This question is raised in very concrete terms by the appearance of What We Talk About When Talk About Anne Frank, the new volume of short stories by Nathan Englander, at the same time as the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, which features Englander’s translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic text. The story collection declares its quandaries in its title, an allusion to the famous Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Englander’s story of that name copies Carver’s basic situation—two couples in conversation, getting gradually more intoxicated and more dangerously honest. By putting Anne Frank in the title, Englander marks his story as Jewish, but in a particular way: The juxtaposition of Carver and the Holocaust is both a declaration of his own fictional territory and a blatantly bad joke.

The big question about Englander’s work, since his sensational debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges appeared in 1999, is whether his stories transcend their jokey premises to achieve some higher meaning, or simply offer a kind of Jewish minstrelsy. Englander himself is aware of this danger, as he made clear in the story “The Tumblers,” in his first book. This story imagines the fate of the holy fools of Chelm, the town celebrated in Jewish folklore, during the Holocaust. Englander has them escaping deportation to a concentration camp by boarding a train full of circus performers, then posing as a tumbling act in order to survive. The story climaxes with the Chelmites, dressed in pitiful costumes, putting on an incompetent show in front of an audience of Nazis.

The story strives to be a parable, but, as with much of Englander’s work, the more closely you read it, the less coherent the parable seems to be. After all, the crime of the Nazis was not primarily to humiliate Jews; nor can the Jews during the Holocaust be thought of as performers. And if the idea is to show what happens when folktale innocence meets human evil, that was already done supremely well by Isaac Bashevis Singer; inevitably, one reads Englander’s tale as a pale imitation of Singer.

What is distinctive about the Englander story is its sentimentality, which is another way of saying its failure to trust the subject and the reader, its insistence on underscoring the tragedy of the situation with cues and nudges. One such nudge comes when a young Jewish girl is shot by a German soldier: “The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear.” Another comes when the Holocaust is described as “unmatched feats of magic performed with the trains. They go away full … and come back empty, as if never before used.” (This kind of mock-naiveté has more in common with Roberto Benigni than with Singer.)

Where “The Tumblers” makes sense, however, is as an interrogation of Englander’s own treatment of the Holocaust and of Jews. Is writing about these things the way he does equivalent to forcing the innocent Jews of Chelm to dress up and play tricks for a hostile world? For there is indeed something potentially exploitive about the high-concept premises of Englander’s stories about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. In “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” a moneyed WASP suddenly decides that he has a Jewish soul, and begins to live Jewishly, to the outrage of his disbelieving wife. In “Reb Kringle,” a Hasid with a big belly and beard makes his living as a department-store Santa. In the title story, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” a Hasid is told by his rebbe to go to a prostitute when his wife won’t sleep with him.

The wager of each of these stories is that the comic premise will build and topple over into liberating outrage—as Roth does in early stories like “The Defender of the Faith” or “Eli, the Fanatic”—or else deepen into a Malamud-style magical realism. But the truth is that Englander’s talent is not perfectly suited to either of these purposes, and his stories often seem to end where they begin, with the punchline of their premise. That is when the threat of minstrelsy appears—the possibility that readers will laugh at these stories only as familiar Jewish shtick.

Englander is at his best in a more familiar and old-fashioned kind of realism, in which he simply explores the common humanity behind the surface unfamiliarity of Hasidic or Orthodox life. Englander, who was raised Orthodox on Long Island, is well-situated to do this, just as Sherwood Anderson did it for the inhabitants of his invented Winesburg, Ohio; and a story like Englander’s “The Wig”—in which a Hasidic matron’s disappointed sexual feelings are sensitively imagined—puts the reader in mind of Anderson’s compassionate realism.

Thirteen years later, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the same impulses are still at war in Englander’s fiction. Once again, he is prone to high-concept stories that trade on the obvious incongruity of Jews—especially old or Orthodox Jews—doing profane things. In the title story, two couples—one pair of assimilated American Jews, one pair of baalei tshuvah from Israel—smoke a lot of pot and get the munchies, and the sight of black hats getting high is a large part of the story’s point. In “Camp Sundown,” a group of Holocaust survivors, convinced that another elderly man is really a concentration camp guard in disguise, murder him in a bout of senile revenge.

Worst of all is “Peep Show,” a story about a former Orthodox Jew who goes into a Times Square peep show and, instead of a stripper, is greeted by his therapist, his mother, and his childhood rabbi. The book’s high-powered blurbs describe Englander as “edgy” and “audacious,” but this fantasia on Jewish guilt is like something Woody Allen would have rejected for being too broad around the year Englander was born. (There are even shrink jokes: “I think it would be best if you paid for my peep. Thus far in your therapy, we’ve constructed a relationship based partly on financial remuneration.”)

Both the shtick and the psychology here are so contrived that it brings home one of the dilemmas Englander faces as a writer: simple belatedness. To rebel against a puritanical Jewish household in the year 2012 is inevitably to repeat the gestures of those who did the same thing in 1932 and 1952 and 1972, and it would take a writer of genius to give that rebellion a genuinely new fictional form.

Even then, the rebellion itself would not speak to today’s young Jews in the way that Roth’s did a half-century ago. If postmodernism, in the 1960s and 1970s, gleefully exposed the nullity of traditional authority and the corrupt partiality of every account of the past, then the post-postmodernism of the writers who emerged in the 1990s is an attempt to rescue the concept of authority and to regain contact with an authentic past. The literary standard-bearer for this generation was, of course, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s achievement was truly dialectical: Instead of simply rejecting postmodern fictional techniques and returning to an outworn mode of realism (à la Jonathan Franzen), Wallace pushed through the artificiality and self-consciousness of postmodernism to create a new, self-critical sincerity. His achievement, one might say, was to make sentimentality legitimate again.

Continue reading: The chains of tradition

Within a year, however, the Nazis took power in Germany, making it impossible for Roth, or any German Jewish writer, to live and work in the country. Roth spent the next five years living hand-to-mouth in France, cranking out short novels at a terrific pace in an increasingly hopeless attempt to support himself. He died in 1939, a victim of alcoholism and of history, at the age of just 45—though to judge by photographs of his booze-ravaged face, he already looked like an elderly man. As it turned out, this premature death came just in time, for if Roth had still been living in France after the German conquest in 1940, he would surely have been sent to a concentration camp.

Several of Roth’s books were published in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, but after his death his reputation nearly vanished here. Over the last decade, the translator Michael Hofmann has led a major effort to reintroduce Roth to America, translating many of his novels and stories as well as collections of his journalism. There is still no English-language biography; it would take a fearless biographer to disentangle the truth of Roth’s life from the many myths and legends he liked to propagate about himself. Instead, Hofmann has now produced Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, a big collection of Roth’s correspondence, which allows us to trace the stages of his difficult life—and gives some unsettling insights into his understanding of Jewishness.

Unfortunately—but, given his harried existence, understandably—most of Roth’s letters are lost. Though A Life in Letters runs to more than 500 pages, it has, as Hofmann points out in his introduction, no letters to Roth’s parents, his wife, his lovers, or his best friends. The bulk of the correspondence before 1933 consists of letters to his editors and colleagues at the Frankfurter Zeitung, the prestigious liberal newspaper where he was a staff writer. After 1933, by far the most important recipient of Roth’s letters is Stefan Zweig, another German Jewish literary émigré, and the Roth-Zweig friendship emerges as the real drama of the book.

Still, the letters are enough to give a vivid sense of what Roth was like. As a very young man, writing from Vienna to relatives in Brody, he is precocious, haughty, and dandified: “What can I wish for you? Three kingly things. … The golden crown of imagination, the scarlet cloak of solitude, and the scepter of irony,” the 22-year-old tells his younger cousin. In 1917 Roth enlisted in the Austrian army, and over the next year he accumulated experiences that would shape his writing. Indeed, he deliberately blurred the line between his life and his fiction, often telling people that he saw combat and was taken prisoner by the Russians, when in fact he spent most of his time working on an army newspaper. Unfortunately, this crucial period is represented by just two brief letters.

When the correspondence really picks up, in 1925, Roth is already a well-established journalist, a star of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Not just a star, in fact, but a prima donna: Many of these letters involve Roth’s complaints that he is not getting the best assignments or the highest rates. “I am not an encore, not a pudding [i.e., a dessert—Hofmann writes British English], I am the main dish,” he lectures his editor. What remains constant, and significant for Roth the writer, is his deep discomfort with Germany, which leads him to idealize just about every other country as an alternative. In France for the first time in 1925, he is rhapsodic: “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here,” he writes his editor Benno Reifenberg. “Whoever has not been here is only half a human.”

France especially gains by contrast with Germany: “Any chauffeur is wittier than our wittiest authors,” Roth writes, and later, “I don’t see the point in being a German writer. [Paris] is like being on top of a tall tower, you look down from the summit of European civilization, and way down at the bottom, in some sort of gulch, is Germany.” It was a bitter blow when he was denied a permanent Paris assignment and forced to come home. “I feel Germany right off the bat, and all of it at once,” he writes in 1931, after another trip abroad. “Every street corner expresses the awfulness of the whole country. It has the ugliest prostitutes. … The men are all scoutmasters on display. … The feeling as though your genitals were gone, nothing left!”

The 1920s were a boom time for German journalism, and for Roth. Yet even in these letters, we hear his constant complaints about money, and his stratagems for getting more of it. Often this involved what Hofmann calls a “scorched-earth” strategy with publishers: Roth had a habit of accepting more assignments and book contracts than he could possibly carry out, and he always had to work frantically to catch up. One story, which Hofmann tells in a footnote, is suggestive. Roth had promised to write a novel for serialization in a Munich newspaper. When he delivered the manuscript, he accidentally included a page on which he had written a dozen times: “Must finish novel in three days! Must finish novel in three days!” The newspaper, disturbed at the evidence of Roth’s working practices, rejected the novel. It is no coincidence that his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, was also the book on which he spent the most time—two years, an eternity by Rothian standards.

Continue reading: ‘The great wheel of bestiality’

To look back on The Israel Lobby’s reception today is to see a remarkable unanimity of rejection, from the New York Times (“mostly wrong … dangerously misleading”) and Foreign Affairs (“written in haste, the book will be repented at leisure”) to The Nation (“serious methodological deficiencies … a mess”). There was also a general recognition that in their insinuations about secret Jewish power, Mearsheimer and Walt—professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, respectively—had given a respectable imprimatur to old and sinister anti-Semitic tropes. Michael Gerson, an evangelical Christian adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post: “Every generation has seen accusations that Jews have dual loyalties, promote war, and secretly control political structures. These academics might not follow their claims all the way to anti-Semitism. But this is how it begins. This is how it always begins.”

Alert to the same danger, George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of State—who should know about how foreign policy is made—went so far as to write the foreword to The Deadliest Lies, a book by Abraham Foxman refuting the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis. “Jewish groups are influential,” Shultz wrote. “But the notion that these groups have anything like a uniform agenda, and that U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East is the result of their influence, is simply wrong.”

Case closed, it would seem. And looking at the history of the last four years, there is no doubt that Walt and Mearsheimer failed in their stated goal of disrupting America’s close alliance with Israel—or what they call “treating Israel as a normal state.” Their book, published in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, opened with a complaint about how “serious candidates for the highest office in the land will go to considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one foreign country—Israel—as well as their determination to maintain unyielding U.S. support for the Jewish state.”

Fast forward to 2012, and the candidates for the Republican nomination were saying just this: At the Republican Jewish Coalition candidates’ forum last December, Mitt Romney promised that his first foreign trip as president would be to Israel. And for all the Jewish right’s criticism of President Obama’s Israel policy, the fact remains that in 2011 the United States pledged to veto the Palestinian bid for statehood in the United Nations.

But if The Israel Lobby has not changed American politics, it has had an insidious effect on the way people talk and think about Israel, and about the whole question of Jewish power. The first time I had this suspicion was when reading, of all things, a biography of H.G. Wells. In H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, published in the U.K. in 2010, Michael Sherborne describes how Wells’ contempt for Nazism went along with a dislike for Judaism and Zionism, which he voiced in deliberately offensive terms even as Nazi persecution of Jews reached its peak. “To take on simultaneously the Nazis … and the Jewish lobby may have been foolhardy,” Sherborne writes apropos of Wells in 1938.

There’s no way to prove that Sherborne’s “Jewish lobby” is the intellectual descendant of Walt and Mearsheimer’s “Israel lobby,” but the inference seems like a strong one. Wells, the term suggests, was not attacking Jews, a group that in the Europe of the 1930s was conspicuous for its absolute powerlessness in the face of the evolving Nazi genocide. Instead, he was bravely standing up to a powerful “lobby,” an organization designed to punish critics of the Jews, and whose influence was on a par somehow with that of the Nazis.

What is disturbing in the Sherborne example is the way Walt and Mearsheimer’s conception of Jewish power is projected into a historical moment when it could not have been less accurate. In France during the Dreyfus Affair, it was common for anti-Semites and anti-Dreyfusards to speak of a Jewish syndicate that secretly ruled the country. Now, in the 21st century, it has once again become possible to speak of a Jewish “lobby” that it would be foolish to cross. One of the central premises of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is that it takes unusual courage to oppose the Jews, since they use their power to ruthlessly suppress dissent in both the political world and the media. Walt and Mearsheimer place themselves on the side of the angels when they attack the Israel lobby’s “objectionable tactics, such as attempting to silence or smear anyone who challenges the lobby’s role or criticizes Israel’s actions.”

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, fill their book with denials that they are talking about a secret syndicate: “The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy,” they write in the introduction. But the book itself, with its lists of Jewish organizations and journalists, and its tone of moral outrage, works to give exactly this impression. In fact, you don’t even have to read the book to get the impression: Looking at the cover is enough. In 2002, when the British magazine the New Statesman ran a cover story titled “The Kosher Conspiracy” with an image of a gold Star of David pressing down on a Union Jack, it was roundly criticized for copying imagery that would have been familiar in the Nazi periodical Der Sturmer. Yet The Israel Lobby, published by America’s most prestigious house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, bore a cover image of the American flag rendered in the blue and white of the Israeli flag—an unmistakable visual shorthand for Jewish domination. All by itself, this image nullified Walt and Mearsheimer’s repeated insistence that they were not describing the Israel lobby as a cabal.

So the floodgates were opened: What we have witnessed in the five years since is a blithe recuperation of dangerous, vicious imagery and ideas, with no apparent compunction about their origins or consequences. In 2010, Tablet’s Lee Smith investigated the way certain bloggers—including Walt himself—amassed large anti-Semitic readerships through their conspiratorial denunciations of Israel and the Israel Lobby. Quoting the comments sections of such blogs, Smith found them rife with unbridled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as “It seems to me that it is no exaggeration to say roundly that the USA in its entirety is under Jewish control of one variety or another.”

Compare this with Thomas Friedman’s Dec. 14, 2011 column in the New York Times, where he wrote about Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Criticized for this remark, he replied to New York’s Jewish Week that “In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby—a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to.” But of course, “engineered” suggests exactly the same thing as “bought and paid for.” Decades ago, the right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan was widely denounced for referring to “Israel’s amen corner.” Today, an establishment pundit like Friedman can suggest even more crudely that Congress is bought and paid for by a foreign government with the sense that he is simply voicing conventional wisdom.

Continue reading: An intellectual landmark

In the preface to the New York edition of Roderick Hudson, Henry James explained that the chief problem of the novelist is deciding where to stop his characters’ stories—at what point to give up tracing the development of relationships. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, a circle within which they shall happily appear to do so,” James wrote. But by telling a story about Jews in the Italian city of Ferrara during the late 1930s, the novelist Giorgio Bassani jeopardized this artist’s freedom: The circumference of his 1962 novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was determined for him by history. In 1943, after the northern part of Italy was occupied by German soldiers, most of Ferrara’s small Jewish community was sent to the death camps. (Out of 183 deportees, only one returned to the city.)

In a brief prologue, Bassani makes clear that the members of the Finzi-Contini family died in the Holocaust: “for Micol, the second child, the daughter, and for her father, Professor Ermanno, and her mother, Signora Olga, and Signora Regina, Signora Olga’s ancient, paralytic mother, all deported to Germany in the autumn of ’43, who could say if they found any sort of burial at all?” At this early point in the book, we do not know anything about these characters but their names, though they will go on to populate the narrator’s emotional universe. They are introduced under the sign of death, and we read about their friendships and enmities and love affairs knowing that all such complications will be annulled just a few years after the action of the novel ends.

But is death an annulment? That is the question raised by the novel’s prologue, which is set in 1957. In it, the narrator—who goes unnamed in the text, but who is conventionally referred to as “B.” just as Proust’s narrator is called “Marcel”—describes an excursion with friends to the coast near Rome. On the way back home, the small group visits an Etruscan necropolis, a complex of funeral mounds that makes “the area, really … nothing but an immense, almost uninterrupted cemetery.” One of the party is a young girl, Giannina, who sighs over the Etruscan dead. Her father explains these 5,000-year-old tombs are so ancient that it’s hard to feel any real grief for their inhabitants: “it’s as if they had never lived, as if they had always been dead.” But Giannina disagrees: “But now, if you say that … you remind me that the Etruscans were also alive once, and so I’m fond of them, like everyone else.”

It is not hard to make the connection between the girl’s affection for the ancient dead and the more recent dead who weigh on the narrator’s mind. (“Tell me, Papa: who do you think were more ancient, the Etruscans or the Jews?” Giannina asks her father.) What Bassani calls the girl’s “extraordinary tenderness” seems to release a blockage in his mind: It is possible, he realizes, to preserve the dead as they were when they lived, to refuse to allow death to invalidate life. “For many years I wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis,” he explains in the book’s first sentence, but it was not until this episode that “the stimulus, the impulse to do it really came to me.”

The gulf between the values of life and the manner of death is especially wide in the case of the Finzi-Continis, for as we go on to learn, the family was defined above all by its aloofness from the Jewish community of Ferrara. For one thing, the Finzi-Continis were much richer than their neighbors. Their ancestor, Moise—part of the first Italian Jewish generation to be emancipated from the ghetto—acquired a large tract of land near the city wall of Ferrara, and the family built a magnificent estate there, complete with a magna domus or “great house.” This is the “garden” of the title, which is not an ordinary flower or kitchen garden but a vast walled enclave. In effect, the Finzi-Continis have retreated into their own world.

To the young B., this withdrawal makes the Finzi-Continis an object of fascination. The family has children his own age—a boy, Alberto, and a girl, Micol—but because they do not attend the public school, he sees them only occasionally; above all, in synagogue. In a resonant image that haunts the whole book, B. describes being gathered under his father’s tallit for the benediction, and staring at Micol Finzi-Contini, hidden away under her own father’s tent-like tallit: “Below him, for the entire duration of the blessing, Alberto and Micol never stopped exploring, they too, the gaps in their tent. And they smiled at me and winked at me, both curiously inviting: especially Micol.”

It is not hard to guess that B. is destined to fall in love with Micol, or that the love will be unhappy. (In this sense, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis can be compared to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, another novel about a middle-class boy who falls fatally in love with an aristocratic family.) The course of their adult relationship is foretold in an incident when they are about 12 years old. Micol invites B. to climb over the garden wall, but by the time he convinces himself to do it, she has disappeared back into the house.

If the Finzi-Continis’ wall is an invitation to B., however, most of their neighbors take it as an insult:

Oh, it still took very little to be offended by it! It was enough, say, to pass along the endless outside wall … or else … overlooking the park, to peer through the forestlike tangle of trunks, boughs, and foliage below, until you could glimpse the strange, sharp outline of the lordly dwelling, and behind it, much farther on, at the edge of a clearing, the tan patch of the tennis court: and the ancient offense of rejection and separation would smart once more.

Already in this early passage, Bassani begins to establish the paradoxical Jewishness of the Finzi-Continis. When we read of a people that has committed an “ancient offense,” that is blamed for “rejection and separation,” that is simultaneously envied and feared and despised by its neighbors, it is impossible not to think of the Jews among the Christians of Europe. The Finzi-Continis, Bassani suggests, are the Jews of the Jews themselves, embodying and raising to the second power all the ambiguities of the Italian Jewish condition. They are Jews who exemplify Jewishness by dissociating themselves from other Jews—as the narrator’s father notes with scorn:

Instead of giving themselves so many airs, they would have done much better … to remember who they were, where they came from, for it’s a fact that Jews—Sephardic and Ashkenazic, western and Levantine, Tunisian, Berber, Yemenite, and even Ethiopian—in whatever part of the earth, under whatever sky History scattered them, are and always will be Jews, that is to say, close relatives.

One might even say that the Finzi-Continis treat their fellow Jews the way the Jews themselves treat the Gentiles—whom the narrator’s father refers to, with anxious contempt, as “goyische blacks.”

Continue reading: The secret garden

Modern Jews are not immune to this kind of nostalgia; but as so often happens, the Jewish case is different and more complicated. At the beginning of her superb and thought-provoking new book, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton), Leora Batnitzky explains that modern definitions of Jewishness are inescapably divided and partial. She begins: “Is Judaism a religion? Is Jewishness a matter of culture? Are the Jews a nation? These are modern questions.” But there was a time, “prior to modernity,” she continues, when “Judaism and Jewishness were all these at once: religion, culture and nationality.” Until the 18th century, the question of how to define Jewishness never arose, because Jews lived in a wholly Jewish world. A Jewish community was made up exclusively of Jews, lived by Jewish law, prayed according to Jewish ritual, and even had a large degree of political autonomy—it could levy its own taxes, appoint its own officials, and punish lawbreakers. Each community, Batnitzky writes, enjoyed this wholeness, and together they formed an even larger whole: “Premodern Jews imagined themselves as one united people, as klal Yisrael, ‘the collective people of Israel.’ ”

For Batnitzky, too, modernity is the age of fracture, when this ostensible wholeness and unity began to come apart. This began in Western Europe with the French Revolution, which introduced the principle that Jews should not be viewed as members of an autonomous community but as individual citizens in a secular nation-state. As one French statesman put it: “One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation but one must give them everything as individuals.” This principle spread with Napoleon’s rule to Germany, where the substantial Jewish population became a test case for the possibility of true emancipation in an anti-Semitic society.

For these German Jews, who make up the focus of the first half of Batnitzky’s book, the age of lost wholeness was too close to be the source of comfortable nostalgia. It was too close in time—the most assimilated German Jewish families were only a generation or two removed from the ghetto—and too close in space: Just over the German border to the east lay Poland and Russia, the Jewish heartland, where millions of Jews lived traditional lives and labored under bitter government persecution. The only way out, for these emancipated Jews, was forward. But if Jewishness was no longer an all-encompassing identity, no longer the name of a world, what could it be?

Batnitzky’s answer is given in her title. Judaism became a religion, she argues, when it stopped being a civic and political identity. Religion was the name of the shrunken sphere of life that Jewishness was allowed to occupy in the modern world. In particular, Batnitzky argues, German Jews began to think about Judaism in terms borrowed from Protestantism, as a private faith whose most important dimensions were emotional and ethical.

The problem, of course, is that this understanding of religion manifestly clashes with rabbinic Judaism as it had evolved over the centuries. Rabbinic Judaism, as expressed in the Talmud and many later commentaries and codes of law, was above all a religion of practice, of public and communal life. Every area of a Jewish life was regulated Jewishly, from sexual relations to diet to tort law. Yet these were exactly the things that, in the modern world, were meant to be governed by the nation-state and by a common, secular culture. How could Judaism’s all-encompassing legacy be squeezed into the small compartment designated for religion?

The first four chapters of How Judaism Became a Religion are devoted to the ways major German Jewish thinkers tried—and, in Batnitzky’s view, largely failed—to answer that question. She begins, inevitably, with Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-century philosopher who is remembered as the first modern Jew, in large part because he was accepted as an equal by Gentile thinkers such as Lessing and Kant. In his 1783 book Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, Mendelssohn, an Orthodox Jew, argued that—in Batnitzky’s words—“Judaism … is not concerned with power and therefore does not conflict with the possibility of the Jewish integration into the modern nation state.” Equally important, as Batnitzky writes of Mendelssohn’s case, Judaism does not possess a creed to which every believer must adhere, the way Christianity does. Instead, it possesses “divine legislation—laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life,” which the Jew can follow without prejudice to his citizenship in the German state.

There is, however, a fairly obvious contradiction between the two premises of Mendelssohn’s argument. If Judaism is a religion of legislation, of behavior rather than belief, how could it not conflict with the legislation and custom of the wider Christian society? Or, to put the question another way: What compels the Jew to keep practicing Jewish law, living a Jewish life, once the possibility of assimilation opens up? “Mendelssohn offers no philosophical or theological justification for why Jews should obey the [Jewish] law,” Batnitzky writes. Personally, he would find it possible to be at the same time an enlightened philosopher and an observant Jew; but all of his grandchildren would end up converting to Christianity.

Continue reading: Zionism arises

Inevitably, however, we tend to create a generic Holocaust narrative out of the tales we hear most often, and find most easy to identify with. As Americans, we respond to stories of assimilated Western European Jews who are gradually shut out of their country’s life, like that of the German diarist Victor Klemperer. As city dwellers, our imaginations are compelled by Anne Frank’s experience of hiding out in a crowded apartment, invisible in the multitude. And as members of an advanced industrial society, we are compelled by the image of the gas chamber, which writers since Hannah Arendt have made the central emblem of the Holocaust—the ultimate reduction of human life to inanimate matter.

All of these are truths about the Holocaust, but they are not the only truths. As many Jews died by simple shooting as in gas chambers; far more died in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe; millions were killed almost as soon as their towns and villages were occupied by the Germans, with no chance to hide out or adjust in any way to life under Nazism. Statistically speaking, the representative Holocaust story might not feature concentration camps or hiding places or repressive laws at all; it might simply be the story of waking up one morning to find German tanks in your street and a month later being shot and buried in a mass grave. It might sound like this:

People carry on, Vitya, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say whether that’s wise or foolish—it’s just the way people are. I do the same myself. There are two women here from a shtetl and they tell the same story as my friend did. The Germans are killing all the Jews in the district, children and old men included. The Germans and Ukrainian police drive up and recruit a few dozen men for field-work. These men are set to dig ditches and two or three days later the Jewish population is marched to these ditches and shot. Jewish burial mounds are rising up in all the villages round about. …

Our turn will come in a week or two, according to plan. But just imagine—I still go on seeing patients and saying, “Now bathe your eye regularly with the lotion and it will be better in two or three weeks.” I’m taking care of one old man whose cataract it will be possible to remove in six months or a year. … Meanwhile the Germans burst into people’s houses and steal; sentries amuse themselves by shooting children from behind the barbed wire; and more and more people confirm that any day now our fate will be decided.

This is the voice of Anna Semyonovna Shtrum, writing her last letter to her son Viktor, in Vasily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate. Anna’s letter takes up a whole chapter of the novel, and it haunts the 800-page book just as it haunts Viktor, a Soviet nuclear physicist who is one of its half-dozen main characters. Viktor lives in Moscow, which never fell to the German Army, so he and his family survive the war. If only Viktor had allowed his mother to come and live with him, she would have survived; but his wife, Lyudmila, didn’t get along with Anna, so she remained in Berdichev and died. It’s a situation Grossman could have invented out of sheer authorial sadism, in order to burden Viktor Shtrum with the maximum amount of guilt—except that it was Grossman’s own story. Grossman’s mother never had a chance to smuggle a letter out of Berdichev before she died, so the son invented one for her, setting down the grief and guilt that defined his postwar life:

But my fate is to end my life alone, never having shared it with you. Sometimes I’ve thought that I ought not to live far away from you, that I love you too much, that love gives me the right to be with you in my old age. And at other times I’ve thought that I ought not to live together with you, that I love you too much. Well, enfin, Always be happy with those you love, those around you, those who have become closer to you than your mother. Forgive me.

Continue reading: The Jewishness of Soviet citizens

“I had the whole picture,” Sondheim explained. “He’s a tired businessman on his way home to Westchester, and he thinks, I’m going to stop and see a musical. The curtain goes up and six ballet-dancing juvenile delinquents in color-coordinated sneakers go, ‘Da da-da da da,’ with their fingers snapping. And he thinks, ‘What—? My God!’ … I can’t blame him! But that’s when I knew my career was in trouble.”

Another kind of Broadway artist might have seen this as a warning; for Sondheim, it seems to have been a challenge. If that “tired businessman” found the Jets and Sharks too unconventional for a musical, just imagine what he and his descendants thought about the stories Sondheim would go on to bring to the stage in a career that has spanned almost 60 years. There have been shows about marital anguish and loneliness (Company, Follies), about artists who sell out (Merrily We Roll Along) and cut themselves off from love (Sunday in the Park With George). Then there are the evenings devoted to the opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures), presidential assassinations (Assassins), and serial murder and cannibalism (Sweeney Todd). It’s all a long way from “In your Easter bonnet/ With all the frills upon it.”

Yet this month, as Sondheim publishes the second volume of his lyrics—Look, I Made a Hat, with the subtitle Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes, and Miscellany—it comes as the latest crown on a career full of honors. The first volume of Sondheim’s lyrics, Finishing the Hat, was a best-seller and a cultural event when it appeared last year. (The titles come from a song in Sunday in the Park With George, in which George Seurat sings about the costs and pleasures of artistic invention—making a picture of a hat “where there never was a hat.”) His 1971 show Follies is currently back on Broadway, the latest in a string of successful Sondheim revivals. Next year, City Center’s Encores! series will produce Merrily We Roll Along, a legendary flop in 1981 that, like so many Sondheim scores, has steadily gained in popularity thanks to recordings. He has won seven Tonys, seven Grammys, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize.

No wonder that in 2010’s Sondheim on Sondheim—the latest of several revues drawn from his catalog of some 800 songs—Sondheim contributed a tongue-in-cheek number poking fun at his status as Broadway’s “God”:

God.
I mean the man’s a god.
Wrote the score to “Sweeney Todd,”
With a nod
To de Sade—
Well, he’s odd.
Well, he’s God!

It’s strange to think that a man so honored could remain a minority taste. Yet that is clearly the image of himself that Sondheim cherishes, and he insists on it in the two volumes of his lyrics, which double as a kind of self-portrait. In particular, he is obsessed by the longstanding charge that he is a cold artist, admirable but not lovable. As he goes on to say in “God”:

Smart!
The lyrics are so smart!
And the music has such heart!
It has heart?
Well, in part.
Let’s not start—
Call it art.

Arthur Laurents, the writer-director who worked with Sondheim on West Side Story and Gypsy, told Secrest, “I don’t think there’s any question that he is the greatest lyricist there’s ever been.” Leave it to such a lyricist to capture the whole dynamic of his career in a simple, even banal rhyme, “heart/art.” For the struggle Sondheim records in his collected lyrics is precisely the attempt to shift the musical from an affair of heart—naive beauty and emotion—to one of art—deliberate construction, in which every lyrical and musical choice serves the overarching theme.

Sondheim was not the first Broadway composer to make this shift. He refers often in his collected lyrics to the “Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution”—the attempt, starting with Oklahoma in 1943, to give the musical comedy the integrity of a play, by grounding the songs more deeply in plot and character. Musicals before Oklahoma—with the notable exception of Show Boat, which was also written by Oscar Hammerstein II—are almost never revived today; their songs may be standards, but their plots and characters were deliberately disposable. It is the decades after Oklahoma, the 1940s through the 1960s, that gave us virtually all the musicals now considered classics, from Carousel to Fiddler on the Roof.

Sondheim worked on two of these classics as the lyricist, West Side Story and Gypsy, and his lyrics for Gypsy are one of the high points in Broadway history. In Finishing the Hat, he remembers the time he played “Together Wherever We Go” for Cole Porter. When he reached the wonderful quadruple rhyme—

Wherever I go, I know he goes.
Wherever I go, I know she goes.
No fits, no fights, no feuds and no egos—
Amigos,
Together!

—he recalls that Porter gasped with pleasure and surprise at that unexpected fourth rhyme. “Any time I need an ego boost, I conjure up that gasp; it may well be the high point of my lyric-writing life,” Sondheim writes.

Continue reading: An artistic revolution

This kind of traumatic awakening comes to everyone, of course, but for a Jewish child learning about the Holocaust it comes early and in an especially personal form. In David Bezmozgis’ scandalous, compassionate story “An Animal to the Memory,” a Hebrew school student is punished for wrecking a display on Holocaust Remembrance Day; the story ends with the rabbi holding the child in a painful grip and shouting, “Now, maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.” Not since Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” has a writer so economically expressed the sense that initiation into Jewishness means the infliction of pain—a pain that can’t be rejected, like most parental impositions, as gratuitous or neurotic, but that history forces us to acknowledge is necessary and true.

To grow up into a world in which the Holocaust was possible is a difficult burden. No wonder, then, that readers have always been drawn to stories of children who grew up during the Holocaust itself. When it comes to exploitatively sentimental works like the movie Life Is Beautiful, the appeal of a child-centered story can seem cynical: The suffering of the innocent is a surefire way of delivering an emotional charge. But the most serious books about the Holocaust are also disproportionately about young people, from The Diary of Anne Frank to Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness to Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies. Even fraudulent memoirists like Benjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca pay a twisted tribute to the power of the genre by inventing Holocaust childhoods for themselves.

Two novels, above all, helped to establish the moral authority of the child’s perspective on the Holocaust. Night, by Elie Wiesel, was first published in France in 1958; seven years later, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird appeared in the United States. Both writers were child survivors of the Holocaust—Wiesel was deported at 15 from Romania to Auschwitz, while Kosinski, born in 1933, lived in hiding with his family in Nazi-occupied Poland. Both men drew on these early experiences in their books, producing works that were widely read as factual autobiographies, even though they were technically novels and employed clearly novelistic techniques.

Yet as Ruth Franklin points out in her superb recent study A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, the reputations of the two books, and of their authors, could not be more dramatically different today. Night marked the beginning of Wiesel’s long career as a public sage, a living reminder of the moral and political lessons of the Holocaust; in 1986, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Thanks in part to its brevity and simplicity of style, Night has been a staple of high-school reading lists for decades. In 2006, the book won a new generation of readers when it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, sitting atop the best-seller list for a year and a half.

Kosinski, on the other hand, fell dramatically from grace in the last decade of his life, dragging The Painted Bird down with him. Always a mysterious and theatrical man, he became embroiled in accusations that he had not lived the experiences in his book, despite his claims that “every incident is true.” What’s more, it began to be whispered that Kosinski had not even written his books, but employed teams of assistants to turn his Polish into stylish English prose. When Kosinski took his own life in 1991, it was seen less as a belated martyrdom—as in the case of another Holocaust writer, Primo Levi—than as the aftermath of scandal.

If someone handed you copies of Night and The Painted Bird and asked you to predict, strictly on the basis of reading them, which book’s author would end in sainthood and which in scandal, the answer would be all too easy. Wiesel’s book is lucid, convincing, heartbreaking, morally serious, and explicitly Jewish; Kosinski’s is shadowy, dreamlike, grossly exaggerated, bizarrely erotic, and leaves the Jewishness of its protagonist a standing mystery. Night, one might say, represents the superego of Holocaust fiction, while The Painted Bird is its roiling id. But this very difference is what makes it so revelatory to read the books side by side—and to discover how much they have in common as primers on a world defined by the Holocaust.

***

One of the chief ambitions of the modern novel was expressed by Stendhal, almost 200 years ago, in The Red and the Black: “A novel, gentlemen, is a mirror carried along a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure of the sky, sometimes the mire of the puddles on the road.” When he wrote this manifesto for realism, Stendhal was on the defensive; he was urging the reader who objected to his immoral story to blame not the novelist but the world he reflected, in which evil could flourish. When a survivor writes a novel about the Holocaust, however, the defense is no longer necessary: No one thinks to blame Wiesel or Kosinski for depicting the horrors they lived through. On the contrary, now it is the absolute, unblemished clarity of the mirror that becomes a moral imperative. The more detailed and unstylized picture a Holocaust novel presents, the more likely we are to trust it.

Yet this is how the critic Clement Greenberg responded to Chagall’s Crucifixions: “A new yellow plays a role, along with more ambitious or more surrealist subject matter—crucifixions and monsters. … Chagall’s two or three new major efforts—major in size and pretension—abound in patches of interesting painting, but none is fused into a complete and organic work of art.” The chilly insistence on formal analysis (“a new yellow”) and the brisk rebuke to the Crucifixion imagery—which can be admitted, at most, as an example of surrealism—reads as a complete evasion of the specifically Jewish challenge of these pictures.

It begins to seem a little suspicious, even neurotic, that Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg—two leading 20th-century American art critics whose Jewishness played a central role in their public and private identity—set their faces so completely against the very idea of a modern Jewish art. In 1966, Rosenberg attempted to tackle the relationship between Judaism and visual art head-on in a lecture at New York’s Jewish Museum titled “Is There a Jewish Art?” As he recognized, it was a funny question to ask in that venue: “First they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art! Jews!” He went on: “As to the question itself, there is a Gentile answer and a Jewish answer. The Gentile answer is: Yes, there is a Jewish art, and No, there is no Jewish art. The Jewish answer is: What do you mean by Jewish art?” Was it any art produced by Jews, or fine art with Jewish subject matter, or strictly “Judaica”—Jewish ceremonial objects like rimonim and kiddush cups?

Such questions are very familiar in modern Jewish cultural debates; they are regularly asked, for instance, about Jewish writers. No Jewish reference ever appears in the fiction of Franz Kafka, and it would be entirely possible to read and admire his work without knowing anything about his Jewishness. But as soon as you do know something about Kafka’s life and times, it becomes impossible not to understand his themes—alienation, miscommunication, the perversion of law—as expressions of a particular moment in modern Jewish history. That is why most readers would agree that Kafka is a Jewish writer, while insisting that Jewishness does not explain or exhaust his genius—just as calling Flaubert a French writer is the beginning, not the end, of appreciating him.

With the visual arts, however, things are even more ambiguous. While no one would doubt the existence of Jewish literature, the very phrase “Jewish Art” is still contested—even, ironically enough, in the pages of Jewish Art. Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver, the authors, acknowledge in their introduction that, almost half a century after Rosenberg, “no sole definition of Jewish art has universal applicability.” They begin by inviting the reader to “consider two paintings” of haystacks, one by Camille Pissarro, who was Jewish, and one by Claude Monet, who was not. In his lifetime, Pissarro was “often singled out as a ‘Jewish artist,’ ” above all during the Dreyfus Affair, when many of his fellow-Impressionists revealed themselves as anti-Semites. Yet simply by looking at their canvases, Baskind and Silver ask, “can we determine what distinguishes Pissarro’s painting [from Monet’s] as an example of ‘Jewish art?’ ”

In practice, Jewish Art relies on a less abstract criterion: If an artist is Jewish, he finds a place in the volume, regardless of technique or subject matter. Pissarro, for instance, is represented by a cityscape, Place du Theatre Francais: Rain Effect, an urban variation on the Impressionist haystack, which is equally inexpressive of the artist’s religious background. Many other 19th-century Jewish artists, however, were drawn to explicitly Jewish subject matter. Emancipated from the traditional Jewish past yet not quite integrated into the promised secular future, such painters turned to Jewish subjects in a spirit that was both anthropological and apologetic.

Alphonse Lévy (1843-1918) painted the Jews of Alsace, presenting figures “clad in their distinctive ethnic garb, uncompromised by urban modernity in the capital, and busy with activities of prayer or holiday preparations.” Jewish Art includes his 1883 picture Evening Prayer, which shows a middle-aged married couple standing on their balcony: The man davens, holding a book and candle, as the woman directs a slightly insipid smile to the viewer. To Baskind and Silver, “their faces display exaggerated features, which in the hands of a non-Jewish artist might well be described as caricatural,” but in reproduction at least this is hard to see. Lévy seems to be trying, rather, for an effect of frank, unintellectual good-nature, such as we would find charming in 17th-century pictures of Flemish peasants.

If there is an element of domestic exoticism in this canvas, it is nothing compared to the full-blown Orientalism of pictures like The Mother of Moses by Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) or Jesus Preaching at Capernaum by the Polish Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879). As an Eastern European Jew—a native of Drohobycz, like the writer-painter Bruno Schultz—Gottlieb faced an even tougher path to acceptance than French or German Jewish artists did. By depicting Jesus in a synagogue—he stands before an unrolled Torah, wearing a tallis—Gottlieb tries to reinstate Christ in Jewish history, and thus heal the breach between Polish Catholic and Jewish traditions. Baskind and Silver quote his heartfelt plea: “How deeply I wish to eradicate all the prejudices against my people! How avidly I desire to uproot the hatred enveloping the oppressed and tormented nation and to bring peace between the Poles and the Jews, for the history of both people is a chronicle of grief and anguish!”

It is tempting to say that Judaism has always been a religion of stories. After all, what stories are more familiar or beloved than the ones in the Hebrew Bible: Adam and Eve, the binding of Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, Daniel in the lion’s den? These stories are certainly Judaism’s greatest legacy to the world; adopted by Christianity, they have been told in every language, not to mention painted, acted, and set to music. Even in a post-biblical culture like our own, they remain the closest things we have to universal myths.

Yet the truth is that for most of the history of Judaism it would have been an insult to reduce the religion to its narratives. Until the destruction of the Second Temple, in the first century C.E., cultic worship and sacrifice were the heart of Judaism. After that trauma, for the next 1,800 years, it was the interpretation and practice of law that defined a Jewish life. It is only in the modern, secular world that narrative, the simple fact of storytelling, could be considered the supreme human method for making meaning, including Jewish meaning.

That is because, for modern people of all faiths, stories are often the only part of religious heritage that still seems valid. We no longer believe in laws dictated from heaven, or even in heaven itself; but we allow ourselves to feel that ancient religious stories have a numinous power, if only as a residue of the faith that so many generations invested in them. For many Jews today, reading biblical stories, or retelling them on Passover or Hanukkah, is the only part of Jewish tradition that still seems available, or necessary.

This new focus on story as the heart of Jewish experience can be dated to the beginning of the 20th century. Chaim Nachman Bialik mined the Talmud for its legends and tales and published them as Sefer Ha-Aggadah in 1911; Louis Ginzberg’s even more broadly based collection of midrashic tales, The Legends of the Jews, began to appear in 1909; Martin Buber performed a similar task for Hasidic stories, publishing Legend of the Baal-Shem in 1908. All these works reflected a growing tendency to divorce law from literature, halakhah from aggadah, in keeping with the positivist spirit of the 20th century.

Despite his contribution to this movement, Bialik, in a landmark essay called “Halakhah and Aggadah in Jewish History,” expressed a fear that aggadah—the inner, spiritual, narrative legacy of Judaism—could not survive in the world without halakhah—the outer, material, legal practice of Judaism. Depending on how you look at it, this fear has either been justified or refuted by the course of Jewish life in the post-Holocaust world. There’s no denying that rabbinic Judaism as it was lived for 18 centuries is no longer part of the lives of the large majority of Jews. Yet this secularizing process is not peculiar to Judaism: The vast majority of Western Christians, too, no longer lead lives as defined by ritual practice as they were two or 10 centuries ago.

To the extent that there is a Jewish culture or identity that cuts across national boundaries, it is defined largely by storytelling. Just as many Jews now consider scripture to be what Wallace Stevens called a “supreme fiction,” so fiction has become our contemporary scripture—a body of texts that creates Jewishness in a post-religious age. When we read the major Jewish writers of the last 60 years, we inevitably think about what they have in common and what we have in common with them, as Jews and interpreters of Jewish experience.

These are the questions I will explore in this space over the next year, in a monthly series on postwar Jewish fiction. Some of the writers I will discuss are well-known to American Jewish readers—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick—while others may be new discoveries—France’s Romain Gary (born Roman Katsav), Brazil’s Moacyr Scliar. They write in a half a dozen languages (though I am reading them in English), and they occupy every point on the spectrum of Jewish identification. By reading them together, it may be possible to get a new sense—less authoritative but more intimate than those offered by politics and religion—of what it means to belong to the Jewish people today.

***

In the postwar world, it has hardly been possible to think about that question without thinking about Zionism and the State of Israel. In fact, if you wanted to name the most influential Jewish novel of the last 65 years, a good case could be made for picking Leon Uris’ pulp epic about the founding of the Jewish State, Exodus. Published in 1958, it has sold 7 million copies in the United States alone, and the movie version has reached millions more around the world. Samizdat copies of Exodus helped inspire the first refuseniks with the dream of going to Israel. That was exactly the kind of reaction Uris must have hoped for. As David Ben-Gurion put it when the book came out, “As a literary work it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.”

Uris engineers the book according to familiar Hollywood formulas, in particular the formula of the Western. Ari Ben Canaan, the novel’s hero, is a classic cowboy—ultra-masculine, brave, and taciturn, he defends civilization without quite joining it. To be complete he needs the love of a good woman—in this case, Kitty Fremont, an American Gentile who gets caught up in the Zionist movement largely out of unadmitted love (and lust) for Ari. And of course in a Western there must be Indians, the savage enemies of civilization. This role is played in Exodus by the Arabs, and the novel is never more propagandistic than in its unapologetically hostile caricature of “the Arab world”: “unspeakable disease, illiteracy, and poverty were universal. There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. It was a constant struggle to survive. In this atmosphere cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.” The message Uris wanted the American reader to take from the book is unmistakable. Kitty Fremont states it on the last page: “Israel stands with its back to the wall. It has always stood that way and it always will … with savages trying to destroy you.”

But it would be too easy to say that the message, or the battles and love scenes, is what explains the success of Exodus. In fact, Uris, like Dan Brown today, is so popular because he delivers something like an education—or at least, great heaps of more or less accurate historical information. In Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s the history of Christianity and the Catholic Church; in Exodus, it’s the history of Eastern European Jewry, from the rise of Zionism in the 1880s through the Holocaust and the birth of Israel in the 1940s. And reading Exodus is not the worst way to get an introduction to this period. It teaches the reader about Bilu and Hovevei Zion and kibbutzim and the Haganah—and about the Nuremberg Laws and the Warsaw Ghetto and the postwar DP camps. This is one of the most fascinating and tragic periods in modern history, and millions of people, including many Jews, got their first introduction to it from Leon Uris.

The problem with Uris’ history is not inaccuracy, though of course there are errors. It is that he can find in all of it only a single meaning: the importance of Jewish toughness. This is not a value to be scorned, and it is true that it inspired much of the urgency and success of the Zionist movement. But with Uris, it becomes something monomaniacal and amoral—an obsession with proving that Jews can and will use violence. Take the scene where the young Ari, having been robbed by Arabs, is instructed by his father Barak in the use of a bull whip, Indiana Jones-style. “The son of Barak Ben Canaan is a free man! He shall never be a ghetto Jew,” he bellows.

Yet the very fact that I felt a certain relief at the omission of Jews from the list, as well as a certain disappointment, forces me to acknowledge that things are not that simple when it comes to Jews and Sept. 11. We insist on separating the two terms so strictly, perhaps, because so many enemies of the Jews have insisted on linking them in false and dangerous ways. For instance, there is the notorious lie that no Jews died in the World Trade Center, because the 4,000 Jews—or, depending on how the rumor is phrased, 4,000 Israelis—who worked there were warned to stay home. (The origin of this rumor, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, seems to be a Jerusalem Post article that reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had received inquiries from the relatives of 4,000 Israelis believed to be in New York City on Sept. 11.) After the attacks, this idea gained traction on the far right and far left, with everyone from David Duke to Amiri Baraka, and it remains disturbingly current in the Muslim world. Eventually the U.S. State Department had to issue a rebuttal pointing out that, in fact, somewhere between 200 to 400 of the ground zero victims were Jewish, in keeping with the proportion of Jews in the local population.

On the one hand, this anti-Semitic rumor is meant to deny Jews a part in the national mourning over Sept. 11, to suggest that they had not suffered their share. In this sense, it is like the (false) allegations of German anti-Semites that Jews had not served in the army in World War I. On the other hand, of course, the accusation of Jewish absence is really supposed to be a proof of Jewish presence: If Jews stayed home on Sept. 11, it must be because other Jews knew what was coming and warned them.

Thus, anti-Semitic rumors suggest that the Mossad brought down the twin towers, either because the real hijackers could not have possessed the technical ability to do so, or because Israel was the real beneficiary of the War on Terror. (A strange kind of benefit, one might think, looking at the history of Israel over the last 10 years.) The power of the slander lies not in its plausibility but in the diabolical way it confounds rebuttal. If Jews are accused of staying home on Sept. 11, they can point to the State Department for a defense; but then the anti-Semite’s question becomes, why is the American government so solicitous of Jewish honor? Is it not because, in the words of one fringe anti-Semite quoted in the ADL report, “our government has for decades been used to further the interests of Israel at the expense of the interests of the American people”?

Some lowlife rabble-rouser said that, but in the years since Sept. 11, an increasing number of respectable people have been saying things close enough to it. Thanks to Stephen Walt (of Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (of the University of Chicago), the phrase “Israel Lobby,” often enough translated into “Jewish Lobby,” has become almost as commonplace in American leftist discourse as the phrase “Jewish syndicate” was among the French right during the Dreyfus Affair. Think of how common it was, five or six years ago, to hear opponents of the Iraq War reel off the names of the so-called neoconservatives whose fault it allegedly was—always Jewish names like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith. Remember the bizarre ingenuity that traced the invasion of Iraq to the teachings of a long-dead Jewish mastermind, Leo Strauss.

In this way, the anti-neoconservative rhetoric of the post-Sept. 11 left managed to do for Osama Bin Laden what he could never have achieved on his own. It gave currency and respectability to his belief that events in general, and American policy in particular, can be explained only by reference to Jewish power. This idea is pervasive in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, a book that is necessary to read in the same way that Mein Kampf was once necessary.

Take, for instance, Bin Laden’s statement of Oct. 6, 2002, titled “To the Americans.” “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” he begins, and the first of dozens of enumerated reasons is “You attacked us in Palestine.” In this “you,” the distinction between America, Israel, and the Jews ceases to exist, a point that becomes explicit later on: “[T]he creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.” Later, in the course of explaining why America is “the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind,” Bin Laden explains that “the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.”

The only proper response to this kind of evil fantasy is to ignore it; yet for American Jews, it was hard to ignore. For the insidious power of this discourse was the way it made American Jews self-conscious about something that should, by rights, have been a source of pride: the identity of American and Jewish interests and values in the post-Sept. 11 age (which is not the same thing as the identity of American and Israeli policies). One reaction, perhaps the first reaction, to hearing Bin Laden’s rhetoric—or its echoes in the words of Walt and Mearsheimer, or Helen Thomas—is to deny its poisonous premise that “the Jews” are running America or America is serving “the Jews.” That denial is true, of course. But it leaves those who insist on it looking, and feeling, scared. It places American Jews in the paradoxical position of denying their own patriotism and belittling their own power.

***

A better response emerges in one of the defining books of the post-Sept. 11 period, Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. What Berman shows, in his analysis of the intellectual genealogy of al-Qaida, is that there’s a good reason why the Jews should occupy a central position in the fight between America and what he called Islamism or Muslim totalitarianism—and not because this is a fight about or against Jewish power. Rather, as in Europe in the 1930s, the fate of the Jews is a bellwether for the fate of liberalism—a social order founded on individual rights, secularism, private property, and the rule of law. Since the first, partial emancipation of European Jews in the French Revolution, Jews have thrived in liberal societies and suffered in illiberal ones. This makes perfect sense when you consider that the Jews, as a tiny and historically persecuted minority in the Christian world, could succeed only to the extent that they were allowed to live as free individuals, in a free society.

Historically, then, the fate of the Jews is tied to the fate of liberalism; and after Sept. 11, Berman showed, the greatest threat to liberal values came from Islamic fundamentalists, who spoke about Jews in terms borrowed from European fascists. Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, blamed Islam’s problems on Marx and Freud: “[T]he atheistic, materialistic doctrine in our world was advocated by a Jew, and the permissive doctrine which is sometimes called ‘the sexual revolution’ was advocated by a Jew. Indeed, most evil theories which try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind are advocated by Jews.” This, as Berman points out, is not theological anti-Judaism (though Qutb voiced that variety as well) but the kind of anti-modern anti-Semitism that identifies the Jew with social dissolution and rootless individualism. But these are the very same things that, when considered as values rather than vices, we think of as essentially American: freedom of the individual, free thought, pluralism.

Wendy Wasserstein may not belong in the ranks of the greatest American Jewish writers, but like Neil Simon before her, she helped popularize the Jewish family romance by making it a subject for heartfelt and accessible comedy. And whether the characters in her plays are explicitly Jewish, as in The Sisters Rosensweig, or atmospherically so, like the heroine of her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein left no doubt that it was her personal experience she was dramatizing.

Indeed, as Julie Salamon makes clear in Wendy and the Lost Boys (The Penguin Press, $29.95), her rather breathless new biography, Wasserstein was her own most popular creation. Fans reacted to her more like a character in a play or TV show than a mere playwright. “When we walked up the street,” remembered her friend William Finn, the songwriter best known for Falsettos, “all these sixty-five-year-old Jewish ladies would come up to Wendy, and she would talk to them. They’d talk about their husbands and their daughters, and when they left, I’d ask her who was that, and she’d say, ‘I have no idea.’ … People embraced her as if she were going to explain their lives to them.”

The key to Wasserstein’s appeal, however, was not that she had all the answers. Her gift was for tormented ambivalence—about daughterhood and motherhood, feminism, romance, achievement, and not least, body image. It’s rare, and illuminating, to read a literary biography in which so much attention is paid to the subject’s weight. It would never happen with a male writer, and that very fact helps to explain why Wasserstein’s open discussion of weight and food and dieting struck such a chord.

As Salamon shows, Wasserstein was not above using her candor strategically. In 1988, the actress Caroline Aaron, who had played a major part in the out-of-town tryout of The Heidi Chronicles, was replaced for the New York run. Salamon reproduces Wasserstein’s apologetic letter to Aaron, which begins, “Oy Gavalt!! I’ve had a baguette, a Saga Blue Cheese, and a nice bag of Reese pieces before I sat down to write this note.” It was a ritual abasement—a confession of weakness and a plea for sympathy—and it worked: “After reading Wendy’s words, Caroline Aaron had no doubt that she and Wendy would become even better friends.”

This is one of the useful and revealing anecdotes in Wendy and the Lost Boys, showing how Wasserstein could use weakness as a form of power. (There are many others that are much less useful—Salamon often seems to have put in everything her interviewees told her, and there were clearly a lot of people eager to talk about Wendy Wasserstein.) Even the book’s cover makes the point: It features a photograph of a ruefully smiling Wasserstein with her eyes closed and her palm planted on her face, as if she had just made some comical blunder. A born theater person, she had a sure instinct for dramatizing her incompetence: “Sometimes she forgot to wear a sanitary pad when she had her period and then walked around with stains on her dress,” Salamon writes.

Salamon tells us enough about Wasserstein’s childhood to make clear that her performance of helplessness was, at bottom, a defense mechanism. It may not be literally true that, when she won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, her mother Lola went around bragging that her daughter had gotten the Nobel—this is one of many too-good-to-check stories that Wasserstein told in several versions (like the one about the time Joseph Heller introduced her as “the funniest girl in New York” and she promptly vomited). But Lola does seem to have been a world-class neurosis-inducer, a mother who set the bar for her children so high that even a Pulitzer seemed like a B-plus. She was also largely to blame for her daughter’s lifelong weight issues: In a horrifying detail, Salamon writes that Lola would walk down the street with the teenaged Wendy and tell her, “They are all looking at you and thinking, ‘Look at that fat girl.’ ”

From one point of view, this technique worked, since the Wasserstein children grew up to be very high achievers. Sandra became a pioneering female corporate executive, Bruce became a Wall Street billionaire, and Wendy became Wendy. (A third sister, Georgette, led a more normal life as a mother and innkeeper in New England.) Lola went around the house singing “There’s no children like my children,” to the tune of “There’s No Business Like Show Business”—one of many Mama Rose-like details in Salamon’s portrait—and she might well have felt justified. When Bruce was born on December 25, it was the set-up for a lifelong joke: “Bruce and Jesus Christ—the Messiahs, holy Jewish sons—shared a birthday.”

But this tiger-mothering (or is a more passive-aggressive animal called for?) exacted a high price. Its most dramatic casualty, Salamon writes, was Abner Wasserstein, who was born in 1940 and began to suffer from seizures and mental retardation at the age of 5. By the time Wendy was born, in 1950, Abner had been sent to a “home,” and she grew up unaware of his existence. She was also unaware that her older sister, Sandra, was actually Lola’s child by her first husband, George—the brother of her own father Morris. Parents of that generation believed in keeping secrets more than we do today, but by any standard, Wendy Wasserstein grew up in a family with a problematic relationship to the truth. And that’s not counting the more innocent, eccentric lies Lola indulged in—like cutting the line at Radio City Music Hall by telling people she was visiting from out of town.

It was all perfect training for a playwright, and Salamon shows that Wasserstein never stopped writing about, or mythologizing, her parents and siblings. In 1973, her early play Any Woman Can’t (already a characteristic title) dissected her brother Bruce’s marriage—so successfully that, after seeing it, his wife, Lynne, filed for divorce. Twenty-seven years later, Old Money was a thinly veiled commentary on Bruce’s plutocratic milieu and his relationship with his son. And the three sisters Rosensweig are clearly versions of Sandra, Georgette, and Wendy Wasserstein—the corporate conquistador, the homemaker, and the commitmentphobe.

The most intimate sections of Wendy and the Lost Boys show how Wasserstein’s ambivalence about romantic commitment played out in real life. The title refers, of course, to Peter Pan—Wasserstein was “one among the many babies [in the Baby Boom years] named for Peter’s beloved friend Wendy Darling”—and the “lost boys” in question are the gay men with whom Wasserstein had her closest relationships. The allusion is in poor taste and sets an unfortunately whimsical tone for a story that is actually quite sad.

Wasserstein repeatedly fell in love with openly gay men she met in the theater world, a distinguished list that included Christopher Durang, Andre Bishop, Terrence McNally, and Nicholas Hytner. In each case friendship turned into a quasi-romantic, quasi-sexual bond: “Wendy always tried to say, ‘Oh, let’s get married, let’s have children, and be sort of lovey-dovey,’ said Andre [Bishop]. I think she thought, ‘At some point he’ll marry me and we’ll have a strange but happy relationship.’ I thought it too. Seriously. I had nothing else in my life.” But inevitably, these relationships foundered on the bedrock of sexual incompatibility, and the men found love with other men—as happens to Pfeni, the Wendy figure in The Sisters Rosensweig.

Salamon doesn’t venture a direct psychological explanation for all this, but after reading her portrait of Wendy Wasserstein, it isn’t hard to imagine one. Convinced of her unattractiveness, still under the sway of her parents and siblings, Wasserstein shielded herself from romantic intimacy by falling in love with men she knew would not respond to her sexually. Not until the very last minute, at age 48, did she become a mother through artificial insemination, keeping the identity of her child’s father a closely guarded secret. Salamon does not reveal it, but she does show that Wasserstein tried for a long time to have a baby with the costume designer William Ivey Long—a failed effort that ended in bad feelings. “I don’t feel defined by being gay,” Long told Salamon. “Michelangelo wasn’t a gay artist. I have never felt I am a gay designer. But with Wendy I felt I was part of a big group of gay men, part of the people who had disappointed her. I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t you go after straight men if we were going to fail you as a group?’ ”

It is an unusually candid moment in this usually fulsome biography, and it hints at the deep tensions in Wasserstein’s glitzy circle of friends. After reading Wendy and the Lost Boys, it’s easy to feel that the best play about her life has yet to be written—and that it wouldn’t be a comedy.

But in The Vices, Douglas has something more intriguing and unexpected in store for his narrator. The void in his life is filled by his friendship with Oliver Vice, a brilliant, wealthy, well-connected young philosopher on the faculty of Harkness College (a thinly veiled version of Amherst, where Douglas teaches). Vice is descended from English nobility on his father’s side—he displays coasters with his family crest, which dates “all the way back to some prince born in Sussex in 1327”—and from Hungarian nobility on his mother’s. Through his stepfather, a lighting designer for rock concerts, he knows a whole other kind of royalty—the Rolling Stones are family friends, and he loves to brag about beating “Keith” in ping-pong when he was 8 years old. And Vice takes full advantage of the aristocrat’s license to misbehave. He is rude, distracted, imperious, eccentric, in ways that only make him more fascinatingly elusive: “He never greeted me when our paths crossed,” the narrator notes, “he would stare intently, his eyes wide in an expression of detached superciliousness.”

Death only makes Oliver Vice more fascinating. The first thing we learn about him, on the first page of the novel, is that Vice apparently committed suicide by leaping from the deck of the Queen Mary 2 during an Atlantic crossing. Such a dramatic, mysterious end seals Oliver’s legend in the narrator’s mind and drives him to write a book about his friend—the book that is The Vices. “Oliver’s suffering had volume and depth,” the narrator thinks, “it was large, relevant, and ramifying.”

This makes it supremely different from his own suffering, which he sees as “merely suburban, Jewish, and neurotic. I knew the latter world intimately, I came from it, had written a novel about it, and would never fully escape its orbit.” In a nicely satiric touch, the narrator’s autobiographical novel is titled Exit 33, after his hometown’s exit on the Long Island Expressway. No wonder that on his first day at Harkness, a “colleague made it abundantly clear that she considered my suburban Jewish novel … a contribution to an exhausted and clichéd form.”

By falling in love with Oliver Vice, with a passion that is less erotic than imaginative, the novelist gives himself access to a new world and a new subject. “I didn’t turn to Oliver because I needed fresh material,” he writes, but “I’d come to think of Oliver’s as a family whose story had to be told.” Yet by becoming Oliver’s chronicler, he implicitly accepts the role of wide-eyed arriviste in the Vices’ gilded world—a role with humiliations that are sure to breed resentment. This dynamic makes the friendship at the center of The Vices reminiscent of thrillers like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, in which the tensions of such cross-class friendships finally erupt in obsession, betrayal, and violence.

That kind of uncanny atmosphere is present in one of Douglas’ best scenes, when the narrator and his new wife, Melissa, visit Oliver’s family home for Christmas. They have already been told that Oliver’s mother, the regal Francizka, is a “latent anti-Semite. The family surrounds themselves with Jews and secretly hates them all,” Oliver’s Jewish girlfriend Sophia warns. (When Oliver calls Sophia by the nickname “Soap,” it’s impossible to dismiss the feeling that it’s not just an abbreviation but some sort of obscene Holocaust reference.) The magnificence of the Vice apartment puts the narrator on the defensive: “Paintings hung on the walls one atop the other, salon style. … There was a tasseled dinner bell of bronze enameled in lapis with a design of dragons, and another with a pattern of warriors riding costumed elephants. Manhattan must have had hundreds, maybe thousands, of such apartments, but for me, the son of Long Island, it was something new, intimidating in its casual opulence and suggestive of self-sustaining and inexhaustible wealth.”

But the family turns out to be as uncanny as it is rich. Bartholomew, Oliver’s twin brother, is physically massive, clearly disturbed—he sports a Hitler mustache, seemingly unaware of how people will react—and incestuously close to his mother. Francizka herself is a horror, reacting icily when Melissa sets aside the pork in her dinner—“it’s like listening to an orchestra without the violins, a waste”—and hurling a present she dislikes in the trash. Later that night, the narrator finds his own gift, a copy of his novel, has also been thrown away by Oliver, who explains: “The scene where the protagonist gags on a pubic hair during oral sex—I can’t have my mother read that. It would completely disgust her.”

This fastidiousness is odd, and the more the narrator learns about Oliver’s sex life, the more suspicious it becomes. He is a regular visitor to S&M clubs and surprises the narrator by taking him to an establishment called The Leash, where Oliver ends up demonstratively masturbating in front of him. It is a moment of seduction and a ritual humiliation: “I rebelled against my assigned role, the chronicler, the witness,” the narrator says. By the time he finds Oliver in an ambiguous embrace with Melissa, the betrayal seems foreordained, just another exercise of Oliver’s droit de seigneur.

At first, the reader may suspect that all these dark mysteries suit someone named Oliver Vice a little too well: Isn’t there something too perfect about that portentous, Nabokovian name? And doesn’t Vice seem too obviously modeled on Ludwig Wittgenstein, another rich, eccentric philosopher? Vice always eats lunch at the same bad Chinese restaurant, he explains, because Wittgenstein always ate at the same bad coffee shop: “He told the waiter, ‘I don’t care what you serve me, as long as it’s always the same thing.’ ” Even Vice’s philosophical work, an aphoristic treatise called Paradoxes of Self, takes the form of variations on Wittgenstein’s themes: the unknowability of the inner self, the impossibility of getting behind language to reach a truer reality.

Soon enough, however, the reader begins to understand that these are not blunders on Douglas’ part, but deliberate clues. Could it be that the reason Vice seems clumsily invented is that he has, in fact, invented himself, and that in fundamental ways he has more in common with the narrator than he imagines? The first hint comes at the ill-starred Christmas party, where Melissa compounds her social disgrace by breaking a dinner spoon that is a priceless antique. To atone, she takes the spoon home and sends it to a fine-art restorer—only to be told that it is actually a cheap imitation.

Soon the narrator begins to wonder about the famous paintings on the Vices’ walls. Victor Vice, Francizka’s first husband and Oliver’s biological father, was an art dealer in postwar Europe: Did he make his fortune by dealing in paintings stolen from murdered Jews? Is that why Francizka seems to be fudging the truth about her own past, claiming to have lost her family in a World War II bombing raid when—as the narrator discovers on a trip to Budapest—the building they lived in was never bombed at all? And is the latter-day fall of the Vices—Oliver’s suicide, Bartholomew’s madness, the scandal that eventually envelops Francizka—a kind of karmic retribution for their making a fortune from the Holocaust? (“I can see no difference between a belief in poetic justice and a belief in God,” Oliver complains. “If anything, the belief in poetic justice is more insupportable.”)

Without giving away Douglas’ surprises, it’s fair to say that the Vices’ history turns out to be rather less exotic than the narrator believes—and for that very reason, all the more fascinating. In one of Douglas’ many purposeful allusions, Oliver muses at one point about Nabokov’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “Certainly the main character might be no more than an invention of the narrator. But imagine a book that does the reverse, in which the narrator turns out to be the invention of the main character. … Now that would be truly remarkable.” In its deft exploration of the way identity, especially Jewish identity, is constructed and performed, The Vices does justice to its elegant Nabokovian inspiration.

Lucas is right, of course. In the 1950s, getting the scoop on someone like Noel Field, an American Communist who played a leading role in the Stalinist show trials in postwar Czechoslovakia, would have made a journalist’s career and maybe even changed world history. Fifty years later, Field’s name is known only to a handful of academics and ideologues—the same tiny but committed group who continue to debate the guilt of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.

For the same reason, the potency of cutting-edge, politically informed spy fiction tends to weaken over time. John Buchan’s novels about Anglo-German rivalry before World War I, or John le Carré’s Smiley tales, were read on first publication as bulletins from the front of an ongoing battle; today, they offer the quainter pleasures of genre fiction. Stone’s gamble in Damascus Gate was that a spy novel set in Jerusalem would be different. That is because, as many characters in the book have occasion to muse, Jerusalem itself is different. “Other cities had antiquities,” Stone writes, “but the monuments of Jerusalem did not belong to the past. They were of the moment and even the future.” The rivalry between the United States and the USSR lasted 44 years, but the contest between Jews, Christians, and Muslims for physical and spiritual ownership of Jerusalem is still going strong after millennia.

It stands to reason, then, that the new paperback edition of Damascus Gate (Mariner, $15.95) should be as timely as the original. In fact, the identity of past and present is the key doctrine of the religious cult at the novel’s heart. The leader of this cult is Adam de Kuff, a middle-aged American Jew turned spiritual seeker, who we first see waiting in a psychiatrist’s office. He is, Stone makes clear, a schizophrenic and manic-depressive, prey to the delusion that he is the Messiah. Such delusions are common enough in Jerusalem; indeed, the novel opens with Lucas encountering a deranged German tourist in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

What sets de Kuff above such garden-variety lunatics—in Arabic, Stone writes, they are called majnoon—is his partnership with Raziel Melker. Melker, who was born Ralph, is another American Jewish seeker, the son of a congressman who has been by turns a yeshiva student, a jazz musician, a drug addict, and a Sufi master. Stone leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether Melker actually believes that de Kuff is the Messiah or is just preying on a madman for his own hidden purposes, or some combination of both.

In any case, Raziel acts as the Saint Paul to de Kuff’s Jesus, building a cult around him and formulating a new, syncretic theology. “They talked about Zen and Theravada and the Holy Ghost, the bodhisattvas, the sefirot and the Trinity, Pico della Mirandola, Teresa of Avila,” and on and on, Stone writes, in a passage whose bop Ginsbergian rhythms remind us that he is essentially a product of the 1960s. (“You’re one crazy mixed-up chick, baby,” Raziel says at one point.) And there is a genial ’60s-ish eclecticism, not to say fogginess, about the de Kuff cult. He declares himself to be at once the Jewish Moshiach, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Muslim Mahdi: “So as the Almighty is One, so also are the believers,” he explains. The cult’s emblem is the ourobouros, the Greek image of a serpent swallowing its tail: It is meant to symbolize the unity of all times and all ways of worshiping God.

It was on the road to Damascus, of course, that Saul had the epiphany that led him to embrace Christianity and change his name to Paul. The title of Damascus Gate alludes to that conversion, and one of the novel’s main themes is appeal of faith to the nonbeliever. Christopher Lucas, as a journalist, an American, and an earnest liberal, holds himself immune to the blind faiths and sectarian loyalties that determine Jerusalem’s history. (“In the United States people are what they choose to be,” says a minor character in the novel. “It’s not that way here, unfortunately.”) Yet Lucas is also half-Jewish, and he was sent to Catholic school by his mother; the impulse to believe is vestigial in him, and the de Kuff cult makes him at least nostalgic for faith. “He could not resist the little flutter of mindless hope,” Stone writes. “In what? In nothing he could remotely conceive.” On a more worldly level, he is drawn to the cult by his passion for Sonia Barnes, a half-black, half-Jewish jazz singer who succumbs to Raziel’s persuasion.

But if Lucas can’t bring himself to believe, he is surrounded by people who are dangerously convinced. Like a detective in a film noir, he gradually unearths an ever-ramifying conspiracy: a plot to blow up the Temple Mount, in order to clear the way for the construction of the Third Temple. It becomes clear that Raziel has set up Adam de Kuff as the fall guy for this plot, whose real movers are a combination of hard-right Jewish settlers and messianic American Christians. Along the way, Stone spins a dense web of connections and betrayals: Lucas encounters a gun-running Irish NGO worker, and a Palestinian Communist doctor, and a fascistic British archeologist, and a close-mouthed American diplomat, and many more. In the novel’s frenetic last hundred pages, Lucas and a handful of other characters race to a chamber under the Temple Mount, where some are planning to detonate a bomb and others hope to stop it—and it remains unclear, until the very end, exactly who is on which side.

Damascus Gate’s combination of abstruse theological speculation (Stone clearly researched the Kabbalah) and screen-ready action sequences won it a lot of praise when it appeared in 1998. Taken together, they made the novel a good match for its pre-millennial moment, when old fears about the end of the world were taking new forms, and readers responded in kind: To Annie Dillard, for instance, Damascus Gate was “a narrative of good and evil written in letters of fire.”

Certainly no one could say that Jerusalem has calmed down in the last 13 years, or that the religious passions in the city have stopped being explosive. Indeed, just two years after Damascus Gate appeared, Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount helped to set off the so-called “al-Aqsa Intifada,” named after the mosque that Stone’s fictional terrorists hoped to blow up.

Yet that event also helps to show how Damascus Gate misunderstands the very passions it means to analyze. To Stone, the danger of religion is that it is apocalyptic: At the core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he argues, is a belief that the world as we know it will someday end, to be replaced by something infinitely better. The most religious people, in Stone’s novel, are those who take this promise seriously and try to hasten the Messiah’s arrival. “We change, we fail,” Raziel tells Lucas, “but the Torah remains, never changes under its garment. The chance to restore tikkun comes again and again.”

Because this dynamic is common to all faiths, Stone suggests, it can best be embodied in a movement like the de Kuff cult, which is post-sectarian and even New Agey in its blending of religious symbols. This licenses the biggest and, at times, most ludicrous failure of realism in Damascus Gate: the fact that its messianic plotters are not mullahs or Lubavitchers but hipsters. Raziel and Sonja are both jazz musicians and ex-druggies, and when they’re not planning the end of the world they jam at a Russian-owned club in Tel Aviv. Even the minor characters in the novel are generally cool and sexy—from Nuala Rice, the seductive Irish leftist who ends up dangling from a noose, to Janusz Zimmer, the aging womanizer and ex-Communist who seems to be masterminding the Temple plot.

Surprisingly, however, in this novel about Jerusalem, none of the main characters is Israeli or Palestinian. At one point Lucas refers to himself as being “in country,” and this foreign-correspondent’s or aid-worker’s phrase sums up the relationship of Stone’s American protagonists to Jerusalem and its inhabitants: They are sources, interlocutors, or obstacles, but seldom peers. This distance allows Damascus Gate to maintain a certain grim neutrality about the Arab-Jewish conflict. The Israeli soldiers we see in the novel are habitually brutal, and one of them—a mysterious figure who operates under the nom de guerre Abu Baraka—leads a vigilante gang in random attacks on Palestinians.

Yet these characters are at least individualized, and Stone balances them with other Jewish Israelis who are benevolent, such as the human-rights worker Ernest Gross and the worldly psychiatrist Dr. Obermann. Palestinians, on the other hand, appear most forcefully in Damascus Gate in the form of superstitious, murderous mobs: Two of the novel’s most powerful scenes involve Lucas fleeing for his life from Arab crowds chanting, “Kill the Jews.” Lucas seems to speak for the novel as a whole when he says that the Israelis, for all their flaws, are “people more like me, in the end. They may not be Knights of the Round Table, but they won’t kill me for being a Jew. Or a djinn.”

To really come to grips with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, would take a novelist more interested in history and less interested in apocalyptic mysticism. After all, when Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount in 2000, it was not in an attempt to hasten the End Times, but as a way of claiming sovereignty over territory and signaling his intentions to the Israeli public; that is, his motives were political. So were the motives of the Palestinians who responded with massive violence and suicide bombings. And the militant zealots among Jewish settlers and Palestinian Muslims are not in search of some tantalizing new spiritual insight, like Raziel’s synthesis of Sufism and Buddhism and Judaism; they do not stand for hybridity but for purity and tradition. A fundamentalist is someone who is exactly what he says he is. And that makes fundamentalism a terrible subject for a spy novel, where the narrative suspense comes from the reader’s uncertainty about whether anyone is what he claims to be.

Damascus Gate fails as a book about Jerusalem, one might say, because it is too interesting—more interesting than the city it aims to describe, or else interesting in the wrong way. The best antidote to its fever-dream is to open a book like Zeruya Shalev’s Thera, an Israeli novel in which Jerusalemites get divorced and raise children and argue and suffer, just as people do all over the world. Or, for that matter, to open the newspaper and read about how tens of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets of Jerusalem—not to build the Third Temple, but to protest the high cost of housing. These are the kinds of human stories that keep getting told in novels, long after the flashy conspiracies are forgotten.

Two years later, this desperate and confused mood was given powerful literary expression in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. There had indeed been a plot against America not long before; but in Roth’s historical novel, the plot in question was not hatched by Muslim terrorists. It was the work of isolationists, right-wingers, and anti-Semites, led by Charles Lindbergh, whom Roth imagined winning the election of 1940 and launching America on a path to fascism and a domestic Holocaust. By rights, the book ought to have been called The Plot Against the Jews. But Roth, like Hentoff, had performed a strange inner displacement. The actual present threat to Jews, from Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East, had been translated into the old historic threat to Jews—the fear of Nazis and the Holocaust.

That fear was not reasoned or reasonable, and it received a timely rebuke from Leon Wieseltier, who noted in the New Republic that the only Jews actually gathered in Times Square were there to buy tickets to The Producers—that is, to laugh at farce Nazis. But the readiness of otherwise levelheaded people, in that post-9/11 world, to give in to the instinct of fear made clear just how deeply rooted that instinct remains in contemporary Jewish life.

Memories of that strange time came back recently as I read several new books dealing with the experience of “ordinary Germans” in the Holocaust. Reading about the Holocaust always involves a conscious patrolling of the inner boundary between fear and reason; that’s one reason why it is so taxing. Reading history of any kind requires a negotiation between the duty of empathy and the instinct of self-preservative withdrawal, all the more so when it is tragic history (and, as the celebrated British historian Edward Gibbon said, the history that gets written down is usually “the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”).

But when the history in question is as recent as the Holocaust, and as threatening, and as overwhelmingly, unimaginably cruel, the negotiation can turn into a panicky tug-of-war. The claim of the dead on the remembrance and grief of the living is so vast that it puts us permanently in the wrong: Not only can we never rectify the past, we can never sufficiently attend to it or atone for it. One way of dealing with this guilt is to elide the difference between the Jewish situation today and in the past: to say that Times Square is a potential Drancy or Westerbork.

Yet simply to dismiss the possibility of a “second Holocaust,” to say confidently that it can’t happen here, is to court inner doubts and reproaches. What could be more shameful than to follow in the footsteps of those German Jews we read about so often, with their super-patriotism and super-assimilation—attempts at camouflage that were doubly disgraceful for being so totally ineffective? This dialectic of fear and guilt and suspicion makes it very difficult to see the Holocaust objectively—which is one reason, perhaps, why many Jewish scholars have devoted their careers to doing exactly that.

For American Jews, the problem of the “ordinary German” is especially troubling, because it brings us directly to the darkest, most unassuageable suspicions about Jewish vulnerability. The most controversial books about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, have been the ones that try to explain how the Germans—citizens of an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews. For if this people could do it, the strong implication is that under the right (or, better, the wrong) circumstances, any people could. And the history of the world since 1945 seems to bear out this implication. Cambodians, Serbs, and Rwandans have all shown that people do not have to be Nazis, or anti-Semites, in order to slaughter their neighbors.

Yet nobody looks into his heart and sees an Eichmann lurking there. And this inability to match up our self-knowledge with our historical knowledge is the most disconcerting thing of all. Are we genuinely different from those millions of people, in the past and in other places, who did and do engage in mass murder? What justifies this moral self-confidence, and can we be sure that a majority of our fellow-citizens share it? And if not, if we are as blind to our own capabilities as any ordinary German, then might we ourselves, in the right circumstances, engage in exactly the same behaviors that we condemn in the Germans—their indifference, complicity, active participation in evil? In that case, how can any of us be guiltless, or safe?

***

The most concise and insidious way to pose this question is with a photograph. In The Druggist of Auschwitz: A Documentary Novel (Farrar Straus Giroux, $27), Dieter Schlesak reproduces a snapshot taken at a swimming pool in the Romanian city of Sighisoara in 1928. It shows a group of five people in bathing suits, including a stocky man named Victor Capesius and, sitting right next to him, a smiling, round-faced young girl named Ella Boehm, both of them there for swimming lessons. They knew each other slightly: Capesius, a pharmacist, was a sales representative for the pharmaceutical company Bayer, in which capacity he would call on Ella’s father, a doctor. Sometimes he would give the girl little presents: “Capesius was sweet to me,” she recalled later.

In May 1944, Ella and her mother Gisela were among the hundreds of thousands of Jews deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, after the previously safe country was occupied by German troops. When they reached the camp, having survived a four-day journey in a cattle car with no food or water, they saw that a group of SS officers was standing on the ramp making selections among the prisoners. Ostensibly, they were asking the prisoners “whether they could walk or not, in which case they would then go by car.” Of course, the selections were really for the gas chambers, and anyone who claimed to be too weak to walk was immediately killed. “Among the commission members,” Ella testified later, “I recognized Dr. Capesius, the pharmacist from Sighisoara, and I was so surprised to see him there.”

The Boehms were not the only ones to find their neighbor on the ramp at Auschwitz. Another prisoner, Adrienne Krausz, was another daughter of a doctor who recognized Capesius. “When my mother saw the officer carrying out the selection process,” she remembered, “she said, ‘Well, that’s Dr. Capesius … ’ I think he recognized my mother as well, because he waved at her. My mother and sister were sent to the left by him, into the gas, but I went to the right and I survived. Later I met a friend who had been with my father during the selection. He told me that father had said hello to Capesius and asked him where his own wife and 11-year-old daughter were. Capesius supposedly answered: ‘I’m sending you to the same place where your wife and daughter are, it’s a good place.’ ”

Stories like this suggest why Schlesak made a minor figure like Victor Capesius the focus of his “documentary novel” about the Holocaust. In order to be willing to send human beings to their deaths, it would seem necessary first to dehumanize them, to see them as enemies or statistics—or a problem requiring a final solution. That was the attitude of another doctor at Auschwitz, a fanatical Nazi named Fritz Klein. When asked how he could reconcile his actions at the camp with his Hippocratic oath, Klein replied, “Out of respect for human life I excise an ulcerated appendix; the Jews are the ulcerated appendix in the body of Europe.”

Continue reading: The Reluctant Accomplice. Or view as a single page.

Another of Goldberg’s many literary contributions to Hebrew was as a translator—she knew seven languages and brought many Russian classics into the language for the first time, including War and Peace. The year before her novel was published, Goldberg translated Chekhov’s stories, and you could almost deduce this from the beautifully restless and nostalgic atmosphere of And This Is the Light. Nora Krieger, the 20-year-old heroine, is based fairly directly on Goldberg herself: Like her creator at the same age, Nora has a mentally ill father, is a precocious Zionist, and studies at a university in Berlin. But she seems equally modeled on Chekhov heroines like Masha in Three Sisters and Sonya in Uncle Vanya, passionately sensitive young women marooned in the provinces, longing for the great love or opportunity that will rescue them.

Nora is not quite as badly off as those characters, as she is only back in Kovno, Lithuania, for the summer vacation. But even on the train carrying her there, she begins to feel suffocated by the weight of home. Goldberg expertly evokes that phase of adolescence when all young people feel embarrassed and outraged by the very existence of their families. But for Nora, as a member of the tightly knit, parochial, embattled Jewish community of Lithuania, every Jew she meets feels like family and provokes that same queasy urge for escape. The very first paragraphs of the novel show her reaction to a Jew who sits down in her train compartment, with a “smug expression,” and promptly spits “a lush gob of saliva onto the floor”: “I’m back in my native land. At home. A thought of derision went through Nora’s heart, whose bitterness wasn’t yet mature.”

Nora’s shame is compounded by the presence in the compartment of an urbane, sensitive Swede. She wants to talk to this handsome stranger, but the Jewish trader immediately stakes a claim on her, insisting that he must know her family. When she denies it, he scoffs, “So where are they from? Africa? All the Kriegers come from one place.” It’s only because this is the truth that Nora is so angered by it. “It was as if she stood on display naked between the two of them: the Jew and the Gentile. Damn them, why can’t I just be me?”

Beyond pride and adolescent rebellion, Nora has a darker, more private reason for not wanting to be associated with her family. We soon learn, through her family’s whispers and euphemisms, that her father is incurably insane, a paranoid schizophrenic whose rages scarred her childhood. The morning after her arrival, her mother tells her that she has divorced him, and Nora’s instinctive reaction is to blurt out, “You did well!” But as in an Ibsen play—it’s no coincidence that Nora is named after the heroine of A Doll’s House—she is haunted by the fear that she might have inherited her father’s madness. By escaping home, Goldberg shows, Nora is also trying to outrun this frightening legacy, which only gets worse when she uncovers a family secret—her uncle, who she thought died of tuberculosis, turns out also to have gone mad. When old Aunt Zlata tells Nora the truth on her deathbed, she seems to be pronouncing a curse:

“And then, dropping back into the pillows, weary and old, she lay among them like a cat, her eyes extinguished, and her lips still muttering, ‘It’s in your blood. In the blood of the whole family. All the Kriegers. I’m telling you this for your own good.’ … Filth, filth, [Nora] thought, filth and bondage. And there’s no way out, no way out. And I don’t want to go crazy. That’s the verdict. I don’t want to…”

But this is a luridly melodramatic moment in a novel that is, for the most part, modest and realistic, in the Chekhovian style that turns plainness into a kind of compassionate poetry. Nora may be held back by her family’s past, but she is also full of instinctive longing for the future, painfully keen to all varieties of beauty. Goldberg writes lovingly about the natural world, evoking a Lithuanian landscape of forests and rivers that for centuries was the backdrop of Jewish life:

“The water was green and deep, and the river was very broad in that place. Beyond it was the bank with its oaks and pines, suffused with lushness, and here and there the cattails stuck up through the greenery with their velvet-brown heads. The heavy boat sailed lightly, and passed fields whose stalks were mostly harvested by now, and piles of yellow-green hay in meadows, whose good smell rose.”

Goldberg’s prose, as rendered by Barbara Harshav, is always clear and unpretentious, allowing her to evoke natural beauty without self-conscious rhapsodizing. This restraint is especially valuable when it comes to writing about love, which descends on Nora in the shape of Albert Arin. Arin is an old friend of her parents who’d gone into exile 25 years earlier and ended up living in California. Now, for reasons that are unclear at first, he has returned to Kovno, where he troubles the hearts of Nora’s mother, her dutiful maiden aunt, Lisa, and most violently, Nora herself.

Goldberg shows that Nora’s passion for Arin is quite overdetermined. She built up a romantic image of him during her childhood, based on his letters from exotic locations—so much so that she is chagrined to learn that he ended up owning a prosaic tobacco shop. More important, Arin is clearly a fantasy replacement for Nora’s mad father, a middle-aged man who could give her the secure love she missed as a child: “Nora walked and was suddenly sure that everything would be good, that there was nothing to worry about, that he would take care of her.” All this is obvious to Goldberg and the reader, but touchingly hidden from Nora herself, who simply luxuriates in the pangs of unrequited love: “What a musical night! Perhaps the nightingales are singing joyfully in the depths of the forest. … Because his hand was on my shoulder, because he is so mature. Because I, I, I will see him tomorrow.”

The plot of And This Is the Night centers on the unraveling of this fantasy, as Nora comes to learn more about Arin’s real past and his reasons for visiting Lithuania. But if her love turns to disillusion, Goldberg presents this as part of an all-around, necessary coming of age. The drama of this summer is mostly interior, as Nora gains a new, more adult perspective on her relatives, her childhood, and her Jewishness. By the end of the story, she has experienced death up close, and learned not to romanticize it, in the way that sensitive adolescents do. She begins to appreciate the wisdom of Arin’s words: “I said life is precious. In spite of everything. Because there is no disaster and no disease of body or mind that can lower its value. None.”

This principle has one meaning for Nora, hearing it in the summer of 1931. For Lea Goldberg, writing after World War II, it has another, much more terrible meaning. She wrote And This Is the Light, and we read it, with the knowledge of what is waiting just around the corner for Nora and her family: Starting in 1941, almost every single Jew in Lithuania would be murdered by the Nazis. Goldberg (and her real-life mother) escaped this fate by emigrating, but she alludes to it several times in the novel. The Krieger family has a meek, devoted gentile servant named Thekla, whom Nora treats with compassionate condescension. But Arin warns her that “that Thekla of yours, who loves you so much … would be ready and willing, during some pogrom, to murder you and your family with the same simplicity and that same sense of righteousness.” He is right—in Lithuania, local collaborators played an especially large role in the Holocaust.

But Goldberg is determined not to turn her coming-of-age novel into a premature elegy. The story she tells so beautifully is one of youth discovering its commitment to life, and she refuses to say that this commitment is mocked by the millions of deaths lying in wait. Public history cannot falsify private memory, as Arin tells Nora: “The facts of our lives, marvelous as they are at times in a person’s life, are nevertheless common property. We share them with others. And only what is kept in memory, unimportant things, as it were, they’re what constitute our real being.”

In many ways, Blum might be compared to Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet. Both were artistically inclined sons of prosperous Jewish businessmen, both had impeccable taste and wide connections, and both devoted their lives to building ballet companies. But just as Kirstein, in Martin Duberman’s recent biography The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, seems to shrink in the titanic presence of George Balanchine, so Blum, in Chazin-Bennahum’s book, seems rather less interesting than the artists he patronized, from Marcel Proust to Marcel Pagnol to—as it happens—George Balanchine.

The thinness of René Blum and the Ballets Russes can also be partly explained by the thinness of the sources. Chazin-Bennahum is writing some 70 years after her subject’s death, which means that everyone who knew him is also dead. Blum was apparently working on a memoir before he was arrested—Chazin-Bennahum has found a publisher’s advertisement for the book, “Souvenir sur La Danse,” that appeared in a ballet program in 1939. But whatever he wrote has disappeared, along with his personal papers and letters.

Another biographer might have responded to these absences by trying to give a rich picture of Blum’s milieu, to deduce the man from his time and place. This would be especially interesting in Blum’s case, because in addition to his own accomplishments, he was notable as the younger brother of Leon Blum—the first Socialist and first Jew to become prime minister of France. But Chazin-Bennahum, a former professional dancer turned dance historian, is much more at ease with the details of the ballet world than with the broader world of politics and culture, of Frenchness and Jewishness. Her accounts of such matters are shallow and sometimes erroneous, and her translations from the French are awkward. The second half of her book, which focuses on Blum’s 15 years as a producer in Monte Carlo, is much better than the first, in which she tries to situate him in relation to the Dreyfus Affair and World War I.

René Blum was born in 1878, the youngest of five boys in an assimilated, ardently French family. Their Frenchness was all the stronger because, like many French Jews, they traced their ancestry to Alsace, a German-speaking province that was annexed by Germany in 1871. (Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer at the center of the Dreyfus Affair, had the same background.) The oldest of the Blum brothers, Lucien, was destined to take over the family firm, Blum Frères, a women’s garment wholesaler. But Leon, the second son, followed the classic path of using his father’s capital to launch himself on an intellectual and literary career. In the 1890s, Leon Blum was a leading critic for the avant-garde arts magazine Revue Blanche, and the connections he established were of great use to his younger brother, René. In that halcyon age of the French Jewish bourgeoisie, the Blums lived a life of idyllic refinement, mixing in salons and summer houses with painters like Vuillard and Bonnard and musicians like Casals and Ravel.

The Dreyfus Affair, which erupted in 1894, revealed that even the most elite French Jews were living over an abyss of anti-Semitism. The false accusation of treason against Dreyfus, and the prolonged efforts of the French Army to cover up the falsehood, set the stage for a ferocious culture war, with Jews functioning as the symbolic battleground. To the anti-Dreyfusards, treason was to be expected from a Jew, and the whole campaign to rehabilitate Dreyfus was an act of Jewish-liberal hostility to France. To the Dreyfusards, the case was a test of secular and liberal principles—whether France owed justice to a Jew as much as to any other citizen. In the end, the Dreyfusards won, but the whole Affair exposed the deep divisions in French society and helped to politicize a generation of intellectuals—including Leon Blum, who launched himself on a career as a Socialist politician.

René Blum, it seems, stepped neatly into his brother’s vacated role as an aesthete and connoisseur. Never venturing into the world of politics, he became an editor for a literary magazine called Gil Blas, where he worked from 1903 to 1913. Chazin-Bennahum tries to mine his contributions for some sense of Blum’s personality and taste, but it’s a losing battle; she makes heavy weather of what were plainly light, dispensable theater reviews and questionnaires. In one issue, for instance, Blum invited contributors to answer the question, “What are your hopes for a vacation this year and where do you think you’ll spend it?” Chazin-Bennahum writes, “We must remember that for the French, vacations are sacred and offer vital moments of reprieve and rejuvenation.” Well, maybe, but it was still a silly question.

Without a doubt, Blum’s most important contribution to the world of letters came not as a writer or even as an editor but as a friend of Marcel Proust. Proust belonged to the same artistic and Dreyfusard circles as the Blums, and René had known him since 1902. But few people expected the dandyish Proust to produce a serious novel, and in 1913 he could not find a publisher for Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. He turned to the well-connected Blum, and, as a friend recalled, “with an amazing and obstinate energy that Blum rarely used for his own interests, he sought out [the publisher] Bernard Grasset and pleaded Proust’s cause.” Grasset published the book, and Proust sent Blum a copy of the first edition, inscribed, “In this way you get back the book that you brought forth with such a noble gesture.”

This episode brings out one of the paradoxes of Blum’s character: the combination of his personal modesty, even shyness, and his aggressive support of the art and artists he admired. One testimonial from a friend described him as “tender, amused, comprehensive, sensitive. … He was always kind, with clemency and urbanity.” Yet he abandoned his refined milieu in the very first days of World War I, enlisting in the Army at the age of 36. He ended up winning the Croix de Guerre in a delightfully characteristic fashion, as his citation explains: “he did not cease in the course of the evacuation of Amiens … to show proof of his great courage … offering spontaneously during perilous missions to evacuate great historic objects [and] … to save works of art.” Few people get the chance to demonstrate so concretely that they are willing to die for art.

But it was not until 1924, when he was in his mid-40s, that René Blum began the work for which he is most remembered. Then as now, Monaco was a favorite resort for rich and aristocratic tourists, who went to lose money at the casino and be entertained in the process. Blum was hired to provide the entertainment, as artistic director of the Theatre de Monte-Carlo. It was the job he had been training for all his life: As a friend wrote, “He had read everything, seen everything, and heard everything. He would know exactly what play, opera or ballet could be produced by any French house, as he had a deep understanding of the inside workings of companies and producing.”

Now he had the ideal situation for a producer, with the deep pockets of the Casino behind him, and a highly refined audience eager for the newest and the best. Chazin-Bennahum describes some of the theatrical works he put on: avant-garde plays by Pirandello, classics like La Dame aux Camelias, English-language works by Shaw and Wilde to appeal to English tourists. There was even a play by Israel Zangwill, Le roi des schnorrers (“The King of Beggars”)—one would like to know what the Monegasques made of that.

Since before World War I, the great theatrical draw in Monte Carlo had been the Ballets Russes, under the direction of Serge Diaghilev. This legendary company made ballet into one of the most dynamic modernist arts, and it turned dancers and choreographers like Nijinsky, Massine, and Fokine into legends. But with the death of Diaghilev in 1929, the company and its traditions threatened to dissolve. It was at this moment that Blum made his greatest contribution—and that Chazin-Bennahum’s book comes into its own.

In the teeth of the Depression, Blum maneuvered to reconstitute the company as the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, fending off rival impresarios to keep the dances, dancers, and sets intact. Chazin-Bennahum chronicles the absolutely Byzantine intrigues that set Blum against the shady producer known as Colonel de Basil—first as partners, then as bitter rivals. As chief choreographer, Blum hired the young George Balanchine, who was ousted in favor of Leonide Massine, who gave way to Michel Fokine; Chazin-Bennahum describes the major dances each man made for the troupe.

For Blum, handling all these mercurial artists was a draining, sometimes thankless task. By the time he had to sell the company to an American backer, in 1938, he sounded rather discouraged: “I have a love for this art and for the artists for whom I have sacrificed almost everything, without any hope for a return,” he said plaintively. But to those who cared about dance, Blum was a heroic figure, and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo gave him a personal standing separate from his famous brother Leon, the prime minister. In 1939, during the company’s American tour, he was received by FDR at Hyde Park.

In the spring of 1940, as France fell to the Germans, Blum was again in America, and he was urged by friends to stay there. But his family and national pride made him insist on returning, and he even stayed in Paris, in the German-occupied zone, rather than flee to the Vichy-controlled south: “I and my family are too well known to flee from the Germans, or to ask for protection by the Vichy authorities,” he said. As the brother of Leon Blum, he was an obvious target for the Nazis, and it was only a matter of time before he was picked up by the Gestapo.

Blum was arrested on Dec. 12, 1941, in a sweep that targeted 700 notable French Jews, and interned in a camp at Compiègne. Fellow-prisoners who survived testified that Blum’s sweet temper and courage made him a beloved figure in the camp. He was one of the favorite teachers in an improvised lecture series, where he spoke on literature and dance. In his late 50s, in poor health, starving, he became a symbol of the endurance of all that was best in French culture: “He was a continuous ray of light that sustained our hope and our confidence. He always thought of others before himself,“ another prisoner wrote.

When Blum was transferred to Drancy and saw Jews being sent to Auschwitz, he told a friend, “if one day I get out of here, I will fly to America, to Russia and everywhere in order to tell this story. … Humanity cannot possibly be as villainous as these Germans.” But on Sept. 23, 1942, it was his turn to board the transport. According to one unconfirmable story, he was called for by name and led off by guards as soon as the train arrived at Auschwitz, then sent to the crematorium, where he was burned alive. That one life could include such heights of art and generosity and such depths of suffering is itself enough reason for René Blum to be remembered.

At the same time, of course, liberal members of these faiths were just as passionate in support of the bill. For Jews, a perfect image of this intra-communal divide came when Sharon Kleinbaum, a tallis-clad rabbi holding a pro-equality sign at an Albany rally, was spit on and told “you are not a Jew” by a young Satmar Hasid. (By putting her arm around the man’s shoulder, in violation of the rules of shomer negiah, Kleinbaum, rabbi of a gay congregation in Manhattan, surely expected to provoke a reaction, but perhaps not such a passionate one.)

In the unlikely event that Kleinbaum and that Hasid were to sit down with their Bibles and debate the Torah’s view of homosexuality, who would come away the winner? The answer seems totally unambiguous. Just look at Leviticus 20:13: “And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death: their blood shall be upon them.” The law as written does not apply to women, but for homosexual men, it means death.

At this point, the 21st-century Jew—like the Protestant and the Catholic, anyone whose religion views the Bible as holy writ—has two simple choices, and one messy and unsatisfying one. The first simple choice is the one the Satmar would take: The Bible is God’s word, therefore homosexuality is an abomination, Q.E.D. The second is the one any secular rationalist would take: The Bible is not God’s word, and it has no more binding force than any other ancient Near Eastern law code. The Code of Hammurabi, for instance, holds that “If a man’s wife be surprised with another man, both shall be tied and thrown into the water.” But we are no more obligated to follow this law today than we are to follow Leviticus. Both reflect millennia-old views of gender and sexuality that now appear simply unjust.

The third choice is the one represented in The Bible Now, the new book by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky (Oxford University Press, $27.95). Friedman, a senior and very eminent Bible scholar, and Dolansky, a junior scholar at Northeastern University, have set out to explain “what the Bible has to say about the major issues of our time,” in particular “five current controversial matters: homosexuality, abortion, women’s status, capital punishment, and the earth.”

Some people turn to the Bible for guidance, they write early on, “because … the Bible is the final authority and one must do what it says.” But as secular academics, Friedman and Dolansky recognize that the Bible was written by historically situated human beings, with various political and religious agendas. They belong to the other category of Bible-seekers, they say, those “who do not believe that the Bible is divinely revealed, [but] turn to the Bible because they believe it contains wisdom—wisdom that might help anyone, whatever his or her beliefs, make wise decisions about difficult matters.”

The first chapter of The Bible Now is devoted to homosexuality, and it is not long before Friedman and Dolansky run into Leviticus 20:13. It is easy to sympathize with their embarrassment. Here the Bible is saying something they obviously regard as cruel and retrograde, something they would not hesitate to brand as homophobic in any other situation. What to do?

Well, “for one thing, one must address the law in its context.” Turning from Israel to Assyria, Egypt, and Greece, Friedman and Dolansky observe that these other Near Eastern societies generally had nothing against homosexual acts per se. They reserved their odium for the passive partner in anal sex, the man who was penetrated. A “Middle Babylonian divination text” instructs that “If a man copulates with his equal from the rear, he becomes the leader among his peers and brothers”; on the other hand, Plutarch writes, “We class those who enjoy the passive part as belonging to the lowest depths of vice.”

Never mind that these texts were written more than a thousand years apart, in two very different civilizations, neither of which was Israelite. Friedman and Dolansky use them to establish “the wider cultural context” of Leviticus, from which it follows that “what the authors of Leviticus … may be prohibiting is not homosexuality as we would construe the category today but, rather, an act that they understood to rob another man of his social status by feminizing him.” Why, then, does Leviticus, uniquely among ancient Near Eastern law codes, prescribe death for both partners in homosexual acts? Because, Friedman and Dolansky argue, quoting another biblical scholar, Leviticus “emphasizes the equality of all. It does not have the class distinctions that are in the other cultures’ laws.”

This is a remarkable performance. Before you know it, a law that unambiguously prescribes death for gay men has been turned into an example of latent egalitarianism. Friedman and Dolansky imply that it was not homosexuality the Bible wanted to condemn, but the humiliation of the passive partner. And since we no longer think of consensual sex acts as humiliating, surely the logic of the Bible itself means that homosexuality is no longer culpable: “The prohibition in the Bible applies only so long as male homosexual acts are perceived to be offensive.”

But wait: Doesn’t Leviticus also say, in Chapter 18, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination”? Here too, Friedman and Dolansky have a reassuring response. “The technical term to’ebah,” they write, is usually employed in the Bible not for absolute moral laws, but for cultic taboos: “an act or object that is not a to’ebah can become one, depending on time and circumstances.” Maybe homosexuality was once to’ebah, but “Why do people assume that things relating to God must be absolute and unchanging? Even for a person who believes in God wholeheartedly, why should that person assume that God is never free to change?”

By this point, the game has been pretty well given away. “We must use [the Bible] with integrity—and humility,” Friedman and Dolansky write in their preface. “We have to recognize what it teaches even when that teaching goes against what we want. Better to reject the Bible’s teaching than to twist it to make it say what we prefer.” Yet their treatment of Leviticus is nothing but a masterful example of twisting the text to make it say what they prefer. What licenses this kind of reading is the principle that “God is free to change,” that is, to change his mind about what is offensive and inoffensive, good and evil—but only, it seems, in ways that bring him more in tune with the views of people like Friedman and Dolansky (and, I hasten to add, myself).

But this is not a hermeneutical principle; it is an anti-hermeneutical principle, and one that has historically been inimical to the Hebrew Bible. After all, the New Testament was written on the premise that God “changed his mind” about the law, and about the chosenness of Israel. Could God also change his mind about, say, child sacrifice? Once we start to believe that we know God’s mind independently of the Bible, why do we need the Bible at all?

“Most people on earth,” Friedman and Dolansky write, “including most Christians and Jews, do not accept the Bible as an absolute authority in their lives. … In their position, the Bible can still be the Bible without our having to insist that it is right 100 percent of the time … the Bible can still be a guide, a significant guide, but human beings must accept the benefits and the burdens of becoming their own authorities in the end.”

This is an honorable way to be religious, and The Bible Now is an honorable book. It is quite possible, Friedman and Dolansky show in later chapters, to discover an environmentalist ethic in the Bible, and a feminist one. It is even possible to read the Bible’s extensive list of crimes that call for capital punishment—from murder to consulting a medium—and conclude, as they do, that the Bible’s true message is that “we cannot do execution until we arrive at a more advanced state of human civilization.”

So why, if I am basically in agreement with what I take to be Friedman and Dolansky’s views on all these questions, does The Bible Now make me so impatient? I think it is because, by paying so much attention to the way the Bible can be made to corroborate modern ethical beliefs, this book—like many similarly liberal and well-intentioned religious books—slights the actual sources of those beliefs.

When it comes to the way we actually think about questions of right and wrong today, we owe more to Spinoza and Kant and Mill than we do to Leviticus—even though, it is fair to say, the West could never have produced those Enlightenment thinkers without its biblical, Judeo-Christian inheritance. And the key principle of the Enlightenment is that we depend on our own autonomous reason, not on the authority of ancient texts, to decide what is just and unjust. We owe it to ourselves—especially in a country where the Bible enjoys so much moral and political authority—to declare openly that our moral reasoning is our own, that we do not have to reconcile our judgments with Leviticus in order to validate them. There is still an exhilaration in Kant’s answer to the question “What Is Enlightenment”: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.”

This incident, recounted by Tara Zahra in her superb new book The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families After World War II (Harvard), is almost comic. But it hints at the profound challenges that faced the social workers and psychologists who made it their mission to help the youngest victims of the war. With the best will in the world, how could you gain the trust of children who had spent their youth in a place like Buchenwald? Even the experts, Zahra shows, despaired of the task.

One observer from the UNRRA—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the chief agency dealing with postwar displaced persons—noted that the young Holocaust survivors exhibited “poor work attitudes, cheating, lack of respect for personal property of others … extremes of aggressiveness and shyness, and abnormal sex behavior.” Another decided that the boys “were true psychopaths, cold and different by nature, and that this was the reason they were able to survive camp life.” In these inhuman-sounding judgments, we surely hear the desperate frustration of social workers—all Jewish themselves—up against a tragedy too deep to fathom or cure.

What to do about Jewish children after the Holocaust was one of the most intractable problems facing postwar Europe. The standard solutions for displaced children were family reunification, when immediate relatives could be traced, or at least repatriation. But the 175,000 Jewish children who survived the war—out of a prewar population of 1.5 million—had usually lost their entire families; and they had no desire to return to countries where anti-Semitism was still rampant. Jewish survivors congregated in Displaced Persons camps, forbidden to go to Palestine (where the British blocked all Jewish immigration) or America (where harsh immigration laws had the same effect). In the meantime, the birthrate in the DP camps skyrocketed, in a sign of the survivors’ determination to go on living.

Almost every one of those Jewish children had lived through events that the imagination can hardly grasp. Zahra draws on the testimony of Ruth Kluger, who was born in Vienna in 1931; she and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. On their first night in the camp, Kluger remembered, “My mother explained to me that the electric barbed wire outside was lethal and proposed that she and I should get up and walk into that wire. I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. … I was twelve years old, and the thought of dying, now, without delay, in contortions, by running into electrically charged metal on the advice of my very own mother, whom God had created to protect me, was simply beyond comprehension.”

After the war, Jewish children were not alone in their suffering. As Zahra makes clear in this wide-ranging, exceptionally well-researched study, there wasn’t a country in Europe—victor or vanquished, democratic or fascist or Communist—where children had not been displaced, starved, sickened, or killed in large numbers. In Germany, Allied bombing had destroyed millions of homes, and the invading Red Army had caused millions of civilians to flee; as a result, some 8 million German children were homeless by the time the war ended. So were 6.5 million children in the USSR and more than a million in France.

Even in Britain, which was never invaded by the enemy, half of all schoolchildren had been evacuated from cities during the war, as part of “Operation Pied Piper.” This step was seen as necessary to save children from German bombing, but as Zahra shows, influential child psychologists like Anna Freud and John Bowlby saw evacuation as a potentially life-changing trauma. Indeed, the process of evacuation, as Zahra describes it, sounds horribly ill-considered and unnecessarily cruel. Children, many of them from poor families in London, would arrive in a country town and stand in a group while host parents picked them out: “The scene which ensued was more akin to a cattle- or slave-market than anything else,” one schoolteacher observed.

In Anna Freud’s view, maternal deprivation was a far more serious trauma than bombing: “The war acquires comparatively little significance for children so long as it only threatens their lives. … It becomes enormously significant the moment it breaks up family life and uproots the first emotional attachments of the child within the family group.” In fact, one of Zahra’s claims in The Lost Children is that our current orthodoxies about child-rearing—above all, the emphasis on early “attachment” between mother and child, fostered by breast-feeding, co-sleeping, and constant physical proximity—can be traced to psychologists’ responses to such wartime traumas. Postwar Europe, she writes, was “a moment in which basic ideals of family and childhood were reinvented.”

But it would take a different book, one more strictly focused on cultural and social history, to prove such an ambitious claim. Zahra is really less interested in the history of child psychology than in the ways children, during and after World War II, became proxies for politics and ideology. This could be seen as early as the Spanish Civil War, when both the Republicans and the Nationalists sent children to France for refuge. After Franco’s victory in 1939, the Spanish government demanded that these children be returned, and the debate became a way of continuing the war itself: Leftists and labor unions opposed returning children to fascist Spain, while rightists and the Catholic Church insisted on it. (Imagine the Elián Gonzáles case, multiplied by tens of thousands.) Once France fell under Nazi occupation, Franco sent raiding parties to simply kidnap the children.

After 1945, this kind of ideological battle took place all over Europe. In Poland, the Nazis had made a practice of seizing children whom they deemed Aryan and handing them over to German parents. Naturally the postwar Polish government pressed for the return of these children, seeing the Nazi kidnappings as a tool of genocide. But what if a child had been seized as an infant, and grown up knowing no family but its German foster parents? Would it be in the best interests of the child to return it to Poland, where its biological parents might no longer be alive?

Take the case of Janina and Kazmierz Mackowiak, who were taken from a Polish orphanage during the war, renamed Johanna and Fritz, and given to a childless German couple named Coppenrath. After the war, the Coppenraths wanted to legalize the adoption, but the children were seized and sent back to Poland against their will. They immediately fled and spent two months walking back to Germany to be with the only parents they knew. Did justice require righting a Nazi crime, even at the price of wronging its victims? It’s a question fit for a Greek tragedy, and The Lost Children shows that thousands of similarly insoluble cases arose across the continent.

Every country claimed that it wanted to repatriate its lost children in the children’s own best interest. Many psychologists argued that a Polish child could only thrive in Poland, a Spanish child in Spain. Zahra quotes one relief worker insisting on “how much the children need a country of their own if they are to be psychologically normal and feel ‘like other people.’ ” At the same time, nations also saw children as a crucial geopolitical asset that they could not afford to forfeit. In a postwar Europe where Germany remained the most populous country, France and Poland and Czechoslovakia believed that rapid population growth was a matter of national survival.

Zahra shows that this could lead to bizarre ironies. A year after throwing off German occupation, for instance, the French were encouraging young Germans to immigrate to France, on racial grounds that the Nazis could have approved: “An addition of a reasonable quantity of German blood could be particularly precious … [to] compensate for the excessive flow of Latins and Slavs.” Postwar Czechoslovakia expelled millions of Germans from its borders, creating a huge population deficit, even though many of those expelled were actually the Czech-speaking children of mixed Czech-German marriages.

No people needed to reclaim its surviving children more urgently than the Jews, and this led to its own complications. When Catholic Poles who had sheltered Jewish children during the Holocaust discovered that Jewish relief agencies were willing to pay for their return, what Zahra describes a “a bidding war” broke out. One agency had to pay $1,000 to get the address of a hidden Jewish child. In France, there was the sensational Finaly Affair, in which a Catholic teacher forcibly baptized two Jewish boys under her care, then spirited them away to Spain rather than return them to their aunt.

Jewish children who were reclaimed had to be cared for and educated; and this too, Zahra shows, became a contested issue. Ordinarily, UNRRA social workers preferred to return all refugee children to their parents, when possible. But many Jewish activists argued that it was both psychologically and politically better to place surviving children in group homes or kibbutzim, where the education on offer was frankly Zionist. Zahra quotes one Jewish teacher defending this practice: “Indoctrination may not be good for normal children in normal surroundings. But what is normal here? … A crooked foot needs a crooked shoe.” In the end, Zahra writes, “many UN workers and American authorities came to embrace the Zionist solution for Jewish refugee children.” They were persuaded by the kind of harsh, irrefutable logic another Zionist teacher employed: “The children have nothing, nothing. What should we talk about—the blessings of Poland? They know them. Or the visas for America? They can’t get them. The map of Eretz [Israel] is their salvation.”

But reading Folktales of the Jews, Volume 3: Tales From Arab Lands, the remarkable new collection issued by the Jewish Publication Society, shows how dubious this way of thinking about folktales really is. This anthology of 60 stories is drawn from the Israel Folk Archives at the University of Haifa, where, starting in the 1950s, immigrants to Israel from around the world recorded the folktales of their native lands. (The volume opens with a foreword by Ellen Frankel, the series’ editor, paying affectionate tribute to Dov Noy, the IFA’s founder and “an unsung Jewish hero.”) Earlier volumes in the series covered tales from Eastern Europe and the Sephardic Diaspora. This one includes stories from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, and other Arab lands that were, until 1948, home to ancient Jewish communities.

Originally, these stories were told orally, in the humblest circumstances: “watching over a delivering woman, during condolence visits, on holidays and on the Sabbath. … On the trips men took to and from markets.” The generations of Jews who recounted them would doubtless be surprised to see them as they appear in this book, so formidably armored by scholarship. It’s not uncommon for a one-page story to be followed by eight pages of footnotes and commentary, and each tale is cross-referenced against the standard register of folklore motifs, The Types of the Folktale.

The lay reader will not be able to make much use of these motif codes (e.g., “D2188.2: Person Vanishes”; “N825.2: Old Man Helper”). But simply seeing them after each tale helps to drive home an important point about the universality of folktales. It is natural to read Tales From Arab Lands for insight into Jewish and Arab cultures or for a sense of connection with this part of the Jewish past; and the stories do yield some historical insights. Yet these Jewish stories—whether they are about the Baal Shem Tov, or King Solomon, or some venerated Moroccan rabbi—are usually close cousins of folktales told in other parts of the world, from Scandinavia to Japan. Just as humanity’s language instinct allows us to invent thousands of different languages from the same basic elements, so our story-telling instinct leads us to adapt the same narratives to every climate and culture.

Take, for instance, the brief story of “Rabbi Shelomoh the Lion,” about a Moroccan tzaddik known for his exceptional piety. Once it happened that a fight broke out between local Arabs and Jews, and Shelomoh was chased by some Arabs into a dark cave. When he entered, he saw a lion with its foot raised in the air; fearlessly, he approached and pulled a thorn out of the lion’s foot. In gratitude, the lion protected Shelomoh and even let him ride on his back.

This story may shed some light on the historical animosity between Morocco’s Jewish and Arab populations. But it is also, unmistakably, a retelling of a very famous legend from ancient Greece, “Androcles and the Lion.” The notes show that a similar story was told about Saint Jerome, the early church father, and also about the 12th-century rabbi Samuel ben Kalonymus of Speyer, who was said to have befriended a leopard. It says something about the strange epistemology of folktales that the man who recorded “Rabbi Shelomoh the Lion,” one David Buhbut, claimed that it was a story about his own grandfather and took place just 50 years in the past. Surely, we think, he could not have literally believed this? But then, ancient Roman writers also recorded the Androcles story as true history.

A number of the shorter tales in this volume are so plainly moral fables that the question of fact hardly arises. Take the second tale in the book, “Reciting Psalms,” which was recorded by Bajah Cohen, a woman from Tunisia. (Each narrator is named and given a brief biographical note, a gesture that seems designed at once to honor the teller, vouch for the tale’s authenticity, and prevent the reader from taking it as a timeless, placeless folk product.) “Once upon a time,” the story begins in classic style, there was a Jewish storekeeper so poor that he couldn’t afford to buy food for his family. Instead, he spent all day in his shop reciting psalms, and when his wife nagged him, he would merely reply, “One must trust in God!”

The night before Passover, as he sat reciting psalms, a customer came into his shop. Before leaving, he touched one of the rafters in the ceiling: “The poor man looked at the rafter, and behold, it was entirely gold.” Naturally, the customer had been Elijah the Prophet, there to reward the Jew’s piety and make it possible for him to celebrate Pesach. The moral of the tale could not be more straightforward: Trust in God will be rewarded. In particular, it drives home the potency of the psalms, which as the notes point out was a democratic gesture. “Because of the familiarity of the psalms through the synagogue service, Jews who were not learned in any other aspect of the Jewish tradition knew them.”

Other tales cross the border from pious homily to superstition and folk magic. “The Holy Book” is a suite of stories of about the Zghair, a particularly sacred Torah scroll cherished by the Jews of Derna, in Libya. A boy dies, but his body is placed next to the scroll, and he miraculously gets up and starts to walk. When a child is born, at any time of the day or night, the Zghair knows and immediately tells the shammash what name to enter in the community register. Rather charmingly, “sometimes the Zghair felt like being read,” so it would switch places with the other scrolls in the ark, “push to the front of the line, and the shammash had to use it that Sabbath.”

Such stories, one feels, could be a hundred or a thousand years old—indeed, the Jews of Derna believed that the Zghair was written in Jerusalem at the time of Ezra, in the 6th century BCE. Yet the folk tradition could also evolve with the times. One pointed story, set “before World War I,” describes how some rich American Jews came to Derna and tried to buy the Zghair. They put it on a ship for New York and kept close watch over it, but when the scroll’s case “was brought with pomp and circumstance to the magnificent synagogue in New York,” it turned out to be empty: The Zghair had magically returned to Libya, where it belonged. Alas, the time came when the Jews of Derna themselves had to leave, but at least they took the Zghair with them: It is now in a synagogue in Netanyah, Israel.

The most interesting moments in Tales From Arab Lands, however, are when the stories induce an odd literary déjà vu. In “The Cruel Loaner and the Clever Princess,” a poor Jewish merchant in Casablanca borrows money from a rich Jew, who sets one condition: “At the year’s end, if you don’t return the money I loaned you, you agree to give me a kilogram of flesh from your own body.” When the year is up, the debtor is unable to pay. Luckily, however, he has won the love of a clever princess, who disguises herself as a male lawyer and defends him in court. “I demand that the rich man will cut from the body of the young man precisely one kilogram of flesh. … If he cuts too much, we’ll cut from his flesh that amount, to return it to the young man,” she warns. Whereupon the creditor, outwitted, agrees to “waive both the flesh and the money.”

When I first read this tale, I wondered how and when The Merchant of Venice could possibly have filtered into Moroccan Jewish folk culture. Reading the notes, however, I realized my mistake. It was Shakespeare who, in that play as in so many others, took over a preexisting folk story for his plot. The “pound of flesh” motif is found in medieval Latin stories starting in the 13th century. In the earliest examples, the creditor is a serf and the debtor a young nobleman who had once injured him. It was not until later that it evolved into an anti-Jewish parable, with a vengeful Jew extracting the flesh of a Christian.

“The Cruel Loaner,” however, nicely turns the tables on the Shylock story. Here, both the debtor and the creditor are Jews, so the loaner cannot be motivated by Shylock’s resentment of Gentiles (“if you prick us, do we not bleed,” and so forth). And the loaner, while cruel, finally listens to reason and gives up his pound of flesh, so that there is no need for Portia’s lecture on Christian virtue (“the quality of mercy is not strained”). Here as throughout Tales From Arab Lands, the folktale demonstrates one of its greatest attractions: It gives every people the right to tell its own stories.

In telling the story of the decade he spent living in Paris, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Zweig offers an original take on a classic American myth—the myth of Paris, that sensual, liberated city where good Americans are said to go when they die. At the same time, Zweig probes behind the romance of Paris to examine the dark motives that led him—the solitary child of a Brooklyn Jewish family, raised in the shadow of the Holocaust—to reinvent himself so thoroughly as a Parisian. From the ages of 20 to 30, Paris was his “visible identity,” but his “bones,” Zweig suggests, were always Brighton Beach: “As a foreigner [in France], I felt my connections to others were flimsy, unserious. I could choose to set aside this labored character who spoke French, and lapse into my secret otherness as a boy from Brooklyn, living near that other beach, Brighton Beach, where the language that escaped me wasn’t Italian or French but Yiddish.”

Lambert Strether, the hero of Henry James’ The Ambassadors and the archetypal American in Paris, summed up the city’s lesson in a famous phrase: “Live all you can! It’s a mistake not to.” From the very first pages of Departures, it is clear that Zweig has taken this advice to heart—and that for him, as for so many American before and since, “live” is really a euphemism for another four-letter word. “I don’t remember how I met Claire for the second time,” the book begins, but Zweig does remember how “for weeks after that, we made love almost anywhere we could get our clothes off. … When we made love, Claire would seem to bend into a depth, holding her breath and reaching, and then, with a helpless gulp, find what she had been reaching for, and expand.” Years earlier, Claire’s older sister Arlette had been his first lover in Paris; in between he was married to Michele, a Communist painter. And then there is Anna, a new widow, who comes to Zweig for sexual solace: “We were castaways adrift on a raft of coarse white sheets. We hadn’t chosen each other, but our ship had gone down, and here we were trying to salvage ourselves. Anna buoyed me up with her pure, nervous will. ‘I’m already dead, Paul,’ she would say. ‘I’m not here, not alive.’ ”

It’s no good denying that this way of writing about sex, which dominates the first third of Departures, now feels rather embarrassing—at once mannered and awkward, prurient and religiose. In his foreword, Gopnik aptly compares Zweig with John Updike, another writer born in the 1930s who made a cold poetry out of sex. Both grew up in a culture still vestigially Victorian, only to find that the wide-open sexual regime of the bohemian 1950s and 1960s was a new, perpetually intoxicating world.

Today, when sex has no secrets even to most teenagers, we have much less patience for Zweig’s kind of sublime swooning: “She lived for that grateful gulp at the bottom of her flesh; and I adored her.” What is more striking is the way Zweig’s fascination with sex seems to grant him no access at all to the inwardness of his partners. Arlette, Claire, and Michele have no real life on the page; they are stylish, seductive abstractions, more like figures in an Antonioni movie than like characters in a novel, or people one might know in real life. “You were there, Arlette, in all your forbidding deliberation, like a nun,” he writes, with the kind of rhetorical flourish that seems more natural in French than in English. “I could see you clearly unbuttoning your plaid dress and folding it on the chair in my room; I could see you unhook your brassiere, like Jeanne d’Arc preparing for the flames.”

The first section of Departures focuses on Zweig’s final weeks in Europe as he prepares to end his 10-year sojourn and return to America (where he would become a professor at Columbia and then Queens College). The man we meet in these pages is Zweig’s evolved persona, the product of a decade of self-invention—a libertine intellectual, an expatriate who has no roots and casts no shadow. It is telling, then, that the main drama of this section is Zweig’s struggle with a sudden, unprecedented bout of impotence, which destroys his relationship with the gulping Claire. “I was … a sexual fool, a partial man. My personality had become unraveled.”

Clearly, the impending end of Zweig’s exile is connected to the disappearance of his freewheeling potency. It is as though the self he created in Paris has burst like a bubble, revealing how insubstantial it was in the first place. “I myself had become strange: a Gallic ghost walking the streets of Paris, with my fraudulent but accurate French,” Zweig writes. Indeed, he comes to feel that the very ease with which he mastered French is suspicious, the sign of an essential rootlessness. “You speak French so well, it is uncanny, even unhealthy,” says his friend Witold Gombrowicz, the great Polish novelist. “It seems to me that you are a modern-day wandering Jew, someone who doesn’t have a home, and doesn’t want one.”

In the second section of Departures, Zweig begins his story again, hoping to understand the origins of his own ghostliness. “I was brought up as a child of silence,” he writes, a silence intimately connected to Jewishness and to the Holocaust, which was taking place across the ocean while he grew up on Coney Island. “The enormous killing of the war seemed to have no content in my neighborhood of brick tenements and aging three-family houses,” Zweig remembers:

they never talked about the Holocaust. In my house, it was present as a silent bewilderment, and a struggle to be cheerful. I remember it, I suppose, as a lack of light in the various apartments we lived in, or as a sagging in my grandmother’s face. To be a Jew, when I was a boy, was to be unhappy, unspeaking; it was to live within an invisible limit.

Is it any wonder that such a childhood should produce a man impatient of all limits, who taught himself to speak freely in another language? What matters is less the factual accuracy of Zweig’s recollections—he notes that he remembers nothing about large swaths of his childhood, including the birth of his younger sister—than the psychological truth his memories are trying to tell him. (Departures is a book written under the sign of Freud, and Zweig is clearly a veteran analysand: When impotence strikes, he turns not to a doctor but to a therapist, who blames his Oedipus complex.)

One of his strongest early memories, from the age of 3 of 4, is of wandering off on the beach by himself and feeling no fear: “Was I lost? I didn’t think so. I was happy, alone.” His life in Paris, Zweig suggests, was another way of being happy and alone, unencumbered by possessions or relationships: “The deeper I slipped into French … the more certainly I knew, in some chamber of my heart, that my bags were packed.” It is as though Zweig were compelling himself to prepare for, or atone for, the refugee’s life of uncertainty and expulsion that was led by so many Jews in the 20th century.

Indeed, the contrast between his own idyllic life as an American Jew in Paris and the deaths of so many Jews in the same city just a decade earlier, is a constant, largely unspoken theme in Zweig’s French memories. It helps to explain the adventure that dominates the later part of Departures: Zweig’s reckless, uninformed embrace of Communism, which led him to become an underground supporter of the FLN, the terrorist group then seeking Algeria’s independence from France. When Zweig opens his apartment to Daniel, an FLN agent on the run from the police, he is clearly trying to reenact the not-so-distant days of the Occupation, when Jews and resistance fighters hid from the Nazis. It is a way of casting off the safety of his American identity and passport, of reclaiming the danger and ephemerality that Zweig associates with Jewishness: “I thought of Trotsky, the Russian Jew, who had made a silence of his past. … I too was abstract, although I lived only on the edge of action, a voyeur.” Nor was he the only one engaged in such psychic role-playing. There were seven people in his cell of FLN sympathizers, Zweig writes, and “the odd thing is that we were all Jews, all seven of us.”

In the end, Zweig did return to America, and to a conventional career as a writer and teacher. None of that experience figures in Departures, however. Instead, the book concludes with a brief, shocking postscript, in which Zweig recounts the diagnosis of cancer that he received in his early forties, and the struggle with sickness and dread that dominated his last years. Working under a maddeningly indeterminate death sentence, Zweig comes to feel that the writer’s dream of posterity is just that, a dream. “I saw that a writer’s immortality exists in the moment of conception, in which language has seized hold of him. … A work is not a life, but writing is living, and now especially I wanted to live with all my might.” In the pages of Departures, he still does.

When Peggy Guggenheim descended on Pollock’s studio, however, the artist wasn’t at home. He arrived late, to find Guggenheim storming out the door. “I came into the place, the doors were open, and I see a lot of paintings, L.K., L.K. I didn’t come to look at L.K.’s paintings. Who is L.K.?” she demanded.

This little episode tells you all you need to know about the pathos of Lee Krasner’s life, and of the new biography Lee Krasner by Gail Levin (William Morrow, $30). Krasner was, of course, the L.K. whose paintings shared space with Pollock’s. The two painters had met in late 1941, and would be married in 1945. Guggenheim, Krasner insisted, “damn well knew … who L.K. was.” She just had no interest in Krasner’s paintings, certainly not when Pollock’s were on view. And while few people were as defiantly nasty to Krasner as Guggenheim, almost everyone in the mid-century art world agreed that Krasner’s main value was as the guardian, gatekeeper, and promoter of Pollock’s work. To this day, far more people can identify Krasner as Pollock’s widow—or as the character Marcia Gay Harden played in the movie Pollock—than can name one of her canvases.

Levin, an art historian who teaches at CUNY, has written this biography partly in order to rectify this injustice. Levin was one of a group of young feminist curators and art historians who helped bring new attention to Krasner’s work in the 1970s. Krasner was grateful for their interest, and for feminism as a political movement: “I’m glad I’m alive, now that women’s lib has brought a new consciousness,” she said in 1973. “Thank you, women’s lib.”

Yet as Levin shows, Krasner also remained wary of the idea of feminist art. One of the constant themes of her career was her rejection of all parochial labels. She refused even to call herself an American artist, seeing art as a universal and timeless pursuit, and she did not like the idea of viewers finding something essentially female in her abstract-expressionist canvases. In 1974, for instance, a group of students in a feminist art program wrote to Krasner asking her to compose a “Letter to a Young Woman Artist.” In her reply, she conspicuously avoided any mention of gender, preferring to address the “relation to past, present and future” in her work.

In her stern universalism, both political and aesthetic, Krasner was a typical member of her generation of New York Jewish artists and intellectuals. She was born in 1908 in Brownsville, the Brooklyn slum neighborhood that was a center of immigrant Jewish life. (It’s easy to imagine her crossing paths with the young Alfred Kazin, whose classic memoir A Walker in the City tells of a Brownsville boy’s yearning for beauty and culture.) Her given name was Lena Krassner, which she changed as a teenager to the more Anglicized and poetic “Lenore”; not until she was 40 did she consistently call herself Lee Krasner.

Levin astutely notes that, as the first American-born member of her family—she was born exactly nine months and two weeks after her mother joined her father in New York—Krasner would have been set apart in several ways. Unlike her parents and older siblings, she couldn’t speak Russian or Yiddish. She remembered learning the Hebrew alphabet, but she always had trouble with languages—Levin suggests that she might have been dyslexic—and it seems that the shape of the letters meant much more to her than their meaning: “Visually I loved it. I didn’t know what it meant.” Perhaps this early memory fuelled Krasner’s 1960s paintings like Kufic and Uncial, whose titles refer to kinds of script.

As a young girl, Krasner recalled, she was drawn to Jewish practice: “I went to services at the synagogue, partly because it was expected of me. But there must have been something beyond, because I wasn’t forced to go, and my younger sister did not.” But she rebelled against the segregation of men and women in synagogue and was “shatter[ed]” when she understood that, in the morning prayer service, men give thanks for being made in God’s image, while women give thanks for being created “as You saw fit.”

As she got older, art replaced religion as the focus of Krasner’s spiritual life. She herself couldn’t explain how a girl from a poor immigrant family, who never saw the inside of a museum, conceived the desire to be an artist: “I don’t know where the word A-R-T came from; but by the time I was thirteen, I knew I wanted to be a painter.” Her parents did not so much support her as refrain from causing problems—mainly because they were too busy making a living to take much interest in her plans. Krasner enrolled in a girls’ high school, Washington Irving, whose vocational curriculum included classes in the arts, and then studied at a series of art schools—Cooper Union, the Art Students’ League, and the National Academy of Design.

By the 1930s, Levin shows, Krasner was part of a tightly knit community of downtown artists who idolized the School of Paris and were committed to abstract painting. This made them marginal in the American art world, and many, including Krasner, survived the Depression thanks to the WPA, painting murals in high schools and post offices. Inevitably, Krasner became politicized during the radical ’30s, joining the Communist-dominated Artists Union and taking part in protests. These often ended in mass arrests, and the artists amused themselves by giving fake names to the cops—Cézanne, Michelangelo, Rubens. Even here, Levin nicely observes, Krasner was confronted with the scarcity of women in art history: “I didn’t have a big selection, you know, it was either Rosa Bonheur or Mary Cassatt.”

Yet Krasner, like most of the “advanced” New York intellectuals, found that her artistic ideals made it impossible for her to be a good Communist. She identified with the Trotskyites, whose opposition to Stalin made them anathema to the Communist Party. But she does not seem to have been essentially political, even at the height of her activism. The debates at Village artists’ hangouts like the Jumble Shop and Café Society concerned Matisse and Picasso, not Marx and Lenin.

As the fashion in American art began to change in the 1940s, Krasner’s colleagues—Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and of course Jackson Pollock—started to win fame. Thanks to the advocacy of critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, both of whom were associated with Partisan Review, these disparate painters took on a media-friendly identity as a school, the abstract expressionists or action painters. In the postwar world, the shift of the center of artistic gravity from Paris to New York was one hallmark of the “American Century,” and some surprisingly powerful American institutions—from the Luce magazines to the State Department—started to lavish attention on their work.

But never on Krasner. The contrast between her obscurity and Pollock’s worldwide fame was especially striking. In 1949, Life ran a feature with the headline “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Meanwhile, Krasner was one of 17 artists in a group show in a small East Hampton gallery, where her work received one sentence in a New York Times review: “Lee Krasner’s rigidly patterned abstracts sound a call to order.” A New Yorker piece on the couple described her as “a slim auburn-haired young woman [in fact, she was 41] who is also an artist,” and showed her “bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly.” Levin demonstrates that this kind of sexism, which now seems appallingly blatant, was standard practice in the macho art world. The bohemians of East Hampton were no more enlightened than the executives and suburbanites of Mad Men.

As Pollock’s alcoholism and self-destructive behavior spiraled out of control, Krasner was reduced to the ungrateful role of caretaker. Trying to keep him working and sober, she seemed to his friends like a spoilsport or a tyrant; she had to put up with his flaunted infidelities and violent rages. Even after his death, Krasner lived in Pollock’s shadow. As Levin shows, more than one gallerist and dealer feigned interest in her paintings when their real objective was the big prize, Pollock’s estate. It wasn’t until the last decade of her life that a new generation of feminist artists and scholars began to give Krasner’s work sustained critical support.

Yet Levin never quite gives that work the close attention that would be needed to argue that Krasner was, indeed, a great artist. Over a 50-year career, her paintings varied dramatically in quality and originality. She had a very long apprenticeship, and at different stages her work seems excessively indebted to Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, and Pollock himself. In the end, her greatest appeal to posterity may not be as a painter, or as the wife of Jackson Pollock, but—in the words of the art historian Barbara Rose—as “a beacon of integrity. She had an absolute inability to compromise with anything.”

If only as a change of pace, then, a book called Philosemitism in History (Cambridge University Press) should be cause for celebration. Never mind that it is a mere 350 pages, and not a continuous history but a collection of academic papers on fairly narrow subjects, from the Christian Hebraists of the 17th century to documentaries on West German TV. At least it promises a chance to hear about Gentiles who admired and praised Jews, instead of hating and killing them. There must have been some, right?

Well, yes and no. As every contributor to Philosemitism in History acknowledges, Jews have never been entirely happy about the idea of philo-Semitism. The volume’s introduction, by editors Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp, begins with a Jewish joke: “Q: Which is preferable—the antisemite or the philosemite? A: The antisemite—at least he isn’t lying.” This may be too cynical; closer to the bone is the saying that “a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.” That formulation helps to capture the sense that philo- and anti- share an unhealthy interest in Jews and an unreal notion of who and what Jews are. Both deal not with Jewishness but with “Semitism,” as if being a Jew were the same as embracing a political ideology such as communism or conservatism—rather than what it really is, a religious and historical identity that cuts across political and economic lines.

This Jewish mistrust of philo-Semitism finds ample support in the history of the word offered by Lars Fischer in his contribution to the book. Fischer’s essay focuses rather narrowly on debates within the socialist movement in Germany in the late 19th century. But since this was exactly the time and place that the words “anti-Semitism” and “philo-Semitism” were coined, Fischer’s discussion of the political valences of the terms is highly revealing. From the beginning, when the word was coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, “anti-Semitic” was a label proudly claimed by enemies of the Jews. In Austria and Germany, there were political parties, trade unions, and newspapers that called themselves “anti-Semitic,” even when their political programs went beyond hostility to Jews.

Philo-Semitism sounds like it would have been the rallying-cry of the opponents of anti-Semitism, a movement with its own political program. But Fischer explains that this was not the case. In fact, “philo-Semitism” was invented as a term of abuse, applied by anti-Semites to those who opposed them. Though Fischer does not draw the parallel, he makes clear that “philo-Semite” was the equivalent of a word like “nigger-lover” in the United States, meant to suggest that anyone who took the part of a despised minority was odious and perverse. “Its obvious implication was that anybody who could be bothered to oppose anti-Semitism actively must be in cahoots with ‘the Jews,’ ” in thrall to the very Jewish money and power that anti-Semitism attacked.

What this meant was that, in Wilhelmine Germany, those who fought anti-Semitism—above all, Germany’s Social Democratic Party, whose leadership included many Jews—had to be careful to deny that they were philo-Semites. In 1891, for instance, the New York Jewish socialist Abraham Cahan, later to be famous as a novelist and the editor of the Forward, attended the International Socialist Congress at Brussels, in order to propose a motion condemning anti-Semitism. Victor Adler and Paul Singer, the leaders of Socialist parties in Germany and Austria—and both Jews—fought against Cahan’s motion, afraid that condemning anti-Semitism would only heighten the public perception of socialism as a Jewish movement. Finally, the motion passed, after it was amended to attack anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in equal measure.

No one, it seems, wanted to be a philo-Semite; and for a long time, on the evidence of Philosemitism in History, almost no one was. Certainly, it takes pathetically little good will toward Jews to qualify for a place in the book. Robert Chazan, looking for “Philosemitic Tendencies in Western Christendom,” finds one in Saint Bernard’s warning to the Second Crusade not to repeat the anti-Jewish violence of the First. “The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world, so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption.”

In this context, philo-Semitism means persecuting Jews to the brink of killing them, but no further. (Paula Frederiksen wrestled with this ambiguous Christian legacy in her excellent book Augustine and the Jews.) Likewise, Chazan shows, the medieval princes who invited Jews to settle in their lands did so not out of any love for Jewish people, but in order to create a taxable commercial class—and they often ended up killing the goose that laid so many golden eggs.

As early as the 11th century, then, we can see the ambivalence that continues to mark Christian philo-Semitism down to the present. Jews are valued, but only as long as they play the role assigned them in a Christian project or worldview. If Jews step out of that role, they are bitterly criticized. During the Renaissance, for example, a desire to read the Bible in its original language drove many leading humanists to study Hebrew. These Christian Hebraists engaged with Jewish traditions more deeply than any Gentiles had done before, even studying the Mishnah and Gemara for clues about historic Jewish practices. As Eric Nelson showed in his recent book The Hebrew Republic, the Israelite commonwealth became a major inspiration to English political theorists in the 17th century.

Three essays in Philosemitism in History focus on the Christian Hebraist movement. Yet as Abraham Melamed writes in “The Revival of Christian Hebraism,” “the big question … is whether the emergence and influence of Christian Hebraism in early modern Europe led to a more tolerant attitude toward the Jews, and additionally to any kind of philosemitism.” Reading Hebrew and admiring the Israelites were all well and good, but did they lead scholars like Johann Reuchlin and William Whiston to have any sympathy with the actual, living Jews of their time? “This is not necessarily the case,” Melamed answers. The English scholar John Selden was referred to, jokingly, as England’s “Chief Rabbi,” for his mastery of Jewish texts, but he seems not to have known any Jews, and he publicly endorsed the blood libel, citing Jews’ “devilish malice to Christ and Christians.”

A more complicated case of Christian philo-Semitism is the subject of Yaakov Ariel’s essay “It’s All in the Bible,” which explores the strong support of Israel by contemporary American Evangelicals. For centuries, but especially after 1967, evangelical Christians have been staunch Zionists, and their friendship has been welcomed by the Israeli government. Yet the premise of that friendship is a millenarian theology, based on a reading of the Book of Revelation, which holds that the establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land is a precondition to the Second Coming of Christ. On the road to the redemption, Christian Zionists believe, the majority of Jews will be wiped out in apocalyptic wars, and the remainder will convert to Christianity.

This philo-Semitism is, at its heart, deeply anti-Jewish, and the attempts of Israeli politicians to court evangelical support have been awkward, to say the least. In 1996, during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, he supported a bill, urged by Orthodox members of the Knesset, to ban Christian missionary activity in Israel. When he realized that this would profoundly offend the American Christian Right, Netanyahu changed his mind and thwarted the bill. Here we have the Jewish leader of a Jewish state permitting Christians to try to convert Jews, as the price for Christian political support.

Does this count as “philo-Semitism”? And what about the painfully earnest documentaries aired on West German TV in the 1970s, discussed by Wulf Kansteiner, in which “self-pity and appropriation of Jewish culture went hand in hand with awkward silences”? Or the Jewish kitsch on sale in many Eastern European cities, which Ruth Ellen Gruber writes about? Lodz, in Poland, was once a great Jewish metropolis, and then one of the most lethal Nazi ghettoes. Today it is home to a restaurant called Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof, where you can be served matzoh by a “waiter dressed up in Hasidic costume, including a black hat and ritual fringes.” Gruber is rather indulgent toward this kind of thing, seeing it as a byproduct or precursor of a genuine rebirth of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Seen in a colder light, this Jewish kitsch, like many of the phenomena on display in Philosemitism in History, might seem to call for a paraphrase of Oscar Wilde: Not “each man kills the thing he loves,” but each man loves the thing he killed.

But this is too bitter. There may be little to love about philo-Semitism, and little to be grateful for in its history; but that is because genuine esteem between Christians and Jews, like real affection of all kinds, cannot be grasped as an “-ism.” Ideologies deal in abstractions, and to turn a group of people into an abstraction, even a “positive” one, is already to do violence to them. That kind of violence is what historians tend to record, but most of the time, it is not the way real people think and live.

For instance, one of the most heartening stories in Philosemitism in History comes from 14th-century Marseilles, where a Jewish moneylender named Bondavid was tried for fraud. The trial record still exists, Chazan writes, and it shows that Bondavid called a number of Christians as character witnesses. A priest, Guillelmus Gasqueti, testified that “actually [Bondavid is] more righteous than anybody he ever met in his life. … For, if one may say so, he never met or saw a Christian more righteous than he.” This kind of genuine, personal esteem between Christians and Jews was “unusual,” Chazan writes, “but surely not unique.” And it is the proliferation of such face-to-face friendships in modern America that has made this country, not the most “philo-Semitic” in history, but the one where individual Jews and Christians have actually liked each other most.

That’s why Leeches, the newly translated novel by David Albahari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24), reads at first like a kind of throwback. First published in Serbia in 2006, the book is fully stocked with Jewish mystical props: not just the golem and the 10 Sefirot, but portals into higher dimensions, ancient manuscripts that rewrite themselves, cosmic sexual rites, souls that are reincarnated in every generation, and so on. Yet at the same time, Albahari—a Serbian Jewish writer who now lives in Belgrade, and the author of the acclaimed Holocaust novel Götz and Meyer—allows his text to be haunted by more interesting and unusual ghosts.

Most obviously, Leeches is dominated by the specters of the Holocaust and of resurgent anti-Semitism. The novel’s narrator—we never learn his name—is a columnist for a Belgrade newspaper, Minut, and as he befriends a few members of the city’s Jewish community, he becomes increasingly aware of the threat posed to Jews by Serbian nationalism. “This is one big pile of nonsense … and there is no point in paying attention to it,” he declares after reading a pamphlet about “the Aryan origins of the Serbian people and the need to preserve their racial purity.” But his Jewish acquaintances aren’t so sure: “We paid no attention to another pile of nonsense, said Jakov Svarc, and look where it got us.”

As another Jewish character points out, however, “The same thing would have happened … even if we had paid all the attention in the world”; and the more the narrator denounces anti-Semitism in his newspaper column, the more vicious and violent the response becomes. A Jewish cemetery is defaced, an art exhibition vandalized; graffiti is scrawled on the narrator’s front door, feces left on his doorstep. Finally, the threats become murderous: “We will impale you, and display you on Terazije so that everyone can see how our enemies fare.”

This constant drumbeat of violence is only one of the sources of the novel’s rising tension. The other, more mysterious unease comes from the narrator’s growing conviction that he has stumbled into a bizarre and intricate conspiracy. Leeches opens with a scene reminiscent of Blow-Up or The Conversation, those classic movies of voyeurism and paranoia: The narrator is walking by the banks of the Danube, eating an apple, when he notices a man and a woman having an argument. Suddenly, the man slaps the woman in the face and then turns and runs off.

The narrator, his interest drawn, finds himself following the woman through the streets: “I wasn’t thinking at all, I didn’t pause to wonder what I was up to, I didn’t say to myself that I should follow her, I simply put one foot in front of the other, and followed her.” He loses track of her in the maze of streets, but as he continues to search, something even odder happens. He picks up a button lying on the sidewalk and finds that underneath it someone has drawn a symbol, a circle containing two triangles. Nothing he has seen is inherently unusual—a fight between strangers, a bit of graffiti—yet he is convinced that there is more at work than meets the eye. “The longer I chewed on this, the more convinced I became that the explanation for the events on the quay and the woman’s disappearance lay in these mathematical relationships, and that if I were to penetrate their secret, they would lead me straight to her door.”

At first, the reader is not sure whether Albahari wants us to trust the narrator’s paranoid theories. In a nice touch, he makes clear that the narrator is a dedicated stoner—he is constantly smoking joints with his friend Marko—and marijuana is not known for promoting clear thinking. But then the narrator starts to see the mysterious symbol everywhere, and it seems there must really be a conspiracy at work in Belgrade. (Here Albahari’s allusion is to Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, where a certain graffiti symbol reveals the existence of the Tristero, an underground postal service.)

Albahari weaves the magic net of the conspiracy tighter and tighter. The narrator is convinced that an anonymous classified ad in the newspaper is addressed to him; when he replies to it, he is given a copy of a manuscript titled “The Well,” which seems to be a history of Belgrade’s Jewish community. But each time he opens it, the text seems different, and he keeps finding passages that describe a mystical figure named Eleazar, who seems to reappear in Belgrade throughout the centuries. The woman from the riverbank turns up again; it turns out that she is Jewish—and has a connection with the manuscript. The narrator turns to an old high-school friend, now a mathematician, for help decoding the symbol, and he too seems to be in on the plot. Even his best friend Marko starts to give him a bad feeling.

“All I want … is to understand what’s going on,” the narrator says. But it is easy to grow impatient with Leeches’ woozy, over-plotted mystery. No matter how it is eventually explained—and Albahari does explain it, sort of—it has all clearly been arranged, as in a book by Umberto Eco or Dan Brown, to give the reader a conspiratorial frisson. Juxtaposed with the real danger of anti-Semitism, the kabbalistic game seems rather indulgent.

Much more interesting are Albahari’s occasional attempts to link the Serbian predicament with the Jewish one, in provocative ways. At one point, Albahari seems to suggest that the international odium inspired by Serbia’s ethnic-cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo led the Serbs to become a pariah people, a scapegoat, like the Jews in Christian Europe: “The horror of identity is that it can’t be sloughed off the way a snake sheds its skin, and there is no dungeon worse than an identity that one doubts or that others have proclaimed to be bad or evil. I experienced this myself many times in the years of ethnic strife, facing the prejudices about Serbian identity, and I could only assume how that must have seemed from the perspective of being Jewish or of an identity that had permanently been branded as negative.”

It’s not entirely clear how Albahari means this to be read, but it sounds like a damning statement of Serbian self-pity. If the world had a negative view of Serbia during the 1990s, it was not because of “prejudice,” but because of the Serb concentration camps that murdered thousands of people. The ambiguities in Albahari’s understanding of his Serb and Jewish identities are deeper, and more interesting, than any of the carefully contrived mysteries in Leeches.

This principle may or may not be true, but it has nothing to say about the truth or falsehood of any particular religion. Presumably, if Americans started sincerely worshipping Zeus or L. Ron Hubbard, they would get all the same civic benefits as if they were pious Jews, Catholics, or Protestants. The temptation to make a religion of religion, to recommend that other people believe doctrines one does not believe oneself, is a standing temptation for ideologues, especially on the right.

Yet the generosity of Eisenhower’s statement is even more striking than its awkwardness. When you consider how much blood has been spilled over questions of theology, there is something quite wonderful about the way Americans are so eager to give every religion equal credit for good intentions—or even to believe that good intentions are more important than theological correctness. And what is most amazing of all is the way Jews are automatically included in this consensus—in what Eisenhower went on to call “the Judeo-Christian concept.” The very term “Judeo-Christian,” which is now a cliché in American political discourse, represents a healing of a 2,000-year-old breach, an off-hand repudiation of the whole bloody history of Christian anti-Judaism.

When and how did America start to think of itself as a Judeo-Christian country, rather than what it historically has been, a Protestant one? That is the question Kevin M. Schultz asks in Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford), and he gives a very concrete answer. The change came about in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks primarily to the concerted effort of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a lobbying and educational group founded in 1927. In fact, the first half of Tri-Faith America reads like a history of the NCCJ, as Schultz draws on archival material to show how the group developed its programs and understood its mission.

That mission was even clearer in the group’s original, unwieldy name, National Conference of Jews and Christians (Catholic and Protestant). For if one of its goals was to bridge the divide between Jews and Christians, the other was to stimulate good will between Protestant and Catholics—groups whose antagonism had been a far more important feature of American history. Indeed, from any reasonable point of view, Catholics posed a much greater challenge to the hegemony of American Protestants than Jews ever could: At mid-century, the population was estimated to be two-thirds Protestant, one-quarter Catholic, and 3 percent Jewish. To many Protestants, moreover, Catholics were inherently unsuited to democracy, because of their obedience to the Church and their communal clannishness. Not until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 would this kind of hostility be wholly put to rest.

It is greatly to the credit of America’s mainline Protestant leaders, then, that in the 20th century they put the weight of the Establishment behind the “tri-faith” vision and against the forces of bigotry. The NCCJ had its origins as a reaction to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, with its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic hatreds, and took new urgency from the rise of Nazism in 1930s Europe. Its most popular programs were the so-called Tolerance Trios, in which a priest, minister, and rabbi would tour the country conducting public discussions. The NCCJ’s head described these tours as a benevolent American “ ‘storm-trooping’ … in sharp contrast to Nazi precept and procedure.”

Anodyne as the Tolerance Trios sound, they did have to overcome some initial resistance, notably from the Catholic Church. Some bishops refused to allow priests to appear in a setting that suggested parity with ministers and rabbis. Yet the clergy who took part in the Trios went out of their way to minimize doctrinal differences. At one conference in the early 1930s, a priest told a Methodist questioner, “I would hope that you should become a Catholic. But as long as your reason and conscience truly lead you to do otherwise, you have as good a chance to get to heaven as any Catholic.” As Schultz notes, this was “a bit theologically soft regarding the Catholic position,” but for that very reason it was a good example of how the rhetoric of tolerance helped to produce the reality. The official NCCJ formula, “the brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God,” nicely elided dogmatic differences.

World War II, Schultz shows, was when Tri-Faith America became official government policy. Privately, Franklin Roosevelt could be cutting about Jews and Catholics, once announcing that the United States was “a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.” But during the war, the political appeal of “brotherhood” was too obvious to ignore. Not only did it serve to tamp down ethnic and religious prejudices that could hinder the American war effort, but it provided a perfect foil to Nazi racism. “We are at war with a people claiming to be a ‘lordly race,’ ” said Henry Sloane Coffin, a leading American Protestant minister. “We must hold fast to our national unity by insisting that all men have one heavenly father who wills His Children to honor and serve one another as brethren.”

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, then, the NCCJ was given free access to the American military. Tolerance Trios visited camps and bases; soldiers were issued pamphlets with titles like “A Faith for Young Men in the Armed Forces” and “Why We Are at War.” Perhaps the most concise and moving statement of tri-faith unity was the “prayer card” issued to every soldier, containing Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish prayers to be read to a dying man. The kitschiest example, on the other hand, may have been the football game at Ft. Benning described by Schultz in which the marching band formed into a Star of David and played a rousing version of “Ein Keloheinu,” before reforming as a cross and playing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

The NCCJ representative at that game noted happily that “the massed thousands cheered wildly and warm-heartedly this gesture of good-will.” But then, he wasn’t exactly a neutral party. Schultz’s institutional focus on the NCCJ means that he has little to say about how its propaganda was actually received by citizens and soldiers and what kind of concrete impact it had on bigotry. (Tom Lehrer, the musical satirist, offered an astringent view in his song “National Brotherhood Week”: “It’s fun to eulogize/ The people you despise/ As long as you don’t let ’em in your school.”)

Schultz’s treatment of the intellectual and theological dimensions of the subject is also fairly summary. Inevitably, Schultz mentions Will Herberg, whose 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew “affirmed the arrival of Tri-Faith-America,” but he has less to say about Herberg’s critique of this concept as “religiousness without religion … a way of sociability or ‘belonging’ rather than a way of reorienting life to God.”

His focus in the second half of the book is, rather, legal and sociological. If World War II enshrined “the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God” as an American principle, the 1950s and 1960s saw Americans wrestle with its limits and contradictions. For one thing, Schultz emphasizes, the divisions among Protestant, Catholic, and Jew were far easier to talk about than the gulf between black and white. The NCCJ faced periodic pressure to broaden its mandate to include civil rights issues; but while many of its members were sympathetic to the cause, the organization itself remained highly cautious.

Still, Schultz argues in his last chapter, “From Creed to Color,” that the tri-faith emphasis on “brotherhood” and “the Judeo-Christian heritage” helped to prepare the ground for the civil rights movement, by giving it “a language to tap into.” In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Schultz notes, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the tri-faith formula when he referred to the day “when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands.”

Yet other postwar developments helped to expose the fault lines in the tri-faith alliance—in particular, the conflicting agendas of Jews and Catholics. While both of these groups wanted to fight discrimination from the Protestant Establishment, they had different visions of what America should be. Jews, as a small and historically persecuted minority, understood America as a secular country, where Church and State were totally separate. Thus, Jewish plantiffs and lawyers helped to litigate the landmark Supreme Court cases that barred school prayer in the early 1960s, and Jewish organizations strongly objected to plans to include a question about religion on the 1960 census. Catholics, Schultz shows, came down on the other side of both issues. As a large and well-established group, they welcomed a recognition of their numbers and wanted a role for religion in public life.

Such disagreements, heightened by Jews’ memories of Catholic persecution, tested but did not break the tri-faith consensus. Today, as Schultz observes, the major divisions in American life cut across religious boundaries. On issues like abortion, homosexuality, and school prayer, conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Jews have much more in common with one another than with their liberal coreligionists.

But the real test for the tri-faith model, which Schultz barely addresses in his book, will be the assimilation of new religious groups into the “Judeo-Christian” model—above all, Muslims. From Ground Zero to Orange County, the last year witnessed a series of revolting demonstrations of anti-Muslim prejudice in the United States, reminiscent of the kind of bigotry that Jews and Catholics once faced. Tri-Faith America shows that our religious diversity has been a process of mutual accommodation: As “foreign” religions become less dogmatic and distinctive, Americans stop seeing them as alien or threatening. With luck, the same benevolent process will allow us, a few generations from now, to talk blithely of America’s Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage.

The most interesting thing about the diary is its Jewish subtext. Benjamin notes that it’s Passover, and that the pension he’s staying in is owned by a Jewish man who “kept saying, ‘So, what do we make for Yontev?’ ” Benjamin parses the word in a way that suggests it is new to him: “One does not say ‘Good day’ but ‘Good Yontev.’ ”

Similarly, the proprietor subscribes to the Israelitisches Familienblatt (“Jewish Family Journal”), and Benjamin notes that the magazine contains advertisements for “dishes for the Seder.” It takes his traveling companion to explain to him what these Seder plates are: “The latter are used for the Passover feast and have different compartments for different foods. So says Steinfeld.” Later Benjamin complains, “with coffee there was matzoh, and that’s how it will be; for … we are in Pesach week.” But while the pension seems to keep kosher for Passover, there is no actual Seder, which seems to both relieve Benjamin and disappoint him: “Thank God they didn’t do Seder. It might well have been very interesting and might even have moved me, but it would have seemed to me like theater, nothing holy.”

Much can be gleaned about Benjamin’s Jewishness, and that of his whole class, from this short diary. He is evidently completely unobservant—more, ignorant of the basic details of Jewish practice—and he feels a nervous disinclination to be “claimed” in any way by Judaism; a 20th-century man, he could find “nothing holy” in organized religion. Yet at the same time, it is impossible not to notice that Benjamin is surrounded by Jewishness like a fish by water. His traveling companion is Jewish; the house he’s staying in is Jewish. As his friend Gershom Scholem, a product of a similar background, would note, it was quite normal for assimilated German Jews never to enter a Gentile home or invite a Gentile to theirs. Jewish identity was much more durable than Jewish belief.

This would be of merely sociological interest were it not for the complicated ways that Jewishness and Judaism informed Benjamin’s brilliant and vastly influential work. His best-known writings—on Proust and Kafka, 19th-century Paris, the movies, “the age of mechanical reproduction”—came after the period covered by Early Writings. But even in these seven years, from the ages of 18 to 25, it’s possible to see Benjamin develop from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker. The latest pieces in the book—in particular “The Life of Students,” “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” and “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”—lead directly to his most important insights into the nature of literature and history. In fact, the last of these, never published in Benjamin’s lifetime, can be seen as a kind of skeleton key to his mature work, full of overtly mystical beliefs that would go underground when Benjamin became a professed Communist.

Benjamin was not just young when he wrote the pieces in this book; as an activist in the German Youth Movement, he was, one might say, professionally young. The youth movement was a loosely organized phenomenon with many tendencies—its adherents were interested in curriculum reform, sexual liberation, and nationalist renewal, among other causes, and there is a definite flavor of the 1960s in its vague, tumultuous commitment to change. Benjamin was exposed to it starting at 13, when he began to attend the Free School Community—an experimental, progressive school founded by the prominent reformer Gustav Wyneken, who became his mentor. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Benjamin was active in youth organizations—he was president of the Berlin University chapter of the Independent Students’ Association, and several of the essays in the book first appeared in movement journals.

In these pieces, we sometimes find Benjamin writing as a muckraker, holding the German education system up to ridicule for its pedantry and mindless authoritarianism. In “Teaching and Valuation,” he complains of the “pious reiteration or regurgitation of unrelated or superficially related facts” and offers a “blacklist” of teacherly philistinism: “Apropos of Horace: ‘We have to read Horace in this class. It doesn’t matter whether we like it or not; it’s on the syllabus.’ ” When Benjamin quotes a teacher at a classical Gymnasium telling a student, “Please don’t think that anyone believes this enthusiasm of yours for the ancient world,” it’s hard to avoid suspecting that he himself was the student.

In response, Benjamin calls, in fairly platitudinous terms, for “a classical secondary school we could love,” where teaching would be related “to living values of the present.” But at heart, he was much too utopian to be contented with any actually existing reform movement. The title of his dispatch from a major youth retreat in 1913 is “Youth Was Silent”: “Excursions, ceremonial attire, folk dances are nothing new and … still nothing spiritual … we will continue, in the name of youth, to weigh the Youth Congress against the demands of the spirit.” It didn’t help that German youth were just as prone to anti-Semitism as their parents: “When the prizes for sports were being awarded, the name Isaacsohn was announced. Laughter rang out from a minority,” Benjamin notes.

The further one reads, however, the clearer it becomes that what Benjamin was really seeking, in the guise of school reform, was spiritual and social rebirth. Thus, in an essay on “Moral Education,” he concludes that “all morality and religiosity originates in solitude with God”—a prescription that seems to leave little role for school reform, or for schools in general. The tension between Benjamin’s private and public agendas becomes even clearer in the unpublished pieces in Early Writings, the poems and stories and sketches he showed only to a few friends. There, the rhetoric of the youth-movement essays clouds over into the dense, tormented prose that would be so characteristic of the adult Benjamin.

In “The Metaphysics of Youth,” for instance, he writes: “Greatness is the eternal silence after conversation. It is to take the rhythm of one’s own words in the empty space.” There is also a good deal of unresolved sexual anguish at work; Benjamin writes portentously about “the prostitute,” as in, “The woman is the guardian of the conversations. She receives the silence, and the prostitute receives the creator of what has been.”

Benjamin’s disenchantment with the youth movement didn’t become official until the beginning of the First World War. He was disgusted by the way the allegedly progressive movement rallied around the kaiser. Personally, he wanted nothing to do with the war, and he went to great lengths to avoid the draft, finally moving to Switzerland. In terms of his intellectual development, however, this disillusionment was a blessing, allowing him to unyoke his true concerns from the official cause of “youth” (and by 1914, he wasn’t so young any more). “The Life of Students,” from 1915, shows Benjamin bidding farewell to the student movement, while drawing on his experiences to frame a new, radically utopian vision of progress:

History rests concentrated, as in a focal point, something seen from time immemorial in the utopian images of thinkers. The elements of the ultimate condition do not manifest themselves as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and ridiculed ideas. The historical task is to give shape to this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute, make it visible and ascendant in the present.

Already in these lines, it’s possible to hear the messianic tones of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which he would write in 1940, just before he committed suicide in the face of the Nazi onslaught:

It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

When it came to his deepest political hopes, Benjamin seemed to fall instinctively into a Jewish vocabulary of messianism. So, too, with language and literature. “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” has at its core a reading of Genesis and advances an idea of divine language that sounds amazingly like kabbalism: “Language is therefore that which creates and that which completes; it is word and name. In God, name is creative because it is word, and God’s word is knowing because it is name.” One of the things that makes Benjamin so fascinating is the way he seems to translate Jewish ways of thinking into a post-Jewish intellectual culture. Early Writings shows that this fertile dualism was present from the very beginning.

It’s an old joke; but as Marc Lee Raphael shows in The Synagogue in America: A Short History (NYU Press, $35), the phenomena of inter-shul rivalry and congregational splitting are quite a bit older. In 1825, for instance, some of the members of New York City’s Shearith Israel, the oldest synagogue in America, decided to break away and start a new congregation. Their stated reasons, Raphael notes, sound very contemporary—“complaints that would echo and reecho within various congregations in the following two centuries.”

When Shearith Israel was built in downtown Manhattan, in 1695, the city’s Sephardic merchants all lived nearby. But by the 19th century many Jews had moved away, to what were then the suburbs, and found Shearith Israel “very far from the convenience of a considerable number of our brethren.” Besides, the Sephardic population had given way to new Ashkenazi immigrants from Germany and Poland, who found “it difficult to accustom [themselves] to the Portuguese minhag.” The seceders built an imposing new synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun; but apparently it wasn’t good enough, because just three years later a group of Jews split from B’nai Jeshurun to found their own congregation, Anshe Chesed. Both of those shuls still exist, almost 200 years later, but after several incarnations they’re now on the Upper West Side.

This little episode demonstrates all the forces that would continue to drive the evolution of the American synagogue, down to the present day. Shuls follow Jews: geographically, when the Jewish population moves to new neighborhoods and cities; demographically, when new Jewish immigrants import different ways of praying; and theologically, as American Jews change their understanding of how and why they practice Judaism. In this short book, Raphael, a distinguished historian of American Judaism, uses congregational archives, rabbis’ sermons, prayer books, and other ground-level sources to fill out a basically familiar historical outline. It starts in the 17th century with the first American synagogues, founded by immigrants from Portugal by way of Holland or the Dutch colonies. By the time George Washington was inaugurated, in 1789, there were six Sephardic congregations in the United States—in New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Savannah, Charleston, and Richmond.

The second phase in American Jewish history began in the 19th century, when immigration from Germany and Central Europe brought tens of thousands of Ashkenazi Jews to the country. Almost immediately, they began reforming traditional Jewish practice—though, as Raphael shows, not all adopted the name or ideology of Reform Judaism. Raphael lists 20 popular changes that became widespread between 1850 and 1890. They range from the aesthetic (using an organ, replacing the shofar with a cornet) to the linguistic (reading the haftorah in English) to the calendrical (eliminating the second day of holidays, scheduling evening services later on Fridays).

But what “definitively moved a synagogue out of the ‘traditional’ realm and firmly, incontrovertibly, into that of Reform” was changing the siddur, by eliminating or shortening prayers, or translating them from Hebrew into German or English. As early as 1857, the Reform leader Isaac Mayer Wise produced a prayer book, Minhag America, which aimed to be “thoroughly American, republican, and cosmopolitan—every man of any creed can now pray with us.” Any creed included Christians; in fact, Raphael shows that some Reform rabbis were so well-known for their sermons that they attracted as many Gentile listeners as Jews.

Edward Nathan Calisch, the rabbi who led Richmond’s Beth Ahabah from 1891 until World War II, serves as Raphael’s example of the ideal Reform clergyman. In his pursuit of an Americanized Judaism—a religion for “Americans who happen to be Jews”—Calisch did away with the kippah, the bar mitzvah, the chuppah at weddings, Friday night kiddush, and almost all Hebrew prayers. His most popular sermon identified Jewish heroes with American heroes, casting “George Washington as a modern Joshua, Thomas Jefferson as a modern Moses, Benjamin Franklin as a modern Solomon, Andrew Jackson as a modern David,” and so on down to George Mason.

There is something ludicrous, even self-abasing, about all this, and Raphael writes about Calisch with notable irony. But classical Reform Judaism was trying to answer, as honorably as it could, the same problem faced by all Jewish congregations and denominations. This was the problem of how to pray in a way that felt honest in both Jewish and modern, American terms. As Raphael shows throughout The Synagogue in America, this was a matter of style even more than of substance. The key word in synagogue debates from the 19th century on was not orthodoxy or reform, tradition or modernity, but decorum. To 19th-century German-American Jews, a traditional Jewish prayer service did not seem decorous enough: It lacked the choir, organ, pulpit, and reverential hush that made high Protestant churches so imposing.

In the 20th century, Raphael shows, the concern for decorum was a major driver of the evolution of Conservative Judaism. When Eastern European Jews began to arrive in the United States in the hundreds of thousands, starting around 1880, they did not want, and were not wanted by, the socially elite Reform congregations. But within a generation, the descendants of these immigrants felt the need for synagogues that preserved more of Jewish tradition than Reform wanted to, yet testified in concrete ways to the Americanization of their own tastes and values. A shul became Conservative in the 1920s by adopting many of the same changes that made a shul Reform in the 1820s: mixed seating, English prayers, late Friday services. The justification for these changes was not doctrinal but, in the words of one New York rabbi in the 1920s, a matter of “dignity and decorum and beauty.”

The irony is that this growing concern with dignity—with what religion should look and feel like—went along with a decrease in actual Jewish knowledge. It may have been cacophonous when, in an Orthodox shul, each worshipper entered at a different time and started praying at his own pace; but it was also a sign that people actually knew the Hebrew prayers and what they meant. A Conservative congregation singing in unison, or a Reform one sitting reverentially while a choir sang, may have looked more dignified, but they understood far less. This was the vicious circle of assimilation: The less Hebrew American Jews knew, the more English was used in synagogue; but the more English was used in synagogue, the less reason Jews had to learn Hebrew. “The Jews to whom we minister are ignoramuses when it comes to the elemental facts of Hebrew,” said one rabbi on the commission charged with writing a new Conservative prayer book—and that was in the 1930s.

In the last 30 years, Raphael writes, all denominations have moved toward a greater fidelity to tradition: Reform services now use more Hebrew, and the standard of observance for Orthodox shuls has become markedly more rigorous. (In the 1950s, it was common for Orthodox congregants to drive to synagogue, and mikvehs were almost unknown—there was only one in all of Westchester County.) On the other hand, less than half of American Jews identify themselves with any of the four denominations (counting Reconstructionism), and only a fraction of those attend synagogue regularly. And if most non-Orthodox synagogues are full of people reciting Hebrew prayers they don’t understand and couldn’t honestly endorse if they did, it’s no wonder. The Synagogue in America suggests that, in modern America, it has always been thus. Fortunately, what happens in synagogues does not constitute all, or even most, of what it means to be Jewish in America.

The American release of The Mighty Walzer (Bloomsbury, $16), Jacobson’s acclaimed 1999 novel,  gives us the chance to see him in a different mode—less troubled, more nostalgic, more energetically hilarious. Writing quasi-autobiographically about his childhood in 1950s Manchester, Jacobson evokes the insularity of the Jewish community, made up of fairly recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, and their wary fascination with the “real” English. This Jewish world is doubly provincial: a generation removed from “some sucking bog outside Proskurov,” still able to feel “mud from the Bug and the Dniester” clinging to them, Manchester’s Jews regard “Shaygetsshire” with wary fascination.

At the same time, Jacobson notes, the England they are assimilating to is itself provincial, a lower-middle-class Manchester with a fatal taste for “swag”—that is, junk, kitsch, crap. The Walzers, in fact, make their living from swag; the father of the family is a peddler of knickknacks, “ornamental Dutch pee-pee boys with Chinese faces, and flowery wall plates that said ‘Too Grand Ma,’ and brass mirrors in the design of a ship’s porthole.” Oliver Walzer, Jacobson’s grubby adolescent hero, looks on with horror: “Under the influence of swag, we became confused. Aesthetically confused. Whether we also became morally confused is the big question. I believe it depressed us—I’ll go that far. I believe the ugliness of the tsatskes we sold, and then surrounded ourselves with, demoralized us.”

But then, Oliver is in no position to sneer. Egotistical, sex-obsessed, pathologically shy, he is the gauchest, grossest Walzer of them all. It seems hard on Jacobson that just about every American reviewer of his books compares him to Philip Roth—indeed, the cover of The Mighty Walzer features a quote from Janet Maslin that mentions Roth’s name three times in the space of one sentence. But it’s impossible to miss the family resemblance between Oliver Walzer and Alexander Portnoy, Roth’s horny, neurotic avatar. It may have been a desire to go Roth one better that led Jacobson to make Walzer an even more defiantly perverse masturbator than Portnoy, who famously employed a piece of liver. When Oliver locks himself in the bathroom, however, it’s to cut the heads out of photographs of his female relatives and paste them onto bodies from pornographic magazines. “And I did this even to my little Polish grandmother? Especially to my little Polish grandmother.”

This is skin-crawling, but as in Roth and Mordecai Richler—who is the Canadian member of this international brotherhood of literary tummlers—it is also psychologically revelatory. Personally, I have always found it hard to sympathize with the sexual hang-ups of that generation of Jewish male writers—especially their inability to have erotic feelings about Jewish women, their fixation on blond goddesses. But the phenomenon is so well-established that there must some sociological reason for it. Maybe the answer can be found in Isaac Rosenfeld’s 1949 essay “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” which equates kashrut with the incest taboo. If sexual desire is trayf, Rosenfeld writes, then it has to be kept outside the Jewish family, restricted to Gentiles. Walzer feels just the same way. As Jacobson writes in one of his mad riffs: “I’d been brought up, by precept and example, to believe that virginity was an exclusively Jewish property. Why would a hymen have been called a hymen if it wasn’t Jewish? I had cousins called Hymen. We all did. Becky and Shoshanna Hymen.”

If this doesn’t make you laugh, you won’t like Jacobson; if it does, you’ll feast on The Mighty Walzer. Here, as often, it’s in words themselves that the comedy of Jewishness erupts. The novel is packed with Yiddish words, which are never translated, helping to underscore the sense that Walzer and his friends literally speak a different language from their Gentile peers. The difference between unserer and anderer, us and them, is always on their minds. Even when they’re speaking English, Jacobson writes, they can’t shake “the belief that we could magic words and that none of them would hear what we were saying.”

There is just one place where Jacobson’s timid hero becomes strong, skilled, and competent, where he can be “the Mighty Walzer.” The joke is that this place is the ping-pong table: Oliver is a hero of an unheroic game, a champion of a sport no one cares about. Jacobson writes about ping-pong knowledgeably, lovingly, with Nabokovian lyricism; but the fact remains that he is writing about ping-pong, and he delights in the mock-heroic irony that results. Take his poetic little treatise on the difference between old-fashioned rubber paddles and new sponge-covered ones:

My own inclination was to leave well enough alone, not because I was a purist … but becasue I liked the control conventional rubber gave me, I liked the sound—plock plock, plock plock: like the clatter of high heels on a wet pavement—I liked its associations with my old club and team-mates, and I liked the game as I played it; I liked chopping deep, arresting the ball on my forehand, telling it who was boss, and that you could only do with pimples. No one in his right mind chopped with sponge. With sponge there was no call to chop. If you needed to chop you were using the wrong rubber. And if you were using the wrong rubber you were in the wrong game.

Surely no one has ever written, or ever will write, a better ping-pong novel than The Mighty Walzer. But Jacobson’s novelistic talent really shows in the way he makes ping-pong serve as a mirror, in which Oliver’s neuroses and appetites are ludicrously reflected. He becomes romantically obsessed with a female player, Lorna Peachley, but can only get aroused by losing to her—by being humiliated, even beaten and choked. “The last thing I wanted Lorna Peachley to do was hang me from the rafters and paddle me with her bat. Not the very last thing, but one of the last things. The point of the bat was that she should use me as she used it. I didn’t want to suffer the bat, I wanted to be the bat.”

Finally, Oliver’s perverse desire to lose at ping-pong—to surrender the game whenever he meets an opponent who seems to want to win more than he does—is shown to be his fatal flaw, bound up somehow with his Jewish alienation and family misery and sexual guilt. “Winning is a test of character, as every sporting commentator will tell you, and I didn’t have any character. Grandiosity, yes. Skills, yes. But character?” Jacobson’s verdict on his alter ego is ultimately very harsh, and the novel ends with a hurried flash-forward to the present day, allowing us to see how Oliver’s adolescent flaws have ruined his adult life. Walzer’s curse, really, is that he never learned to become a comic novelist. For as Jacobson shows, it takes a writer of genius to take all of life’s sordid humiliations and redeem them with laughter.

This week, Jews everywhere will engage in the annual ritual of digging out their haggadahs from the bookshelves and closets where they have been stored since last Passover. The typical haggadah is only used a couple of nights a year, far less than a prayer book or a Bible. But somehow, the words and images of the haggadah—whether it’s an Artscroll tome or a flimsy Maxwell House booklet—have a way of sinking deep into the memory. At many Seder tables, the haggadah itself becomes a record of meals past, with wine drops discoloring the page that lists the Ten Plagues and food stains marking the sections for matzoh and maror.

Perhaps the power of the haggadah has to do with the way Passover is celebrated at home, rather than in synagogue; perhaps it comes from the way children are enlisted in the Seder early on, with important roles like reciting the Four Questions and finding the afikoman. And surely it is related to the fact that the Passover liturgy constantly insists on the importance of remembering and reenacting the past. This memorial purpose is emphasized at the very moment the holiday is instituted, in chapter 12 of Exodus: “And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the Lord will give you, according as he hath promised, that ye shall keep this service. And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses.”

There is a striking dislocation of time here: Even before the Lord has smitten the Egyptians, even before the Israelites have been freed, Moses is already looking forward to an era when these events will have to be recollected. The haggadah itself can be seen as a tool for collapsing time. To explain the holiday to the son “who does not know how to ask,” it instructs, “you shall explain to your son on that day, ‘It is because of what God did for me when I went free from Egypt’ ”—as though each Jew still had the foam of the Red Sea on his shoes.

No run-of-the-mill haggadah is quite as effective at making the past present, however, as The Washington Haggadah (Harvard University Press, $39.95). This beautifully produced book is a detailed facsimile of a 500-year-old haggadah in the collection of the Library of Congress, which explains the name (although it is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Thanks to an inscription near the end of the book, we even know the exact day it was finished—January 29, 1478—and the name of the scribe who produced it: “The work was completed, and it is sufficient. And today is the twenty-fifth day of the month of Shevat in the year 238 according to the short enumeration. The work of the least of the scribes, Joel, the son of Simeon of blessed memory.”

But Joel ben Simeon was being too modest. Far from being “the least of the scribes,” he is described by David Stern, in the introduction to this edition, as “one of the most important and prolific scribes and illustrators in the history of the Jewish book.” Ten manuscripts bearing Joel’s signature survive, and another four to nine can be attributed to him based on peculiarities of his style, which combines the traditions of his native Germany with those of northern Italy, where he spent much of his working life.

The first thing that strikes the contemporary reader of this 15th-century book is that, if you threw away your haggadahs and replaced them with copies of The Washington Haggadah, you would hardly notice the difference—except, of course, for the aesthetic improvement. The Hebrew and Aramaic text is the same one we use today. There are the same mishnaic passages (“Said Rabbi Eliezer ben Azaryah: Look! I am seventy years old, and I never merited understanding why the Exodus should be mentioned in the evening until Ben Zoma interpreted the following verse.”), and even, on the first page, the same mnemonic for the order of the Seder (“Kadesh Urchatz Karpas Yachatz”).

This concrete evidence of the way the Seder has been performed for centuries is a powerful lesson in what is dryly called “Jewish continuity.” More powerful still, however, are the illustrations that Joel ben Simeon added to the margins of the text (usefully, The Washington Haggadah includes a descriptive catalog of all these illustrations). On the first page of the manuscript, for instance, underneath the blessing for getting rid of chametz, there is a picture of a man peering into a cupboard, holding a candle for better light and a feather for sweeping stray crumbs. Behind him, another man, wearing red tights, a blue singlet, and a green cap, uses a bellows to fan a fire where the collected chametz is being burned. This kind of charming, lifelike, instantly legible drawing will be familiar to anyone who has looked at medieval Latin manuscripts; but here they are translated to a Jewish context, offering glimpses of how our ancestors lived before Columbus discovered America.

Sometimes, the pictures communicate more than you’d expect. The four sons, explains Katrin Kogman-Appel in her essay on “The Illustrations of the Washington Haggadah,” were a popular theme for medieval illustrators, giving the chance to depict different human and social types. In The Washington Haggadah, the wise son is shown as a scholar, seated on a chair with a book open on his lap and a thoughtful expression. He is effectively contrasted with the simple son, who sits on the floor and peers suspiciously at an open book he’s clearly having a hard time with. The son who doesn’t know how to ask is a jester, wearing a cap and bells and beating a drum. But the most interesting drawing is the wicked son: He is depicted as a Christian knight, wearing armor and holding a sword and lance. This image, so familiar even today as the embodiment of chivalric virtue, appears to the Jews as a symbol of vice—the proud, violent face of the oppressor. It’s a small gesture that succeeds in overturning our received ideas about the Christian and Jewish past.

A more domestic kind of realism can be seen in other drawings. Underneath the “Dayenu,” just at the point in the Seder when mealtime is approaching, Joel has drawn a scene of two women stirring a pot over a blazing fire, while a man next to them turns a spit. The man, we note, has a prominent goiter—a symptom of iodine deficiency that would have been a common sight in certain regions of Germany in the Middle Ages. More pointedly, Joel illustrates the text about maror with a picture of a man and woman, evidently a married couple; the woman is holding a sword, an emblem of discord, while the man tries to stuff a bitter herb into her mouth. It’s a wry commentary on family life, somehow made more affecting by the way it sits across the page from a whimsical drawing of a monkey brandishing a piece of matzoh.

Food leaves its trace in The Washington Haggadah in a more concrete way, as well. The publishers have reproduced the manuscript so accurately that you can see wine and food spots on several pages, as well as places where the ink has smeared after being touched with a wet hand. And on one of the blank pages at the end of the manuscript, there is a handwritten note. Hard to make out, it is explained by David Stern: It was written “by one Ettore Finzi in German, dated April 7, 1879, which was indeed Passover eve that year … he writes that they are sitting at the seder table, where they have just sung the first part of the ‘Gada,’ and are awaiting the food. After the food arrives, they start eating, and he signs off, ‘Guten Appetit.’ ” From the Exodus to the Rabbis to 1478 to 1879 to 2011—in these pages, if anywhere, the past is present and the present past.



Bezmozgis showed the Berman children mastering the English language and expressing their own resentment and powerlessness by trying out playground insults like “shithead” and “gaylord” on a beloved dog. He showed Roman Berman, a former Olympic trainer forced to start over as a humble massage therapist, playing up to rich Canadian Jews by bemoaning Soviet anti-Semitism. And in “An Animal to the Memory,” a worthy successor to Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews,” Bezmozgis wrote one of the best accounts I’ve ever read of the way Jewish children both resist and submit to the legacy of the Holocaust.

Seven years later, Bezmozgis is finally back with a novel, The Free World (Farrar Straus Giroux, $26), and once again his focus is on a Soviet Jewish family from Riga. Yet The Free World is a very different book from Natasha, for both good and ill. In moving from the short story to the novel, Bezmozgis has become a more deliberate and objective writer; he has also become a more cautious and dutiful one. One sign of this change is that the Krasnansky family, whose misadventures form the subject of the new book, includes no character whose biography parallels the author’s. Instead of telling this family’s story from the inside, with a child’s intimacy and unfairness, Bezmozgis wants to tell it from the outside, to do it a more adult kind of justice.

This is not to say that Bezmozgis has started to idealize the Soviet Jewish émigrés. In fact, the best way to read The Free World might be as a subversive companion to Gal Beckerman’s magisterial history of the Soviet Jewish emigration, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, published last year. Where Beckerman tells the official, public history of that movement—its ideals, protests, organizations, heroes, and villains—Bezmozgis avails himself of literature’s privilege to tell the private, unofficial, often unheroic truth.

The Krasnanskys, like the large majority of Jews who left the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, are not committed refuseniks but ordinary people in search of a better life. And Bezmozgis captures them at the moment of maximum disorientation: The story takes place over a few months in 1978, while the family waits in Rome for the immigration permits that will allow them to go to Canada. This is not yet “the free world,” but a kind of limbo, offering all the temptations of freedom with none of the rootedness or responsibility. Marriages, in particular, suffer under the strain. “Incidents began as early as Vienna,” Bezmozgis writes, “with tales of wives running wild, abandoning their husbands. And in Ostia and Ladispoli, there were the common occurrences of one man leaving his wife for that of a friend. This was then typically followed by threats and imprecations and the obligatory loopy fistight—the whole sorry spectacle played out before somebody’s distraught five-year-old.” Such couples, he concludes, “remained together just long enough to get to the free world—whose freedom they’d defined in no small measure as freedom from each other.”

The novel is built, one might say, around this distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to”—what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative and positive freedom. For Alec Krasnansky, a charming 26-year-old whose fecklessness makes him seem younger, paradise would be freedom from obligation:

[T]he only thing Alec detested more than being ordered around was having to order someone else around. Basically, he was of the opinion that the world would be a far more interesting and hospitable place if everyone—genius and idiot alike—was allowed to bumble along as he pleased. ‘More freedom to bumble’ neatly described his motive for leaving the Soviet Union.

This is Alec’s vision of the free world, and it sounds like the kind of thing that would appeal to the author of Natasha, and to most literary, liberal readers. Certainly, Alec starts out as the novel’s comic hero. On the first page, we see him fantasizing about picking up a couple of pretty American tourists, confident that he is irresistible to women: “In his presence, they often became exaggerated versions of themselves. The maternal ones became more maternal, the crude ones became cruder, the shy ones shyer.” Alec was persuasive enough, at least, to convince his non-Jewish girlfriend, Polina, to marry him and leave the USSR—though we learn, from her letters to her sister back home, that she is anything but sure about her decision.

But as The Free World develops, we start to realize that Bezmozgis is far from indulgent to Alec’s brand of adolescent, “bumbling” freedom. It looks especially dubious in contrast to the stern, revolutionary freedom that Alec’s father, Samuil, devoted his life to achieving. Samuil, a World War II veteran and a high-ranking Party man, never wanted to leave the USSR in the first place; but after Alec and his brother Karl applied for exit visas, Samuil was tainted by association. In disgrace, he considered suicide, but finally agreed to join the family in emigration—or, as he sees it, in exile. Even as he is surrounded by Jewish émigrés, he holds himself apart: “Samuil thought, as he had time and again, that the Soviets had wisely managed to rid themselves of the least desirable elements. In his long life he had never had the misfortune of being cast among such a lot of rude and unpleasant people.”

The Free World chronicles an interlude in these characters’ lives, and partly for this reason it never develops a consistent narrative momentum. Bezmozgis tries to move the plot forward by thrusting various Krasnanskys into tragicomic situations: There are illicit affairs, bureaucratic snafus, even a brush with organized crime that leads to a climactic scene of violence. But his heart never seems to be in these formulaic devices.

Instead, Bezmozgis is at his best when offering concrete historical details, trying to capture the way it really was for these emigrants in this time and place. He shows the Krasnanskys trying to navigate among unscrupulous hotel managers, importunate Lubavitcher missionaries, and high-handed consular officials. Above all, we see the randomness and precariousness of the decisions that will shape the Krasnanskys’ future. “They lived in a fog of doubt and apprehension,” Bezmozgis writes, and when someone casually suggests they go to Canada, they make the decision in a 10-minute colloquy in a stairwell. “What do we know about it?” one asks, and another replies, “You watched the Olympics. You liked what you saw of Montreal.”

This kind of close, authentic observation is one of the best reasons to read The Free World. The other is the surprising way that Bezmozgis develops his own and the reader’s sympathy with Samuil, the Soviet true believer. In a world that has experienced the failure of Communism, Samuil is a melancholy spokesman for the old generation of Eastern European Jews who believed passionately that the Revolution would redeem them. More and more, his memories and reflections dominate the novel. He remembers the words of the “Red Haggadah,” with which young Communists would mock and celebrate Passover: “Twenty-five years ago the working classes of Russia with the help of peasants searched for chometz in their land. They cleaned away all the traces of landowners and bourgeois bosses in the country and took power into their own hands. … This year a revolution in Russia; next year—a world revolution!”

It is an ironic echo of the languid remark made earlier in the novel by another emigrant: “Next year in Los Angeles.” The Samuils of Jewish history are seldom remembered these days, and even more seldom with sympathy. By contrasting their idealism and sternness with the aimless freedom of the younger generation, Bezmozgis pays nostalgic tribute to a world that history, and his own family, left behind.

But who wants to know that spring is tatters
of dingy whiteness clinging to a briar?
Can’t just one bush blaze with fire—
for a single instant—that does not consume?
Or is this my vision? this stingy bloom?

With her usual poetic intelligence, Osherow succeeds in turning the flower into a double metaphor. First, the whitethorn is an emblem of middle age, with its reduced expectations and loss of “bloom”—a floral cousin to Robert Frost’s oven-bird, whose unlovely call is a reminder “that leaves are old, and that for flowers/ mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.” Then, in the poem’s last lines, Osherow deepens the image by contrasting the whitethorn with the burning bush, from which God speaks to Moses in the book of Exodus. With this swerve, a poem about nature becomes a poem about the divine, and the disappointment that the whitethorn embodies becomes spiritually fraught—and distinctively Jewish.

This is a rarer quality in contemporary American poetry than one might think. There are plenty of Jewish American poets at work today—including some of the most highly esteemed, like Adrienne Rich and Robert Pinsky—but no one, I think, is as successful as Osherow at making Jewishness a productive subject for poetry. This is not because her work is saturated with biblical references, or because she writes piously about a vanished past, or because she waxes kabbalistic and makes play with Golems and gematria—all techniques that have grown overfamiliar in American Jewish writing. Rather, Osherow allows Judaism and Jewish history into her work as problems—as things to think about, with, and sometimes against; as sources of questions and, occasionally, answers. In this way, she comes much closer than most poets to an honest expression of contemporary American Jewish sensibility.

In Whitethorn, the poem that best showcases this aspect of Osherow’s talent is “Todas las Puertas,” the last piece in the book. It is 17 pages long and written in the interlocking tercets of terza rima—and these facts alone suggest some of the most important things about Osherow’s talent. First, she is a natural formalist, whose thoughts and feelings flow most easily into the channels of regular meter; and she is able, as contemporary formal poets must be, to bend and flex rhyme in creative ways. Terza rima is the meter Dante uses in the Divine Comedy, but Italian has many more rhymes than modern English. Turning this difficulty into a strength, Osherow comes up with triplets like “Hebrew/view/parvenu” and “Istanbul/guttural/comprehensible,” which make the most of slight assonances and force words into witty juxtaposition.

Second, Osherow is a poet who takes pleasure in discourse—who thinks and talks in verse, rather than offering isolated images and epiphanies. She needs those 17 pages to do justice to the complexity of her subject, which is the relationship of the contemporary American Jew to the Jewish past. “Todas las Puertas” begins by recounting a trip to a town in Spain, Trujillo, where Osherow read that there is a surviving medieval synagogue now being used as a pharmacy. The poem’s first line—“Even then, I knew it was ridiculous”—captures the ambivalence and self-consciousness that accompanies her quest for signs of the Jewish past. After all, Osherow writes, the Hebrew inscription over this synagogue—“This is the gate to God, the righteous will enter through it”—is “what you can see on synagogue/ doorways anywhere.” Yet she is hungry for some tangible sign of the past:

keeping, all the while, on the lookout

for even the most questionable clue—
a dent (maybe from a mezuzah?) in a doorpost—
that a single house had once contained a Jew.

“I swear I looked at every doorpost/ in every juderia left in Spain,” Osherow writes, wryly, aware of the cliché of the insatiable American tourist. Yet this search for physical traces is really a way of trying to imagine her way into a Jewish past so remote that it seems wholly alien. Visiting “the pink stone mikvah in Besalu,” Osherow explains that she had always found “the monthly rite of women’s purification” to be “abhorrent,” an expression of misogyny. Now, however, she is able to imagine it more sympathetically, not as a repudiation of sexuality but as an overture to it:

a ritual extravagant

with the dreaminess of anticipation—
one’s entire body immersed below
water on pink stone in preparation

for the certain pleasure that would follow…
it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh…

These echoes of the Song of Songs gain power for coming near the end of a book that is largely devoted to the failure of love. In fact, an earlier sequence, “Sonnets from The Song of Songs,” uses the biblical love poem as a bitter counterpoint to the dissolution of the poet’s own marriage—the casualty, Osherow reveals after some hesitation, of her husband’s mental illness. In “Thorns/Forest,” she writes of her inability to come up with a love poem to her husband:

You could read The Song of Songs. I felt like that,
which explains how I lived the way I lived.
I was fearless once; I chose the rarest
apple tree among the trees of the forest.

But the exhilaration of that choice is shadowed by the suffering that came afterward. In “Snow in Umbria,” Osherow finds an omen of her marriage’s fate in the fact that she and her husband honeymooned in Italy just after a once-in-a-century snowstorm had devastated the fruitful country: “It was like a tour through Pharaoh’s dream,/ with olive trees replacing cows and corn.”

The metaphor here is a little too explicit, especially when the poem concludes by finding inspiration in the gradual recovery of nature, “rumors of the slow ascent of green.” Osherow’s insistence on ending the poem on this affirmative note may be a sign that her style, so intelligent and conscientious, can also be inhibiting. “My misfortune’s relatively mild,” she acknowledges in “Autumn Cottonwood,” but one of the privileges of poetry is to show how the objectively mild can be subjectively total—to inhabit a dark or bright moment without contextualizing it.

Osherow is at her best when dealing with more abstract subjects, showing how much emotion can reside in seemingly impersonal words like history, memory, and identity. That is what she achieves in “Western Red Cedar: Missing Psalm,” another sonnet, which cleverly compresses a whole treatise’s worth of ruminations on American Jewishness into a single conceit. Osherow takes two lines from Psalm 29 as an epigraph—“God’s voice shatters the cedars;/ God shattered the cedars of Lebanon”—and then wonders whether God’s voice could have done the same to “these cedars,” the American giants, “nothing like their puny Lebanese cousins.”

Would a David who lived in America, rather than Judah, still have imagined the same God, Osherow wonders? “He might not have heard God’s voice at all/ in the sudden, giddy clamor of his own.” This is the guilty conscience of American Judaism, afraid that it has abandoned God in the search for self-fulfillment. Yet Osherow declines to let guilt have the last word. Maybe, she wonders, God wishes he had placed David in America, to see what new kinds of songs he would have sung there: “now God laments that missing psalm.” Osherow’s poems are not psalms, exactly, but they offer their own powerful model of what American Jewish poetry can be.

By a grim irony, it was in Germany—where Kertész had connections as a translator of modern German literature into Hungarian, and where he eventually moved—that his work had the biggest impact. Even so, Kertész was obscure enough that it came as a surprise when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. Though Kertész was the first Hungarian writer ever to win the Nobel, the award earned him the hostility of right-wingers and anti-Semites at home, resentful that a Jew who wrote openly about his alienation from Hungarians should be so honored. In America, meanwhile, only a couple of his books had been published in small editions, and his name was almost totally unknown.

After the Nobel, Kertész’s books began to appear in new English translations by Tim Wilkinson, but out of chronological order. Fatelessness introduces Kertész’s alter ego, the teenager Gyorgy Köves, whose concentration camp experiences track his creator’s (but, Kertész has insisted, not with complete fidelity). Kaddish, the next book of Kertész’s to appear in the United States, was the third book in a trilogy, featuring a middle-aged Köves who explains, in a long, furious monologue, why he refuses to bring a child into a world capable of the Holocaust.

It is only now, with the publication of Fiasco (Melville House, $18.95), that we have the book that came in between, the second volume in the trilogy. If Fatelessness was written with a bright mock-naivety that led to comparisons with Candide, and Kaddish employed the harsh comic rant of Thomas Bernhard, then the presiding ghosts of Fiasco are clearly Beckett and Kafka, those 20th-century masters of confusion and despair.

In fact, they divide the novel between them quite neatly. The first third of Fiasco presents us with a middle-aged writer who is clearly Kertész, though he is referred to, with a combination of intimacy and disdain, only as “the old boy.” Like Kertész, the old boy is a writer and translator whose life work was an autobiographical novel about the Holocaust, which took him a decade to write and which was initially turned down by publishers. Now he is searching for a subject for another book, not because he really wants to write one, but because he has become a professional writer, more or less by accident:

with his other books (since by then writing books had become his occupation, or rather—to be more precise—things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) (seeing as he had no other occupation) he merely devoted the time that was absolutely necessary to get them written, which was essentially a function of their thickness, because (since things had so transpired that this had become his occupation) he had to aim to write books that were as thick as possible, out of carefully considered self-interest, since the fee for thicker books was fatter than that for slimmer books, for which—since they were slimmer—the fee was correspondingly slim.

This voice, this method of comically refining and qualifying the expression of banality, will be familiar to anyone who has read Beckett’s fiction. And the plot of the first section of Fiasco, such as it is, comes directly from Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape. Looking for inspiration, the old boy rummages through his file cabinet and reads out old notes and memoranda, only to deflate their pretensions with muttered exclamations—just as Krapp does while listening to his audiotaped reminiscences. The effect of these auto-interruptions—“Aha!” “My God!”—depends on a sure sense of timing and of the comedy of repetition, which Kertész happily possesses. But while Beckett must have brought something new to Kertész’s Hungarian prose, turning that prose into English only emphasizes how much it owes to Beckett. The result is that Fiasco sounds rather more familiar in translation than it must have in the original—one of the ironies of literary influence.

The memoir the old boy reads out—between interruptions from his wife, his nagging mother, and his upstairs neighbor (“a female Cyclops which fed on noise”)—dates from the time when he finished his first novel and could not get it published. This is the fiasco to which the title refers, and Kertész finds a perverse fascination in delving into the psychology, the existential implications, of his failure. He digs out the old rejection letter, whose date (“27/JUL/1973”) and descriptions suggest that it refers to Fatelessness—indeed, it may even be the actual letter Kertész himself received: “We consider that your way of giving artistic expression to the material of your experiences does not come off, while the subject itself is horrific and shocking.”

All this metafictional apparatus serves Kertész as a way of getting to the problem at the heart of this first section: What is Holocaust writing for? How can the imagination deal with facts and stories that we all too thoughtlessly call unimaginable? Even being a Holocaust survivor does not make Kertész immune to the odd unreality of reading about the Holocaust. For instance, he recalls reading a particularly horrifying story about the murder of 340 Dutch Jews at a quarry at Mauthausen: They were forced to carry boulders up a steep stairway, then beaten if the rocks were dropped, until they all succumbed to violence, injury, or suicide. He reflects:

I closed the book and put it aside with the feeling that this fact, which I came across at random among 400 pages of further facts … might rightly find a place among the symbols of the human imagination—but on one condition: only if they had not occurred. Since they did occur, it is hard even to imagine them. Rather than becoming a plaything, the imagination proves to be a heavy and immovable burden, just like those boulders in Mauthausen: people do not want to be crushed under them.

At the same time that he is unable to read about the Holocaust, however, Kertész is also unable to stop writing about it. In his description of what it was like to write Fatelessness, Kertész offers a vision of the writer’s psychology—caught between obsessive dedication and the suspicion of futility—that is, perhaps, applicable to serious modern writers of all kinds, even those not burdened with Kertész’s atrocious subject:

While my destiny was with me—which is to say, while I was writing my novel—I had no experience of these kinds of concerns. Anyone living under the spell of destiny is liberated from time. Time still marches on, of course, but its duration is irrelevant: its purpose is solely to accomplish that destiny.

But what happens when Kertész has accomplished his destiny—when he has transformed his Holocaust experience into Fatelessness, and sent it out into a largely indifferent world? He finds that he still has to write, because he can no longer do anything else. This is the second, subtler fiasco: the fiasco not of failure but of achievement. And so, despite all his protestations—that he has nothing to say, that his old notes don’t interest him, that he only wants to retire—the “old boy” does, in fact, sit down to the typewriter and produce a novel: the novel within a novel that constitutes the second, longer part of Fiasco.

Thus, on page 119 of the book, we are greeted with the heading “Chapter One,” and the “old boy” gives way to Köves, Kertész’s old narrative alter ego. At the same time, the Beckett atmosphere gives way to a dense Kafkaesque fog. Köves wakes up to find himself on an airplane, leaving Budapest for some faraway destination—“he had already been flying for sixteen hours.” But when the plane lands, he disembarks into what is plainly Budapest—only it is the city of the late 1940s, the city as the young Köves experienced it when he returned from Buchenwald.

None of this is explicitly spelled out; but unlike in Kafka’s fables, where we could really be anywhere, Kertész leaves no doubt that he is writing autobiographically. The purpose of the Kafka atmosphere is to emphasize the bewilderment of the returning refugee—in particular, his inability to navigate the mistrustful, arbitrary society of Communist Hungary. By now, the comparison between the unaccountable courts of The Trial and the irrational bureaucracies of the Communist state is a familiar one, and much of the second half of Fiasco plays out in expected ways. Köves is fired, hired, and transferred at the behest of unknown higher powers; people are afraid to talk openly about anything that happens to them; lovers attack one another with passion, then part with disdain. Everyone speaks in knowing, evasive abstractions:

‘And why would they haul you out anyway?’ Köves probed further. ‘Over the numbers?’
But the pianist merely smiled with sealed lips at that.
‘Is there any way of knowing over what?’ he then returned the question to Köves.
‘No, there isn’t,’ Köves admitted.

Cleverly, Kertész allows us to see how the “invented” story of Köves mirrors the “true” story of the old boy. In the novel’s last pages, Köves ends up in a philosophical dialogue with a man named Berg—a former war criminal, though we never learn exactly what he did—that echoes the ideas of the first part of Fiasco. And the image of the Dutch Jews carrying their boulders, with its cruel echo of the myth of Sisyphus, returns in a riddlingly literal form in the novel’s final pages. By the end of this tricky and powerful book, it begins to look like a Mobius strip or a snake swallowing its own tail—an apt emblem of a life devoured by art, and an art devoured by what its creator had to live.

Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo via Wikimedia Commons.

“Modigliani should have been the father of a family. He was kind, constant, correct, and considerate: a bourgeois Jew.” The English painter C.R.W. Nevinson, who rendered this verdict, knew full well that these were not the first adjectives that would spring to most people’s minds to describe Amedeo Modigliani. Jewish, certainly: He was born in 1884 in Livorno, an important Jewish mercantile center in Italy, to a Sephardic family that boasted of its (perhaps imaginary) connection to Baruch Spinoza. Bourgeois, at least at one point: The artist’s father managed the Modigliani family’s extensive landholdings and lead mines on Sardinia, while his mother’s family, the Garsins, ran a credit agency with bureaus in several Mediterranean cities. The union of Flaminio Modigliani and Eugenie Garsin was meant to unite these two prosperous clans, even though the bride and groom barely met beforehand.

Within 10 years of the marriage, however, both families had gone bankrupt; the couple’s house was foreclosed, and all their belongings were put up for auction. To make matters worse, Eugenie was then pregnant with her fourth child, Amedeo. And here, as so often happens when the painter takes center stage, the story becomes a little too good to be true. As Meryle Secrest explains in her new biography Modigliani: A Life (Knopf, $35), “the Modiglianis discovered an obscure Italian law that prevented the authorities from removing the bed on which a pregnant woman was about to give birth.” So they piled as many of their worldly goods as they could under the bed: “jewels, silver, clothes, laces, silks,” and so on. “The scene’s aspects are worthy of opera buffo,” Secrest comments: “the wailing family, the bailiffs methodically removing chairs, tables, beds, armoires.”

Did it really happen that way? After so many years, who can tell? In any case, writers on Modigliani have usually been happy to follow John Ford’s dictum: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And the legends that cling to Modigliani all tend to undermine Nevinson’s praise of a constant and correct paterfamilias. If that was, in some sense, Modigliani’s destiny, he cast it off very early. Another often-repeated story has Modigliani discovering his calling as an artist at the age of 14, when he suffered a dangerous attack of typhoid. “Dedo said he wanted to study painting,” his mother recalled in a memoir composed decades later. “He had never before spoken of this and probably believed it was an impossible dream that could never be realized.” But she promised that if he recovered, she would get him drawing lessons. After studying with various teachers in Italy, he set out for Paris in 1906, where in less than 14 years he would produce the body of work that makes him one of the most popular—if not the most critically admired—artists of the 20th century.

Secrest tries to pry loose some of these encrusted myths. It is not true, for instance, that Modigliani suddenly decided to become an artist while at death’s door. One of his brothers recalled that, as a child, “Dedo” loved to draw on paper and, when the paper ran out, on the walls. But because Modigliani lived so fast and died so young—he was just 35 when tuberculosis finally took his life in 1920—he was the subject of many memoirs and anecdotes by other veterans of the Parisian art world, some of them by no means well disposed to him. And that world itself—Montmartre and Montparnasse in the years before the Great War, where modern art was born—has been as thoroughly romanticized as any in history. The unheated studios in peeling slums, the cheap meals at artists’ cafés, the parties at the Lapin Agile—Picasso, Brancusi, Apollinaire, Utrillo—all of them turn up in Modigliani, and it’s impossible not to thrill once again at the sheer bohemian glamour.

Secrest tells the story, for instance, of the dinner given in 1917 for the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the artist Fernand Leger, both of them just discharged from the French army. Modigliani had recently broken up with his lover, the English journalist Beatrice Hastings, and she was planning to attend the party with his successor, a sculptor named Alfredo Piña. Knowing that the sight of them together would infuriate Modigliani, his friends bribed him three francs to stay away. But he could not resist: Just as Matisse was about to carve the turkey, the door burst open and Modigliani rushed in, heading straight for Piña, who in turn produced a gun and aimed it at Modigliani. Accounts vary as to whether Piña got off a shot, but in any case he was disarmed and Modigliani kicked out before anyone got seriously hurt. Marie Vassilieff, the hostess, made a sketch of the scene that is reproduced in Modigliani: A Life, and it’s hard to sense any real danger in it. As so often in this theatrical milieu, one suspects that getting talked about was the real goal of all concerned.

This is just the kind of story that Secrest would like to rebut. Modigliani, she argues, has become an icon of bohemian dissipation—the wildest, sexiest, drunkest artist in Paris—to the detriment of his reputation as a serious painter and sculptor. (“There was something like a curse on this very noble boy,” Jean Cocteau said; others said worse.) But Secrest insists that “coherent and guiding principles can be glimpsed in his life as well as in his art, despite appearances. In short, the apparent chaos of his private world threw an essential veil over the truth, buying time for him to go on developing as an artist.”

The problem is that, even in Secrest’s own telling, the chaos of Modigliani’s world is more than “apparent.” The fight with Piña really did happen, as did many, if not quite all, of the exploits attributed to Modigliani: not just glamorous ones like the legendary affair with Anna Akhmatova, but the years of alcoholic penury when he would exchange his drawings for drinks, and the many nights when he was discovered passed out on the street or in his studio. The best Secrest can do in the way of vindication does not change the overall picture. For instance, she argues that, contrary to legend, Modigliani could not actually have thrown Hastings through a window during a drunken fight: “It strains credulity to believe that Modigliani, at five foot three or four and now ill, could have summoned the strength to toss Bea through a window with the necessary force to break glass.” More likely, Secrest writes, “Hastings fell or was pushed backward and ended up against a window.” Maybe—but the impression the reader is left with remains basically the same.

Secrest’s strongest argument is that previous biographers have not given enough weight to Modigliani’s battle with tuberculosis. If he became an alcoholic and a drug addict, she writes, it was mainly because he was trying to find relief from his symptoms. (Because Modigliani wrote nothing about those symptoms, Secrest quotes accounts from other famous TB sufferers like Keats and Katherine Mansfield.) By the end of his life, when his behavior was at its most floridly bizarre—dropping his washbasin out of an open window, then perching in the window himself and “singing at the top of his voice”—Secrest plausibly suggests that he was suffering from dementia brought on by tubercular meningitis. Secrest tries too hard to make TB the key to understanding Modigliani, but it is useful to remember, in our age of antibiotics, how terrifying the disease used to be, and how the certainty of a painful, early death could have tipped an artist’s life into recklessness.

What is missing from Secrest’s Modigliani, on the other hand, is an intimate sense of the artistic and intellectual forces that made his behavior, and his achievement, possible. Secrest is a professional biographer who chooses her subjects from across the whole range of the arts—she has written lives of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Salvador Dalí, among others. But she does not display a deep knowledge of Modigliani’s time and place, relying heavily on just a few historical works for context, and making some telling errors. For instance, to conjure the atmosphere of Paris in 1906, when Modigliani arrived there, she quotes a letter of George Sand: “People are mad, they’re intoxicated, they’re happy to sleep in the gutters & congregate in the heavens.” Secrest uses this as if it were a description of the bohemian luftmenschen of Montmartre. But in fact, as the date of March 1848 makes very clear, it is a description of the mood of the capital during the democratic revolution that had just driven Louis-Philippe from the throne; it has no relevance to Modigliani’s Paris.

On Jewish subjects, too, Secrest is not knowledgeable enough. This becomes clear from the moment she describes Modigliani’s Sephardic background, using The Joys of Yiddish as her source: “Unlike Ashkenazic Jews … the Sephardim spoke Ladino, were educated and cultured, and rose to positions of eminence in Spain, Portugal, and North Africa as doctors, philosophers, poets, royal advisors, and financiers.” What, all of them? There were a few famous, elite Sephardim answering to this description a thousand years ago; but there were precious few Sephardi philosophers and royal advisers in Livorno in the 1880s. Later on, while Secrest quotes Modigliani’s matter-of-fact assertions of Jewish identity—“I forgot to tell you I’m Jewish,” he told Akhmatova soon after they met—she makes little of the fact that he associated with so many Jewish artists and dealers. (Chaim Soutine, in particular, called forth a remarkable generosity in the infinitely more urbane Modigliani.) While Secrest’s book is an entertaining, colorful read, anyone looking for a more substantial take on Modigliani’s life and work would be better off turning to Modigliani: Beyond the Myth, the catalog of the landmark show at the Jewish Museum in 2004.

For all three faiths, history begins in Jerusalem—it is the city where Solomon built his Temple, where Jesus suffered his Passion, and where Muhammad went on his visionary night journey. And it is also the destination where history is leading. For millennia, Jews have prayed “Next year in Jerusalem,” and we still do, even though we could go there any day of the week. Christians, meanwhile, looked forward to the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city foretold in the Book of Revelation: “the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God.”

“Only Jerusalem occupies such a transcendent place in the imagination,” Carroll writes. “It is the earthly reflection of heaven—but heaven, it turns out, casts a shadow,” the shadow of war and terrorism and massacre. According to Carroll, “over the past two millennia, the ruling establishment of Jerusalem has been overturned eleven times, almost always with brute violence, and almost always in the name of religion.” Some of these invasions are central to Jewish memory—the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE and the Roman siege of 70 CE each led to the destruction of the Temple, and to profound changes in Jewish identity.

Then there were the Sassanid conquest of 614 CE, when Zoroastrian Persian armies took the city from the Byzantine Empire; and the Arab conquest of 638, when Caliph Umar entered the city on foot as a token of humility; and the Crusader victory of 1099, which the Christian Franks celebrated by massacring Jews and Muslims; and the British victory in 1917, when General Allenby took the city from the Ottoman Turks during World War I. Most recently, of course, there was the Israeli conquest of 1967, when the city’s sacred sites returned to Jewish possession for the first time in almost 2,000 years. Initially hailed as a miracle, this was also the beginning of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank—a victory whose cost mounts and mounts as the years go by.

No wonder there have been so many books written about the history of Jerusalem. The title of Carroll’s new work makes it sound like still another of them; but the further one reads in Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the clearer it becomes that the title is misleading. The reader of this book will learn only the basic outlines of Jerusalem’s history, and still less about its geography, culture, architecture, or even its representation in art and literature. At moments, one begins to wonder if Carroll put the city’s name in the title twice to make up for the fact that it is so elusive in the book itself.

What Carroll is really doing, in the best tradition of the Jerusalem-fevered, is using the city as a metaphor—in this case, a metaphor for the human tendency to involve religion with violence. This is the “shadow” of which Carroll writes, and if it is cast by Jerusalem, it can fall virtually anywhere; wherever Europeans or Americans have killed in a righteous cause, Carroll feels Jerusalem’s presence. The conversion of Constantine, Columbus’ discovery of America, the Thirty Years’ War, the Freemasons, the American Civil War, World War I, the Grand Mufti, McCarthyism, the Eichmann trial—as long as it falls under the broad theme of sacred violence, it finds a place in this book. At times, Carroll seems to grasp at the slimmest of Jerusalem connections: Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem was “marked” by “Greek architectural style,” and so is the Lincoln Memorial; and just before he was shot, Lincoln mentioned that he wanted to visit Jerusalem. There is something almost conspiratorial about these arcane affinities, and Carroll treads on Dan Brown territory when he muses darkly on the power of the Knights Templar—named, of course, after the Temple in Jerusalem.

But if Carroll has been driven a little mad by Jerusalem, it is with a noble madness. While the subtitle claims that Jerusalem “ignited our modern world,” Carroll’s real argument is that the city only symbolizes an ancient entanglement of sacredness with violence. Just how ancient becomes clear in the second chapter, “Deep Violence.” “Where did Jerusalem and all that it implies come from?” Carroll asks, and his answer begins this way: “Thirteen billion years ago … all matter was concentrated into a single point.” From there, we are launched on a whirlwind tour of cosmic evolution, from planet formation down to the emergence of primates with opposable thumbs, until we get to the first homo sapiens.

Inspired by the “mimetic theory” of the French thinker René Girard, especially Girard’s famous work Violence and the Sacred, Carroll speculates that the human need for religion grew out of the fear and elation primitive men experienced in hunting animals. Animal and human sacrifice was a way of containing man’s potential for violence through ritual: “Sacrifice is the ritual par excellence, the act of making something holy by killing it.” And archeology tells us that Jerusalem itself, a high point surrounded by valleys, was a site for such primitive sacrifices long before it became David’s capital.

Some memory of this past, Carroll argues, is encoded in the story of the binding of Isaac, which took place on Mount Moriah—traditionally held to be the same as the Temple Mount. The story of the akedah is fatefully ambiguous. On the one hand, it shows that the God of Abraham, who would become the God of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, does not desire human sacrifice—he sends a ram to substitute for Isaac, marking his difference from Canaanite deities like Moloch. On the other hand, as Kierkegaard insisted, it is Abraham’s willingness to kill his own son that proves his perfect faith in God. Many true believers, from the Masada Zealots to today’s Islamic suicide bombers, would follow his example.

To Carroll, the whole Bible—the whole history of religion—can be understood as a dialectic between sacred violence and sacred rejection of violence. As a deeply humane, intellectually scrupulous man—a former priest turned liberal Catholic—Carroll believes that religion is, or should be, moving in the direction of peace. The Hebrew Bible, as he reads it, progresses from the murderous Yahweh of Exodus to the ethical self-criticism of the Prophets: “Against the violent God, the Bible proposes a countervision of God, a deity whose most solemn allegiance is not to the perpetrator of violence but to its victim. God does not sponsor violence but rescues from violence.”

This movement from a vengeful to a loving God has often been cast, in Christian apologetics, as a rejection of the Jewish God in favor of Jesus Christ. But Carroll, whose acclaimed book Constantine’s Sword is a landmark dissection of Christian anti-Judaism, specifically rejects this supersessionist view. Rather, he sees Christianity itself as containing both these poles and laments that it has so often followed its evil inclination. Born out of Jesus’ message of universal acceptance, Carroll writes, it devolved into the state church of Constantine’s Empire, then into the warring faith of the Crusades.

It is the anti-Semitism of the Gospels, the way they blame the Jews for the death of Jesus, that represents, for Carroll, Christianity’s original sin. “The fatal character of this structure—Christianity born of and nurtured by the same scapegoating violence that killed Jesus—has yet to be fully faced,” he concludes. And throughout Jerusalem, Jerusalem, it is always Christian and Catholic violence that most disturbs Carroll. Likewise, as an American, he is uniquely offended by the violence America has committed in the name of its own ideals. Just as he finds good and bad tendencies in the Bible and the Church, so Carroll’s sketches of American history contrast what he admires—above all, the legacy of religious tolerance bequeathed by Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and the Quakers—with what he despises—the conviction of exclusive righteousness that led to the mass slaughter of the Civil War and World War I.

In the end, Carroll makes this dualism explicit. What we need, he believes, is not to replace religion with reason—reason breeds its own monsters—but to replace bad religion with good religion. “Given the depth of religion’s complicity with violence, what would good religion look like, anyway?” he asks, and gives a five-part answer. Good religion celebrates life, not death; believes in the unity of all men, as a reflection of God’s unity; cares more about knowing God (revelation) than avoiding punishment (salvation); and refuses to coerce believers. Finally, and “paradoxically, [it] may have a secular character,” in the sense that the religious impulse may oppose traditional organized religion. Given the bloody history Carroll recounts, it would surely take a miracle for such a “good religion” to prevail on Earth; for it to bring peace to Jerusalem would be the biggest miracle of all.

Both liberation movements eventually took up arms against Britain, the imperial power, and on occasion they cooperated with one another. In 1938, Bornstein writes, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of the hard-line Revisionist Zionists, went to Ireland to receive guerrilla training from Robert Briscoe, a Jewish veteran of the Irish underground. Yitzhak Shamir, as a leader of the terrorist Stern Gang in Palestine, used the code name “Michael” in honor of Michael Collins, a leader in the Irish war of independence. And both these causes helped to inspire the African-American nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association sought to create a new homeland for the black diaspora. At the UNIA’s rally in Madison Square Garden in 1920, Bornstein writes, Garvey read a telegram of support from a Zionist leader and announced that he was sending a telegram of support to the Irish revolutionaries.

Here, then, is one interpretation of Bornstein’s title: Shamir and Collins and Garvey each had a “Zion,” a dream of national redemption, and so they understood one another. But there is not much reason to tell the stories of these nationalisms together, because their Zions were, at best, parallel. By definition, nationalism is opposed to fusion, and the last thing any of those leaders would have wanted was to mix the three groups together. (Indeed, Bornstein acknowledges, some major Irish and black nationalist leaders, including Garvey, were anti-Semitic.)

But that kind of mixing is the whole purpose of the American “melting pot”—a metaphor that comes, Bornstein notes, from a play by the English Jew (and leading Zionist) Israel Zangwill. At the premiere of Zangwill’s The Melting Pot in Washington, in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt called out, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill!” He recognized that its message of patriotic tolerance was perfectly suited to an America struggling with mixed feelings about the immigration of Jews, Italians, and other groups. Bornstein usefully summarizes the plot of Zangwill’s play, now more often referred to than read, and quotes its Act One peroration: “Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to … into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.” To Zangwill and Roosevelt, the real colors of Zion were red, white, and blue.

Bornstein, then, is telling two very different stories about these three groups, with contradictory implications. Are Irish, blacks, and Jews different nations, with destinies in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, or are they three ethnicities, happy to blend together in America? If Bornstein never really comes to grips with this question—and if his method, in The Colors of Zion, remains magpie-like and anecdotal, now examining Broadway shows, now giving a close reading of Ulysses—it is because he is writing less out of a historian’s desire for enlightenment than out of a familiar, and undeniably appealing, kind of Jewish liberal sentiment. In brief, Bornstein wants to remind us of a time when Jews, blacks, and Irish all stood together because they were all victims. Today, he complains in his introduction, that solidarity has dissolved into mutual suspicion:

When our present historical memory includes contact at all, it usually stresses tension rather than cooperation. Whether in the Black-Irish confrontation of the movie Gangs of New York, the poetry of Amiri Baraka libeling Jews as absent from the World Trade Center on September 11, or the tendency of the Irish nationalist movement to align itself with the Palestine Liberation Organization or Hamas rather than with the Zionist movement it once invoked, the images of the past few years feature antagonism between separate groups.

This is a peculiar list, reflecting the uncertainty of Bornstein’s focus: It mixes up American ethnic tensions with geopolitical tensions, Irish Americans with Ireland, and Jewish Americans with Israel. Then there is the more basic problem of insisting that black, Jewish, and Irish relations can be seen as three sides of a triangle, with each group having similar allegiances and tensions with each other group. In fact, it is the black-Jewish part of the equation that has been most historically fruitful and complex, and which interests Bornstein the most. The alliance of blacks and Jews, from the founding of the NAACP through the Civil Rights movement, and the subsequent fracturing of that alliance, have been the subject of much study and emotion (on the part of Jews, mainly). The Jewish-Irish relationship is much less significant to the development of American Jews’ sense of themselves, and it mostly appears in The Colors of Zion when Bornstein discusses literature and popular culture. He devotes a number of pages to Leopold Bloom, the Irish-Jewish hero of Ulysses, and quotes Joyce’s riff on the parallels between Gaelic and Hebrew:

The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having been taught on the plain of Shinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel, and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland: their archaeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homiletic, toponomastic, historical and religious literatures … ”

This is good fun, but it would be hard to argue that Joyce had much effect on the way Jews and Irish thought about each other, especially in America. Only a little more weight can be given to the vogue, in the 1910s, for Broadway shows and vaudeville songs about mixed Jewish-Irish romances: It’s Tough When Izzy Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone, My Yidisha Colleen, Kosher Kitty Kelly, and so on.

The interaction of Jewish and black musicians was more significant, but by now it is a very well-known story. In writing about George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess, Bornstein is mainly concerned to refute the idea that a Jewish composer was exploiting an African-American art. On the contrary, he writes, one of the black singers in the original production called Porgy and Bess “a monument to the cultural aims of Negro art” and described Gershwin as “the Abraham Lincoln of Negro music.” So, too, Bornstein argues that The Jazz Singer, which is now in ill favor because of the scene in which Al Jolson wears blackface, was largely embraced by black audiences in 1928. (The Amsterdam News, New York’s leading black newspaper, called it “one of the greatest pictures ever produced.”) To see Jolson as a Jewish interloper in black culture, Bornstein writes, is a “back-projection of present attitudes onto the foreign country of the past.”

This phrase suggests that the best way to read The Colors of Zion is as Bornstein’s nostalgic protest against the identity politics that have dominated American life, especially in the academy, over the last 20 years. The academic school known as “whiteness studies,” in particular, emphasizes the way the Jews and the Irish were helped to assimilate in the United States by identifying as white, in opposition to America’s eternal Other, blacks. (See books like How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev, How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America, by Karen Brodkin, and Walking Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White by David Roediger.)

In response, Bornstein reminds us of occasions when Irish and Jews and blacks all stood together—whether it was Louis Armstrong wearing a Star of David in honor of the Jewish family that helped him as a young boy or Al Jolson refusing to eat in segregated restaurants that excluded his black fellow-performers. In his closing pages, Bornstein goes so far as to apply the term “righteous gentile” to all “men and women who served and saved groups other than their own … whether they risked their lives or only their reputations.” The problem, however, is how to translate that solidarity into the present, when the situations of Irish, blacks, and Jews are no longer so parallel. By ending his study in 1945, Bornstein spares himself such questions, remaining content with the pleasure of virtuous nostalgia.

Reading American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States, the fascinating new study by Michael Weingrad (Syracuse University Press, $34.95), I kept wondering if Edelshtein knew how good he really had it. For if the world of American Yiddish writing was small and beleaguered, the world of American Hebrew writing that Weingrad describes was practically non-existent. During World War I, Weingrad points out, “the Yiddish daily press in the United States reached a peak circulation … of more than six hundred thousand,” whereas Hadoar, the leading Hebrew periodical in America, “had a circulation of about nine thousand to twelve thousand.” By the end of World War II, the number of important Hebrew writers in America could be counted on the fingers of one hand; when the last of them, the poet Gabriel Preil, died in 1993, “the story of the immigrant Hebraists and the literature they created in America came to an end.” In fact, at the end of Weingrad’s book, he reveals that Ozick knew that story very well: Her own uncle, Abraham Regelson, was a Hebrew poet, and the bickering Yiddishists of “Envy” are at least partly based on “the immigrant Hebraist writers.”

For Weingrad, a professor of Judaic studies at Portland State University, it is precisely the marginality, even the perversity, of the American Hebraist project that makes it so fascinating. “The simple and obvious fact is that despite their best efforts, the Hebraists were always a marginal group that never succeeded in determining the values of the American Jewish mainstream.” This is not surprising when you consider that Hebraism as an ideology was born in Eastern Europe, where the conditions of Jewish life and literature were totally different than in the United States.

In late 19th-century Russia, a ferocious battle was fought between supporters of Yiddish and supporters of Hebrew as the language of Jewish national revival. The choice had profound social and political implications. Yiddish, as the actual spoken language of the Jewish masses, attracted the support of socialists and populists. Hebrew, the language of the Jewish classics, tended to appeal to Jews who had received and rebelled against an elite religious education—which explains why the literature of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, was mostly written in Hebrew. At the same time, Zionists embraced Hebrew as the language spoken by Jews in Palestine, while anti-Zionists preferred Yiddish as the language of the Diaspora.

This ideological division crossed the Atlantic along with millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the years 1880-1920. Yet the Yiddish-Hebrew debate quickly became obsolete in America, where the younger generation leaped happily into the open arms of English, leaving both ancestral languages behind. The sheer mass of Yiddish-speaking immigrants ensured that Yiddish literature and journalism would thrive for a few generations, until its native speakers died out. But the idea of creating a national Hebrew literature in America could not appear other than quixotic—especially since there was an actual Hebrew-speaking society growing in Palestine and then Israel. To be an American Hebraist meant rejecting the language of America, while also refusing to leave it.

This double-bind resulted in a literature that was constantly preoccupied by its own futility. American Hebrew writers, Weingrad writes in his first chapter, were extremely caustic about American life, especially American Jewish life: “their writings frequently castigate American Jews for their ignorance of Judaism, their materialism and coarseness, and their assimilatory values.” In the Old World, the Hebraists may have been champions of secularism and foes of religious tradition, but in the New, complained Menahem Mendel Dolitzky, there was “no one to fight against, no one to fight with, and nothing to fight for.” Dolitzky began to miss his old Hasidic opponents: “They were at least loyal and devout Jews. Here we have a pack of boors, ignoramuses, whose only thought is to ‘make a living,’ with nothing spiritual about them.”

The Hebraists’ distaste for America was clear from the way they wrote about New York, where most of them lived. The poet Shimon Ginzburg, who came to America in 1912 at the age of 22, wrote about the city in phantasmagorical terms: in “Bamigdal” (“In the Tower”), he describes the Statue of Liberty holding up not a torch but “a clenched fist,” and telling new arrivals, “Come to me, all who are hungry. … Die here of hunger like a stray dog.” At moments, as Weingrad nicely points out, Ginzburg foreshadows his more famous namesake, Allen Ginsberg: Like the author of “Howl,” he sees the city as a “Moloch,” eating immigrants alive. Another poem, “Behar beit Kolombiyah” (“On the Temple Mount of Columbia”), is set at Columbia University, where Ginzburg attended Teachers College. Here the poet marvels at the city’s ethnic diversity—“up the marble stairs hurries a daughter of Calcutta;/ and after her, a Japanese, a Negro,/ a young man from Jaffa in Judea, and myself”—while feeling humiliated by its opulence: “You have conquered me, you the rich and I the poor.”

For an antidote to everything they hated about New York, the Hebrew writers turned to rural America and to an idealized Native American past. Some of the most touching works Weingrad discusses feature the Jewish writer exploring the Gentile countryside, and being surprised by the kindness and hospitality of Americans. “Misis Voods” (“Mrs. Woods”), a poem by Hillel Bavli, channels the voice of a 92-year-old farm widow, who explains: “a Catholic church, a Baptist/ or Presbyterian, or Hebrew,/ I don’t discriminate between one sect and another,/ between people I don’t make distinctions.” Sometimes, this openness itself could look like a threat. In his autobiographical novel Ele toldot adam (translated as In the Grip of Cross-Currents), Ephraim Lisitzky writes about falling in love with a Canadian Gentile, Becky, while living in a small town in Ontario. He must make an effort to tear himself away from the “simplicity and uprightness” of “these non-Jews among whom I lived,” to reclaim his Jewish and Hebraist identity.

The single unlikeliest episode in the history of American Hebrew writing, however, must be the vogue for epic poems about American Indians, on the model of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” Weingrad explains the genre’s appeal: Writing about Indians allowed the Hebraists to claim an authentic American subject while avoiding, and implicitly criticizing, 20th-century urban America. The image of the Indian as bearer of an endangered culture also had an instinctive appeal to these writers, struggling to preserve their own ancient heritage. All these elements can be seen in Benjamin Nahum Silkiner’s 1,500-line poem Mul ohel Timurah (“Before the Tent of Timmura”), whose publication in 1910 marked “the beginnings of an estimable Hebrew literature in the United States.” Weingrad summarizes the complicated plot, showing how the “the Indian was a dark mirror in which the poet could contemplate the most extreme Jewish hopes and fears,” including the dread of extinction.

One does not come away from Weingrad’s chapter on these Indian epics (titled “Going Native”) with any urgent desire to read them. But there are a number of works discussed in American Hebrew Literature that sound fascinating and might add a new dimension to our sense of American Jewish writing. Some of them have been translated into English, like the poems of Gabriel Preil, which Weingrad writes about with obvious affection: “The medievals had their wine, the Romantics their opium; for Preil, the cafes of New York were the launching pad for his reclusive sensibility, their windows his eyes on the world.” But most have never been translated, including Shimon Halkin’s Ad mashber (“To the Point of Crisis” or “Until the Crash”), which Weingrad describes as both a “Great American Novel” and “a precursor to the novels of Yehoshua and Yaakov Shabtai.” “This is America!” muses one character in the book; “If it weren’t for Jews and Judaism, you couldn’t find a nicer place in the world than this great wide land, eager to live and in love with life.”

It was the American Hebrew writers’ realization that the Jewish world they longed for could never exist in America that led most of them, finally, to emigrate to Israel. Halkin himself decided as early as 1929 that “I could no longer believe at all in the naïve dream of our Hebrew-cultural renaissance in exile,” that the Jews “could not exist as a historical people except in one place, the Land of Israel.” More than 80 years later, American Jews do still exist as some kind of a people; but Weingrad’s book is an often haunting reminder of one of the paths we did not take.

Read about the 20th-century Hebrew revival in Ilan Stavans’s Resurrecting Hebrew, available from Nextbook Press.

In America today, thankfully, the ancient theological ire between Christians and Jews has been almost forgotten. But as Timothy Beal shows in his personal, accessible new book, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), there is still a profound difference between the ways the two faiths read their Bibles. The kind of Jewish education that most non-Orthodox American Jews receive leaves us familiar with the major biblical stories; and of course, many Jewish holidays revolve around biblical episodes, from the Exodus on Passover to the Maccabees on Hanukkah. Jews who receive a traditional Orthodox education learn the Bible much more thoroughly, but the core of their study has to do with the Talmud and commentaries—a way of thinking about Torah that treats the original divine text primarily as a subject for interpretation.

Neither of these Jewish approaches to Torah has anything in common with the fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity that is so potent in the United States—especially the parts where Jews do not live. Beal, a professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University, is now an academic scholar of the Bible, accustomed to thinking of it as the work of historically situated human beings. But he was raised in an evangelical Christian home, where the Bible was held to be quite literally the Word of God. He hastens to explain that this does not mean his parents were naive or uneducated: “My parents’ biblical faith … was as seriously intellectual as it was devout.” His mother, who studied Greek in college, would “sometimes … pull out her old Greek New Testament to see how else the text might be translated.”

Still, growing up in this bibliocentric culture gave Beal an early sense that the Bible was “the go-to book for any serious question we might have, from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to heaven, hell, and why bad things happen to good people.” The Bible was “God’s book of answers, which if opened and read rightly would speak directly to me with concrete, divinely authored advice about my life and how to live it.” In short, to use an evangelical acronym that I, for one, had never heard before, it was “B.I.B.L.E.: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”

The Rise and Fall of the Bible is Beal’s attempt to shatter this popular understanding of the Bible as a combination of divine instruction manual and self-help book. While there’s no denying that the Bible remains central—Beal quotes polls indicating that “65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible ‘answers all or most of the basic questions of life,’ ”—he, at the same time, notes that Americans are surprisingly ignorant of what is actually in it. “More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse,” he writes. Less than half of all adults can name the four Gospels; only one-third can name five of the Ten Commandments. In his own experience as a college teacher, Beal says, students “come to class on the first day with more ideas about the Bible derived from … The Da Vinci Code than from actual Biblical texts.”

What explains this disparity between Americans’ absolute faith in the Bible and their evident ignorance of it? To Beal, the problem lies with the notion that the Bible is “a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life.” For as soon as you open it and start reading, it becomes troublingly apparent that the Bible is no such thing. It does not offer answers to problems, especially not 21st-century problems; only in a few places does it even offer straightforward moral counsel. Depending on where you open it, the Bible might give the impression that it is mainly composed of genealogies and agricultural regulations.

The gulf between what readers expect to find in the Bible and what they are actually given produces a kind of paralysis, Beal writes. “For many Christians, this experience of feeling flummoxed by the Bible … [produces] not only frustration but also guilt for doubting the Bible’s integrity.” The Bible-publishing industry feeds on this anxiety, he argues, by endlessly repackaging the Biblical text in ever more watered-down and over-explained forms. Most Jewish readers will probably be unfamiliar with the world of Christian “Biblezines,” in which biblical texts are interspersed with magazine-style articles and quizzes: “There are Biblezines for just about everyone. Becoming targets college-age and young professional women. Explore is for preteen boys, and Refuel is for teenage boys. Blossom is for preteen girls, and Revolve is for teenage girls.”

What troubles Beal about these publications is not just the way they dumb down the Bible—Blossom is a long way from Beal’s mother reading the New Testament in Greek—but the way they translate and interpret the text according to an undeclared social and political agenda. Beal shows how the Manga Bible turns Eve into a simpering temptress (“Hee hee … girls can make guys do anything,” she titters in one panel), while the Life Application Study Bible makes Leviticus sound like an anti-gay tract.

All these quasi-Bibles are designed to eliminate what Beal regards as the Bible’s most inspiring feature—its refusal to speak with a single voice. The Bible isn’t really “a book” at all, but a library of books (the Greek word biblia, Beal points out, is a plural), written over a span of centuries, in a wide range of genres—myth, history, law codes, poems, proverbs. The middle section of The Rise and Fall of the Bible is devoted to a capsule history of the writing and editing of the Bible, designed to show readers new to the subject that the book in the hotel nightstand is not a divine artifact.

In asking “What Would Jesus Read?” Beal also ends up explaining what is still apparently unknown to many Christians—the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and Christianity initially a Jewish movement. The episode in Luke 4 where Jesus preaches in a synagogue leads Beal to discuss Torah reading and Shabbat services. Later on, he examines the Hebrew text of the Bible to demonstrate how every English translation is inevitably an interpretation—sometimes, a Christian apologetic interpretation, as when the Hebrew word almah in the Book of Isaiah is translated as “virign,” rather than “young woman,” in order to produce a Christological reading (“Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son …”)

By insisting on the Bible’s human making, however, Beal does not want to convince Christians to stop reading it—the way Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris would. Rather, he wants them to read the Bible with more tolerance for ambiguity, recognizing that the text cries out for interpretation. In short, as Beal puts it, Christians need to read more like Jews:

Here again we may find insight from Jewish tradition’s understanding of Torah. One legend says, ‘When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, he gave it only in the form of wheat, for us to make flour from it, and flax, to make a garment from it.’ The idea is that God depends on the community to fulfill biblical meaning. The Torah is incomplete without its interpreters who make something new of it.

Naturally, the kind of interpretation Beal has in mind is not the kind the rabbis had in mind. Talmudic interpretation is based on the premise that, since the Torah is God’s word, every meaning that can be found in it is divine. That is how a whole legal system, and then, in Kabbalah, a whole mystical system, could be deduced from the biblical text. Beal’s reading of the Bible depends, conversely, on the premise that the Bible is not divine writ, but rather a precious human inheritance, which can be used to support and enhance contemporary moral intuitions. As he puts it, the Bible “hosts the human quest for meaning without predestining a specific conclusion.”

This is not talmudic, but it is exactly the same spirit in which liberal Jewish theologians now interpret the Bible. Like Beal, the authors of a book such as Jewish Theology in Our Time are attempting to salvage the vocabulary of faith they grew up with, while discarding the dogmas in which they can no longer believe. The Bible, read this way, is historically and emotionally primary, but not theologically primary—not, in fact, essentially different from the sacred texts of every faith, or the great works of secular literature. Perhaps it is on these ironic terms that Jew and Christian, after so many centuries, can agree to read the same Bible after all.

But underneath the reproach and the frustration, the longing for a Palestinian Gandhi is an expression of the Jewish desire to be enabled to make peace by being morally compelled to make peace. Gandhi, after all, did finally succeed in driving the British out of India, and his Palestinian equivalent would presumably succeed in making Israel withdraw from the West Bank. The key to this dream, however, is that such a Palestinian leader would be so trustworthy, so committed to peace and nonviolence, that an Israeli withdrawal would not invite future aggression.

Sari Nusseibeh is not a Palestinian Gandhi—he is a secular intellectual, not a saint, and while he has occupied prominent roles in Palestinian life (formerly as a leader of the first intifada and a Palestinian Authority diplomat, currently as president of al-Quds University), he has never commanded a mass following. But in his short new book What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Harvard University Press, $19.95), he comes closer to advocating a Gandhian strategy than any other Palestinian leader I know of. Near the end of the book, Nusseibeh turns to Hind Swaraj, Gandhi’s 1909 pamphlet on Indian Home Rule, as a manual for the Palestinian cause: “The way for India to become free and exercise real self-determination or home rule is through swaraj, the inner freedom and self-sovereignty individuals achieve by remaining true to their humanity,” he explains.

If Palestinians would take their cue from Gandhi, they would cease looking upon their own patriotism as a religious or national cul-de-sac, and begin viewing it instead as an overarching affinity with the land and its multifaceted racial as well as religious history. They would have to transform their vision of a free Palestine from that of a princedom to be ruled by Arab Palestinian “princes” to that of a land of a free people living by moral values. In such a land, an Israeli could be just as patriotic a Palestinian as an Arab Palestinian!

These sentences capture both what is so admirable and encouraging about Nusseibeh’s book, and what, from a Zionist perspective, is ambiguous about it. On the one hand, for Palestinians to acknowledge the “multifaceted racial [and] religious history” of the region would mean, presumably, to accept the Jewish place in that history. But it is not wholly clear, from Nusseibeh’s language here and elsewhere in the book, whether that means accepting Israel as a Jewish state. For an Israeli to be a “patriotic Palestinian” seems to look forward, instead, to a binational state, in which Jews and Arabs would embrace a common political identity. “The vision of the peaceful and prosperous future may take any of several forms,” Nusseibeh writes: “one state, two states, confederation involving one country, or two, or three, and so on.”

This ambiguity is not strategic or accidental; it lies at the heart of Nusseibeh’s philosophical argument. Essentially, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? is a brief for liberalism—which makes it, in the generally illiberal political culture of Palestine, a radical document. The first principle of liberalism is that the individual is prior to the collective, that states and ethnicities and religions—what Nusseibeh calls, a bit awkwardly, “meta-biological” entities—are meant to serve human beings, not vice versa. “Moving along the garden path from I to we and then to the state,” he writes, is a “normal and justifiable psychological human need,” but it has the potential to become “a demented ideological imperative or dictate.” When that happens, “instead of individuals ‘having’ the state to fulfill their needs, the state is regarded as primary, as what ‘has’ individuals as its tools.”

It is here that the question of Nusseibeh’s title comes into play. If the state is more valuable than the individuals who make it up, then a Palestinian state is “worth” any number of human lives—for instance, the lives of a suicide bomber and his or her victims. “During the period after 2000,” he writes, “when Palestinian suicide attacks almost became the norm to express resistance to the occupation, disaffection with politics, or simply frustration and anger with life itself, I began asking myself what the state we were fighting for is worth. How much killing can a group suffer or commit before the suffering and the loss of life outweigh the values on whose behalf the killing is being committed?” Out of the horror of that period, Nusseibeh draws the following exemplary rule: “Respect for the preservation of human life, rather than violation of life in the name of any cause, should be what guides both Israelis and Palestinians in their pursuit of a just peace.”

No decent person could dissent from this principle. What keeps it from being observed, of course, is fear—fear that, if I do not use violence today, my enemy will use it tomorrow. That fear explained the Israeli invasion of Gaza, with its horrible carnage, and it explains the continuing Israeli reluctance to withdraw from the West Bank, despite all the demographic and political arguments in favor of such a step. Occupation, with all its costs, is still preferable to the creation of a hostile Palestinian state so close to Israel’s heartland.

One of the things that makes Nusseibeh exceptional among Palestinian commentators is his ability to sympathize with this Israeli fear: “Some might argue that Jews in particular, given their history, have no choice but … to rely on their own might, however detrimental its use may be to others, as a way to ensure their security, or at least to minimize their vulnerability as much as possible.” Most Palestinians, he writes, “cannot believe that Israelis live in perpetual fear,” partly because, in their own eyes, Israel seems to have a monopoly on force. Still more important, and more ominous, Nusseibeh suggests that Palestinians cannot imagine this self-protective fear because it “has been so incredibly exorcised” from the Palestinian psyche. “Among Palestinians,” he writes in the book’s most daring passage, “there may well be a more fundamental underlying cultural or religious disposition to believe in the reality of death so strongly as to view life as being on a par with death, or even of far less value.”

So long as this is true, there is no chance for peace between Palestinians and Jews, much less for the building of the kind of Palestinian society Nusseibeh hopes for. What is needed is a radical transformation of the attitudes of both Arabs and Jews—the kind of psychological paradigm shift that seems impossible, mere wishful thinking, until it actually occurs. “What we need to do is to redraw the current reality so as to provide, to both Palestinian and Israeli publics, an alternative vision of the future so overwhelming that it will make present-day political squabbling pale in significance,” Nusseibeh writes.

This is less a political project than a spiritual one: “faith, vision, and will are all indispensable to our quest for a better future.” And Nusseibeh’s challenging conclusion is that this transformation will have to come from the Palestinian side first. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between force and power, he explains: “if one defines power as the ability to cause political change to one’s own advantage, it is the Palestinians who hold this power even though (or precisely because) they are being held down by a mighty military force.”

The most controversial proposal in What Is a Palestinian State Worth? has to be understood, I think, as Nusseibeh’s attempt to change the terms of the Palestinian-Israeli discussion. At the beginning of the book, Nusseibeh suggests that the Palestinians give up their demands for sovereignty and instead agree to become second-class Israeli citizens—that is, citizens without the right to vote or run for office. “Thus the state would be Jewish, but the country would be fully binational, all the Arabs within it having their well-being tended to and sustained. … In any case, such a scenario would provide [the Palestinians] with a far better life than they have had in more than forty years under occupation.”

It seems to me that Nusseibeh, who was one of the earliest proponents of a two-state solution, is not seriously endorsing this idea. He is fully aware that it would not be feasible or desirable, from either side’s perspective. It is, rather, a thought experiment, designed to challenge the assumptions of both Jews and Arabs. For the Palestinians, it is a challenge to “think deeply about what states are for”—that is, to examine whether they want the trappings of statehood or a better, more secure life. For Jews, it is a challenge to contemplate whether such a two-tiered system, with its echoes of South African apartheid, is consistent with Israel’s principles—and whether such a system might not already be in place in the Occupied Territories. I wonder if Nusseibeh’s book, published in English by an American university press, is actually going to reach either of the audiences who need it most; let’s hope it does.



And then there’s Leon Uris. Uris, needless to say, was no Rashi; after reading Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, the new, distinctly unflattering biography by Ira B. Nadel (University of Texas Press, $27.95), one is tempted to say that he was not even Herman Wouk. But like it or not, Exodus, Uris’ 1958 novel, has earned its place in the history of the people of the book. It might, in fact, be the worst-written book ever to do so. Here, for instance, is how Uris introduces Kitty Fremont, the American Gentile love interest of the Jewish hero Ari Ben Canaan: “She was even more beautiful than he remembered. They stared at each other silently for a long time. He studied her face and her eyes. She was a woman now, soft and compassionate in the way one gets only through terrible suffering.”

Yet despite a style that Nadel describes as “melodramatic and mannered,” full of “repetitious phrasing, unimaginative language, and clumsy syntax,” Exodus became an enormous, worldwide best-seller. A thoroughly romanticized retelling of the Israeli independence struggle, the novel sold millions of copies and was turned into a movie that reached millions more. Nadel credits it with an “incalculable” effect on the way American Jews, and Americans in general, thought about Israel and Jewish history. Jews “were no longer victims but heroes,” Nadel writes. “The sheer number of copies sold meant that many experienced Jewish history and heroism dramatically and romantically.”

Such things are hard to measure, of course, and the turning point in American thinking about Israel is more often dated to the Six-Day War, a decade later. But there is no question that Exodus mattered to American Jews; and it mattered still more powerfully to Soviet Jews. Exactly how the first copy of the novel got into the Soviet Union is a matter of rumor and legend—one story has the Israeli consulate in Leningrad receiving copies in the diplomatic mailbag and handing them out in secret to Soviet Jews. Soon, Exodus became a kind of holy text among the Soviet Jewish refuseniks of the 1960s and 1970s, whose Communist education had left them totally ignorant of Jewish and Zionist history.

For them, Uris’ bold, broad strokes, colored by fervent Jewish pride, were the perfect way to fill in the gap. Samizdat translators spent months turning the book into Russian, and then painstakingly typed out copies to pass hand to hand—the dedication of monks in a scriptorium, lavished on an airport best-seller. Nadel quotes the story of one Soviet Jew, Leonid Feldman, who recalled the danger and secrecy that surrounded “the book”—the title was never spoken aloud. “He waited one night at eleven in a dark corner of a park. He was handed a heavy briefcase. ‘Take a taxi and go home, but you must return with the manuscript to this spot by seven a.m. finished or not,’ said the courier. ‘No one must know what you’ve done.’ ” (It all sounds rather like a scene from a Leon Uris novel, in fact.)

What did the American and Russian readers of Exodus get from it? First, there was the action-packed story of Ari Ben Canaan, a heroic Haganah commander who outwits the British to bring illegal Jewish immigrants into postwar Palestine. Ari has a lost love, Dafna—after whom he names a children’s kibbutz, Gan Dafna—and a new love, Kitty, whose heart he wins with feats like escaping from a British prison. At the same time, Uris introduces the history of the Holocaust through another character, Dov Landau, who survives the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Auschwitz to become an Israeli freedom fighter.

Most important of all, however, was the way Uris turned these unimaginably tragic and complicated events into a clear-cut and inspiring tale of good against evil—a Middle Eastern Western. Before writing Exodus, Nadel shows, Uris had spent time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, thanks to the success of his debut novel, the World War II saga Battle Cry. He was not nearly as successful writing scripts as he was with books: The directors he worked with, including Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock, complained of his inability to pare down his stories to the requirements of the screen, or work collaboratively.

Uris’ one unambiguous success as a screenwriter was Gunfight at the O.K Corral, a retelling of the Wyatt Earp story, and he learned its lessons well. “You can write westerns in any part of the world,” Uris remarked, and he did: Mila-18 was a Warsaw Ghetto Western, Topaz a Cuban spy Western, Trinity an Irish Western. Nadel shows how he adopted the genre’s themes: “brotherhood, heroism, the sacrifice of women to a greater cause, male stoicism masking anger,” and, of course, “heroes and antiheroes, strong men of virtue and weak men of anger.” If Uris never really mastered the screenplay, he did import many cinematic techniques into his novels. “Often, his novels seem storyboarded,” Nadel writes, “as if the plot had been rendered in a series of sketches with a line or two under each drawing expressing the main action.”

This helps to explain why his books were so easy to read, even though they were so terribly written—and why they were critic-proof. One of Nadel’s section headings, “The Critics Are Again Unkind,” says it all. Indeed, reviewers seemed to treat each new Uris book as a contest to come up with most imaginative insult. (About QB VII, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times, “One can read it and simultaneously work out tables of actuarial statistics … or iron out the snags in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.”) Even David Ben-Gurion couched his praise of Exodus carefully: “As a literary work it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.” Menachem Begin was less pleased by the way Exodus transformed the Irgun into a fictional underground group called the Maccabees: He wanted full credit for his exploits.

American Jewish intellectuals were frequently appalled by the way Uris turned the Israelis into fantasies of toughness—what one critic called “Jewish Tarzans.” To Robert Alter, Exodus was a clinical case study in “what Americans would like to think about Jews and what American Jewish intellectuals would like to think about themselves.” Yet as Nadel shows, this view doesn’t get Uris quite right. It’s true that Ari Ben Canaan was a wish-fulfillment figure, a clichéd expression of Uris’ lifelong admiration for tough, fighting Jews. But Uris’ whole emotional and mental life seems to have been animated by clichés, and he took this particular one seriously enough to become a fighter himself, for good and bad.

The good came early on, when the 17-year-old Uris enlisted in the Marine Corps just after Pearl Harbor. He was eager to escape a thoroughly miserable childhood, spent shuttling back and forth between his divorced, bitter parents. His father, William Uris—formerly known as Wolf Yerushalmi—was the bane of his existence, as he explained in a late, autobiographical novel, Mitla Pass. William came to the United States from Belarus by way of Palestine, but he did not find America a golden land. He drifted from job to job, had a half-hearted career as a Communist organizer, and married and divorced Leon’s mother, Anna Blumberg. His attitude toward his successful son was a mixture of narcissism and criticism. Freud would have had a field day with the story, told by William in all guilelessness, about how he autographed Leon’s name in a fan’s copy of one of his books.

Joining the Marines was a godsend to Leon—“the war came along at a time when I needed to go to war,” he said—and he identified with the Corps for the rest of his life. (His tombstone, in a military cemetery in Virginia, reads “American Marine/Jewish Writer.”) Uris’ experiences in the South Pacific, where he saw action on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, also gave him the subject matter for his first novel, Battle Cry. From the very beginning, Nadel shows, Uris saw it as his mission to offer an unambiguously patriotic account of the war, in contrast to writer-veterans like Norman Mailer and James Jones. He provided “patriotism not nihilism, heroism not cowardice.”

The secret to Uris’ success was that he applied this same uplifting formula to every conflict he treated, from the 1948 war (the Jews were good, the Arabs evil) to Northern Ireland (Catholics good, Protestants evil). To Jewish readers, Uris’ message of Jewish toughness, repeated in book after book—even Battle Cry featured Captain Max Shapiro, who dies heroically—was a welcome antidote to anti-Semitic stereotypes. And it was only because Uris genuinely believed in this cult of toughness that he could so earnestly create heroes like Ari Ben Canaan.

Yet as Nadel shows in his account of Uris’ private life, masculine toughness is generally a way of concealing insecurity and confusion. After hearing about Uris’ rages, bullying, grandiosity, and infidelity, it’s no surprise to learn that his first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife committed suicide just months after their wedding; his third wife, who was the same age as his grown children, also left him in the end. By the book’s close, when the aging Uris, no longer a best-seller, is seen bragging about getting beaten up by a prostitute (she apparently found him “too aggressive”) and asking his (female) editor to “procure him some women,” he seems a pathetic, ugly figure. It might be fun, or even therapeutic, to read about Jewish Tarzans once in a while, but you wouldn’t want to live with one—or be one.

No one mastered these techniques of persuasion better than Kristol. You can follow the progress he describes in the pages of The Neoconservative Persuasion itself. The earliest pieces gathered here come from a tiny magazine Kristol launched in 1942, Enquiry: A Journal of Independent Radical Thought. The “independence” was from the official Communist line, and it signaled the anti-Communist direction his thinking would continue to take. It also suggests the quality that Kristol described, in An Autobiographical Memoir, as having “a ‘neo’ gene”: “I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-socialist, a neo-liberal, and finally a neoconservative. It seems that no ideology or philosophy has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment.”

That succession of “neos” can be mapped onto Kristol’s career as a writer and editor. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at Commentary and Encounter, both liberal anti-Communist journals. In the 1960s he launched The Public Interest, the original neoconservative magazine, dedicated to challenging the assumptions of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Finally he became a key voice on the very conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, during the height of its influence in the Reagan years.

The irony, which Kristol relishes, is that his “Leninist” path carried him ever further to the right. It was to capture this evolution that he coined the term “neoconservative,” the ambiguous label with which Kristol became so closely identified. (This is the third of his books to use the word in the title.) To anyone who followed political and foreign policy debates during the George W. Bush years, however, that term took on an ominous coloration. To put it crudely, after September 11, 2001, “neoconservative” often became a code word meaning “Jewish warmongers.” It was common for critics of the Iraq War to blame it on a “cabal” of neoconservative advisers in the Bush Administration, all of whom happened to be Jewish—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith were the most frequently named.

The idea that a secretive group of powerful, behind-the-scenes Jews were running American foreign policy became an article of faith to many on the American, and especially the European, left—people either indifferent to the anti-Semitic tropes in this discourse or those who positively relished them. A common corollary to this idea was the belief that the neoconservatives were acting under the influence of Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish political philosopher who fled the Nazis and spent his last decades teaching at the University of Chicago. Strauss, according to the caricature, was an elitist enemy of democracy, whose thought encouraged the “neocons” (some of whom, like Wolfowitz, had been his students) to lie the country into war.

It is not surprising that, in the wake of these developments, the label neoconservative has been abandoned by most of those who used to claim it. Naturally, readers will turn to The Neoconservative Persuasion for enlightenment: What did the “godfather” of neoconservatism think of the ugly turn the term took in the last few years? But while the subtitle of the book promises “Selected Essays, 1942-2009,” it turns out that very few of these pieces date from the last decade of Kristol’s life. Perhaps this is only to be expected—after all, Kristol was already in his eighties when George W. Bush became president.

The one place where Kristol indirectly addresses the connection of neoconservatism with the Iraq War is in the 2003 op-ed that gives the book its title. And his main reaction is, surprisingly enough, surprise that any connection has been drawn: “And then, of, course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy.” Instead, Kristol says, there are at most a few neoconservative principles or intuitions: that American power should not be subordinated to “world government” or “international institutions”; that America’s national interest requires global engagement, not isolationism; and that “the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces.”

It was a little disingenuous for Kristol to deny that there is such a thing as a neoconservative foreign policy. After all, one of the eight sections of The Neoconservative Persuasion is titled “Foreign Policy and Ideology.” All but one of the essays in that group, however, were written during the Cold War, and it is fair to say that if neoconservatism—or Kristol himself—had a diplomatic philosophy, it was one totally shaped by America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union, with only limited application to the post-Cold War world.

Essentially, Kristol believed that America’s struggle with the USSR was the criterion by which everything else had to be judged. Anything that could hurt the United States or benefit the USSR was wrong, no matter how right it might seem on the surface. Perhaps the most uncompromising essay in the book is “ ‘Human Rights’: The Hidden Agenda,” in which Kristol totally rejects the idea of making human rights an American foreign-policy priority, as Jimmy Carter had done. His reason is that, if regimes are judged by human rights standards alone, many American allies—he is thinking particularly of right-wing regimes in South America—would come out quite badly. Rather than pick our alliances based on moral purity, Kristol writes, America should look to the differences between “authoritarian governments” and “totalitarian regimes.” The first—like, say, Pinochet’s Chile—may eventually evolve into democracies, and they pose no threat to America. The latter, like the Soviet Union, are inherently dangerous and must be opposed at all costs.

It’s true, Kristol acknowledges, that a torture victim in Chile has suffered just as much as a torture victim in Russia. But, he writes, “the perspective of the victim, whether in war or peace, is the stuff of which poetry (or perhaps theology) is made, not politics, and certainly not foreign policy.” This is probably the single sentence in The Neoconservative Persuasion that best captures Kristol’s entire worldview. Concern for victims—of war, of torture, of poverty, and of racism—is all well and good, but finally Kristol regards it as sentimentality. What really matters is power, and it would be suicidal for Americans to give up power in the name of sentiment.

For Americans, and also for Jews, Kristol famously joked that a neoconservative was a liberal who got mugged by reality, and the trajectory of his own thought was always in the direction of disillusionment. Over the decades covered in The Neoconservative Persuasion, the reader sees Kristol losing patience with liberalism, modern art, the welfare state, blacks and the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay rights. In each case, his initial sympathy or at least respect gives way to a disgusted sense that all these movements have gone too far, until the word “liberal” itself became a kind of imprecation to Kristol (as it did in American politics generally). By the time he wrote the essay “The Way We Were,” in 1995, he had given in to simple nostalgia: In his childhood, Kristol writes, “the reason there were no ‘troubled’ schools is that ‘trouble’ was not tolerated.”

But nothing in The Neoconservative Persuasion makes Kristol lose patience like the Jews. You can see it happening even in the titles of his essays: “The Political Dilemma of American Jews” (1984) gives way to “Why Religion Is Good for the Jews” (1994) and finally “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews” (1999). The stupidity Kristol has in mind can be summed up in the question his fellow neoconservative Norman Podhoretz asked in the title of a recent book: Why Are Jews Liberals? For it is unmistakable that, in every one of the movements Kristol deplores—modern art, civil rights, feminism, and so on—Jews have been enthusiastic supporters.

Once upon a time, Kristol grants, it may have been sensible for Jews to support liberal and progressive causes, “given the historic attitude of the European Right toward Jews.” But the same calculus of power and interest that he employs in foreign policy leads Kristol to conclude that Jewish interests now lie with the right, especially the Christian Right. Evangelical Christians are strong supporters of Israel; yet Jews, he complains, continue to pointlessly antagonize them by insisting so strongly on the separation of Church and State. Conversely, he argued several times in the 1980s, Jews continue to sympathize politically with African-Americans, even as black anti-Semitism and anti-Zionsim rise. In short, Kristol finds it absurd that Jews refuse to ask whether “a given turn of events or policy is ‘good for the Jews’ ”: “to ask that question in the United States today in Jewish circles is to invite a mixture of ridicule and indignation.”

Here, as so often in The Neoconsevrative Persuasion, Kristol seems to me to be right in part and wrong in greater and more significant part. Yes, Jews should be confident and realistic enough to ask what is in their best interest—just as Americans should apply the same standard to domestic and world politics. In each of these areas, we should not be afraid to identify our enemies as enemies and to oppose institutions and policies that sound virtuous but are actually harmful—one of Kristol’s favorite examples is the United Nations. The single best essay in the book, “The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew,” demonstrates the dangers involved in imagining Judaism as “a divinely intoxicated form of liberalism.” (That essay was written in 1947, and it is notable that Kristol’s most sophisticated and penetrating work was written in the 1940s and 1950s, before he became settled in his beliefs and began to write mainly op-eds: Op-eds are interventions, not explorations.)

But is it true, as Kristol believes, that American Jews would be better off in a more conservative, more Christianized polity—or, at the very least, that, since such a polity is certain to come, we had better reconcile ourselves to it? Is it true that an American foreign policy committed to human rights is shackled and enfeebled? Is it true that black and Jewish aspirations are now opposed? In his essays of the 1980s and 1990s, Kristol said all these things quite confidently. Yet despite the red/blue divide, the Moral Majority has not become a majority in America. In fact, contrary to the central premise of Kristol’s social thought, the most religious parts of America are now the parts most afflicted by divorce and teen pregnancy, while the most secular parts of America are the least afflicted.

Many of Kristol’s other premises have also been proved wrong. After the fall of the USSR, the American commitment to human rights led not to self-doubt and paralysis but to a more vigorous and interventionist foreign policy—in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and even Iraq. (Not to mention the fact, slighted by Kristol, that the human rights movement played a major role in bringing down the Soviet empire.) In a 1984 essay, Kristol lamented that “Jesse Jackson [is] the political leader of American blacks,” and that Jackson “stands for black nationalism”—indeed, he writes about Jackson as if he were Louis Farrakhan.

But a quarter-century later, the political leader of American blacks is the political leader of America, Barack Obama, and the main charge against him from the left is that he is too committed to consensus-building. Finally, Kristol saw the gay-rights movement as a sign of American decadence, part of the Sixties assault on bourgeois values; today, the major gay-rights issues are the right to serve in the military and the right to get married. In each case, Kristol’s hard-headed realism turned out to be a poor guide to reality. Perhaps the inveterate Jewish tendency to care about “the perspective of the victim” has something to be said for it after all.

Singer’s novel is considerably more literary than Mitchell’s, but it is surprising how well the adjectives that apply to Gone with the Wind also suit The Brothers Ashkenazi. Singer’s book, too, is a sweeping historical novel, covering several generations in the life of a family and leading them through world-changing events. And Singer, too, is more interested in big, impressive set-pieces than in characterization—the major figures in The Brothers Ashkenazi tend to be forcefully one-dimensional, with little interior life or capacity to change.

The reason for the different fates of these bestsellers, of course, has to do with the particular histories they bring to mythic life. In writing about the Civil War and Reconstruction, Mitchell tackled the central American experience, and despite her racist sentimentalizing of the antebellum South—or, perhaps, because of it—she has never stopped appealing to American readers. Singer, on the other hand, wrote in Yiddish about the central modern experience of Eastern European Jewry: the violent transformation of Jewish civilization, from 1880 to 1920, under the pressures of secularism, industrialism, nationalism, and Communism. It is no coincidence that the family at the center of the book is called Ashkenazi; Singer set out to write the archetypal story of Ashkenazi Jews, on the same scale as epic novels like War and Peace and Les Misérables.

The novel’s vantage point on this crisis is the city of Lodz, sometimes called the Manchester of Poland. In the late 19th century, Lodz was transformed from a small village to an international capital of the textile industry—an industry dominated by Jewish manufacturers, merchants, and laborers. Singer captures this reckless, explosive growth in a cinematic sequence in the novel’s first pages: “Seemingly overnight the houses already standing sprouted additional stories, annexes, wings, extensions, ells, attics, and garrets to accommodate the flow of newcomers … like a torrent overflowing its banks, the Jews smashed down all barriers set up to exclude them.” Singer’s method in The Brothers Ashkenazi is to drop his protagonists into this bubbling cauldron and document the changes that result.

The patriarch of the Ashkenazi dynasty, Abraham Hersh, gets rich as the chief salesman for the Gentile-owned manufacturing firm of Huntze. Just as he is an employee of capitalists rather than a capitalist himself, he seems to be in the new Lodz without being of it: He remains a traditional Hasid, spending as much time as possible at the court of his rebbe. He uses his wealth to do mitzvot like buying Passover supplies for the poor and ransoming Jewish prisoners.

Yet Singer is by no means an admirer of this traditional Hasidic culture, and he blasts it with all the standard criticisms that enlightened Jewish writers had been making since the days of Haskalah. Abraham Hersh’s piety, though sincere, is shown to be harsh and superstitious, and it entails a total contempt for women, especially his own wife. “If he loved her in his own fashion, he showed it only in their bed, as the Law prescribed. Otherwise, he was quite rigid about a woman’s role in life. She was to bear children, rear them, observe the laws of Jewishness, run a household, and obey her husband for life.”

Abraham Hersh’s priorities are made quite clear when he leaves his wife alone, even though she is about to give birth, while he makes his usual Passover pilgrimage to his rebbe. She ends up having twin boys—Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem, the brothers of the title. Singer does not waste time setting up the temperamental and physical contrast that will define these characters for the rest of the book, and end up determining their fates. Simha Meir, the older by five minutes, is small and frail, bites the nipple while nursing, and turns into a solitary, clever, manipulative boy. Jacob Bunem, a vigorous baby, is also his brother’s opposite in every other way: athletic, charismatic, and not too bright.

It is hard to decide whether such blunt dualism is simple, like a myth—Singer clearly wants us to think of Jacob and Esau—or simplistic, a melodramatic convention. In any case, the reader never has to wonder what Simha and Jacob will do in any given situation, and one reason The Brothers Ashkenazi is so easy to read is that its complications are all sociological, seldom psychological. For instance, it is fated that Simha, the prodigy, will end up claiming the desirable Dineleh as his wife, even though she loves Jacob; and it is equally fated that the marriage will be full of mutual contempt and sexual coldness, since Simha’s defining trait is that he is impossible to love.

Likewise, we see enough of Simha as a greedy boy, cheating at cards and loansharking to his friends, to predict that he will grow up to be a ruthless and successful businessman. The rise and rise of Simha Meir—who in time drops his Yiddish name and becomes simply Max—dominates the first half of the novel. Singer, knowing he has a great villain on his hands, clearly relishes the scenes in which the young Simha coldly bankrupts his father-in-law, in order to take control of his business, and then gets his own father fired, so that he can take over his job. Eventually Max Ashkenazi gains control of the Huntze factory and achieves his dream of becoming “King of Lodz.”

But the cost of his ambition is not merely personal. All along, Singer shows that the rise of Lodz’s Jewish bourgeoisie takes place at the expense of the Jewish workers, who spend endless shifts at their factory looms and still don’t earn enough to support their families. The Brothers Ashkenazi never quite manages to become a great realist novel, in the tradition of Balzac or Zola, because Singer doesn’t write concretely enough about the realities of labor and commerce—he tends to offer emotive formulas in place of precise observation. But these are enough to keep the reader on the side of the proletariat against the bosses:

The more agile among the workers managed to filch some bread from the pantry, but those less bold starved. A piece of meat was never seen; the chicory substituting for coffee was served with a mere lick of sugar. The work went on all through the night by the dim light of oil lamps and smoking wicks. The smoke from the stoves irritated the eyes; the boss’s children cried; the women cursed and bickered. When the red eyelids could no longer be held open, the men stretched out on the dirty floor with a piece of goods as a pillow and dozed off, freezing in the winter, steaming in the summer, eaten alive by fleas, flies, and bedbugs.

Yet even as he mounts this Marxist critique of Lodz-style capitalism, Singer is convinced that Communism, too, is a dead end for Eastern European Jews. If Abraham Hersh shows the bankruptcy of tradition and Simha Meir the bankruptcy of capitalism, the bankruptcy of socialism appears in the character of Nissan, a rabbi’s son who becomes a strike-leader and revolutionary conspirator. Nissan earns the nickname “the depraved” for his open rejection of everything his puritanical, pious father believes in. Yet as Singer shows, with blunt irony, Nissan’s own longing for revolution is the mirror image of his father’s messianism, and he annotates the margins of Das Kapital just as his father annotated volumes of the Talmud.

Jewishness, Singer insists, is inescapable, and it makes any real comradeship with Polish workers impossible. When Nissan launches a strike against Lodz’s factory owners, it quickly degenerates into a pogrom. “Didn’t you know it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding?” the townspeople reproach him, and while Nissan can’t accept this truth, Singer clearly does. The Brothers Ashkenazi takes its characters through all kinds of social upheaval, culminating in World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. But anti-Semitism never changes, and it makes a mockery of every attempt to break the impasse of Eastern European Jewish society. In the novel’s very last chapter, the funeral liturgy—“Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return”—is echoed in the hopeless refrain of Lodz’s Jews: “Everything we built here we built on sand.”

This somber, trapped, helpless conclusion now seems horribly prescient. A few years after The Brothers Ashkenazi was published, the thousand-year-old Ashkenazi civilization would be annihilated in the Holocaust. Lodz itself became the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, with some 250,000 residents, most of whom were murdered at Chelmno and Auschwitz. In some ways, the world of the Lodz ghetto can be seen as a nightmare sequel to the world of The Brothers Ashkenazi, with sweatshops transformed into labor camps and Simha Meir, the “king of Lodz,” giving up his throne to Chaim Rumkowski, the infamous head of the Lodz Judenrat, who was derisively known as “King Chaim.”

I.J. Singer himself left Poland for America in 1934, taking a job at the Forward, New York’s socialist Yiddish daily. The following year he brought over his brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, then a fledgling writer. Emigration saved their lives—their mother and younger brother were killed in the Holocaust. Yet as Rebecca Goldstein points out in her introduction, it was not until Israel Joshua died of a heart attack, in 1944, that Isaac Bashevis began to flourish as a writer: “it was only the death of the one brother that brought the genius of the other to life.” And the prodigious success of the younger Singer, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature, has cast a retrospective shadow over the older brother whom he idolized: “To me, he was not only the older brother, but a spiritual father and master as well.” The Brothers Ashkenazi does not, I think, have the same literary power as the best of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work, but it remains a powerful and indispensable document of Yiddish civilization.

When the acclaimed Israeli novelist Zeruya Shalev writes a book about a woman’s divorce and calls it Thera (Toby Press, $24.95), then, she is not erring on the side of understatement. The death of a marriage, the metaphor implies, is no less traumatic the death of a civilization:

Unfathomable amounts of lava and ash leapt from the mountain that turned into a gaping maw, burying a wondrously developed ancient culture, leaving in its wake a crescent of smoking cliffs, a forlorn, craggy smile in the heart of the sea, and a desperate yearning for the sun, which would not show its face for many long years.

And the attempt to begin a new, post-divorce life is as perilous and tentative as the Israelites’ journey from Egypt to Canaan:

forced to cope with the disintegration of the frameworks, with the spreading violence, with the thousands of displaced people wandering over land and sea in search of a new home.

The voice we hear in these lurid, spiraling sentences belongs to Ella Miller, the 36-year-old woman whose psychic death and rebirth form the plot of Thera. Even in brief quotation, it’s clear that Ella is a domineering narrator: Her paragraph-long sentences plunge us into the center of her consciousness and keep us there, often uncomfortably. But to mock these narrative arias as self-indulgent, even purple, would be too easy. Shalev’s style (as rendered, utterly convincingly, by the translators, H. Sacks and Mitch Greenberg) is excessive because Ella is excessive, and the only way to understand her is to submit to her. This is not easy, because she is in many ways an unlikable character—needy, impulsive, self-destructive. Yet Shalev brings us so close to her emotional center that judgment is overwhelmed by sympathy. There really is something volcanic about Ella’s suffering, something epic about her superficially ordinary story.

For what could be more ordinary, in a modern, middle-class society, than divorce? Ella lives in Jerusalem, but she and her circle of secular professionals could just as easily be in Tel Aviv, or San Francisco. When she decides to leave her husband, Amnon, after years of coldness and mutual recrimination, she takes comfort in the banality of the step. “Times have changed,” she tells her father, a stern and pompous professor. “Today people don’t make such a fuss over divorce, I know lots of children of divorced parents and nothing happened to them, they have a father and a mother and they learn to cope with life.”

Yet it is precisely the effect of the divorce on her own son, 6-year-old Gili, that Ella most fears. The very first sentence of Thera has Gili shouting, “I’m dead … I’m totally dead, dead forever,” into his mother’s face, a childishly provocative way of expressing his grief. And Ella’s father sends her into a panic when he warns that “the child will not be able to cope with the situation, he won’t survive, he’ll be annihilated.” Because Ella is an archeologist—specializing, naturally, in the Thera eruption—her thoughts run automatically to classical, world-historical metaphors. To her, it sounds as if her father is “summing up the fate of … the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, entire empires vanished from the world, but we’re talking about a little child … who has difficulty tying his shoelaces.”

Freud, however, compared the human psyche to an archeological site where time does not exist, where the oldest layers exist simultaneously with the newest. And Shalev writes about character and emotion in a thoroughly psychoanalytic spirit. Indeed, one of the surprising features of this Israeli novel is the way Shalev deliberately minimizes the importance of politics to the happiness or unhappiness of individuals. American Jews tend to talk about Israeli life mainly in the context of political crisis, and symptoms of that crisis do appear in the novel—it was published in Hebrew in 2005, with memories of the second intifada still fresh. We hear about the security guard at Gili’s school, and Oded’s reluctance to take his children to public places. “I’m finished with this city, it’s a city of masochists,” says one minor character, to which another replies, “This whole country is a country of masochists.”

But the suffering that Ella endures has nothing to do with “the situation,” and if she is a masochist, it is her parents that are to blame, not her country. Ella’s childhood, we learn, was poisoned by the fighting between her overbearing father and her submissive mother. (She even had a tragic teenage romance with a boy who died young—an echo of Joyce’s The Dead, and an example of Shalev’s tendency to gild the emotional lily.) Like all of us, a psychologist might say, she is urgently in need, but has no idea what it is she needs.

It makes only too much sense, then, that she should try to escape from her post-divorce depression by falling in love with a psychologist, Oded Sheffer, who is the father of one of Gili’s schoolmates. Oded is in the process of divorcing his own wife, Michal, a neurotic, possessive invalid, and he and Ella cling to each other like survivors of a shipwreck. When they go to bed for the first time, it’s not clear whether Ella is having an orgasm or a therapeutic “breakthrough”:

Don’t be shy, he whispers, I want to hear you, I’ve already told you, words are important to me, and I hear myself speaking as I’ve never spoken before, in a voice that is not my voice, telling the story of a body about to be returned to the earth, a deceptive body whose growth was arrested, wizened before it ever ripened … it seems that I can hear the peel of my ancient loneliness splitting, the protective barrier … how scary it is to part from loneliness, how loud, its voice carrying from one end of the earth to the other.

How can Ella be a mother when she is still fundamentally a child? This is the novel’s central problem, and Shalev is at her best analyzing Ella’s guilty love for the vulnerable Gili. Shalev writes with terrific accuracy and empathy about the life of children—how they communicate despite their inarticulacy, how they overcome helplessness or resign themselves to it.  No one who has a child, or remembers being one, could read her description of Gili’s first night in his new, post-divorce home without being moved by his fear, anger, and bravery. When he sees his new room, he crows, “Mommy, the room’s huge, he spreads out his arms, it’s much bigger than my old room”—but Ella knows it’s actually smaller, that this is Gili’s attempt to master his loss.

Ella’s divorce brings so much grief to her, to Gili and Amnon, eventually even to Oded and his family, that it’s impossible to say whether it was worth getting divorced in the first place. Like death or natural disaster, Shalev seems to say, divorce is an absolute rupture; the new life is not better or worse than the old, because it is too different. There is a glimmer of hope, in the last pages of Thera, that Ella and Oded will be able to create a new, more resilient family, but Shalev leaves their future in doubt. “All is not lost, not yet,” Ella pleads; and Shalev suggests that, in human life, that is usually the best we can hope for.

Brodsky, however, continues to look a little blurry to American readers. His work does not have the currency or influence, among younger poets, that his reputation would suggest. Some critics, especially in England, are prepared to dismiss him entirely, to call his work overrated and his reputation unearned. But most simply ignore him, as though he did not belong to the same conversation that includes Heaney or John Ashbery or Adrienne Rich.

In one crucial sense, of course, he does not. All those poets write in English; but Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky, born in Leningrad in 1940, was a Russian poet. This means that it is Russian readers, familiar with Brodksy’s language and literary tradition, who must decide his claims to greatness. And as Lev Loseff shows in Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Biography, his clarifying new book, the best Russian judges have been unanimous about Brodsky from the beginning.

When he was 21 years old, for instance, he was introduced to Anna Akhmatova, the tragic heroine of 20th-century Russian poetry. Loseff, a poet and friend of Brodsky’s, explains that such “pilgrimages” to Akhmatova were common for young writers, who would arrive “bearing flowers and notebooks full of poetry.” Unsurprisingly, the encounter made a deep impression on Brodsky: “I suddenly realized—you know, somehow the veil suddenly lifts—just who or rather just what I was dealing with.” What is more surprising is that Akhmatova, then 72 years old, immediately accepted Brodsky as an equal: “Iosif, you and I know every rhyme in the Russian language,” she told him. In 1965, after reading a poem of Brodsky’s, she wrote in her diary: “Either I know nothing at all or this is genius.”

There is nothing new about English readers being baffled by poetry that Russians adore. On the contrary, it’s a critical truism that Russian poetry doesn’t translate well. Pushkin occupies the same place in Russian literature as Shakespeare does in English, but it has always been hard for us to really understand why. Twentieth-century masters like Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva are probably as well known in America for their life stories as for their writings. If Brodsky belongs in their company, then it makes sense for him to remain a little obscure to Americans, just as they do.

What makes Brodsky’s case so unusual is that this Russian poet spent almost half his life in America. Between 1972, when he was expelled from the USSR, and his death in 1996, Brodsky traveled extensively—“probably no Russian writer ever traveled more,” Loseff writes. But his home bases remained New York, where he lived in a two-room apartment on Morton Street, and South Hadley, Mass., where he taught at Mount Holyoke College. He even managed to become a vital figure in the American literary world, eventually being named U.S. Poet Laureate. This was possible, in large part, because Brodsky translated his own later work into English—first with the help of translators and other poets, then on his own. (Eventually he even wrote some modest original poems in English.) These versions were the ones included in his American collections, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, and now available in Brodsky’s Complete Poems in English.

Yet few English readers have been really satisfied with Brodsky’s own translations. His desire to make them is understandable—by turning himself into an American poet, after a fashion, he was saved from the obscurity and resentment that is the usual lot of the literary émigré. But he never became a master of English, in the way that, say, Vladimir Nabokov did. (As Loseff points out, Brodsky came to English much later than Nabokov and was largely self-taught, while the well-born novelist had English tutors from childhood.) Indeed, Brodsky in English remains, all too often, wrenched, unidiomatic, and unmusical. The genius of the Russian poet can be intuited—you can sense it in Brodsky’s intellectual range, bold metaphors, and rhetorical flow—but not really experienced. Loseff quotes the American poet Robert Hass to the effect that reading Brodsky in English is “like wandering through the ruins of a noble building.”

Loseff’s book is, as its subtitle insists, a strictly literary biography. The outlines of Brodsky’s life are sketched, but private experiences are related only when they directly inspired his poetry. Thus Loseff tells, in brief and general terms, the story of Brodsky’s long, tumultuous love affair with a woman named Marina Basmanova, which drove him to a suicide attempt, produced a son, and inspired some major poems. On the other hand, Brodsky’s marriage, late in life, is dispatched in a single sentence, and there is little about other friendships or relationships.

Where Loseff excels is in sketching the Russian literary and cultural context for Brodsky’s work—the poets he knew and admired, the “schools” that dominated Leningrad poetry in his youth. This kind of analysis is a reminder of how little Brodsky can be understood through an American prism. Likewise, the excerpts from his early Russian poems, translated (along with the whole book) by Jane Ann Miller, show how much we would benefit from a comprehensive new translation of Brodsky’s poetry. Miller’s excellent work is only seemingly slighted by the odd way that each of her verse translations is followed by the word “non-poetic”: This is to show that the translation is not by Brodsky, but in fact, her lucid and convincing versions are often more effectively poetic than the poet’s own.

Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Biography also helps to shed light on the complex question of Brodsky’s Jewishness. In one sense, Brodsky is unequivocal on this subject: “I’m a Jew. One hundred percent. You can’t be more Jewish than I am,” he told an interviewer. Yet he was typical of his Soviet Jewish generation in having absolutely no knowledge of Judaism—apparently he did not even read the Bible until he was in his twenties—and his understanding of Jewishness seems to have been passive and minimal. “When anybody asked what my ethnic background was, I of course answered Jewish,” he explained, “but that didn’t happen often. There was really no need to ask. I can’t say a Russian r.” Brodsky saw Jewishness in terms of such details of speech and appearance, like his prominent nose and pale skin. It could also be a cause of (fairly minor) discrimination: He recalled being teased by classmates and having his application to the Naval Academy rejected because of anti-Semitism.

But his essential identity, as he created it in his poems and essays, was universalist and cosmopolitan. Its key ingredients were the Russian language, European art and literature, and classical history: “Roman Elegies,” “To Urania,” “Venetian Stanzas,” and “Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots” are typical Brodsky titles. He seems to belong to the noble tradition of Jewish writers who, emancipated or severed from Jewishness, became universal humanists. One thinks of Marx, or Freud, or especially, in this case, Osip Mandelstam, whom Brodsky described in a superb essay as “a little Jewish boy with a heart full of Russian iambic pentameters.” The phrase is obviously autobiographical as well, and when Brodsky calls Mandelstam “the child of civilization,” he could be describing himself.

The story of the orphaned Jew who is reborn as the child of civilization is one of the great and ambiguous legends of modernity; and all such stories include a scene where the child is forcibly reminded that civilization doesn’t always trump history. That moment came for Brodsky in 1972, when he was abruptly summoned to the Leningrad bureau of OVIR, the office of visa and registration. The acronym was much in the American news at the time thanks to the Soviet Jewry movement. As Gal Beckerman writes in his recent book When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone, it was OVIR that obstructed Soviet Jews from going to Israel—or, at certain politically opportune moments, made emigration possible. This was one of those moments—in 1972, 32,000 Jews were allowed to leave as a token gesture in advance of President Nixon’s visit to Moscow.

But Brodsky was quite surprised to be one of them. He was by no means a refusenik, and the reason why he was persona non grata with the Soviet regime had to do not with his identity as a Jew, but with his identity as a poet. In 1964, Brodsky had been denounced by a Communist party loyalist for the vague crime of “parasitism,” or refusal to work. In fact, Loseff writes, he held a number of jobs, many of them quite arduous—he had worked on a geological expedition to the Arctic and as an assistant to a boiler inspector. But he had no real career, preferring short-term work that kept his time free for writing, and he shunned the established literary clubs and unions.

In short, he was acting just as a poet should—educating himself in his art, preserving his freedom, steering clear of cant and obligation. In the USSR, however, this was an intolerable display of independence, and Brodsky was subjected to a trial that truly merits the adjective Kafkaesque. As Loseff shows, the witnesses against him were a cross-section of ordinary citizens—a clerk, a soldier, a retiree—who all “began their testimony by stating that they did not know Brodsky personally.” Indeed, they hadn’t even read his poems, few of which had been published at the time. Their testimony amounted to stating that, based on what they had read about Brodsky in slanderous, error-filled newspaper articles, they believed him to be “anti-social.”

The judge, a caricature of a party hack, asked Brodsky who had given him the right to call himself a poet: “Did you try to attend a school where they train [poets]?” His reply—“I don’t think it comes from education … I think it’s from God”—is deservedly legendary. Indeed, the trial created such a loathsome spectacle—a stupid bureaucracy persecuting an idealistic young poet—that it became an international embarrassment for the Soviets. Brodsky was sent to do hard labor in exile, but after pressure from abroad, including a statement by the usually pro-Soviet Jean-Paul Sartre, his sentence was commuted after a year.

The official malice toward Brodsky remained, however, and he was not allowed to publish his poetry in the USSR, even as unauthorized editions appeared abroad. In 1972, then, the authorities decided to take advantage of the Soviet Jewry agitation to get rid of Brodsky once and for all—and it was his Jewishness that gave them the means. Summoned to OVIR, he was told that he must write out a statement accepting an invitation to Israel, or else he’d be “in big trouble.” He had no interest in going to Israel, or even in leaving the country; but within four weeks Brodsky was on a plane to Vienna, the transfer point for Jewish émigrés. He never returned to Russia, not even after the fall of Communism, and he never saw his parents again. Nor, of course, did he go to Israel; and while he became an American citizen, his body is buried in Venice. Loseff quotes his friend Susan Sontag’s telling explanation: “Venice was the ideal place to bury Brodsky, since it was essentially nowhere.” Does being a child of civilization mean belonging everywhere and nowhere? As Brodsky himself put it, in his poem “Venetian Stanzas I”: “At night here we hold soliloquies/ to an audience of echoes, whose breath won’t warm up, alas.”

Rachel’s suicide was not something her work predicted—in the way that, say, Sylvia Plath’s poetry toys with and threatens suicide—but the person we come to know in her poems is deeply acquainted with sadness, loneliness, fear, and doubt. (This is one of the reasons I felt so drawn to them.) Like Philip Larkin, Wetzsteon—now that I’m talking about her work, the last name seems more appropriate than the familiar first—had the rare gift of writing about suffering without falling prey to histrionics or self-pity. “At least/ I won’t be someone who, smiling too often,/ gives too much away,” she writes in “A Bluff,” and strong feeling is something her poetry never gives away. Her deft rhymes and meters, her allusiveness, and her guarded irony are all ways of containing feeling, and thereby heightening it. As she writes in “Commands for the End of Summer”:

Deepen,
leaves, not with what
has made us sorry but
with what was profound about that
sorrow.

Make me
spontaneous,
gathering winds, but don’t
blow so giddily I teeter
too much.

That poem, from Sakura Park, is one of many that seem even more fraught and moving now, when Wetzsteon’s death has shown how hard she had to struggle to keep her balance. Certainly it is impossible to read her new book, Silver Roses (Persea, $16.50), without sensing the shadows retroactively cast by her suicide. (The collection, her fourth and presumably last, was in preparation when she died.) The first poem in the book, “Among the Neutrals,” is a series of haiku responding to an image in the Inferno: Dante assigns the neutrals, “those/ who lived without disgrace and without praise,” to limbo, since even their sins were not positive enough to merit entry into hell. Wetzsteon finds ingenious, wittily concrete ways to bring their predicament home: “How could we not know/ we were drowning in huge tubs/ of lukewarm water?” And then comes the fourth haiku:

Even the poor souls
lower down in the sad wood
stood up for something.

She is counting on the reader to know that the “sad wood,” in the seventh circle of the Inferno, is where suicides are punished: Their souls are turned into gnarled trees, which bleed and wail when their branches are snapped off. These lines, coming on the first page of Silver Roses, might be taken as a romantic indulgence of suicide—better to be a “poor soul” than a tepid one. But in fact, Silver Roses, like Wetzsteon’s earlier work, is admirable above all in its refusal of such sentimentality. The poet is often sad, but she doesn’t glamorize sadness; she knows that it is right to affirm life, which makes the moments when she’s unable to do so all the more powerful. She critiques her own morbid tendencies in “Ex Libris”:

Ballpoint in hand
I mourned corpses by moonlight,
cooed at sightless embryos
safe in their petri dishes

until these sad rites came to feel
as natural as breathing.

Perhaps they were natural.

But so is breathing,
and so is praise,
etching our silver nights and golden days.

This poem is from the third section of Silver Roses, which is the most painful part to read precisely because it is the most hopeful. This group of poems chronicles the happy, complicated growth of a new romance, and their real subject is Wetzsteon’s ambivalence about happiness. Loneliness and the longing for companionship are one of the constant themes of her work; in art and life, Wetzsteon makes clear, she has grown accustomed to melancholy, and knows how to make use of it. She is reluctant, then, to give up solitude, which is such an important condition of her writing. “I must face my fate like Estragon, asking/ What do we do now, now that we are happy?” she writes in “Halt!” In “Interruptus,” poetic inspiration literally competes with sex for her attention:

There was a lull, a break from bliss
when I turned to face the window
looking for all the world, you said,
“like I was composing a new verse.”

But the poem goes on to reconcile art and life, insisting, “I stroke you with both tangible hands/ and feet unstressed or thudding”—the “feet,” in this case, being the iambs of a poem. The poet’s tentative joyfulness is summed up in the last image of the title poem, which is the last poem in the collection. The silver rose Wetzsteon has in mind is the token that the young lover Octavian gives to his beloved Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, in that opera’s most ravishingly romantic scene. In her poem, Wetzsteon remembers seeing the opera with previous companions, who failed to inspire Octavian-like bliss:

I went with others, threw
bouquets and caution to the whirling wind,
believing that the rhapsody on stage
would waft its wonders up to our cheap seats;
but mirrors can be beautiful fierce cheats,
delusions of an oversmitten mind …

In the final stanza, however, we see the poet on the verge of fulfillment, planning to watch Der Rosenkavalier on television with her new love: “and I’ll be there upon the stroke of eight,/ bearing in my trembling ungloved hand/ a silver rose for you.” The gender reversal in that image makes it, I think, especially moving. Wetzsteon is Octavian offering the silver rose, not Sophie choosing whether to accept it, and the one who makes the offer bears the risk of rejection.

If you were to read this poem, and the whole book, not knowing anything about Rachel Wetzsteon, you would not necessarily care whether the relationship she is writing about flourished or failed. As she herself would certainly have insisted, a poem is a poem, not a diary entry; its job is to communicate an emotion, and “Silver Roses” beautifully captures the experience of “trembling,” vulnerable love. But it is impossible to unknow what one knows, and every reader of Wetzsteon’s New York Times obituary was made aware—regrettably, perhaps—that her suicide came after “she had been severely depressed in recent months, partly over the breakup of a three-year romance.” Presumably this is the romance whose birth-pangs we read about in Silver Roses; and this cannot help making the book painfully poignant. Reading Wetzsteon’s poetry means being drawn into her loneliness and her hope:

this closeness all the more delicious for arriving late
[is] prodded, haunted, pierced by doubting voices from the past
who say, Pack up your things and go, this comfort cannot last,
for you are destined now and always for another scene
where you lance boils, sport braces, brood, and wear a size fourteen,
live wholly and quite happily upon an island where
the smallest tender gesture would be more than you could bear.

Rachel does not yet belong to the past; but Silver Roses is a posthumous work, and posthumousness is the first stage of becoming part of the past, part of literature, which is what every serious poet hopes for. If she is still being read a generation from now—and I hope she is—young readers will probably think about her in the same way that we think about figures like Plath or John Berryman—as a poet who was a suicide, whose suicide is part of her literary identity. But to have known her, even slightly, as a living person, with all the freedom and uncertainty of a life still in its prime, and then to see her transformed into something closed, fully achieved, irretrievably past—this has been, for me, an uncanny and piteous enlightenment.

You can listen to some of Rachel Wetzsteon’s poems here:

Two untitled poems from Home and Away, read by the poet. (Audio courtesy of The Paris Review, 2001.):

“Gold Leaves” and “Septimus,” from Rachel Wetzsteon’s posthumous collection, Silver Roses, read by Grace Schulman, author of the introduction to that collection, and of a recent collection of essays titled First Loves and Other Adventures:

An untitled poem from Sakura Park and “Paradigm Shift” from Silver Roses, read by Adam Kirsch:

“Short Ode to Screwball Women” and “Flaneur Haiku,” both from Sakura Park, read by Alana Newhouse:

It is a wonderful irony, then, that this most cutting-edge and Parisian of movements can be traced to a moment of epiphany in a primitive Indian village in western Brazil. In 1936, Lévi-Strauss and his wife Dina led an anthropological expedition to study the indigenous peoples of this region, at that time barely accessible from the big cities of Brazil’s Atlantic coast. One of the tribes they visited was the Bororo, and though Lévi-Strauss spent just three weeks with them, Bororo culture and myth would lie at the heart of his work for the next 60 years.

What fascinated Lévi-Strauss was not the picturesque elements of Bororo life—what Wilcken calls “the fetishized objects of the Western imagination: penis sheaths, multicolored headdresses, nose feathers, lip ornaments and body paint.” Rather, he became obsessed with the way the Bororo village was laid out. By diagramming the location of the huts, Lévi-Strauss came to realize that they reflected the intricate social hierarchy of the tribe. As Wilcken summarizes:

An invisible north-south axis divided the village into moieties (that is, two intermarrying descent groups); within the moieties were clans, and within the clans, a tripartite system of castelike grades. Marriage was permitted only between moieties and within grades, with a procession of men, once married, crossing the yard to live on the other side—their in-laws’ huts. The village circle was then quartered by an east-west axis running parallel to the river, the upstreamers organizing the downstreamers’ funerals, and vice versa.

This elaborate organization, which Lévi-Strauss compared to a ballet, turned physical space into a map of social space, governing the lives and deaths of the Bororo. And it had evolved gradually, unselfconsiously, without the use of written language.

To Lévi-Strauss, this vision of culture as the product of hidden structures was immensely seductive. The Bororo, he said in a late interview, were “the great theoreticians of structuralism.” But it took a French academic mandarin like Lévi-Strauss to turn structuralism into a worldview, and even into a fad. (At the height of his fame, in 1970, Lévi-Strauss was photographed for Vogue by Irving Penn.) In a series of influential works, Lévi-Strauss proposed that incest taboos, kinship rules, culinary practices, and primitive myths—in all their bizarre, seemingly unnecessary complexity—could be similarly explained as the permutations of a few basic rules or structures. So, Barthes proposed in his famous study S/Z, could the European novel; so, Lacan wrote, could the unconscious itself.

Lévi-Strauss’ theoretical works were far too abstruse to reach a wide audience. Even fellow anthropologists were daunted, and skeptical, when Lévi-Strauss claimed to be able to reduce all myths to a mathematical formula—Fx(a): Fy(b)=Fx(b): Fa-1(y), if you’re keeping score at home. But he reached a broad audience with his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques, a memoir of his Brazilian fieldwork that stringently dispels the romantic myths of anthropological fieldwork. “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe,” the book begins, and Wilcken shows that Lévi-Strauss really meant it: After his Brazilian sojourn in the 1930s, he did little fieldwork, and even in Brazil his research was often hasty and haphazard. Wilcken’s subtitle is “The Poet in the Laboratory,” not the poet in the jungle or the desert, and most of Lévi-Strauss’ career was spent in the well-equipped, well-financed institutions of French academia.

Lévi-Strauss was, in fact, a creature of Paris, a species of master-thinker that could flourish nowhere else. He was born in Paris in 1908, to a Jewish family originally from Alsace—no relation to the jeans manufacturer, though he never escaped jokes and questions about it—and his childhood showed all the contradictions of the assimilated French Jewish bourgeoisie. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a celebrated musician who worked with Berlioz and Offenbach and used his fortune to amass a collection of Judaica. His maternal grandfather was a rabbi, and when World War I broke out the 6-year-old Claude was sent to live with him in Versailles. Yet in Tristes Tropiques, he explains that Judaism remained foreign to him:

[My grandfather’s] house stood next to the synagogue and was linked to it by a long inner corridor. Even to set foot in that corridor was an awesome experience; it formed an impassable frontier between the profane world and that other world from which was lacking precisely that human warmth which was the indispensable condition to my recognizing it as sacred. Except at the hours of service the synagogue was empty; desolation seemed natural to it, and its brief spells of occupation were neither sustained enough nor fervent enough to overcome this. They seemed merely an incongruous disturbance.

It is tempting to wonder whether this estrangement from Judaism played a role in Lévi-Strauss’ search for the sacred in primitive cultures. Did his liminal position as a Jew—both inside and outside of French society—make him particularly suited to the role of sociologist, one who both inhabits a culture and stands outside of it at the same time? It is certainly suggestive that the masters of French sociology—Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Lévi-Strauss—were all Jewish.

Yet Lévi-Strauss was sufficiently detached from Jewish concerns that, in the 1930s, he had little sense of the threat posed by Hitler. In 1935, Lévi-Strauss was one of a group of young French academics offered jobs at the newly founded University of Sao Paulo, and he spent the next four years mainly in Brazil. When he returned to France in 1939, it was just in time to be drafted into the French Army; his limited English was good enough to qualify him as a liaison officer, working with the British Army in northern France. When the German invasion led to the disintegration of his unit, he made his way south to the unoccupied zone, where his parents had also retreated.

Then, amazingly, in September 1940, Lévi-Strauss asked to be allowed to return to his old teaching job in Paris—that is, to go back to the Nazi-occupied zone. “Fortunately for Lévi-Strauss,” Wilcken writes, “the official dealing with the request … refused to send anyone with such an obviously Jewish name back into occupied France.” Asked about this episode in the 1980s, he blamed his own “lack of imagination” about the real danger of Nazism. Soon enough he began to realize his true position: When the Vichy government fired all Jewish professors, Lévi-Strauss “felt myself to be potential fodder for the concentration camp.”

He was rescued, like so many other European Jewish intellectuals, by an invitation to teach at the New School for Social Research, in New York. In fact, the war years turned out to be a sort of idyll for Lévi-Strauss: He enjoyed living in the Village, socializing with avant-garde artists like Max Ernst, and doing research at the Museum of Natural History and the New York Public Library. Crucially, it was in New York that he met another Jewish refugee, the linguist Roman Jakobson, who gave him his first exposure to structuralist ideas. When the war ended, Lévi-Strauss was appointed by the new Gaullist government as cultural attaché, charged with escorting French luminaries on visits to New York. By the time he returned to France, in 1948, he had already drafted his first major work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

From this point on, Wilcken’s biography has less to say about Lévi-Strauss’ life, which became quietly professorial, than about his work. Strikingly, even as he was becoming the world’s most famous anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss showed no appetite for further fieldwork. To write his magnum opus, the four-volume study Mythologies, he devoured thousands of books on native myth and sent out his own researchers to interview distant tribes. But he himself preferred to stay home in Paris, pondering and writing. “I try to be the place through which the myths pass,” he explained, in the quasi-mystical tone that made him such a charismatic teacher.

To one student who attended Lévi-Strauss’ seminars at the Collège de France, “He was the king who opened the door; the moment it seemed the philosophers’ stone had been found, he shut the door again and took up another subject.” All such kings of thought are eventually deposed, and Lévi-Strauss lived long enough to see his own glamour fade—he died only last year, at the age of 100. But Patrick Wilcken’s skillful, highly intelligent biography allows us to understand all that Lévi-Strauss meant, as well as who he was.

Insofar as American readers think of the Middle East as a region full of real or potential enemies, Tablet and Pen can be seen as another bridge-building exercise. As the editor Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American writer and intellectual, says in his introduction, “the writings in these pages may help move our consciousness of the region away from the ubiquitous images of terrorists and fanatics and toward a new, more constructive set of ideas and metaphors.”

To frame a literary anthology as a response to political enmity, however, is already to cede ground to the mindset that the book means to change. You can see this in the odd way the anthology defines the Middle East. Tablet and Pen includes writing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, as one would expect, but also a considerable amount of Urdu, the language of Muslims in Pakistan and India. Ordinarily, the Middle East is not considered to extend all the way to Lahore; but if it does, why doesn’t Tablet and Pen include any other languages of the Indian subcontinent, such as Hindi? On the other hand, it makes perfect sense for such an anthology to include writers from Palestine, as it does; but then why does it not include any Hebrew writers, since Israel is surely just as central to the Middle East as Palestine?

The answer could not be more obvious: Tablet and Pen is really an anthology of writing from the Muslim world. The religion of Islam is what unites such diverse languages, cultures, and civilizations as Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and Arabic. Not only would there be no harm in acknowledging this, it might even make the book more saleable. Yet Aslan shies away from it:  “This is not meant to be an anthology of literature from ‘the Muslim world’—not only because many of the authors do not self-identify as Muslim but also because there is no such thing as a monolithic ‘Muslim world,’ save perhaps in the imaginations of some in the West.” Fair enough—but since the editors opt for a geographic designation like “the Middle East,” rather than one based on religion, the decision to omit Hebrew literature from the book becomes all the more striking.

It also starts to look polemical. Having dismissed Islam as the essence of “the Middle East,” Aslan opts instead for a post-colonialist identity: “What binds together the writers in this collection … is neither borders nor nationalities, but rather a struggle for self-definition in the context of imperialism, colonialism, and Western cultural hegemony. (It is for this reason, and to avoid further complicating the narrative, that Hebrew literature, which has developed along a different path, is not included in this anthology.)” In fact, the contents of the book resist this kind of Saidian simplicity. “Western cultural hegemony” interests only a few of the more engagé intellectuals in Tablet and Pen, while the best pieces—like Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s memoir of the Indian independence movement, “For Freedom’s Sake”—are actually critiques of the human deformations wrought by political grievance.

Yet it is precisely on Aslan’s stated grounds that Hebrew literature would have been a valuable addition to Tablet and Pen. For it, too, can be read as a postcolonial literature. Like India and Pakistan, Israel was created in opposition to the British Empire; like Iran, it is a country with an ancient culture and history that must be reimagined in the modern world. And Hebrew literature, like Arabic literature, uses a Semitic language and European forms, raising questions about Eastern and Western identity. The Israeli perspective on all these questions is different from the Arab or Iranian perspective, of course, but they are shared questions.

If Hebrew writers are not engaged in “a struggle for self-definition in the context of imperialism, colonialism, and Western cultural hegemony,” the troubling implication seems to be that this is because Israel is a creature of Western imperialism, while the peoples represented in Tablet and Pen are its victims. The editors of Tablet and Pen may not believe this, but a number of the contributors definitely do. Take the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, one of the few writers in the book whose name is familiar to Americans—he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the only Arabic writer to win the prize so far. Mahfouz is represented by an excerpt from The Seventh Heaven, his last book, published in 2005 (though the anthology does not give any publication dates, a serious handicap for a work so engaged with history).

In Mahfouz’s tale, a young man named Raouf is murdered by his friend Anous, who is his rival for the love of Rashida. At his death, Raouf’s soul ascends to Heaven, where he is told that, while the souls of the pure can ascend to God, the souls of the sinful are reincarnated on Earth. This leads to a discussion of various famous men and their current reincarnations. Adolf Hitler, Mahfouz writes, has been reborn as “Boss Qadri the Butcher,” Anous’ father, a local thug and gangster who keeps the neighborhood in fear. But Boss Qadri, we learn, is only able to operate because he has “bought the loyalty of the shaykh,” the nobleman in charge of the district. And whose soul is reincarnated in that shaykh? “Lord Balfour,” Mahouz writes simply. In other words, the British statesman who signed the Balfour Declaration, supporting the creation of a Jewish homeland, is said to be worse, in some sense, than Hitler, who killed 6 million Jews.

This is a very troubling moment in Tablet and Pen, both because of the eminence of the writer and because of the casualness of the reference. Clearly, Mahfouz knows that his readership will share his opinion of Balfour and, by extension, of Israel. And this kind of reflexive hatred can be found in several contributors. The anthology includes a long performance poem, transcribed from a cassette, by the Iraqi Mozaffar al-Nawwab. Most of the poem is a profane satire on the corruption of Arab rulers and the cruelty of the Lebanese Christians in their civil war with the Lebanese Muslims. “What wonders the Arab oil has done for us!/ We belch to the point of indigestion from hunger/ While the Oil King is afraid of rats getting at his cash,” al-Nawwab declaims, and one can imagine how effective it would all be in performance. And then, at the end of the poem, comes this:

Naft ibn Kaaba [a satirical name for a Gulf oil sheikh] announced
That a meeting would be convened
It’s coincidence, I swear, sheer coincidence
That there were six members
And that the corners of the star are six in total
Oh, star of David, rejoice
Oh, Masonic Lodge, go wild with delight
Oh, finger of Kissinger …
For the royal asshole is hexagonal!

In this image, all of al-Nawwab’s grievances—all the problems of the Arab world—are explained by a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. It is a concrete example of the anti-Semitic pathology that continues to flourish in the Middle East, even as some Arab intellectuals denounce it. Less mad than this, but just as dire in its implications, is “Letter From Gaza” by Ghassan Kanafani, whose biographical note explains that he was “the spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” and that he was assassinated by Israeli agents in 1972 (but not that this was a reprisal for the PFLP’s massacre of 26 people at Ben Gurion Airport in May of that year). Kanafani writes of visiting his 13-year-old niece, Nadia, in the hospital in Gaza, after she lost her legs in an Israeli bombardment. Such a scene prompts feelings of anger and revenge, of course, and then Kanafani writes: “I imagined that the main street that I walked along on the way back home was only the beginning of a long, long road leading to Safad”—Safad being, as a note explains, “a small town in northern Israel.”

In other words, Kanafani is looking forward to the day when the whole country, not just Gaza, becomes part of Palestine—that is, when Israel is destroyed. Here in a nutshell is the rejectionist attitude that, as Benny Morris wrote recently in Tablet, makes Israeli-Palestinian peace talks so hopeless. The same vengefulness leads Abu Salma, another Palestinian poet, to write: “Some morning we’ll return riding the crest of the tide,/ our bloodied banners fluttering/ above the glitter of spears.” It is a good example of the kind of archaic, aestheticizing treatment of violence that writers in the West have mostly eschewed since the First World War.

One of the problems with this kind of writing is that its unreasoning hatred makes it much harder for Jewish readers to take in the honest, angry witnessing of other Palestinian writers. Zakaria Mohammad’s “This Is Home,” for instance, is a searing account of returning home to Jericho after spending decades abroad:

Then I got to the bridge that connects one bank of the river to the other. I arrived, and ended up on the other side. I came away from the bridge with my blood boiling. Five hours of interrogations and closed rooms with the Israeli secret police seemed to have injected poison into my veins, and obliterated all of the happy scenarios I had constructed for the moment of my return. For the Israelis, these hours were needed so that each and every returnee would understand the truth they wanted understood: you are coming to place yourself under our heel. This is the supreme truth, and everything else follows from it.

Imagine this rage and resentment multiplied by hundreds of checkpoints and border crossings, and you begin to have a sense of the dimensions of the Israel-Palestine problem. I have focused on that problem in writing about Tablet and Pen, and unfortunately this means I’ve given almost no sense of the majority of the book, which is about so much else—love and desire and youth and age and hope and despair, all the universal subjects that really do make literature a source of understanding and connection across borders. But across borders doesn’t mean without borders, and not all literature is written in a humane spirit—a lesson that a reader of Tablet and Pen can’t help learning.

Each change of regime, each military campaign, brought death on a massive scale—from combat, but still more from imprisonment, massacre, deportation, and deliberate starvation. Between 1933 and 1945, 14 million civilians and prisoners of war were killed in this region. As Timothy Snyder emphasizes in his important new history, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, $29.95), this fantastic figure does not include combatants, even though half of all the soldiers killed in the Second World War, on all fronts around the globe, died in Eastern Europe.

What it does include, of course, are the 5 to 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, which took place exactly in the region that Snyder designates “the bloodlands.” Something like 40 percent of the civilians killed in the bloodlands were Jewish victims of the Germans and their collaborators. Or, as Snyder writes in another attempt to put the Jewish experience in perspective, “Jews were less than two percent of the population [of the USSR] and Russians more than half; [yet] the Germans murdered more Jewish civilians than Russian civilians in the occupied Soviet Union.”

“Jews were in a category of their own,” Snyder goes on to write. The language of history reflects this: We speak of the Holoc