Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel by Leah Garrett (review)

In Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel, Leah Garrett analyzes evolving post-war American representations of the Jewish soldier and shifting attitudes toward Jewishness in a range of best-selling Jewish war novels published between 1948 and 1961. In lucid and engaging prose, grounded in insightful close readings, archival research, and instructive historical context, Garrett analyzes how the protagonists of these novels navigate the impulse to maintain their individual Jewish identities while being pressured to assimilate to a more "universal" American ideal. She also illuminates the varied ways in which the authors of these texts address anti-Semitism and inform readers about the Holocaust. She observes that the authors emphasize the value of American pluralism, often using the platoon as "a symbol of an idealized American melting pot where those from a variety of different ethnicities came to live and fight together" (4). In this way, Garrett says, the novels situated themselves within a tradition of Jewish literature that "had always had a strong moralistic intention," although they also "carried this tradition into mainstream America in an attempt to shape the ethical stance of the reading public" (7).

Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) is a focal point of Garrett's study, and she consistently returns to it as a point of comparison. Mailer's novel works well in this capacity, as most of the themes Garrett traces throughout her book converge in Mailer's text. For example, Mailer closely interrogates the fraught masculinity of his soldiers (particularly his marginalized Jewish soldiers), criticizes anti-Semitism within the military, and carefully crafts a diverse array of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds for his characters. As a result, his book effectively fosters "a deeper understanding of what it means to be part of the broader multiethnic American community" (63), thereby accentuating the valuation of pluralism Garrett finds within each of the texts she studies.

While Garrett's references to Mailer's novel often helpfully tie together the many texts she considers, they are occasionally sites of puzzling contradictions. For example, when comparing The Naked and the Dead to Ira Wolford's An Act of Love (1948), Garrett argues that both novels present an idealistic scenario "where Jews could be treated as equals with others, but only as long as they were willing to discard their own specificity" (76). This is not quite accurate in Mailer's case; in fact, earlier in the book, Garrett acknowledges that Goldstein, a Jewish soldier and a central figure in The Naked and the Dead, is "the sole character of all the novels that will approach his postwar life comfortable being both a Jew and an American" (131). Additionally, although Garrett commends Mailer's ability to demonstrate the "psychological reality of war" (53) through an "extraordinarily varied template" of characters who struggle with their insecurities, she later seems to undercut her own analysis, wondering whether Mailer's text would have been more authentic had he instead "written a brutally frank account of the terrors men feel about warfare" (204).

These few confusions aside, Garrett demonstrates an impressive ability to navigate the many representations of Jewish American identity across a series of different texts. After closely analyzing Mailer's critically lauded best seller, for instance, Garrett turns her attention to a collection of popular novels published in 1948 that left critics more divided: Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, Merle Miller's That Winter, Stefan Heym's The Crusaders, and Martha Gellhorn's Point of No Return. Garrett rescues these novels from the negative connotations of their categorization as "middlebrow" fiction, persuasively vouching for their significant reflection of political and personal turmoil faced by Jewish Americans after World War II. Notably, Garrett also emphasizes the central role of the Holocaust in these novels, thus expanding on research done by Hasia Diner, who "exploded the myth that Jewish Americans were largely silent about...