The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea by Sam B. Girgus (review)

114Reviews Girgus, Sam B. The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984. 220 pp. Cloth: $19.95 The New Covenant is far from being a conventional study of twentieth-century Jewish American writing. Although it contains the expected discussions of writers like Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud, it otherwise departs quite radically from the canon. The New Covenant places the authors of The Rise of David Levinsky, Call It Sleep, My Life as a Man, and A New Life among such unlikely bedfellows as Louis D. Brandeis, Sidney Hillman, Oscar S. Straus, and other non-literary presences. Sam B. Girgus, a professor of American Studies, seems completely at ease as he maneuvers literary texts in and out of historical, political, and cultural circumstances. The New Covenant convincingly offers new strategies for studying Jewish writers. Girgus' agenda is quite different from that offered by most commentators on the American Jewish literary scene. He posits a "new covenant" between Jews and what he variously refers to as "the American Idea" and "the American Way." He interestingly conceives of a "line of argument" which "demolishes the wall dividing Jewish from American identities and heals conflicting loyalties by making Judaism and Americanism mutually re-enforcing ideologies" (p. 4). With Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad serving as a central text (Bercovitch's endorsement of The New Covenant appears prominently on the dust jacket), Girgus fashions a gathering of Jewish writers from Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska down to Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, and Johanna Kaplan, who assume the role of "New Jeremiahs." "The rhetoric of the jeremiad" occupies Girgus' attention through most of his study as he tries to account for the "long partnership between Jews and the American Way" (p. 63). After an introductory chapter which usefully assesses "the tradition of the New Covenant" (p. 23) and establishes something of a "poetics," The New Covenant moves away from theory toward examination of historical currents and of individual writers and works. Each of Girgus' ten chapters seems to have its own rhythm and set of strategies. In chapter 3, for example, a vast period of Jewish American history is surveyed (from 1492 through the New Deal), with Leopold Kompert, Oscar S. Straus, Louis D. Brandeis, and Sidney Hillman acting as touchstones. Most of the other chapters concentrate on individual writers but offer quite different emphases. Thus the chapter on Henry Roth's Call It Sleep calls upon Norman O. Brown's interpretation of Martin Luther in his Life Against Death as a supporting text. In the section aptly called "The Jew as Underground Man: Philip Roth," The Ghost Writer, The Professor of Desire, and My Life as a Man are viewed against the backdrop of "the triad of modernism, American culture, and Jewish life in America" (p. 123). Girgus introduces Hayden White's notion of metahistory in the chapters on Mailer and Doctorow. The myth of the West plays a crucial role in the brief section on Malamud, which is mainly concerned with A New Life. The diverse strains of these discussions are neatly tied together in a ten-page "Postscript: Toward a New Consensus ." The bibliography which follows is extensive and impressive; it attests to the wide range of Girgus' reading. In a review of Martin Green's The Great American Adventure (New York Times Book Review [October 14, 1984], p. 32), Richard Slotkin comments revealingly at one point: "The most difficult task of a book of this kind is to make the connection between a literary text and the historical moment that surrounds it." This is clearly Girgus' task in The New Covenant, and, in large part, it is managed with finesse. At the same time he often eschews the responsibility of the literary critic, which is to make judgments about the quality of works. Thus we can never be sure, from reading Girgus, whether Henry Studies in American Fiction115 Roth's Call It Sleep is a better novel than Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky or Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers. Specialists on American Jewish fiction might be surprised to find no mention in The...