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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 and committed Zionist, Wouk explores his commitment to Judaism in This Is My God (1959). Though not quite an autobiography, Wouk’s novel of 1985, Inside/Outside, concerns a character similar, in some regards, to the author; for critical and biographical treatment of Wouk, see volumes by Arnold Beichman (1984) and Laurence Mazzeno (1994). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46pCompulsion By Meyer Levin SIMON AND SCHUSTER, 1956. 480 PAGES. There’s no dearth of murder in American literature; Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy (1925) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) follow a simple pattern, recounting at great length a vicious crime, the police’s efforts to catch the criminal, and finally the trial, culminating with an impassioned oration by a defense attorney that condemns our corrupt society for fostering disobedience and then putting the guilty to death. (It is a model that one imagines having been around forever; in the 1990s it was put to emphatic and seemingly endless use on television in Law & Order and its various spinoffs.) Meyer Levin’s Compulsion is an outstanding example of the genre—a major bestseller, adapted into drama and film, and in many ways more accomplished than either of the books named earlier, though it has received less attention from literary scholars. Like Dreiser’s murder epic, Levin’s is based on a real-life sensation, that of Leopold and Loeb, which was called the “Crime of the Century.” Levin’s version changes the names—his murderers are called Steiner and Straus—but hews 69 Titles American Jewish Fiction faithfully to the particulars of the original case. The pair were prodigies, child geniuses raised in the wealthiest of Jewish families in Chicago; they graduated college while still in their teens, and, for reasons that baffled their families and the world, picked a young boy at random to murder. Levin explores the motivations and the methods of the crime, delving deep into his characters’ psychologies: the homosexual relation between the boys, their coddled upbringings, Straus’s obsession with detective fiction, and Steiner’s with Nietzschean philosophy, all get examined in turn. Levin’s brilliant structural gimmick is a narrator, Sid Silver, who is both a classmate of the criminal duo and a cub reporter and, therefore, has access to all of the details of their sordid story and even identifies with them, a little—he, too, graduates college while still in his teens. More fascinating still, this character is based on Levin himself, who covered the Leopold and Loeb case as a cub reporter for the Chicago Daily News and did also graduate from the University of Chicago when he was 19. In addition to its attention to the trial (with an extended closing argument by a character based on the famed lawyer Clarence Darrow), Levin’s novel suggests here and there the ramifications of the case’s Jewish aspects. For one thing, it was an embarrassing scandal that shocked Jews everywhere; as Levin has the narrator’s father say, “It’s lucky it was a Jewish boy they picked”—for if it had been a non-Jew, it would...

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