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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.