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American Jewish Fiction 19pSingermann By Myron Brinig FARRAR AND RINEHART, 1929. 446 PAGES Myron Brinig’s first novel, Singermann, can be thought of as a little-known Jewish counterpart to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Anderson’s book earned its secure position in the American canon by informing the literary vanguard of the post–World War I years that the nation’s small towns were just as full of unexpressed longings, dark secrets, and flaring passions as the big cities. Singermann does the same for American Jewish life, for it takes place not on the teeming Lower East Side or in the well-to-do neighborhoods of suburban Boston or Baltimore, but in a frontier town, Silver Bow, modeled on Brinig’s childhood home of Butte, Montana. As in Anderson’s collection of linked short stories, each of Singermann’s chapters describes the frustrations and desires of a different conflicted individual; in Brinig’s book, though, all of these characters belong to the same titular family. The patriarch, Moses, arrives in the United States from Romania at the relatively advanced age of 30, and through his energy and hard-headedness manages to become one of his small town’s most respected merchants. He’s a lusty and vital fellow—in the Old Country he was a tavern keeper, and he still loves his homemade wine—and despite a sometimes adversarial relationship with his strong-willed wife, Rebecca, he fathers seven children, six of them boys. In the chapters devoted to them, each of the Singermann kids stirs up drama. The youngest, Michael, is the one most modeled after the author, and the book begins with his bris and ends with his departure for college in Chicago; Joseph, the oldest, marries a shrewd Jewish girl with an interest in Christian Science who isolates him from his family; David, a handsome go-getter, falls in love with a prostitute who treats him like dirt; while Rachel, the only daughter, falls for a romantic Russian who, it turns out, has not one, but two previous wives. Perhaps the most interesting chapter focuses on Sol, Harry, and a violent riot by the town’s striking miners. Sol, the strongest and most doltish of the Singermanns, decides—like many Jews of the early 20th century—that his destiny will be found in the boxing ring, while Harry, an intelligent and effeminate young man, is receptive to the seductions of a high-school teacher; his dawning consciousness of his homosexuality, described sympathetically if somewhat vaguely, is a remarkable first in American Jewish literature. Brinig’s lyricism occasionally rings false, and his plots border on melodrama, but the book paints a vivid portrait of Jewish life in the American West. Spiced with untranslated Yiddish phrases and details of life in a mining town, Singermann is irreplaceable as a reminder that Jews have lived just about everywhere in the United States and compelling as a family saga and social history of Montana. Further reading: Brinig’s debut was successful enough to merit a sequel in 1932, This Man Is My Brother (also known as Sons of Singermann), and the author 36 published more than a dozen other books, some of which, like Anthony in the Nude (1930) and Footsteps on the Stair (1950), also feature sympathetic gay characters. Earl Ganz’s The Taos Truth Game (2007) fictionalizes Brinig’s adult life in Taos, New Mexico, based in part on Brinig’s unpublished (and reportedly not-so-interesting) memoirs; it might be easier to find Ganz’s novel than Brinig’s books themselves, which—until they are reprinted—must be sought out at wellstocked libraries. Later Jewish novels that deal with homosexuality include Sanford Friedman’s Totempole (1965), Gene Horowitz’s Privates (1986), and David Sadownick’s Sacred Lips of the Bronx (1994); see also the work of Lev Raphael (including 1990’s Dancing on Tisha B’Av) and David Leavitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20pBottom Dogs By Edward Dahlberg PUTNAM, 1929. 269 PAGES. In selecting the subject matter of his first novel, Edward Dahlberg scraped the very bottom of the economic barrel, long before it was fashionable to do so— before novels of junkies and drifters, lunatics, and street children had become common literary fare. The panoramic view of American low life in orphanages and petty jobs and business scams that came to be called the proletarian novel as well as the modern American road novel (the most famous example of which is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road¸ published in...

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