Into the Literary Mainstream

At mid-century, Jewish writers connected with American readers by writing about alienation.

Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.

 

Restrictions against Jews existed in many social clubs during the 1950s, and few Jews headed major banks or corporations. But they were already prominent in medicine, psychoanalysis, science, law, music, and entertain­ment, and before long Jews entered the literary mainstream.

 

A sign of the times can be seen in the Paris Review interviews with prominent writers, an ably conducted and widely circulated series. The first collection, stemming from the early- to mid-1950s, included two practically invisible Jews, Dorothy Parker and Nelson Algren. In the next, from 1960 to 1961, were two more recognizable but hardly mainstream Jews, Boris Pasternak and S. J. Perelman. But the third set of interviews, from 1962 to 1966, featured Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, and was introduced by Alfred Kazin.

 

By this time, people "of the Mosaic persuasion," as was said not all that long before, were epitomizing American fiction--so much so that the critic Leslie Fiedler could speak of "Zion as Main Street." Jewish authors have become "representative Americans," he said, while "the American is becoming an imaginary Jew." And what makes these authors representative? Their wisdom "that home itself is exile, that it is the nature of man to feel himself everywhere alienated." Not only Bellow's "dangling man" and Malamud's and Roth's misfits tapped an American vein, but even Miller's Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (1949), J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and Mailer's White Negro (1957)--none of these outwardly Jewish. Mailer even published some commentaries making existentialist parables out of Martin Buber's Hasidic tales (1962‑1963). Otherhood joined brotherhood as a Jewish attribute. The question is what wisdom otherhood really engenders.

 

In an often‑cited 1944 symposium held by the predecessor of Commentary magazine, Kazin had not felt himself "a part of any meaningful Jewish life or culture," and for Lionel Trilling, the Jewish community could "give no sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew." Of course, this was before the full damage of Hitlerism had shown American Jews how precarious and precious their predicament was. But in that same 1944 symposium, Muriel Rukeyser declared herself "as a poet, woman, American, and Jew." A few years later, she wrote: "To be a Jew in the 20th century / Is to be offered a gift"--the "agonies" together with "The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee / For every human freedom." And also in 1944, Isaac Rosenfeld said, "Out of their recent sufferings one may expect Jewish writers to make certain inevitable moral discoveries"; "alienation from society…may function as a condition of entrance into society."

 

As the Eisenhower Fifties wore on, Jewish writers were "quick to show the lunacy and hollowness of so many present symbols of authority," as Kazin puts it. Certainly, they touched a nerve. The National Book Award was give to Bellow in 1954, Malamud in 1958, Roth in 1959. Those three we so often spoken of in one breath, they might have been playing shortstop, second base, and first in a champion double‑play combo.

 

The Pulitzer prize went to Miller in 1957, Kunitz in 1959. And though Allen Ginsberg certainly got no prizes, his prophet-like Howl (1956) and Kaddish (1961) gave the Beat Generation a Judaic jump start. A Jewish ethos surged to the fore, almost regional in its accent--urban, ironic, richly wordy--much as William Faulkner had made the South strangely exemplary. That ethos involved an ambiguous chosenness in the aftermath of the European Jewish catastrophe, as brilliantly caught in Malamud's The Last Mohican (1958) and Roth's Eli, the Fanatic (1959). This exchange (from The Last Mohican) between a New Yorker and a survivor quite literally makes the Jewish question common parlance: "Am I responsible for you then, Susskind?" "Who else?" By 1960 or so, Edward Field could imagine two famous authors bathing at Coney Island: "They tell me you are called the Yiddish Mark Twain." / "Nu? The way heard I it you are the American Sholem Aleichem." Together they end up "splashing about in the sea like crazy monks."

 

Why I Choose to Be a Jew, Arthur A. Cohen's 1959 essay, announces that "in the United States today it is at last possible to choose not to remain a Jew." From the Middle Ages through the reigns of communism and Nazism, Jews had no such choice. But now, says Cohen, with acculturation, affluence, and educational achievement, with fear of anti‑Semitism and hope for Israel's restoration mainly resolved, Jews can, if they wish, relax or repudiate their Jewishness. Cohen made his choice on religious grounds, for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and for the Law of Moses. Most Jews then, as social Judaism proliferated in new suburban synagogues and temples, schools, and community centers, probably fell between Cohen's doctrinal affirmation and Malamud's Henry Levin, alias Henry R. Freeman.

 

Unlike Jews, black Americans at the turn of the decade enjoyed no such choice. The civil rights movement gaining force then deeply involved many Jewish activists and organizations, as it had for decades. Theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel locked arms with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama; rabbis marched with ministers and priests; Jewish youth flocked south in the summers to work against segregation. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, racists brutally murdered a young black man along with his two Jewish coworkers. Later in the decade, interracial relations became strained. "Black power" and separatism rather than integration, plus the radicalized Black Panthers and Black Muslims, made whites less welcome in the movement. "The Jewish community," sociologist Nathan Glazer says, "which had seen much of its reason for being in its liberal political and social attitudes, began to question the value of these attitudes." Still it remains true that the American Jewish 1960s, like the women's movement a little later, owe in part to the evolution of ethnic self‑awareness among black Americans.

 

Already by 1965, an astute critic such as Robert Alter could observe that the American Jewish literary "renaissance" was playing itself out. Sentimentality was setting in, marked by "garbled Yiddish, misconstrued folklore" from writers "only peripherally or vestigially Jewish," lacking any nutritive cultural matrix. The mid‑1960s were not exactly a time when Jewish writers could, like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." They were, after all, as Leslie Fiedler notes, dealing in alienation and the fading of deep‑dyed Judaic practice. Many novels then were indeed getting a comic lift out of American Jewish life, and Neil Simon's The Odd Couple (1965)flourished on Broadway. So did Fiddler on the Roof (1964), based on Sholem Aleichem's Tevye tales, though a captivated public may too readily have taken its bittersweet cheer as the truth of shtetl existence.

 

Meanwhile, two superbly serious novels appeared to great acclaim in 1964: Bellow's Herzog, which won the National Book Award, and Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, which first came out in 1934 and was rediscovered a generation later, gripping readers not only, with its rich Joycean narrative, but because it summoned the poignant hardships of immigrant existence.

 

Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) takes place later, during the war, genocide, and struggle for Israel. It presents two Orthodox boys, one Hasidic and the other modern, who draw toward each other under differing fatherly constraints. Despite its pointedly Judaic conflicts, the general public greeted this book fervently. As did a wildly different book, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969), whose protagonist shooting off his mouth (and more) might well have gotten his go‑ahead from Milton Berle. "Brash Jews" are what Roth wanted in order to dislodge the restraining stereotype--"unaccommodating Jews, full of anger insult, argument, impudence."