SOURCE: "Jewishness, Judaism, and the American-Jewish Novelist," in The Chicago Jewish Forum, Vol. 23, No. 4, Summer, 1965, pp. 275-82.

[In the following essay, Bernstein characterizes the half-century between the publication of The Rise of David Levinsky and Herzog as a period of waiting "to rediscover in Judaistic values the definition of the worth of self heart, mind, and society.']

Today the Jewish writer is the subject of scrutiny in Germany, in England, and in America. On the East Coast he is studied in the Jewish-supported Commentary; on the West Coast he is studied in the Catholic-supported Ramparts. Last year the Jewish Publication Society (Philadelphia) not only issued Irving Malin and Irwin Stark's Breakthrough, an anthology of thirty-one American Jewish writers but also Oscar Janowsky's edited collection of essays by many hands, The American Jew, A Reappraisal. For the 1964-65 season the New York City 92nd Street YMHA-YWHA has advertised a ten-lecture series on American Jewish novelists by Dr. Eugene Borowitz.

To Dr. Janowsky's book professor Marie Syrkin (Brandeis) contributes an essay, "Jewish Awareness Literature," in which she writes: "One must conclude a survey of the American Jewish novel with the unhappy reflection that for many of the ablest of its sons, 'being Jewish' has become a dry well." Regrettably, prof. Syrkin had formulated her conclusion before the publication of Saul Bellow's Herzog. It is precisely Bellow's deep, full well meaning that controverts her statement. The development that brings us to Bellow is a significant chapter in American life and literature.

Before Abraham Cahan published The Rise of David Levinsky in 1917 the Jew in America was a literary accident not an essence, as Leslie Fiedler points out in his Herzl Institute pamphlet, The Jew in the American Novel (1959). In nineteenth-century American literature he was potential, rarely kinetic, as in the short stories of Hawthorne, in his The Marble Faun, in Melville's and Longfellow's poetry, and, according to Edmund Wilson's A Piece of My Mind, in the curious rabbinism that made some New Englanders eccentric. The Jew crossed the Atlantic a stereotype: he was a stage Shylock and a fictional Fagan, softened somewhat by Scott's Rebecca, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and ennobled in Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra, a puzzle in Disraeli, and a fear in Dreyfus. (Browning's philo-semitism was such that there was a minor English and American magazine controversy whether or not Browning was a Jew, perhaps a Marrano. The controversy died from anoxia of facts).

Late in the century Emma Lazarus published an idealistic American request. In "The New Colossus" she pleaded: "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses." Cahan's David Levinsky was one of these, not a stereotype but a steerage passenger. He was poor, huddled, but not tired.

David Levinsky of Antomir, Russia, grows up a poor Talmud student, becomes an orphan when his mother is beaten by a pogromist, gets to America, and changes from idealist to egotist, from innocent to experienced, from Talmudist to secularist, from European to American. We watch the Americanization of Jacob Riis without that Dane's energetic altruism. Cahan the Socialist had no love for Levinsky's Social Darwinist triumph, his anti-unionism, anti-socialism, and egotistical philanthropy. In Americanizing himself, Levinsky dejudaized himself. Cahan awards him success but withholds from him happiness. The Jewish immigrant novel had been born. It was to be sub-genre.

Samuel Ornitz published anonymously in 1923 Haunch Paunch and Jowl. An Anonymous Autobiography, a novel masked as an autobiography, adding a dimension of personal bitterness to the fiction he chose to tell with bitterness. It is an up-from-steerage, out of the East Side, up to a judgeship and on to Riverside Drive novel. Meyer Hirsch, an only son, living with a sweated garment worker father who is dying of the immigrant's occupational disease, TB, paying scant attention to his mother who yearns for respectability, assimilating the instruction not of his Cheder teacher but of his uncle Philip whose overriding desire is to be a Russian Jewish American gentleman as good as the German Jewish American gentleman (that is, to be rich)—Meyer Hirsch uses his brains to lead his gang, haggle with the fences over the stolen goods, run cases for crooked lawyers, break strikes with goons, and compromises justice by getting a bribed appointment to the judge's bench. Judaism was no deterrent to the jungle morality of America. In a chapter headnote Ornitz quotes The Education of Henry Adams: "neither to him nor his brothers was religion real." And Uncle Philip could define a rov (rabbi) as "a scholar a thousand years behind the times." On his Bar Mitzvah day Meyer can't swallow that bunk: "I puke it right back." At the end of his life he lives among the allrightnicks on Riverside Drive, and the bejeweled plump women, the fat cigar-chewing men playing pinochle, among people whose religion was "a bumptious holding forth in swell temples and synagogues." At the end of the novel he wonders whether the new generation will be made as dizzy and giddy by sudden riches as his sordid generation.

The common denominator of these two American-Jewish novels is their assimilationist complaint. Both threw out the Yahweh of Moses and Isaiah, of legalism and compassionate morality. Levinsky and Hirsch turn out to be apostates and moral cripples holding on to dead twigs of the tree of life. They are Jewish victims of American life.

And life in America was a conspiracy against the Schearl family in Call It Sleep. The 600-page story covers the years 1911 - 1913, the years six to eight, in the young life of David Schearl whose father is irascible and suspicious, whose mother is resigned, resourceful and loving, whose Aunt Bertha is the salt of the earth, whose urchin friends educate him in sex, wilyness, violence, and if one is lucky, survival. It is a moving, unforgettable novel about people who happen to be Jewish immigrants, who talk Yiddish, immigrants from Europe bringing into the Golden Land their character. It is a Jewish novel not a Judaistic novel.

Its Jewishness lies in its characters acting out their destiny in translated Yiddish, doffing their European Jewishness (phylacteries, dietary laws), little by little but trying not only to maintain the family, honorable marriage, and human dignity, but also to endure with the stiff-necked humanism that lies at the core of the Jewish contract between God and man. Its sense of peopleness makes it a fiction without ideology but with an empirical theology. Genya is like her Jewish God: a creature of wide nostrils, which translates into a metaphor for long suffering. She is the Jewish mother of fiction in the tradition of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Ruth—a good woman whose value cannot be measured in pearls or rubies, split-level houses or mink stoles. To the sophisticated, she is a category: a side of the Oedipal triangle. In terms of what Saul Bellow calls "potato love," she is Al Jolson's Mammy and George Jessel's Yiddishe Momma. To David Schearl she is love.

What we have been observing chronologically in Cahan, Ornitz and Roth is the dejudaizing of the Jew. He becomes like everyone else in America. The 1930's continued the transformation of the Jew from the villages of Sholom Aleichem, Peretz, and Babel. He became Michael Gold, Albert Halper, and Howard Fast; he became the New Masses man. Just as the reverberations of the German Jewish Enlightenment turned the grandson of Lessing's Nathan the Wise (Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn) into Christian Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn, so the Aujklarung und Wahrheit of Hegel, Marx, Trotsky, and Lenin turned American Jewish messianists against their sectarian past, and their ideological bourgeois selves. For their lost theology and messianic Zion, they substituted their own secularized, internationalized dream of the end of days. Das Kapital was substituted for Talmud; the cell was the minyan (minimum congregation); the front was the congregation; and Lenin was Rashi. Emancipation from primitive religion was a delirium.

During this time a number of Robert Cohns had gone to more colleges than Princeton, but only a few of them remained to teach. It was to be a while before the literary appreciation of the fictional Leopold Bloom, the fictional Tevya, and Zero Mostel's stage Tevya were to be translated into acceptance of human beings called Bloom and Tevya. In the meantime the Jew had to cleanse himself from pacifism by fighting in World War II in the novels of Shaw and Mailer. But he still ran like Sammy Glick; and Schulberg wrote Sammy's obituary in terms of dozens of pairs of shoes, just as Fitzgerald had written Gatsby's in dozens of shirts. Herman Wouk changed his name Ehrmann to Airman, hers from Morganstern to Morningstar. And in Arthur Miller's Willy Loman and Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and especially in the Glass family, the Jew exists as an American hybrid so many times cross-pollinated that his Jewish archetypal origins are ignored. Gentiles take them to their bosoms as one of their own; and Jews say Kaddish (memorial prayers) for Willy Loman and Seymour Glass—killed in America, by America.

Current Jewish-American novelists are hardly through with the self-hatred created by being outside the power structure of the Golden Land first advertised by Capt. John Smith and splendidly exploited to the detriment of their Christianity by the Bildads and Pelegs, the Carnegies and Rockefellers. (Incidentally, it's a North American phenomenon. Things are not better in Canada, according to the novel of Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1959).

Consider Burt Blechman's second novel, The War of Camp Omongo (1963).

Out of pencil scrawlings on toilet walls (jottings less poetic than Genet's prison fantasies), out of the civil war of status-seeking Jews who in their pecking order dislike Jews poorer than themselves, out of the conniving of dishonest men in the clothing business, out of the unhappy marriage of a Jewish high school math teacher to a lecherous wife, out of the summer camp business of this teacher who runs Camp Omongo for boys complete with a paramilitary color war that climaxes the camping season, Blechman has written a novel trite in its satire, tired in its ersatz plot. This is not a tentative reading of human nature comparable with William Golding's Lord of the Flies; rather it is a sociological document. The value on the stake is not a Jewish value; it is an American value—success. The people in the book (Levine, Oronsky, Greenberg, Bernstein) happen to have Jewish names, that's all. America—not the Jews—is on the verge of Omongo extinction is what the book is saying. This book is a look at the other side of the Cahan-Ornitz coin. If the earlier novelists portrayed the Jewish sociology of being poor in rich America, Blechman is reporting the Jewish sociology of being affluent. In addition, the camp rabbi is a fool and is treated as one. In this respect the portrayal of the ineffectual rabbi is equivalent to the ineffectual minister in Faulkner, in Updike, in Styron, and in Heller's Catch-22.

One realizes how big a failure Blechman's extravagant satire is when his anger is compared with the more delirious satirical humor of Bruce Jay Friedman. Friedman's two novels, Stern (1962) and A Mother's Kisses (1964) concentrate absurdly, surrealistically in parts, on two facets of Jewishness, one more Judaistic than the other. In Stern the story turns on Anti-Semitism; In A Mother's Kisses the object is the phenomenon of the Jewish mother, the modern Rebekah, the mother who tricked Isaac into blessing Jacob not Esau. It is a bold writer who would make jests remembering the six million who died of Jewishness; it is an equally bold writer who would desecrate the Yahrzeit (memorial) candle lit for Momma. Yet Friedman does it.

No summary does justice to Stern, for the point of the book is its hallucinatory verbalization of a compound angst. Stern, a writer of labels in an advertising agency, buys a house and moves to the commuter's suburbs with his wife and young son. One day an arrogant Gentile in the neighborhood insults Stern's wife—calls her kike—and in the altercation she either falls or is pushed so that the hostile anti-Semite looks up her skirt under which she habitually wears nothing. Stern is told about it and his inability to deal with the ethnic insult and the accidental voyeuristic aggression against his property in his wife's sexual parts both lead him to torture himself into an ulcer. Returning from a rest home he learns that his son has been insulted again. Stern decides to face his insulter, gets beaten, and stumbles home, still afraid of the man who threatens his wife's world, his son's world, and his world.

I confess to an inability to be precise about the many things that are working in this book. In the world of Job there was discourse: "Come let us reason together." In Friedman's world reason, order, cause and effect, and certitude are gone. One possible meaning is that there is no freedom from insult in the existence of the Jew—at least, not yet, not now. But before taking this one key from the key ring of many keys for the meaning, consider these two quotations:

[His son Donald is speaking.] "Listen, do you know where we are?"

"Where?" Stern said.

"In God's hand; right on his pinkie, as a matter of fact."

"Who teaches him God things?" Stern said to his wife.

"The baby-sitter. She's inside."

Stern said, "She shouldn't." He wanted to go inside and tell her to discontinue the God information, but he was afraid she would come after him one night with a torch-bearing army of Gentiles and tie him in a church.

And this:

He wanted to go out of his house and say to the man who'd kiked his wife and peered between her legs, "You've got me wrong. I'm no kike. Come and see my empty house. My bank account is lean. I drive an old car, too, and Cousy thrills me at the backcourt just as you. No synagogue has seen me in ten years. It's true my hips are wide, but I have a plan for thinness. I'm no kike."

According to this reducto ad absurdum, according to Friedman, a Jew is any man who is like every irreligious American around him, but for some irrational non-Jewish reason gets angst when he is called a kike. Stern is a novel of social cruelty and comic distortion suggesting the domestic nonsense of Norman Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle and Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, Salinger's short story "De Daumier—Smith's Blue Period," and the Complete Works of Nathanael West, with Friedman extending their satiric revulsion by his fertile scatology.

The core of Friedman's second novel, A Mother's Kisses, is as deceptively economical as his first. Seventeen-year old Joseph hangs around Brooklyn that summer waiting for the mail to bring him an acceptance into college. He receives rejections. His mother Meg takes over his college problem. Sinking her untiring mind (and perhaps her indefatigable body) into that of a retired Navy officer who has college entrance connections, Meg gets her son into Kansas Land Grant Agricultural College. And that isn't all. She takes him there, delivers him to class, makes friends with fraternity men who've invited Joseph to their house. Having achieved her mother's wish—to see her son in the Gentile world of Kansas Land Grant Agricultural, in a city where there are, thank God, some Jewish cab drivers.

This is Jewish Momism, bringing up Father and children, and bringing the whole world as tribute to her son by extraordinary feats of family technology and social engineering. This is the Jewish world of food, clothes (she wears Toreador pants), hennaed hair, mountain resorts, health, specialists (not doctors), conniving (ostentatious tipping averts the evil decree of anti-Semitic prejudice), imaginative cursing, and giving lip service to the posture of bowed head bent to the Wailing Wall but secretly having the strength of a Caterpillar earthmover that turns rivers from their courses. This is the Jewish mother, a Darwinian type of adaptable species fiercely overriding adversity, violently subverting the sex-survival-success myth of America to her tenacious and resilient ideal of masochistic service and sadistic mastery. She is the six days of creation in one, and for her there is never a Sabbath to her mastery, manipulating, and motherlove. Stern and A Mother's Kisses are novels not of Judaism but of Jewishness.

The bitter reassessment of Jewishness, the circling of the Judaistic living cell around which Jewishness builds its spore, is painfully, satirically, compassionately, and savagely explored in the fiction of Norman Fruchter, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth.

Norman Fruchter's first novel, Coat Upon a Stick (1962), covers the day of a nameless 68-year old man living on the East Side of New York, a shamos (sexton) in a synagogue, a father of a married son Carl who has a son David and lives in New Jersey. Ritually observant, comforted by his rabbi, befriended by his cronies, looked after by his son, the old man is locked up in his mind, haunted by retributive thoughts. In Russia he had got a girl pregnant and palmed her off on an innocent man; he had promised the man who agreed to take him to America to work for him for passage money; instead, he stole his benefactor's heirloom silver and pawned it; working in a butcher shop he made false weights, stole the over-price he charged; he had married for advancement, was never tender to his wife who died in childbirth. To this day he steals: tea and crackers from the supermarket, and a Yiddish paper, the Forward, from the newspaper stand.

Although the old man has violated all of the 613 Commandments of the Torah, yet he is bitter toward his son for not being ritually exacting in the education of grandson David. After an unhappy visit with his father and accompanied by David, Carl is home in New Jersey talking with Millie, his wife:

What'd he pick on David about?

Oh, the usual thing. Wanted to know how often David went to synagogue, whether he laid tephillin (phylacteries) and all. I said it wasn't fair to ask David, so then he jumped on me. Said it was my fault. Said I was bringing David up to be a goy.…

A few minutes later Carl asks:

Does it ever worry you, the way we're bringing David up? You think maybe we're doing something wrong? You think he's not Jewish enough?

Oh, Carl, he's Jewish enough, for God's sake. It's bad enough you have to go see the old man, you don't have to take him seriously.

Is he Jewish enough? What (among other things) Fruchter is asking is: what is the connection between religious ritual (one form of Jewishness, a controversial Judaistic essence) and morality? The old man is not a scheming hypocrite. Praying the counsel of perfection three times a day, yet he has sinned against man and Torah, and lives sheltered under the wings of the Temple lions who guard the Torah. Whether or not Fruchter wants to show the inability of institutionalized religion to reach precisely down to the old heart of man, unable to give him the "new heart" of self-knowledge, atonement, and moral reconstruction, I am not sure. But the Judaistic essence of the book is this: the God of Moses is in tension with the God of the prophets; Law and the spirit of the Law are at odds in the body and spirit of man. And man—the Jewish man without intercessor—must keep peace between himself and God by keeping peace, justice, and mercy with his fellow man, and by striving against the imperfections of his compulsive flesh. Nor is it America that has corrupted the old man; he was a scoundrel in heart and mind in Europe. The novel is less Jewish than it is Judaistic. It is a morality novel not a novel of mores.

Bernard Malamud's old man, Morris Bober, in The Assistant (1958) is in many ways the vital opposite of Fruchter's old man. He is the normative Jew (whose ethos not his sociology is his Jewishness) living a marginally successful life, enterprisingly incompetent to get rich, doggedly persisting in giving service, credit to customers, and charity to the poor; he forgives, he forgets, he endures. He is the education of the Christian Frank Alpine, his store assistant, who enters his life as a hooligan and ends the novel as a repentant, learning service and self-denial, experiencing atonement and community and undergoing the circumcision of his heart. Circumcision has moot origins but one thing it did. It served to divide truth from error, the monotheists from the idolators. Idolatry is many things but one thing it is. It treats things as if they were people. Judaism ever repudiates this. God is not a thing. People are not things. And Frank Alpine had to learn that Morris Bober, his daughter Helen, and even Frank Alpine himself were not things. They were people, related not to an idol but to other people and to God.

Malamud's fiction (Idiot's First, A New Life) for all its experimentalism with sober fantasy, zany fantasy, and its locations in Rome, New York, or the West Coast, is richly veined with Jewishness. Its bigger arteries carry transplanted European Yiddish and close to Judaistic affirmative values. The Jew emerges as a folkhero, now saint now rogue, but always carrying on his tough back the heavy peddler's pack of sorrow in every land, in every time, time without end. His task is ever to wrestle with the Angel of Death and win not the whole match but at least a fall. The Chosen People must choose and wisdom says (as in the title of one of Malamud's stories), "Life is better than death." Much of Malamud's fiction explores the tragicomedy of choosing.

No such tenderness inhabits the fiction of Philip Roth. He is appalled by American life. Writing in Commentary (March, 1961) on the difficulties of writing American fiction, Roth observed:

The American writer in the middle of the 20th Century has his hands full in trying to understand and, then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.… The actuality is continually outdoing our talents. Who could have invented Charles Van Doren, Cohn and Schine, Eisenhower in Columbia?

His disgust is less controlled than Malamud's either by taking thought, or using benign and healing humor, or expressing a poetized compassion. His anger is expressed in chiaroscuro, in desperation, and in mercilessness.

In the novella, Goodbye, Columbus Roth scores the Americanized Jewish life of the Newark rich, although the Columbs of the story is Columbus, Ohio. In Roth's short fiction, the beatings of a cheder rabbi drive a little boy desperate. A World War II Jewish soldier uses his Jewishness to get favors from sergeants and congressmen and tries to get his name off a shipping list. The moving of a Hasidic school to a largely-free-of-Jews-New-York-City suburb drives one Jew in Woodenton to a nervous breakdown. The troubled characters in this tedious novel, Letting Go (1962), are not helped by their Jewishness; indeed, they are further demoralized. Gabe Wallach, the Jamesian observer of, and participant in, this Judaeo-American debacle, is helpless to ameliorate the condition, for he is quite dejudaized himself. Libby, one of the tortured women in the novel, says, "You're a hundred percent right, religion is very important to a child. But … my husband and I don't believe a God damn bit of it." Letting Go is not an able novel, not well written, not clear. Its mood is destructive and agnostic, renouncing the possibility that Jewish balm can come out of the American-Jewish Gilead.

The mood is different in the fiction of Saul Bellow, in Herzog. Suffering the Ten Plagues of spiritual distress, twice-divorced Moses Elkanah Herzog, Ph.D., University of Chicago, wanders in the dark Egypt of bondage to love of flesh and ideas and through the blooming desert of self-examination. He writes unmailed letters addressed to persons in the modern world of change, and compulsively fondles the blooming, prickly cacti of memory. Doggedly he seeks the milk of love and the honey of ideas. That is the story.

The plot of Herzog is contained in the unmailed letters Herzog writes in this novel. It is a testing of the Jewish definition of life and living, of purpose and death in the world—nothing less. It is a novel of ancient belief tested against modernism in the person of Herzog. The total sensibility of Herzog is Judaistic. His mind is rich in Biblical allusions, many of them parodies. Herzog's God identified Himself to Moses as I AM THAT I AM. And Moses Herzog several times in the book says of himself "he was what he was." From this stems his agony: can he be what he wants himself to be? How does one in the twentieth century translate the injunction: "Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might?" Does man bring on his fate by too much willing and wanting with all his might?

For the American-Jewish world of affection, self-pity, Cadillacs, and yearning for the old time Orthodox religion of shuts and chazans not cantors and temples, Herzog has compassionate understanding. But it is Herzog's Jewish mind that rejects the doctrine of the First Fall of Man, Heidegger's Second Fall of Man, the scientific assertion that no certitude can be reached in questions of value, the notion that universal space destroys human value, the Freudian assertion that the mind is merely tropistic, and the Hegelian assertion that man is the cork that bobs in the stream of determinism. As a Jew he believes that his "own actions has historic importance." As a Jew, he believes in "personal responsibility" with its corollary of personal dignity. Herzog's mind is the Jewish mind historically at home in all civilizations but rejecting the anti-Jewish, the non-Jewish, those values that do not affirm empirical and transcendental Judaistic values.

To the Jew Herzog reality (facts) leads to spirituality, to transcendence. To the Jew Herzog, the Jew in history although outcast, despised, persecuted, killed in numbers and by the concentration camp numbers, could still pray: "Ma tovu ohaleha Yaakov … How goodly are thy tents, O Israel." This is optimism. As a boy, Herzog had studied in cheder the story of Cain's murder of Abel and Potiphar's wife's attempted adultery with Joseph. Life (the Bible was clear about it) had in it murder and adultery. This is realism. Yet the Jew aspired; Herzog aspired.

In these details is contained the vexatious empirical transcendentalism of the Jewish ethos. Life is hard, and yet, yet one tries, one chooses. It is important, nay, it is vital to choose. Out of the million facts of our modern fact hoard choose, but make the choice for life not for death. This is the Bible: "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, and I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed." (Deut. 30:19) And this is the way Herzog muses in accents of empirical transcendentalism and Hasidic aphorism: "His duty was to live. To be sane, and to live, and to look after the kids." "To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin." "On the knees of your soul? Might as well be useful. Scrub the floor." Significantly, his memories contain not only Yiddish but fragments of Hebrew prayers with their emphasis on life. Always life. The Jews toast each other with the words: "L-chayyim" (To life). Herzog believes that he owes to the powers that created him a human life.

Herzog's epistolary dialogue with the world includes an unmailable letter to God in whom he continues to believe "though never admitting it." He feels God in the summer ambiance of his Berkshire house and addresses Him in Abraham's obedient language, "Hineni" (Here I am). In his Job-like exhaustion and acceptance of self with its flawed humanness, he concludes: "But I have no arguments to make about it. 'Thou movest me.' But what do you want, Herzog? But that's it—not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy." The Day of Atonement of his spirit has ended. His New Year begins.

Bellow's Herzog came some forty-seven years after Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky. In the interim, except for Call It Sleep, American Jewish fiction is predominantly sociology, anthropology, psychiatry, and Jewish imitations of Dreiser, Farrell, Dos Passos, Algren, Cain, Schulberg, Shaw, Wouk, and Ferber (that is, Jewish writers imitating Jewish writers who were imitating the sociological realists among Christian writers; they were Jewish writers trying to get into the Establishment). The early novelists reflected naturalism and realism. Bruce Jay Friedman uses the current American mode of the comic, but is still writing parodistic, cinematic studies of the sociology of being Jewish. Herbert Tarr's The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen is a kitsch novel, which in its "Jewishness" is comparable to the "Jewishness" of, let's say, Shelley Berman in particular and Jewish vaudeville entertainers in general.

It took some fifty years for the American-Jewish novelist to make his way in the Golden Land, to resist its assimilationist pressures for cause, and to rediscover in Judaistic values the definition of the worth of self, heart, mind, and society. Because of the success of Herzog, today it is less rewarding to talk of Malin and Stark's academic categories of Jewish-American fictional themes—alienation, the Old Country, the sense of past, and what all. As Herzog says, "Foo on all categories." Also, Prof. Syrkin can revise her opinion, for Herzog with its fictional artistry, complexity, and unity, is, today, the American Jewish novel, the culmination of the immigrant novel of fifty years ago, with Jewish here meaning not sociology but values.