The Jewish American Novel

Chapter Eleven. Daniel Stern: Touching the Void

216 Chapter Eleven Daniel Stern: Touching the Void (In Memory of Daniel Stern, 18 January 1928–24 January 2007) In spite of his early involvement in Holocaust writing and despite his distinct interest in Jewish subject matter, Daniel Stern’s name remains unrecorded in surveys of Jewish American and Holocaust writing. Ihab Hassan is possibly the only scholar who refers to the three novels that Stern published during the 1960s (Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die, After the War, and The Suicide Academy), but he mentions them only in passing (Contemporary 72). In fact, the nearly total critical neglect is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of a literary career which spans over five decades. It is all the more puzzling given that his first novel, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die (1963) won him the International Prix du Souvenir from the Bergen-Belsen Society and it moved Elie Wiesel to an enthusiastic encomium: “I loved it when it first appeared, I love it still. I believe it stands among the best of the genre” (“Foreword” x). Stern’s later work was awarded the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award for literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His short stories have received praise from critics and writers such as Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode, Elie Wiesel, Edward Albee , and Cynthia Ozick. Moreover, Stern is one of the few Jewish American novelists whose work dating from the 1960s is still available in print (only two of Wallant ’s four novels are still in print, while none of Rosenfeld’s or Baumbach’s novels from the 1940s to the 1960s are). A close family friend of Malamud, Stern can also be credited with the most revealing and profound interview ever with Malamud (see Stern, “Art”). Stern’s work is of interest for the present study because his novels dating from the 1960s are—often explicitly—steeped in French existentialist thought. By the end of the twentieth century, Stern’s admiration of French existentialism had not wavered much. In 1998, he published an article entitled “The Fellowship of Men That Die: The Legacy of Albert Camus” to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Camus’s death. The article displays Stern’s intimate knowledge of Camus’s literary and philosophical work. Camus’s ideas, Stern wrote, “affected me in a permanent Daniel Stern 217 way, beginning when I was a young man and continuing over the years” (183). In the article, Stern discusses The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, and The Stranger, and he notes “the [US-American] excitement that filled the air as news of what was happening in a small section of the left bank of Paris, known as St. Germaine des Prés, filtered in” (184). He expresses his admiration of the position Camus had arrived at by the time he published L’Homme révolté: A socially conscious rebellion against the absurdity of an indifferent universe. In a personal letter, Stern also attests to his familiarity with Sartre’s and Camus’s work: “I read Sartre, of course, as well as Camus , though Camus remains my favorite. And I saw No Exit in its New York production , but I can’t see much connection—though some subliminal influence may have crept in. Who Shall Live is so riddled with the existentialism of the time that the rhythms of that thought may be present, too” (Personal e-mail letter to Philippe Codde. Houston, 18 March 2004). The existentialist sociolect of Stern’s novels emphasizes the importance of moral choice, uses the semantic and lexical dichotomies typical of existentialism, and counters the sociolect of fascism. His novels present the intertwined issues of the Holocaust, death-of-God theology, and existentialist thought, joined together in a tightly woven fabric. Because I have dealt with his debut novel Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die elsewhere (see Codde, “Holocaust,” “Burned,” and “Early Holocaust”), I have chosen to focus on his second novel, After the War, instead. After the War is the more interesting novel for the present study because it brings Stern’s oeuvre to a position similar to Bellow’s: Straddled across the categories of commitment and negativity. While the novel cannot be considered fully af- firmative, it does leave its protagonist poised on the brink of connection and fellowship . There are some explicit—although less important—references to Sartre and Camus: One of the characters praises his own writing as “flashing prose replete with what Camus (that decadent Frog) calls a ‘virile tenderness...