The Jewish Vogue

The Chosen.
by Chaim Potok.
Simon and Shuster. 284 pp. $4.95.

The 28th Day of Elul.
by Richard M. Elman.
Scribners. 279 pp. $4.95.

Thou Worm Jacob.
by Mark Mirsky.
Macmillan. 213 pp. $4.95.

There are a number of factors responsible for the school of American-Jewish fiction that has emerged in recent decades. A bookish generation, sprung from the people of the Book, came of age, and it had the old compulsion to make books, and the language and the skill with which to make them. With the writers came the readers; we have seen the emergence of a self-conscious Jewish reading public, avid to see itself mirrored in print. More than anything, there is a premium on ethnicity in our culture: everyone wants to hear about everyone else, and the more vivid the color, the greater the payoff.

But there has also been a real need to come to grips with the “Jewish experience,” and the questions of tradition and identity which it entails. The forms and impulses of our tradition—albeit shattered and enfeebled—continue to haunt us, but provide no clear means of assessing or of integrating them. In the absence of other sources we tend to look to our novelists both for a diagnosis of the past and for prophecies of the future.

But to do so is to face recurrent disillusionment. Every generation has not only its backlog of experience, but also a limited set of vital issues. Those writers, now in their forties and fifties, who have made their mark with works of specifically Jewish interest, have done so essentially from a position of disaffiliation. Saul Bellow “writes Jewish” not because he is engaged with questions of public interest, but because he happens to be a Jew and happens to be committed to a kind of writing in which what one happens to be is of cardinal interest. So with Herbert Gold. And although Bernard Malamud “writes Jewish” in a more self-conscious, more literarily committed way, this is largely a matter both of artifice and of private myth-making.

Now, one might expect another generation to emerge, rooted in the ideology of the cultural pluralism that has characterized American life in recent decades, and hence more closely attuned to the interests and issues of the communities with which they are identified. Such a generation would be less anarchically individualistic than its predecessor and more thoroughly engaged with the issues that vex the community at large. It could, presumably, offer a new sort of insight into the conditions of ethnicity in general and of Judaism in particular today.

Such a generation of writers has indeed emerged. But although its members do engage with large public issues and particular social backgrounds, their work tends to suffer from a lack of imaginative and intellectual vigor; it is seldom adequate to the issues which it raises and attempts to confront.

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Three recent novels, by writers in their twenties and thirties, epitomize the difficulty. All three take on potentially large questions-nothing less than the ultimate viability of Jewish survival—and all approach these questions out of an apparent rapport with the experience involved. The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, is set among the Orthodox Jews of Williamsburg during the 40’s and is concerned with the problem of transmitting the traditions of that seemingly doomed community. Richard M. Elman’s The 28th Day of Elul confronts the Holocaust; in telling the story of a family’s response to the threat of deportation to Auschwitz, the novel implicitly raises all those questions of heroism and cowardice that were aired in the controversy about Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. And Mark Mirsky’s Thou Worm Jacob, in evoking the condition of a set of superannuated public Jews in Boston’s old ghetto, renders the oddity and desperation of old-timers who have nothing to cling to but the forms of their discourse and the creaking pieties of an eviscerated tradition. What is curious—and ultimately disappointing—about these novels is that all three touch on public issues, but all three turn on essentially private preoccupations; rarely does any of them attain the vision and objectivity needed to deal with its manifest concerns.

The Chosen portrays the lives of two boys, one the son of a Hasidic rabbi, the other of a “scientific” Talmudic scholar, who clash on a baseball field. Charged with hatred at the outset, the boys nevertheless proceed to become fast friends. Reuven Malter, son of the secularist scholar, slowly comes to understand the pressure his friend Daniel is under—the pressure of his father’s authoritarian distance and remoteness, and the tug of secular studies, with which this young heir to a Hasidic dynasty is infatuated. The novel rises to a climax on the eve of the Israeli War of Liberation, as tension mounts between Hasidic anti-Zionists, inspired by Daniel’s father, and rationalist Zionists. Daniel finds himself faced with the choice between graduate school and the vocation his father has destined him for. Ironically, Daniel chooses graduate school and psychology, whereas Reuven, the secularist, opts for the rabbinate. In the crisis of generations and cultures, the son of a rationalist, who has come to love the tradition because he has been reared in love, chooses to sustain it; the son of the mystic, reared in silence and seeming hatred, turns toward secular science.

Fathers and sons dominate the action of The Chosen. Like many contemporary writers, Mr. Potok has turned with a vengeance from the old bogeys of Momism to the problems and anxieties surrounding a spiritually absconded paternity; from the vexed question of relations between the sexes to the cruxes of relations between men. He has, in fact, written a psychological thriller, playing out the friendship between two boys against the machinations of a seemingly villainous father: Reb Saunders, who has reared his son Daniel in brutal silence, and who presides over his life and destiny like a tyrannical god. Reb Saunders only seems tyrannical, however. We learn in the end that the silence which Daniel has suffered has been imposed for the sake of his salvation, to save him from the pride with which his intellectual gifts might have threatened him. Far from being distant and hostile, Reb Saunders is seen in his way to be close and loving.

It is in fact Potok’s handling of this culminating vision of sudden wholeness and compatibility which makes The Chosen what it is: a novel written in the psychological optative, a wish-fulfillment fairy tale which concludes with the familiar, sugary projection of desiderated relationships and a not altogether convincing justification of the ways of fathers with their sons. There is no reason that things should not have been as Mr. Potok describes them, but one feels that on the whole they would not have been and in fact were not that way. In a sense, Mr. Potok’s two intentions cancel each other out: on the one hand, a psychological exploration that could have made a telling case in point has been sacrificed to a mass of local color; on the other, a potentially authentic genre novel has been undermined by the private psychological games of the author. On the face of it, we have rationalism and mysticism and the conflict of the generations in a changing culture; in fact, we have a rather slick projection of fantasy, colorfully decked out for all our pleasures.

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An analogous difficulty besets Richard M. Elman’s The 28th Day of Elul, a far more ambitious novel and one that poses very real, very public questions, only to obscure them in a cloud of erotic irrelevance. Mr. Elman convincingly captures the guilt and torment of a particular Holocaust survivor—his crabbed sense of physical and psychic frailty, his scatological hatred of bodily functions, his irascible response to people and weather—and he makes his protagonist’s boyhood milieu live vividly. But the point of this novel lies elsewhere.

Shandor Yagodah, now a 42-year-old resident of an Israeli moshav, has been asked to bear witness to the fact that he is a practicing Jew in order to inherit money from an American uncle. Outraged by the demand, and haunted by the shame and guilt of his experience during the war, he writes a long memoir to explain the absurdity of the request. He recalls the days immediately preceding the deportation of the Jews from his peaceful Transylvanian village; his account unmasks his bourgeois father as a self-deluded fool who could not face the ineluctable facts, yet successfully conveys the pathos, and even the inevitability, of that particular form of escapism. As the memoir unfolds, it transpires that Lilo, Shandor’s cousin, fiancee, and lover, was sacrificed by Shandor’s father to Miklos, a resentful gypsy boy, half-satyr, half storm-trooper, in order to save the Yagodah family on the eve of deportation. Shandor tells this story in order to suggest the ambiguities and complexities of the European situation, to illustrate the contention that even in a crisis, men do not ordinarily transcend their habitual ways of being and thinking, that when all else is stripped away a man will equivocate, temporize, and finally betray to save his bare flesh and the dreams and delusions that inhabit it.

Like Potok’s Williamsburg, Elman’s Clig is solidly rendered; but his characters, like Potok’s, are unconvincing. Again, what we are told has happened might well have happened, but its significant inwardness eludes us. The trouble is partly in Elman’s melodramatic gypsies. Almost Gothic in quality, they lurk on the edge of the Yagodahs’ world, a virtually allegorical representation of the sinister aspects of the Jews’ relations to their neighbors and—in Shandor’s homo-erotic bond to Miklos—of the ambivalence of that relationship. There is something about these gypsies that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the village idiocy in novels like William Styron’s Set this House on Fire.

But worse than Elman’s handling of the gypsies is the crude and gratuitous keying up in this novel of erotic violence that seems rooted neither in the characters nor in the situation. It is difficult to get from the bewildered Shandor of the Clig episodes to the tormented man who writes about them years later, and it is hard to swallow the simplistic invocation of his beautiful, simple Lilo of the early years. This is, to be sure, not a matter of abstract logic; by extrapolation, one can make sense of the experience which made the boy we have come to know the man who is telling us about him. But there is no sense here of the continuity of that experience, or of its inevitability; hence Elman can provide no fresh perspective from which to view the experience he attempts to illuminate. He leaves us with the uneasy feeling that he has merely indulged a predilection for the scatological and the perversely erotic. The heroic effort implied by the need to confront the Holocaust is undercut by the obtrusion of an irrelevant set of private obsessions decked out in available literary clichés. One wishes he had settled his turgid, hackneyed, erotic hash elsewhere, before turning to such urgent business.

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Thou Worm Jacob, which is hardly more than a sophisticated piece of ethnic smut, suffers from none of the dividedness and unevenness of the other two novels. It is wholly of a piece, and very apt in its management of its materials; if Potok and Elman lack vehicles to objectify their vision, Mark Mirsky has his vehicle ready made. He is absolutely secure in his public and in his stereotypes, and his manipulation of them is fresh and vivid.

Thou Worm Jacob is one of those rollicking tales, highly stylized and peppered with whimsy, that assumes familiarity with the Jewish immigrant world and proceeds to take every liberty with its possibilities. Its subject: a ramble by several survivors of the old Jewish neighborhood in Boston who are beached among the scenes and habits of their past. Its characters are lean, hungry old men who crave past glory and grieve over present misery. They are public functionaries who have lost their public, professional men of the spirit who have no spirituality to profess. Their first action is to con two fat old ladies into letting them gorge on fat fliegels of barbecued turkey and tangy tidbits of commercial herring. They join forces with Druckman the Dreckman (sic!), who nods along behind his jangled knacker’s nag. Together, they take an “apocalyptic” ride over clogged Blue Hill Avenue traffic, landing in time to be collared by a comic old shammes (sexton) to round out his minyan (quorum). The missing tenth in their company is Druckman’s old nag: the shammes notes that the horse has been circumcised. The tale ends with the horse’s head sticking through a window of the basement synagogue.

This final touch is both hilarious and obscene. Reminiscent of the conclusion of Maurice Sendak’s Very Far Away, it suggests, by pointed contrast, the real affinities of the tale. Thou Worm Jacob has been discussed both as a parody of a certain kind of dialect joke and as a parable for the times. It really is neither—neither a takeoff on the vulgarity of cheap bar-mitzvah entertainment nor a disquisition on a vulgarized and eviscerated tradition. It is, rather, that bar-mitzvah entertainment itself, with a touch of idyllic grotesqueness and a big dose of gratuitous cruelty.

Something childish and brutal informs this novel. It reminds one of those sketches of fat ladies and bumptious men made in one’s boyhood, or the cruelty of one’s adolescent correspondence from the borscht belt. Indeed, the gratuitousness of its hilarities is almost a virtue—almost, but not quite. In the end, it says nothing one cares to hear. The bumps and turns of its hilarity are finally exhausting, like the persistence of an indefatigable gagman. And for all the occasional brilliance of the writing, it rarely rises above the level of those hideous Kosher Chinese cookbooks that are written in Molly-Goldberg Yiddish.

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If there are any morals to be drawn from a reading of such novels as these, one is that neither piety nor security in one’s public is a source of strength in contemporary fiction. Another is that we have possibly come to ask more from literature than it is likely, in the ordinary run of things, to deliver. We flatter ourselves—and the entire enterprise of current fiction—when we think of the novel as a ground of radical self-confrontation. At its best, of course, it may be that—and more; at its worst, it is a field on which we project our fears and wishes, but which offers little hope of bringing these emotions to heel. In the middle ground, occupied by these three books, we—and our novel-making alter-egos—muddle along, gripped by pieties or tickled by petulance, happy to tell over what we already know, fallaciously thinking it enlightenment.

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