For neurotic parents freaked out about their kids’ development: Philip Schultz’s memoir My Dyslexia demonstrates that even a kid with learning disabilities, who couldn’t read until the fifth grade, can grow up to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

For the comic-book fan who needs a little help growing up: Created by a brother-sister team, Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s graphic novel Farm 54 describes in harrowing style growing up amid tragedies on a moshav, or settlement, in 1980s Israel.

For the aspiring New York intellectual: If they accomplish nothing else, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook, should counter any youngster’s callow yearning for a more vibrant age of American Jewish culture, by making very clear just how lousy it felt to hang out at the Podhoretzes’ with Irving Kristol and Norman Mailer.

For the sports fan willing to go deeper than, say, Moneyball: In uncovering the role of Jews in running Negro Leagues baseball teams and then integrating the majors, Rebecca Alpert’s history Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball offers support to those who understand American athletics not just as bread and circuses but as a site for the negotiation of key racial and social relationships.

For the religious pedants you can’t avoid: If they’re constantly quoting a baraita at you, they might be interested to learn in Talya Fishman’s Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures that it was hardly inevitable that the Talmud would be transformed into the primary text of rabbinic Judaism.

For a friend in want of a good orgasm: Christopher Turner’s history Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America surveys the career and ideas of Wilhelm Reich, who evangelized for the psychological necessity of getting off.

For an American Jewish World Service-supporting exoticist: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s stories and essays, collected in Mongrels or Marvels, do more than revel in the charms and dangers of the East; they offer the insights of a Jewish woman who was born to Iraqi and Tunisian parents in 1917, raised in Cairo, and wrote exclusively in English while living in Israel.

For the Us Weekly devotee: It may not satisfy TMZ hardcores, but for milder celebrity junkies, Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness will allow your loved one to cook and eat a little like the Hollywood royalty descended from the Gaon of Nitzy-Novgorod.

For someone ignorant about Israeli and American culture who nonetheless insists on spouting off about the politics and culture of both countries: Yoram Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper, a genre-bending work of autobiographical fiction, introduces the reader to a young painter and veteran of the 1948 War of Israeli Independence who spent the 1950s hanging out with Miles Davis and Marlon Brando, and who reels off anecdotes of his youth idiosyncratically and with none of the comfortable clichés one might expect.

Remember Me To God, Myron Kaufmann’s debut novel, came out 54 years ago this month. As Josh Lambert noted on the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication, the book has fallen out of favor, though it had been initially heralded by the likes of Norman Mailer and Alfred Kazin and appeared on New York Times bestseller lists. “Even excellent books fall into obscurity all the time,” Lambert explained, “no matter how popular they’ve been—particularly when, like Kaufmann’s, they spill out over nearly 700 pages of fine print.”

The novel tells the story of a Jewish family, the Amsterdams, in 1941, a year during which the older son, Richard, manages to ascend the social ranks at Harvard and earn a coveted spot on The Harvard Lampoon and induction into the Hasty Pudding Institute. His subsequent proposal to a Radcliffe-attending society girl (named Wimsy Talbot, no less) wreaks the expected havoc within his family—making the novel, in Lambert’s comparison, the emotional equivalent of an excruciatingly slow-motion car wreck, and inspiring Jewish leaders in the late 1950s to denounce the book as a literary documentation of Kaufmann’s own Jewish self-hatred.

Yet, Lambert argues, it actually offers a thorough analysis of the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred, rather than simply serving as an example of it. “It is as an unusually evenhanded entry into this rich tradition that Remember Me to God deserves to be remembered,” Lambert wrote, “and as a finely wrought triumph of midcentury realism so precise in its observation that it captures perfectly the incline of streets in Harvard Square and the musty smell inside the Lampoon castle.”

Read Regatta Land, by Josh Lambert

The Arbiter is a new weekly column dedicated to revisiting canonical works of art, high and low alike, in an attempt to reevaluate their merit. All media are considered; none are pitied. As an homage to the greatest Jewish guardian of memory, Marcel Proust, each work will be rated on a scale of one to five madeleines, with one pastry meaning the work should be forgotten posthaste, and five arguing for a spirited recollection.

The summer of 1991 was a transformative one in my life. With my father freshly imprisoned and my lust animated, I was stumbling into adulthood in that state of dumb ecstasy inhabited by maniacs, poets, and pubescent boys: Nothing was true, everything was permitted.

The season’s event was a late August party at Ella’s. Sweet Ella—at 15, not yet stripped of her innocence—decided that hers would be a costume party, and that the theme would be the 1960s. To my friends, that meant bell-bottoms and afro wigs and necklaces with the peace sign and other glittering clichés. I showed up wearing a dress shirt and a tie.

I spent most of the evening sitting on a couch in Ella’s living room, staring at her family’s snapshots scattered all around, feeling sweaty and sullen. The sight of Adi approaching made nothing better. She was the alabaster-skinned girl, the grinning, hard-faced beauty all the boys wanted to fuck. I despised her, which, in the tubular logic of high school, meant that I wanted to fuck her more than most. I’m certain that she knew. She sat on the sofa’s sunken arm and playfully yanked at my tie.

“And who are you supposed to be?” she asked.

I muttered the first words that came to mind: “Alfred Kazin.”

I had no idea why I said that. For one thing, while Kazin enjoyed a long and storied career, the pinnacle of his fame as a literary critic came in the 1940s and 1950s; by 1966, he disapprovingly referred to much of the American literary scene as “the usual twaddle.” For another, I knew very little about Alfred Kazin at the time. A few weeks earlier, at a small Tel Aviv shop that was one of the few in town to carry books in English, I had picked up a used copy of his autobiography. I bought it on the strength of the title alone—New York Jew.

That, I thought, was what I wanted to be: For numerous reasons, I felt ill-suited to life as an Israeli Jew, but perhaps my overactive mind might pave the way to a loftier existence among my pensive tribesmen in America. I knew nothing of Edmund Wilson, Delmore Schwartz, and the other men and women who were Kazin’s friends and colleagues, but I was ready, on faith, to admit them as my heroes. They, and Kazin first and foremost, seemed to have tamed the world with their intellects, to offer foundations where before there was nothing but words and ideas, swirling and clashing.

The publication, last month, of selections from his journals was an invitation to revisit Alfred Kazin. Now that I am a Jew residing in New York, rereading Kazin threw me for a loop. “Every original Jew turns against the Jews,” he wrote in his journal on July 24, 1951, a typical entry. “They are the earth from which his spirit tries to free itself. … The vice of Jewish solidarity—it is an unexpressed compassion without love. The glory of being in the truth, Jewish or not Jewish, is to find a love higher than solidarity.”

If his journals are any indication, that kind of love eluded Kazin throughout his life, but he never stopped looking for it. The writers he admired were his trusted guides, Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. The Concord sage appears frequently in many of Kazin’s works, like a shaman, demarcating the sacred and the profane. In Emerson, Kazin found everything he felt himself not to be. “The Jew’s God,” he wrote in his journal on April 26, 1969, “is hidden and the Jew’s fate is always mysterious. By contrast, Emerson is open, radiant, a poet of unlimited perception as possibility.” Kazin returned to this dichotomy frequently—the Jew obsessed with his past, Emerson with the future; the Jew bound by the others, Emerson cheerily insisting that “that is always best which gives me to myself.” Reading Kazin on Emerson sometimes feels like watching a child push his nose against the thick glass of an aquarium, wishing desperately that he, too, could grow gills and jump in with the magnificent fish inside. “Emerson,” Kazin wrote elegiacally in the summer of 1974, “made me a Jew.”

That may be the case, but not for any reason Alfred Kazin might have consciously understood. In his books—the journals but also God and the American Writer, On Native Grounds, Writing Was Everything, and New York Jew—he tells another, subtler, far more radical story: Emerson made Kazin a Jew not because he was so different from anything Kazin might have recognized as distinctly Jewish, but because the Transcendentalist faced the very same problems as Kazin, the son of Gedaliah from Minsk. So, despite the occasional anti-Semitic statement, had Herman Melville. So had Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne and others Kazin helped induct into the pantheon of American letters. Like a talented tea-leaf reader, Kazin peered into the pages of American literature and saw there men and women just like himself, lonely geniuses who hailed from families of faith and found, in their own truth and in their own passions, a calling louder than community and stronger than religion.

What, after all, separates Kazin’s description of Hawthorne’s lack of faith “in salvation through the extraordinary, complex, and ultimately inexplicable will of God that kept the Puritans snug and safe (despite predestination) in this world,” from his bafflement at his own aunt, who refused to flee into the forest even when she realized the Nazis were at her doorstep, wondering if the upcoming annihilation might simply be “God’s will”? The author of The Scarlet Letter and the author of New York Jew are deeply similar in this sense; they observe with disbelief the tradition that had spawned them but that insisted on seeing the whole existence as divinely ordained and ultimately unknowable to Man.

Of course, few intellectuals can accept such a premise; mindful men, even the more fatalistic among them, like to think that their thinking orders their surroundings. Kazin was aware of Alexis de Tocqueville’s stern warning that unprecedented faith in the individual could “make every man forget his ancestors” and “confine him within the solitude of his own heart,” but he ignored it nonetheless, as did his literary heroes. But whereas Emerson et al., were writing America at the moment of its rebirth from the furious thrusts of the Civil War and the emergence of market capitalism, Kazin was observing postwar society re-invent itself via mass production. Emerson’s private religion and personal faith might have made some sense in the Massachusetts of the late 19th century, but in Manhattan of the mid-20th it was farcical, doomed to generate nothing but pain.

It did, at least for Kazin. His yearnings for women are well-documented, but also entirely congruent with his wider beliefs. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to realize that the man who’d written that “the aim of literature has always been to reconcile us to life by showing that it is not limited to the actual data of existence” might feel the same way about sex and that he might be disappointed when he realized—as he did, again and again—that passion eventually evolved into relationships, just as writing eventually evolved into literature.

This was too much for Kazin to take. Emily Dickinson, he wrote, “would have liked Simone Weil’s ‘Attentiveness without an object is the supreme form of prayer.’ ” Kazin was enormously attracted to Weil’s thought (although relieved not to have met her in person) because it suggested a world at once self-referential and pure, a world in which the disappointment that is the key element of politics—or, for that matter, of any form of human interaction—didn’t exist. Like Weil, Kazin was hungry for epiphanies in a world moved by organizing principles; it was a dissonance that drove Weil to an early death and drove Kazin to women. He refers to himself in his journals as a “prisoner of sex! Prisoner of women!” In sex, he found Transcendence; in women, the possibility of reproducing “some early bliss, to be at home with myself.” But never for long; like any religious device, the tremors of consummation soon led to the strictures of commitment, which in turn bred resentment. Kazin wanted to be alone together with other people in the world, and he realized that this yearning wasn’t feasible in a world of mass movements.

One of the charms of reading Kazin today—the superb prose and the pleasures of the company of a first-rate mind aside—is the realization that his very American and very Jewish form of unease may be in the midst of a renaissance in our digitally mediated world of friending and liking, following and being followed, and advertising our favorite bands and relationship status. With the aid of William Blake and Dickinson and Emerson, Kazin found a way of reimagining loneliness as a social activity, of making life tolerable in absence of community and absolute faith, of avoiding solipsism and resisting despair. He was perhaps our most skilled non-belonger and no stranger to the mad desire of our age, the desire for immediate connection without real human bondage, for communication without commitment, for “friending” without friendship—the desire, in other words, for ecstasy, which is a state of simultaneously being at one with the world and intensely inside one’s own mind. He muddled through the swamps of uncertainty to emerge with answers as complex and tentative as the problems he faced. He took solace in lines like this one, from Blake: “Do what you will, this life’s a fiction /And is made up of contradiction.” If that’s true, and if we want to make any sense of life regardless, we need a guide. Kazin had Emerson, Dickinson, Melville. We have Alfred Kazin.

“And do what?” I wanted to know.

“Nothing. Just be there. They want a Jewish writer in their home.”

“Do I get paid for this?”

“No. But you get several days off. And they have a wonderful chef.”

Gelfman was surprised when I said I wasn’t interested.

“I thought it would be right up your alley.”

“It’s not. Actually, it’s the worst offer I’ve ever received.”

“Fine,” he said, irritably. “I’ll call Dan Greenburg.”

The Caracas invitation was another story. It was not a Lake Como proposal, but it was close.

The idea was to put a group of American artists and intellectuals together with their Latin American counterparts in an attractive setting—the Hotel Avila in Caracas, Venezuela—and to see what came of it. Among those from the States were Lillian Hellman, Ada Louise Huxtable, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and, as it’s put on the television variety shows, “a host of others.” I was part of a youthful contingent that included Claude Brown, Jules Feiffer, and Jack Richardson. My play Scuba Duba was having a strong run in Manhattan, which would have accounted for my being asked along. This was heady company for me. There was a suspicion that the enterprise had been sponsored by the CIA, in an effort to smoke out Cold War chicanery. If so, little profit would have come of it. During one session, a journalist from Brazil took exception to a position the United States had taken on an issue related to Central America. When asked, sharply, by Arthur Schlesinger, what the correct stance should have been, he said: “I’m not sure.”

That was pretty much the extent of the political intrigue.

We got off the ground with what I recall as a solemn processional to a local bordello—as if we were making a scholarly investigation of the local customs and mores. One of our number, an early deconstructionist, got caught up in the sybaritic merry-making and was not seen again for the duration of the conference. Claude Brown, author of the celebrated Manchild in the Promised Land, had a reputation as a jazz musician. For the delectation of the ladies, he sat at the piano and played “Heart and Soul.” Jack Richardson thought this an odd selection, considering the setting. Brown’s performance inspired an economist in our group to sit on the lap of a resident lady, thrust his tongue down her throat, then leap off and call his wife in Manhattan to beg her forgiveness for his transgression.

I chose the most attractive of the women. It was the only time in our long friendship that I was quicker on the draw than Richardson.

For some mysterious reason, I was encouraged to participate in a panel discussion having to do with the pros and cons of modern art. The critic Harold Rosenberg, a bearded and fierce-looking man, staked out his position, then whipped his head in my direction as if challenging me to find flaws in his thesis. I muttered something to the effect that Picasso’s Blue Period was “a nice little period.” Then, falling into the spirit of it, I whipped my head around fiercely to the next participant. There seemed to be quite a bit of that going on. Later, at dinner, I was seated beside Robert Lowell. He stared blankly ahead through several courses, then suddenly, in what seemed to be the conference style, did another head-whipper and mystifyingly berated me for personally holding down the Palestinians. The outburst threw me off stride. I tend to be wary of poets generally, afraid I’m going to be quizzed on layers of meaning in The Waste Land. Still, I pulled myself together and continued to enjoy the best steak I’d ever eaten.

The panel moved on to a discussion of literature, the critic Alfred Kazin holding forth at length on the wonders to be found in the novels of Herman Melville. I had met Kazin briefly at a book party, was aware of his eminence, and was quoted in a local newspaper as having said: “You’re Alfred Kazin … and you’re just standing there, like a normal person?” After the critic’s talk had wound down, something impelled me to get to my feet and say a word on behalf of “our young writers” who had not yet become Herman Melvilles.

“Surely,” I heard myself say, as if I were Disraeli, “we did not come all this way to inform our Latin American colleagues that Moby-Dick has merit.”

The comment drew an appreciative chuckle from Elizabeth Hardwick, thus making the moment a high point of my trip. It seemed only fair that I then list the names of the writers who were being slighted, but suddenly I could not think of who they were and took my seat with a certain awkwardness. Further along, I thought of Terry Southern and Thomas Pynchon, among others, but by that time the discussion had moved on to another topic, and I could only whisper their names to a puzzled Jules Feiffer.

There was a reception for our group, given by a wealthy Venezuelan whose home was filled with major works of contemporary art and sculpture that would have been recognizable to anyone who had only the most glancing acquaintance with modern art. Priceless sculptures were placed casually about the main hall. At one point, as I relaxed, with a drink in my hand, I was told, gently, that I was leaning on a Marisol. Drums could be heard in the hills above us, along with periodic gunshots. An unforgivably beautiful hostess said that disaffected groups were a stone’s throw away.

“When it suits them they will come,” she said (noirishly?) and with a shrug. “And they will take everything, including me.” Later in the evening, she said to me: “You’re deep, aren’t you. Perhaps too deep.” For all of that, I could not pry her away from Richardson. I imagine she felt he was just deep enough.

A poker game started up the next day beside the pool hotel. One advantage of being a poor player is that you can spot someone who is even worse at it than you are. Lillian Hellman, who was such a case, sat prominently at the head of the table, trying to fill inside straights and betting into hands that even a neophyte would recognize as unbeatable. But all the while, she took languorous puffs of a cigarette and gave off the picture of a consummate gambler, which she may have thought she was. It was a costly pose, but seemed worth it to her to be thought of as “one of the guys.”

Toward the end of our conference, she asked if I would like to spend a few weeks with her, touring the Caribbean and, I would imagine, gambling at the casinos. I thought it was brave of her to ask, and this was one of the few times in my life when I was at loose ends and didn’t have much else to do. But I turned down the offer. Though I wasn’t familiar with her plays (I was later to enjoy her books, particularly An Unfinished Woman), I was intimidated by her fame. Then, too, the prospect of strolling up to the desk of the San Juan Hilton with a woman three decades my senior was unappealing. (I don’t need to be told that the reverse situation would have been acceptable.) But finally, none of that mattered. (I’ve thought about this often.) She seemed depressed; I had a broken marriage and I was depressed enough for the two of us.

I took a stroll along the beach with the political columnist Max Lerner. He told me at length of his affair with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. (As a lover, in terms of chronology, I believe he was wedged between Eddie Fisher and Michael Wilding.) After tending to the actress in Los Angeles, during one of her illnesses, he returned to London, there to endure a lover’s agony over the romance. “I could not believe my situation,” he said to himself, as he rolled around in torment on his hotel bed. “There I was, a short, fat, aging Jewish intellectual, albeit a married one, having an affair with a woman who was—not even arguably—the most beautiful creature on the planet. What on earth was I to do?”

As we returned from our talk, we ran into Arthur Schlesinger. “You poor man,” the historian said to me, “Max has obviously been telling you his Liz Taylor story.”

Bruce Jay Friedman, the author of Stern, The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life, and the off-Broadway hit Steambath, is a novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter. He was born and lives in New York City. This is excerpted from Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir by Bruce Jay Friedman. Copyright © Bruce Jay Friedman, 2011. Reprinted by permission of Biblioasis.

Make it the second-most-neglected book: One Foot in America, Yuri Suhl’s recently reissued immigrant novel, covers much of the same territory as Roth’s masterpiece, but whereas Call It Sleep is dark and brooding, Suhl’s book is a fast-paced, entertaining picaresque.

Published by Macmillan in 1950, the book garnered enthusiastic reviews but has been out of print for over 60 years. It tells the story of Sol (Shloime) Kenner, a good-natured and strong-willed immigrant who relishes his passage from “greenhorn” to fully fledged American in the mid-1920s. The new edition was published in paperback by Now and Then Books earlier this year.

The novel tells Suhl’s largely autobiographical story. He was born in Galician Poland and came to America in 1923. Like his narrator, he settled in Brooklyn and worked at menial jobs while attending night school, eventually graduating from college and making a living by teaching the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Later, he edited the left-leaning magazine Jewish Currents. His interests were broad: He published poetry, children’s books, several works of nonfiction, and two novels. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he gravitated not toward the psychological complexities of the immigrant’s experience but toward its more lively, Dickensian aspects.

In One Foot in America, we meet characters like Mr. Resnik, the tight-fisted butcher for whom Sol works as butcher boy; Mrs. Kaplan, the sagacious candy-store owner and mother of Sol’s first love, gum-cracking Shirley; and Max, his leftist, tough-talking pal. Suhl’s European-born characters speak Yinglish: Sol’s stepmother refers to a neighbor as “a nextdoorkeh of mine.” And they are presented in vignettes that convey a bittersweet humor. Max asks Sol, while explaining the unfairness of his working conditions in the butcher shop: “Did you ever hear of a man named Karl Marx?” No, replies Sol, before adding: “Who is he? Also a butcher?”

It’s a humorous moment, but also one that conveys Sol’s particular charm. He has much to learn, but he won’t attend Marxist lectures or devote himself to religion, so determined is he to define himself on his own terms. His attractiveness as a character stems from his pluck and ambition. Even butcher-boy drudgery is performed with passion: “I scrubbed the meat blocks with gusto, because the workout was good for my shoulder muscles. I sawed the bones with fervor, because the exertion hardened my arm muscles .… I walked into the icebox with enthusiasm, because the freezing temperature hardened me against catching colds.” Sol is a newcomer, but his spirit is unmistakably American.

While often charming and whimsical, One Foot in America deals with the most perplexing aspect of the Jewish American experience—the tension between the Old World and the new. Several poignant scenes center on Sol and his ineffectual father, the Talmudic scholar Chaim Kenner. In Europe, Chaim’s erudition and spirituality were praiseworthy; in America, where immigrants are rapidly moving from believing in monotheism to believing in money, otherworldliness is inconvenient baggage.

“Business! Everything in America is business!” Chaim cries out in a typical rant. “You hustle away your whole life and all you have to show for it is a bankbook.” For the aged scholar, the New World is suffocating—“a tiny island in a small, dimly lighted kitchen on Walton Street, Brooklyn, surrounded by a big, tumultuous ocean called America.” For his son, it is a new continent of promise and adventure.

With a sensitivity that presages the stories of Bernard Malamud, the forgiving and often tender relationship between Sol—who admits that, for all his willingness to assimilate, he, too, is “a part-time dweller” in the new world—and his feckless father generates the humanity of One Foot in America. Sol is not resentful when he has to quit school and work to support himself and his father, and he understands that his father’s obsessive poring over the Talmud gives him “a sense of spiritual fortitude” against an indifferent, cold world.

Not that the world Chaim and Sol had left behind was much better. The book’s most dramatic scenes are flashbacks to anti-Semitic incidents in Poland. For Sol, life in Europe was nightmarish: “On the houses and streets lay the drabness of poverty, and in the eyes of the people smoldered the fierceness of hunger. They were all chasing a phantom—a loaf of bread.” America is energizing, liberating, but, as the book’s title suggests, not yet truly home.

Among the neurotics and depressives of 20th-century fiction, Sol Kenner’s happiness sets him apart. He is an everyman, but not a fool. Even when working hard and grasping at happiness, he always keeps one watchful eye out for calamity. He is, in short, the sort of role model that never gets old, and well-deserving of being rediscovered.

Kenneth Sherman’s essay collection, What the Furies Bring, won the 2010 Canadian Jewish Book Award.

Kazin set out to be an intellectual-at-large, the Jewish Wilson, and while he could never approach Wilson’s global reach or genius for languages—it was Wilson, ironically, who could read Hebrew—his voice had its own distinctive soulfulness and vibrato. Like Wilson, Kazin mastered critical prose in both long and short forms—the broad panorama and the slashing review—and both men exercised authority from positions at the New Republic, where Wilson was an editor from 1926-1931 and Kazin from 1942-1943. But like Wilson, Kazin could turn up anywhere: He was one of the go-to guys of literary thought. Both kept daily journals, and Kazin’s, just now published by Yale University Press, may well turn out to be his greatest work. And Wilson never wrote a memoir with anything like the thrilling emotional peaks and isolated beauties (Kazin’s phrases) of Kazin’s A Walker in the City or character portraits with the zest and bite of those in New York Jew. Wilson’s Upstate (1971) came late in his life and lacked both the youthful self-exaltation and the social drama, the up-from-the-ghetto adventure, of Kazin’s book. And both were four times married, as though divorce above all were the intellectual’s Purple Heart. In matters of domestic disorder and sorrow, the Jewish apprentice kept pace with the Yankee master, wife for wife.

Kazin’s memoirs have enjoyed a longer shelf life than his literary criticism. For one thing, they tell a classic novelist’s story: arrival. The young man from the provinces, in this case the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, comes to the big city to seek his fortune. Along the way, he rubs shoulders with the literary beau monde until the arriviste becomes the A-list invitee. In his memoirs, Kazin gave full rein to his talent for portraiture and low-down gossip. New York Jew in particular established him as the gossip-laureate of the New York intellectuals. With his endless parade of portraits and cameos—Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Isaac Rosenfeld, Arthur Schlesinger—Kazin had become the Ed Sullivan of the literati. But he was an Ed Sullivan with a barracuda’s nose for blood in the water.

We now know, thanks to Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook and published by Yale University Press, that Kazin had been rehearsing this role privately for years, in a journal he had been tending since he was 18, and that at a certain point the journal had become his chief care. He intended to publish it and did manage to release selections from it in 1996, two years before his death, as A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment. But to edit and publish the whole was beyond him, and even Cook, who has edited this 632-page volume, concedes that the entries here represent just one-sixth of what’s housed in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. In putting the volume together, Cook writes in his introduction, his goal was “to faithfully represent the range of Kazin’s interests and the tenor and depth of his thought. As [Kazin] readily acknowledged, he was not a systematic thinker; he was, however, capable of sustained and passionate reflection, moving from image to insight, from feeling to idea, from association to discovery, surprising himself, Emerson-like, by what he never knew he knew.” Given the dense foliage of Kazin’s reflections and the brio and velocity of his style, even one-sixth of the whole will make for a month’s reading, and then some. Cook’s own labor over this material has been all-consuming; his 2007 Kazin biography took him some 25 years to complete.

Ever the walker in the city, Kazin employed a peripatetic style of crisscrossing a section of the map and recording his encounters, like an anthropologist describing an alien culture. The journals are rambles: anecdotal, impressionistic, breathless, sharp, gossipy, diffusely spiritual, and saturated in verbal music. Lionel Trilling, the other Jew, shows up as regularly as the postman. “Trilling, the pompously respectable professor is a character in my imagination of society, not a person to argue with—the Jew’s dream of literary England, of surpassing his servile state by culture. No one was ever so much the prisoner of culture as Trilling. No one was ever so much the victim of the genteel fantasy.” T.S. Eliot makes a courtly appearance as “the high priest of this movement in criticism, [who] reviews the ‘contemporary situation’ as something frozen in its own despair, shut-in from the past, and destroyed in the supernatural disgust with [all] that is expressed in Thunder.”

Presiding over this assembly is Wilson, the master, the icon, the elder, the polymath, the stylist, the goy as rabbi, and the fellow journal keeper against whom Kazin measured himself: “I notice in all excerpts from Wilson’s famous journal that they are set pieces of literary-historical description, formal portraits, essays in miniature. How nice it would be to keep a journal like that, to leave a treasure like that. But so often I turn to this notebook as if it were my private lie detector, my confession, my way of ascertaining authenticity—and of recovering it—of making myself whole again. Talking to myself as I do here, I nevertheless find in the expression of private uncertainties a form of release, a clarity, from which I can start up again.”

Kazin’s journal was the more intimate. He scrutinized his world at close range, as if nearsighted. He had nothing of Wilson’s world-historical latitude, or Trilling’s oracular profondeur, or Hannah Arendt’s reprocessed Hegel, or Irving Howe’s doctrinal intransigence. He recorded meetings, conversations, encounters at his house, at her house, at a restaurant, at a party. He said, I said, we said, they said. Does Edmund Wilson have ideas? Kazin doesn’t tell us. But he does have a house: “Edmund W[ilson] in his wonderful ‘old’ house on Route 6 in Wellfleet. Everything in this house passed down or acquired by someone who could recognize immediately its historical application to himself.” Why should we know this? Because “By contrast virtually everything I own I have bought for myself or have had to decide its merits in relation to an entirely new situation. The crucial factor in the life of the ‘new man’ who is the Jewish writer in this country is this lack of tradition.” Brownsville might just as well have been halfway around the world from Wilson’s primary residence in Talcottville, N.Y. Everything was personal for Kazin, and the self-conscious Jew in him was at the center of it all. “I wonder if Edmund Wilson ever gets into his journals of the literary life anything as personal, harrowing, mixed as this?” he wrote after reading entries from Wilson’s journal in The New Yorker. Kazin knew the answer. He was the counter-Wilson, a Jewish spokesman for angst and confusion.

The highlights of this volume are Kazin’s portraits: tableaux vivants of actors frozen in mid-gesture and placed on public display. In Kazin’s hard-edged prose, people become more vivid. He practiced the one-liner, the punch line, a style that had more in common with the stand-up comedians of his day than with literary critics. “Dinner party at Louis and Adele Auchincloss, Louis so bright and cheery, always primed for cordial interchange and Adele with the mysteriously bad teeth for a Vanderbilt, with that extraordinary sweetness and presentability of the very, very rich.” Elsewhere, “George Kennan, noble, solemn, aggrieved; the composer Milton Babbitt writhing like a cornered boxer; Karl Shapiro very wistful and out of it.” And again, “Bellow came on with his eyes confronting you. The sense of some overall, private confidence was enormous. But his private radar never stopped studying you—and warding off anyone who might obstruct his assured progress.” This compulsive spying dismayed some of Kazin’s targets, but it also affirmed the acuity of his impressions and the penetration of his social radar. He’d gladly sacrifice a friendship to an epiphany.

Kazin himself was the common target of his own caustic pen. The journals are an odyssey of self-discovery by a man who was never entirely certain of who he was or what social mask he should wear. He called them his private lie detectors. Yes, he was a great success, but he never grew to trust it. The man who wrote was always struggling to feel identical to the man who experienced: the feeling man. The journals are filled with the pathos of the feeling man, and Kazin acknowledged more than once that he felt anguished over “the labyrinth of my own soliloquy.” He was obsessed with his own blunders and refused to make peace with his achievements. He never became the smiling public man. “When I look back at these notes from time to time, it seems to me that their main burden is passive suffering, complaint, and yearning. I feel ashamed—not because I have suffered or revealed my suffering, but because I have not sufficiently defined my suffering, or been sufficiently generous, loving, and therefore challenging toward it. The task is to use our suffering and to use it so well that we can use it up.”

Kazin fit a familiar social profile, the non-Jewish Jew, a term coined by Leon Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher. Though Kazin had written in New York Jew that he “had come to believe that Jew and my family were identical” and “the Jews are my unconscious,” his Jewishness was more a register, a mood, a poetics of being rather than a belief or practice. Yet he possessed, as many Jews do, a tuning fork inside him that vibrated powerfully to Jews around him. Kazin’s early plan for this journal was to call it just Jews, but he possessed neither Irving Howe’s grasp of Yiddishkeit nor any Hebrew, and one of the uses of the journal was to align his profound feeling of Jewishness with some durable evidence of it. Declaring himself to be an “isolato” in the manner of Melville or Hawthorne, he saw how that put him ever at the margins of Judaism. “There are public Jews and private Jews,” he wrote. “But can one really worship the Jewish God privately? There is no ‘private Jew.’ That is just genteel affectation—a social mannerism—a way of living in a society you do not trust.” And yet, was there ever a more gregarious isolato than Kazin? This was no peg-legged Ahab beating out a Morse code of rage on the deck of the Pequod. He was the most sociable loner of his generation.

The durable Jewish goods he sought turned out to be his family, his own bruised ego, and the Shoah. If he was self-exiled from the observant life of the Jews and had tenuous relations with Jewishness as community, he felt profoundly about the Shoah, and the journal is filled with horrified reflections on it. They are everywhere. “In Alexander Donat’s memories of the last days of the Warsaw ghetto, the Polish Catholics on their way from Church on Easter Sundays watched the helpless Jews flinging themselves out of the windows, and they applauded.” Or this particularly horrifying entry: “Read in Podhoretz’s selection of 20 years of Commentary and broke down in reading Sol Bloom’s old piece on the Jewish dictator of Łodz and the children being taken out of the orphanages en route to the gas chambers, crying Mir viln nisht shtarbn [I don’t want to die.], 1943, the year of agony!” One of the clichés of our time is that the postwar generation of Jewish American writers did not respond to the Shoah as profoundly as they should have. Kazin was an exception; his horror was unceasing.

Time and Kazin’s own habits of work have done much to blur his reputation as a scholar and critic of literature. After completing On Native Grounds, Kazin dove headlong into a career of reviewing, journalism, and lecturing; he did little research and did not keep up with the work of fellow scholars. Writing itself was his métier, and after the success of A Walker in the City, the career of the memoirist opened its arms to him. Indeed, in 1951, Bernard Malamud had yet to publish his first novel, The Assistant, and Saul Bellow had only two novels to his credit, Dangling Man (1942) and The Victim (1947). A Walker in the City was a pioneering instance of Jewish-American writing—a harbinger of what would soon become a flood—and in the originality of its material, the freshness of the writing, and its candor it has stood the test of time better than Kazin’s critical writing.

Kazin remains relevant as a writer, a voice, a social portraitist, and an artist who composed in words. Kazin was to my mind a hero of the English language. He was a master of the vernacular as an instrument of literary expression. He brought the cadences and resources of American colloquial speech with him miraculously from Brooklyn and a household in which ideas were nonexistent and Yiddish was spoken. Perhaps because he had a terrible stammer as a youth, the written word became his primary voice and the essay his form of conversation. The English vernacular, its rhythms, its registers, its juxtapositions, and its layers, became the key to his escape from the confines of Brooklyn, and he applied himself to it with a rare ferocity until he became one of the great phrase-makers in English critical prose. How much of this phrase-making started out in his almost-daily notes to himself we now understand. Of the major critical voices, maybe only Wilson had anything like Kazin’s facility and ease. Lionel Trilling, who wrote a generic and fussy English, never did. Some Jewish novelists also took possession of American English with similar tenacity and insistence, Saul Bellow for one and Philip Roth for another, and it is telling that Roth wound up as one of Kazin’s younger friends and was at his bedside toward the end.

Alfred Kazin comes across in these journal entries as both the Brownsville Jew and the Emersonian thinker-at-large. He saw himself as the Jewish version of the mythic American individual forging his own destiny, and doing it in the only way he knew how: by words alone. This look behind the scenes at Kazin’s act of self-creation makes for remarkable and exciting reading, and Richard Cook deserves our gratitude for the labor of bringing it to us.

Mark Shechner is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

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.”

The Bintel Brief, the iconic advice column of the Yiddish Forverts, has been well preserved. You can listen to letters from the column read by Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, or download Isaac Metzger’s collection of samples onto your Kindle, or enjoy excellent pastiches of the form in E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) and Johanna Kaplan’s O My America! (1980). It’s relatively easy to recall, then, how Jewish immigrants to the United States in the early years of the 20th century sounded when they poured their hearts out to the editor of their beloved newspaper. What Gur Alroey offers in his new book, Bread to Eat and Clothes to Wear: Letters From Jewish Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century (Wayne State, June) are 66 examples of the personal letters written by such immigrants before they set out on their journeys, expressing all the hopes and worries of people whose lives were about to be flipped upside down.

***

Letters from this period can be shockingly intimate, and banal, too. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933 (Yale, May) offers hundreds of missives exchanged by the famed American painter and her husband, the German-Jewish photographer, in the first decades of their relationship. The letters skip charmingly from everyday trivialities to art and politics: In one fairly representative example, from December 1933, O’Keeffe tells Stieglitz that she’s now putting a raw egg in her orange juice every morning, and that she “talked way into the night” with the avant garde poet Jean Toomer about the “the race problem,” inspired by Waldo Frank’s article, “Why Should the Jews Survive?” from a recent New Republic, which Stieglitz had sent her.

***

Among other sources, Carrie Pitzulo’s Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago, May) examines another journalistic trove of American letters, at least as reflective of its historical moment as the Bintel Brief was of its own: the Playboy Forum. Through the letters from readers they printed and responded to, Pitzulo argues, the magazine’s editors “articulated a progressive view of sexual politics,” which included “a distinct tolerance for, if not outright embrace of homosexuality.” Pitzulo acknowledges Nat Lehrman as having edited this section of the magazine “for much of the sixties,” but, unlike your friends at Tablet, she does not mention that Lehrman, Playboy’s sex editor, was a Brooklyn mensch.

***

Even more revealing than letters are private diaries, which can seem to offer a window into a writer’s mind. Alfred Kazin’s Journals (Yale, June), edited by Richard M. Cook, serves up the great literary critic in vivid detail and in all his human complexity. At the top of a page in July 1933, when he was an 18-year-old sophomore at City College, Kazin scribbled “Alfred loves Nancy; Alfred loves Sex: Nancy!” and then, below that: “The essence of fascism is not so much the capitalist as it is the nationalist ideal.” The journals dramatize Kazin’s astonishing energy, which he saw as a requirement of his vocation: As he says, apropos an essay by his contemporary Milton Hindus, “the Jewish intellectual has to perform so many functions at once.”

***

A certain type of intellectual proclaims in public what another might be content to scribble in a diary. An infamous example took place on the Dick Cavett Show on January 25, 1980, when Mary McCarthy quipped, of Lillian Hellman, that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman—a Jewish playwright and McCarthy-era blacklistee, notorious for fudging her personal details—wasn’t laughing; she sued McCarthy for slander. The case, which played out political schisms of 1930s leftists, serves as a jumping-off point for Alan Ackerman’s discussions of language, libel, privacy, and autobiography in Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale, May).

***

Jewish intellectuals, like Kazin and Hellman, have a tendency to cluster in cities, but out in the American hinterlands Jews take on all sorts of other roles. In the Midwest, they’ve been chefs who incorporate local flavors into traditional classics, with results like cornmeal-crusted rye, sour grape ketchup, Syrian spinach souffle, and Eli’s Cheesecake; Ellen Steinberg and Jack Prost cover the history and recipes in From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways (Illinois, June). In Deadwood: “Cattlemen and bankers, watchmakers and innkeepers, purveyors of cigars and whiskey, and suppliers of hardware, boots, and bread,” according to Ann Haber Stanton’s Jewish Pioneers of the Black Hills Gold Rush (Arcadia, April), further evidence that David Milch got it right on HBO. In Belleville, Virginia? Black base-ballers. Yes, seriously: Rebecca Alpert’s Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford, May) tells the tale of the Belleville Grays, “the only Jewish team in the history of black baseball,” and details the role of Jewish owners and journalists both in Harlem Globetrotters-style “Baseball Comedy” and in the integration of America’s pastime. The good news is that according to Uzi Rebhun, a Jewish demographer at the Hebrew University, and his new book The Wandering Jew in America (Academic Studies, June), American Jews were still moving from state to state late in the 20th century. This suggests that there may continue to be new stories of Jews in the American wilderness, innovating further in the fields of sport, mining paraphernalia, and cholesterol delivery.

But, Kazin argues, we shouldn’t be surprised: Writers, the sort of cats who see the world with all its vivid intricacies, and who are accustomed to winning our praise for delivering precise and moving portraits of life, may be forgiven for assuming that they can do with political ideas what they do with words. That is to say, let us not be surprised that the same Ezra Pound who so vividly described the scene in a Paris Metro station—“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough”—also, in his infamous World War II broadcasts from Fascist Italy, imagined the Jews as belligerent profiteers and President Franklin D. Roosevelt as biologically inferior to Aryans.

Why do we forgive our writers their feats of folly? Because we believe, like Shelley, that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and because we take Pound at his word that he and his colleagues are the antennae of the race. We not only forgive our writers their political transgressions, but, for the most part, we celebrate them; the writer as political crazy is the writer we’ve come to expect.

Yet as the essayist Eliot Weinberger noted in “The Arts and the War in Iraq,” having come of age with neither existential nor economic crises to guide their upbringing, many of our writers, even the finest among them, have come to see their art as a sterile, commercial pursuit, one largely uninterested in the making of meaning. This is why we no longer have Robert Lowells, Dwight Macdonalds, Norman Mailers, Allen Ginsbergs, politically and morally committed in life as well as in art. Can you imagine Jonathan Franzen trying to levitate the Pentagon in protest of the Iraq War? Or Nicole Krauss leading a march of thousands on the National Mall in support of, say, immigration reform? In lieu of the armies of the night, we’ve settled for the solitary individuals of the late afternoon, polite and clever and opinionated and terribly disengaged. Weinberger correctly observes that “the Cheney-Bush II era has not produced a single poem, song, novel, or artwork that has caught the popular imagination as a condemnation or an epitome of the times.”

***

Out of such dire straits, American intellectuals eager to once again huddle around a thriving and politically active vanguard of writers may consider looking to Israel for comfort. There, it seems, the writer is king. In 2006, for example, the novelist David Grossman, having recently lost his son in the Lebanon War, thundered to a crowd of tens of thousands gathered in Tel Aviv, accusing the government of lacking a vision and losing its way. Grossman is also sporadically present in the weekly demonstrations against the questionably legal expropriation of Arab homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Together with his close friends, the novelists Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, Grossman frequently writes open letters to Israel’s political elite, publishes political tracts in newspapers, and infuses his novels with what the critic Susan Willis termed portents of the real. His most recent book, To the End of the Land, features a mother embarking on a prolonged hike, adamant in her belief that her soldier son will be safe so long as those army officials whose job it is to notify parents that their children have died in action can’t find her at home. Praising both Grossman’s work as a novelist and as an activist, the Frankfurt Book Fair awarded him its prestigious Peace Prize earlier this year and applauded him as “a symbol of the peace movement” in Israel.

The designation was intended as a laurel, but it is more poignant as a statement of fact. Together with his two prominent colleagues, Grossman is very much a symbol of the Israeli peace movement, a movement as earnest as it is ineffective. But even as the peace movement fades, the three writers who are so closely identified with its efforts gather encomiums from fellow writers and critics the world over. The praise, alas, is undeserved.

To understand this contentious statement—Grossman, in particular, is a secular saint of sorts among many literati in Europe and the United States—let us revisit the moment, late in 2007, when the novelist was awarded the Israeli prime minister’s Emet Prize for Arts, Science and Culture. Having expressed his strong criticism of then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in his Tel Aviv speech the year before, the novelist told the ceremony’s organizers that he would accept the prize but would not shake Olmert’s hand. The prime minister was informed, and remained seated when Grossman claimed the prize. Asked later why he didn’t shake Olmert’s hand, Grossman replied, “for obvious reasons.”

The Israeli media reveled in this scrap of theater, but, examined on its own merit, Grossman’s bout of disobedience grows pale and small. The man who in 2006 appealed to throngs of demonstrators, who decried “Israel’s quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering,” who spoke out against “this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalized racism against the Arab minority,” the best that man could do just a year later was refuse to shake another man’s hand. To sit the whole thing out—as Robert Lowell, for example, did when invited by President Lyndon Johnson to attend the White House Arts Festival in 1965—seemingly never occurred to Grossman. Nor did any other act that would have carried him over the threshold of the nice.

Of course, it would be foolish, even brutal, to expect anyone to become anything they’re not. When I interviewed Grossman on a recent afternoon in his American publishers’ offices—his evening would include an interview with Charlie Rose and a well-attended event with Nicole Krauss at the New York Public Library—the novelist, welcoming and sweet, began with an anecdote by way of warning. It’s the old hasidic tale of Reb Zusya, who, lying on his deathbed, has one more bit of wisdom to impart. When I die, Zusya tells his students, God will not ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses; he’ll ask why I wasn’t more like Zusya.

What the anecdote means to Grossman—what his definition of the ideal writerly self might be—became clear toward the end of the interview. Many floors below, the sun reflected off the Hudson River, and Grossman, as smiling publicists floated in and out of the room, spoke about the way his latest book was received around the world. It stunned him, he said, to hear people in the United States and elsewhere say they hadn’t realized how difficult and sad life in Israel really was. The problem, Grossman added, is that many Israelis hadn’t realized that either.

“Because we don’t understand the price we pay for life in a disaster zone, we don’t do enough to change it,” Grossman said in Hebrew. An author, he argued, “must always remind us that there’s an alternative. If you asked me what’s the thing that propels me to political action, it’s the desire to constantly remind that there’s an alternative, that people won’t think that there’s some sort of divine act that condemns us to kill and be killed, that we’re lords of our fate. We need to massage and revive the frightened and ossified consciousness of Israelis and Palestinians and remind them that they’re not condemned. Our story could be written differently.”

Which brings us back to the same question that plagued Pound and Oppen and nearly anyone who has ever made a living observing the world and committing his or her insights to print: How to rewrite reality?

***

For Grossman, for Oz, for Yehoshua, the solution is more statements, more letters, more talk. Last week, for example, the three signed a letter in support of an artistic boycott of the newly opened cultural center in the settlement of Ariel. Receiving the Siegfried Unseld Prize in Berlin this September, Oz (who shared the prize with Palestinian professor of philosophy Sari Nusseibeh) delivered a touching speech about the importance of the two-state solution. In October, in Paris, appearing alongside philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and Green politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit in support of a dovish new Jewish lobby, Yehoshua did the same.

Paradoxically, the more celebrated the three authors are in Israel and elsewhere in the world, the more moribund the values on behalf of which they so adamantly speak appear. If politics is an act of imagining better endings to our shared story, Oz and Grossman and Yehoshua aren’t being terribly creative.

Luckily, others in Israel are. For the past few months, for example, Ilana Hammerman, an award-winning translator and editor, has been smuggling Palestinian women and girls out of their besieged villages and towns, taking them for a day out on Tel Aviv’s beach. Most of these women, despite having been born and having lived their entire lives just a few miles away, had never before seen the Mediterranean; their joy at this shard of normal life is great. Hammerman, of course, is breaking the law: In smuggling the women she runs afoul of Israel’s intricate policy of border control, enforced by roadblocks and checkpoints. Yet Hammerman believes that the moral duty of allowing fellow human beings the chance to run barefoot on the beach is paramount. She has inspired scores of Israeli women to follow her example by taking a novel approach to reality: Instead of railing against injustice, she showed her peers what life could look like if we cared enough to perform small acts of kindness to benefit those people that Israelis usually see only as foes.

Even without breaking the law, it’s not difficult to imagine other creative political stories for the three to compose. They could, like playwright Shmuel Hasfari, promote the claim that because the Jewish settlements of the West Bank were never legally annexed by Israel, any measure of cultural activity there—from the selling of books to the performing of plays—should be subject to a foreign licensing agreement; such an act would send a clear message and serve to undermine the legitimacy of settlements, a premise all three authors, to some extent, strongly support. Or they could arrange for forums where real Israelis might meet real Palestinians, an increasingly rare opportunity for both sides these days. Many more alternatives, some more intricate than others, suggest themselves; but Oz, Yehoshua, and Grossman steer clear of the real and stick to the purely symbolic.

This should surprise no close reader of their work. If there is one thing that binds the three’s different styles and sensibilities it is the nearly religious adherence to symbolic structures, grand metaphors from which all meaning is meant to unfurl. Oz’s famous My Michael, for example, tells the tale of a woman married to a kind but unthrilling man—a geologist, in case his connection to the land of Israel was too subtle to grasp—and who sinks into fantasy to escape her anxieties. These fantasies involve Arab twins with whom she had played as a child in Jerusalem. The dreams sometimes get steamy—what else can The Other do than appear naked in our shower and allow us to relieve ourselves of our urges and fears? A woman escaping her fate is, of course, also the subject of Grossman’s latest novel. It is also the theme of Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride, in which a young woman bolts out of a marriage after one short year and in which her judgmental mother-in-law is a judge and inquisitive father-in-law, the one who refuses to let go of the past, is a historian. There are other books, and other similarities, but, with few exceptions, the following generalization still stands: Oz and Yehoshua and Grossman tell stories of men and women who are wrecked by reality, who try to escape it but can’t, who do their best and discover that their best isn’t enough.

The same could be said about their political sensibilities. Grossman described it best. “It’s not that I think that suddenly Jews and Arabs can walk hand in hand towards the sunset,” he told me. “That’s not the case. But I think there’s a place somewhere in between the Hollywood ending and being tossed into the sea. There is nuance. And that’s where we need to go, to those places where we can have a life that is possible, where we could slowly douse the flames and control the madness, no more.”

But the madness, as artists should know better than most, is often all that there is. The madness starts wars and writes great novels and propels throngs of people to either love or hate their fellow man. And the madness is what we need writers for, because the madness is sublime and without it there is much that matters but not much that can move us.

***

The direction we move in is, of course, up to the writer’s own conscience, and it hardly dictates allegiance to the left. The poet Yonatan Ratosh, for example, proved better than most that the lyrical was political when he founded his ultra-right-wing Canaanite movement in 1939. Calling for the struggling Jewish state to abandon its religious foundations and return instead to the archaic, pre-biblical, pagan civilization of the region, Ratosh did violence to the carefully constructed prose of his contemporaries; his name, which he gave himself (he was born Uriel Shelach), is a play on the Hebrew verb le’ratesh, to tear apart. He selected as his themes the myths of prehistory, and he wrote lines that were terse and muscular and sounded like the beat of ancient drums.

Although the Canaanite movement was short-lived, it attracted a committed cadre of writers—Benjamin Tammuz, Amos Kenan, Aharon Amir—that went on to shape Israeli culture from the 1950s onward.

A more recent example is Moshe Shamir: Having abandoned his socialist upbringing and becoming one of the standard-bearers of the settler movement, the writer co-founded the right-wing Tehiya party and briefly served as a member of Knesset. His political madness—shortly before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, he likened negotiating with the Palestinians to collaborating with the Nazis—echoed his literary sensibilities. His novels were a thunderstorm of short, strong sentences and searing social criticism. He was inspiring as both a legislator and a writer because, politically and aesthetically, he was on fire.

The mission, politically and aesthetically, of Grossman, Yehoshua, and Oz is very different. It is, as Grossman told me, to douse the flames, to control the madness. This is why they produce so much symbolism, and this is why so many of their protagonists are running away from life. The alternative would be to fight like hell and dream up wild, new paths to redemption. As leaders, as writers, Israel’s three most famous writers, unlike several of their less heralded peers on the left and on the right, have failed to do just that. Rather than hail them as paragons, anyone committed to the future of the Israeli peace movement would do well to thank them warmly for their concern and hope for a writer to come along and write a better ending to this mad, mad story.

The Jew-as-character-of-fiction had fared not much better. American Jewish writing was a fiction of mawkish quaintness, what Irving Howe called Second Avenue tearjerkers, stuffed with sentimentalized stereotypes: the suffering schlemiel; the Lower East Side immigrant who peddles his way from rags to riches; the wise, pious patriarch struggling to accept the Americanized son; the son desperate to escape the old world who felt “too foreign in school and too American at home,” as Will Herberg put it. Even worse were Jewish characters written by non-Jews. The Jew appeared as the annoying stranger (Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises); as rebellious young radical (Ben Compton in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.); or as unscrupulous businessman (Harry Bogen in Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale). Abe Jones, in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Irving Howe complained in Commentary, is “dreary, tortured, melancholy, dully intellectual, and joylessly poetic, his spirit gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish murk.”

This state of affairs carried over into the 1940s. Writers in the extended Commentary circle—the ‘Family’ as future paterfamilias Norman Podhoretz would retrospectively call it—found nourishment in Herman Melville or Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English poets or Russian novelists—but not in Jewish texts. The motives of Jewish writers, managing editor Robert Warshow complained in 1946, “are almost never pure: they must dignify the Jews, or plead for them, or take revenge upon them, and the picture they create is correspondingly distorted by romanticism or sentimentality or vulgarity.” One Commentary writer, seeking in 1948 to find promising Jewish contributions to contemporary American literature, could point to only three minor talents: Harriet Lane Levy, William Manners, and Charles Angoff. American Jewish writing, Commentary reported the next year, lay fallow, “steeped in apologetics and in false provincial pride.”

Commentary founder Elliot Cohen grasped that the Family’s discoveries of America could have literary reverberations, could release among the Family a great literary efflorescence that had only yesterday seemed an impossibility. By taking Jewish writing seriously, by refusing to disdain it as a parochialism, Cohen’s magazine planted the seeds of a generous literary fertility. Cohen had always demanded that Jewish writing of any kind conform to the highest standards. The future American Jewish culture “cannot be purely imitative,” he insisted. “As to Jewish culture,” he said, “the first question we should ask is not whether it is Jewish, but whether it is good. And ‘good’ means on a par with the best in the culture of society in general.” In literature as in all else, Cohen recoiled from apologetics, defensiveness, sectarianism, sentimentality, and self-congratulation. What lay fallow would grow in the 1950s into a jungled abundance that surprised even the presiding genius.

Several seasons passed before the new literary fruit showed itself. The first Commentary fiction was perfectly parochial. But very soon new Jewish writers, to borrow a phrase Philip Roth used in Commentary, launched “an imaginative assault upon the American experience.” Writing became for them a priestly calling, an instrument of upward mobility, a gateway for fighting their way into the great American beyond. It seemed to Cohen as though he were watching before his very eyes the passing of dominance from the southern school of William Faulkner to the urban Jewish school of Saul Bellow. A new kind of fiction, not intended to flatter the Jewish ego, was coaxed forth from the novelist branch of the Family, language obsessed writers seeking, in Irving Howe’s phrase, to shower the country with words. And what words! These scribes brought with them to the great culture rush the tones of Jewish speech and verbal performance: a street brashness and detached irony, an ability to careen between different registers and inflections, from high to low, from wide-ranging erudition to urban idiom.

Among the first fruits Commentary reaped was Bernard Malamud’s “The Prison,” a 1950 story that beautifully dilated upon the theme of Jewishness as confinement. The magazine would run eight more of Malamud’s stories (at $30 a page), including “Idiot’s First,” and five of the thirteen stories in The Magic Barrel, the collection that would earn Malamud a National Book Award. “Commentary gave him the perfect audience,” his friend Philip Roth said. In fact, young critic Norman Podhoretz made his Commentary debut in 1953 with a review of Malamud’s first novel, The Natural. “Well, you seem to know something about novels,” Cohen had told Podhoretz; “you know something about symbolism, you know something about Jews, and you know something about baseball. Here’s a symbolic novel by a Jewish writer about a baseball player. I guess you’re qualified to review it.”

What begins in the flat cadences of Malamud becomes visionary in Saul Bellow’s exuberance. In a review of Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, Commentary recognized with more than a little prescience what Bellow had done. That novel, Martin Greenberg (then an editor at Schocken Books) announced in the January 1948 issue, was “the first attempt in American literature to consider Jewishness not in its singularity, not as constitutive of a special world of experience, but as a quality that informs all of modern life.” Bellow animated the book’s hero, Asa Leventhal, with a feeling of somehow not belonging, a loneliness Greenberg called “the malaise of the megalopolis.” In a similar vein, Alfred Kazin hailed The Adventures of Augie March as Bellow’s “attempt to break down all possible fences between the Jew and this larger country.” The book’s famous first line announced a turn from alienation to affirmation: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Forging a passage from marginality to American literature writ large, Bellow’s own pieces for Commentary reprised the theme. In the February 1951 issue (a month before Cohen ran Bellow’s story “Looking for Mr. Green”), Bellow condemned the self-doubt that cramped other Jewish writers, a timidity about writing in a language their immigrant parents did not speak. “As long as American Jewish writers continue to write in this way,” Bellow said, “we will have to go elsewhere for superior being and beauty, and will thus continue to be foreigners.”

Philip Roth, to complete the triumvirate, made his Commentary debut in 1957, at age twenty-four, with a charming piece that Norman Podhoretz, then assistant editor and only three years older than the writer from Newark, had rescued from the slush pile. “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” included two years later in Goodbye, Columbus, was Roth’s first published story. The magazine also ran “Eli, the Fanatic,” Roth’s brilliant story about the confrontation between assimilated Jews and ultra-Orthodox Holocaust refugees intent on setting up a yeshiva in their suburb. Roth had first come across Cohen’s magazine as an undergrad in the periodical room in the Bucknell University library in the early 1950s. “I was stunned,” he said. “So this is what it’s like to be Jewish.” By offering a sophisticated Jewishness, free of parochialism and apologetics, Commentary did for Roth what the Menorah Journal had done for Lionel Trilling three decades before. “Commentary furnished a whole education, a way of being Jewish and intelligent and American—all at once.”

By now Commentary fiction was consistently first rate. Cohen ran two parables by Henry Roth, his first publications since Call It Sleep in 1935, as well as stories by Delmore Schwartz, Nelson Algren, and Alison Lurie, who published her earliest story in Commentary when she was all of twenty. Cohen fertilized all of this with translations of Yiddish literature: stories by I. J. Singer, Zalman Shneour, Y.L. Peretz, and David Bergelson, and Chaim Grade’s first published story, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” a powerful meditation on faith after the Holocaust. Most spectacularly, Commentary published Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” (translated by Marion Magid and Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Pollet), first appeared there in English in September 1962, as did some of the vignettes that would make up In My Father’s Court (1966). “Commentary is one of the rare magazines in America which takes seriously both the writer and the reader,” the future Nobel laureate said. “I also have a personal feeling about Commentary: it was the first magazine which published me in English.”

Jewish writers, ex-alienated men, were in vogue. Norman Podhoretz used to joke about the Jewish writer who took the name Nathanael West that had he arrived in the 1950s rather than the 1930s, he would have changed his name back to Nathan Weinstein. After the American Jewish literary profusion had peaked, Edward Hoagland, the essayist married to Marion Magid, was grumbling (in Commentary itself ) that the Family’s writers had all but forged a new establishment, making it difficult for a WASP like him, who “could field no ancestor who had hawked tin pots in a Polish shtetl.”

In later years, some of these plaints would turn uglier. Gore Vidal complained that Jewish writers like Bellow, Roth, and Malamud “comprise a new, not quite American class, more closely connected with ideological, argumentative Europe (and talmudic studies) than with those of us whose ancestors killed Indians.” Truman Capote bitched in a 1968 Playboy interview about a Jewish literary cabal: “a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines. All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention. . . . Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer are all fine writers, but they’re not the only writers in the country, as the Jewish mafia would have us believe.” (Perhaps Capote’s line would have been softer had the Commentary review of his bestselling In Cold Blood not dissented so vigorously from the notion that the “competently though too mechanically told” book represented some kind of literary breakthrough.) But as boosters and detractors could agree, America’s new Jewish writers had come into their own.

Even as Cohen’s magazine helped forge a new literary temper, Commentary acted as a greenhouse for a new style of literary criticism, too, incubating the first generation of critics to grow from America’s working class. Before World War II, the upper reaches of American life had excluded Jews as much from the study of literature as from the creation of it. No matter how assiduously the Family’s critics may have schooled themselves in Walt Whitman’s 1871 Democratic Vistas or Van Wyck Brooks’s 1915 America’s Coming of Age, they were disqualified by heredity from the Republic of Letters. “Jews, it was often suggested, could not register the finer shadings of the Anglo-Saxon spirit as it shone through the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton,” Irving Howe recalled. “I wouldn’t recommend that you study English,” the head of Northwestern’s English Department had told Saul Bellow. “You weren’t born to it.” The Family could not help but notice that currents of anti-Semitism ran deep within the Anglo-American literary tradition itself—from William Shakespeare’s Shylock, to Charles Dickens’s Fagin, to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim. “We reexamine our literary heritage as Jewish writers and readers of English—and we wince!” Leslie Fiedler wrote in Commentary. “We enter into our supposed inheritance, only to find we are specifically excluded.”

The attraction to fascism exhibited by poets W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot didn’t help matters. The Library of Congress’s decision in 1948 to award the Bollingen Prize to Pound’s The Pisan Cantos vaulted Cohen into high indignation, and he dedicated Commentary’s first symposium to the question of literary anti-Semitism. The responses he received bespoke a newfound literary self-confidence. Some advocated a separation of wheat from chaff. Alfred Kazin replied, “If we were to read only those who love us, even among ourselves, our intellectual diet would be thin indeed.” Lionel Trilling commented, “Anti-Semitism is, as Nietzsche said, a vulgarity; it is indeed remarkable how often notable minds of our day can support their quanta of vulgarity; but it would be foolish not to take from them what they have to give.” Saul Bellow suggested that the direction of judgment had reversed: “Modern reality, with the gases of Auschwitz still circulating in the air of Europe, gives us an excellent opportunity to judge whether they [modern Jew-despising writers] are right or wrong.” So long to inferiority.

In the beginning, Commentary critics aimed at Jewish writers. Irving Howe, born and bred in the Bronx, would write for the magazine on, say, Daniel Fuchs, who had authored several novels about Jews in Williamsburg. Tellingly, the magazine’s first critical essay on a goyish writer was called “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism.” When the magazine examined Pearl Buck—as in a 1948 review of Peony—it was for her description of Judaism. But the more Family critics assimilated—and assimilated into—American literature, the more confidently did they put Jewish writers in the highest fraternity of Gentile company. Both outside the magazine and inside its pages, Jews began to write about American fiction under the assumption that it was their inheritance, too.34 And they wrote not just about fiction. The magazine’s poetry criticism included John Berryman on W. H. Auden and a consideration of Sylvia Plath, who had studied with Alfred Kazin at Smith.

Commentary critics, never afraid to contradict the prevailing estimate of a reputation, shared a contempt for middlebrow mushiness. James Gould Cozzens, Arthur Miller, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk—these were almost too gauche to bother with. The result was an urgent style that combined scholarly rigor with journalistic flair. The urgency came from the way the Family’s strenuous strivers took literature as a matter of high gravity, as a secular scripture, as if it should yield to moral, and not just aesthetic, judgments. Writing, as vocation and avocation both, became in their hands a kind of emancipation, a gesture of self-fashioning; it was everything. The Family’s rhapsodists of American literature met America through its writers, the highest manifestations of national feeling.

Alfred Kazin, who would write some twenty pieces for Commentary, was a case in point. Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a son of immigrants, Kazin came to City College at age sixteen. In 1942, at twenty-seven, he published On Native Grounds, a tellingly titled history of American prose from the 1890s through the 1930s. Like Philip Roth, Kazin acknowledged that his view of the possibilities of Jewish writing was indebted to Commentary:

I remember that as the first issues began to appear at the end of that pivotal year of 1945, I was vaguely surprised that it dealt with so many general issues in so subtly critical and detached a fashion, regularly gave a forum to non-Jewish writers as well as to Jewish ones. Like many Jewish intellectuals of my time and place, brought up to revere the universalism of the socialist ideal and of modern culture, I had equated “Jewish” magazines with a certain insularity of tone, subject matter, writers’ names—with mediocrity. To be a “Jewish” writer . . . was somehow to regress, to strike attitudes, to thwart the natural complexities of truth. . . . “Jewish” magazines were not where literature could be found, and certainly not the great world. “Jewish” magazines worried over the writer’s “negative” attitude toward his “Jewishness,” nagged you like an old immigrant uncle who did not know how much resentment lay behind his “Jewishness.” But Commentary, to the grief of many intellectual guardians of the “Jewish” world, marked an end to that.

For Kazin, literary criticism was “the great American lay philosophy.” He and the other Family generalists who came to command the literary heights—Trilling, Rosenfeld, Howe—wrote not to advance an academic point, not to advise the author, guide the book buyer, or impress the professional specialist, but to assess the larger meaning of a work. (The adjective “academic” was for them always a pejorative, a synonym of “pedantic” and antonym of intellectual audacity.) They considered criticism a branch of literature itself, a rival form of imagination. Unlike the New Critics who treated literature as something hermetically self-contained, the Family critics believed that writing was a political act; they read a work with an eye for what it said about its cultural environment. They practiced literary criticism as social criticism. These inebriates of literature wrote in a way, Kazin said, “that pure logic would never approve and pure scholarship would never understand.”

Before too long, by pursuing things unattempted yet in the precincts of American Jewish writing, Elliot Cohen was beginning to feel that his magazine was changing the world. Before Commentary (to paraphrase Leon Trotsky on Russian writer Nikolay Gogol), American Jewish literature in English, stuck in imitation, merely tried to exist. After Commentary, it existed.

Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem and fellow at the Hudson Institute. The preceding is excerpted from Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right.

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

As we embark on this decline, with newspapers folding, and the book industry itself threatening collapse, it is revealing to read the writers of this generation—Henry Roth, Daniel Fuchs, Michael Gold, Albert Halper, Tess Slesinger, and others—in order to understand how they survived, not only financially, but also spiritually. Because they came of age in Depression, much of their work was published poorly, then quickly forgotten by an accelerated wartime economy just a decade down the breadline. But if Jewish American literature has any true founding fathers (and mothers), these are they—writers who first established its concerns with justice and ethnic censure in public language.

The Great Depression coincided with the settling of the final great wave of Jewish immigration in the 20th century. Boats all but stopped steaming into Ellis Island with the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed a quota on foreign arrivals. When the stock market crashed five years later, the island was being used as a prison and mustering station for the deportation of immigrant thieves, murderers, and Anarchists. By the time the law had taken effect, however, most Jews in America were already citizens, paying taxes, building cities. As the Depression encroached, these European and Russian speakers of Yiddish were raising the first generation of American Jews to speak English natively, and the first generation of American Jewish writers to write naturally in English, too. The Depression marked the profoundest attempt by Americans of any origin to address the claims of the Old World, as Jewish writers of criticism and fiction shaped accounts of their pre-histories, defining the margins of inheritance, while codifying the essential success of immigrant acculturation.

Depression’s newest Americans also discovered democracy, though the zeal of enfranchisement, abetted by financial distress, often led them to extremes—to the foremost forms of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism; Stalinism; Trotskyism; the politics of Norman M. Thomas; and the Labor politics of unions, representing the social welfare interests of workers in various trades. To get a clearer snapshot of the milieu, imagine these movements surrounded by loose, citybound circles of young intellectuals, who espoused a cafeteria Marxism more concerned with the artisanal quality of talk than with any quantity of action. However, the very fact that there was never any real prospect for Marxist revolution in America might have given Depression’s thinkers and writers the freedom to apply the Left’s radicalism directly to themselves—their personalities.

In his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, Irving Howe, born in the East Bronx in 1920, evoked the intense, immersive political atmosphere of the 1930s, particularly in New York—which had the most jobs in a country of no jobs, yet which also suffered the worst housing shortages, and hunger—and particularly centered around Manhattan’s City College, where ferocious arguments were waged between students who were exhaustively reading, and exhaustedly (if they were lucky) working their way through school: “We took positions on almost everything, for positions testified to the fruitfulness of theory. Theory marked our superiority in ‘vulgar empiricist’ politics, compensated for our helplessness, told us that some day this helplessness would be dialectically transformed into power. We took positions on the New Deal, the class nature of Stalinist society, strategies for Indian liberation, the ‘four-class’ bloc proposed by the Chinese Communists, tactics for the French Left, the need for a labor party for the United States.”

Alfred Kazin, born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1915, and Howe’s fellow City College alum, was another critic who made his name writing for “the little magazines” that proliferated in the aftermath of Depression, including Commentary, Dissent, and Partisan Review, which themselves grew out of miniscule, shoestrung Jewish journals of the 1930s like Jewish Frontier, and Menorah Journal. Starting Out in the Thirties, Kazin’s least-read memoir (others are New York Jew, and his classicA Walker in the City), intimates that Depression aspirations to political change began personally, as a poetics of the soul. Injustice, to be recognized as such, required empathy, or compassion, while utopian dreams required both imagination, and the youthful—or the youthful culture’s—ability to self-re-invent: “What young writers of the 1930s wanted was to prove the literary value of our experience, to recognize the possibility of art in our own lives, to feel that we had moved the streets, the stockyards, the hiring halls into literature—to show that our radical strength could carry on the experimental impulse of modern literature.”

As the Spanish Civil War smoldered (1936-1939), and the Stalinist purges and show trials of often-Jewish Trotskyites continued unabated, Kazin remembered: “Not even the hack jobs I did for a living now seemed unworthy, for the issue raised in a book review, a street scene studied for an article, always fitted into my sense of the destiny and inclusiveness of history. So my parent’s poverty had a mystique for me, and our loneliness a definite heroism—we were usually unhappy and always on each other’s necks, but I saw us all moving forward on the sweep of great events. I believed that everyone was engulfed in politics, absorbed in issues that were the noble part of themselves.”

This sort of hyperbolic mimesis is typical of the period: Just as things get externally worse, we celebrate the internal best, “the noble part.” Such romantic reinventions of poverty into heroism, of individual misfortune transformed to philosophical iniquity and so, for political cause, are marks of a new people—or of a saved race thinking through a new language of the self. It was this language, that of Howe, Kazin, and Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Paul Goodman, and others whose Jewishness was strictly associative (such as Dwight MacDonald, and Mary McCarthy), that became the lingua franca of America’s first truly democratic decade—a decade that matched ambition with possibility, and responded to privation with an amalgam of innocent gusto, and wiseass “sensibility.”

Post office, Lower East Side, June 1936

To be sure, Saul Bellow, writing in 1953, could not have had his Augie March stand at Liberty’s golden door, declaring himself “an American, Chicago-born”—“first to knock, first admitted”—without Depression’s actual Augies having thanklessly laid the groundwork. American Jewish writers of the 1930s engineered a literature that, while unread today, defined concerns for the next generation, setting out the radical agenda decades before Bellow and Philip Roth would reap the spoils of a postwar economy of readers with more money, and more leisure-time: Michael Gold (1893-1967), editor of The New Masses and a columnist for The Daily Worker, turned the Lower East Side into a political hothouse, a raucous forum for Downtown grievances against an Uptown ruling class (his novel Jews Without Moneyis an overwritten, overheated, slummy masterpiece); Albert Halper (1904-1984) was less ideological than his frequent antagonist Gold, and more concerned with the characters of workers than with their aspirations toward political power (his novels include Union Square, and it is telling that his Depression memoir is wistfully entitled Goodbye Union Square); Tess Slesinger (1905-1945) was an incisive stylist, though perhaps too cynical for affiliation of any kind (her novel, The Unpossessed, is a scathing treatment of the nativity of the non-group Irving Howe later called “The New York Intellectuals”).

It was an immigrant, though, who wrote the consummate work of growing up on the East Side—Henry Roth, born to Yiddish in Galicia. Called Call it Sleep, Roth’s book virtually disappeared upon publication in 1934, though its 1964 rerelease as a “mass-market paperback”—a Depression innovation, ever since an institution in American publishing—revitalized interest among readers for whom the ghetto was only an ancestral rumor. The 1964 review that brought attention to the book came from Howe—not in the pages of a leftist journal or undercirculated literary quarterly, but on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

The writers of little magazines become the writers of big magazines; while the political radicals, if they live to compromise with prosperity, become the political conservatives; the failed books of yesterday are sure to be the classics of tomorrow: these are stories tinged with sadness, with an autochthonous American sadness; stories that, in their prescribed conventionalities, function as jokes, and, as jokes, might be the closest this country comes to a native, Jewish-like dark humor. Here, in large liberal America, intellectuals, to say nothing of writers, have improved on Protestantism’s libertarian streak, and are now more grossly atomized than ever, which condition they think beneficial, if not to themselves then to their governance—capitalism requiring competition, and competition requiring separation, their heads left apart and alone to find out “the fittest.”

opening credits for The Hard Way, screenplay by Daniel Fuchs

But to survive in any way during Depression, American writers had to join something—whether the WPA, the Communist Party, or even the parties of eastern scribblers who went west in the 1930s to work for a Hollywood that had recently discovered sound, and needed writers to write dialogue for it (just a handful of years later, everyone, literary or not, joined the war effort, joining up for a just war being the ultimate belonging). Among those ambivalent fortunates who went to California to write for film was Daniel Fuchs. Author of three brilliant neglected books of Jewish Brooklyn, Fuchs left the east for Lala Land, and its guaranteed salary, in 1937. His subsequent writing serves as a window into how necessity inspires life. From Fuchs’ diary: “For ten days I have been sitting around in my two-room office waiting for some producer on the lot to call me up and put me to work on a script. Every morning I walk the distance from my apartment on Orchid Avenue and appear at the studio promptly at nine. The other writers pass my window an hour or so later, see me ready for work in my shirtsleeves and suspenders, and yell jovially ‘Scab!’ But I don’t want to miss that phone call.”

That is the Depression mentality in a sentence, qualified with Judaic neuroses. Let it be that generation’s epitaph, and a millenarian motto: “But I don’t want to miss that phone call.”

The Polish-born Asch, a prolific author of Yiddish novels, plays, and short stories, was by then getting used to such accolades. In 1928, he had been named honorary president of the Yiddish PEN Club; two years later he celebrated his 50th birthday with fanfare at public celebrations in Warsaw and Vienna, receiving congratulatory cables from Einstein and Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization. Asch’s sprawling historical drama Three Cities, published in 1933, earned a front-page rave from The New York Times Book Review. That same year, he was nominated for a Nobel Prize.

By the end of the 1930s, however, the tide turned. Abraham Cahan, the legendary editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, accused Asch of “having gone off the rails.” A fellow writer charged Asch with apostasy. Rabbis inveighed against him from pulpits. Critics devoted entire books to denouncing him.

What set off all this hatred? In 1939, at the height of Hitler’s power, Asch published The Nazarene, a thick historical novel based on the life of Jesus. If that wasn’t enough, Asch went on to pen two other installments; The Apostle, based on the life of Paul, in 1943, followed six years later by Mary.

For Asch’s devoted Yiddish-speaking readers, this literary move constituted nothing less than a betrayal, and their anger surely must have deepened as the books catapulted up the American best-seller lists, helped by praise from Alfred Kazin and other New York intellectuals. An inexhaustible writer with a penchant for the melodramatic, Asch was best-known for his sepia-tinged portrayals of shtetl life, serialized, to popular acclaim, in the Forward. But throughout his career, he had also displayed a provocative streak, a desire to break out of Jewish parochialism.

Born in a Polish shtetl in 1880, Asch moved to Warsaw around the turn of the century and fell under the tutelage of I.L. Peretz, who urged him to write in Yiddish rather than Hebrew. He complied, and in 1908, Cahan began publishing Asch’s work in the Forward, gaining him an international audience.

Asch plumbed the Jewish world he knew so well for material: He translated the Book of Ruth into Yiddish, and one of his first major hits was Reb Shlomo Nagid (1912), a nostalgic novella based loosely on his childhood. Just a few years earlier, though, he had penned God of Vengeance, a play about a Jewish brothel owner whose daughter—his only hope at salvation—embarks on a lesbian affair with one of his prostitutes. “Burn it,” I.L. Peretz reportedly told his protégé. Asch ignored Peretz’s advice and the play went on to successful runs in Europe and America—until it reached Broadway. It was unceremoniously shut down and its producer and lead actor hauled off to jail for mounting “offensive material,” despite Cahan’s vociferous defense.

Asch and his wife, Matilda, arrived in New York on the eve of World War I, after a two-year stint in Paris. Here he wrote Mottke the Thief, which centered on another Jewish world rarely revealed: the seamy Warsaw criminal network. Asch’s gritty portrayal of a young Jewish man’s rise cemented his literary reputation and made him a household name among American Jews.

In 1925, Asch and his family returned to France. Eventually, they settled in Nice, where he built himself a home called the Villa Shalom and wrote Three Cities, which brought him his widest acclaim. Taking inspiration from the sprawling social novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Asch’s tome moves from the well-off assimilated Jews of St. Petersburg to the tight quarters of Warsaw’s anti-tsarists and back east to Moscow and the Bolshevik rise to power. “One of the most absorbing, one of the most vital, one of the most richly creative works of fiction that have appeared in our day,” declared Louis Kronenberger in The New York Times.

Buoyed by this success and with the political news darkening, Asch turned to a project he had been mulling over for decades: a novel about the life of Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph, otherwise known as Jesus. As Ben Siegel details in his clear-eyed biography, The Controversial Sholem Asch, Asch made his first attempt at the project after a 1908 trip to Palestine. Dissatisfied with the results, he put it aside but remained haunted by the idea. “Since that time I have never thought of Judaism or Christianity separately,” Asch told a reporter of the New York Herald Tribune. “For me it is one culture and one civilization, on which all our peace, our security and our freedom are dependent.”

Of course, there were other, perhaps less conscious factors at play. As popular as Three Cities had been, Asch yearned for another success, one that would broaden his readership beyond its traditional base. He had long coveted the Nobel Prize, and the universal subject of Jesus might catch the eye of the Nobel committee.

Whatever his motives, Asch’s timing couldn’t have been worse. In the late 1930s, atrocities against the Jews were being committed in the name of a “Christian” nation. His readers wanted an explanation for the unexplainable, not an attempt to bridge gaps between the two religions.

When he sent the first chapter to the Forward in 1938, Cahan responded decisively. Asch should destroy what he had written, the imperious editor told him, and halt work altogether on the project. Asch refused, and Cahan not only rejected The Nazarene for publication, severing a nearly 30-year-old relationship, but embarked on a public campaign to pillory the author. Other Yiddish papers followed suit, and the former honorary chairman of the Yiddish PEN Club found himself without an outlet in the papers that had launched and nurtured his career. Only the Communist Freiheit would run his work; Asch insisted on a disclaimer distancing him from their politics.

The novel that caused such a commotion is itself an oddity. Asch constructed the book in three parts: Pan Viadomsky, a bilious anti-Semitic history professor in pre-Hitler Warsaw, has just hired an unnamed Jewish assistant to help him translate an ancient manuscript. Soon Viadomsky is confiding in the assistant about his, um, past life as the Roman commander Cornelius, Pontius Pilate’s right-hand man. Viadomsky/Cornelius recounts life in Jerusalem at the time of the Second Temple and the appearance of the Rabbi from the Galilee that had everyone talking. The text of the yellowing manuscript, which Viadomsky insists is written by Judah Ish-Kiriot, constitutes the second part of Asch’s novel. Then Asch returns to Viadomsky’s Jewish assistant, who conjures a past life of his own as a student of a rabbi witness to Jesus’ last days.

In rich, dizzying detail, Asch reconstructs ancient Jerusalem chafing under Roman rule, from the gleaming golden towers of the Temple to the spice dealers and money changers of the old city and the poor in the teeming crooked streets below. But his principal goal was to reclaim Jesus—and his earth-bound rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph is unquestionably grounded in his Jewish faith. Asch introduces us to a “lean and hungry-looking” Jesus preaching to the poor fishermen by the harbor, with his dark beard and traditional sidelocks, clad in a tallis with the “ritualistic fringes hanging down almost to the ground.” This is a rabbi who followed Hillel’s teachings, who was well-liked and respected by his fellow clergymen, who declared while speaking from a tiny synagogue pulpit (with his mother, Miriam, proudly watching with the other women in the balcony) that he had come “not to destroy the Law and prophets, but to fulfill them.”

But the attempt to return Yeshua ben Joseph to the people of Israel did little to assuage his critics. Rumors abounded that Asch was on the verge of converting. In the pages of the Forward and in his antagonistic book Sholem Asch’s New Way, Cahan accused Asch of distorting Jewish tradition. The longtime Forward columnist Herman Lieberman published The Christianity of Sholem Asch, a scathing book in which he claimed that The Nazarene “may lure away ignorant Jewish children into worshipping foreign gods.”

Such arguments incensed Asch: “I am a Jewish writer, who has all his life tried to understand the Jewish spirit,” he told The New York Herald Tribune. The American public was firmly on Asch’s side; the book shot up the best-seller lists, securing positive reviews from prominent critics, including several first-generation Jewish Americans who rose to defend Asch’s right to write whatever he pleased.

In The New Republic, Alfred Kazin declared, “Nothing, as it happens, could be more characteristically Yiddish or more imperative in its way than this Gospel according to Chaver Sholem.” Philip Rahv, writing in The Nation, called Asch’s effort “brilliant, convincing and unprecedented in its range.” And Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker in 1943, after the publication of The Apostle: “Let the Nobel Committee convene as soon as may be and award this year’s prize for literature to Sholem Asch.”

The committee never came calling, but the success of The Nazarene gave Asch a financial security he had never known before, which likely incensed his critics further. As the situation in Europe got worse and his detractors more vitriolic, Asch and his wife, who had been living in France, retreated to Stamford, Connecticut, at the urging of friends and family. There he began working on the life of Paul while writing short stories about the dire situation for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1943, he published The Apostle. Predictably, the Yiddish press lambasted it; this time, however, most mainstream critics were also lukewarm. (Paul is “so complex, mystical, and Christian a matter that Asch misses him,” Kazin concluded.) Nevertheless, Asch’s Christological series continued to rack up sales, and The Apostle became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mary, which appeared in 1949, was the least successful of the three. Asch’s longtime translator, Maurice Samuel—whose English versions Irving Howe preferred to the original—refused to take on the project.

In 1950, the year he turned 70, Asch announced that he would devote himself to Jewish subjects, turning his attention to a long-planned novel about Moses. Still the accusations haunted him. He and Matilda moved to Miami, but after learning of an aborted street assault on him by “Yiddish extremists,” the Asches packed their bags once again, eventually settling in Israel, of all places. He began work on yet another Biblical novel, this one about Rachel and Jacob, but in 1957, during a trip to London, Asch passed away. His wife buried him in the cemetery of the West London Synagogue, noting with bitterness that the English had always been stalwart supporters of her husband’s work.

Certainly there was a degree of hubris in writing the Christological trilogy, egoism mixed with naiveté and no small dose of terrifically poor timing. Asch must have believed that his intentions would be clear no matter what, that his act of mediation between the two religions would somehow be understood and matter in such fraught times. The public became more receptive to such ideas after Geza Vermes published Jesus the Jew in 1973.

But in many ways, Asch’s literary efforts underscore a yearning to taste a dizzying freedom that his peripatetic existence never granted him. Asch considered himself a Jewish writer, but also a man of letters to whom the greater world of European literature mattered immensely. The work of his heroes—Dickens, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky—all grew out of the Christian tradition. Asch badly wanted his writing to be considered part of the larger body of Western literature, and what better way to gain permanent admittance to that literary world than to reclaim Jesus as a Jewish figure and prove that his tradition, the Jewish tradition, had been the basis of all that was to come?