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s n l jp Epilogue Anti-Semitism was a pervasive element in the thinking of many of the new writers who emerged during the 1890s. Although the prejudice never reached the virulence found in a Dostoevsky or Celine, it was nevertheless a distinct presence. For Hamlin Garland, anti-Semitism was largely a closet belief, expressed principally in his diaries and later autobiographies. For the other writers I have discussed, however, it found its way into their fiction, often in relation to significant strands of plot and theme. Although all the writers I include in this study had Jewish friends and acquaintances, a few— notably Theodore Dreiser and Willa Cather—derived at least some of their bias from difficult personal and business relationships with specific Jews. Despite this understandable diversity in their personal experience of Jews and in the forms used to express their belief, the anti-Semitism of these writers share a number of common elements. All were responding in varying degrees both to significant social events of their time and to currents of belief that had arisen in response to these events. Chief among these were the western farm depression and consequent Populist revolt of the 1880s and 1890s and the onset of the great immigration to America of eastern European Jews in the 1880s, both of which encouraged the acceptance of economic and racial theorizing prejudicial toward Jews. Norris’s figures of Zerkow in McTeague and S. Behrman in The Octopus, for example, offer clear instances of the ancient Shylock image infused with elements drawn from events and ideas of Norris’s own time and place. Other writers are more indirect, but all reflect in varying degrees beliefs derived from a contemporary ethos that denigrated the Jewish presence in America. i-xviii_1-90_Pize.indd 65 4/10/08 11:37:57 AM s n l jp 66 . american naturalism and the jews The anti-Semitism in the writers I have been discussing is of course a phase in the long and often bitter history of American nativist belief. Almost from the founding of the country to the present, Americans who were themselves descendants of immigrants have attacked as undesirable each fresh wave of newcomers. The writers who came to maturity in the 1890s, however, express as well in their anti-Semitism two additional blind spots in self-perception. These writers considered themselves in one form or another as “advanced” in their thinking. Whether it was a participation in left-wing politics (Dreiser), a desire to improve western farm conditions (Garland), attacks on monopolistic business practices (Norris), or sympathetic portrayals of women seeking to break down barriers against individual fulfillment (Wharton and Cather), they tended to view themselves as seeking to express in their writing a greater need in America for social justice and personal freedom . Yet they failed to perceive a relationship between this frame of mind and the average Jew seeking the same justice and freedom in the face of immense hurdles and handicaps. An almost surreal instance of this blindness can be found in the thinking of Jack London, who viewed Socialism as a paradise of social equality to come but who refused to consider Jews, because they were of “degenerate” stock, as potential participants in this Eden.1 A second failure of self-perception is closely related to the first. Deeply influenced by Darwinian belief, writers of this generation frequently portrayed characters whose lives and beliefs are shaped and often controlled by the social reality and ideas of their time and place. For example, Dreiser’s and Wharton’s nuanced portrayals of this kind of environmental determinism in An American Tragedy and The Age of Innocence, portraits that involve the imprisoning impact of contemporary custom and belief on a character’s thinking, are among the glories of their fiction. And yet all of these writers failed to recognize that their own ideas about Jews were deeply “environmental ” in their source—that these beliefs were as much a condition of their moment as those ideas about America’s supposed social equality and the inferiority of women that they were attacking in their novels. i-xviii_1-90_Pize.indd 66 4/10/08 11:37:57 AM ...

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