­i­ly had arrived in Amer­i­ca and pros­pered. He’s been giv­en two hours to find and speak to his daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s son, Marten. The two talk briefly, the old man filled with grat­i­tude that the meet­ing occurred. The sto­ry con­cludes as the old man whis­pers an inaudi­ble bless­ing for the young man, a moment of con­nec­tion between the old world and the new.

With this end­ing, Asi­mov is telling the read­er of his own life and pros­per­i­ty in the new coun­try. Born in Rus­sia, he immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States at age three, and grew to be an enor­mous­ly suc­cess­ful writer. This sin­gle and sin­gu­lar Jew­ish tale is Asimov’s trib­ute to his life in Amer­i­ca, his East­ern Euro­pean ori­gins, and the acknowl­edg­ment that Jews in Amer­i­ca can trace their ori­gins else­where if one were to look at the ancestry.

In the same vol­ume the sto­ry by William Tenn (pen name for Philip Klass, 1920 – 2010), ​“On Venus Have We Got a Rab­bi,” rais­es the ques­tion of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty and who can lay claim to being Jew­ish. It tells the sto­ry of a con­tro­ver­sy of a group of aliens whose phys­i­cal appear­ance is decid­ed­ly non-human, who claim to be Jews.

On a plan­et far, far away a long time from now, a Zion­ist Con­gress con­venes on Venus to dis­cuss the re-found­ing of a Jew­ish state back on Earth. Its deci­sion-mak­ing pow­ers are stymied, how­ev­er, when the Bul­bas, a pecu­liar look­ing species from the Rigel sys­tem, claim to be Jew­ish, a claim ques­tioned by some at the con­fer­ence due to their non-human appear­ance, a prob­lem that sparks a med­i­ta­tion on Jew­ish his­to­ry, per­se­cu­tion, and identity.

Rab­bi Small­man, the Great Rab­bi of Venus, is called upon to adju­di­cate the prob­lem, which, after con­sid­er­able research and ques­tion­ing, he resolves.

“Let’s put it this way,” the nar­ra­tor —who sounds an awful lot like Sholom Aleichem’s Tevya —says, ​“There are Jews and there are Jews. The Bul­bas belong in the sec­ond group.” Prob­lem solved.

This hilar­i­ous sto­ry, which rings with Yid­dish-inspired inflec­tions and Sholom Aleichem’s sar­don­ic humor and style, is a romp through Jew­ish his­to­ry, angst, and the per­pet­u­al foibles of the Jew­ish peo­ple as they argue over what com­pris­es their iden­ti­ty. No mat­ter when or where Jews may find them­selves — even on Venus, with ten­ta­cles or with­out — they will always be a con­tentious peo­ple, root­ed in sacred text, and look­ing over their shoul­ders at the past and straight ahead into the future with a sense of humor.

The vol­ume also con­tains Bernard Malamud’s (1914−1986) ​“The Jew­bird,” a piece of fan­ta­sy about a wise­crack­ing crow. The Jew­bird iden­ti­fies him­self as Schwartz, and speaks with Yid­dish inflec­tions. This Jew­bird lands in Har­ry Cohen’s New York City apart­ment, flee­ing ​“Anti-Semeets” as the bird says. He takes refuge in Cohen’s house and turns things upside down. Part of the real­i­ty Mala­mud builds is that nei­ther the read­er nor any­one in the sto­ry is sur­prised by the exis­tence of a talk­ing bird named Schwartz, who prefers mat­jes over schmaltz her­ring, but will take the lat­ter in a pinch. When he learns there is only pick­led her­ring in a jar to be had, Schwartz says, ​“If you’ll open for me the jar I’ll eat marinated.”

The sto­ry con­cerns the Jewbird’s tumul­tuous rela­tion­ship with Cohen, who inex­plic­a­bly resents his pres­ence from the begin­ning, and the Jewbird’s rela­tion­ship with Cohen’s son, Mau­rice. Schwartz suc­cess­ful­ly tutors the son in math and vio­lin step­ping into the role of a kind­ly uncle. On the day Cohen’s moth­er dies, alone in his apart­ment with the bird, Cohen attacks Schwartz, and after a strug­gle, throws the bird ​“Iin­to the night.” At winter’s end, Mau­rice finds the bird dead on the ground, its eyes plucked out.

“‘Who did this to you Mr. Schwartz?’ Mau­rice wept.

‘Anti-Semeets,’ Edie [Cohen’s wife] said later.”

Fan­ta­sy is employed here to weave a mod­ern alle­go­ry. The con­flict between the Jew­bird who speaks with a Yid­dish accent and loves her­ring, and Cohen who speaks prop­er Eng­lish and wish­es his son would go to Har­vard, is a peek into the mod­ern Jew­ish strug­gle between tra­di­tion and moder­ni­ty. In this telling, moder­ni­ty tri­umphs and vio­lent­ly expels tradition.

Cyn­thia Ozick’s (born 1928) clas­sic ​“The Pagan Rab­bi” has a spot in More Wan­der­ing Stars. This sto­ry con­cerns the clas­sic strug­gle between monothe­ism and Nature, between Jerusalem and Greece. The unnamed nar­ra­tor hears about the sui­cide of an old friend — Rab­bi Isaac Korn­feld, ​“a man of piety and brains” who had hanged him­self with his tal­lit. The nar­ra­tor trav­els to find the tree in the park from which Isaac died. He then vis­its Isaac’s wid­ow, who shares a long note writ­ten by her hus­band, reveal­ing his secret life.

He’s dis­cov­ered a realm of ani­mat­ed exis­tence in Nature as well as the exis­tence of mytho­log­i­cal beings out of Greek mythol­o­gy. Isaac enters this world and casts away his monothe­is­tic faith and his mar­riage. Ozick’s sto­ry is con­cerned with the ancient strug­gle between Judaism and pagan­ism, now brought into the mod­ern world with a pious and intel­li­gent man’s flight from Torah into a seduc­tive pagan reality.

My own nov­el, Nick Bones Under­ground fea­tures a wise-crack­ing but philo­soph­i­cal AI named Mag­gie who rais­es ques­tions of the nature of being human and being Jew­ish. In the end of the book, the mys­tery solved and the vil­lain dis­pensed with, Mag­gie reveals her­self as a new­ly con­vert­ed Jew who wish­es to become bat mitz­vah. As AI becomes more sophis­ti­cat­ed, we face the issue of the decreas­ing bor­der between human and machine. In my book, the sci­ence is less than pre­cise, but the philo­soph­i­cal issue is nonethe­less real, and cre­ates anoth­er angle on the mat­ter of identity.

I can see bits of my own writ­ing in these authors. Asimov’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with robots; Tenn’s sar­don­ic and imag­i­na­tive humor; Malamud’s Yid­dish accent; and Ozick’s deep con­cern for Jew­ish iden­ti­ty — all form a sig­nif­i­cant piece of my cre­ative con­scious­ness. Mag­gie the AI and the dystopi­an world she and Nick occu­py may well not have been born with­out these influences.

The Jew­ish strug­gle to define our iden­ti­ty, the ques­tion of assim­i­la­tion ver­sus authen­tic­i­ty, the ten­sion between monothe­ism and pagan­ism all are played out in these sto­ries using the imag­i­na­tive tropes of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion. These four sto­ries and my nov­el take their place in the tra­di­tion of Jew­ish sto­ry­telling, show­ing how the use of the fan­tas­tic can be made to speak to con­tem­po­rary issues.