SOURCE: "Mutations of Jewish Values in Contemporary American Fiction," in Tradition and Change in Jewish Experience, edited by A. Leland Jamison, Syracuse University Press, 1978, pp. 184-97.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1966, Schwarz contrasts the literature of alienation with literature that affirms traditional values.]

Contemporary American novelists are preoccupied with man's condition and his attempts to find meaning in it. This preoccupation has elicited opposite responses: no one is less capable than the writer of describing his times and his contemporaries; no one has this capacity in greater degree than the writer. The literary artist, it is argued, cannot be trusted as an elucidator of man's condition and fate because on the one hand he has escaped into incomprehensible imagery and symbolism, and on the other hand he sees in man only absurdity, self-deception and insignificance. No doubt something like this has happened, but it does not follow that a writer who despairs of a world in which he sees no meaning must fail to lend reality to the segment of life he has chosen to record. True as it may be that a scientific and technological society is creating a man without values, it is also true that, science and technology notwithstanding, there are men who cherish traditional values.

Of course the probing of man's situation and his search for self-significance is not the walled-in preserve of the literary artist. Critics, philosophers, sociologists, and theologians are there to testify to the contrary, but the point is that they are concerned in the main with mankind and society; that is to say, with man collectively and metaphysically. The case is different with the literary work. It deals with individual human beings in their infinite variety and complexity, their dilemmas and delusions, their frauds and failures, their fears and faiths, their degradation and ennoblement, their coarse malignancy, and lyric tenderness. The writer's province is not statistical tables or clinical experiments or subcommittee meetings or press relations. His aim is insight, not manipulation. No one is more sensitive to the self-righteous, the sanctimonious, the fraudulent, the obscene, and quicker to express them. He uses his gifts—his sense of irony and his sense of pity—to hold the mirror up to our face, to project images of human life. He persuades us to think, wonder, feel, and, in his best creations, to confront life at its most real levels.

All this is general, but it establishes the context in which I propose to examine traditional values and the changes they have undergone in contemporary American fiction. I mean by "values" the beliefs, ideas, and lifeways which give human life and human beings significance and meaning. I shall confine myself to certain moral values which, though not peculiar to, are essential to the Jewish structure of beliefs. It may be well to point out here that in speaking of values I employ the term "moral" rather than "ethical." Ethics is concerned with the theoretical formulation of a system of values—a speculative task for philosophers and theologians. Morality has to do with commitment to standards of conduct. You can solve ethical problems in an armchair. Moral problems are resolved in life.

The novels of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow provide numerous illustrations of the present-day change of values. Whether the vogue of these writers is owing to their literary talent or their ideological bent, or to their appearance at a time when literature has become big business, I do not know. That they are epicures of psychopathology and sex is doubtless part of the explanation. In any case, the characters who people their novels project a view of man and society which emphasizes that the individual is alone, forsaken, and alienated by powerful impersonal forces that grind him down to anonymity and hopelessness. Coupled with a passion for introspection and a sense of disillusionment, the positive non-belief of these novelists has made for a version of American reality that negates tradition and religion. Their books present an American version of the Luftmensch, Americans wallowing in confusion and misery without an ideal or value to their name. Specifically, these writers are engaged in assaulting the American middle-class and middle-brow, and since American Jews are practically or potentially middle-class, and Jewish characters fill their pages, the gallery of Jews they portray seem like figures embalmed in pop art—rootless, neurotic, frozen in a scatological daymare. They see in man only absurdity, self-deception, and insignificance.

Philip Roth has given us, in his Letting Go, the alphabet and syntax of the alienated American, both Gentile and Jewish. All the characters in the book are trapped in lives of noisy desperation. Whether in Chicago or New York, the atmosphere in which they live is polluted to the point of suffocation. Roth shows with remarkable psychological insight how the involvement of the four principal characters with each other is a process of pushing and pulling in which each is letting go of his past and of the values associated with that past. They are like young teenagers who are torn between self-dependence and over-dependence, and haunted by excessive feelings of personal guilt. As the emotional intensity is built up to a nerve-wracking pitch, childhood values and loyalties disappear as if in a cauldron. Paul Herz says, in talking of his planned marriage to a Catholic girl, "She's a Catholic like I'm a Jew. It's not the kind of thing that'll have much to do with our lives. It hasn't to do with us. It's another ruse." The protagonist, Gabe Wallach, intelligent, rich, and well-intentioned, who is drawn capriciously into the lives of the Herzes and Martha Regenhart, avoids full involvement and is conscience-stricken because he cannot let go and become responsible for the health and security of others. In the last pages of the book, Gabe is free of his involvements: he has escaped to London, but he remains the slave of his incapacity to cope with his guilt and has nothing to cling to. He has no values and hence no moral choice.

Although Bellow's Herzog appears to be a more philosophical work, it is nevertheless just as clinical as Letting Go. The mind of Moses Herzog is a willed chaos—a chaos that is death to human relationships; his utterances are piffle rather than philosophy. He is frustrated, angry, defeated, or more to the point, self-defeating. He wallows in emotional and intellectual sludge. He thinks freedom is only "a howling emptiness." He, too, has "let go" of traditional values, and he has nothing with which to replace them. The best he can do is to investigate "the social meaning of nothingness." Man has made his bed of neuroses, and he must lie in it. Herzog's definition of truth reveals his distorted sense of life. "Truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings," he writes, "so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion." Is Herzog searching for truth or succumbing to chaos? What is evident in his neurotic epistoloquacity is something other than rebellion, skepticism or iconoclasm. It is his failure to accommodate to the human community. The world of Herzog is first bent and then broken.

Alienation is the child of nihilism. Paradoxically, these writers regard alienation as the condition of being Jewish. Leslie Fiedler has stated this pointedly: "Jewishness means … not to belong; to be alienated." This, in essence, is a new kind of galut, a galut that rejects everything including the Jewish doctrine of galut. No wonder the alienationist writers regard Judaism as an anachronism. Knowingly or not, they are engaged in devaluating all human values. They are unable to believe in a reality that is not physical, sexual, or visceral. If the identification of Jewishness with nihilism has a precedent in the 3,500 year tradition of Jewish literature, I do not know of it.

If the apostles of the doctrine of alienation have expressed the dejudaization of the American Jew, certain other novelists in vogue can see the Americanization of the Jew in the light of what amounts to caricature. Writers who came to the fore in the fifties and sixties seem to expressed the condition portrayed in Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch (1937), showing perhaps a deepening of the process of accommodation to American mores and morality. Two instructive examples are Marjorie Morningstar, the coed who wants to make the borscht circuit and have suburbia too, and Richard Amsterdam, a kind of male Marjorie Morningstar and Harvard playboy whose ideals are the Hasty Pudding Club and having a beautiful gentile wife and ten thousand a year (Remember Me To God, 1957). The worlds of Herman Wouk and Richard Kaufmann swarm with Americanized versions of schlemeils, schleppers, and paskudnyaks. Those who speak for traditional Jewish ideals, like Richard's father and Marjorie's uncle, are the only characters who win the reader's sympathy. But their views are deprived of any intellectual or moral force.

Few observers will deny the impact of American mores upon Jews, as portrayed by Wouk, Kaufmann and dozens of other popular novelists. Richly illustrative in this regard is Broadway's fiddling with Sholom Aleichem. Fiddler on the Roof, certainly an amusing, successful musical, is nevertheless false to Sholom Aleichem's Tevye the Milkman. The Broadway Tevye is made over into a permissive father who blesses the marriage of his daughter to an apostate. The original Tevye would neither have blessed nor condoned the marriage, however painful his decision. The Broadway Tevye is transformed into an oafish, peasant-like, hip-swinging, hen-pecked fellow whose faith is tailored to titillate the amharazus de luxe of the devotees of musicals. He is a purveyor of wise-cracks rather than sober wisdom. The line spoken to God on Broadway, "I don't have to tell you what the Good Book says," is jazz for "I don't have to tell you what the Gemora says." The original Tevye is a spiritual descendant of the Biblical Job, protesting life's injustice and affirming man's moral integrity—an affirmation enshrined in Jewish tradition and traceable to Mt. Sinai, as Tevye knows and his bellowing Broadway counterpart does not.

We shall have to look elsewhere for that part of American reality which reveals the attempt by Jews to establish traditional Jewish values on American soil. An illuminating example is the series of engrossing novels by Charles Angoff, which began with Journey to the Dawn in 1951 and passed its middle point with the sixth volume, Summer Storm, in 1963. The protagonist, David Polansky, and his proliferating family emigrate from Russia to Boston, where they endure the trials of economic hardship and social adjustment. Angoff is no less aware than Bellow and Roth of the corrosive effect of American life upon the Jewish family and tradition. Yet the Polanskys, for all the diversity of their viewpoints and the new roles of the second and third generations, remain rooted in Jewish life. They have regard for the Puritan-oriented culture of Boston. They revere the great representatives of American liberalism—figures like Woodrow Wilson and Louis D. Brandeis. In no way does this accommodation to American life obscure or downgrade Jewish culture and values. The Polanskys maintain their family integrity, employ Hebrew and Yiddish as living tongues, venerate education, respect law and justice, and are deeply mindful of human dignity. By a natural and healthy identification with Jewish values, the Polanskys are, according to their endowments and talents, conservators of Jewish cultural values.

Moreover, the Polanskys are not grotesque aberrations or wistful abstractions. Whether they are secularist or religious, their lives are informed and inspired by the traditional values—freedom, justice, law, goodness, learning, and compassion with its religious and moral bearings. These values are real and are expressed in human and communal relationships. Ben Gurion and Eric Fromm notwithstanding, the perpetuation of the structure of Jewish values requires something more than that we be upright and humane. The moral essences of Jewish culture, whether sanctioned by religion or humanism, require an institutional expression of shared beliefs and values.

How these values become merely verbal labels, emptied of their essence, can be illustrated by the present vogue of "compassion" in American fiction, especially in the tough, realistic novels. It would seem that compassion is lavished on the neurotic, the hipster, the whore, and an assortment of "sad cryptograms." What these practitioners of realism suggest is a phony compassion for ineffable delinquents. This amounts to the exploitation of human degradation for commercial ends rather than the sense of human tragedy. For compassion, in the traditional sense, is rachmanut: derived from rechem, the womb, the very matrix of life, compassion is a discriminating sympathy for human suffering, tempered by an understanding of pain and tragedy. True compassion requires a generous view of life and a standard of values. The compassionate man lives within a moral framework. He recognizes the gap between the man that he is and the man he can be.

All this is especially evident in the stories of Bernard Malamud. His characters are inept, hard-pressed, and sometimes obnoxious, yet they rise above the cruel pressures of their existence. They have an indomitable will to survive. Malamud invests these sad failures with pathos and dignity. His writing is instinct with the profoundest virtue of the Jewish spirit—a healing tenderness and loving compassion.

The world of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels and stories is rooted in the soil of Jewish tradition. His symbolism is of a pre-modern culture, but his themes are as fresh as the dialogues of our time. The major characters of his stories and novels, despite the blend of mysticism, superstition, and eroticism in them, are deeply religious and moral. Singer has come to terms with himself; he is committed to the hallowing of man and life. In his novel The Slave, Jacob, a pious scholar of Josefov, is sold as a slave to a Polish peasant. At first Jacob regards the peasants as debauched and soulless creatures. But in time he discovers that they are in reality human beings, created like himself in the image of God. In this way he learns from actual life his own affinity with "all living things: Jews, Gentiles, animals, even the flies and gnats." As a consequence he eats no flesh, "neither meat nor fish nor anything else from a living creature, not even cheese or eggs." He is ultimately ransomed and busies himself obsessively with the 248 commandments and 365 prohibitions of the Law. But he sees all around him Jews obeying every injunction and practicing every ritual, yet mistreating their fellow men. Ripening into an inner maturity, Jacob discovers that the essence of his religion is the relation between man and his fellows. Singer's theme, then, is the Jew and his faith in their universal character; his message is that all creatures, man and beast, are God's chosen. Singer's allegory of man enshrines other essential Jewish values. Jacob's marriage to a Gentile woman made him subject to excommunication and subject to death by burning. But Jacob and his wife loved each other, hoped, endured, and kept their faith. Like Job and the Berditchever Rabbi, he engaged in a perpetual debate with the Almighty. Despite the evil he saw in his fellow Jews, he recognized that there were many kind and good Jews. No matter how cruel he found the Gentiles, he found that there were many good Gentiles. It is the practice of human goodness that gives nobility to the religion they all profess. Singer shows, by way of acts of faith and kindness, that the mind and the heart are human instruments which must be played upon together in order to produce the true music of life, that the secrets of the heart are as real and powerful as the secrets of the atom. The words are the words of Singer, but the message is the message of Judaism.

A similar validation of Jewish values, based upon the experience of the present, may be found in the fiction bequeathed to us by Edward Lewis Wallant (1926-62). Deeply concerned with the problems of human guilt and responsibility, Wallant's stories of emotional crises penetrate to the essence of the human personality. The hero of The Human Season is a hero and not a victim. Joe Berman is a plain, roughhewn, unselfconscious Jew. He exults in being alive. He accepts hard labor with equinamity. His Irish boss is a bully, but Joe does not crawl or cringe before him. Nor is he overawed by the bully's physical prowess. He meets insult and challenge head-on, without fear of the mauling he knows awaits him. Berman's head is bashed, and he loses a finger. When he awakes and discovers that his head is swathed in bandages and his finger gone he laughs. His brother thinks the beating has affected his head. "It's affected my head and my hand, too," Joe says, "but you should see the other guy." His humor is an expression of his love of life. "His heart sang with that mysterious exaltation that had no basis in reason." Later, in the face of the death of his wife, he is driven to the depths of melancholic grief and suffers the torments of what Freud calls "the work of mourning." He rises out of his bewildering sorrow with a deepened sense of family and faith, and achieves a dignity hewn out of a poignant encounter with life and man, with death and God. There is no ambiguity about his ultimate affirmation of life. Joe Berman is an imperfect man whose very imperfection gives the reader hope that the good in man as well as the evil is amenable to human need. Wallant's view of man, as expressed through Berman, makes man comprehensible without making him contemptible, just as Wallant's view of life makes life compassionate without making it cruel.

Nothing has been more corrosive of traditional values than modern science, and its offspring, technology. In this regard, it is science fiction that portrays the struggle of God versus Golem. In his gem of a story, The Golem, Avraham Davidson pictures a humanoid robot, which a scientist has created to displace mankind, making his first assault on a plain, middleclass Jewish couple, the Gumbeiners. They are unimpressed by his highfalutin scientific vocabulary and his pretensions to mastery. Their main concerns are the ordinary problems of everyday life. They quickly recognize a golem when they see one. Mr. Gumbeiner, drawing on his knowledge of Jewish folklore, employs the old device of marking a mystical formula on the robot's forehead and then puts the robot to work on household chores. The author mixes humor with satire to expose the intellectual smugness of technology. The use of ordinary people to project the conflict between man and technics is an expression of faith in the capacity of plain people to expose the protective devices of intellectual humbug. Davidson reasserts the Jewish belief that humor is the great solvent of life.

More than any other contemporary American writer Meyer Levin has explored the Jewish psyche in all of its bearings. Very early in youth he discovered his roots in Zionism and Hasidism and employed his art in the service of his American and Jewish heritage. One of his early novels, Yehuda, is a splendid evocation of life in a Palestinian kibbutz in the twenties. The Golden Mountain, published in 1932 before Buber's books were available in English, beautifully brought to life the legends of Israel Baalshem and Nachman Bratzlaver. His realistic portrayal of second-generation American Jews in The Old Bunch reveals clearly and memorably the paradoxes of American Jews. During the past two decades Levin has plumbed the psychopathology of violence in crime and war and their consequence for his own people and mankind. He sees in the emergence and growth of the state of Israel a catalyst for Jews and Jewish culture and feels that Jewish fate is bound up in the development of an organic relation between American Jews and Israel. Fostering such a relation is therefore a work of supreme importance. He writes: "If there was a Messianism in the Jewish folk that enabled it to rise out of death to attain Israel, then humanity as a whole must possess the fuller Messianism, and contain within itself the force to attain universal peace and justice."

Levin's recent novel, The Stronghold, continues this grand theme. In a Bavarian castle a dozen renowned Allied hostages, including a Jewish ex-Premier of France, await liberation by the American forces. During the few days when they are suspended between life and death, there is a dramatic confrontation between the prisoners and their Nazi jailors. All the subconscious forces in the protagonists come to the surface, and the questions of motive, responsibility, identity, and faith are explored. The book is a consummation of Levin's personal and moral quest and of the meaning of the Jewish experience in our time. "The story is developed," he writes, "as a thriller, but it is in reality a confrontation, a distillation, I hope, of the morality of Judaism, Christianity, and Nazism. The story is as far as I have got, in my sixty years, to an understanding of what we in our amazing time have lived through, in relation to our Jewish tradition and history, and in relation to the behavior of mankind." Levin has made his home in a villa in Israel, overlooking the Mediterranean. His odyssey over the past forty years, from Chicago to Herzliya, has deepened his Jewish roots and enlarged his vision. The humane values of Jewish culture, which inform his life and art, work to offset the barbarities of alienation and to transform the suffering of our time into something tonic and healing.

By way of conclusion, I shall try to point out objectively a few of the implications of the changes of values described above. But being objective does not mean being impartial.

The novelist is neither scientist nor philosopher nor sociologist. He is primarily an artist, and as such he must remain a stranger within our gates. He has his own net and his own draught of fishes. The images of Jews enshrined or embalmed in his writing are in part the image of the writer himself and in part the composite image of the people and the world he knows—and hates or loves, debases or ennobles. Either the novelist is confused, bitter and ill at ease ("alienated") in Zion; or he has come to terms with himself and his moral and spiritual tradition. In the one case he tells us what it is that makes our Sammies run; in the other, what makes our Davids and Ruths walk and think, despair and hope.

It is significant that writers like Angoff, Singer, and Wallant, whose writings convey a sense of immediacy and warmth in human association, were rooted in Jewish tradition in their childhood. They were reared in a milieu where the passion for kindness and justice took precedence over the lust for wealth and success. Jewish education taught them, not merely about Judaism, but, above all, to be a Jew. In a sense, they are the true rebels. The true rebel is a person who refuses to be what he is and attempts to become what he can be. This means, not copulating with death but coping with life, and this, in turn, means facing the crises and paradoxes of existence and making hard decisions on questions of right and wrong.

Most of the living novelists, whether specialists in tradition or alienation, are dissenters, and on this count they deserve the attention especially of those who live within the fortress of convention. What are the implications of the reality they describe? Their charge is that Jews live on the principle of When-in-Romism, and their adoption of American mores is so complete that they have become indistinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors; and that this attenuation of the cultural and religious values of the Judaic tradition is brining about a spiritual abortion. Within the Jewish establishment, one notes everywhere a Gallup-poll mentality, a reliance on quantity rather than quality, a yielding to expediency instead of an embracing of faith, a substitution of research for fact rather than a search for values. Like other Americans, Jews are satisfied with a slip-cover religion and confuse mores with morality. And finally, they tell us that Jewish values, like the Jewish faith, once a substantial part of life, are now a ceremonial aspect of it.

It will serve no purpose to look upon the alienationist writers with an oblique eye or to turn from or on them in anger. To call them "self-hating Jews" is neither honest nor useful. Of course, the process of alienation is a fact of life in our technologized, middle-class society. It is expressed by American novelists of every background and persuasion—perhaps most poignantly by Negro novelists—for example, in Ralph Ellison's superb novel, The Invisible Man. For Jews, alienation is part of the process of the recent naturalization of Jews and Judaism in American society, and committed Jews should consider seriously what these gifted, free-wheeling writers are saying. They should be faced with historical and psychological candor.

It is our obligation to counter their doctrine of nothingness and meaninglessness on rational and moral grounds. The principle that all men are strangers is no adequate substitute for the principle that all men are brothers. To hallow human estrangement and to sanctify the emptiness of life is, in terms of the consequences of this doctrine, to justify inhumanity. A writer cannot be absolved of the responsibility for the consequences of his ideas any more than the scientist can be absolved for the consequences of nuclear fission.

There is in our best fiction an indefinable note whose burden is that the inhuman and destructive elements in life today are evidence of human inadequacy and moral failure. Even the philosopher of the absurd, Albert Camus, has written, "The meaning of life is the most urgent of all questions." And he has carried the thought further. Here is a passage from an address delivered in New York in the spring of 1946, a little less than two years after he emerged from the French underground:

We all sanctify and justify [murder and terror] when we permit ourselves to think that everything is meaningless. This is why we have sought our reasons in our revolt itself, which has led us without apparent reasons to choose the struggle against wrong. And thus we learned that we had not revolted for ourselves alone, but for something common to all men.… There was in this absurdity the lesson that we were caught in a collective tragedy, the stake of which was a common dignity, a communion of men, which it was important to defend and sustain.

Thus speaks a voice of honesty, courage, and moral vision. And a voice which should remind us that the latest literary fashion is not necessarily the last word.