To the Editor:
To a reader who always held COMMENTARY in highest esteem it came as a shock and disappointment to find in your December issue the story “Children of Two Houses” by Elaine Gottlieb. Not the fact that you published it—but that you published it without a COMMENTARY seems to me deplorable and not in line with your program “to enlighten and clarify public opinion on problems of Jewish concern.” For this confusing and misleading story can only add to the widespread confusion and ignorance in matters of Jewish concern, both in our own fold and among our Christian neighbors.
Elaine Gottlieb writes about her childhood experience: “We almost wept. It was hard not to weep. We wanted to ask a question, but we knew no one would answer it. Bitterly, we went upstairs.”
“It was hard not to weep” for me also after reading this story. For does it not reveal how sadly and bitterly “both houses” have failed in their sacred obligation to respond to the innermost needs of their children, to offer explanation and loving guidance in religious matters to searching young hearts and minds? Is that all that Jewish parents and grandparents, be they Reform or Orthodox, have to give to their children of their rightful inheritance? Their inheritance of the good way of life, of the beauty, the love of God and fellow man, the kindliness and mercy, the tactfulness and charitableness, the tolerance, the joy and fervor of religious observances that mean Judaism? As they then “bitterly. . . went upstairs” will not these children, once they are adults, also go bitterly out into the world? Will they be able to understand themselves, or for that matter, will they be able to understand their Christian neighbors, for a large part of whom—in spite of all its commercialization and nationalization—Christmas still holds a deep and sacred religious meaning?
Has not COMMENTARY this time failed in its “aims to meet the need for a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jewish affairs and contemporary issues” by withholding its opinion and by avoiding the issue expressed in this controversial and misleading story?
Louise Gruen
New York City
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To the Editor:
The story “Children of Two Houses,” which appeared in your December issue, is an affront to the sensibilities of even your most liberal readers. (And I am disregarding completely the “moral” of the story, which, in its thesis that Christmas is a national and not a Christian holiday, is at least questionable.) It is not a short story. For whether or not the author intended it so, it is nothing more than a piece of propaganda-by-innuendo against a large segment of American Jewry, Orthodoxy. Had it appeared as an article attempting to expound a legitimate point of view, well and good. An open attack can be defended. But to use the artistic medium of the short story to ridicule matters which to many of your readers are sacred is an insult to the art of writing, no matter how technically skilled that writing may be. Since the end result is propaganda, I feel that its publication . . . is regrettable.
The piece makes of Orthodoxy a gray, dismal way of life. . . . Undoubtedly Miss Gottlieb is a gifted writer. But she has missed entirely that enviable trait of objectivity in her art. Surely a sensitivity such as hers could not have overlooked the happiness of traditional living, the liberty of restriction under God and Torah. . . .
(Rabbi) Emanuel Feldman
Congregation Beth Jacob
Atlanta, Georgia
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To the Editor:
First the brickbat: Is it necessary to insult us of the Orthodox faith to make a case for Reform Judaism? That is what Elaine Gottlieb does in her story “Children of Two Houses.” She exalts the Christmas spirit but does not mention the Chanukah festival. Both probably derive from a heathen celebration of the winter solstice. But one uses a biological anomaly as an excuse for gift-giving, whereas we Orthodox base our holiday on a historical incident. And I have yet to meet Orthodox people who look on children with “derision and disdain.”
And now the posy. In my thirty-six years of studying and teaching economics I have not come across a clearer or more accurate exposition of economic theory than Daniel Bell’s “The Prospects of American Capitalism.” It should be made compulsory reading for the teachers of the subject in New York City.
William D. Max
Brooklyn, New York
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