Herman Wouk Just Isn't That Neurotic
Looking back on it, the triumph of American Jewish literature in the 20th century seems like something foreordained. Take a people, Eastern European Jewry, that had always cherished literacy and give them a freedom they had never been granted before, and the result is a creative explosion—Death of a Salesman, The Adventures of Augie March, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Catcher in the Rye (not to mention the Broadway musical, Tin Pan Alley, and Hollywood). Why is it, then, that the American Jewish writers who were most successful, whom we now regard as classics, did not make success their theme? On the contrary, they generally wrote about failure, alienation, neurosis, and guilt—to the point that these subjects came to seem stereotypically Jewish in American culture. If the American Jewish story is, on balance, a very happy one, why are our books so miserable? Where are the well-adjusted Jewish writers?
The answer is that such writers did exist, but the critics who dictate literary posterity had little use for them. Just look at Herman Wouk. Bellow and Roth, for all their popularity, never dominated the best-seller lists for years at a time the way Wouk did with books both explicitly Jewish, like Marjorie Morningstar, and completely non-Jewish, like The Caine Mutiny. Indeed, the sheer number of his readers, over a span of four decades, means that Wouk did more to shape Americans’ image of Jews than any other Jewish writer. In his World War II books The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, and in his Israel books The Hope and The Glory, and above all in his best-selling primer on Judaism, This Is My God, Wouk presented a vision of Judaism at one with itself: proud of tradition, pious toward the past, devoted to Zionism, yet totally open to the American experience and all its rewards.
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