SOURCE: "Zion as Main Street" and "Jewish-Americans, Go Home!" in Waiting for the End, Stein and Day, 1964, pp. 65-103.

[Fiedler is a controversial and provocative American critic. While he has also written novels and short stories, his personal philosophy and insights are thought to be most effectively expressed in his literary criticism. Fiedler often views literature as the mirror of a society's consciousness, and his most important work, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), assesses American literature, and therefore American society, as an infantile flight from "adult heterosexual love." In the following essay, he examines the place of the Jew in twentieth-century American culture and literature.]

Certainly, we live at a moment when, everywhere in the realm of prose, Jewish writers have discovered their Jewishness to be an eminently marketable commodity, their much vaunted alienation to be their passport into the heart of Gentile American culture. It is, indeed, their quite justified claim to have been first to occupy the Lost Desert at the center of the Great American Oasis (toward which every one now races, Coca-Cola in one hand, Martin Buber in the other), which has made certain Jewish authors into representative Americans, even in the eyes of State Department officials planning cultural interchanges. The autobiography of the urban Jew whose adolescence coincided with the Depression, and who walked the banks of some contaminated city river with tags of Lenin ringing in his head, who went forth (or managed not to) to a World War in which he could not quite believe, has come to seem part of the mystical life history of a nation.

Even in the realm of poetry, writers of Jewish origin are beginning for the first time, not only to project the most viable images of what it means to be an American, but to determine the cadences with which we glorify or deplore that condition. The very lines inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty are, to be sure, by Emma Lazarus, who called one collection of her poems Songs of a Semite; but it was not until the appearance of Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro, in the years just before and after World War II, that Jewish-American poets succeeded in producing verse capable of living in libraries and the hearts of other poets, rather than on monuments and in the mouths of politicians. And only within the last decade has a poet as Jewish in his deepest memories (whatever his current allegiances) as Allen Ginsberg been able to stand at the head of a new poetic movement.

Yet the moment of triumph for the Jewish writer in the United States has come just when his awareness of himself as a Jew is reaching a vanishing point, when the gesture of rejection seems his last possible connection with his historical past; and the popular acceptance of his alienation as a satisfactory symbol for the human condition threatens to turn it into an affectation, a fashionable cliche. Indeed, the recent recognition of even the most serious Jewish-American writers seems somehow less an event in literary history than an incident in the development of middle-brow taste, part of the minor revolution which has made Harry Golden into a modern prophet and has enabled newspapers to build circulation by running serializations of the latest pseudo-books of Leon Uris. Surely, a kind of vicarious shame at the monstrosities practiced against the Jews of Germany by the Nazis has something to do with this revolution; and the establishment of the State of Israel has tended to give even the Jews in exile a less ambiguous status, while the struggle against Great Britain leading to that establishment has lent them a certain sentimental cachet, ranking them, in the minds of American Anglophobes, with the Irish and the mythical revolutionary ancestors of us all.

But it is chiefly the resurgence of "intergroup understanding," the tidal wave of toleration that has flowed into the vacuum left by the disappearance of zeal and the attenuation of faith among churchgoers, which has carried the Jews along with it. And they have benefited, too, by the canonization of support for "little people" among the pieties of yesterday's liberalism which have become the orthodoxy of today's New Deal-New Frontier conservatism. Armenians, Greeks, Chinese, Cubans, low-caste Indians, Mexican wetbacks, women without suffrage, paraplegics, teen-agers—one group after another has been dubbed with that condescending tag. But, maybe, from this point of view the ordeal of the Jew is almost over, for he no longer occupies the number-one slot among the insulted and injured. Even the New Yorker has recognized that the Negro is, at the moment, up; and it is the Baldwins rather than the Bellows who have to wrestle now with the mystery of the failure of success in America. The general detente in the cold war between Gentile and Jew in the United States persists, and though other sentimental fashions challenge it, it remains chic in certain middlebrow, middle-class, middle-liberal quarters to be pro-Jewish. Philo-Semitism is required—or perhaps, by now, only assumed—in the reigning literary and intellectual circles of America, just as anti-Semitism used to be required—and after a while only assumed—in the Twenties.

But the Judaization of American culture goes on at levels far beneath the literary and the intellectual. The favorite wine in Missoula, Montana, which does not have a dozen Jewish families, is Mogen David; and for years now, "Nebbishes" have stared out of the windows of the local gift shop from greeting cards, ash trays, beer mugs, and pen stands. And why not? Everyone everywhere digs Jules Feiffer and Mort Sahl, just as everyone tells "sick" jokes and sends "hate" cards to celebrate birthdays and weddings and national holidays. The "sick" joke and the "hate" card, however, represent the entry into our popular culture not only of certain formerly exclusive properties of the avant-garde (the mockery of bourgeois pieties, a touch of psychoanalysis) but also of Jewish humor at its most desperate. There is nothing entirely unprecedented here, of course; Potash and PerImutter were best-sellers in the opening years of this century, and Charlie Chaplin's debut was almost contemporaneous with theirs. As a matter of fact, the Jew enters American culture "on the stage, laughing."

It might be possible, indeed, to make a graph showing, decade by decade, the point at which it became possible for Jews:

1. to act out travesties of themselves on the stage;
2. to act out travesties of other "comical" ethnic gropus (Chico Marx as an Italian, Al Jolson in blackface);
3. to write popular songs and patriotic sub-poetry and begin the wholesale entry into universities as students;
4. to produce comic strips and popular novels;
5. to argue cases in court and judge them from the bench, to prescribe for the common cold and analyze the neurotic;
6. to write prose fiction and anti-academic criticism;
7. to teach in the universities and help determine official taste in the arts;
8. to write serious poetry, refuse to go to college, and write on the walls, "Down with the Jews!"

Presently all of these things are possible at once, for no new gain has canceled out another, our successes expand at dazzling speed. Huckleberry Finn becomes Augie March; Daisy Miller turns, via Natalie Wood, into Marjorie Morningstar; Eddie Fisher is drafted as the symbol of clean young American love, while Danny Kaye continues to play the blue-eyed jester; and finally we enter an age of strange conversions to Judaism (Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis, Jr.), and symbolic marriages. Eros himself turns, or seems to for a little while, Jewish, as the mythical erotic dream-girls of us all yearn for Jewish intellectuals and learn to make matzo-balls.

Even more startlingly, the literature of busy males, of politicians and executives seeking at once relaxation and the reinforcement of their fantasies, is Judaized, too. The long dominance of the Western and the detective story is challenged by that largely Jewish product, science fiction. There are a score of Jewish authors among the most widely read writers in that popular genre as compared with practically none in the two older types of institutionalized fantasy. The basic myths of science fiction reflect the urban outlook, the social consciousness, the utopian concern of the modern, secularized Jew. The traditional Jewish waiting-for-the-Messiah becomes, in lay terms, the commitment-to-the-future, which is the motive force of current science fiction. The notion of a Jewish cowboy is utterly ridiculous, of a Jewish detective, Scotland-Yard variety or tough private eye, nearly as anomalous—but to think of the scientist as a Jew is almost tautological.

Much science fiction, set just before or after the Great Atomic War, embodies the kind of guilty conscience peculiar to such scientist-intellectuals (typically Jewish) as Robert Oppenheimer, while the figure of Einstein presides over the New Heaven and New Earth which such literature postulates, replacing an earlier Hebrew god who is dead. Even in its particulars, the universe of science fiction is Jewish; the wise old tailor, the absurd but sympathetic yiddishe momme, plus a dozen other Jewish stereotypes, whiz unchanged across its space and time. Even secret Jewish jokes are made for the cognoscenti: the police on a corrupt, trans-galactic planet are called, in the exotic tongue of that only half-imaginary world, Ganavim (thieves). And in the Superman comic books (the lowbrow equivalent of science fiction), the same aspirations and anxieties are projected in the improbable disguise of the Secret Savior, who may look like a goy, but who is invented by Jews. The biceps are the biceps of Esau, but the dialogue is the dialogue of Jacob.

Even for those who read neither books nor comics, Jewish culture lies in wait—not only in the gift shop and the saloon, but in what is our only truly living museum, the real cultural storehouse of the average man: the supermarket. There—even in the remotest hamlets—beside the headcheese, the sliced ham, the pseudo-hot-dogs composed of flour and sawdust, one finds kosher salami; beside the hardtack, Rye Krisp, and lbfsa—matzos; beside the chocolate-covered ants, fried grasshoppers, and anchovy hearts—Mother's Gefilte Fish. But whatever is in the supermarket, like whatever is in Life (both organized on the same pseudo-catholic principle: everything glossily packaged and presented without emphasis and distinction) is in the great democratic heart of America. In that heart, at least, Jewish culture, as defined by gefilte fish and Natalie Wood, the Jewish scientist and the Nebbish, has established itself as if it meant to stay. And it is in light of this cultural fact that Jewish-American writers must assess the mounting sales of their books and the warm reviews which greet them; but the confrontation leaves the best of them amused, the second best embarrassed, and the worst atrociously pleased.

Yet this kind of success is, in a way, what the Jewish-American writer has all along desired—though for a long time he was able to depend on the realities of his situation, the exclusion from which he began, to protect him against his own lust for belonging. From the start, the Jewish-American writer has desired not only to create living images of his people in the imagination of all Americans, and to redeem them from psychic exploitation at the hands of anti-Semitic Gentile authors; but also, by creating such images and achieving such a redemption, to become himself part of the American scene, a citizen among citizens, one more author on a list which begins with Benjamin Franklin and Washington Irving. The very notion of a Jewish-American literature represents a dream of assimilation, and the process it envisages is bound to move toward a triumph (in terms of personal success) which is also a defeat (in terms of meaningful Jewish survival). If today Jewish-American writers seem engaged in writing not the high tragedy of Jewish persistence in the midst of persecution, but the comedy of Jewish dissolution in the midst of prosperity, this is because they tell the truth about a world which neither they nor their forerunners can consider themselves guiltless of desiring.

Yet at first the striving of the American-Jewish community, through its artists, to become a fact of the imagination as well as of the census seemed merely gallant and happily foredoomed. In the beginning, the Jewish author and the Jewish character, whether invented by Gentile or Jew, played only a slight and peripheral role in the literature of the United States and in the deep mind of the American people which that literature at once reflects and makes. This is in part the result of the simple sociological fact that Jews were, in the earliest years of our nation, few and insignificant and that, therefore, the mythology of the Jew, which we inherited along with the English language and the corpus of English literature, moved the popular American mind scarcely at all. What could the figures of the Wandering Jew, of Shylock and Jessica, Isaac of York and Rebecca, Riah and Fagin mean to a people whose own guilts and fears and baffled aspirations were projected onto quite different ethnic groups? Associated with the names of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott and Dickens, authors sometimes revered, even loved, but chiefly, alas, resented as required reading in the classroom, such figures assume the vicarious reality of classroom facts, of something learned for the first time out of books, rather than recognized in books as the truths of nightmare and dream.

It is those whom the white Anglo-Saxon Americans persecuted in the act of becoming Americans, even as the Europeans persecuted the Jews in the act of becoming Christians, who live in the American psyche as Shylock and the Wandering Jew live in the European one: the Indian and the Negro, who are facts of the American imagination from the moment that imagination is formed. The Anglo-Saxon immigrant could maintain only a theoretical anti-Semitism in the New World, just as he could maintain only a theoretical opposition to the aristocracy; his real struggles were elsewhere, and his attempts to project his own psychological difficulties onto the enemies of his ancestors never took root in literature. So, also, with later generations of immigrants, from other parts of Europe. The Germans, the Poles, the Czechs may have brought with them certain traditional anti-Semitic fantasies of their native lands; but at the moment that their assimilation to America moved from the social to the psychic level (and in the country of the melting pot this moment comes quite soon), they began to find their old nightmares driven out by new.

James Fenimore Cooper, greatest of American mythographers, tried to identify the evil Indian of the Last of the Mohicans with Shylock, and, in one of the last of his novels, portrayed the Indians as New World Jews re-enacting the crucifixion in the midst of the wilderness; but this major attempt to make transatlantic and cisatlantic attitudes of hatred and guilt reinforce each other failed. The Jew could not figure as the archetypal Other, the psychic whipping boy, in a society which was not bound to him by ancient and terrible guilts: guilts lived, as well as read about in schoolrooms or even sacred books. Exclusions from jobs and country clubs is no substitute for pogroms and massacres, and even the anti-Semitism implicit in Christianity has remained, in America, largely theoretical; an occasional schoolchild has been sent running home in tears with the cry of his classmates, "You killed our Christ!" ringing in his bewildered head; but practically nobody in the United States has ever died from HI And this is perhaps why in our classic literature, much concerned with precisely those conflicts from which men had indeed died, Jewish characters play such unimportant roles.

It is worth remembering that the poet who wrote and rewrote, from just past the middle of the last century to almost the beginning of ours, the four-hundred-page poem which declares itself the most broadly inclusive of all all-American poems, included no Jewish character or scene in his mythic world. There are no Jews in Leaves of Grass; and the single appearance of the adjective "semitic" recorded in the concordances to that work turns out to be an error. Whitman, meaning to describe the ideal American poet as "plunging his seminal muscle" into the "merits and demerits" of his country, miswrote "semitic muscle" the first time around, but changed it when some amused reader called it to his attention. White, red, and black make up his America, and even the yellow oriental makes an occasional appearance; but the Jew was represented by no color on his palette and constitutes no part of the myth he has left us. No more are there Jews included in that otherwise universally representative crew: the Manx, African, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Polynesian, and Middle-Eastern human flotsam of the world who, under a mad Yankee skipper, sail a ship called after a defunct Indian tribe in the pages of Melville's Moby Dick. Nor does Huck Finn meet a single Jew, either ashore or afloat on the great river whose course he follows down the center of civilized America.

There are, to be sure, occasional Jewish characters elsewhere in Melville, and in Hawthorne, Henry James, even Longfellow; but, by and large, these are either borrowed bugaboos, male and female, or inventions of a sentimentality which kept itself pure by keeping its Jews imaginary. In Melville's long narrative poem Clarel, for instance, one finds the major attempt to adapt for American uses the archetypal pattern story which has most appealed to the American imagination when it has sought at all to deal with things Jewish: the myth of Shylock and Jessica, the sinister Jew deprived of his lovely daughter. But the American imagination does not permit the Gentile hero to get the Jewish girl in a blithe Shakespearean ending; on this side of the ocean, a tragic blight falls over the European 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 elements (patriarchal rigor and harsh legalism: the figure of the High Priest and Father Abraham with a knife).

The trouble is that the Jewish girl is thought of not in terms of Mary, but of Lilith, and becomes one with all those dark ladies (otherwise Latin) who are paired off against the fair, Anglo-Saxon girl: the former representing all the Puritan mind most longs for, and fears, in passion; the latter standing for a passionless, sexless love. At the very beginnings of our literature, Charles Brockden Brown could permit his hero to marry a Jewish woman, but neither Melville nor Hawthorne could forget his own pale, Anglo-Saxon bride long enough to follow Brown's example. Even in our presumably post-Puritan times, the protagonist of Two for the Seesaw finally abandons his Gittel Mosca, Jewish embodiment of impulse and sexual generosity, to return like a good American to the Gentile wife he left behind.

But beside the nightmare of the Jew's alluring daughter flanked by the castrating father, there exists for the American imagination a dream of the "little Jew," too, enduring and forgiving under abuse—a kind of Semitic version of "Uncle Tom." Unfortunately, this is to be found nowhere in our serious writers and is, I suspect, an English importation where found, a spreading out and down of George Eliot's hortatory philo-Semitism. There appeared, at any rate, in the 1868 volume of the children's magazine called Our Young Folks, a poem which begins:

We were at school together,
The little Jew and I. He had black eyes, the biggest nose,
The very smallest fist for blows,
Yet nothing made him cry.

and which ends, after the speaker has thrust an apple under that "biggest nose" on Yom Kippur, mocking the child for his fast, and has then repented:

Next day when school was over,
I put my nonsense by;
Begged the lad's pardon, stopped all strife.
And—well, we have been friends for life,
The little Jew and I.

A second-hand nightmare is answered by a borrowed dream.

The Jewish writer himself was engaged with these half-felt stereotypes in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and his responses seem as unreal, as far from the center of American psychic life, as those stereotypes themselves. Up to the end of the last century (and in a certain sense that century did not end for us until the conclusion of World War I), Jewish-American literature, the stories and poems written out of their own experience by those willing to call themselves Jews, or descended immediately from those so willing, remains not only theoretical but parochial. In this regard, it is like all the sub-literature which we customarily call "regional"—writing intended to represent the values and interests of a group which feels itself penalized, even threatened, by the disregard of the larger community. From one side, such writing constitutes a literature of self-congratulation and reassurance, intended to be consumed by an in-group which knows it is abused and suspects that it is hardly noticed by those who abuse it; and from another, it aims at becoming a literature of public relations, intended to "sell" that in-group to certain outsiders, who, it is assumed, will respond favorably only to "positive," i.e., innocuous or untrue, images of the excluded group.

Regional writing ceases to be sub-literary, however, not when those it portrays are made to seem respectable, but when they are presented as representative (in all their particularity) of the larger community: the nation, an alliance of nations, all of mankind. But this only begins to happen when regional writers stop being apologists and become critics, abandon falsification and sentimentality in favor of treating not the special virtues of the group from which they come, whether those virtues be real or fancied, but the weaknesses it shares with all men. Such writers seem often to their fellows, their very friends and parents, traitors—not only for the harsh things which they are led to say about those fellows, friends and parents in the pursuit of truth, but also because their desire for universality of theme and appeal leads them to begin tearing down from within the walls of a cultural ghetto, which, it turns out, has meant security as well as exclusion to the community that nurtured them.

The plight is particularly difficult for those who are not even psychically exploited, not even used to represent certain deep uncertainties and guilts in the undermind of the larger community, but only psychically ignored, which is to say, blanked out of the range of vision of that larger community. They may, indeed, congratulate themselves on their social invisibility, taking it for a result of their own firm resolve not to be assimilated to the ways of strangers. Mythically invisible men, that is, tend to confuse their essential peculiarity, to which they are resolved to cling, with the psychic walls that make them invisible and which they know they must someday breach. They are, therefore, likely to think of those who first begin to breach these walls, in quest of the freedom to become the selves of their own imagining, as apostates from their ancestral identity and the values which sustain it.

The breakthrough to such psychic freedom and to the cultural assimilation which is its concomitant requires, then, a series of revolutionary acts at a critical point in the history of a minority group; but that critical point is determined not by the revolutionary writers alone. It is no more a mere matter of a certain number of heroic individual decisions than it is of the simple growth in size and prestige and power of the mythically non-existent community. The mass immigrations of Eastern European Jews to the United States was over by 1910, and, some decades before that, a novelist who called himself Sidney Luska had attempted single-handed to transform various aspects of Jewish immigrant life in New York, which he had observed at first hand, into fictions capable of moving all Americans. Even the names of his novels, however (As It Was Written, The Yoke of the Thorah, etc.), are by now forgotten; for he had begun by imposing on the facts, as he knew them, a vision of the Jew as the infinitely sensitive artist and the herald of the future, compounded out of George Eliot's portrait of herself as a young Jew in Daniel Deronda, and the dreams of the Ethical Culturists of his time. And "Sidney Luska" was not really a Jew, only a disaffected white Anglo-Saxon Protestant who had affected what he took to be a "Jewish" beard as well as a "Jewish" name; and who, when confronted by the pettiness and weakness of actual Jews, returned to his own name, Henry Harland, and ended as an expatriate and editor of the Yellow Book and the author of a fashionably Catholic, anti-Semitic bestseller called The Cardinal's Snuffbox. It is the comic-pathetic catastrophe fitting to one hubristic enough to have attempted single-handed to give to Jews the status that only time and history could bestow.

The creation of Jewish characters able to live in the American imagination cannot be the work of Jewish writers, real or imagined, alone. As the Jewish writer goes out in search of his mythical self, he is bound to encounter the Gentile writer on a complementary quest to come to terms with him, the stranger in the Gentile's land. As collaborators or rivals, wittingly or not, Jewish author and Gentile must engage in a common enterprise if either is to succeed. The presence of talented Jewish writers concerned with Jewish life, and of a rich and complex Jewish life itself, are essential preconditions of the Jewish breakthrough into the deep psyche of Gentile America; but there is a necessary third precondition, too. At the moment of such a breakthrough, the Jew must already have become capable of projecting psychological meanings with which the non-Jewish community is vitally concerned, must already have come to represent in his mode of existence, symbolically at least, either a life lived and aspired to by those others—or at least (and more probably) one passionately rejected and secretly regretted by those others. But this is the job of non-Jewish writers, and for this reason we must look to such writers, rather than to the Jewish writers of the period, to understand just how the Jewish character became mythically viable during and just after World War I.

There were, to be sure, Jewish writers of varying degrees of talent who not only published during this period but were, in certain cases, widely read. In fiction, for instance, there were the mass entertainers: Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber; middlebrow wits like Dorothy Parker; and even quite serious novelists like Ben Hecht (before his removal to Hollywood) and Ludwig Lewisohn (before his surrender to Zionist apologetics). The nineteenth-century "poetesses" from good Sephardic families, chief of whom was Emma Lazarus, were giving way to high school teachers with social consciences: Louis Ginsberg, James Oppenheim, Alfred Kreymborg. The minor achievements of such poets were preserved, along with the brittle verse of F.P.A. and Arthur Guiterman, the efforts of certain Village Bohemians of the Twenties (e.g., Maxwell Bodenheim), and the verses of Jewish prodigies like Nathalia Crane in the pages of Louis Untermeyer's earlier anthologies. In a time when poetry was in the process of becoming what was read in classrooms, certain Jewish journalists and educators compiled the standard classroom anthologies. Though these Jewish-American writers thus controlled American taste to some extent, they did not—in verse any more than in prose—succeed in making images of even their own lives that were capable of possessing the American mind. In any case, the writers anthologized by Untermeyer and others had little consciousness of themselves as Jews, were engaged, in fact, in assimilating themselves to general American culture by pledging allegiance to social or cultural ideals larger than their Jewishness, whether Bohemianism or socialism or humanism in its broadest sense.

No, the compelling images of Jews were made by writers who were not merely Gentiles but anti-Semites, interested in resisting this assimilationist impulse and keeping the Jews Jews. It is important to understand, however, the precise nature of their anti-Semitism. Quite different from working-class or populist, economic anti-Semitism, that "Black Socialism" of the American factory hand or poor farmer which identifies the Jews with Wall Street and international bankers, theirs was the cultural anti-Semitism of the educated bourgeois seeking status through a career in the arts; and it was, therefore, aimed not at expelling the moneychangers from the Temple, but at distinguishing the Jewish exploiters of culture from its genuine Gentile makers, at separating the pseudo-artists (naturally, Jews) from the true ones (of course, Gentiles). This cultural anti-Semitism was the inevitable result of certain provincial Gentile Americans' moving toward the big city (Theodore Dreiser, for instance, and Sherwood Anderson) and discovering that the Jews had beat them to the artists' quarters of Chicago and New Orleans and New York; and it was exacerbated when still other provincial Gentile Americans, attempting expatriation (Pound and Eliot, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and E. E. Cummings), found Jews even on the Left Bank, in the heart of what they had always dreamed of as Heaven. What the expatriates discovered in fact when they arrived at the Paris of their dreams was most vividly sketched not in a book by any one of them, but rather in one about all of them, Wyndham Lewis's Paleface: "Glance into the Dôme, anyone … who happens to be in Paris. You would think you were in a League of Nations beset by a zionist delegation, in a movie studio, in Moscow, Broadway or even Zion itself, anywhere but in the mythical watertight America …"

And when, in the Thirties, Henry Miller belatedly arrived in the same city, abandoned now, as far as Americans went, to the second-rate and the shoddy, he found the same overwhelming proportion of Jews in the expatriate community and exploded with baffled rage:

He is a Jew, Borowski, and his father was a philatelist. In fact, almost all Montparnasse is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse. There's Carl and Paula, and Cronstadt and Boris, and Tania and Sylvester, and Moldorf and Lucille. All except Fillmore. Henry Jordan Oswald turned out to be a Jew also. Louis Nichols is a Jew. Even Van Norden and Cherie are Jewish. Frances Blake is a Jew, or a Jewess. Titus is a Jew. The Jews then are snowing me under. I am writing this for my friend Carl whose father is a Jew. All this is important to understand.

Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become a Jew. Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jew?

No wonder the German occupation forces in Paris made Miller a favorite author, finding in him not only sex but their favorite obsession with the Jew as the absolute Other. And, meanwhile, Miller's fellow German-American writer of the Thirties (one is almost tempted to say Nazi-American), Thomas Wolfe, was finding in New York City similar occasions for anti-Semitic outbursts, reacting with hatred and fear, and a lust of which he was ashamed, to the young Jewesses at New York University, forerunners of later Jewish coeds, who, a short generation later would be writing (under Jewish advisors) theses about the very anti-Semites of the decades before.

Even Jewish writers of the Thirties were more likely than not to produce hostile travesties of their own people, especially if—like Michael Gold, for instance, whose Jews Without Money was the first "proletarian novel" of the period—their Messiah was a Marxian rather than a Jewish one. The anti-Semitism so deeply implanted in Russian Communism during the Stalin regime was reflected in the American Communist Party, largely Jewish though it was, and in the literature which followed its line. Indeed, the presence of such anti-Semitism was taken as evidence that American Jewish Communists were emancipated from parochialism and chauvinism. In Michael Gold, at any rate, only the yiddishe mamme, the long-suffering maternal figure, comes off well; the Rabbi, the landlord, the pawnbroker are treated as egregious villains, and Gold's portraits of them disconcertingly resemble both those of European Jew-baiters like Julius Streicher, and native American provincials like Thomas Wolfe.

There are ironies involved here disturbing to both sides; for the anti-Semite, intending merely to excoriate the Jew, learns eventually that he has mythicized him. And the offended Jew realizes, after a while, that before the Jewish character could seem to author and reader in the United States an image of the essential American self, he had first to seem the essential American enemy. Nevertheless, it is depressing for the Jewish American to think how many of our most eminent and central writers in the decades during which we entered fully into world literature produced anti-Semitic caricatures, not from mere habit or tradition, but from conviction and passion. What a black anthology lives in his head: out of Cummings ("and pity the fool who cright/god help me it aint no ews/eye like the steak all ried/but eye certainly hate the juse."); and Eliot ("And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,/ Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,/ Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London."), and Pound ("the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle/in gt/proportion and go to saleable slaughter/with the maximum of docility … "), and Hemingway ("No, listen, Jake. Brett's gone off with men. But they weren't ever Jews, and they didn't come and hang about afterward."), and Fitzgerald ("A small, flatnosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness… 'I see you're looking at my cuff buttons.' I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.… 'Finest specimens of human molars,' he informed me."), and Michael Gold ("The landlord wore a black alpaca coat in the pawnshop, and a skull cap. He crouched on a stool behind the counter. One saw only his scaly yellow face and bulging eyes; he was like an anxious spider."), and Thomas Wolfe (" … Jews and Jewesses, all laughing, shouting, screaming, thick with their hot and sweaty body-smells, their strong female odors of rut and crotch and armpit and cheap perfume … ").

How hard it is, after Hitler, for any man of good will, Gentile or Jew, to confess that the most vivid and enduring portraits of Jews created in the period are not works of love and comprehension, but the products of malice and paranoia: Robert Cohen of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and the multiformed Jewish usurer of Ezra Pound's Cantos, Boris of Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Abe Jones of Wolfe's Of Time and the River—anti-goyim and anti-artists one and all. And yet they are not all quite the same; though Hemingway and Pound, for instance, were motivated by a similar malice, and though both moved through the salons of Paris just after World War I, learning, as it were, their anti-Semitism in the same school, their ideologies must be sharply distinguished.

For writers like Pound and Eliot, on the one hand, it is European culture, particularly of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which represents the essential meaning of life when it is more than just "birth, copulation and death." And to them the Jew, excluded from the culture in the days of its making, is the supreme enemy; for as merchant-tourist and usurious millionaire, he desires now to appropriate what he never made, to buy and squat in the monuments of high Christian culture, fouling them by his mere presence. He is, therefore, felt and portrayed not only as the opposite to the artist but also to the aristocrat, who, traditionally, sustained the artist in his days of greatest glory.

To writers like Hemingway, on the other hand, to the devotees of raw experience who went to Europe to fish rather than to pray (though also, of course, to make books), the Jew stands for the pseudo-artist. Along with the homosexual, he seems to them to travesty and falsify their own real role; to help create in the public eye an image, from which they find it hard to dissociate themselves, of the effete intellectual, the over-articulate, pseudo-civilized fake. For them, too, the Jew represents the opposite of the Negro, Indian, peasant, bullfighter, or any of the other versions of the noble savage with whom such writers, whether at home or abroad, sought to identify themselves. When either the cult of the primitive or a genteel tradition is in the ascendancy, the Jew is likely to be regarded as the Adversary; for he is the anti-type of Negro and Indian, a projection of the feared intelligence rather than the distrusted impulse, and "genteel" equals Gentile in the language of the psyche. Neither paleface nor redskin, neither gentleman nor genital man, to what can the Jew appeal in the American imagination, which seems to oscillate helplessly between these two poles? Is he doomed to remain merely the absolute un-American, everybody's outsider?

This seems an unanswerable question at first; but it answers itself with the passage of time, and in the very terms in which it is posed. When Americans have grown tired of the neo-gentility, the selective ancestor worship and high-churchly piety of Eliot, and when they are equally sick of the white self-hatred and the adulation of blood sports and ignorance, but especially when they are sick and tired of the oscillation between the two, they can find in the Jewish writer and the world he imagines a way out. Through their Jewish writers, Americans, after the Second World War, were able to establish a new kind of link with Europe in place of the old paleface connection—a link not with the Europe of decaying castles and the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor with that of the Provengal poets and Dante and John Donne, nor with that of the French symbolistes and the deadly polite Action Française—for these are all Christian Europes; but with the post-Christian Europe of Marx and Freud, which is to say, of secularized Judaism, as well as the Europe of surrealism and existentialism, Kafka, neo-Chasidism—a Europe which at once abhors and yearns for the vacuum left by the death of its Christian god.

And through the same intermediaries, Gentile Americans discovered the possibility of a new kind of vulgarity unlike the old redskin variety, the when-the-ladies-are-out-of-the-room grossness of works like Mark Twain's 1601, which depended upon naiveté and simplicity in writer and audience alike. The special Jewish vulgarity exemplified with greater or lesser skill from Ben Hecht through Michael Gold and Nathanael West to Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, is not merely sophisticated, but compatible with high complexity and even metaphysical transcendence. The Semite, someone once said (thinking primarily of the Arabs, but it will do for the Jews, too), stands in dung up to his eyes, but his brow touches the heavens. And where else is there to stand but on dung in a world buried beneath the privileged excretions of the mass media; and where else to aspire but the heavens, in a world whose dreams of earthly paradises have all come to nothing?

Moreover, the Jewish-American mind, conditioned by two thousand years of history, provides other Americans with ways of escaping the trap of vacillation between isolationism and expatriation, chauvinism and national self-hatred. Jewish-American writers are, by and large, neither expatriates nor "boosters"; and they do not create in their protagonists images of the expatriate or the "booster." More typically, they have begun to produce moderately cynical accounts of inpatriation, the flight from the quasi-European metropolis to the provincial small town. This flight they have, indeed, lived, moving in quest of more ultimate exile not out of but into America, moving from New York or Chicago, Boston or Baltimore, to small towns in New Mexico, Oregon, Nebraska, and Montana.

After all, if it is a difference from what one is born to that is desirable, there is a greater difference between New York and Athens, Georgia, than between New York and Athens, Greece, or between Chicago and Moscow, Idaho, than between Chicago and Moscow, Russia. Within the past couple of years the first fictional treatment of this new migration, a comedy involving an urban Jew in a small university community in the West, has appeared in the form of A New Life, the novel by Bernard Malamud.… But though Malamud's book begins with exile, it ends with return; for, like the expatriates of the past, the inpatriate of the present also ends by going home, returning East as inevitably as his forebears returned West.

All flights, the Jewish experience teaches, are from one exile to another; and this Americans have always known, though they have sometimes attempted to deny it. Fleeing exclusion in the Old World, the immigrant discovers loneliness in the New World; fleeing the communal loneliness of seaboard settlements, he discovers the ultimate isolation of the frontier. It is the dream of exile as freedom which has made America; but it is the experience of exile as terror that has forged the self-consciousness of Americans.

Yet it is the Jew who has best been able to recast this old American wisdom (that home itself is exile, that it is the nature of man to feel himself everywhere alienated) in terms valid for twentieth-century Americans, which is to say, for dwellers in cities. The urban American, looking about him at the anonymous agglomeration of comfort-producing machines that constitutes his home, knows that exile is what one endures, not seeks, and he is willing to believe the Jewish writer who tells him this. That the Jewish writer be his spokesman in this regard is natural enough, for he descends from those whose consciousness had already been radically altered by centuries of living in cities; and he stands at ease, therefore, in the midst of the first generation of really urban writers in the American twentieth century. Unlike those who made up the first waves of the movement in the United States, replacing the representatives of proper old Boston and old New York, he is no provincial, no small-town Lewis or Anderson or Pound come to the big city to gawk; he is the metropolitan at home, though expert in the indignities, rather than the amenities, of urban life.

Therefore the American-Jewish writer chooses, characteristically, to work in neither the traditional tragic nor the traditional comic mode; for he feels both modes to be aristocratic, that is, pre-industrial, pre-mass-culture genres, reflecting the impulse of a reigning class to glorify its own suffering and to laugh at the suffering of others postulated as inferior to them, to treat only its own suffering as really real. The Jew, however, functions in his deepest imagination (influenced, of course, by the Gentile culture to which he aspires) as his own other, his own inferior; and he must consequently laugh at himself—glorify himself, if at all, by laughing at himself. This is the famous Jewish humor, rooted in a humility too humble to think of its self-abasement as religious, and a modesty too modest to think of its encounter with pain as really real. But this is also the source of a third literary genre, neither tragedy nor comedy, though, like both, based on the perception of human absurdity—a genre for whose flourishing in recent American literature certain Jewish-American writers are largely responsible, though with thanks to Mark Twain as well as Sholom Aleichem.

We have similarly witnessed, over the last thirty years or so, the recasting in terms of second-generation American urban life certain American archetypal heroes and the rerendering of their adventures in an American English affected by the rhythms of Yiddish and shot through with a brand of wit conditioned by the Jewish joke. These great figures out of our deepest imagination, whom we had thought essentially American, we now learn are—or at least can be made to seem—characteristically Jewish as well. It is not a matter of cultural kidnaping, but of the discovery of cultural resemblances. What, for instance, has happened in the middle of the twentieth century to Huckleberry Finn: loneliest of Americans; eternally and by definition uncommitted; too marginal in his existence to afford either conventional virtue or ordinary villainy; excluded, by the conditions which shape him, from marriage and the family; his ending ambiguously suspended between joy and misery; condemned to the loneliness which he desperately desires? Reimagined by Saul Bellow for the survivors of the thirties. he comes now from northwest Chicago, works for petty Jewish gangsters, reads Kafka and Marx, goes to live with Leon Trotsky, and is called Augie March. Or re-invented yet again by J. D. Salinger for a younger and more ignorant audience, he comes from the west side of New York, a world of comfortably assimilated and well-heeled Jews (though his name cagily conceals his ethnic origin), plays hooky from an expensive prep school, slips unscathed through a big-city world of phonies and crooks, and is called Holden Caulfield.

Meanwhile what has happened to the most typical of all the heroes of American poetry? Conceived so deeply and specifically, expressed so passionately and intensely out of the self of the poet who first invented him, this mock-epic hero, crying the most pathetic and lovely of American boasts, "I was the man, I suffered, I was there," once seemed doomed to remain forever what he was to begin with—Walt Whitman, who was born of Quaker parents and moved through a world without Jews. But now, improbably reborn, he remembers listening beside his mother to Israel Amter, idol of the Jewish-American Communists of the Thirties, scolds America for what it has done to his Uncle Max, howls his rage at his father's world (the world of Jewish high-school-teacher-poets memorialized by Louis Untermeyer), and when he has symbolically killed it, writes a volume called Kaddish, title of the Hebrew prayer for the dead and tenderest of pet names by which a Jew calls his son. Walt Whitman, that is to say, becomes Allen Ginsberg.

Not only on the highbrow level of Bellow and Ginsberg, however, but on all levels of our literature, archetype and stereotype alike are captured by the Jewish imagination and refurbished for Gentile consumption. Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw, for instance, have conspired to teach us that no platoon in the United States Army is complete without its sensitive Jew to suffer the jibes of his fellows and record their exploits, while Herman Wouk has made it clear that the valiant virgin beset by seducers, whom female Anglo-Saxondom once thought of as the pale projection of its own highest aspirations, is really a nice Jewish girl who has misguidedly changed her name. What Shaw and Wouk teach, the movies and Time magazine transmit to the largest audience; and who is to say them nay in a day when all rightminded men approve the fact of Israel and detest the memory of Hitler, a world in which Anne Frank, our latest secular saint, looks down from the hoardings on us all. Even the crassest segregationists sometimes combine their abuse of Negroes with praise for the Jews. "From the days of Abraham …" writes a certain Reverend G. T. Gillespie of Mississippi, "the Hebrews … became a respected people … and they … have made an invaluable contribution to the moral and spiritual progress of mankind." So the occasional anti-Semitic crank who still sends through the mail a cry of protest ("Every book that goes into print… is either written by, edited by, advertised by, published by—or what is common, all four—Jewish people … these publishers are at war with the American intelligence, as well as its. Christian morality.") seems scarcely worth our contemptuous notice.

And there is no end. Very recently, for example, there has been an attempt, in the screenplay for The Misfits written by Arthur Miller, to adapt the classical American Western to new times and new uses. It is not merely a matter of making the Western "adult," as certain middlebrow manipulators of the form like to boast of their efforts on television, but of turning upside down the myth embodied in such standard versions of our archetypal plot as The Virginian and High Noon. In both of these, a conflict between a man and a woman, representing, respectively, the chivalric code of the West and the pacificism of Christianity, ends with the capitulation of the woman, and the abandonment of forgiveness in favor of force. In The Misfits, however, the woman is no longer the pious and pretty but flat-chested schoolmarm that Gentile Americans know their actual grandmothers to have been, but the big-busted, dyed blonde, life-giving and bursting with animal vitality; she is all that the Jew dreams the shiksa, whom his grandmothers forbade him as a mate. In Miller's film, that archetypal blonde was played by Marilyn Monroe (at that point Miller's wife and converted to Judaism), who, under the circumstances, was bound to triumph over the male Old West: the Gentiles' Saturday-matinee dream of violence and death, personified by Clark Gable, tamer of horses and females. What remained for Gable, after so ignominious a defeat, except, aptly, to die? Only the author lived on, though his marriage, too, was doomed by the very dream out of which he made a movie in its honor.

Generation after overlapping generation, American-Jewish writers continue to appear: Bellow and Malamud, Irwin Shaw and Arthur Miller and Karl Shapiro, followed by J. D. Salinger and Norman Mailer and Grace Paley, after whom come Philip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman and Norman Fruchter, on and on, until at last Gore Vidal, himself a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, writes in mock horror (but with an undertone of real bitterness, too) in the pages of the Partisan Review, where, indeed, many of these authors first appeared: "Every year there is a short list of the O.K. writers. Today's list consists of two Jews, two Negroes and a safe floating goy of the old American Establishment (often Mr. Wright Morris) …"

But it is the whole world, not merely our critics, who list, year after year, the two new Jews, plus the two Negroes and the one eternally rediscovered goy. The English boy in the sixth form of the Manchester Grammar School digs Norman Mailer; and his opposite number in the classical liceo in Milan sees himself as Salinger's giovane Holden. At the moment that young Europeans everywhere (even, at last, in England) are becoming imaginary Americans, the American is becoming an imaginary Jew. But this is only one half of the total irony we confront; for, at the same moment, the Jew whom his Gentile fellow-citizen emulates may himself be in the process of becoming an imaginary Negro. "Do we have to become Gentile Jews before we can become White Negroes?" an impatient and reasonably hip youngster from a college audience I addressed recently asked me; and he was only half joking.

In any case, the Jewish-American writer is likely to view with detached amusement (and the younger he is, the more likely this is to be the case) the fact that his Jewishness is currently taken as a patent of his Americanism, and that he is, willy-nilly, the beneficiary of a belief that in their very alienation the Jews were always mythically twentieth-century Americans—long before the twentieth century and even, perhaps, America itself had been reached. Quite simply, he does not know in what his Jewishness—so symbolically potent—consists; he is only aware that it is on the point of disappearing. This disappearance he may celebrate or deplore when he is called on to take a stand in the symposia on the subject which have tended to become staple items in the Jewish press (we have seen them recently in Commentary, Judaism, and Midstream); and, indeed, he is free in this regard, so long as he is willing to suffer criticism and reproach, to plump for persistence or annihilation as his principles or instincts incline. But when he functions as a writer, when he pledges himself, that is to say, to describe in fictional form the kind of Jew he most probably is and the kinds of Jews he most probably knows, these must be, if not terminal Jews, at least penultimate ones: the fathers or grandfathers of (barring always some horrific or miraculous turn of events) America's last Jews.

Such are the inhabitants of Philip Roth's re-created suburban America: vestigial Jews who find the appearance in their midst (as recounted in "Eli the Fanatic") of a Chasidic Jew, garbed still and believing still as their ancestors were garbed and believed, quite as disturbing as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor found the return of Christ; and such, too, are the inhabitants of J. D. Salinger's New York west side, those parents and friends of Holden Caulfield whose Jewishness has faded and paled until it could be proved against them in no court. But the portrait of the terminal Jew in extremis has recently been drawn in the title character of Bruce Jay Friedman's wicked and veracious short novel, Stern; a man whose Jewishness has lost all ideological content, positive or negative, and survives only as a psychological disease (strong enough to create an ulcer and motivate a breakdown), kept alive by an equally vestigial and almost equally impotent anti-Semitism.

Moreover, the Jewish writer begins to be influenced by the responsibilities he feels implicit in the recognition accorded him. Quite as the work of certain Nobel Prize winners is altered, even falsified, by the award, and they are tempted to respond imaginatively not to the world of their own making, but to another, more "real" world of whose existence the applause and the prize money reminds them, the Jewish writer's work is altered, even falsified: he has, it is borne in on him, an unsuspected noblesse which begins to oblige him. If, indeed, the particular experiences into which he happens to have been born have come to seem archetypal to Gentiles, if it is he who must "forge the conscience" of his nation in his time, he must attempt to become worthy of the role (he is likely to think) by guarding himself against the parochial and eliminating from his books all merely local and chauvinistic concerns.

Like the Negro, the homosexual, the southern author who has left the literature of protest and apology behind, he starts to feel uneasy about eternally projecting characters who are images of himself and his people: Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews! He is not, of course, in the situation of those early Jewish (or Negro or homosexual or southern writers) who wanted only to pass, to mingle unnoticed in the world of northern, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. That is to say, he wants to be not a Jewish writer who is less than Jewish, but one who is more than Jewish. And the devices open to him are many, ranging from the quite simple (and patently false) to the quite devious (and complexly true). He can, like Arthur Miller, for instance, and Paddy Chayefsky, create crypto-Jewish characters; characters who are in habit, speech, and condition of life typically Jewish-American, but who are presented as something else—general-American say, as in Death of a Salesman, or Italo-American, as in Marty. Such pseudo-universalizing represents, however, a loss of artistic faith, a failure to remember that the inhabitants of Dante's Hell or Joyce's Dublin are more universal as they are more Florentine or Irish. The works influenced by pseudo-universalizing lose authenticity and strength.

Or the Jewish writer can, like Herman Wouk in The Caine Mutiny, reverse the stereotypes of popular art: set in opposition a hyper-articulate intellectual, who ought to be a Jew but is disguised as a goy, and a hard-bitten fighting man, dedicated to the armed forces and loving authority, who ought to be a goy but is given a Jewish name and face. This kind of stereotype-inversion, however, merely substitutes falsification for falsification, sentimentality for sentimentality, even when, as in Leon Uris's Exodus, the Jewish military heroes are presented as Jews already become, or in the process of becoming, Israelis. The work of both Wouk and Uris represents, in fact, a disguised form of assimilationism, the attempt of certain Jews to be accepted by the bourgeois, Philistine Gentile community on the grounds that, though they are not Christians, they are even more bourgeois and philistine so that one is not surprised to find Uris appearing in court in the role of allrightnik and enemy of literature, to cry out that Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer "goes beyond every bound of morality I've ever known in my life—everything I've been taught. And I'm not ashamed to say I have morals."

On a more serious level, it is possible to create characters who are specifically half-Jewish, like Salinger's Glass family, those witnesses against the general corruption of a society who appear in story after story in the New Yorker and seem always on the verge of becoming the actors in a full-fledged novel, which, alas, never materializes. That the Glasses are Irish as well as Jewish is especially attractive to a public the older members of which have been conditioned by Abie's Irish Rose on the stage and the Cohens and the Kellys in the movies; but Salinger seems bent on making more of the popular contrast than its earlier commercial exploiters. In a similar way, I have attempted to pass beyond the Philistine uses of stereotype inversion, as practiced by Herman Wouk, reversing in my The Second Stone the traditional roles of accepted Gentile and excluded Jew in order to raise the disturbing question: who in this time of semi-required philo-Semitism is the real Jew, the truly alienated man?

It is possible, too, to experiment, as Bernard Malamud has in A New Life, with writing a book about Jewish experience that scarcely mentions the word Jew, presenting a character Jewish in name and background, but not identifying him as a Jew until the book's final pages, and then only indirectly. Even more daring, and finally, I think, more successful, is Malamud's attempt in The Assistant to create a Jewish Gentile in Frankie Alpine: a man who moves from a position of vague hostility to the Jews, through exclusion and suffering, to the point where he is ready to accept circumcision—to become dejure what he is already de facto, one of the ultimately insulted and injured, a Jew: "One day in April Frank went to the hospital and had himself circumcised. For a couple of days he dragged himself around with a pain between his legs. The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew." It is one of the oldest and (from the vantage point of 1789) one of the most unforeseen happy endings in a literature of strange happy endings; and it could only have happened in 1957, at the high point of the movement we have been examining.

This solution of Malamud's already begins to look a little old-fashioned, appearing as it does in a book which seems a belated novel of the Thirties, a last expression of the apocalyptic fears and Messianic hopes of those terrible but relatively simple times. Certainly The Assistant is a book which reminds us of ancestors, rather than suggesting to us progeny, like, say, certain works of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, a book, for all its desperation, not quite desperate enough to be in tune with the more post-apocalyptic fears and hopes of our bland but immensely complex times. Nowhere in Malamud's pages, for instance, do we find allusions either to Zen Buddhism or the psychology of Wilhelm Reich; and this is an important clue. For not only in Bellow and Mailer, but in Paul Goodman and Isaac Rosenfeld and Allen Ginsberg and Karl Shapiro, there is felt the influence of Reich, one-time brilliant exponent of Freudian insights, and later independent magus and healer, who taught that through full genitality man could conquer the ills of the flesh and the corruptions of society; and who died—convicted for quackery under the Pure Food and Drug Act—in jail, an ambiguous martyr. A flirtation with Zen, and especially a commitment to Reichianism, however, often indicates a discontent with simple or conventional plot resolutions and hence a deeper awareness of the contradictions in the situation of the Jewish-American writer than that possessed by Roth or Malamud or Salinger (who has played with Zen but avoided Reich), much less Uris and Wouk.

It is not enough merely to know that at the moment serious Jewish writing comes to play a central part in American life, the larger Jewish community is being assimilated to certain American values which are inimical to everything for which that serious writing stands, pledging allegiance to belongingness and banality and sociability while condemning abberration and intellectual concern and dissent. One must also be aware (as perhaps even a belated Forties writer like Philip Roth is not sufficiently aware) that the opposition to belongingness and banality and sociability has been itself kidnaped by suburbia. Anticonformism has become a comfortable slogan of the well-to-do middle-aged with B.A. degrees, and intellectual concern itself has been transformed into academic diligence: standard equipment for teaching jobs at the colleges to which more and more young Jewish people go to sit at the feet of professors, more and more often Jewish, too; not City College any longer—but Amherst or Princeton or Vassar.

Similarly, the radicalism of the Thirties has, with the passage of time, become a polite, accepted leftism—in whose name certain well-meaning Jews, along with their Gentile opposite numbers, twice worked hopelessly to elect Adlai Stevenson President of the United States and then accepted, with a sigh, John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile the great sexual revolution of the Twenties has turned into a vaguely Freudian broadmindedness toward masturbation in the very young and casual copulation in the somewhat older; and the search for sources of cultural strength in the European avant-garde has become the frantic quest for prestige in the pursuit of the chic.

To some contemporary Jewish writers, therefore, the effort simultaneously to exploit a vestigial Jewishness (never quite understood) and to satirize the American-Jewish Establishment (pitifully easy to understand) seems itself an outworn convention, conformism once removed. Such writers are driven, in their attempt to preserve what seems to them the essential Jewish tradition of dissent, to attack the academy in which the second degree Philistinism of the sub-Freudian pseudo-left especially fluorishes. Their heroes are likely to be boys running away from school, perpetually "on the road"; and revolt for them tends to be defined as high-level (involving prep school at least, and preferably the university) hooky playing. Such an attack on school and professors inevitably becomes an attack on the kind of literature and criticism which such schools and professors foster, and then an attack on literature and criticism themselves—finally an onslaught against and a rejection of intelligence: the very quality for which, in the deepest American imagination, the Jew has traditionally stood. Imagine living in an age when, with whatever reservations and ironies, an American-Jewish novelist has founded a magazine called The Noble Savage, and an American-Jewish poet has collected certain of his essays under the title In Defense of Ignorance!

Astonishingly, the literary and cultural ideals of many younger Jewish writers (and these by no means the worst among us) appear no longer to be conceived primarily in terms of the European avant-garde, but rather to be modeled after the examples of certain nativist hyper-American authors of the immediate or remote past. To be sure, no American, not even a Jew in pursuit of a Utopian Americanism, can escape European culture completely; after all, Reich himself was a European before becoming an American and shreds and scraps of existentialism play an important role in the works of the writers in question. But it is Walt Whitman who most deeply possesses the imagination of such writers, along with Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams; and from them is derived the dream of a literature native as well as unbuttoned, untidy, intuitive, and passionate. Indeed, there are some Jewish-American authors (most notably Karl Shapiro) who have tried to argue that in Judaism itself there are to be found grounds for a revolt against the academic, formalistic, and genteel, that our tradition has been all along more Whitmanian than Eliotic.

At any rate, certain Jews now stand in the forefront of the newest American revulsion from Europe and the life of the intelligence which Europe represents to the popular imagination in the United States. Under the aegis of such publishers as Grove Press, and in such magazines as Big Table and the Evergreen Review, the Jewish offspring of Twenties schoolmasters and Thirties Communists have oddly banded together with Gentile ex-athletes and junkies to make the movement called "beat," and to define for that movement a program advocating the rediscovery of America and the great audience via marijuana and jazz, more and better orgasms, and a general loosening of literary form. Some of the bright young Jews currently producing first novels and early poems are "beat" or "hip" as their parents were once Stalinists or Trotskyites, only in their larval stage; with maturity (i.e., marriage or a graduate fellowship), they are likely to shave off their beards and settle down to doctoral dissertations or new publishing ventures. And some of the older writers who have climbed on the bandwagon in search of a second youth may have been driven less by their conviction that youth is an absolute good, to be repeated as often as possible, than by a sense of flagging powers, sexual or creative; and they may not preserve their new-found allegiances past the next turn of fashion. But the new Jewish anti-intellectualism cannot be wholly explained away by an analysis of its psychogenesis; the works produced in its name will survive the allegiances behind them, and the critic must deal with them in their own terms.

In their own terms, they are marked by the abandonment of the Jewish character as a sufficient embodiment of the Jewish author's aspirations and values, and by the invention, beside him or in his place, of characters who are not merely non-Jewish, but are, in fact, hyper-goyim, super-Gentiles of truly mythic proportions: specifically, sexual heroes of incredible potency. Such characters represent a resolve on the part of certain Jewish writers to invent (reversing the traditional roles) mythical Gentiles with whom they can identify themselves. But even here, they were anticipated by a non-Jewish writer, Henry Miller, who enjoys the special distinction of being the first Gentile author in our literature to see himself not directly as an American, but defensively as a Gentile, the Jew's goy—even as certain white writers now begin to see themselves as the Negro's o'fay. "I sometimes ask myself," Miller writes in Tropic of Cancer, "how it happens that I attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neuraesthenics, neurotics, psychopaths—and Jews especially. There must be something in a healthy Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour black bread." It is perhaps because Miller has already provided them with a living imaginary Gentile that American-Jewish writers did not turn, as one might have expected, to the Negro as a model for their re-invented selves. Certainly the Negro is the Jew's archetypal opposite, representative of the impulsive life even as the Jew is the symbol of the intellectual; and the Negro is everywhere in these times at the center of our concern. Indeed, there were tentative efforts in this direction: the account, for instance, written by Bernard Wolfe along with Mezz Mezzrow, of how the latter had passed, or almost passed, by way of the world of jazz, into the deep world of the Negroes; and the manifesto, or more properly pre-manifesto, of Norman Mailer in which the life of the "hipster," the White Negro, is more sighed for than advocated.

Mailer, however, when he dreamed his mythical goy in the character of Sergius O'Shaughnessy (who moves through the novel The Deer Park, is hinted at in the story "The Man Who Studied Yoga," and reappears heroically in "The Time of Her Time") created a protagonist who seems less White Negro than Jew's Hemingway and, in this respect, improbably resembles the Eugene Henderson of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, though Bellow, for all his commitment to Wilhelm Reich, is not "hip" or "beat" at all. Both writers at any rate, have recently projected similar versions of the good life: passionate, genital, anti-intellectual, impulsive, though the one has lived a life of risk, daring drug-addiction, and even jail, while the other is a professor at the University of Chicago, daring only boredom and the dangers of security.

While the general American reader is still eager to identify himself with the mythical Jews of the Forties and the Fifties, alienated intellectuals like Mailer and Bellow, who began by portraying such Jews, have moved on to imagine themselves as mythical Gentiles: paleface Protestant noble savages, great muscular conquerors of women and jungles, aging athletes, who, to the parents of those writers, would still have represented the absolute Other. Where, then, has he come from, this Anglo-Saxon hero-monster, the "Golden Goy," with which certain hitherto dutiful Jewish-American boys insist on confusing themselves? Appropriately enough, out of the ambivalence stirred in the minds of these writers by the public image of Ernest Hemingway: inventor—out of anti-Semitic malice—of the first notable Jewish character in American fiction, Robert Cohen. Committed to Hemingway insofar as they are Americans of a generation that learned its speech and its life-style from his books, but cut off from him insofar as they are Jews and, therefore, to Hemingway embodiments of the fake artist, the fake lover, the fake outsider—they constructed, in irony and desperate love, portraits of the elder novelist at the moment of his artistic defeat and just before his death.

Norman Mailer's Sergius O'Shaughnessy is portrayed in "The Time of Her Time" as giving bullfight lessons in a loft in Greenwich Village: a bullfighter without real bulls, though surrounded by real enough women whom he actually possesses, in the place of imaginary conflict. It all amounts to a strange yet somehow tender travesty of the images of Eros and death and of Hemingway himself as connoisseur in both areas which run through The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. In Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, the same author is evoked by a hulking giant of a protagonist whose initials are E.H., and who seeks in the heart of Africa, in an encounter with savages and wild beasts, the answers to questions he is not articulate enough to formulate; and for all its mannered irony and outright burlesque, Bellow's book, too, seems—especially now—a memoir and a tribute. But Hemingway, as we have noticed earlier, could never tell the difference between himself and Gary Cooper, who came to play on the screen so many of the roles projected by Hemingway out of his own anguish and vanity, while Gary Cooper is finally an up-dated Natty Bumppo, perhaps the last Natty we can afford. And Natty was to begin with, of course, the American Indian in whiteface.

The Jewish writer, trying to imagine the goy he longs to be, or at least to contemplate, succeeds finally in reinventing the mythical redskin out of James Fenimore Cooper, which is amusing enough. But it is not the whole story; for Henderson and O'Shaughnessy are half-breeds, and the Indian in them, which is to say, their American component, is improbably crossed with a legendary horror out of the deep Jewish past, a component rooted in the life of the shtetl and memories of that life: a world the first Cooper surely never made and the second never acted. There are clues to the true nature of this second component in both Bellow and Mailer, though in Bellow they are few and obscure. Nonetheless, before Henderson became fully himself, turned loose in Africa to flee dark princesses and mate chastely with African kings who tame lions and read Wilhelm Reich, he was tentatively sketched as the Kirby Allbee of Bellow's earlier novel The Victim: a seedy Anglo-Saxon anti-Semite, bound to Asa Leventhal, his Jewish victim (or victimizer) with a passion like that which binds the cuckold to his cuckolder. That passion is rendered in terms of an appalling physical intimacy: "Leventhal … was so conscious of Allbee … that he was able to see himself as if through a strange pair of eyes: the side of his face, the palpitation of his throat, the seams of his skin.… Changed in this way into his own observer, he was able to see Allbee, too…the weave of his coat, his raggedly overgrown neck… he could even evoke the odor of his hair and skin. The acuteness and intimacy of it astounded him, oppressed and intoxicated him." And its consequences are violence, a final scene in which Leventhal thrusts Allbee from his apartment, though not until they have been joined in the embrace of struggle, an even closer contact of the flesh, and a kind of consummation in horror. Allbee, Bellows makes clear, is Leventhal's beloved as well as his nightmare, just as Leventhal is Allbee's beloved as well as his nightmare; and the climax of such ambivalence is a kind of rejection scarcely distinguishable from rape. What Bellow leaves unclear, perhaps deliberately, is the order of generation of these nightmares. We suspect that Leventhal (closer to his author in origin and temperament, though by no means a self-portrait) is dreaming Allbee dreaming him, but Bellow does not tell us this.

Mailer, on the other hand, has placed the question of the genesis of the mythical goy at the center of his most recent work, commenting on it editorially and including it inside his fictional framework as well. Originally, he tells us, for instance, the two Sergius short stories preserved in Advertisements for Mysel and the one Sergius novel were to be part of a larger, immensely ambitious scheme: a study of how an inadequate Jew, baffled sexually and artistically, invents, in his troubled sleep, the synthetic Ubermensch, Sergius O'Shaughnessy. "I woke up in the morning," Mailer writes in Advertisements for Myself "with the plan for a prologue and an eight-part novel in my mind, the prologue to be the day of a small, frustrated man, a minor artist manqué. The eight novels were to be eight stages of his dream later that night, and the books would revolve around the adventures of a mythical hero, Sergius O'Shaughnessy …" The "artist manqué" is not identified in these notes as a Jew, but we are not surprised to discover, reading the novella into which Mailer's "prologue" turned, that his name is Sam Slabovda, and that he is given to making statements beginning, "You see, boychick …"

Mailer's scheme has fallen apart in his hands, as his view of the world and himself has fragmented perilously; and surely one of his basic problems has been a temptation to believe that, after all, he himself is the goy O'Shaughnessy rather than the small Jew, Slabovda, who, in defeat and distress, has dreamed O'Shaughnessy. Hemingway had the same difficulty in keeping himself, brown-eyed poet and laureate of impotence, distinct from the Amerikanski heroes of his later works; yet in Hemingway no ethnicmythic gulf separated him from his Gentile protagonists. And he was never driven, even in his moment of acutest anxiety, to imagine a mating, brutal as an evisceration, between his passive self and its more active projection. Such a mating, however, constitutes both the action and theme of Mailer's most successful piece of fiction, the short story "The Time of Her Time." At once a confession of terrifying candor and a parable of our times, "The Time of Her Time" imagines an encounter between O'Shaughnessy and a Jewish coed from N.Y.U., whom we might well take for his anima-figure did we not know that she represents the Jewish author, and O'Shaughnessy the animus of his fantasies. No wonder the "heroine" is possessed completely and at last, not as a woman may be but as a man must, through what Mailer calls "love's first hole."

Mailer opens his tale in a Negro hash-house, but cannot keep it there. Ill at ease in that theoretically preferred milieu, he returns quickly to the pseudo-Hemingwayesque Village loft and his true subject: the long struggle between his mythic, beloved hero and his equally mythic but hated heroine, called Denise. Denise seems at first glance the Temple Drake of the Sixties, as archetypal a coed for our troubled days as Temple for the Twenties. Like her prototype, she is hot for love but incapable of submission to it, and therefore incapable of an orgasm; but, unlike Temple, she is no decadent last product of Anglo-Saxon gentility—only the black-haired offspring of a hardware merchant from Brooklyn (out of, presumably, one of those sexually aggressive Jewesses who terrified and allured Thomas Wolfe in the Thirties); and she is not driven, but committed to bohemian freedom, T. S. Eliot, and Sigmund Freud, or at least to her own analyst.

The blow-by-blow description of the sexual combat between her and O'Shaughnessy threatens momentarily to turn into an allegory of the cultural plight we have been examining, but it is saved by the vigor of Mailer's language and the acuteness of his senses, especially his nose. We are not surprised to discover that it is rape, on either the literal or symbolic level, which Mailer's coed demands before she will pay any man the tribute of her orgasm; though we may not have been as prepared as is Mailer's O'Shaughnessy to understand just what sort of rape she had all along required. And why not, since Sam Slabovda (who is Mailer, who is Denise) invented him? "… and then she was about to hang again," Mailer makes his protagonist say, "and I said into her ear, 'You dirty little Jew.' That whipped her over …" And whipped Mailer over with her; for precisely here, I think, he made it, too, for the first time in his life, made it artistically as his heroine made it sexually; and he has been more or less peacefully writing midrashim on Buber's retelling of Chasidic tales ever since.

What is finally clear in Mailer as well as in Bellow, though clearer in the former, is that the other half of Henderson-O'Shaughnessy, the non-Hemingway half, is the pogromchik, the Cossack rapist of the erotic nightmares of the great-grandmothers of living American Jews and that the great-grandchildren respond to him precisely as their archetypal female ancestor in the not-very-funny old Jewish joke, who whispers over the shoulder of her assaulter to the child indignantly screaming and attempting to tug him away, "Quiet, Rosalie, a pogrom is a pogrom." Adopted to our needs of today, however, it seems funny enough: a joke both very American and very Jewish this time around; not merely one more but perhaps the greatest, as well as the latest, Jewish-American joke. Yet there is one more: the Jew who thinks he is an American, yet feels in his deepest heart an immitigable difference from the Gentile American who thinks he is a Jew, need only go abroad to realize that, in the eyes of non-Americans, the difference does not exist at all.

"Americans go home!" the angry crowds cry before our embassies; and hearing them, the Jew knows not only that he is quite as American as his Gentile fellow-tourist, but also that the fellow-tourist along with him, that all Americans, are the Jews of the second half of the twentieth century: refused (outside of their own country, at least) any identity except the general one contained in a name which is an abusive epithet. "Americans go home!" the crowds roar again, while the rocks fly, the police-lines buckle; and running for cover, the Jewish-American keeps imagining that he hears behind him (as, running from the schoolyard once, he heard the cry, "You killed our Christ!") the shout, "You killed our Julius and Ethel Rosenberg!" "Your Rosenbergs?" he wants to yell back, "your Rosenbergs?" as once he had wanted to holler, "Your Christ?" And remembering the childhood indignity in the midst of adult ones, remembering when it was as difficult to be a Jew as it has become to be an American, he finds himself laughing too hard to be dismayed.