Promised Lands and Vanishing People

PromisedLandsandVanishing People Allan Guttmann, The lewish Writer in America. Oxford University Press, 1971. $7.95. 256 pp. JOSEPH GOLD One of the most extraordinary features of 20th-century American literature is the large proportion it contains of Jewish writing. Allan Guttmann has written what amounts to a concise and knowledgeable history of this segment of American culture. It is from this point of view, the book as readable reference work, that The Jewish Writer in America seems to me an important work. Not that Prof. Guttmann would himself stake his claim for attention on these grounds. The book's subtitle, u Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity/' reveals that the author has sought to construct his study around a thesis, namely, that the dynamic of Jewish writing, as distinct from writing by Jews, derives from one or another aspect of identity problems for Jews in America. There is, of course, nothing profound in such a discovery, which would seem, to an outsider like myself, a truism. Nor is this insight pursued at any deep level of analysis or with any startling complexity. No, what impressed me rather about Mr. Guttmann's survey, is the thoroughness of its compilation and the great breadth of reading it reveals . The more credit is due for great chunks of this reading by virtue of the fact that much of it is in realms of dull and second-rate writing, to say the least. That the reading has been done first-hand is clear from the author's method of summarizing most of the novels he discusses. This incidentally must be reckoned one of the flaws of the book, for the author finds himself in the familiar dilemma of wishing to make critical comment on quantities of little-known fiction, and feeling pretty certain that his readership is unlikely to head for the nearest library (where most of the works under discussion won't be found anyway) he must resort to paraphrase and then commentary. It is for this reason that the book is, by its nature, likely to remain a work for specialists in what will undoubtedly become, or is on the way to becoming, a well-established field or sub-field of American literary study. Ethnic study will soon be, I believe, what regionalism once was to American literature. Certainly the Jewish writer is here revealed in the role once enjoyed by the Southern writer, as part of a group sufficiently troubled or alienated to be able to examine THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. III, NO. 1, SPRING 1972 American values and seeking to find their personal and their group relationship to those values. It is quite clear, as I have said above, that the great number of Jewish writers in America constitutes a phenomenon that inevitably provokes close study. Consider for a moment the kind of list we are speaking about: Herman Wouk, Daniel Fuchs, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Ludwig Lewisohn, Paul Goodman, Leslie Fiedler, Mary Antin, Herbert Gold, Meyer Levin, and Norman Mailer, to mention only some of the most obvious and omitting those like Arthur Miller and J. D. Salinger whom Guttmann regards as in no significant sense (i.e., from his thesis angle) Jewish. It is, of course, true that literature has always been a Jewish strength. Followed by music, also an important part of the tradition, and now by film, also a narrative art, fiction and poetry have been the central Jewish cultural achievement, for after all, at the heart of Judaism, at the inception of its Bible, at the end of its apocalypse and amid the intervening myth and dialectic, is the word. This has been true everywhere, so that what we are observing in America is not unique. What is unusual is the force and timing, the concentration of production within American writing, for since the end of the Hemingway-Faulkner era, Jewish fiction has dominated the American literary scene, with the exception of the essay, which has become the black man's phenomenon. Let me add, while I am on the subject of the distinctive features of American Jewish literature, that Mr. Guttmann makes little or no mention of any relations...