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  • Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel by Leah Garrett
  • Brian McDonald
Garrett, Leah. Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 275pp. $34.95 paperback; $99.95 cloth; $34.95 e-book.

Leah Garrett begins Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel by noting the striking historical fact that the five most prominent war novels on the 1948 New York Times bestseller list were by Jewish writers. The widespread popularity of Jewish-authored war novels in the wake of WWII is certainly indicative of the emerging prominence during that period of Jewish writers across the post-war American literary landscape—a development well documented in the critical literature. Leah Garrett’s central interest, however, lies in what she regards as the often overlooked but crucial shift in the genre of the American war novel brought about by the distinctive ways Jewish American writers engaged with the subject of the then-recent war in their fiction, a shift which would significantly influence literary and non-literary representations of war and the military for decades.

Garrett scrutinizes each of the five bestselling Jewish American war novels from 1948—Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw’s Young Lions, Ira Wolfert’s An Act of Love, Merle Miller’s That Winter, and Stefan Heym’s The Crusaders—routinely providing biographical profiles and plot summaries to complement her analysis. A sixth book published in 1948, Martha Gelhorn’s Point of No Return, which sold well but was not a bestseller, is given the same treatment.

Garrett employs a self-described interdisciplinary approach to make her case for the presence, in these novels, of a specifically Jewish American perspective on the war that challenged comfortable, mainstream mid-century conceptions of liberalism, masculinity, and the nature of literary art. What defines this perspective, for Garrett, is not necessarily a shared identity, background, or religious faith among the writers she highlights or their fictional characters, but rather their specific experiences of the war as Jewish soldiers or journalists that compelled them to wrestle with a unique set of issues, including anti-Semitism, the ambivalent status of the Jewish soldier, the unfulfilled promise of American pluralism, and the centrality of the Holocaust to their war experience. In her readings Garrett is constantly alert to how these issues, in ways both overt and subtle, impose themselves on the manner in which Jewish American novelists described the war; and how, through the popular medium of the war novel, they were translated for a mainstream American audience, thereby helping to shape the way the larger American public came to understand the war and to confront the horrific reality of the Holocaust.

While 1948 is the essential year in the critical story Garrett wants to tell, she is also keen to map the evolution of the Jewish American war novel in the decades following WWII by extending her discussion into the 1950s and charting its relationship to important ideological developments in American postwar life such as the Cold War and McCarthyism. Indeed, one of the particularly valuable qualities of Young Lions is the attention Garrett pays to the currently unfashionable writers Herman Wouk and Leon Uris. While the earnest conservatism and unequivocal patriotism on display in massive bestsellers such as Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and Uris’s Battle Cry garner them scant attention from contemporary academic critics, Garrett spends significant energy exploring their cultural impact and analyzing the implications of their straightforward depictions of masculine heroic Jewish soldiers.

Garrett is less convincing in her often strained attempt to offer a “Jewish reading” of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, and strikes a particularly false note in her characterization [End Page 250] of Norman Mailer’s war service. Garrett refers to Mailer’s “not seeing fighting” and having “serv[ed] on the periphery of battle” (24). She also speculates that The Naked and the Dead would be a more authentic work if Mailer had written “an honest account of what he had actually gone through,” and “if he had not been so desirous of creating a popular story about soldiers on the front lines...

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