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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.