To the Editor:
Since I must be the corpus vile, it is hard for me to make the observations on Irving Howe’s “The Stranger and the Victim” (August COMMENTARY) that ought, after all, to be made. His approach is revealed at once in his complaint that the Jew in American fiction is rarely an individual. A Jew is always, of course, a Jewish individual; there is no kindless individual; there is no abstract human being. What Mr. Howe, whether he knows it or not, is in search of is a Jew who is no Jew. No wonder that he has words of sincere praise only for a “Jewish character” delineated by Ernest Hemingway.
I never expected, after the beginning of his adventures in pseudo-Christianity, to defend Sholem Asch. But when Mr. Howe remarks that Asch and I “are so obsessed with their conception of Jewishness that they cannot create a Jew,” I am forced to do so. The trouble with the quite young Jewish intellectual in America seems to be his virginity in respect of Jewish knowledge, tradition, faith, historic feeling, and, above all, that ahavath Yisrael which leads to understanding and Jewish creativity. And even in his ugly pseudo-apostasy Asch has vestiges of all those qualities that would suffice to set up in “Jewishness” a wilderness of the younger intellectuals who place Hemingway above him as a delineator of Jewish character.
It is Mr. Howe’s privilege to dislike my The Island Within. It came out in 1928 and I have long been dissatisfied with it because it does not go nearly far enough. But I dare say Mr. Howe has no notion of the fact that in a dozen languages that book helped to sustain and comfort Jews. It was in the luggage of refugees; it was in the DP camps. It helped a whole generation to bear affirmatively its Jewish destiny. A new printing of the Italian version (Il Popolo senza Terra) has just come off the press. In view of the date of its publication and in view of what happened in the next decade, it is quite funny to have Mr. Howe say that I confused my “will with destiny.” The reproach to be brought against the book is that its view of destiny was not far sterner and more uncompromising. Mr. Howe quite writes as though what “de-nazified” Germans would like us to regard as “a late unpleasantness” had never happened.
But, above all and if only to keep the record straight, it is absurd to write about Jewish fiction and its characters in America without a knowledge of my later and maturer books, specifically, since The Last Days of Shylock and Renegade are historical novels. This People, Trumpet of Jubilee, and Breathe Upon These. I invite Mr. Howe to study the delineation of the Jewish group in Ozark City in Trumpet of jubilee. But Mr. Howe’s whole emotional approach is clear, so abundantly clear! “When we come to Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, we are dealing with writers of far greater abilities than any yet discussed.” Perhaps. At least Hemingway—perhaps. And perhaps not when in a generation or two vogue and value will have split. But we know the source of this bland and immediate assumption that everything that is not ours is better and that all of ours must be valued inversely to its authenticity.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts
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