The Family Markowitz

Allegra Goodman started her career as a writer very young: as a 21-years-old Harvard senior, she published her first collection of short stories, Total Immersion. It took her only eight years to publish her first novel – The Family Markowitz, in 1996. The Family Markowitz, which I will look at in some detail in this essay, appeared in the New Yorker (a weekly American Magazine) and was highly praised. This novel was acclaimed as a fiction winner: the First Annual Salon Book Award and Book of the year in the United States of America. The Family Markowitz, considered a Jewish masterpiece, is a funny collection of interlocked stories about three generations of a Jewish American family. In this way, she is a narrator in the classic Jewish tradition. Although, Goodman rises up from other great writers as Cynthia Ozick, Rebecca Goldstein, Daphne Merkin or Isaak Bashevis (other remarkable Jewish writers) in the way she uses the words in her writing, there is no evident innovation. In her stories, the author skips through no flaming literary circle and uses no post-modern narrative writing. To a certain extent, she succeeds in using the traditional form of writing, which is the pure direct form of describing the happenings. As we will see, The Family Markowitz deals with the life of characters that seems to the reader very real. I mean, these stories that she presents us, although are fiction, could perfectly be the narration of real persons.