on of a specifically Jewish identity before the war appears to have been made more available to Jewish orphans educated in institutional settings than to Jewish children attending public schools (Bernard passim).
To a degree, in the postwar literary treatments of Jewish children, the Jewish identity matters more than any other factor of the children's lives because that identity was nearly destroyed by the Holocaust. To be sure, the external culture also made such identity decisive, irrespective of whether a child was predisposed to religious observance or way of life. Thus the experience of the Holocaust revived the American Jewish assimilated culture's interest in making a specifically Jewish identity concrete. In the literature that has emerged since World War II, the Jewish children portrayed appear highly conscious of their Jewish identity on one hand, and of the special character that such identity assumes relative to the larger culture. Gross argues that one theme of Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint (the former of which can be broadly considered a coming of age story) is the fact that the third generation of Jewish immigrants rekindle what might be called a Jewishness in outlook that their vulgar, nouveau riche, thoroughly assimilated parents had ignored (Gross 55).
One survey suggests that the Jewishness of children's literature is also specifically religious in tone, inasmuch as observance is a fundamental aspect of the cultural experience of being a Jew (Patz and Miller, 19 29). When a postwar literary theme is not about the Holocaust, frequently the action involves how the Jewish child will grow into the experience of being a Jew, inflected by religious observance, on one hand, and on the other how the Jewish identity will affect the more generalized experience of being in the world. This is the precise theme of Potok's The Chosen, which deals with the friendship of two Jewish boys, one H...