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44pBlessed Is the Land By Louis Zara CROWN, 1954. 394 PAGES. Long before the first American Jewish writer—more than a century, in fact, before anyone had ever dreamed of a United States of America—the first Jews set foot on the island known today as Manhattan. Not much is known about the party of 23 Jews who arrived from Recife, Brazil, but enough details survived to furnish Louis Zara, a historical novelist and publishing executive, with the beginnings of a swashbuckling tale of pioneering adventure. Zara’s chronicle features Ashur Levy, a historical personality verifiable in New Amsterdam’s legal records, whose unknown interior life and personal history Zara imagines with admirable gusto. Zara’s Levy is something of a writer himself, if only in his own journal, which makes up most of the novel. The tale begins with the Jews’ departure from Brazil, follows them through persecution by seafaring Spaniards, and continues on to their not-so-triumphant arrival in New Amsterdam, where the director, Peter Stuyvesant, barely tolerates their existence. It’s impressive that Levy finds time to write anything at all, actually, what with his stints as a soldier, fur trader, tavern owner, lawyer, and cattle farmer. Though a “man of action” rather than a scholar, Levy is no blockhead; he speaks Dutch, German, Portuguese, French, Castilian, Yiddish, Ladino, and eventually English, too. Following the wisdom of the community elder (“Let old men go to old worlds and young men to new!”), Levy embraces the undiscovered continent, while Dutch officials, fearing that the Jews will “multiply, and overrun Manhattan,” slap fines on the new arrivals whenever possible. Living what some would consider a prototypical American Jewish tension, Levy claims he would love to establish a dedicated Jewish colony so that his people could finally live in peace, but, in the meantime, he amasses a significant fortune and earns the regard of his non-Jewish neighbors. Zara published his historical novel in honor of the tercentenary of the Jews’ arrival, and not long after the Nazi Holocaust had decimated the Jews of Europe as European colonization had decimated aboriginal Americans a few centuries before. It is not surprising, then, that Zara’s Jewish characters reach out to the natives, and vice versa: Levy adopts the son of his back-country guide and raises him more or less as a Jew, while one of his countrymen, a messianic kabbalist, relocates to a tribal village and marries a squaw. Along with a Swedish Marrano and a Jewish child raised as a Christian, these ethnically and culturally hybrid characters suggest that, at least in Zara’s view, being Jewish in America is always a complicated enterprise. Hardly a literary masterpiece, Zara’s well-researched, charming, and accessible novel nonetheless offers its readers a rousing, atmospheric tour through an obscure but crucial moment of history, the beginnings of Jewish life in the United States. Further reading: Zara, whose last name was Rosenfeld (though you wouldn’t know it from his New York Times obituary), began his literary career with Blessed 67 Titles Is the Man (1935), a novel of Jewish immigration that made the Chicago bestseller lists for months. In a lengthy career, he published many historical novels—many set in early America, some featuring famous figures—and worked as a publishing executive. For those interested in the beginnings of American Jewry and its literature, the scholar Michael Kramer has argued that we should acknowledge as the first American Jewish writer one Judah Monis (1683–1764), who taught Hebrew at Harvard and published A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue (1735) after converting to Christianity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45pMarjorie Morningstar By Herman Wouk DOUBLEDAY, 1955. 472 PAGES. Along and detailed novel of American life, Herman Wouk’s best-selling Marjorie Morningstar can be summed up in three words: Mother knows best. Or, more precisely, everybody knows best. Wouk’s young protagonist, Marjorie Morgenstern, receives sage advice from her parents, her friends, and, in several cases, people she has barely met. They tell her that her infatuation with this boy or that man will pass; that she is fooling herself with her dreams of becoming an actress (with Morningstar as her stage name); that what she really wants and needs, as much as she denies it, is a comfortable suburban life with separate meat and dairy dishes. What is amazing is that all of these concerned parties turn out to be right, time and again. Marjorie’s fate is not to spend her life gallivanting around...

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