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"The Jew in American Literature"
Sr. Louis Gabriel

The most valuable aspect of Mr. Sol Liptzin's book The Jew in American Literature (Bloch Publ. Co., 1966) is his analysis of the different attitudes of Jewish as well as of non-Jewish authors to the problem of being a Jew in America. This seems to preoccupy the author more than the literary value of the works he surveys, otherwise it would be difficult to understand, and to forgive, the several pages devoted for instance to Emma Lazarus and the casual mention of Saul Bellow.
In the 18th and early 19th century the image of the Jew in colonial and republican America resembled that of his co-religionary in England. It was shaped by several conflicting tendencies: the protestant veneration for the patriarchal figures of the Old Testament, the liberal spirit of the Enlightenment, and the stereotype of Western literature, the evil Jew, whose prototype was Judas and who conquered his place in European drama and fiction via the mystery play, Chaucer, Marlowe and Shakespeare. The literary portrait of the Jew assumes a more specifically American character with the mass immigration of Eastern European Jews, refugees from the Russian pogroms, during the period Loin 1880 to the First World War. They and their descendants constitute the core of what is now the largest Jewish community in the world, Israel included. It is they and their problems, in the first decades of their struggle for survival as well as in our own times, that the authors reflect and with whom they come to terms. The main issue in the beginning was that of acceptance by their Gentile neighbours, despite their foreignness and their rather rapid economic integration. Fiction reflects the fact that they were subjected to a number of discriminatory measures — down to the fear of lowering the value of real estate if they were admitted to the better suburbs — and the object of well-meant humanitarian efforts of Christian preachers and liberal intellectuals (Mark Twain among them), very much in the manner of the recent attitude of the white community towards the black minority.
The racist attitude is there too, for instance, in I. Donnelly's apocalyptic Ceasar's Column (1890) or in James Russell Lowell's sayings reported by the Atlantic Monthly in 1897. Despite all differences it seems therefore quite legitimate to discern in the fate of the Jewish immigrant community of that time — at least as it is described in literature — a certain parallel to that of the negro community half a century later, and to perhaps find that their relatively quick progress from the slum to the suburb partly explains the presence of a certain anti-Jewish bias in the still predominantly ghetto-bound negro community. That their Gentile fellow citizens were, and perhaps still are, not prepared to grant the Jew an equal share in the blessings of the 'Promised Land" is well brought out by Mr. Liptzin in his chapter of the same title. A certain section of the Jewish population — and here fiction seems to be a rather faithful portrait of reality — was therefore inclined to throw overboard all vestiges of their origin, so as to become indistinguishable from their fellow Americans. Others, on the contrary, discovered —or rediscovered — their Jewish heritage, having undergone the often painful experience that complete assimilation was both an impossible dream and a betrayal of their identity.
This situation prevailed in literature and in real life during the years between the two world wars. Both Jewish and non-Jewish authors, for example, Ludwig Lewisohn, Maurice Samuel, Ernest Hemingway and John Hersey, in their protrayal of Jewish characters sensed the complexity of the problem of integration. They experienced the tension between their desire to be like the rest of the population and the almost inevitable reaction — arising from within themselves or caused by outside factors — that made them conscious of a separate cultural heritage, too precious to be lost in the American melting pot. During that period three factors tended to preserve American Jewry as a separate distinctive entity. All three are present in the fictional and non-fictional writings of the time: Nazism and its repercussions in the United States, the fluorishing Yiddish literature, and the enthusiasm with which certain authors, such as Judah L. Magnes, Marvin Lowenthal and others, succeeded in presenting the cause of Zionism.
A phenomenon, reminiscent of certain German-Jewish writers of the early twentieth century is that of Jewish self-hatred whose best-knownrepresentative is the young Ben Hecht, for example in his novel A Jew in Love (1931). This morbid and cruel vivisection of the admittedly sometimes clumsy or exaggerated effort of certain second generation Jews to fit into the Gentile milieu by renouncing their Jewishness is by no means restricted to the thirties. It can be observed today in the reaction to the State of Israel of some Jewish intellectuals (and others) belonging to the so-called New Left. The motivation behind it is complex; the avowed desire for perfect objectivity in the name of an ideology seems to hide the age-old desire to escape the community of fate into which they have been born, to exchange it for another, for fellowship, freely chosen because of elective affinities. Yet in the end the attempt resembles that of some medieval Jewish converts to Christianity who denounced their former friends in the vain attempt to become more acceptable to their present ones. One is left with the embarrassed impression that "the lady protests too much". It is a relief to return to the matter-of-fact acceptance of one's own inescapable identity in the works of Bernard Malamud, even if this implies assuming the tragedies of the past and facing perhaps, clearsightedly and courageously, those of the future.
The portrait of the American Jew in literature seems to document the gigantic effort of the Jewish community at integration. However it finally achieves this — or desires to achieve this — without paying the price of total assimilation: disintegration on the community and individual levels. In the ideal pluralistic society it should be possible to be both Jew and American, to assume a two-fold cultural heritage without being a traitor to either.