In the midst of the current flood of problem novels dealing with Jewish life in terms of frustration, hatred, and alienation, there have been a few books which seem to represent a different—and perhaps healthier—approach to Jewish experience in America. George J. Becker, who in this article analyzes the qualities and values of this less “problematic” literary current, both in terms of the American scene in general and the Jews’ own sense of themselves in it, is assistant professor of English at Swarthmore College, specializing in modem American and European literature.

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One of the most exciting aspects of writing in America since the First World War has been what may be called the Great Inventory. At last liberated from English stereotypes and the genteel tradition, and accepting the basic concept of the realistic movement that no subject is more dignified or inherently more worthy of literary treatment than another, American writers have been exploring American life and American personality with such exuberance and vitality that for the first time there has been brought into view the infinite variety and richness of American life.

The process is little more than begun. Whole groups have vet to exercise their literary franchise. It is only a few years ago that Pietro di Donato and Jo Pagano began to speak for those of Italian extraction. William Saroyan, in one delightful book, has paid homage to his Armenian background. If Louis Adamic is not known as the interpreter of the Yugoslavs, it is only because he has made himself interpreter for all those of immigrant background. After three centuries on American soil, the Negroes also have produced those who attest to the true nature of their being, in contradistinction to the insipid and time-worn stereotypes deriving from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Nelson Page. Some day there will be works giving an equally worthy account of the Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans, the Japanese, of those of Portuguese, and Finnish, and Greek extraction.

In this wonderful medley of racial strains, the Jewish voice is of special interest. Jews are at once among the most articulate and the most inarticulate of newcomers to these shores. Some have come bringing with them the full flower of European culture, capable of speaking in a cosmopolitan manner, rising above local interest and limitation. Others have come bringing only such remnants of culture as impoverishment and persecution have left them—or, for many, the very strength and fullness of the specifically Jewish tradition of Eastern Europe has stood in the way of new expression—and in this large group whole generations have passed without its members having been able to get far enough above their experience to describe it adequately. (There are, of course, some notable exceptions: Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, for example.) The former group will continue to write in what might well be called international idiom; as in Europe they produced a Kafka and a Proust, and on a lesser level a Werfel and a Zweig, so in this country they may produce writers of equal stature. But, because of their very absorption with the profound and timeless, they will have little to add to the Great Inventory.

It is the other, emergent level of Jewish life that offers—in the terms I have set—humble but significant promise. From these Jews we may learn of Jewish experience in little towns and out-of-the-way places. Their medium may be biography and anecdote as well as fiction, they may write of broad social currents or of day-to-day perceptions. What they have to say is of interest both for what it tells of specifically Jewish experience and as one more manifestation of the infinite variety that has gone to make up the social history of this country and the myriad personalities of its citizens. And, I should add, it is of interest not only for Jews, but especially for those non-Jews like myself who seek to understand the complex and varying texture of American life. Such works need have no lasting importance in themselves, but they do have importance in helping to complete the record, in shaping attitudes, and in indicating a fruitful line to be followed in that continuing effort toward mutual understanding which is so essential a part of the democratic tradition.

Three recent books,¹ all written with love and nostalgia for a Jewish childhood in places as different as pre-earthquake San Francisco and Zanesville, Ohio, give evidence of what is potentially in store for us.

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It is not surprising that Harriet Lane Levy, 1 former associate of Gertrude Stein, should provide the best writing in her account of a San Francisco childhood in the late 19th century. What we see there is significant: a Jewish merchant group, living quietly to themselves without any sense of forced segregation, their chief enemies being the Bavarians, German Jews who considered themselves of more cultivated background. They attend a synagogue without any sense of perilously practicing an alien religious form; they employ for years an Irish cook-general who is quite competent—and not at all indignant—in coping with the intricate taboos of kosher cooking. When Josiah Royce laughs at young Harriet as she takes an examination for entrance to the University of California, he laughs at her as a funny and precocious little girl, and it never occurs to her to put any other construction upon it. Neither does it offend her that she does not move in the highest San Francisco society, with the Crockers and the Spreckels. Anti-Semitism did exist, to be sure. Young Harriet even engaged in a public debate on the subject, but her emotions—and she tells us she was eloquent—sprang from a generalized sense of justice, not from the experience of personal indignities.

Miss Levy thinks in retrospect that there was too much emphasis on money and money values, on making a rich marriage, on the awful specter of financial insecurity. But this as nothing to do with her condition as a Jew, for it is difficult to see in this O’Farrell Street interior values much different from those prevailing elsewhere in the Gilded Age. If, in later life, she preferred the Left Bank of Paris, so too did many other Americans equally in revolt against a materialistic scale of values that pressed on Jew and Gentile alike.

The other two books come from the other end of the socio-economic spectrum but tell also of integrated and significantly American lives. The father of William Manners was a rabbi. He was called “rev’r’nd” by the townspeople like anybody else who wore the cloth. Everybody in town recognized that he was a good man, and people of all faiths came to him for help. Everybody enjoyed his eccentricities and respected his right to those eccentricities. His children participated in the life of Zanesville on the same terms as any of their contemporaries. Whatever adjustments they had to make were personal: that is, they were required not by any generalized Jewish “problem” but by the unique interplay of personalities in a specific family relationship. The village, to be sure, has long since been discredited; but, for what it was worth, William Manners had much the same sort of up-bringing as Mark Twain had at an earlier date in Hannibal, Missouri, or as Sinclair Lewis had, or Sherwood Anderson, or Theodore Dreiser, or any of us who grew up in a typical small American town.

And so it was with Charles Angoff, though he grew up in Boston after 1900, where the currents of prejudice might be thought to have begun to run high. Yet in the sketches of adolescent friendships and impressions which he gives us there is no self-consciousness, no shamefaced acknowledgment of the esoteric qualities of Alte Bobbe or Yetta or Harrele-mit-the-Pants. His family was often in straitened circumstances; he knew economic misery early. He also found that there were hands held out to help him, notably that of Jerry, a Catholic boy, who was his mentor on his first job. His memories are of people, of fugitive insights into the sorrows of existence brought by early death and capricious love. He gives no evidence of feeling himself set apart by a hostile community.

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This, then, is a small part of the record, 1 three lives out of millions lived by Jews in America—statistically slender proof that Jewish lives fit into the pattern like those of anybody else, but, because of its unpretentious validity, proof nonetheless. There can be no doubt that recent books on the subject of anti-Semitism, overt and implicit, are also necessary and often telling works. Yet they have one constant fault. They assume that the Jew is basically and sharply set apart from other men in the American scene without pausing to examine whether or not he is, or even how he is. They not so much attack the misconceptions that give rise to anti-Semitism as they exhibit plot and behavior and characters based on the assumption that it is inevitable and virulently dangerous.

Thereby, it seems to me, they succeed, to some extent at least, in verifying in a kind of back-handed way what it is their intention to combat. Decrying the stereotype of the Jew as “eternal alien,” they yet serve to underscore, confirm, and set that stereotype as a permanent pattern in the American consciousness. Operating, in other words, in an area of abstraction, they permit even the most arrant offender to cry “Culpa non mea,” to say in effect, “If that’s the way things are, how can I be expected to act differently?”

Actually there seem to be two groups who must be convinced that Jews are individuals: on the one hand, the anti-Semites and those faint-hearted brethren who go along with them; on the other, some of the Jews themselves, who, though in quiet moments they know very well that they are individuals, seem under pressure from their adversaries to be subject to a kind of hysterical and hypnotized doubt of their own personalities. The essence of the argument of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose reflections on the Jewish question are currently appearing in COMMENTARY, is that it is the anti-Semite who creates the “Jew”—that is, who forces the person of Jewish background into the “inauthentic” position of correspondence with a wholly imaginary stereotype. Thus both groups are in need of seeing Jews as individuals, of looking at actual lives, not at caricatures or abstractions.

Such literature as is exemplified in the books I have described above serves first of all as a record of what has been. It may serve to demonstrate, to those who need the demonstration, that anti-Semitism is not the whole pattern of Jewish life in America and has not always existed in the intense, violent form in which it now exists—or, more accurately, is imagined to exist.

Perhaps an American’s first reaction to Sartre’s description of the Jewish situation is that things cannot possibly be as bad in this country as they are described to be in France. Indeed they are not, and it is possible that they never will be. But there are many Jews and some Gentiles who fear that things are that bad, or inevitably will be so; such people must be reassured as to what has been normal in this country.

Whether the evidence can have any effect on the anti-Semite is another question. He is not likely to read these books. Probably we can do no more with him than rob his claws of their talons, precisely as we must try to take from the Southern believer in “white supremacy” any effective ability to do harm. But there remains a great body of “fellow-travelers” who are affected simply by the noisy iteration of anti-Semitic statements. If there were a competent body of writing attesting with equal insistence and iteration to the variety and “normality” of Jewish experience, some of these might be brought back again to the more basic American tradition. Whichever stroke of the caricature it is that they allow to stand for the whole portrait of millions of individuals, they might be forced to recognize its inadequacy, its palpable inveracity, if they were confronted with enough individuals. It would do no harm for them to be reminded that Jews do engage in all sorts of vocations and have all kinds of experiences, even the experience of the “best people”—though that is not the point, since individuals are to be valued for what they retain of individuality, not for what they surrender to unimaginative conformity.

In short, so long as the Jew—or the Negro or the Pole—is an abstraction, he can be hated and he can be baited. Abstractions thrive on the lack of facts. Literature is one way to provide fact, emotionally charged fact, to make up for the limitation of experience. What we need is a multitude of facts, some white, some black, some gray. It is the wrong approach, I would say again, to try, as the movies are currently doing, to substitute one stereotype for another, to impose the “good Jew” in place of the “bad Jew.” Let’s just have Jews, lots of them, in every conceivable posture and situation, until it becomes just as tiresome to think of them as “Jews” as it is to label everyone we meet as Protestant or Catholic, as German or Italian, or as anything else which categorizes and conceals a fluid personality which is many different things at one time.

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There is a more subtle point involved here. To cite Sartre again, he points out that in France, at least, there are those who assume a deep chasm between the true France and the legal France, between those who participate through a kind of mystical fellowship in things French and those who, though guaranteed equality by the laws, are disqualified from genuine participation on the grounds that they “don’t understand,” that they “don’t feel” that which is the “essential” heritage of a Frenchman. Such a tendency is clearly in direct proportion to the frustration, economic and personal, of the self-styled true inheritor of the national being. In this country a similar assumption underlies the attitude of the Southern “poor white”; all he has left is his conviction that somehow he is the real, native American. This is his one title to respectability, and, tattered though it is, he uses it to cover both his spiritual and his physical nakedness.

On occasion, there are disturbing signs that there are those who would react to the Jews of this country in this way also, though such a tendency has nowhere reached the virulence of the outpourings of the Action Française in the decade before the war. One way to combat this tendency, where it does exist, would be to demonstrate both in daily action and in literary record that Jews always have participated, and continue in ever increasing numbers to participate, in the life of America, in whatever terms one can legitimately define that life.

Many Jews, too, lack knowledge of what Jewish experience is like outside their own narrow existences. (Wherever one looks, one finds that people generally have a painfully limited conception of the lives of others.) For such Jews, too, a record of the variety of Jewish experience might be helpful. If there are those who have been cowed into believing that they do not participate in the mystical “essence” of Americanism, such writing might bring proof that they, or at least their fellows, can so participate. Despairing of integration in American life, they may find that it is already complete in ten thousand places. Or, what is more important, they may discover that integration is not one thing but many things—that it is even being a Jew—and that the best thing one can do is to be oneself, not to be hustled into the unnatural attitudes to which others (and one’s own image of the others) would constrain one.

It is no more strange to attend synagogue on Friday night than a Seventh Day Adventist church on Saturday or early mass on Sunday. Yom Kippur has an alien sound to some ears, but so does the Stations of the Cross to others. Ceremonial garments of Jewish family ritual are no more eccentric than the costume habits of Mormon elders. In other words, those things which to the Jew are peculiarly his own—though one would judge they are diminishing—would cease to set him apart as an alien if he contemplated the fact that other American stocks also have brought their own private cultural heritages, parts of which they have kept and parts surrendered to convenience or changed needs.

As he sets the transcript of his experience alongside that of other groups, the Jew can thus gain a double assurance—assurance of the process of assimilation, in so far as it is meaningful, and at the same time assertion of legitimate individuality. For how can one individuality be more suspect than another in a culture which is a pot-pourri of individualities, where a formal mold of behavior has never been more than local?

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It is a delicate balance that is wanted. We must cherish and, where we can, preserve through artistry that which is our past; at the same time we must see it as contributory to a dynamic present. Nearly every American, whether of “old” or “new” stock, is busily becoming something other than what he was to begin with. His affirmation is therefore usually in the future; he has a tendency to deny the past as ignoble, or as simply irrelevant, a temporary passageway to a state actually never to be achieved. When he pauses to observe his own origins, it is with a sense of wonder because he is already so completely somewhere else. When he ponders those origins, he finds in them a mirrored magnification of the overwhelming variety which he already sees around him, a verification that this is the “normal” situation in this country.

Because of this fluidity of forms, this uncertainty of destination, he who denies any part of this social body is denying part of his own body. The only tenable attitude, so long as we all engage in the same social enterprise, is that we are all Americans—without anybody’s feeling a need to define exactly what an American is. If we can conceive of America as infinite variety striving toward an eventual, though many-faceted, unity, then we can take pleasure in the Great Inventory, can indeed use that inventory to demonstrate our right to belong and to strengthen our conviction that we do belong.

Perhaps participation really is a mystical thing, but it is first of all a physical thing, and it is asserted by the very act of participating. It can be undermined only by abstention. Literature is a record and an affirmation of that fact. There can be no surfeit if each man sets down what he feels and sees. Such records honestly made are a valid and permanent enrichment of the stock of American experience. They have ceased to be alien or parochial by their reference o the larger social framework. And that is as it should be.

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¹ Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street (New York, Doubleday, 1947); William Manners, Father and the Angels (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1947); Charles Angoff, When I Was a Boy in Boston (New York, Beechhurst Press, 1947).