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Chapter Seven Jews without Judaism DECONVERSION AND DISAVOWAL The record of Jewish American cultural achievement in the postwar decades is extensive and irregular. Many of the emerging writers in the era, now treated as fomenting a “Jewish American Renaissance,” had a background in Marxism, usually Communism, by personal or family association.1 What is still visible of the left-wing reference points of this literary tradition resembles a disrupted itinerary, fractured but conveying information nonetheless. A few authors made open but laconic references to their political pasts in their writing, including Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Grace Paley, and Tillie Olsen. Others, such as Bernard Malamud, evaded the subject, and there are indications of radical pasts that biographers might pursue in respect to Karl Shapiro, Philip Roth, and even J. D. Salinger. Only recently, the more precise Communist personal histories of Leon Uris (1924–2003), inspired to write by Mike Gold’s Jews without Money (1930) and William Blake’s The Copperheads (1941), and Arthur Miller (1915–2005), whose enthusiasm for the movement began in 1935, have come to notice.2 Of the hundreds of lesser-known writers who were part of the broad Left anchored by the Communist movement, one can make exalted claims for only a few. Still, apart from literary distinction and whatever distance the authors did or did not take from their backgrounds in Marxism, the fiction and poetry of a good number function as a sort of dissident literature. This embedded protest may have been inspired by opposition to the commercialization of culture in the 1950s but was also tacitlyagainst the stifling mentality generated by pro-Communists and Progressives under the spell of late antifascism . Even prior to the 1950s, novels that were fragmented and convoluted, selfabsorbed and bookish, constituted by definition a decided rebellion against 217 Jews without Judaism most of the Soviet literary models. It was with a new consciousness regarding the terrain of the Consumers’ Republic that one-time Leftists Bellow and Malamud reacted at least implicitly to the excesses embodied in Zhdanovism by promoting an ethical concern that valued individuality and creativity over mythologized heroics of self-sacrifice. Their best sellers, The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and The Assistant (1957), showcased the very interiority and idiosyncrasy of the private person that remained at odds with the two rival political forces pressing upon them from opposite sides: the ideologically saturated official culture of the Stalinist regime and its imitators in the United States, and the stifling constraints of McCarthyism and Cold Warconformity . Limits were thus created that confined openly political articulations to a few outcast books, such as Norman Mailer’s canny but roundly deplored Barbary Shore (1951). Yet the labor of dissidence of even the restricted rebellion by Bellow and others won out. It came into view more effectively than the less discernible backdrop of the particular group of Jewish American novels that are the subject of this chapter, ones unmistakably expressing an attendant mourning for a lost sense of evolution toward a collective aim. Ironically, it was writers like the rightward-moving Bellow and the even more conservative Jack Kerouac (also a socialist in his youth) who eventually helped to release new literary space for a younger generation of radical political voices who returned in the 1960s to broader and often militant social criticism. Walter Benjamin coined the phrase “Left Melancholia” in the early 1930s as an epithet criticizing a radical writer’s backward-looking attachment to petrified sentiments and analysis.3 It is an elusive concept when applied to literary practice, not to be reduced to the psychiatric definition, but augments the better-known “diaspora” (a communityof people in exile), “trauma” (psychic injury), and the broader concept of Weberian “disenchantment” (eradication of traditions and emotions) as one of the critical categories by which to understand the 1945–60 unraveling of Jewish American Communism as a movement. In specifically literary matters, the joining of Left Melancholia with the terms “deconversion” and “disavowal” may create a productive perspective on the inner workings of Jewish American fiction of the long postwar era that emerges from the splintering political tradition of the previous decades.4 The combination provides an idiom for translating the common structures of feeling of several superior but overlooked novels that register a crumbling worldview. Taken in unison, these three concepts also allow a pointed contrast with the renowned Cold War, anti-Communist confessional autobiographies of Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, and Whittaker Chambers, a genre in which [18...

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