Although Sinclair often is included in discussions of American-Jewish novelists, her interest in the painful psychology of the 20th-century human transcends the boundaries such a category suggests. Her characters must confront their own pasts as well as learn to accept the values and pasts of others. In Anna Teller, the Tellers' Jewishness is peripheral. Emil feels unidentified with Jewish peoplehood, but joining a temple does not assuage his pain; acceptance of his mother as a strong, but human and loving woman does. In Sing at My Wake, the only characters who are Jewish are Phil and Anne Barron, friends of the heroine.
