In January, The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs blog serialized a lighthearted novella called “Sell Out,” by Simon Rich, about a religious Jewish immigrant in 1912 Brooklyn who falls into a vat of brine at a pickle factory. Emerging intact a century later, he meets his hipster great-great-grandson and ultimately draws him back to some version of faith.

Of all the things one might say of a novella about a pickled Jewish man, the last thing ought to be that it’s unoriginal. But as I read Rich’s story, I was reminded of Steve Stern’s marvelous novel “The Frozen Rabbi” (2010), about a Jewish teenager in Memphis who discovers a 19th-century Hasidic rabbi in his family’s basement freezer. In Stern’s novel, the rabbi defrosts and becomes a media sensation peddling ersatz kabbalah, while the teenager experiences his first taste of true religious transcendence. One could easily chalk up the similarities between these cryogenic Jews to coincidence. But when I first read Stern’s book, I had been reminded of another masterpiece — “The Last Jew” (2007), by the Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk — about a Jewish man who, through a surreal combination of trauma and magic, loses his personal memory and has it replaced by a collective memory of all of Jewish literature and history, allowing him to recite massive religious tracts and communal records by heart, a talent that makes him into a cabaret star. I was again reminded of Kaniuk, who passed away in June, when I read Joshua Cohen’s novel “Witz” (2010) — which features an apocalyptic scenario where the main character, born as a fully grown and bearded man, becomes the world’s last Jew. More than one Jewish author these days seems to have some preserved human vestige of the past up his sleeve — or in his freezer.

Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today’s mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O’Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can’t do this all by herself!) But there doesn’t seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. On the contrary, a surprising number can’t seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists. If today’s literary fiction can’t be accurately described as “post-Jewish” the way Elie calls it “post-Christian,” that may be because in Judaism, faith itself is largely built on the concept of preserving memory. And the urge to stop time — to freeze the fleeting moment and thaw out its meaning later — is what drives many writers to write.

The word “novel” implies something fresh, unprecedented, but it’s a core premise of traditional Judaism that after biblical times, nothing really new ever occurs. In his book “Zakhor” (1982), the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi analyzed the roots of Jewish collective memory and its odd staying power (“zakhor” is an order to remember). Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past. They named Germany “Ashkenaz” after a biblical locale, lamented Crusader massacres with the same poetry used to recall the Babylonian conquest of Judea and described their expulsion from Spain in 1492 as though they stood at the edge of Red Sea (with “enemies on one side, and the sea on the other!”). The belief that we are just re-enacting history persists into the modern era, even among the nonreligious. To give only one example, last fall the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, as “a modern-day Haman,” a biblical Persian official who plotted a genocide against the Jews.

This seeking out of patterns straddles the line between fantasy and our desire for real transcendence. It is the very stuff of literature. As Yerushalmi describes it, “What was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn.” The fictional teenager who found the rabbi in the freezer would certainly agree.

That existential possibility makes Judaism into a religion unusually friendly to writers. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record-­keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns — and forever believing that such patterns are to be found. In his essay “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James provided many a future writing instructor with a handy opening-day quote: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” For Jewish writers, this advice is almost unnecessary. When you are surrounded by those who honestly believe that the past endlessly repeats — people who name you after your dead ancestors, reread the same book every year, and earnestly inform you that you yourself once stood at Sinai — you are already living in the past, so you don’t have to try that hard to be one of those people.

The idea that largely nontraditional or even secular Jewish writers today would draw on a religion they barely observe may seem far-fetched. But the Jewish practices most rooted in collective memory, which are coincidentally those most accessible to the least observant (family-oriented holidays and text study in various forms), are less about believing in a supernatural reality than about appreciating the metaphor of the past’s presence. For those with vivid imaginations, that metaphor easily comes alive.

The British novelist Naomi Alderman put it bluntly in a recent interview with Tablet magazine, when she traced the anxiety that often accompanies Passover preparations back to a time when the holiday coincided with Easter-inspired persecutions. “Each Passover is more like other Passovers than it is like the day that came before it or the day that comes after it,” she said while discussing her novel “The Liars’ Gospel,” a book about Jesus, the world’s most famous death-defying Jew. “I think probably at some point our great-grandmothers saw their mothers in absolute terror during this Passover preparation, knowing that someone would probably get killed, and the terror continues even when the threat is removed.”

Alderman has abandoned the Orthodox practice of her youth, but her statement strikes me as almost involuntarily devout. It suggests a mystical and irrational belief in a type of memory no neurologist would recognize, a phenomenon both uncanny and eternal. It is a belief at once deeply religious and deeply literary, expressing every writer’s secret faith: that time can be stopped, that somewhere, whether in our notebooks, our basements or our spirits, everything is perfectly preserved and recorded, ready to return to life.

That writer’s faith is honored at the Jewish New Year celebrated this week, known in the Hebrew liturgy as the Day of Remembrance. One of its central prayers, composed at least a thousand years ago, describes God as an ideal reader — with humans as the authors of a comprehensive book detailing their own deeds. “You remember all the forgotten things,” the medieval words claim of God. “You open the Book of Memories and it speaks for itself, for each person’s hand has signed it.”

Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person’s hand, turned into stories.

Dara Horn’s fourth novel, “A Guide for the Perplexed,” has just been published.