To the Editor:

As a novelist who some years ago suffered from the lash of Meyer Levin’s “obsession”—his belief that he not only owned Anne Frank but also all proprietary rights to novels relating to Israel—I am scarcely objective in my views. Yet I cannot in simple decency permit Pearl K. Bell’s essay [“Meyer Levin’s ‘Obsessions,’” Fiction, June] to stand without comment.

In the world of the American novelist, where one has to look with persistent ardor to find more than a handful who “reach” for greatness and even fewer who “grasp” it, Mrs. Bell’s put-down of Levin’s ambition suggests that she considers it a little like original sin. Despite Levin’s inflated view of his labors, other important critics believe he has achieved some of his goals.

In In Search Levin has written a meaningful and significant portrait of the American Jewish intellectual. Yet all Mrs. Bell finds in it to quote is a silly boastful line. It seems to me to be a bleak absurdity for a critic to use a novel’s length or an author’s partiality toward one or more of his characters as a standard of judgment. This goes beyond the requirements of critical sensibility.

I do not think that Levin is the great American novelist he dreamed of becoming, yet despite his “obsession,” as hurtful to him as to others, he was and is a serious and consequential writer.

Levin’s art may be faulty, but he was as much a pioneer in his chosen field as James T. Farrell, Henry Roth, and Daniel Fuchs. He deserves a more rounded analysis than Mrs. Bell’s condescension and irrelevance.

Michael Blankfort
Los Angeles, California

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To the Editor:

After a perfunctory nod toward Meyer Levin as historian, Pearl K. Bell proceeds to tear down Meyer Levin as writer. . . . By attempting to discredit The Harvest, Mrs. Bell does a disservice to a generation which knows little—but should know more—of the times of which Levin writes. For it is not enough to discuss Levin’s works only as literature. What we have in The Settlers and The Harvest is a huge mural of . . . the brief period of fifty years in which the Jews of the world underwent, as a people, the greatest and most revolutionary change in all the 1,900 years of their dispersion. There is not one of us who has not been touched by the events, the aspirations, and the mores so poignantly recorded by Levin. One must read both books as the sweep of history in our day, forming and reforming the character of the Jewish people. And, yes, as family history, but not family in the sense Mrs. Bell uses the term. Levin has written the history of the American, the European, and the Israeli families of the house of Israel.

As for the literary quality of The Harvest, Mrs. Bell’s comments lead me to wonder which generation she belongs to. As for myself, I am of Levin’s generation and can testify that the “sentimentality” Mrs. Bell finds objectionable was common in—was indeed the hallmark of—the period in which the book is set. Moreover, the characters who shaped the Zionist movement and founded the state of Israel were, in fact, larger than life, and Levin’s portraits of them are accurate, despite Mrs. Bell’s objections. . . . An artist does not hesitate to use the spirit of the times in which his work is set—no matter how distasteful that spirit may be to the critics of the time in which his book appears.

Isaac Imber
New York City

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To the Editor:

Pearl K. Bell includes Men of Good Will in her list of different European literary works that chronicle the history of various families and which may be understood as a microcosm of society. The author of this work, however, is not Romain Rolland, as she indicates, but Jules Romains. Another such 20th-century literary chronicle that might have been included is La Chronique des Pasquier by Georges Duhamel.

Sidney D. Braun
Department of French
Graduate Center, CUNY
New York City

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To the Editor:

Whether one believes in Meyer Levin’s theory of a “conspiracy” or not, the fact is that his books are hardly ever reviewed and he cannot get on any major TV or radio show in New York. Pearl K. Bell asks the question: “Is Meyer Levin the first-rank writer he believes himself to be?” For the sake of argument, let us assume he is not. There are, nevertheless, dozens of other writers who are not first-rank and yet are lavishly reviewed, interviewed, and promoted. Thus Levin’s problem is not that he is less than first-rank.

Levin’s temptation to consider himself a “first-rank writer” must be well-nigh irresistible, especially after having received the following comments. Albert Einstein wrote about In Search (from which Mrs. Bell quotes): “In this book, the Jewish problem and fate [have] been grasped in all [their] full depth.” Thomas Mann said about the same book that it is “a human document of the highest order.” Norman Mailer said: “Levin is one of the two or three best American writers working in the realistic tradition.” Hemingway called Levin’s Citizens (which Mrs. Bell finds “rambling”), a “fine American novel—one of the best I ever read.” The New York Herald Tribune ranked Levin’s best-selling Compulsion with Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. And the Los Angeles Times called The Settlers “Tolstoyan in scope,” and “the War and Peace of all books ever written about Israel.” For Mrs. Bell all this may be no recommendation, because of what she calls “the eclipse of this genre from literary fashion.” Which would make Levin an unfashionable novelist, an accusation he can live with, especially if one considers what the current fashion is producing.

It cannot be the purpose of a reader’s letter to prove that Levin “is the first-rank writer he believes himself to be.” But he certainly is not the non-person his detractors try to make him. “Paranoiacs have enemies, too,” said Delmore Schwartz. And Levin’s “obsessions” are certainly not only of his own making.

Let us examine the cavalier attitude with which Mrs. Bell deals with the review of The Harvest in the New York Times Book Review: “Webster Schott facetiously suggested that Levin had whipped up a novel about Palestine to capitalize on the altered political situation in the Middle East after Sadat’s flight to Jerusalem. What might have been brushed aside as a feeble joke led Levin to charge . . .” (emphasis added). I wonder what novelist would have the sense of humor to consider Schott’s suggestion about a 700-page novel “facetious” or a “feeble joke.” The Times Book Review is not after all the Harvard Lampoon. Was Levin so mistaken when he claimed that this outrageous nonsense set the tone for a hatchet-job which Schott proceeded to perform?

One wonders what job Mrs. Bell has set out to perform, beginning, as she does, by describing an address Meyer Levin delivered last spring to a “regrettably small audience” at the Harvard-Radcliffe Zionist Alliance. She knows Levin’s work quite well, and seems to have dedicated to this author much more time than one would expect a critic to lavish on a minor writer. Thus she remembers from the thirty-year-old In Search Levin’s claim that The Old Bunch can be safely considered “the outstanding Jewish novel of its generation.” Mrs. Bell comments: “Not so safely, since that generation included Henry Roth’s extraordinary revenant, Call It Sleep, and Daniel Fuchs’s affectionate, ironic comedies of Brooklyn.” And to prove the latter point she quotes a paragraph from one of Fuchs’s stories. This tour de force falls flat because, read out of context, these lines do not sound as formidable as Mrs. Bell believes them to be.

But even if Mrs. Bell is right, what does she prove? That The Old Bunch was not the outstanding novel of its generation, but third after Roth’s and Fuchs’s? She does not deny The Old Bunch‘s merits; she calls it a “raucous, disorderly, winning account . . .” that “pulses with a frisky youthful confidence that anything can happen and anything goes.” Her criticism is that “the book’s charm is diminished by its inordinate length.” But not everyone considered this a drawback; as she herself admits, Levin’s book sold, whereas the work of Roth and Fuchs “appeared to sink without a trace.” We all know that Call It Sleep was a “revenant,” and to judge from Mrs. Bell’s words, Fuchs’s unnamed “comedies” were revenants also. But the belated success of both works does not contradict Levin’s claim. The Old Bunch was considered outstanding in its generation; the others, later.

Mrs. Bell also discusses . . . Levin’s bête noire, the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. It is easy for an outsider to pontificate that this play “sucked him into a paranoid swamp of protests, petitions, lawsuits, and derision.” Mrs. Bell does not mention that, paranoid or not, Levin won that lawsuit. The jury accepted his claim that the Hacketts had plagiarized his version. Levin did not face the “crass imperatives” of show business, but the crass clout of Broadway’s cash register and the battery of lawyers that Otto Frank, Kermit Bloomgarden, et al. were able to afford and who managed to set the jury sentence aside—on a technicality: there had been “insufficient expert testimony” to help the jury decide exactly how much Levin was owed.

In this connection, Mrs. Bell should ponder whether Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett (the “Hacketts”) are first-rank writers. They knew their craft in converting the book into a play, but they lacked Levin’s Jewish sensitivity and ideology.

The Levin version could not be performed due to an interdiction by Otto Frank. It was seen, bootlegged, for six weeks in Israel, until it was stopped there, too. Here is how it was reviewed by Israelis not notoriously generous critics: “In contrast to the much less dramatic version which was approved by Mr. Frank . . . Mr. Levin’s version is populated with living human beings instead of facsimilies” (Maariv). “On the whole a more honest dramatization than the slickly professional one we have seen before” (Jerusalem Post). “Infinitely superior to the Hackett version which put aiming for a hit above faithfulness to the source” (Hatzofeh). Elie Wiesel had this to say about Levin’s play: “It is what it should be: an outcry. Many years ago I saw a Broadway production on the same subject—good entertainment.”

Mrs. Bell is right on one point: all Levin’s “epic longings and his passionate dedication to Israel” do not make him an Israeli writer. Neither did The Sun Also Rises make Hemingway a Spanish writer. Israelis such as Yoram Kaniuk and A. B. Yehoshua may be more authentic, but I doubt whether all Israeli novelists put together have sold in English as many copies as Levin’s The Settlers did in hardcover and paperback. This does not make The Settlers superior to those Israeli novels. But it indicates that there is also room for the novelist who knows less about the Israeli psyche, but more about the American reader. . . . Whether Levin is a first-rank writer or not, he honestly believes himself to be one, and has been encouraged to do so by some of the first-rank minds of our time.

Benno Weiser Varon
Brookline, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

In culturally backward Israel, it has taken several months for the May issue to reach me, but may I still declare my profound appreciation and my total agreement with the criticism therein of my writings. I now see that such malicious reactionaries as Norman Mailer, Thomas Mann, and other Jewish capitalists, Communists, and Zionists who praised The Old Bunch, In Search, and The Settlers, as well as other of my books that will now deservedly sink into oblivion, were part of a vicious world Zionist conspiracy to subvert literary taste and thereby keep humanity enslaved. I realize that for a writer to permit emotion to enter his work, rather than to censor it by the intellect, is criminal. Sentiment is the tool of colonialism! It is an unmitigated evil, the historic weapon of exploiters, old-fashioned novelists, and slave masters from Moses to Count Tolstoy.

Too late, I see that it is good to emulate James Joyce and bad to be influenced by John Dos Passos. Worse—influenced by conspiratorial reactionary movements, such as Socialist Zionism, I wrote of Jews who were activated by idealism rather than by Jewish greed. For many deluded readers the harm is done, but let me urge them to seek reeducation. To prevent further evil, I declare that all I have written should perish, let my name be erased from eternity, as Irving Howe and other properly educated persons have already begun to do! Those whose libraries are contaminated with books by Meyer Levin should burn them.

As for myself, I shall of course cease writing, so as to avoid, even now that I see the light, the production by racial habit of more Jewish propaganda. I can only regret that I was not shown my faults years ago, so that the pollution of literature by my writings could have been avoided.

COMMENTARY’s perfectly educated reviewer made not one error in giving examples of approved authors, such as Daniel Fuchs and Henry Roth. Ah, if I too had only stopped writing before I could err! It is all the more incriminating, in view of my faults today, that forty years ago I knew the Truth, and could write an introduction to the reviving edition of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. Indeed, in early years, I could even write for COMMENTARY. Thankfully, the watchfulness of the subsequent COMMENTARY editor, and the ascendance to power of pure intellect, has now exposed the evil, subversive sentimentality of my cunning writings.

I ask only that others, particularly members of my family (incurable Jewish sentiment), should not be blamed for my errors. I acted alone.

Meyer Levin
Herzlia on Sea, Israel

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Pearl K. Bell writes:

Both Michael Blankfort and Isaac Imber feel that I have grossly underrated Meyer Levin’s achievements as a novelist, to which I must reply that I think they are wrong, for reasons I discussed at length in my article. Since we are dealing with novels, not with politics or didactic history, I sought to show that Levin’s rendering of the Israeli experience in his two-volume saga was sentimental and shallow. Mr. Imber’s invocation of the “sweep of history” and the “larger-than-life” quality of the early Zionist leaders does not prove the contrary. Indeed, Mr. Imber, far from denying that Levin’s Israeli novels are sentimental, tries to justify this with his odd claim that “the period in which the book is set” was sentimental and therefore Levin was simply being true to “the spirit of the times” in writing about the Chaimovitch family as he did. Above all, Mr. Imber believes that it is not “enough” to discuss Levin’s books as literature. Yet it is clear that Mr. Imber and I define sentimentality in irreconcilable ways. What may seem “sentimental” in the exaggerated rhetoric and celebratory, idealistic fervor of particular people in a historical period is in no way the same as a novelist’s portrayal of these people. A novelist is being sentimental when, as I believe Meyer Levin does in The Settlers and The Harvest, lie simplifies and neatens human behavior and motives to suit a simplistic view of history, and settles for categorical assertions about the depth and intensity of his characters’ feelings when those feelings, and the experiences out of which they arise, have not been dramatically realized in their complexity. If one reads the memoirs of the Israeli pioneers, such as Golda Meir, one sees how they reacted exactly against the trite sentimentality about shtetl life, and stressed the need to be realistic and tough-minded about their world.

In claiming that I have denigrated Levin’s ambition, Mr. Blankfort is guilty of careless reading. It was not Levin’s inflated view of his intentions for the Israeli saga that concerned me primarily, but the work itself; not what Levin tells us over and again about his purposes and plans, but the novels he actually wrote. (The sin, if Mr. Blankfort insists on the word, proves to be not very original.) More generally, in his sweeping defense of Levin’s literary status, Mr. Blankfort fails to note the differences of comment and judgment I made about the various books Levin has written in the course of a long career. I did not say or imply that the significance of Levin’s autobiographical In Search boiled down to his one “silly boastful line” that The Old Bunch was the best novel of his American Jewish generation. That one boastful line is neither incidental nor irrelevant, but the overblown climax of many paragraphs in the same vein; it represents with perfect fairness the tone and substance of Levin’s kvetchy self-importance. I made it plain why I think The Old Bunch the best of Levin’s novels, yet Mr. Blankfort seems to have come away with the impression that I was being merely condescending to all his fiction. One may honor a pioneer, but it is what he finally achieves that is the measure of a writer’s accomplishment.

I thank Sidney D. Braun for correcting my error. In my free association I had gone from Jules Romains to Romain Rolland, and now make my apologies to the noblest Romains of them all.

Benno Weiser Varon’s letter is dispiriting. Instead of addressing himself to the substance of my discussion, he quotes other reviews; raises issues, such as book sales, which have no bearing upon my judgments; and attributes opinions to me that are nowhere to be found in my essay. It is a jumble of misreading and irrelevancy. I did not say that Levin’s Israeli saga is inadequate as literature because it harks back to a genre now out of fashion; I do not consider modishness a criterion of literary (or any other) worth. I did not rank Levin, Roth, and Fuchs in a critical “Consumers Union Report” on American Jewish novelists of the 30’s, but Levin’s appropriation of the gold-star “outstanding” struck me as demonstrably self-serving and careless. Unlike Mr. Varon, I do not put great stock in the encomiums that the mighty bestow on lesser mortals. After years of reading uninspired superlatives by the great and near-great on the jackets of countless undeserving novels, I have come to suspect that these one-liners are tossed off by the Manns and Mailers more in the spirit of noblesse oblige than of genuine enthusiasm.

As for Levin’s “obsession” about the Anne Frank play—the word is his, not mine—I do not know where Mr. Varon got the odd notion that I think the Hacketts are “first-rank writers,” or the odder one that I doubt Levin’s claim he was ill-used, in part for political reasons, by those responsible for banishing his play from the boards. But as Levin himself admits in The Obsession, his rage about the injustice has poisoned his response to everyone who does not unequivocally assent to his own evaluation of his work. In fact, his view of himself as the victim of a conspiracy of silence is by now so absolute that he will not even acknowledge any evidence to the contrary. It is interesting that Levin in his talk at Harvard (and Mr. Varon in his letter) failed to mention the unusually long and very respectful interview with Levin, by Frederic Morton, which the Times Book Review published along with Webster Schott’s unfavorable review of The Harvest.