To the Editor:
David Daiches, reviewing Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary American-Jewish Literature [August], which I co-edited with Irving Malin, finds so much that is praiseworthy that it may seem ungracious to quarrel with his reservations. But because they go to the heart of our thesis, that something new and significant has occurred in American-Jewish writing. . . . I must . . . say a few words in self-defense.
Conceding that in the field of criticism “the achievement is evident and formidable,” Mr. Daiches doubts that the same holds true for fiction and poetry. He is certainly correct in stressing the greater éclat which attaches to contemporary criticism. . . . It would be strange if in an “age of criticism” American-Jewish criticism should have proved an exception to the general rule. But . . . are we therefore to assume that American-Jewish fiction and poetry fail to share in what the editors have chosen to regard as a breakthrough?
Mr. Daiches bases his strictures largely on the evidence he discovers in the anthology, but he should know that to suggest the totality of a writer’s work through representative samplings is difficult, if not impossible, especially when his most important achievements—the long story, the novelette, the novel—cannot be included. . . . The question is not whether the specific selections are themselves evidence of a breakthrough, but whether they point to a larger body of achievement. . . .
To put the question negatively, does the work of Bellow, Malamud, Mailer, Roth, Herbert Gold, Ivan Gold, Grace Paley, Paul Goodman, and Wallace Markfield give no warrant for the assertion that something new and significant has occurred within the mainstream of American fiction and within the traditional currents of American-Jewish fiction? We pose the same question in behalf of those—Wallant, Adler, Friedman, Marcus, Swados, Stern, Harris, and others—for whom there was no room within . . . our anthology. The enormous impact of most of these writers on the serious reading public in America provides, we believe, an absolutely unequivocal answer. . . . The question of identity has been asked and answered, to quote Daiches, “in such a way as to illuminate both the Jewish and the general human situation. . . .” This is why American Jewish writers have been and deserve to be taken seriously. . . . How much of a breakthrough has been effected both in fiction and poetry becomes abundantly clear when we contrast the contemporary achievement with the achievement of the previous half-century here in America.
But, Daiches asks rhetorically, does all this “add up to a movement, a real comprehensive breakthrough into new art forms, higher literary achievement?”—implying that it does not. But the answer depends on what he means. If a considerable number of American-Jewish writers have been liberated to deal creatively with the human condition, as Daiches agrees they have, this does in our judgment constitute a movement. If several at least have produced works which, as distinct from the parochial works of the past, have entered the broader streams of American and world literature, this is, again in our judgment, a “higher” literary achievement. . . .
Irwin Stark
Bronxville, New York