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Ida Nasatir book review

Wasteland by Jo Sinclair

May 8, 1947—Book review—Wasteland by Jo Sinclair—Southwestern Jewish Press, page 6:  A year ago, Jo Sinclair's Wasteland won the $10,000 Harper prize. It is an epistle to the Jews who are poor in spirit. The hero, Jake Braunowitz, assumes the name of John Brown. He has a pain in his back, is ashamed of his family, and is ashamed of being a Jew.  His sister Debby insists that he see a psychiatrist about his troubles, and he follows her advice. For eighteen years John has been hiding his Jewishness from his Gentile women, his Gentile colleagues at the newspaper where he is employed as a staff photographer, from himself, and from society at large. Nevertheless he is unable to break away from his family and gefilte fish. Lacking identity, he can identify himself with nothing; at thirty-five he is still unintegrated and obsessed with a sense of waste, hence "wasteland." One reads his story as it comes out weekly, and later in bi-weekly interviews with the psychiatrist.  The poverty and degradation of the family was rather well sketched in—the stingy, dirty, irresponsible father, the beaten, unhappy mother, sister Roz with her promiscuity, Italian boy friends and night clubs, brother Sig with his cars and cigars, and above all, sister Debby. Debby, who has taken over the male role abandoned by her father and becomes a Lesbian, keeps company with colored girls, listens to classical music, writes stories about the poor and oppressed, cripples, social outcasts, Negroes and Jews for the NEW Masses and knows what the score is. Jake-John's visits to the psychiatrist, to whom he talks things out, works wonders. No sooner has John got down on record the story of his family's poverty and humiliation, and the hatred he feels toward it, than his "tzores" drops off, one by one, the pain in his back disappears, and he calls himself Jake once again. The new Jake is a kindly fellow who photographs his parents and his brother, Sig, takes his nephews to prize fights and hockey games and gets them jobs on the paper, introduces his sister Roz to his Gentile friends when they visit the night club in which she waits on tables, gives blood to the Red Cross, enlists in the army and asks the Four Questions at the Seder.  Wasteland comes to an end in an ecstasy of belonging. Jake's Jewish blood has been accepted, it has mingled in the Red Cross station with the blood of America—Negro blood, it is hoped, will soon be allowed to join the stream—and Jake has become Everyman.  There is a superficial attractiveness about his position that has proved tempting to many Jews. It blesses the bourgeois in all of us and is kind, in particular to the Jew's self hatred, with an indulgence that passes for understanding. Miss Sinclair absolves the world of responsibility for what the Jews have suffered as a people, and requires her characters to adjust to the world. She has no concern with the kind of society that is worthy of our adjustment. She allows her characters to "forgive the World" by coming to terms with it.  As a Jewess herself, she should know better.