Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel by Leah Garrett (review)

"Character" seems like the single best word I can use to describe Leah Garrett's Young Lions. The word captures both the objects of her study (the Jewish and crypto-Jewish soldier protagonists of best-selling World War II novels) and her broader thematic arguments: War reveals a man's true character. War exposes a man's prejudices and provides the rare chance to overcome bigotry via the encounter with soldiers of other background. War tests the strength of the powerful, while also affording countless opportunities for soldiers to discover previously unknown strength and to display physical or moral courage. War novels are loud, violent, punctuated by literal and metaphorical explosions. But war novels are mainly quiet, emotional, ruminative. The stillness between battles is a moment to engage in self-reflection, for a man to rethink his beliefs, and to ponder the national character.

Young Lions is an assured work of scholarship. Garrett's study intervenes in the literary history of Jewish America, shifting the critical gaze from the mid-century modernist circles nurtured in New York by the public library (where lions guard the steps), Partisan Review, Commentary, City College, and Columbia (another sort of young lion) to the physicality of war in the Pacific and Europe. The Second World War intrudes on Saul Bellow's Dangling Man and The Adventures of Augie March. It is the giant, unavoidable, generational experience, the outside force that impedes the characters' inner crises by enforcing premature resolution. ("In this era of war there is no room for the indoor man who pursues scholarly endeavors" [207], Garrett writes of Dangling Man.) But for the soldier-heroes of a diverse group of best sellers, the Second World War is necessary, formative. War is the essential psychological experience, triggering the transvaluation of intellectualism, masculinity, Judaism, and American civic identity. Though the book is not without flaws, there is no question that Young Lions is an important work of scholarship. As Josh Lambert rightly noted, many of the novels studied in Young Lions aren't actually worth reading.¹ Read Garrett instead.

Garrett, further, goes on to make second, third, and fourth critical interventions in literary history. To focus on World War II novels is to (a) counter the prominence of the Holocaust novel in the Jewish literary imaginary, and (b) dismantle (again) the myth of Holocaust silence. The Jewish soldier-protagonist experienced the Holocaust as an American, in the same way as other American soldiers: during the liberation of the camps. Dachau emerges as an unlikely type-scene in a quartet of best-selling war novels in 1948, the site where the moral necessity of the war achieves absolute clarity. "The novels use a Jewish soldier to show the pinnacle moment of awakening when what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe becomes tangible and real" (80). More importantly, not all of these books were written by Jews. Decades before we've come to expect it, we find the Jew employed to capture an American experience.

As Garrett notes, the thematic appearance and reappearance of Dachau in these works argues against the perception that Jewish writers could either write about the Holocaust or the war. These novels are not only unambiguous in understanding the Holocaust and the war as intertwined ("conducted at the same time and in many of the same places"), but at casting the American victory as a victory against Nazi anti-Semitism. The 1948 quartet thus served as part of the broad popular attack on American anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of the war. (See also Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement, the two movies about anti-Semitism nominated for Best Picture in 1947. To cite one of the book's highpoints, Garrett's analysis of The Caine Mutiny (1951), the real enemies within are "the intellectual WASPs who believe that their own needs should be more important than the rules that … keep things running smoothly" (150...