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.

Ben Greenman seems plenty comfortable with his ethnicity—heck, he’s a Tablet contributing editor and put together a High Holiday project with Reboot—but his short stories tend to concentrate more on the precision of their formal and emotional effects than on, say, AIPAC, golems, or tefillin. His new collection, What He’s Poised to Do (Harper Perennial, June), emphasizes love, sex, and the mostly lost art of epistolary communication: you know, words sent by mail. Is there something Jewish about that? Maybe not—but then again, maybe Jewishness needn’t be explicit to be meaningful: Greenman managed, in the past, to make even Bigfoot sound nebbishy.

***

The authors of mysteries regularly identify their sleuths as Jewish, even if it isn’t always clear what that has to do with solving crimes or bringing criminals to justice. For example, Ike Schwartz, a Picketsville, Virginia, sheriff and former CIA agent, stars in Eye of the Virgin (Poisoned Pen, July), his sixth outing in Frederick Ramsay’s series of thrillers. In this latest tale, Christian religious iconography features prominently, and the Mossad plays a bit part. But why did Ramsay, an ordained Episcopal priest, make Schwartz a Jew in the first place? Simple: He “thought it would be fun to put a Jewish sheriff in Baptist-land.”

Another example: Sophie Katz, the amateur-sleuth of, most recently, Vows, Vendettas & a Little Black Dress (Mira, June) is Jewish more or less because her creator, Kyra Davis, is, too. Davis notes that “like her protagonist,” she’s “biracial”: “her mother being of Jewish, Eastern European descent and her having been African-American,” she’s “something of a one-woman Benetton ad.” In this outing, Sophie trails the murderer of her best friend, Dena, while helping to plan a wedding, too.

***

In other contemporary thrillers, a protagonist’s Jewishness can occupy a somewhat more central place within a mystery plot. Take Pam Jenoff’s A Hidden Affair (Atria, July), a sequel following hot on the heels of Jenoff’s 2009 effort, Almost Home. Jordan Weiss, a State Department intelligence officer, begins the new book still searching for answers about her former boyfriend, whose death by drowning in Cambridge, England, turns out to have been a hoax with serious geopolitical ramifications. In the earlier novel, Jordan’s having been “raised with the typical upbringing of an East Coast reformed Jew: enough Hebrew school to get through a bat mitzvah, then services twice a year on the High Holidays,” came into play when her investigations touched on Holocaust-era secrets. And it does not seem incidentally related to her ethnicity that, in A Hidden Affair, the young woman encounters, among other foils, a dashing, mysterious Israeli operative.

***

One recipe for powerful Jewish fiction: Combine two parts furious ethnic self-consciousness and one part obscenely rendered sex. (Need proof? See the collected works of Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler, among many others.) Joshua Braff’s second novel, Peep Show (Algonquin, June), follows this program thoughtfully: Set in the 1970s, it presents a New York teenager with the choice of aligning himself with either his mother’s faithful hasidism or with his father’s enterprise in the pre-Giuliani business of Times Square titillation. Note, the novel bears no relation to the 1999 Nathan Englander short story of the same name, except in its parallel fascination with extremes of both religion and sexuality.

The nine stories collected in Jon Papernick’s There Is No Other (Exile, July) likewise embrace a Rothian and Richlerian inheritance, adding to those influences a dash of the fabulism found in the work of Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The stories feature more than a little theological confusion—in one, a young woman decides to circumcise her paramour; in another, an image of the Virgin Mary appears at a suburban synagogue—as well as a few scenes of sex that would be remarkable for their rawness if such explicit sexuality were not so common in the modern Jewish tradition.

***

Papernick, a Canadian, cut his teeth with a widely praised collection of harrowing stories about encounters between Arabs and Jews in Israel; Avner Mandelman, a native Israeli, has lived for decades in Canada but still draws the inspiration for his fiction from the tensions of the Middle East and his own service in the Israeli Air Force during the Six Day War. Following the success of his story collection, Talking to the Enemy, Mandelman debuts as a novelist with The Debba (Other, July). Using the titular figure, “a mythical Arab hyena that can turn into a man who lures Jewish children away from their families to teach them the language of the beasts,” as its central image, the novel explores issues of Israeli patrimony, the power of theater, and the fantasies and delusions that bind Arabs and Jews together.

***

Briefly, here’s another way of saying what intelligent critics have been saying about An American Type (Norton, June), a novel “by” Henry Roth, which was actually assembled after his death out of his voluminous manuscripts by an enterprising editor. The rule should be this: If you haven’t already read Roth’s brilliant, classic Call It Sleep at least twice, as well as the four painful volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream, you should not be allowed even enter the same room as a copy of An American Type, let alone read it. Not because the book could harm you, but because it would be a monumental waste of your time. And if you feel you must read the author’s recollections of life in the 1930s, visit New York City and spend an afternoon at the Center for Jewish History, flipping through the dot-matrix-printed pages of the original, messy manuscripts. That will tell you much more about Roth’s literary project than the version produced for bookstore shelves and for the profit of the author’s heirs.

• In what has become something of a counter-conventional wisdom view, two authors argue that U.S.-led energy sanctions against Iran (which are unlike the just-passed U.N. ones) could go a long way toward welcome regime change. [Slate]

• A profile of Drake, the rising Jewish Canadian hip-hop star. [NYT]

• Judith Shulevitz takes the measure of Henry Roth’s latest posthumous novel. [Slate]

• The Elvis Costello and now Pixies concert cancellations have many Israelis questioning whether their country has become too isolated. [NYT]

• Reps. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) brought two goats to a Capitol Hill press event in order to make a point against a mohair subsidy. The goats were named Lancelot and Arthur; at one point, Arthur farted. Loudly. (Video here.) Then Lancelot nicked Weiner on the hand, drawing blood. Write your own damn jousting joke. [Politico]

On last night’s show, after consulting his Mideast Tsuris Information Tcenter (“Where debate is never cut off—it’s circumcised”), Stephen Colbert sat down with Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren.

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.

• An Israeli chef made the world’s largest falafel ball—30 pounds!—right here in New York City, at what sounds like a typical Greek diner. [JTA]

• The unlikely tale of Henry Roth’s soon-to-be-posthumously-published seventh novel. [NYT]

• Nextbook Press editor Jonathan Rosen is participating in an exciting-sounding forthcoming exhibit at the Whitney Museum. Birds, guys! Birds! [Whitney Museum]

• Simon Monjack, the husband of the late actress Brittany Murphy, was found dead. They’re saying natural causes. [AP/NYT]

• Beef roll-up: The Jewish deli meat presentation you may not have tried, yet. [NYMag]

Marjorie Ingall’s column today has 52 comments! Keep ‘em comin’!

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.”

Pledging modest cash awards to the authors of the six best essays on the theme “Why I left Europe and what I have accomplished in America,” YIVO asked entrants to fill at least 25 “notebook pages” and to be “detailed,” “precise,” and “sincere.” Excellent advice for most writers, this was particularly apt counsel for novices, which nearly all the entrants were expected to be (and turned out to be).

For YIVO, the contest was an expression of a mission undertaken in 1925 in Vilnius (Vilna, to Jews) in what was then Polish-occupied Lithuania. That mission was to study, esteem, and strengthen the common (in both senses) Jews of Eastern Europe and their secular culture, often referred to as Yiddishkeit for the common (both senses again) language that ruled the arguments, lovemaking, postcards, soccer matches, business deals, ribaldry, newspapers, and restive dreams of some 11 million Jews over a territorial swath that extended from western Russia north to the Baltic, south to the Balkans, and then east across empire and satrapy to the Oder River.

By 1925, that great sea was at ebb, reduced by war, revolution, poverty, anti-Semitism, secularism, socialism, Zionism, and America—to name some principal drains on population and spirit. Among other recovery efforts, YIVO dispatched zammlers (collectors) to record story, song, argot, and custom in the shtetls and urban ghettos, and sponsored three autobiography competitions for young Jews in an attempt to secure them as citizens of Yiddishkeit. Those contests were popular successes, the last of them concluding just months before Germany devoured Poland in September 1939.

In 1940, having nimbly reestablished world headquarters in Manhattan and out of what would become murderous German reach, YIVO picked up where it had left off, administering an autobiography contest for young American Jews. But this call from a Yiddishist preservationist organization failed to prick ears that were hearkening to such matters as work, college, the Dodgers’ chances against the Reds, and Frank Sinatra keening “I’ll Never Smile Again.” (In 1946, YIVO would issue an equally tone-deaf and unsuccessful call for what-I-saw-in-the-war memoirs from Jewish veterans.) And so in the spring of 1942, YIVO in America turned to its tried-and-true constituency, Jews native to Eastern Europe.

In all, YIVO received 223 essays (some 25,000 “notebook pages”) before the “Why I left Europe” contest closed in March 1943. About 200 were in Yiddish and the rest in Hebrew or English. Only 47 were by women. The awards were presented at a public ceremony in September 1943, and the contest “secretary,” a distinguished YIVO scholar named Moses Kligsberg, wrote soon afterward, “Now YIVO is confronted with the great task of studying the submitted materials.”

That “great task,” if ever undertaken, is nowhere manifest. After he got done responding to the entrants who believed they’d been jobbed by the judges, Kligsberg himself wrote a few uninspired essays on the contest material. Much later, Irving Howe tapped some of the English-language entries for World of Our Fathers, his 1976 best-seller that still reigns as the heavyweight champion of Third Migration cultural history. But it was not until the late 1990s that the Fordham historian Daniel Soyer and the YIVO researcher Jocelyn Cohen, supported by a grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, cracked “American-Jewish Biographies, Record Group 102” wide open and began the dusty, demanding work (all those handwritings; all those variant spellings and localisms; all those amateurs) that led to publication—in cloth in 2005 and in paperback this past year—of English translations of nine of the autobiographies under the title My Future is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Immigrants.

A fine piece of scholarly and humane business, the book is supported by an informative introduction and comprehensive, lucid notes. The translations themselves move along nicely in Yiddish-flavored English that never goes vaudeville on us and that respects writer as well as reader. When Shmuel Krone—of Denver and Verkhovichi, Belarus—a man rather given to what the law calls excited utterances, says of his oldest son, “He is now a public accountant!,” Soyer and Cohen know that this is an exclamation point to preserve on behalf of the sweet and luckless Krone. And when the pedantic Chaim Kusnetz—from Brooklyn and Duboy, Belarus—repeatedly interpolates “Vayehi hayoym”—“and it came the day”—into his narrative, they know to leave the Hebrew phrase stand in the text for what it conveys about Mr. Kusnetz’s literary and personal vanity. (Kusnetz ends his autobiography with this gem: “And the thorn of loneliness in the desert of my life burns eternal.”) And if, some literary heavy breathing aside, the memoirs generally present as facts mustered in chronological order, the brisk artlessness of the narratives is itself often affecting.

So with Rose Silverman—New York City and Berdichev, Ukraine—who sums up her years of compelled labor as a child-seamstress with the sentence, “The hardship never let up and accompanied me always”; and with Ben Reisman—Pittsburgh and Kalush, Galicia—who writes of the consequences of a slum fire in America, “My oldest boy caught cold and was sick for several months, until he died. Our grief cannot be described.” And so, too, with the ambitious, vivacious, and pretty Rose Schoenfeld—New York City and Drohobycz, Galicia—who recalls her arranged (by her desperately poor parents) marriage in the old country to a visiting American businessman this way: “With an embittered heart, I went to the wedding canopy.” Isaac Babel, a near-contemporary of Ms. Schoenfeld’s and master of the hammer-blow sentence, might well have put it just that way (though he probably would have told us whether the imported bridegroom smelled of onions or a sweet American cologne or a broth of both on the wedding night.)**pagebreak next=”The autobiographies also bring us the details called for by the contest sponsor.”**

The autobiographies also bring us the details called for by the contest sponsor. We learn, for example, that the salary structure for melameds—village religious teachers who instructed children, usually in the local synagogue—was tied not to length of tenure or ability but rose with the ages of the students taught; and that starving Jews filled themselves with cakes made of ground sunflower shells during the Ukrainian civil war; and that the Jewish trade in metal-smithing made its practitioners bearded, skull-capped repairers of church cupolas across the Russian and Ukrainian summer sky.

We also pick up piquant colloquialisms (“Even a broom can shoot if God helps”), rabbinical nicknames (“the Kaidoner prodigy” and “Reb Leybele the Sharp”), and telling exchanges of conversation, as in this one between the then-melamed Shmuel Krone and a fellow greenhorn slightly more versed in America:

Greenhorn: “You are too talented for teaching.”
Krone: “What should I do?”
Greenhorn: “Open a dry goods store like mine.”

It’s a fine harvest altogether, though I, for one, would have liked to have heard more from the editors about their decision to thumb the scales hard for gender (five of the nine contributors are women), for landfall (1892 through 1929), and for place of origin (Ukraine, Galicia, Poland, and Belarus are all represented), rather than simply publish the strongest essays they could find. And they could also have done a better job of placing YIVO within its initial American context, exploring the misapprehensions suffered by the organization’s leaders in the face of a Yiddishkeit on these shores unlike any previously known or imagined, and how their failure to attend to America with some humility undermined YIVO’s early work in this country.

But the most important question this book raises is not for the editors or for the contributors (all of the latter as safely entombed in history now as King Tut), but for the volume itself. And it takes this form:

Following the recovery, beginning in the 1960s, of Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska, and Abraham Cahan (to name a very few); and following the publication of A Walker in the City (1951), The Downtown Jews (1969) and World of Our Fathers (to name a very few); and following the inflorescence of Jewish historiography under the post-war ministrations of Moses Rischin, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Oscar Handlin, and more recently David Roskies, Hasia Diner, and Jonathan Sarna (to name a very very few)—after all that has been delved, recorded, filmed, monographed, and presented at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies ever since the YIVO autobiographies were locked down in 1943—after all this, was the retrieval of these words of nine of our fathers and mothers necessary or even helpful?

From the perspective of what the founders of YIVO thought of as “science” (YIVO has since removed Wissenschaft—or science—from its name and is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research), the answer must be no. The sophisticated scholarly and imaginative work that has emerged over the past 65 years roars like Niagara beside these trickly odysseys. And unmediated personal declarations, while held in scholarly esteem in 1942, are no longer considered important in ordering history. Scholars, to paraphrase the late Moses Kligsberg, are no longer confronted with the great task of studying the submitted materials.

* * *

But if scholars aren’t confronted, maybe others are—or should be. Here I mean we common (in any sense you like) American Jews who have come to view the territories these nine men and women inhabited—the shtetl and the Lower East Side—as cohorts of Mamre’s plains, the brickyards of Egypt, Jerusalem, Sepharad, and (very lately) Masada: stars in that runic cosmos that Jews have been studying for millennia, looking for a “usable past,” by which historians mean the tales that make a tribe’s progress through time explicable.

In the case of the shtetl, how else could we have accommodated the ground that swallowed millions of our brothers and sisters except to declare it holy, and ourselves therefore enjoined from treading upon it in shod feet? And so Abraham Joshua Heschel, speaking on “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” at YIVO in New York City on January 7, 1945, 20 days before Soviet soldiers reached Auschwitz, pronounced an elegy that, in accordance with ancient panegyric tradition, cast what had happened as a theological calamity, as a blow against klal Yisroel, the one covenantal Israel. “Even those who have abandoned tradition . . . have not separated themselves,” Heschel said, reading mundane and also sacral truth in the crematoria ash. And then, after comparing the European destruction with the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem, Heschel concluded by placing the Shoah out of human reach: “If other eras [in Jewish history] were holy, this one was the holy of holies.” The audience, it’s reported, as though one covenantal Israel, stood and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.

And a powerful and incontrovertible umen has sounded ever since, in the stories and memoirs of Singer, Agnon, Wiesel, and lesser lights; in Chagall’s pie-eyed fiddlers, loopy lovers, and crucified rabbis; in the Hasidic and Haredi communities’ faithful replication of the habits, dress, and quarrels of lost study halls and rabbinic courts; in the popularity of Buber’s romanticized Tales of the Hasidim, and of the slushy Life Is With People; in the hundreds of Yizkor books that memorialize the saintly butchers, the uncomplaining widows, the kindly melameds, and the generous mill- and tavern-owners in one shtetl after another and never recollect a card cheat, a child beater, a philanderer murdered by the Germans; and of course in unabashed confections such as “Mein Shtetele Belz” and Fidder on the Roof.

In the case of the Lower East Side, there’s no better explanation for what we have made of the place—in novel, in “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” in movie, in lox, in bagel, in the Tenement Museum, and on Big Onion tours of Delancey Street—than that offered by Irving Howe for why World of Our Fathers became an astonishing (and to him somewhat embarrassing) success. The book, Howe wrote, “enabled [readers] to cast an affectionate backward glance at the world of their fathers before turning their backs upon it forever and moving on, as they had to, to a world their fathers would neither have accepted nor understood. My book was not a beginning, it was still another step to the end.”

For Jews, some failures—an inability to samba, for example—feel stunningly inconsequential, while others, such as the failure to keep faith with fathers and mothers, with that pesky klal Yisroel, feel stunningly unforgivable. And so sitting beneath our vines in Beverly Hills, on West 72nd, or in Cambridge 02138, we trouble our hearts with yearnings for our lost Eden of Jewish authenticity: that land of virile pickle-makers; the communion of three-times-a-day prayer; peddlers and pressers who not only spent a predawn hour over the Torah but remained faithful to the Internationale and saved money for their children’s education; and tenement windows that glowed with Sabbath candles beneath which children studied hard.**pagebreak next=”Unlike us, though, the contributors to this book did not know that “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” was over.”**

Unlike us, though, the contributors to this book did not know that “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” was over. (The ghettos, the shootings, and the sometime gassing by engine exhaust in the closed compartments of trucks were known by 1943, but the six million was an abyss undreamed.) Nor had they any reason to feel guilt about taking off for Brownsville, the Bronx, or Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill and leaving the Lower East Side to wither away, because they wanted the Lower East Side and all it represented to wither away.

And so, a truth escapes like a reflexive sigh from these nine witnesses, which is that the shtetl and the Lower East Side were for common Jews not places of authenticity, pride, and vitality, but vulnerability, contingency, and impotence; and a main product of such a life, for Jews as for other people, is anger, which seeps inward as self-scorn and depression, or spews outward as cruelty directed at the nearest targets, which are usually one’s children, parents, spouse, brothers, sisters, neighbors.

Here is Minnie Goldstein—Providence, Rhode Island and Warsaw—come to tell us that her mother was one of 12 children of whom 11 died young; that her mother was left a widow with two children at 19; that relatives cheated the woman out of her meager inheritance; that her second husband—Minnie’s father—was himself ruined financially when in-laws—his business partners in a shoe store—took to stealing stock during the night; that Minnie herself was loathed by her mother, who called her “treyf,”—unkosher. She writes, “I cannot remember a single day during my childhood when I was taken care of as a child should be, or when I had enough to eat.” Later, a grown woman in Providence, and married to a hapless, cheerless husband, she bears a son who develops polio, and she considers murder and suicide: “Would it not be better to take the child into bed with me, turn on the gas, and go to sleep forever with the child?” She notes, in a sentiment that is repeated in a number of these memoirs, and inferred in more of them, “Those who have been here in America for a long time will never be able to grasp that we who have experienced so much could still be full human beings.”

And here is Aaron Domnitz—Baltimore and Romanovo, Belarus—a sweet man of lively intelligence whose early love of Talmud and then of secular literature led him nowhere but to America and the fate he most wanted to avoid—a six-day-a-week shift at a sewing machine in a rundown factory on the Lower East Side. Domnitz tells us of an impromptu party celebrated by his coworkers in the apartment of a colleague whose daughter had just become engaged. They drank. They sang “Russian revolutionary songs.” And one worker, who was a cantor, sang a High Holy Day prayer. And then the bride arrived. “Instead of greeting us, she twisted her nose and hurled a reproach at her father in English, why did he bring drunks into the house?” Her father “smiled stupidly and helplessly . . . completely foreign among his grown children.”

Leaving the daughter and father behind, the men fled to a nearby park where they “leaned against the fence and looked at the East River. The water, like the sky was dreary, autumnal. . . . Through the mist we saw the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty. Behind her, the ocean spread out far and wide, and across the ocean somewhere were the shores of the Old Country. We were silent.”

Of course, our notions of Belz or “The Historic Lower East Side Bargain District” are no more likely to be altered by the testimony of Minnie Goldstein and Aaron Domnitz, than a bonfire of dreidels is likely to be inspired by evidence that Hashmonean priests and Taliban mullahs had many bloody habits in common—which by my reading of purity zealots through the ages seems highly likely. In the development of prophetic or apologetic history, whether by Jew, Frenchman, Serb, or Abkhazian (who knew?), the truth is whatever shores up the bottom line of need.

Today, the “shtetl” and “the Lower East Side” appear at the very least to be remarkable self-healings of grave wounds, and at the very best creations as brilliant as Hashmonean Jerusalem. Given, however, the amount of evil that has entered the world as a consequence of supra-history, we probably want to try and keep track of what really happened. In aid of this anchoring, we have those books and conferences and peer-reviewed articles, which tell us such things as the percentage of Eastern Europe’s Jews who depended on relief at the turn of the twentieth century (35) and the childhood mortality rate on the Jewish Lower East Side (40 percent). And now we have these words of our fathers and mothers; reedy in places, affecting in places, but surely usable if we ever find ourselves in need.

Ben Birnbaum is the editor of Boston College Magazine and an award-winning essayist. He is the editor of Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time (Crossroad, 2007).

Redemption, Steven G. Kellman’s new biography of Henry Roth, explores a brilliant novelist with a deep secret—an incestuous relationship with his sister, Rose. Roth’s sexual shame informs Call It Sleep, Roth’s Joycean novel of the Lower East Side, which was published in 1934 but forgotten until the 1960s, when Irving Howe’s praise put the paperback reissue on the bestseller list. By this point, Roth was living in Maine, paralyzed by writer’s block. Finally, in 1979, he began working on another autobiographical novel, Mercy of a Rude Stream. This four-volume work and Call It Sleep have been rereleased by Picador.

Jonathan Rosen, the author of Joy Comes in the Morning (now out in paperback) and editor of Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters book series, met Henry Roth in 1993, two years before his death, and wrote an essay on Roth that appeared in The New Yorker earlier this month. Here he talks about Roth’s troubled life and work.