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Appendixes A. Jewish Characters in Modern American Fiction As Louis Harap’s The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (1974) makes clear, Jews have been appearing in American literature for centuries. There are few American masters who haven’t mentioned a Jew here or there. Yet in the most widely read novels by the most celebrated American authors of the first decades of the 20th century, Jewish characters feature even more prominently. Ugly, unpleasant, or pathetic, they play pivotal roles and are always powerful. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), for example, turns on the speculations, both economic and romantic, of one Simon Rosedale, a “plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type.” Jay Gatsby, the alluring center of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s universally read The Great Gatsby (1925), wouldn’t be quite so great, or so rich, if it weren’t for his association with unscrupulous Meyer Wolfsheim, a “small, flat-nosed Jew.” Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925) features an entrepreneurial social climber named Louis Marsellus who exploits the legacy of a beloved young hero in a small university town. On the first page of his breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), meanwhile, Ernest Hemingway describes Robert Cohn as having taken up the sport of boxing “to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton”; though hapless, Cohn nonetheless manages to consummate his desire for the book’s female lead while Hemingway’s macho protagonist— injured in the war and consequently impotent—cannot. A few years later, buried amid the linguistic chaos of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), one discovers tirades against “dam eastern jews,” while a “Jew lawyer from Memphis” makes a crucial appearance late in the great southern author’s scandalous Sanctuary (1931). This list represents only the tip of a disturbing iceberg. Other memorably unpleasant Jews appear in renowned works of American modernism by Djuna Barnes and Thomas Wolfe, as well as the more famously anti-Semitic prize-winning poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Of course, the tradition of depicting the Jew as a villain stretches back much further in English literature: Chaucer’s Jews murder an innocent Christian child, after all; Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock lust after wealth and revenge; and Dickens’s “villainous and repulsive” Fagin lures little boys into lives of crime. It is no wonder, then, that Henry Roth—the author of perhaps the single greatest entry in the American Jewish literary tradition, Call It Sleep (1934)—has the highly autobiographical protagonist of his late novel Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994) recall that when he was a voracious reader, as a child, in the Harlem of the 1910s, “all he asked of a book was not to remind him too much that he was a Jew; the more he was taken with a book, the more he prayed that Jews would be overlooked.” Similarly, decades later, the Canadian Jewish author Adele 171 Appendix A American Jewish Fiction Wiseman realized in her voracious childhood reading that “even in the middle of really good stories they lied about Jews and what we did and why we did it and how we lived and what we were like.” It would be a mistake to write off any of these writers as simple anti-Semites; they may have resented or even hated Jews, in some cases, but they weren’t simpletons and their responses to and representations of Jews contain complications and surprises worthy of investigation. Many of these writers, it should be pointed out, depended on Jewish editors, agents, publishers, and critics for their livelihoods; Hemingway and Faulkner, for example, may never have seen print in the first place if a young Jewish publisher named Horace Liveright hadn’t paid for In Our Time (1925) and Soldier’s Pay (1926), their first books, respectively. For these writers—as for Shakespeare and Dickens as well as—for Henry James and Matthew Arnold—Jews served as windows onto the complex and vast landscapes of modern love, commerce, and community. To understand modern culture and America, these writers suggest, one needs to understand, or at least to consider, the Jews. Similar motivations underlie the many English literary classics, American and European, in which Jews serve as exemplary figures of courage or humanity, in the vein of George Eliot’s remarkable proto-Zionist Daniel Deronda...

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