asidic and one secular, who meet at the time the world was just beginning to discover the horrors of the holocaust. In some cases, the effect is to create a kind of literary ethnocentrism and shallow, one problem characters and situations. Such an argument might be made with reference to Philip Roth's short story, "Conversion of the Jews," in which a Jewish boy experiences faith in a way that might be the equivalent of a Christian's experience of grace. Searles, however, sees the work as a serious attempt to explain how faith operates in Judaism (Searles 59 62). Besides, a claim may be made that Roth's maturation as a second generation immigrant Jew in an anti Semitic America provides background for personalized and yet fictionalized narratives of the experience of specialized social conditions (Roth, Life 1).
In much of the literature deriving from the experience of the Holocaust, the Jewish identity of children is the single personal fact of existence, often the single personal obstacle that must be overcome. This may take various forms, from
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