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Essay by Ida Nasatir
"Novels on Self-Hatred" by Ida Nasatir,
September 8, 1950
September 8, 1950—Ida Nasatir, "Novels
on Self-Hatred," Southwestern Jewish Press, page 21: In
the past two decades there have appeared a great number of novels on the subject
of self-hatred. They have been written by both Jew and Gentile. They talk about
insecure Jews, and those with a self-hating neuroticism. They select for
background peace and wartime. Take for instance, two very recent novels: That
Winter by
Merle Miller, and Whisper My Name by Burke
Davis. The theme in both books is that of a Jew "passing" as a
non-Jew. The Jew in Miller's novel returns to reality when the girl he loves
reveals her anti-Semitism. And in the Davis book, the Jew, living an entire
lifetime of lies, discovers at the end that his game has been known all along,
and that in playing his curious role, he has lost his soul. Both authors point
out that "passing" or the attempt to do so, is bound to end in
failure, for he who tries to "pass," cannot escape his past, his
background, or even more important, his future. Part and parcel of the
theme of trying to "pass," which is a confusion of hatred of one's own
people and background, are the novels dealing with inter-marriage and
self-hatred. Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn
Graham, was heralded as a book with a daring theme. The book itself is
unimportant in the field of fiction: the Jews in it are only cardboard figures
and are Jewish only because the author says they are. But the success of this
book encouraged publishers to produce other works on the same subject. The
Curious Wine by Bianca
Bradbury, was merely a bad novel on intermarriage. A novel which has
evidence of deep maladjustment is Norman
Katov's Eagle At My Eyes, which deals with the marriage of a Jew to a
Gentile, and the resulting animosity of the Orthodox Jewish family to the fact
that one of their children has married a non-Jewess. In the telling of the
novel, Katov makes unnecessary and ugly comments about Jews in general, and
their traditions in particular. His latest novel, A Little Sleep: A
Little Slumber, outwardly the story of a fine old immigrant Jew, is also a
vulgar book, and depicts in various scenes ugly and false facets of Jewish life
in America. On the other hand, Saul
Bellow's The Victim is an honest, mature work, deeply felt,
provocative and brilliantly written. Bellow writes about an insecure Jew who
meets up with an anti-Semite who feels, for a number of reasons that the Jew has
been responsible for the anti-Semite's loss of a job. The Jew, uncertain of
himself at best, permits the Gentile to move into his apartment, wear his
clothes, take his money and torture him in various subtle ways. The book is
overwhelming in its final effect in that one no longer really knows which is the
victim, the Jew or the Gentile. Other insecure Jews have been drawn by Budd
Schulberg in What Makes Sammy Run, and Jerome
Weidman's I Can Get It For Wholesale and What's In It For Me is
a classic character of a self-hating Jew. Even such war novels as Norman
Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin
Shaw's The Young Lions and Ira
Wolfert's An Act of Love include as significant Americans, Jews
unhappy in their Jewishness, sensitive to barbs and insults, and maladjusted to
their society. All are a mass of neuroses and conflicts. They are miserable
human beings. Jewishness—whatever it means to them, and it means little
in any of its manifestations—is a millstone around their necks. Too many
of these novels are sterile; they have too few authentic Jews; there is little,
if any grandeur about their living.