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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 Paris with the bohemian set, but washing her husband’s clothes. From Wouk’s perspective, anything else would be impossible fantasy for a sweet, well-raised Jewish girl like her. Recently, he told an interviewer, “I’ve read an occasional objection to the end as ‘disastrous, wrong, too sad, too religious,’ and what you will. It’s just the truth.” The bulk of the novel takes place in the 1930s and follows Marjorie from the age of 17 to her marriage in her mid-20s; a short final chapter leaps forward 15 years to let us know how it all works out. Beautiful, charming, and well-provided for by her father, a feather importer, Marjorie is the object of adoration of at least half a dozen young men, and the sense is that another several hundred nice Jewish boys, Columbia students and young dentists, would give their right arms for a night alone with her. The romance that takes up most of Marjorie’s time is with a dashing ne’er-do-well named Noel Airman (né Saul Ehrmann), played by Gene Kelly in the movie version of 1958. Though the brilliant son of a distinguished judge, Airman lives up to his name, which is a literal translation of the Yiddish luftmensch—he dabbles in this and that, occasionally scoring a hit with one of the pop songs he writes, but finding it impossible to settle down to steady work even as he enters his 30s. Marjorie’s other suitors include a doctor, a talented radio gag writer one year her junior, and, late in the game, a cynical American Jewish Fiction 68 former Freudian who spends the pre–World War II years smuggling desperate Jews out of Germany. But it is Noel who achieves the unthinkable—persuading Marjorie to give up her virginity out of wedlock; not coincidentally, the momentous event takes place just a few hours after she finally transgresses against her kosher upbringing and eats pork. To Wouk and his characters, Marjorie’s fall from virginity is a terrible, if not fatal, “deformity”; after the man she marries finds out about it, “she never again saw on his face . . . pure happiness.” In other words, Marjorie’s neurotic and bossy mother was right all along. A romantic panorama of the interwar years with stops in Jewish summer resorts, the theater business, and Paris, Wouk’s conservative novel is skillfully, if straightforwardly, wrought, and makes for pleasant reading (though it traffics less in narrative tension, and more in cliché, than Myron Kaufmann’s comparable Remember Me to God). New generations of female readers continue to identify with Marjorie, and presumably there are many who appreciate and identify with the heymish destiny Wouk assigns her. Further reading: Having won a Pulitzer Prize for The Caine Mutiny (1951) and having enjoyed massive sales through a long relationship with the Book-of-theMonth Club, Wouk has had an extraordinary career as a producer of bestsellers; his latest novel, A Hole in Texas (2004), appeared when he was a sprightly 89. A religious man...

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