The Word is Hysteria
Eagle at My Eyes
by Norman Katkov.
New York, Doubleday, 1948. 252 pp. $2.75.

This book begins with the story of a pogrom and ends with the line, “All right, you bastards [the Gentiles], here I come.” The hero, named Joe, tells his story in the first person, in a series of flashbacks. He is a reporter in St. Paul. Seven years ago he met a beautiful Gentile girl, of a good St. Paul family—he himself is the child of immigrant Jewish parents—and they fell decisively and unshakeably in love. There is no question in Joe’s mind as to how his parents would react if they discovered he was going out with a Gentile girl—let alone considering marrying her. Nor is there any question as to what her parents would think. Evidence on the first point is given in a long section on the Jews of St. Paul: it seems there are literally hundreds of Jewish men in St. Paul (and thousands in Minneapolis) who have been mad about Gentile girls, and whose cases have all had the same tragic end: mother threatened to throw herself in front of a train if her son married that shiksa; and the unhappy lovers have either been leading a miserable and furtive existence as man and mistress ever since, or the son gave in completely to his mother’s wishes and has been crushed and slightly queer ever since.

After this excursus the Jews of St. Paul disappear, and we neither see nor hear anything more of them. The evidence on the equivalent hatred of all Gentiles for all Jews is spread more evenly throughout the book, which includes not only the story of a pogrom, but the fullest possible calendar of anti-Semitic slights, insults, and expectations.

Having set up a situation of implacable, unalterable hatred on both sides, Jew against Gentile, Gentile against Jew (Joe never tries to alter the situation: on his first introduction to Mary’s parents, who really treat him very nicely, he makes up a story to get Mary and himself out of the house immediately: “of course they hate me”), Mr. Katkov has only two alternatives for his hero: to go over to the people who hate him and whom he hates—except for one—or abandon that one, whom all his people hate, and go back to them; hardly either a true-to-life or fruitful set of alternatives for a novelist to pose. The last line of the book, already quoted, indicates his choice and the frame of mind in which he makes it.

As a novel, the book has almost nothing to recommend it. The flashback technique becomes boring; there is a total lack of insight into any of the characters, particularly the hero; the Jewish dialect in which the father’s speech is written is disturbingly Chinese and prevents us taking him as seriously as we might. Only the mother comes through, and what Jewish writer could fail with his mother?

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Outside of a psychological treatment of the author, which could only be speculative—though it seems apparent that he bears a tremendous load of self-hatred as a Jew, and a tremendous load of guilt for his presumed “desertion” from the group—the most useful thing one can do is place this novel in the stream of books about Jewish life in America.

Here it seems to me to hold a unique place; it combines a tone that was characteristic of the 20’s and 30’s with a subject matter and treatment that have become popular in the 40’s. The books of the 20’s and, decreasingly so, of the 30’s were books about Jewish life: the Gentile was peripheral, and anti-Semitism was only an additional misfortune added to the major misfortune, poverty. These writers also expressed a kind of self-hatred, but one that was mingled with—or mostly—hatred of the horrible conditions of slum life and of the psychological types produced by hasty adjustment to American conditions, and was combined with a social diagnosis or criticism of some sort.

But Katkov’s self-hatred cannot become either satire or social criticism, as it may have in these earlier writers, because the Jews, the subject of the indictment, are no longer present in any substantial or realistic way.

In Katkov’s book the angry hatred of the 200’s is reinforced by a different setting: the isolated social situation characteristic of the Jewish novel of the 40’s, the novel of intermarriage and anti-Semitism, in which a lone Jew is placed in a world of Gentiles. It is hardly necessary to list the books to which I refer. Their dominant emotion is fear, their context a cold, menacing world without Jews, in which one’s life is determined—more accurately, ruined—by being a Jew. In the warmer, almost hothouse atmosphere of the earlier novels of American Jewish life, there was evident—to ignore their more positive emotions—bitterness, anger, sarcasm—but rarely, as I have said, an undiluted hatred, and not at all, I think, fear.

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Even with rather ordinary gifts, writers using such an approach could utilize the common experience of group life to evoke a strong emotional response; Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, for that reason, is still moving. But Katkov’s fury exists in a vacuum; the Jews are not there—nor are the capitalists, the fascists, the smug middle class, or any other substitute. He is too blinded by his fury and his guilt to justify their absence by seeing the causes or origins of his own condition, and all he can do is multiply meaningless anti-Semitic incidents to justify his fear of the Gentiles, and equally meaningless accounts of the fury of Jewish mothers to justify his incapacity to deal with his problem. Had he any understanding of himself, neither of these two foci of his interest would appear crucial.

I am not denying that there is anti-Semitism, or that such Jewish mothers as Katkov describes exist, but these are only part of the problem he sets himself—intermarriage and Jewish-Gentile relations. These permit glib explanations and rationalizations, but do not form the problem’s most significant context. This is to be found, rather, in the life of the second generation of Jews, who stand in an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to the old Jewish ways and to “American” life, and whose adjustments are complicated by the involvement of anti-Semitism in all their problems. (It is simply not true that anti-Semitism slaps them openly in the face and poisons their existence.) The wild rejection of the past and the passionate embracing of American ways that so well served our novelists in the past—and which we were willing to accept because they were combined with the portrayal of a rich existence—appear totally inadequate.

Katkov’s novel illuminates neither the newer problem nor the older ones. Everything is served up in the standard hash of tough talk, sex, extravagance. His hero, a hysteric fighting shadows, awakens neither sympathy nor understanding.

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