[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1959, Fiedler surveys the defining characters and characteristics of the Jewish-American novel as they developed up to the end of the 1930s.]

This essay is intended to be not exhaustive but representative. The few writers who are discussed at any length are those who seem to me (and my personal taste plays a role of which any reader enamored of objectivity should be warned) both most rewarding as artists and most typical as actors in the drama of Jewish cultural life in America. I have not deliberately, however, omitted as untypical any Jewish American fictionist of first excellence. I am aware of how many rather good novelists I have slighted (along with some rather bad ones whom I am glad to pass over in silence); but I will not try to list them here, thus risking further injustice to those whose names fail to come to mind.

What I hope emerges from my study is a general notion of the scope and shape of the Jewish American tradition in fiction—useful to Gentile and Jew, reader and writer alike, not merely as history but as a source of pleasure and self-knowledge. The bonus of satisfaction for the critic engaged on such a job is the privilege of saying once more how much joy and terror and truth he has found, not only in certain widely respected authors but also in such relatively neglected ones as Abraham Cahan, Daniel Fuchs and Henry Roth.

The novel in which the Jewish writer attempts to make meaningful fiction of his awareness of himself as a Jew in America remains for a long time of merely parochial interest. In the first fifty years of such writing, only four novelists emerge whose work seems worth remembering; yet even of these none is mentioned in the most recent standard history of the American novel. The omission does not arise from ignorance or discrimination; it is a matter of simple justice. The fiction of Sidney Luska, Abraham Cahan, Ludwig Lewisohn, and Ben Hecht appears in retrospect not merely to fall short of final excellence, but to remain somehow irrelevant to the main lines of development of fiction in the United States.

For American Jews, their achievement has, of course, a symptomatic, an historical importance since they act as surrogates for the whole Jewish-American community in its quest for an identity, a symbolic significance on the American scene. Such early novelists begin to establish an image of the Jew capable not only of satisfying the Jews themselves, but also of representing them to their Gentile neighbors. The writing of the American-Jewish novel is essentially, then, an act of assimilation: a demonstration that there is an American Jew (whose Jewishness and Americanism enrich each other) and that he feels at home!

The striving of Jews to become in the United States not merely facts of the census but also of the imagination is only half of a double process that must be seen whole to be understood at all. As the Jewish writer goes out in search of himself, he encounters the Gentile writer on a complementary quest to come to terms with the Jew, the stranger in his land. Collaborators or rivals, whether willingly or not, Jewish fictionist and Gentile engage in a common enterprise. For a long time, indeed, it is hard for the Jewish novelist to compete with the Gentile in the creation of images of Jewishness. Ludwig Lewisohn's The Island Within may not be recorded in the standard history, but The Sun Also Rises is; for it is a subtler and truer book, and Robert Cohn, middleweight boxing champion from Princeton, is a realer Jew than any of Lewisohn's. That he is the product of anti-Semitic malice rather than love is from a literary point of view irrelevant. For better or worse, it is Hemingway's image of the Jew which survives the twenties: an overgrown boy scout and hangdog lover—an outsider still, even among outsiders, and in self-imposed exile.

It is hardly surprising that as late as 1930, Gentile writers are more effective at representing American Jews than are Jews themselves; for behind them there is a longer tradition of working with the American scene, and even a longer experience in projecting images of the American Jew than we are likely to remember. The first Jewish character in American fiction is the creation of the first professional novelist in the United States, Charles Brockden Brown. In 1799, he published Arthur Mervyn, the protagonist of which, after two volumes of being buffeted by a stubbornly perverse destiny, finds himself with a haven in sight. Like the typical Brown hero, he is about to redeem his fortune by marriage to a woman mature and well-to-do; and like all such heroes, he addresses her more as a mother than as a bride—though this time with an overtone of terror. "As I live, my good mamma," he says gazing into the eyes of Achsa Fielding, "those eyes of yours have told me a secret. I almost think they spoke to me.… I might have been deceived by a fancied voice … but let me die if I did not think they said you were—a Jew." "At this sound," the author tells us, "her features were instantly veiled with the deepest sorrow and confusion."

Arthur Mervyn has, indeed, guessed right, and for a moment the promised Happy Ending trembles in the balance; but Jewess or not, Mrs. Fielding offers too great a hope of security to be rejected, and Mervyn marries her. So sane and bourgeois a climax infuriated Shelley, who, though an admirer of Brockden Brown, could never forgive him for allowing his hero to desert an Anglo-Saxon "peasant girl" for a rich Jewish widow. Despite so prompt an appearance in American literature, however, the Jewish character does not immediately prosper, remaining an exotic or occasional figure until our own century. When present at all in classic American fiction, the image of the Jew is likely to appear, as it had in Arthur Mervyn, in female form—superficially just another variant of the Dark Lady, who is otherwise Mediterranean or vaguely "Oriental" (though, indeed, the term seems sometimes a mere euphemism for Jewish) or even Negro. The Ruth of Melville's long narrative poem Clarel or the Miriam of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun are, like Brockden Brown's prototype, dark projections of sexual experience or allure, foils to the pale, Anglo-Saxon maiden. Though objects of great erotic potency, they do not ordinarily survive to their book's endings, being death-ridden as well as death-bearing, but are consigned to imprisonment or an early grave.

The American writer is attracted toward the archetypal pattern of Shylock and Jessica, the sinister Jew deprived of his lovely daughter; but he cannot treat it with the comic aplomb of Shakespeare or even the Romantic blitheness of Scott. In his work, a tragic blight falls over the Gentile myth of assimilation, the dream of rescuing the desirable elements in the Judaic tradition (maternal tenderness and exotic charm: the figure of Mary) from the unsympathetic (patriarchal rigor and harsh legalism: the figure of the High Priest and Father Abraham). Indeed, except as the threatening guardians of sloe-eyed ambiguous beauties, male Jewish characters seldom make more than peripheral appearances in earlier American fiction. There are neither American Riahs nor Fagins though one of the villains in George Lippard's The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall is called, unsubtly enough, Gabriel von Gelt. ("Vot you scratch your fingersh on te floor? Hey?" Gabriel is reported as saying in the earliest of literary "Jewish accents.")

This novel, an astonishing blend of home-grown socialism, violence, and genteel pornography, appeared in 1844 and won rapidly an immense number of readers, who probably did not single out the lone Jew from the crew of thugs who run a Gothic whorehouse for the off-hours amusement of Philadelphia's respectable citizens. Yet it is not unimportant that in the nightmare phantasmagoria of the populist imagination run wild—among the hunchback dwarfs, deaf and dumb Negroes, corrupt clergymen, and millionaires gloating over the bared breasts of drugged virgins—the figure of the hawknosed, conniving Jew takes his due place. Gabriel von Gelt is the ancestor of the fictional Jewish gangster, the Wolfsheim, say, of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Long before the Jewish novelist existed in America, at any rate, the Jewish character had been invented, and had frozen into the anti-Jewish stereotype. Indeed, one of the problems of the practicing Jewish-American novelist arises from his need to create his protagonists not only out of the life he knows, but against the literature on which he, and his readers, have been nurtured. In order to become a novelist, the American Jew must learn a language (learn it not as his teachers teach it, but as he speaks it with his own stubborn tongue) more complex than a mere lexicon of American words. He must assimilate a traditional vocabulary of images and symbols, changing even as he approaches it—must use it, against the grain as it were, to create a compelling counter-image of the Jew, still somehow authentically American.

No wonder Jews are not only businessmen and workers, trade-union officials and lawyers, psychoanalysts and theater-owners but even actors, singers, musicians, composers of popular songs and makers of movies before they are writers. First the world of work and commerce, then of the professions, next that of popular culture, and only last of all, that of serious literature opens up to the American Jew. He can make the nation's songs like Irving Berlin or define its dream of the vamp like Theda Bara; he can even provide the ersatz of fiction like Fannie Hurst or Edna Ferber, act out for the laughs travesties of himself on the vaudeville stage with Smith and Dale or in the Saturday Evening Post with Montague Glass's Potash and Perlmutter. On such a level he speaks neither as a Jew becoming an American nor as an American who was a Jew; he communicates in the nonlanguage of anticulture, becomes his own stereotype. It is for this reason that the popular arts in the United States continue to this day to speak with a stage "Jewish accent." This is, however, only one more hindrance in the way of the serious Jewish writer, who must come to terms not only with Achsa Fielding and Gabriel von Gelt, but also with Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor.

Yet even before the triumph of the Jews in the world of mass culture, even before the perfection of the movies which sealed that victory, the Jewish-American novel had been created, the Jewish-American writer invented. The author of this achievement was, however, a goy—one of the most elusive and riddling figures in all American literature. He emerges in the 1880's out of those rather high-minded, assimilationist circles in German-Jewish New York, in which Ethical Culture seemed to promise a revivifying intellectual movement, at once secular and morally committed, Jewish and American. The name on the title pages of his "Jewish" books (As It Was Written, Mrs. Peixada, The Yoke of the Thorah, etc.) is Sidney Luska, a pseudonym obviously intended to suggest that the writer was himself Jewish; but he had apparently been born Henry Harland, a Protestant American, as discontented with his past, as uncertain of his identity as any alienated Jew. There is a certain appropriate irony in the fact that the first Jewish-American novelist was not a Jew at all, or that, more precisely, he was the creation of his own fiction, an imaginary Jew.

It is not easy to find the truth about so elusive an existence. Henry Harland was above all else an inveterate poseur, a liar who lied for his soul's sake; and the ordinary biographical sources are likely to contain whatever fabrication suited his view of himself at the moment he was asked for information. The ordinarily quite dependable Dictionary of National Biography, for instance, reports that Harland was born in St. Petersburg, that he was educated in Rome and studied at the University of Paris, "acquiring a knowledge of the life of the Latin Quarter"; the groundless romance of a provincial aesthete. Actually, he seems to have been born in Connecticut, to have moved early in life to New York, to have attended the Harvard Divinity School for one year—and then to have fallen under the influence of Felix Adler, who changed his whole life.

There still exists in my own mind a vestigial doubt (unsupported by any fact I have been able to discover) that Luska-Harland may, after all, have been a Jew pretending to be a Gentile pretending to be a Jew; it would be the best joke of all! More probably, however, he was a refugee from Protestantism who passed via Ethical Culture into the German-Jewish society of late nineteenth-century New York, and who tried even growing what he liked to think of as a "Jewish beard" to pass for a Jew. His books are Jewish not only in theme and point of view, but are meticulously documented with references to Jewish-American customs and to the rituals of Judaism. In one of his novels, the pursuit of verisimilitude (or exoticism!) is carried to the point of printing the name of God only as the two letter abbreviation used in Hebrew to avoid profaning the Holy Name.

Though he is now almost forgotten, Luska was in his own day a success, hailed not only by self-conscious spokesmen for Jewish culture, but greeted by William Dean Howells himself as one of the most promising younger realists. At the peak of his first fame, however, Luska committed a kind of suicide, becoming once again Henry Harland and fleeing America in one of the earliest acts of literary expatriation. He reappeared in England as the editor of The Yellow Book, chief journal of the fin de siecle, in which his own crepuscular prose (a new collection of his work was called Grey Roses) appeared beside the elegantly obscene decorations of Aubrey Beardsley. Harland proved to be a first-rate editor, printing, among other representatives of the advanced literature of his time, Henry James, who responded with a grateful tribute to Harland's own fiction; but his old schizoid doubts about who he was were not allayed by his new role.

During his entire term on the magazine, he wrote letters to himself signed "The Yellow Dwarf," attacking his own editorial policy. Only he knew the identity of this constant critic and relished, as he had before, his own secret duplicity. Still restless, however, he felt impelled to move once more, this time quite out of anglosaxondom, to France, where he was converted to Catholicism and ended by writing a best-seller called The Cardinal's Snujfbox. This piece of pseudo-aristocratic, pious fluff, whose title reveals its appeal for the provincials Harland had left behind, earned him $75,000 in its first year and enabled him to live out his life in elegant conversation amid the elegant bricabrac of pre-World War I Europe.

In his final reincarnation, he was asked once by a reporter about Sidney Luska and answered, "I never knew a Sidney Luska …," and spoke of a nightmare, dimly remembered, from which he was now awakened. There is, indeed, something sufficiently nightmarish about the whole episode, though it is from this nightmare that the Jewish novel in the United States begins. But what precisely did Henry Harland dream himself in that bad dream from which it took him so long to wake? He dreamed himself the excluded artist, poor, passionate, gifted and antibourgeois, offering to a world that rebuffed him the dowry of sensibility and insight amassed by an ancient suffering race. For Harland, such mythic Jews seemed to promise the redemption of American culture, a revitalization of American life. But where were they to be found outside of his own books?

He thought, perhaps, that he had discovered the embodiment of his ideal in Felix Adler and in his own deepest self which Adler had revealed to him; but actually Harland's Jewish heroes seem to have been derived first of all from literature. The protagonist of his first book, As It Was Written: A Jewish Musician's Story, seems to have been suggested by the Daniel Deronda of George Eliot, who was one of Harland's favorite writers. But that oddly sexless portrait of the female artist as a Young Jew he naturalized to the American scene endowed him with a particularly American mission. "It is the Jewish element that will leaven the whole lump …" he writes in his novel. "The English element alone is, so to speak, one portion of pure water; the German element one portion of eau sucree; now add the Jewish—it is a dose of rich strong wine.… The future Americans, thanks to the Jew in them, will have passions, enthusiasms. They will paint great pictures, compose great music, write great poems, be capable of great heroism.…" In such praise lurks an implicit threat. What if the Jew refuses the obligation, rejects even the assimilation which is the first step demanded of him in his role of secular savior?

Harland-Luska does not at first face up to this question; but there is present in his work from the start an undertone of hostility, lurking beneath the exaggerated philo-Semitism of the surface. Though his conscious mind writes the editorials that make the avowed point of his fictions, his ambivalent unconscious is writing the plots. Ernest Neuman, the artist of A Jewish Musician's Story, is only one-half artist; the other half is murderer! He is a Jekyll and Hyde character not merely because the exigencies of Harland's Gothic plot demand it, but because the deeper exigencies of Harland's divided mind demanded that plot to begin with. Neuman is a schizophrenic who has murdered his wife and remains unaware of it, who is consciously horrified and baffled until an experiment in automatic writing reveals to him, and to us, his guilt. This "new man," the new Jewish-American proposed as a symbol of assimilation, of the mating of the Jewish and American psyche, ends by killing his Gentile bride and proves capable only of destruction.

In Mrs. Peixada, Harland does permit the mating of Gentile and Jew, though he returns to the pattern of Brockden Brown and makes his symbol of Judaism a woman. It is always easier to breach the barriers against intermarriage in the popular mind by permitting the assimilation of the forbidden group through the female rather than through the male. So in the the earliest novel, marriages of aristocrats and lower-class women were applauded, while the Lady who ran off with her groom was held up as an object of contempt; and so now in the movies, Marlon Brando is allowed a Japanese wife, but his abandoned Caucasian girl is forbidden anything more than sympathetic conversation with a Japanese male. At any rate, Mrs. Peixada represents the return of the Jessica-figure in her American form; though this time she is not only stained by sexual experience (she is a widow, of course, rather than anything less genteel), she is the murderer of her first husband. Legally, to be sure, she is innocent, having acted in self-defense against that husband, who is the monstrous projection of all the evil ever attributed by the Gentile mind to the Jew: a pawnbroker, "gaunt as a skeleton … a hawk's beak for a nose, a hawk's beak inverted for a chin—lips, two thin, blue, crooked lines across his face, with yellow fangs behind them.…"

But there is worse to come. Though Luska was able to maintain in his mind not only Shylock and Jessica, but Daniel Deronda as well—nightmare and idealization in a dreamlike truce—none of those mythic figures could survive the intrusion of real Jews. Real Jews do, however, take over in The Yoke of the Thorah, which is perhaps the first genuine genre study of American-Jewish life in the New World. They are no longer mere projections of Anglo-Saxon self-hatred or guilt, these German-Jewish merchants of the eighties, eating, matchmaking, talking over the market. They are coarse, vulgar, platitudinous, loud, sentimental, gregarious, not saviors at all but only human beings; and the character who represents Harland moving among them shrivels and withdraws in their presence. But he cannot help listening to them, and catches for the first time (ironically, loses by catching) what is to be the real material of the Jewish writer.

"Oh my daughter," Mrs. Morgenthau returned. "She works like a horse.… And such a good girl. Only nineteen years old and earns more than a hundred dollars a month.… She's grand. She's an angel."

"Tillie's all wool from head to foot," put in Mr. Koch, "and a yard wide."

"Such a brilliant musician," said Elias.

"Musician," echoed her mother. "Well, I should say so. You ought to hear her play when she really knuckles down to it. Why you—you'd jump, you'd get so excited. The other night she was only drumming—for fun. I tell you what you do. You come around and call on us some evening."

Where now is the "rich strong wine"? Even music, which represented for Harland the essence of Jewish genius, becomes in such scenes bait in the matrimonial trap and matrimony itself merely an adjunct of business. Such an insight into the discrepancy between the traditional mission of the Jew and his actual accommodation to the American scene might have provided Harland the cue for genuine comedy or tragedy; it became instead merely the occasion for personal disillusion. It is hard to tell whether he is more distressed because the Jews will not assimilate to his heroic, artistic ideal or because they have already assimilated to the actual values of the world around them. Their very vitality parodies the American mores they accept; and face to face with that vitality as it exists not in the imaginary artist but in the real businessman, Harland experiences only a desire to go away.

The divorce to which this desire will eventually lead him is already signalled in The Yoke of the Thorah. The fable is a simple one: a young Jew, talented but weak and superstitious, is bullied out of marrying a sensitive and beautiful Gentile girl by the chicanery of his uncle who is a rabbi. He marries instead the gross daughter of a family of German-Jewish merchants; and having rejected a union with the Gentile world which would have redeemed him, dies lonely and disenchanted. His final gesture is to commit suicide in the middle of Central Park; but that gesture only acknowledges the fact that inwardly he had died long since. The publication of such a book by their former champion and literary hope apparently stirred the Jews of New York to bitterness. They had taken Harland in, and he had turned on them and attacked them—quite as their own writers would do in the years to come. That his attack was rooted in a burgeoning anti-Semitism, Harland himself did not at first realize; but he arose to defend himself in public forums at Jewish synagogues and temples and even wrote a couple of other "Jewish" books, quite innocent of innuendo or offense.

He was, however, really through; he had exhausted Jewishness as a subject and as a mask and was preparing for his next removal. In England and in France, he exiles the Jews from the center of his fiction to its periphery, and his last word on the subject is a casual sneer in the book that made his fortune. The words are put into the mouth of a lovely though improbable lady with an equally improbable Italian title, his gentle heroine: "The estate fell into the hands of the Jews, as everything more or less does sooner or later; and if you can believe me—they were going to turn the castle into … one of those monstrous, modern hotels, for other Jews to come to." The sentence foreshadows one theme of a somewhat later and certainly much greater expatriate American, with similar yearnings for orthodoxy and "the tradition."

And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp.

… On the rialto once
  The rats are underneath the piles. The Jew is underneath
the lot.

The history of Henry Harland is, finally, even more ridiculous than pathetic, a success story in the end: From Rags to Riches, from Ethical Culture on the East Side to Roman Catholicism on the Riviera. Yet before his last metamorphosis, Harland had defined what was to be the obsessive theme of the American-Jewish novel through the twenties: the theme of intermarriage, with its ambiguous blending of the hope of assimilation and the threat of miscegenation. The tradition that begins with Luska-Harland descends in one line to The Island Within and in another to the Cohens and the Kellys and Abie's Irish Rose.

It is self-evident that the Jewish-American novel in its beginnings must be a problem novel, and its essential problems must be those of identity and assimilation. The very concept of such a novel involves an attempt to blend two traditions, to contribute to the eventual grafting of whatever still lives in Judaism onto an ever-developing Americanism. One cannot, however, propose to lose himself without raising the question of what the self is which may be surrendered or kept; and the Jewish-American writer who is, of course, almost necessarily non-orthodox finds a riddle in the place where he looks for an answer. Is there a Jewish identity which survives the abandonment of ghetto life and ghetto beliefs, which for so long defined the Jew? Or has the Jew left in Europe, along with the pain and squalor he fled, the possibility of any definition?

What is unexpected is that these problems be posed in terms of sexual symbols, that the Jewish-American novel before 1930 be erotic fiction. The approach to and retreat from the Gentile community, the proffering of himself and the shying away out of fear of acceptance or rejection, becomes in the imagination of the Jewish writer a kind of wooing, an act of timid and virginal love. It becomes associated in his thinking with his attitude toward the new sexual freedom offered him by the breakdown of ghetto life and with the erotic subject matter that takes a central place in art once religion has been replaced as the essential subject. The Jewish-American novelist begins his attempts at a moment when the triumphs of European naturalism make it possible for fiction in the United States to break through the taboos of gentility, when the antibourgeois writer, in particular, delights in portraying himself as the exponent of the instinctual life, as the lover.

There is a real pathos in the efforts of the Jewish intellectual to see himself as Don Juan, an essential vanity in his striving to embody current theories of sexual freedom. There is nothing, either in his own deepest traditions or in the stereotypes imposed on him by Western fiction, to justify such a mythicization of himself: Shylock as Don Juan, Rashi as Don Juan, Daniel Deronda as Don Juan—they are all equally improbable. Yet it is in the role of passionate lover that the American-Jewish novelist sees himself at the moment of his entry into American literature; and the community with which he seeks to unite himself he sees as the shikse. Don Juan and the shikse—it is this legend, this improbable recasting of Samson and Delilah, which underlies American-Jewish fiction up to the end of the twenties.

The erotic theme had already been proposed by Henry Harland, and it is taken up again by Abraham Cahan in The Rise of David Levinsky, certainly the most distinguished novel written by an American Jew before the 1930's. It is easy to forget the sense in which Cahan's book is a love story, or even more precisely a story of the failure of love; for superficially it is another up-from-the-ghetto book, its concerns chiefly social. Indeed, it appeared in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, when for a little while it seemed possible that the dream of Socialism might become a fact and the Jew really assimilate to the emancipated Human Race instead of to the nation in which he happened to find himself. No wonder that even the more perspicuous critics were content to talk about David Levinsky as a social document: a commentary on the rise of the garment industry and its impact on American life; a study of the crisis in American-Jewish society when the first wave of German immigrants were being overwhelmed by Jews from Galicia and the Russian Pale; a case history of the expense of spirit involved in changing languages and cultures; a portrayal of New World secularism which made of City College a Third Temple and of Zionism and Marxism enlightened religions for those hungry for an orthodoxy without God.

Certainly, David Levinsky is all these things, as it is also the account of a Jew who dissipated the promise of his life in the pursuit of wealth; it is a rich and complex book, a retrospective and loving essay on the failures of his people by a man nearly sixty when he wrote it. An anti-Semitic, book, the conservative Jewish reviewers blindly called it: "Had the book been published anonymously, we might have taken it for cruel caricature of a hated race by some anti-Semite …" It is to remain the typical response of the "guardians of the Jewish Community" to any work which treats with art and candor the facts of Jewish life in the United States. Both the traditions of the European naturalist novel, on which Cahan really drew, and those of the American novel, to which he aspired, prescribe for the author a "negative" attitude toward the philistine society around him; and as a Jew he found especially abhorrent the drift of his own people, the chosen remnant, toward delusive bourgeois values. The disenchantment that became anti-Semitism in the imaginary Jew, Harland, becomes in Cahan a prophetic rage which is really love, an apparent treason which is the profoundest loyalty. In this respect, he remains the model for all serious Jewish-American novelists.

His ultimate subject is, aptly enough, loneliness: the loneliness of the emancipated Jew, who has lost the shared alienation of the ghetto to become a self-declared citizen of a world which rejects even as it rewards him. The unique loneliness of the "successful" immigrant Jew, however, suggests to Cahan the common human loneliness of those who have failed at love; and in the end it is hard to tell with which loneliness his book is primarily concerned. It is with the melancholy of David Levinsky that the novel begins; he came to America, he tells us, with four cents in his pocket and has now $2,000,000, but his life is "devoid of significance." To explain his joylessness David has certain theories. It is all due, he insists, to "a streak of sadness in the blood of my race"; to be a Jew is to be sad! But he asserts, too, that it is his wealth and the devices by which he has pursued it that have cut him off from the sources of happiness: "There are cases when success is a tragedy."

Yet Cahan makes the point with some care that David is only incidentally a capitalist, that he is not fundamentally different from other immigrant Jews of his generation who have become trade-unionists and socialists; what is peculiar in his development has occurred almost by accident. "Had I chanced to hear a socialist speech," he says at one point, "I might have become an ardent follower of Karl Marx." Instead he read Spencer and Darwin! What, then, is essentially wrong with David? Cahan does not answer unequivocally, but at times at least he suggests that he is somehow sexually or affectively incapacitated; that no boy brought up in the Talmudic tradition "that to look at the finger of a woman in desire is equivalent to seeing her whole body naked" can enter into the full heritage of modernity, which includes an ideal of sexual freedom as well as the hope of a classless society. Like Peretz, he considers the vestiges of ghetto Puritanism one of the hindrances that stand between the Jew and his full humanity.

Each failure of David Levinsky at winning a woman (and the book is in effect a tally of such failures) is given a symbolic social meaning. He does not get Matilda, his first love whom he desires while still in Europe, because he is not yet sufficiently emancipated from his Talmudic training; he cannot keep Dora, the wife of a friend with whom he carries on an inconclusive affair, because he has stepped outside of the Jewish family and cannot smuggle his way back in; he cannot win Anna Tevkin, young socialist and daughter of an eminent Hebrew poet, because he has learned to sing The Star-Spangled Banner with tears in his eyes, because he is a "Good American."

But for all his "Americanism," he remains still in some baffling sense a Jew and is, therefore, forbidden the possibility of marrying a Gentile. His last real chance at love seems, indeed, to be offered him by a Gentile woman "of high character," who all but proposes to him; yet at the last moment he feels between them "a chasm of race." There is always something! Though he cannot abide loneliness and prowls the streets ("I dream of marrying some day. I dread to think of dying a lonely man. Sometimes I have a spell of morbid amativeness and seem to be falling in love with woman after woman.… "), it is no use; some deep impotence dogs him. They are not symbols only, these failed love affairs of David Levinsky; they are real failures of the flesh and spirit, failures of a Jew in love with love and money.

In Ludwig Lewisohn and Ben Hecht, the two most admired Jewish novelists of the twenties, the erotic theme is restated in exaggerated, almost hysterical tones. There is something about their work not merely brash and provocative (this they intended), but vulgar and crude; and it becomes hard to remember that they seemed once the most promising of young novelists, before one was translated into a prophet of the new Zion and the other into a maker of successful movies. "More gross talent than net accomplishment," a disgruntled critic finally said of Hecht, and the phrase will do for Lewisohn, too. They chose to begin with such different masks, the professor and the reporter, that it is difficult to see how much they had in common, how both contrived sexual melodramas to project the plight of the Jew in the Jazz Age. A pair of titles, however, Lewisohn's Don Juan (1923) and Hecht's A Jew in Love (1931), frame the period and define its chief concern.

Unlike Cahan, who preceded them, and the Proletarian novelists, who were to follow them, Lewisohn and Hecht are hostile to Marxism; and the Marxists (most of them Jewish, of course) who appear in their books are portrayed as self-deceivers, attempting to conceal their personal anguish behind an artificial fog of socialist cant. The secular Jewish prophet honored by Hecht and Lewisohn is not Marx but Freud; and the secular religion to which they respond is what they call Freudianism, though, like many intellectuals in their time, they were not quite sure where Freud ends and D. H. Lawrence begins. Psychoanalysis seemed to them primarily one more device for mocking the middle class, one more source for arguments in defense of sexual emancipation. Beyond this, their interest remained superficial. Lewisohn's novel, The Island Within, contains what is probably the most unconvincing psychoanalyst in literature and manages to tuck away an utterly improbable description of an analysis, somewhere between its "epical" beginning and the little sermon on mixed marriages with which it ends.

Their common devotion to Eros and to Freud as his prophet, Lewisohn and Hecht develop in quite different ways. Lewisohn sets his in a context of belated German Romanticism, from which he derives a mystique of passion somehow synthesized with internationalism, pacifism, and a Crocean commitment to art. Hecht, on the other hand, adjusts his to a provincial version of symbolisme, which means for him a dedication to disorder and cynicism in art and life. Celebrated in his day as a new American Huysmans, he has become for us undistinguishable from the pressroom heroes of his Front Page, flip hard-guys to whom whiskey is the Muse and Chicago the Earthly Paradise. Lewisohn typically identifies himself with his protagonists, harried by women and bourgeois taboos, but pledged to fight for freedom with the sole weapon of art; Hecht presumably separates himself from the scoundrels who are the heroes of his books, though he covertly sympathizes with their amoral contempt for decency and tenderness.

The leading characters of both, though presumably intellectuals, are notable not for their ideas but for their efforts, successful or baffled, to find in themselves the demonic, impulsive sources of life. In this they are the authentic products of their age, though uneasy projections of their Jewish authors. What has a Jew to do finally with the primitivism and phallic mysticism which possessed the era? Only when he revolts not merely against philistinism but against his own most authentic traditions can he espouse such a cause. It is illuminating to remember that writers like D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson, the real high priests of the erotic religion, portrayed Jews in their fiction as natural enemies of the primitive ideal, antitypes of the passionate hero: cold, cerebral, incapable of the dark surrender of the self.

It is true enough that when Lewisohn uses Don Juan as a book title, he does so ironically and that he somehow feels obliged to pretend (however unconvincingly) that his protagonist is not a Jew; but he is all the while living the role in his own much-publicized life. In the news and gossip columns as well as in the pages of his novels, Lewisohn concentrated on justifying his love life—with time off for belaboring the poor women who failed him and the divorce laws which hampered his style. The only subject to which Lewisohn responds in his fiction with real fervor, the single spring of his creative work, is his own sex life desperately projected as typical.

The Island Within, his attempt at a major novel, opens with a manifesto declaring his epic ambitions and defending them against the proponents of the novel of sensibility, just then replacing the older, objective form. His declared intent is esthetically reactionary enough, but he cannot abide even by that; before the book is half over, he has abandoned the broad-canvas portrayal of three generations of Jewish life in Poland and Germany for a more intimate evocation of modern marital difficulties, for his usual blend of self-pity and editorial. No sooner has he reached America, than he heads for the bedroom, the old battle ground on which the sensitive Jew, a psychoanalyst this time, still struggles with the shikse (in the teeth of public opinion and benighted law) for the possession of his own soul.

Hecht, on the other hand, goes immediately to his theme—in this case not a direct exculpation of himself but the satirizing of another, a successful Jew. When the book first appeared, it was read as a roman a clef; and those in the know were more than willing to let the ignorant in on the secret of who Jo Bosshere, the publisher-protagonist, really was. At this point, when we no longer care about such revelations, it becomes clear that the book is more than a wicked jibe at an identifiable public figure; it is a work of inspired self-hatred: a portrait of the Jewish author as his own worst (Jewish) enemy. At any rate, the hero of Hecht's novel, whose original name was Abe Nussbaum, juggles a wife, a mistress, a whore whom he really loves, the wife of a good friend, in a frenzy of erotic machiavellianism, behind which there is no real desire. He braces himself for each sexual encounter with an energy so neurotically tense that it is dissipated by a knock at the door, a chance remark, the slightest shift in affective tone. What drives him is not passion but the need to force from the world unwilling avowals of love for his absurdly horrifying Jewish face. Bosshere-Nussbaum is portrayed by Hecht as the caricature of the anti-Semite come to life: not merely the Jew, but the nightmare of the Jew (as hawk-beaked and vulpine as Mr. Peixada) as Don Juan.

Of all the women he has possessed without desire, the one to whom Bosshere most desperately clings is, of course, the single shikse among them: the pure blonde tantalizing image of a world which all of his assaults and betrayals cannot make his own. Toward her he is impelled by something deeper than sadism and self-hatred, by what Hecht calls brutally "the niggerish delight of the Jew in the blonde." If he is defeated in the end, however, it is not because of the resistance of his shikse so much as because of his own inability to accept himself as the seducer and scoundrel. "To himself he was only this greedy, monogamous Jew full of biblical virtues.… "T o himself he was only the child of his people, not a great lover but a martyr to women, who cries out finally in the unexpected scriptural allusion, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me," and does not know whether he is invoking Eros or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

This is implicitly at least a self-criticism of the Jewish intellectual that cuts much deeper than personal satire, but it is marred by an imprecision of language and an uncertainty of tone that ends in incoherence. Lewisohn is explicit, however pat and superficial, and in The Island Within (actually published three years before A Jew in Love) he gives to the erotic-assimilationist novel its final form. Arthur Levy, the protagonist of Lewisohn's novel, never abandons his vocation as a lover; he merely transfers his desire from the representative of an alien world to the symbol of his own people, thus reinforcing a battered Romantic faith in sexual passion with an equally Romantic commitment to Zionism. As he has earlier combined the advocacy of sexual freedom with a vaguely internationalist humanism, so now he combines it with a revived Judaism, adapted to the modern scientific mind.

He pretends, indeed, to find in the Jewish tradition sanctions for his view of love. Is not Jewish divorce, he asks rhetorically, easier than Christian? Were not the Jews always skeptical about the notion of marriage as a sacrament? Have Jewish women historically not represented a tertium quid: neither servile like the slave-women of the Anglo-Saxon world before modern times, nor hopelessly lost like the "emancipated" Gentile women of the current era? Have they not remained at the heart of the tradition the Jewish intellectual has temporarily abandoned, waiting to bestow on him when he returns the warm fulfillment he has vainly sought in strangers? We have come full circle from Cahan's view of ghetto Judaism as a castrating force.

But Lewisohn is prepared to go even further than this, from a defense of Zion as the true Eros, to an attack on the Gentile woman as the false Aphrodite. It has all been the fault of the shikse and of the Jewish intellectual only so far as he has become her victim. It is no longer the Gentile world which rejects the Jew in Lewisohn's fiction (that world is, indeed, eager to draw him in and suck him dry), but the Jew who rejects it—even as Arthur Levy rejects the hope of assimilation and sets out at his story's end back to Europe, back to his people's past, to investigate the plight of his fellow Jews in Rumania.

We have reached at last the reverse of Harland-Luska's theory in The Yoke of the Thorah; Jessica has yielded to Delilah. Not by rejecting the Gentile girl for the Jewish one but by preferring her, the sensitive Jew commits spiritual suicide. The shikse represents no longer the promise of fulfilment, of a blending of cultures, but only the threat of death, of the loss of identity. The reversal, however, like the original thesis, remains a little too pat, more suited for sermonizing than poetry; at any rate, in neither case did the authors make of their themes moving and memorable fictions. Yet with Lewisohn's establishment of the antistereotype in its classic form something has been accomplished, that is to say, the last possibility of the erotic-assimilationist novel has been exhausted. His novel rests like a melancholy capstone on the whole period which reaches from the eighties to the dying twenties, a monument to an unsuccessful quest by whose example later writers have profited. After The Island Within, the Jewish-American novelist knew at least one direction in which he could not go.

Though there were American Jewish novelists of real distinction in the first three decades of the twentieth century, it is not until the thirties that such writers play a critical role in the total development of American literature. From that point on, they have felt themselves and have been felt by the general public as more than pioneers and interlopers, more than exotics and eccentrics. Indeed, the patterns of Jewish speech, the experiences of Jewish childhood and adolescence, the smells and tastes of the Jewish kitchen, the sounds of the Jewish synagogue have become, since 1930, staples of the American novel.

It is, of course, Jewish urban life in particular which has provided a standard decor for the novel: the life of New York, and especially of the ghettos of the East Side, Williamsburg, etc. In a certain sense, indeed, the movement of Jewish material from the periphery to the center is merely one phase of a much larger shift within the world of the American novel: that urbanization of our fiction which accompanies the urbanization of our general culture.

Our literary twenties were dominated by provincial writers like Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis, even Faulkner and Hemingway, who close that period and provide a bridge into the age that succeeds it. Whatever their talent, they remained essentially country boys who had come to the big city, who had wandered under their own power into New Orleans or New York, who had been transported by the A.E.F. to Paris. Whether they stayed or returned home again did not finally matter; even when they wrote about the city, they wrote about it as seen through the eyes of one who had come late into it and had remained a stranger.

Despite an occasional sport like Myron Brinig, who writes about Montana, or MacKinlay Kantor, whose subject matter includes hound dogs, Jewish writers do not fit into such a provincial pattern, which does not, in any case, reflect the typical, the mythical Jewish experience in America. Their major entry into the American novel had to await its urbanization, though that entry is not, to be sure, only a function of such urbanization. It is an extension, too, of the break-up of the long-term Anglo-Saxon domination of our literature which began in the generation just before the First World War. The signal that this double process had started was the emergence of Dreiser as the first novelist of immigrant stock to take a major position in American fiction. There is something ironic in the fact that the breach through which succeeding Jewish writers poured was opened by one not innocent of anti-Semitism; but once the way was opened for immigrants in general, it was possible for Jews to follow.

At any rate, by the end of the thirties (a recent historian of Jewish literature points out) there were some sixty American Jewish writers of fiction who could be called without shameless exaggeration "prominent." A close examination of that historian's list proves rather disheartening; for of the sixty-odd names he mentions, fewer than ten seem to me worthy of remembering; and three of these (Abe Cahan, Ludwig Lewisohn and Ben Hecht) belong, in theme and significance, to the twenties in which their major work was accomplished. The writers who remain of the original sixty are Edward Dahlberg, Leonard Ehrlich, Daniel Fuchs, Meyer Levin (recently come to life by reaching back into the Jewish Society of the twenties for an image of violence and disgust stark enough to move us) and Henry Roth. Even if one were to add to these certain others not included in the original group, say, Waldo Frank, Maurice Samuel, Isidor Schneider and Michael Gold, who are at least symptomatically important, it would make a constellation by no means inspiring; for no one of them is a figure of first importance even in the period itself.

Fuchs and Roth are writers of considerable talent, even of major talent, perhaps; but for various reasons, their achievement is limited. Roth is the author of a single novel, Call It Sleep; and Fuchs, though he wrote three before his retreat to Hollywood and popular fiction for ladies' magazines (and despite a recent comeback in short fiction) wrote only one book of considerable scope: Homage to Blenholt. There remains, of course, Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein, who preferred to call himself Nathanael West—and whose long neglect by official writers on the period is now being overbalanced by his enthusiastic rediscoverers. For a long time, scarcely anyone but Henry Popkin considered him worth touting; but now the republication of his whole works and his translation into a Broadway play have given West back a full-scale existence. There is no use being carried away, however, no use in concealing from ourselves the fact that what has been restored to us is only another tragically incomplete figure, whose slow approach to maturity ends in death. And there remains further the troublesome question: is West in any effective sense a Jew?

Though the thirties mark the mass entry of the Jewish writer into American fiction, they do not last long enough to see any major triumphs. There is no Jewish writer among the recognized reigning figures of the period: no Dos Passos, no Farrell, no Steinbeck; there is no Jewish writer who played a comparable role to the continuing major novelists of the twenties: no Fitzgerald, no Hemingway, no Faulkner. There is no Jewish author (with the possible exception of West) who can rank even with middle-generation fictionists like Robert Penn Warren, who seemed at the end of the thirties promising young men.

Even in the creation of images of the Jew, a job the Jewish writer in the United States has long been struggling to tnke out of the hands of the Gentiles, there is no Jewish writer who can compare in effectiveness to Thomas Wolfe. Just as Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway and Fitzgerald succeeded in making their hostile images of Jews imaginative currencies in the twenties, Wolfe succeeded in imposing on his period a series of portraits derived from his experiences at New York University: enameled Jewesses with melon breasts; crude young male students pushing him off the sidewalk; hawkbeaked Jewish elders, presumably manipulating the world of wealth and power from behind the scenes.

What, then, was the modest contribution of the Jewish writer to the fiction of the thirties, and how did this prepare for later successes going beyond anything he himself achieved? Predictably enough, a large number of American Jewish writers of the period were engaged in the production of the best-advertised (though, alas, quite infertile) art-product of the period: the Proletarian Novel. Perhaps the best way to define that subform of the novel is to remind ourselves that it is the major result of applying to the creation of literature the theory that "art is a weapon"; and that therefore it was in intent anti-art, or at least, opposed to everything which "petty-bourgeois formalism" considered art to be. Perhaps because of the contradictions inherent in such a view, it had one of the shortest lives ever lived by a literary genre. One speaks of the Proletarian Novel as a form of the thirties, but in fact it was finished by 1935 or 1936, becoming at that point merely formula writing, completely at the mercy of political shifts inside the Communist movement.

In any case, the Proletarian Novel is not, as its name suggests, merely a book about proletarians; it is alternatively about poor farmers, members of the lower middle class; and most often, in fact if not in theory, about intellectuals, specifically about the intellectual's attempt to identify himself with the oppressed and with the Movement which claimed to represent them. The Proletarian Novel was, then, ideological fiction dedicated to glorifying the Soviet Union and the Communist Party and to proving that the Party was the consciousness of the working class in America as well as in the rest of the world. Yet the most characteristic aspect of such novels escapes ideological definition completely, for it is a product of the age as it worked on writers beneath the level of consciousness of class or anything else. This is the tone of the Proletarian Novel: a note of sustained and self-satisfied hysteria bred on the one hand of Depression-years despair and on the other of the sense of being selected as brands to be snatched from the fire.

The Stalinist movement in the United States has always attracted chiefly marginal and urban groups; and if one thinks of the marginal and urban in the United States, he thinks, of course, largely of Jews. Especially in its cultural activities, in the John Reed Clubs, in the New Masses (and those cultural activities were of major importance in the thirties when the Communists captured few factories but many publishing houses), Jews participated in a proportion completely out of accord with their role in the total population. Indeed, the Movement was by way of being the typical strategy of the ambitious young Jew in a time of Depression for entering fully into American life. Jews who would have been dismayed by older kinds of bourgeois assimilation embraced this new method which allowed them at once to identify themselves with America and protest against certain aspects of its life.

Similarly, the intellectual, whether Jewish or not, found in the Movement an escape from the sense of alienation from American society which the twenties had brought to acute consciousness. One must realize the attractiveness of the orthodox Communist "culture" sponsored by the New Masses for the young man who was both an intellectual and a Jew. It is scarcely surprising that so many of them turned to the Proletarian Novel as their chosen form; even those who for aesthetic reasons found the genre unpalatable apologized for their apostasy, or tried to make up for it: like Nathanael West feeding his more orthodox contemporaries at the family hotel and boasting of having walked the picket line with James T. Farrell and Leane Zugsmith.

Still, no matter how alluring the Proletarian Novel might have been to the unproletarian Jewish writer, he could not, of course, write such a novel as a Jew. It was during the thirties, one remembers, that the Stalinists were officially condemning Jewish chauvinism in Palestine, and attacking Ludwig Lewisohn (who had entered his Zionist phase) as the blackest of reactionaries; and in those days, "race consciousness" was thought to be inimical to class consciousness. It is not surprising, after all, that a recent survey of the literature of the period, in a book called The Radical Novel in America, can point out only one Proletarian Novel which dealt specifically with anti-Semitism. This is a problem which must wait for the Popular Front novel and the Middlebrow Liberal Novel, which is to say, for the forties.

All of which does not mean, of course, that a Jewish writer could not begin with his Jewishness; and, as a matter of fact, Michael Gold's Jews Without Money, which appeared in 1930, was the prototype of the Proletarian Novel, going through eleven printings in its first year and setting a pattern for succeeding writers. Not quite a novel, really, or quite an autobiography, it seems more than anything a collection of vignettes of Jewish life making a moral point—a conversion tract illustrating the passage of a thinking man from Judaism to Communism. The pattern is simple enough (it is picked up and reinforced later in Isidor Schneider's From the Kingdom of Necessity): to make of "Jewish nationalism" and the Jewish religion the chief symbols of reaction; the pious man, the pillar of the synagogue, appears as a landlord and an owner of whorehouses; the rabbi becomes an old lecher; and the rituals of the Jews instances of hypocrisy and backwardness. The Seder (one thinks of what Herman Wouk will be doing fifteen years later to redeem all this!) an especial horror: "Ironical, isn't it? No people has suffered as the Jews have from the effects of nationalism and no people has held to it with such terrible intensity.…"

Can there be, then, in the American Jewish proletarian writer any Jewishness beyond a peculiarly Jewish self-hatred, a Jewish anti-Jewishness? To be sure, there is always available to him Jewish local color: the stumbling speech, the squalor, the joy peculiar to the Lower East Side or Brownsville; but these are by the thirties already sentimentalized cliches also available to the makers of Cohen and Kelly type movies. There is, beyond this, the constant awareness of alienation which belongs to the Jew: the sense of loneliness not as an accident but as a kind of chosenness; and in a writer like Gold the ancestral cry of "Eli, Eli …" persists. "In my ears still ring the lamentations of the lonely old Jews without money: 'I cash clothes, I cash clothes, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!'"

Not only has the concept of the choosing of all Israel in an election which seems an abandonment been transferred from the whole people to a part—to the poor alone—but in the process, what began as a mystery has become hopelessly sentimentalized. It is not for nothing that Mike Gold has been called the Al Jolson of the Communist Movement; indeed, in and through him, a cloying tradition of self-pity, which is also, alas, Jewish, and which had already possessed the American stage, moves on into literature. If the Communist Jewish writer can sing "Eli, Eli …" to his own tune, he can also sing "A Yiddishe Mamme" in a proletarian version. Here is Mike Gold once more: "My humble funny little East Side mother.… She would have stolen or killed for us.… Mother! Momma! I am still bound to you by the cords of birth.… I must remain faithful to the poor because I cannot be faithless to you."

All of this is secondary, however; the special meaning of Judaism for the radical writer of the thirties is, expectedly enough, its Messianism. "I believed," Gold writes, "the Messiah was coming, too. It was the one point in the Jewish religion I could understand clearly. We had no Santa Claus, but we had a Messiah." It is understandable, after all, that Marxism should feel at home with the Messianic ideal, since Marx seems to have envisaged himself, more often than not, as a prophetic figure: the last of the prophets promising a new heaven and a new earth. With the Russian Revolution, however, and the differentiation of Bolshevism, a new tone is apparent in Socialist messianism: a note at once apocalyptic and violent.

The old-fashioned sanity that characterizes Abraham Cahan is abandoned; and especially anything that smacks of the pacifism of the twenties is rejected in favor of an ideal of "hard Bolshevism" and class war. Two quite different sorts of feelings are involved, often confused with each other but logically quite separable: on the one hand, the desire, compounded of the self-hatred of the Jew and the self-distrust of the intellectual, that the good, clean, healthy workers of the future take over and destroy all that has come before them; on the other, an impulse to identify oneself with the future, to feel oneself for once strong and brutal and capable of crushing all that has baffled and frustrated one's dreams. "Oh workers' Revolution," Gold's protagonist cries out at the book's climax. "You brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah.…"

Jewish American fiction in the thirties, whether specifically "proletarian" or not, is characterized by this frantic religiosity without God, this sense of the holiness of violence. Wherever one turns, there is the sense of a revelation, mystic and secular and terrible, as the only possible climax: the challenge to an unbelieved-in God to redeem Williamsburg at the end of Fuchs' first novel; the prayer to Pure Mathematics as a savior in Maurice Samuel's Beyond Woman; the invocation of the holy rage of John Brown in Leonard Ehrlich's John Brown's Body; the baffled and self-destructive attempt of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts to become Christ in a Christless world.

The Jewish novel of the twenties has as its typical theme assimilation and as its typical imagery the erotic; but the novel of the thirties is in theme and imagery, as well as politics, apocalyptic. Sex does not disappear from it completely, for the conquest of erotic taboos is a continuing concern of the contemporary novel; but its meaning and importance alike have been altered as compared with, say, The Rise of David Levinsky or Ben Hecht's A Jew in Love. From the Jew in love to the Jews without money of the thirties is a long way whose direction is indicated by Maurice Samuel's title Beyond Woman. Where erotic material does appear, it is likely to have the function which it assumes in Gold's book, to have become one more exhibit in the Chamber of Horrors: evidence of the evils of prostitution or the prevalence of the homosexual rape of small boys under Capitalism. More generally speaking, after Mike Gold, sex tends to be treated as just another sort of violence in a violent America.

In the 1930's, the Jewish-American novelists, like most of their Gentile fellows, become subscribers to the cult of violence, though for the Jewish writer such an allegiance has a special pathos because of the long opposition to violence in the Jewish inheritance. It is one more way of denying his fathers. And what could he do in any case? In those shabby, gray years, the dream of violence possesses the American imagination like a promise of deliverance. Politics is violent and apolitics equally so; whatever else a man accepts or denies, he does not deny terror.

Obviously, the thirties did not invent terror and violence in our fiction; as far back as our books go, there are images of horror: the torn corpse stuffed up the chimney; the skull split by a tomahawk; the whale spouting blood. Even a "funny book" like Huckleberry Finn has more corpses than anybody can ever remember. There are, however, two transformations in the thirties of the role and handling of violence.

The first is the urbanization of violence; that is to say, violence is transferred from the world of nature to the world of society, from what man must endure to what man has made. There is, of course, a special horror in considering the law of fang and claw walled in but unmitigated by the brick and glass of the city planners. Even a provincial writer like Faulkner is driven in those years to move into the city streets for images of terror adequate to the times; and Sanctuary remains of all his books the most appalling and Popeye, his sole urban protagonist, his most monstrous creation.

But the thirties mark the climax of an even more critical change: the ennobling of violence as "the midwife of history." Under the name of the Revolution, violence becomes not something to be fled, not the failing of otherwise admirable men, not a punishment for collective guilt—but the crown of social life. What had begun just after 1789 with the Terror and been hailed in America by the theoretically bloody Jefferson received in an age of mechanized warfare and mass production its final form. The lust for pain of Nietzsche and the hypostasizing of history by Hegel culminated in the twin horrors of Nazi and Soviet brutality; but a worse indignity had already been worked on the minds of intellectuals, conditioned in advance to accept one or the other.

In light of this, it is easy to understand that questions of ideology are secondary, that it is the pure love-fear of violence which distinguishes the novel of the thirties: a kind of passion not unlike that which moved the Germans before their final defeat, a desire for some utter cataclysm to end the dull-dragging-out of impotent suffering. Not only Communist-oriented writers produced such horror literature, but southerners like John Peale Bishop (in Act of Darkness) or Robert Penn Warren (in At Heaven's Gate); Hemingway made his obeisance to the mode in To Have and Have Not; and even so mild an upper-middlebrow traditionalist as James Gould Cozzens produced in Castaway a novella of the required shrillness.

In the official Communist version, the vision of the apocalypse is translated into that of the "Final Conflict" between worker and boss, Good and Evil; but this pat formula the better Jewish-American novelists could not quite stomach. Rather typically they temper the violence they cannot reject with humor, an ironic refusal to enter the trap completely. At the close of Daniel Fuchs' Homage to Blenholt, the three shlemiels who are his protagonists have reached the end of their illusions and are looking at each other in despair. One has come to realize that he will run a delicatessen for the rest of his life; another has come to see that the greatest event in his career will be winning three hundred dollars on a long shot.

"Well," said Coblenz, "don't take it so hard. Cheer up. Why don't you turn to Communism?"
"Communism?" cried Mrs. Balkin. "Listen to Mr. Bungalow. Communism!"
"What has Communism got to do with it?" Munves sincerely wanted to know.
"It's the new happy ending. You feel lousy? Fine! Have a revelation and onward to the Revolution!"

Fuchs' protagonists remain to the end victims and antiheroes, incapable of any catastrophe more tragic than the pratfall; but this is the traditional strategy of the comic writer. In a more complex way, Nathanael West and Henry Roth manage to achieve at once the antiheroic and the almost-tragic. In West, the comic butt is raised to the level of Everybody's Victim, the skeptical and unbelievedin Christ of a faithless world; in Roth, the shlemiel is moved back to childhood, portrayed as the victim of circumstances he can never understand, only transcend.

West, of course, remains a humorist still; though in him humor is expressed almost entirely in terms of the grotesque, that is to say, on the borderline between jest and horror. In his novels, violence is not only subject matter; it is also technique, a way of apprehending as well as a tone and theme. Especially in the Dream Life of Balso Snell, one can see what West learned from the Surrealists during his stay in France: the violent conjunctions, the discords at the sensitive places where squeamishness demands harmony; the bellylaugh that shades off into hysteria.

Yet he is a peculiarly American case, too. In one of his few published critical notes he announces: "In America violence is idiomatic, in America violence is daily." And it is possible to see him as just another of our professional tough guys, one of the "boys in the backroom" (the phrase is Edmund Wilson's—the title of a little book in which he treated West along with John O'Hara). But West is, despite his own disclaimers, in a real sense, a Jew. He is racked, that is to say, by guilt in the face of violence, shocked and tormented every day in a world where violence is daily. In Miss Lonelyhearts, he creates a kind of portrait of himself as one all nerves and no skin, the fool of pity whom the quite ordinary horror of ordinary life lacerates to the point of madness. His protagonist is given the job of answering "letters from the lovelorn" on a daily newspaper and finds in this job, a 'joke" to others, a revelation of human misery too acute to bear.

But this is West's analogue for the function of the writer, whom he considers obliged to regard unremittingly a suffering he is too sensitive to abide; and in no writer is there so absolute a sense of the misery of being human. He is child enough of his age to envision an apocalypse; but his apocalypse is a defeat for everyone. The protagonist of Miss Lonelyhearts is shot reaching out in love toward a man he has (against his will) offended; the hero-shlemiel of A Cool Million: or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin goes from one absurd anti-Horatio-Alger disaster to another, and after his death becomes the hero of an American Fascist movement. But the real horror-climax of his life and the book comes when, utterly maimed, he stands on a stage between two corny comedians who wallop him with rolled up newspapers in time to their jokes until his wig comes off (he has been at one point scalped), his glass eye falls out, and his wooden leg falls away; after which they provide him with new artificial aids and begin again.

It is in The Day of the Locust, however, West's last book and the only novel on Hollywood not somehow trivialized by its subject, that one gets the final version of The Apocalypse according to Nathanael West. At the end of this novel, a painter, caught in a rioting mob of fans at a Hollywood premiere, dreams, as he is crushed by the rioters, his masterpiece, "The Burning of Los Angeles":

Across the top he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles.… Through the center… spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches—all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence, a great United Front of screw-balls and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.

West does not seem to be finally a really achieved writer; his greatness lies like a promise just beyond his last novel and is frustrated by his early death; but he is the inventor for America of a peculiarly modern kind of book whose claims to credence are perfectly ambiguous. One does not know whether he is being presented with the outlines of a nightmare endowed with a sense of reality or the picture of a reality become indistinguishable from nightmare. For the record, it must be said that the exploiters of such ambiguity are typically Jews: Kafka for the continent, West for us.

But in what sense is West a Jew at all? There is a violent flight from Jewish self-consciousness in his work; indeed, in Balso Snell, there is a bitter portrait of the kind of Jewish artist who feels obliged to insist on his origins:

"Sirrah!" the guide cried in an enormous voice, "I am a Jew! and whenever anything Jewish is mentioned, I find it necessary to say that I am a Jew. I'm a Jew! A Jew!"

Indeed, whenever a Jew is directly identified in West, he is portrayed viciously enough to satisfy the most rabid anti-Semite; although one must hasten to add that this is balanced by portraits of anti-Semites which would gratify any Jew. Finally, however, anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism do not really add up to Jewishness, much less cancel each other out. West's changed name is surely a clue; he is the first American Jewish writer to wear a name which is a disguise; the exact opposite of Henry Harland, first author of an American book with a Jewish milieu, who called himself Sidney Luska and tried to pass as a compatriot of his protagonists.

West, we are told, made a point of dressing in a Brooks Brothers suit, carrying a tightly rolled umbrella and going, conspicuously, on hunting trips—which is to say, he insisted in all ways on making himself the antitype of the conventional Jewish intellectual. Yet it seems to me inconceivable that anyone but an urban, second-generation Jew in revolt against his background could have produced the novels from Balso Snell to The Day of the Locust. Certainly, the epigram of C. M. Doughty, which he himself quotes, seems applicable to Nathanael West: "The Semites are like to a man sitting in a cloaca to the eyes, and whose brows touch heaven."

Henry Roth is quite another matter. Call It Sleep, which appeared in 1935, and which no one will reprint despite continuing critical acclaim, is a specifically Jewish book, the best single book by a Jew about Jewishness written by an American, certainly through the thirties and perhaps ever. Technically, Roth owes a great deal to James Joyce; and, indeed, it is the strategy of intense concentration on fragmented detail and the device of stream-of-consciousness (both learned from Ulysses) which protect his novel from the usual pitfalls of the ghetto book. He reverses the fatal trend toward long-winded chronicle, which had at once inflated and dimmed the portrayal of Jewish immigrant society from Abe Cahan's lifelong study of David Levinsky to Ludwig Lewisohn's "saga" of four generations. The events of Call It Sleep cover two years of ghetto life, from 1911 to 1913, and are funneled through the mind of a boy who is six at the start of the book. It is through the sensibility of this sensitive, poetic, mama-haunted, papa-hating Jewish child, full of fears and half-perceptions and misunderstandings, that the cliches of the form are redeemed to poetry.

But he serves another purpose, too, that of helping the author, apparently committed to the ends of the Movement, evade ideology completely. In the place of the Marxian class struggle, Roth sets an almost Dickensian vision of the struggle between the child and society, of the child as Pure Victim. The lonely boy and the hostile city make only the first in a series of counterpoints on which the book is based: the greenhorn and the American; a subtle and lovely Yiddish and a brutal, gray English; grossness and poetry; innocence and experience, finally Gentile and Jew. In a way, quite unexpected in the thirties, Roth plays off the values of the Cheder against the values of an outside world dedicated to a pagan hunger for sex and success.

The climax of the book comes when David, the young protagonist, thrusts the handle of a milk ladle down into a crack between streetcar rails and is shocked into insensibility. He has learned earlier of the power of the rails, when captured and tortured by a gang of Gentile hoods on the previous Passover, and has come somehow to identify that power with the coal of fire by which the mouth of Isaiah was cleansed. He feels the need of a similar cleansing, for young as he is, he has the sense of having played pander to his cousin Esther and a Gentile boy in order to be accepted in that boy's world. Just before he passes into complete unconsciousness, David is granted a vision—once more the apocalypse—in which all that troubles him is healed: his father's paranoiac rage and fear of cuckoldry; his mother's mute suffering and erotic fantasies; his own terrors and apostasies. Blended into his vision are the harsh cries of the street and the voice of a Socialist speaker prophesying the day on which the Red Cock will crow. For the vision, neither the eight-year-old David nor the author has a name; and as the boy falls from consciousness, he thinks: "One might as well call it sleep."

After this spectacular achievement, Roth wrote no more novels; he works now, one hears, in an insane asylum in upstate New York—and an occasional story reveals him still haunting his old material without conviction or power. It is not an untypical case in the history of American Jewish writers in the thirties. Gold and Schneider lapsed into mere pamphleteering: West and Fuchs moved off to Hollywood, where the former died; no promises were fulfilled. Looking back, one sees a series of apparent accidents and ideological cripplings, acts of cowardice and despair; and yet there is a sense that this universal failure is not merely the function of personal weakness but of a more general situation. Although all outward circumstances in the time of the Great Depression conspired to welcome the Jewish writer, the inward life of the Jewish community was not yet defined enough to sustain a major writer, or even to provide him with something substantial against which to define himself in protest.