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Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948 Author(s): Leah Garrett Source: Jewish Social Studies, Vol.
18, No. 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 70-99 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jewisocistud.18.2.70 . Accessed: 29/05/2013 15:43
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Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948

Leah Garrett
A bstr act
In 1948 five books about World War II dominated the New York Times best-seller list; all were written by Jews and made Jewish soldiers their central protagonists. This essay focuses on the Jewish war novels of 1948 and their critical reception. Jewish writers argued in their novels that the Holocaust was a central, rather than an ancillary, aspect of the war experience. Other themes that Jewish war novelists took up included a focus on endemic antisemitism and racism in the military and the infusion of intellectualism into the figure of the ideal soldier-hero. Jewish authors wrote about the war in unique ways, and since their novels were best-sellers, they had a direct impact upon how postwar Americans understood the war effort. Key words: Jewish American fiction, World War II, Holocaust
ore than 500,000 Jewish mennearly half of the Jewish American male population between the ages of 18 and 40served in the US military in World War II. Jews were primarily in the army, with only a small number entering the navy and with a disproportionate number working as medical and dental officers and joining the air corps. Just over 11,000 died, about 3 percent of the 400,000 general American war dead.1 War service had a profound impact on American Jewish life.2 As with African American servicemen who returned to a United States that still did not treat them as equals, so too Jews came back from the war facing continued discrimination. Many felt that they had the right not only to be treated the same as white Americans but also to be allowed to claim their Jewishness publicly rather than trying to disappear into the
Leah Garrett, Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948, Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 18, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 7099
melting pot of the Anglo-American norm. Moreover, the GI Bill of 1944 helped impel countless young Jewish men into the middle classes, furthering the general trend in American Jewish life toward increased wealth and education. Unlike many Anglo-American men, who were raised on their grandfathers heroic tales about World War I, Jewish immigrant families traditionally looked on military service as a misfortune. 3 By entering the military, Jews had not only to face the antisemitism endemic in the military but also to overcome the legacy of being viewed as weaklings too cowardly, effeminate, or fearful to be effective warriors.4 Enlisting in war service enabled Jews, for the first time, to try to take on a generic American identity and be defined first and foremost by their national status. Furthermore, World War II enlistees were younger than those in the first war, and for many, service occurred during the years when they were coming of age and transforming from boys into men. This new understanding was transmitted in a wave of novels by and about Jewish soldiers that marked a watershed in Jewish American life: never before had Jewish writers been the popular voice of the American experience.5 On December 5, 1948, New York Times cultural correspondent Charles Poore offered an overview of the years major literary trends, in which he noted that [n]ineteen [f]orty-eight will go down in literary history as the year that America rediscovered the war.6 He was describing a new genre of World War II fiction that was written almost entirely by Jews and made Jewish soldiers central protagonists: Norman Mailers The Naked and the Dead , Irwin Shaws The Young Lions, Ira Wolferts An Act of Love, Merle Millers That Winter, and Stefan Heyms The Crusaders.7 A sixth book about a Jewish soldier also sold well that year (although it did not make the best-seller list): Martha Gellhorns The Wine of Astonishment.8 Critical studies often group together American war fiction in order to seek out what is common to the genre.9 However, focusing on general trends overlooks the historically specific aspects of the literature, including how the authors were influenced by their varying backgrounds. Looking at Jewish war novels as a distinct group, very clear patterns emerge. The authors were writing as young Jewish Americans and their view of the war was impacted profoundly by their Jewishness. To overlook or negate how extensively these novels focused on the specific status of Jewish Americans is to miss the major subthemes and aims of these works. Nevertheless, several of these novels have never been considered in critical or historical studies because they are not thought to be
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Young Lions Leah Garrett
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Jewish Social Studies Vol. 18 No. 2
good literature or because the authors were of minor stature.10 Revisiting the best-seller lists of 1948 shows us what the public was reading, which illuminates important aspects of popular culture. By extending Jewish American studies to consider works aimed at a mainstream audience, this essay is part of a trend that seeks to reevaluate the role of popular culture in postwar Jewish American life. Though this essay will focus on 1948 as the watershed year in which Jewish war novels dominated the best-seller lists, the story does not end there. In fact, throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Jewish writers dominated the field of World War II writing. In the 1950s, for instance, Herman Wouks The Caine Mutiny had the highest sales of any American novel since Gone With The Wind and won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize. Leon Uriss war novels were also best-sellers. And in the early 1960s, Joseph Hellers Catch-22 was so influential that it introduced the term catch-22 into common parlance and infused American war writing with a new satirical style that would be taken up in the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon. The only non-Jewish writer of World War II novels who had anywhere near the impact of Jewish writers was James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity (1951) and The Thin Red Line (1962). However, his works were largely influenced by the writings of his friend and main competitor, Norman Mailer. Hasia Diner recently argued that Jewish Americans were hardly silent about the Holocaust until the late 1960s, after the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the Six Day War.11 My essay complements her work by showing how four of the best-selling novels of 1948 included explicit portraits of the death camps and the extermination of the Jews. Although the novels I will consider were primarily about World War II and the experiences of American soldiers, all the stories set in Europe describe the machinery of the death camps and the trauma of the Jews in Europe, often in graphic and extensive detail. Cloaking reportage of the exterminations within a war novel meant for popular consumption became a tool to convey the story of the Holocaust to American readers. Previous researchers overlooked how prevalent the theme of the Holocaust was in the postwar years because they had a very limited notion of what constituted primary sources relating to it: From a research perspective, writes Diner, much of the Holocaust-related material produced in the late 1940s and into the middle of the 1960s did not appear in archives and libraries, in the indices of books or in card catalogs under the heading Holocaust.12 In other words, there was a large range of cultural responses to the Holocaust, including Jewish war novels, that did not fit under any neat heading.
Whereas Diners research has focused on responses aimed at a primarily Jewish audience, my essay considers works that were aimed at a wider readership. The popularity of the Jewish American war novels meant that the authors descriptions of the machinery of the Holocaust penetrated into broader American culture. This suggests that not only Jews but also non-Jews were eager recipients of information about the Holocaust in the years right after the war. Moreover, several of the novels offer a distinctly American perspective on the Holocaust by focusing on the epochal moment when forward units of General Pattons Seventh Army liberated Dachau during the German retreat. What they discovered in the camp was so gruesome and horrific that everyonethe soldiers, General Eisenhower, the journalists covering the eventworried that Americans would not believe what the Germans had done. Even though few American GIs, mostly members of the 157th Infantry Regiment, were at the liberation of the camps, all the Jewish soldiers of the novels based in Europe are placed there.13 These books portray the liberation of Dachau as the moment when the Holocaust was brought home to Americans generally and to Jewish Americans specifically. Martha Gellhorn, one of the novelists whose work I will consider, entered Dachau and then interviewed soldiers who had also witnessed it. She recounts: No one will believe us, one soldier said. They all agreed. We got to talk about it, see? We got to talk about it if anyone believes us or not.14 This aim, to talk about it, is achieved by the authors detailed accounts of the camps. The novels use Jewish soldiers to show the pivotal moment of awakening, when what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe becomes tangible and real. Having awoken, the protagonist in each of the novels changes utterly. These six novels together created a trend in which the soldier was drawn quite differently from the stoic combatant of World War I found, for instance, in Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms. Rather than the idealized Hemingway soldier who does not worry,15 the protagonist of the Jewish novel is a deeply emotional man who battles constantly with his own troubling thoughts about war and death.16 However, the causes of the Jewish soldiers fears are unique. Instead of facing a clearly defined foe from an opposing force, he confronts a myriad of different enemies: Americans within his own platoon who hate him because he is a Jew; Germans who seek to kill him for being both Jewish and American; and the Japanese who want to attack him because he is an American. The soldiers survival depends upon suppressing his worries and acting bravely. But rather than avoiding descriptions of his internal battles, these novels give voice to them,
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offering a general readership access to the dark emotions and angst felt by those in battle. In perhaps the starkest contrast with previous American fiction, the Jewish novels of 1948 gave meaning to the war rather than representing it as a chaotic, corrupt, and anarchic form of mass violence. Where Ernest Hemingways Frederic Henry and the protagonists of John Dos Passoss Three Soldiers find war to be devoid of larger significance, Jewish authors take the opposite stance. For Jews, the war against the Nazis was personal: World War II was being fought for a noble reason and the soldiers were serving a greater good.17 By placing Jewish Americans in the broader America of the platoon, the novels of 1948 also explored how minority groups respond to, and are treated by, white Americans outside the context of their own ethnic enclaves. The authors showed that these interactions were often fraught with negative feelings and that Jews, Latinos, African Americans, gays, and other minorities were frequently victimized by fellow soldiers. Jewish authors were able to expose the negative aspects of service because many of them had firsthand experience of the antisemitism prevalent both among the enlisted men and in the officer corps. Upon returning home from the war, these authors found that Americans were increasingly uncomfortable with public displays of antisemitism, and thus they felt the time was right to discuss the ugly aspects of the American military. Jewish war novels challenge the popular historical conception of World War II as The Good War (an epithet put forth by Studs Terkel in his popular, award-winning oral history of the same name).18 The novels support the idea that the war was just and noble, at the same time detailing the negative aspects of the American military. As these novels document, the mistreatment of Jews was not solely caused by enlisted men but also came at the hands of officers, who were symbolic of upper-class WASP culture, the country-club elite, a bastion of antisemitism and racism. In particular, Mailers The Naked and the Dead exposes how these officers promoted the proliferation of chickenshit: the innumerable petty rules that wore out enlistees and that were the domain of small-minded officers seeking anything with which to chastise their men. As Paul Fussell notes, the literature of chickenshit is extensive, and not surprisingly, since so many authors-to-be were, in the services, precisely the types that are chickenshits external targets, bright Jewish boys like Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.19 When these bright Jewish boys returned home and composed their novels, they remembered everything that had been done to them. In the Jewish war novels of 1948 the authors show how
the culture of chickenshit creates an abusive system where those who do not meet middle- and upper-class white norms become the victims of those who wield the power. Written in the years immediately after the war, these novels delineate the struggles of returning Jewish servicemen as they celebrated their successes as effective fighters, at the same time asserting that the Holocaust and the legacy of American antisemitism meant that they were different from other white Americans. The novels show the complicated push and pull felt by Jewish men who desperately wanted to become part of the American mainstream but who felt the trauma of the Jewish exterminations in Europe and of their own experiences of antisemitism in the military too acutely to simply sweep it under the rug and move on. In this essay I will first discuss the two novels of 1948 set in the Pacific and then the four novels set in Europe. I will follow this with a consideration of critical responses to the novels of the time, showing how these works were viewed in the mainstream press and in the Jewish press. I will then offer a comparative analysis of these works, discussing what they say about how the authors viewed the experience of being a Jewish soldier and the impact it had upon their notions of postwar Jewish life in America. My method of evaluation will primarily be literary, although my contention is that these novels illuminate important cultural trends in Jewish American life after the war. The three main themes that arise in the books that I will discuss are the shift in ideas about masculinity in response to war service, the pervasive antisemitism encountered in the American military and the attempts to come to terms with it, and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as the primary event overshadowing Jewish military service. The Pacific Campaign For Jewish servicemen in the Pacific, Jewishness did not take on the elevated status it did for those serving in Europe, confronting Nazis who wanted to kill them in part because they were Jews. Nevertheless, these novels were written after the war was over and the realities of the Holocaust were becoming known, and those events cast a shadow over the authors descriptions of World War II. The physical landscape of the Pacific contrasts starkly with a European setting. In Europe, things are familiar: there are main roads, towns, churches, locals who might know English. The geography is similar to home. In the Pacific, by contrast, the terrain is utterly foreign,
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fecund and primitive and overgrown; the locals are exotic primitives, in tune with nature and considered childlike; there are no symbols of civilization such as schools, houses of worship, and shops. Not only must the soldier in the Pacific battle the enemy, he must also fight the terrain of a wild jungle landscape filled with deadly insects and malaria, swelteringly hot and difficult to navigate. The landscape takes on its own life as a primitive and deadly force at battle with the modern American war machine.20 The Naked and the Dead Norman Mailer completed The Naked and the Dead in 1948, three years after returning from the Pacific campaign. It appeared in print that same year and was hailed as THE novel of our War. 21 The Naked and the Dead was groundbreaking and is still considered a seminal work of war literature. It challenged the notion that war was a grand event conducted by Hemingwayesque heroes, instead showing it to be a dirty and nasty business that could only be described subversively, using coarse language. (However, in order to impart the profanityladen talk of soldiers and to avoid possible obscenity charges, Mailer used fug throughout the book in place of fuck. 22) The Naked and the Dead presents a gritty, unadorned, and often quite pessimistic view of the armed services generally and specifically of the officers in charge, who are more intent on chickenshit than on protecting their men and winning the war. Using the type of naturalism made popular by James Farrell and John Dos Passos, The Naked and the Dead describes war through a chorus of voices that represent a vast array of American types: the racist redneck, the Mexican with broken English, the weak Jewish intellectual.23 Mailers book paints a portrait of a damaged America, the opposite of the idealized melting pot: here we see disunited platoons riddled with petty hatreds. The book is encyclopedic in scope, seeking to render the full breadth of the internal and external worlds of soldiers at war. The narrative fluctuates between intense and horrific battle scenes and small moments in daily life, depicting the psychological reality of war as one of abrupt shifts between profound and mundane moments. The first section of the novel is about an American counterattack on a Japanese-held island where the enemy is deadly yet nearly invisible. In addition to showing the violence and decay of the battlefield, Mailer also offers lyrical descriptions that imbue the terrible landscape with a dark and haunting beauty. The second part of The Naked and the Dead shifts from a general portrait of the invading Americans
to an account of a single reconnaissance missions terrifying foray into the jungle. Mailer based the account in part on an eight-day patrol he had heard about while serving in the Philippines.24 Mailer highlights the catastrophic effect of antisemitism on Jewish servicemen in the experiences of his central characters, Roth and Goldstein. Although Roth and Goldstein evince traditionally negative Jewish stereotypes such as fearfulness and a lack of physical prowess, they also have a range of qualities that are positive in comparison to some of the brutal warriors with whom they serve: extreme empathy, intellectualism, fairness, and honesty. Moreover, nearly alone of all the characters, Roth and Goldstein have loving wives and stable families to whom they want to return. In contrast, for the non-Jewish soldiers women are viewed as those they abuse and who abuse them. 25 Mailer uses two Jewish characters to give readers a full picture of the complex questions faced by Jewish American soldiers: How is one to live and work with fellow soldiers who are often antisemitic? How to be friends with members of ones platoon when they come from vastly different cultural worlds? Is it better to ignore antisemitism for the unity of the troops or to fight back? What is the relationship between Jews and other ethnic groups, such as Mexican Americans? How does one define positive masculinity when ones culture stresses intellectualism rather than traditional Anglo-American physicality? Mailer delves into these questions with Roth and Goldstein, who find different means of fitting into combat culture. Roth ends up making a catastrophic choice. During the reconnaissance patrol, he is continually belittled by the Irish Catholic antisemite Gallagher for being a weak Jew. The sensitive Roth snaps after being called too cowardly to leap across a large crevice. Attempting to prove to the others that he is a tough soldier, Roth tries to jump across the gap, falls into the crevice, and dies. Roths suicidal leap is based directly on the experience of Mailers best friend, Meyer Marotznik, during their training at Fort Bragg. Mailer described the incident in great detail in a letter to his wife, Bea, on April 26, 1944. Meyer, who was physically unfit and had a bad knee, was the victim of continual abuse from their antisemitic drill sergeant, and like Roth, he finally broke, jumping off a nine-foot fence into a pit after his sergeant egged him on. Mailer describes what ensued:
The Sergeant rushed up worried, because it looked as if Meyer had broken his leg. My God, man, why did you jump? Who told you to? I didnt mean you should, the Sergeant said. Meyer didnt answer. He opened his tired eyes for a moment and smiled, the wise Jew smile at having
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confounded the Goy, shown him something he didnt know. Later he got up and crawled at a minutely small pace, his right knee wrenched, his left ankle sprained. But victorious.26
In Meyers case, jumping the fence is a means to enact revenge on the antisemite; he survives the leap to enjoy the effect of his brave but foolish act. In the novel, Roth also leaps in response to the belittling of an antisemite, but he is unable to enjoy his revenge. Letting Roth live would not have created the necessary turning point in the narrative, and so Mailer transforms him into the neurotic, secular Jew who lacks faith and is therefore unable to achieve his own salvation. But his death also takes on Christological elements, allowing for the redemption of others, particularly Gallagher, who becomes a better man afterward. Goldstein, by contrast, seeks out a different solution. Where Roth kills himself while attempting to be a tough guy, Goldstein instead befriends a poor Arkansas farmer, Ridges. This matches Mailers own experience in the army, where his best friend was a working-class Protestant GI from Arkansas, Francis Irby Gwaltney.27 Perhaps Mailer wanted to show that the friendship between Goldstein and Ridges, like his own with Gwaltney, is an effective means of fighting antisemitism, since in Mailers case Gwaltney often stood up for him against Jew-haters. The Naked and the Dead had a huge influence on American war writing.28 It was the first of the 1948 novels to appear, and in many ways it set the stage for the literature that followed. It focused on the dark underside of war service, used gritty language to convey that reality, treated the armed services as a symbol for America in general, explicitly focused on extensive antisemitism and racism in the military, challenged traditional concepts of the enemy, and at the end sacrificed the Jewish soldier for the good of the platoon. An Act of Love The second 1948 novel about the Pacific, Ira Wolferts An Act of Love, also covers the battle between the Japanese and the Americans for an imaginary South Pacific island during the final stages of the war. Where Mailers novel revolves around a disparate group of Americans, Wolferts work centers on events in the life of Harry Bruner, a twenty-fiveyear-old Jewish lawyer from Newark, New Jersey, who is stranded on a Pacific island after his submarine sinks. Initially he is nursed by the natives, but once recovered, he leaves them to live with an expatriate American farming family, the Andersens, and falls in love with their nineteen-year-old daughter, Julia. Harry remains with them for many
months, until the Americans send a reconnaissance mission to the island in preparation for an invasion to drive out the Japanese. After declaring his love for Julia, Harry leaves to assist the Americans. In the final section of the book, Harry undertakes a terrifying mission into the jungle to try to root out a Japanese unit. He acts heroically, staying behind to find a missing American major rather than rescuing himself by turning back. When he finds the majors corpse next to that of a Japanese soldier, Harry realizes that the major killed the last Japanese holdout and that the battle is over. In an act symbolizing Harrys new faith in a universal humanity, he secretly buries the two together under a sign that reads Here Lies Major Munday & His Bro. in Arms Who Was Known Only in Love. 29 The novel ends with the Americans winning and the Japanese retreating. Harry does not practice Judaism; nevertheless, his Jewishness is the most important factor in his self-definition and an aspect of his selfhood with which he continually grapples. His intense awareness of his Jewishness is brought on by the rise of Hitler and by the increased xenophobia in America during the Great Depression, which makes him realize that he was a member of a hated minority. Harry, however, discovers that he can only come fully into his own when he discards his Jewish particularity, embracing the world as a universal member of it and successfully wooing the (Christian) girl, Julia. In both The Naked and the Dead and An Act of Love , Jewish soldiers face antisemitism in the platoon, which requires them to work harder and be braver than their fellow soldiers. This experience causes the Jewish combatants to have a different take on the Japanese enemy, as Harry illustrates in An Act of Love when discussing how he viewed the war before his enlistment:
Harry was not a political youth. He had hated Hitler and the Nazis as a Jew rather than as a man who knows the world is one. But he knew nothing about the Japanese except that he did not like the people who were in the van of propaganda against them. The big mouthed Yellow Peril, White Mans Burden boys, those who hated the Japanese for Country Club reasons....Harry felt these Americans were stronger enemies of his than the Japanese could ever be.30
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The Jewish soldier views the Japanese as a fellow member of a mistreated minority group. Most of the propaganda efforts in America had been directed toward portraying the Japanese as subhuman, with Germans often viewed as distant European cousins. These novels thus overturned American typecasting of brave soldiers as blond Anglos,
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Japanese as animal-like demons, and Nazis as sharing the blood of white Americans.31 In the Jewish reconfiguration, the brave soldiers are Jewish, the Japanese are fellow minorities, and the Nazis are subhuman monsters. Considering the widespread dehumanization of the Japanese enemy in America during the war, both Ira Wolfert and, to a lesser extent, Norman Mailer created groundbreaking portrayals of the Japanese. In An Act of Love, Wolfert made his boldest statement against the anti-Japanese racism so prominent in America by having his protagonist bury a Japanese soldier with an American major as brothers. And when Mailer portrays the soldier Croft casually shooting a Japanese captive who is begging to be spared so that he can return to his family, he rehumanizes the enemy and shows the easy yet brutal racism that was a part of a soldiers life. In both cases, the Japanese are shown to be as human as the Americans, a challenge to all forms of hatred. This is also a reminder that the Jewish soldier does not easily fall victim to American efforts to make the Japanese into devils, since Jews of the time acutely understood the legacy of propaganda-inspired hatred. The European Campaign The four best-selling 1948 war novels set in the European theater The Young Lions, That Winter, The Crusaders, and The Wine of Astonishment cover events such as D-Day, the liberation of Paris, and the Battle of the Bulge and offer a specifically Jewish American take on the events in Europe. This is evident in the fact that all the novels culminate in the liberation of Dachau. Until that moment, the Jewish American soldier in each novel struggles to fit into a platoon riddled with antisemitism. Upon coming into contact with the dead and dying Jews of Europe in the camp, the soldier labors to redefine his Jewishness. Jewish writers believed that the war was justified because the Germans were intent on killing them; they therefore did not challenge the larger aims of the war in their writings. Instead, what they could and did critique, from a Jewish perspective, was how Americans performed in battle. Though the war was good, the way in which it was conducted needed to be reformed, much as America as a country needed to improve in its treatment of its minorities. Because most of these novels are currently virtually unknown, I will briefly discuss the plots of each before moving on to an analysis of the important trends in the Jewish war experience that the novels delineate.
The Young Lions Irwin Shaws The Young Lions revolves around three main characters: the sensitive, recently married young Jewish father Noah Ackerman; the sophisticated yet restless Hollywood player Michael Whitacre; and the Nazi who in the final scene kills Noah. The Nazi is named Christian, suggesting that a larger battle is being played out between the Jew and the whole of European civilization. World War II is the connective thread between Noah, Michael, and Christian, disparate individuals who normally would not have come into contact with one another. Noah enters boot camp a weak intellectual, toughens up after a series of fights with antisemitic fellow soldiers, and once in Europe is a heroic leader of men. Nevertheless, after guiding his men bravely and risking his life numerous times, rather than being congratulated he hears a fellow soldier, Rickett, state, [O]h, Christ, we still got the Jew.32 In reaction, Noah dissolves into a mere shell of himself, and with his spirit broken, his potential to be a great leader is undermined. As in The Naked and the Dead , antisemitism is a major force impelling the actions of the main characters, causing repercussions in their lives just as profound as those of the war itself. At one point, when Americans mistakenly fire on him in Germany, we read: This will be the final thing the Army will do to me, Noah thought, it will kill me itself. It wont trust the Germans to do the job.33 The book culminates with the liberation of Dachau, where the extermination of the Jews is described explicitly:
The men in the trucks fell quiet as they drove up to the open gates. The smell, by itself, would have been enough to make them silent, but there was also the sight of the dead bodies sprawled at the gate and behind the wire, and the slowly moving mass of scarecrows in tattered striped suits who engulfed the trucks and Captain Greens Jeep in a monstrous tide.34
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Shortly after viewing the camp, Noah is killed by the Nazi soldier, Christian, while he is walking in the forest nearby. His friend Michael responds by hunting down and shooting Christian. That Winter That Winter, by Merle Miller, is a fast-paced accountwithout chapter breaksof three men who have just returned from war and who are spending their first winter back in New York. These include Lew, who
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has become so insecure in response to antisemitism both while growing up and while in the army that he legally changes his last name from Colinsky to Cole in order to marry his antisemitic Catholic girlfriend, Jane Walker. The search for a good life in postwar America ends in dramatically different ways for each of the three central characters. Ted, suffering from post-traumatic stress and alcoholism, shoots himself; Lew gives up on his writing career and returns to Los Angeles to run the family jewelry business; and Pete, after the death of his father, quits his job and heads to Mississippi to visit the widow and children of the friend whose death he believes he is responsible for. Where Lew chooses to retrench himself in his Jewish family despite the fact that the decision terrifies him, Pete sets out on a quest to find himself. Miller later said that while he was writing That Winter and getting it published, he chose to marry a woman in order to pretend that he was as straight as the next man.35 Lews decision to hide his Jewishness by marrying a Catholic mimics Millers own attempt to hide his homosexuality through heterosexual marriage. (And as with Lew, Millers sham relationship quickly fell apart.) As in the other novels under discussion, the Holocaust as depicted in That Winter is centered on the liberation of Dachau, where Lew meets a Polish boy whose parents and two sisters have been killed there. The boy kisses Lews hand when he discovers that Lew is a fellow Jew. This act has a profound effect on Lew, as he realizes that he is more tied to the Jews of Europe than to his fellow American servicemen. As Miller depicts it, the antisemitism of Europe is connected to that of America, much as Shaw described it in The Young Lions. In both books, the Jewish soldiers encounter the same terrible smear: [O]ne of the [enlisted men] said there was one thing about the Germans. They had some pretty good ideas about the Jews. When the soldier who asserts this finds Lew crying, he declares, [T]hat was the trouble with the Jews. Always feeling sorry for themselves.36 That Winter is a returning Jewish servicemans reworking of the themes made popular in the 1946 Academy Awardwinning film The Best Years of Our Lives, which was also about returning soldiers trying to fit back into American life. Miller gives us a specifically Jewish take on returning servicemen by delineating how the return home was especially difficult for Jewish soldiers because of the American legacy of antisemitism.
The Crusaders The Crusaders, by the German American author Stefan Heym, is a historical novel based on Heyms experiences as a member of the US Army counterintelligence unit nicknamed the Ritchie Boys. The story begins after the invasion of Normandy, covering the group as they make their way to Paris and fight in the Battle of the Bulge; it ends with their attempts to bring order and de-Nazify Germany in the months after the war. The main protagonists are the German Jewish American Sergeant Walter Bing and Lieutenant Yates, a professor of German studies from the United States. The novel also covers the liberation of the Paula camp, a German concentration camp where experiments were conducted on prisoners. The sadistic treatment and mass murder of the prisoners is described explicitly. When the American soldiers, overwhelmed by the horror that they are witnessing, begin to hunt down and lynch SS members, they are reprimanded and told that [t]herell be justice, in due time, and by the proper authorities. Therell be no more lynching. Were not Nazis; were fighting for something better.37 Yet in Heyms work, nothing is black and white, and to counter this idealistic vision, Heym describes how the senior officer, General Farrish, is more focused on having press photos of himself taken with the inmates than on procuring food for them. The book ends optimistically with the Americans kicking some corrupt Germans out of a local estate to make it into a home for displaced persons. Bing, like the other Jewish soldiers in the 1948 novels, dies prematurely, killed by friendly fire in the final stages of the war. As in The Young Lions, when Michael must reckon with the death of Noah, Bings death is a sacrifice for the greater good and leads the Christian protagonist, the intellectual David Yates, to try to become a more honest and ethical person. The other Jewish character, Abramovici, is an eastern European who has escaped the Nazis. He is the only character in the novel who acts in a Jewish manner, reciting the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over the spot where Bing has been killed. Only through death does Bing become Judaized. The Wine of Astonishment Although the final novel, Martha Gellhorns The Wine of Astonishment ,38 did not make it onto the New York Times best-seller list in 1948, it sold enough copies to generate a second printing the following year. Of the six popular war novels of 1948 discussed here, The Wine of Astonishment offers the most explicit, brutal account of the European [83]
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campaign. Martha Gellhorn was a war journalist who made her way to the front lines of many important battles (at times without a press pass). She was so good at her job that her husband, Ernest Hemingway, was deeply resentful of her.39 Though her reporting style bore many similarities to Hemingways, their subjects differed. Gellhorns aim was to show the true evil of the Germans, even if it meant abandoning neutrality in her reportage.40 Although raised with minimal connection to her Jewishness, Gellhorns firsthand experience of Dachau made her reaffirm the importance of that aspect of her identity.41 Moreover, it convinced Gellhorn that it was necessary to witness and report on the Holocaust, and she followed her time at Dachau with visits to Belsen and Ravensbrck.42 The Wine of Astonishment was rooted in Gellhorns own experiences traveling with American troops from the Battle of the Bulge to Dachau.43 The plot focuses on Private First Class Jacob Levy during the battle for the Hrtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge and on his love affair with a Christian waitress, Kathe. Levy is a driver for a series of officers, and his work ethic makes him well liked in spite of the fact that he is Jew. The book culminates with Levy going to see the liberation of Dachau. Gellhorn gives us an extremely detailed account of how the Germans abused and killed the Jews.44 As Giovanno DellOrto has shown, Gellhorns novelistic account of Dachau corresponds to the descriptions in her journalistic dispatches, as her main aim in both was to convey the realities of the camp accurately.45 This journalistic approach may explain why the novels descriptions are so explicit, lengthy, and horrifying. Gellhorn does not shy away from anything, describing in detail the medical experiments conducted on live prisoners; the full processes of gassing and cremation; the details of the dying, skeleton-thin survivors; and the piles of corpses every where: On the right was the pile of prisoners, naked, putrefying, yellow skeletons. There was just enough flesh to melt and make this smell, in the sun. The pile was as high as a small house.46 After seeing the reality of Dachau, Levy spots a group of German civilians and is so overwhelmed with anger toward them that he plows his car through the group, killing three. Afterward, in the hospital, Levy, who has been hiding his religion by using a false name, asserts over and over again, to anyone who will listen, that he is Jewish. He writes a letter to his Christian girlfriend, Kathe, and signs it with his real name in large, capital letters, showing the entire world, including his beloved, that he is Jewish and proud of it. Dachau is for Levy, and for Gellhorn as well, the point of no return, after which nothing is the same and he must act or die.47
The Impact of Dachau The novels about the European campaign explicitly depict life in the Nazi death camps and show how coming into contact with them affected the Jewish soldier. The descriptions read almost like journalistic, firsthand reportage rather than novelistic discourse, because the authors preferred the verisimilitude of a journalistic account in order to convince a potentially skeptical reading public that this horror had indeed happened. The books were a means for Jewish authors to disseminate the news to as wide a readership as possible. The works also document the manner in which seeing the Nazi camps firsthand forever transformed the Jewish American soldier. We see this most emblematically in The Wine of Astonishment when Levy, who starts the war an innocent, assimilated Jew wanting only to be left alone, ends the war murdering German civilians, even though peace has been declared, and wishing that he could kill more. He will never be the same, and he will never feel safe again, even in America. In all the novels, even those composed by authors who did not enter Dachau after its liberation, the description of the extermination camp serves two functions. First, the authors are documenting the horrific realities of the Holocaust for a broad American readership. Second, seeing the camp becomes a type scene that delineates the moment when the Jewish soldier must reckon with his particular status.48 The description of Dachau that most mimics the explicit and lengthy one found in Gellhorns novel appears in Irwin Shaws The Young Lions. The two were good friends, and it is possible that Gellhorn shared her experiences with Shaw. When confronted with the multitude of dead and dying in the Nazi camp, Noah at first suppresses his emotions, only breaking down after his senior officer, Captain Green, allows a rabbi to conduct a service for the survivors, against the wishes of an Albanian Christian political prisoner who does not want it to take place. The captains actions show him to be the ideal American, able to do the fair and good thing, to challenge antisemitism, and to stand up for what is right. Noahs faith in America returns. Although these novels all have Jewish authors, events in them are presented from a paradigmatically American angle. The starting point of the Holocaust is the moment when the US army divisions liberate the camps in April 1945. The end point is when the Jewish soldier finds a means to reconcile this moment with his view of himself as a Jew and as an American. In these novels, written so soon after the war, there is as yet no suitable term to describe the extermination of the Jews, no Final Solution [85]
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or Holocaust or Shoah. Instead, what we have is Dachau or concentration camp. In the two novels by journalists, perhaps reflecting the authors nonfictional approach, the Nazi camp is specifically called Dachau. In these novels, the individual Jewish soldiers encounter with the Nazi camp is a symbol for a general awakening to what the Nazis did to the Jews. Moreover, at this early stage, when the extermination of the Jews had not been broadly described as an event unique to World War II or given the label Holocaust, it is still understood as one aspect of the war that the Allied victory has managed to stop. Thus Levy describes it in The Wine of Astonishment :
He thought that the war was a good thing and he would write and tell Poppa so. They did not make the war because of Dachau; if they had, he would certainly have heard about Dachau long ago. But in the end, they reached it. And the S.S. guards were there, piled up dead in a mound and their dogs were dead. So the war was a good thing.49
In The Wine of Astonishment , The Young Lion s, and That Winter, the camp also symbolizes that this is a specifically Jewish tragedy, with Jews as the main victims of the Nazis. The exception is Stefan Heyms The Crusaders, in which, perhaps because of his socialist, universalist orientation, the camps are populated by a range of victims. The Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe also had a profound impact upon how the authors viewed the Jews who were fighting to create a new homeland in Palestine in 1948. For writers such as Martha Gellhorn and Irwin Shaw, the fictional protagonists Jacob Levy and Noah Ackerman represent idealized Jewish warriors who fight for their people, destroy their enemies, and define their Jewishness in terms not of culture or faith but rather of action, a tough response to victimization. In both cases, the Jewish American soldier fighting the Nazis is linked to the Jewish soldier in Palestine fighting the Arabs. After the war, Gellhorn and Shaw, like many left-wing, secular American Jews, became strong supporters of Israel, feeling deep pride in the Jewish state that they saw as the only positive outcome of the Holocaust. The four novels together stressed that in postwar memory, the military battles of World War II must not overshadow the Nazi death camps. Germany was the enemy not only because it was at war with America but also, and perhaps more important, because it was at war with the Jews. The European theater brought soldiers into landscapes not only where military campaigns were being undertaken but also where extermination camps were operating. These novels were an insistent reminder to
the mainstream reading public that the exterminations of the Jews must be remembered and not sublimated to the general military campaign in the European theater. Critical Responses The question whether or not these novels accurately represented the levels of antisemitism encountered in the US military was dealt with in varied ways by the mainstream press. This is shown most emblematically in responses to The Young Lions, the novel that portrays the US military as riddled with antisemitism. All the major New York papers the Herald Tribune, the New York Sun , and the New York Times wrote highly positive reviews, with the New York Times critic Marc Brandel asserting that Shaws description of the savagely anti-Semitic Southern regiment is one of the most moving and eloquent pleas for decency and justice in any recent novel this reader has come across.50 In stark contrast, Time described the novel as having failed and ripped apart Shaws portrait of antisemitism in the military. Though recognizing a moving description of Noahs pain at coming across anti-Semitism in the army, the reviewer claimed that the novel quickly collapses into a completely incredible bit of hocus-pocus. The unnamed critic ended by stating that [w]hile there was antiSemitism in the Army, it never resembled Shaws paranoiac version of it.51 The longest review, by Diana Trilling in the Nation , is, as far as I have found, the sole review by a Jewish critic to gloss over Shaws extensive treatment of antisemitism in the military.52 The Jewish press responded to the manner in which the Jewish soldier was depicted in the war novels from a range of fronts. Harold Ribalow, in his 1949 essay The Jewish GI in American Fiction, disparages the portrayal of Jewish soldiers, who are united by the fact that they
never apparently saw the inside of a synagogueand dont want to. They eat oysters and ham. They have no Jewish education to speak of. They seldom discuss Judaism or Jewishness in any reference other than antisemitism, or how being a Jew instills in them a feeling of alienation....In a word, these characters are indistinguishable from other Americans, but because of the label Jew are not always accepted by other Americans. 53
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Ribalow finds it extremely problematic that these novels do not describe soldiers who embrace Judaism and, like novels by Christian
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writers, portray their Jewish characters merely as alienated minorities. He would prefer that the authors instead share with their readership some of the rich cultural and religious legacy of Jewish life. Ribalow was not alone in his condemnation. Jewish critics, particularly in Commentary, decried the trend of appealing to an Anglo readership by depriving Jewish protagonists of positive Jewish aspects. For instance, Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler both wrote caustic pieces on the deracination of Jewishness in Shaws The Young Lions (in contrast to mainstream critics, who loved the book).54 Kazin hated the contrived nature of the novel, its heavy-handed and stereotypical portraits, and Shaws apparent powerless[ness] to indicate any subtle shading within a character.55 Moreover, he found Shaw to be a muddled thinker who wrote about antisemitism in the military in such a way as to manipulate the emotions of his readers without fully understanding the ramifications of creating Jewish characters like Noah, who die simply to redeem the Christians. We find the same criticism in Isa Kapps review of An Act of Love, in which he admonishes Ira Wolfert for having made Harry Bruner into a Jew not so much in experience or aspiration as in the violated spirit; the anti-Semite makes him.... Thus, his neurotic life is the only life he has, and it constitutes his Jewishness.56 Although the reviews of An Act of Love in the mainstream press were also extremely negative, critics hated it for other reasons.57 The depiction of Harrys Jewishness by Wolfert was clearly only a concern for critics in the Jewish press. In contrast to the Jewish critics who noted the absence of positive portrayals of Judaism and bemoaned the fact that the soldiers were more American than Jewish, the well-known Anglo-American critic John W. Aldridge, in his influential 1951 book, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars, argued that the Jewish soldiers in these books are far too Jewish:
Yet the Jewish character in three of the new novels of the war and the aftermathThe Naked and the Dead , The Young Lions , and That Winter is distinguished by his Jewishness only; and in the last two novels, that one quality so distorts the authors perspective that it forces the character to act in a way that is inconsistent with reality and with human nature. 58
For Aldridge, the troubles of Jews and other minorities (he likens them throughout to Negros and Homosexuals) are simply minor issues that are not central to the meaning of this age.59 These varied responses shed light on the real tensions felt in the late 1940s and into the 1950s about how to view the Jews in America.
For many Jewish critics, an authentic portrait of the Jewish experience should consider the religious and cultural aspects of being a Jew. In contrast, Aldridge views Jews as similar to African Americans and asserts that in order to present them as more than cardboard figures, writers must downplay discrimination to show the Jews universal characteristics.60 In fact, for Aldridge it is impossible to imagine minority characters existing for any other reason than to be literary devices manipulating readers with irrelevant dramas. The idea that writers might use these characters for more than literary reasons, in order, for instance, to shed light on the poor treatment of minorities in America and to give voice to the realities of their daily lives, never enters Aldridges discussion. A comparison of the war novels, where Jewishness is primarily linked with antisemitism, to letters sent home by Jewish soldiers in fact reveals a significant difference between how soldiers actually viewed their Jewishness and how the authors described it.61 In the letters, Jewish connotes a range of positive aspects: shared meals during the Jewish holidays, attendance at religious services with fellow Jewish soldiers, yearning for Jewish food, longing to see ones rabbi, and so on. Even if we grant that internal and external censorship of the letters may have in part caused the soldiers to focus on nostalgic and warm remembrances of Jewish family life while avoiding discussions of antisemitism, nevertheless there is a clear and persistent theme that Jewish soldiers see their Jewishness in a positive light and long to partake of all its facets. This was further evident in a Yiddish writing contest held in 1946 at YIVO, where Jewish soldiers were asked to submit essays entitled My Experiences and Observations as a Jew in World War II. There were 52 submissions, and according to the judges of the contest, The most important statement made by almost all of our contestants is that they all came back from the war with a feeling of pride in their Jewishness, with an awakened interest in Jewish life and with a readiness to carry out actively certain Jewish responsibilities.62 Granted, an essay contest would likely reflect self-selection by those seeking to write on the topic for a Jewish organization; nevertheless, the essays bespeak the cultural shift toward pride in Jewishness in response to service. Yet by 1948, all six authors chose to reject a fully explicit expression of Jewishness and to create characters who merely exemplified the struggle against antisemitism. The Jewishness of the characters was therefore reduced to nothing more than victimhood, which Jewish critics found to be troubling. While reducing their characters Jewishness, the authors expanded and shifted the definition of masculinity to take on the characteristics of the exemplary soldier: heroic, strong,
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loyal, tough, physically adept. The heroism and positive masculinity of the Jewish soldier was to be a challenge to the antisemitic charge that Jewish men were weak and cowardly. The novels used reconstructed visions of Jewish masculinity to show American readers that through military service Jewish men have transformed into ideal, strong Americans. A Comparative Analysis Having just risked their lives to fight for the larger ideal of America, returning Jewish soldiers and journalists wrote novels that presented portraits, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, of what it meant to be an American man. The novels not only illustrated troubling divisions in the United States, as symbolized by the antisemitism in the platoons, but also idealized the possibility of a new type of brotherhood, as when Michael Whitacre, for example, risks his life to avenge the death of Noah Ackerman in The Young Lions. Even the officers, bastions of the WASP world from which the Jews were excluded, could change, as is evident in the evolution of David Yates in The Crusaders. In the stress of war, where divisions among the men could lead to their deaths, soldiers had to find a way to work together. This urge to connect with fellow Americans across ethnic and class lines (although African Americans do not come into the picture) often survived the war, as is the case with the three protagonists of That Winter, who discover how deeply bound they are to one another. Although in war, the authors show, the brotherhood in arms is an ideal rather than a reality, upon returning home some try to realize that ideal by establishing new friendships. However, these novels also showed that in the postwar era, Jewish men had few options. Either they could hold on to their ethnic backgrounds as represented by their weak and crippled parents, or they could shed their pasts and be reinvented as new Americans. Like pioneers heading west, the Jewish soldiers returning home often felt themselves to be in a new land. To survive, they needed to keep hold of what they had become as soldiers: tough, brave, and willing to fight for what they wanted. In these novels, the ultimate prize was the Christian wife who accepted the returning Jew as a real American hero. The novels of 1948 illustrate how war service exacerbated many of the challenges of being Jewish, male, and American. Jewish soldiers felt their lives and sense of worth to be at risk not only from the German or Japanese enemy but also from their antisemitic fellow Americans.
Responses included suicide missions to prove oneself, as in The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, and An Act of Love. Other reactions included putting pressure on fellow Jewish soldiers to act appropriately in front of Christians, seeking out friendships with non-Jews as a buttress against antisemitism, and downplaying the endemic hatred of Jews. In all cases, it meant that Jewish soldiers were undergoing two campaigns: to successfully fight the enemy and to survive as a Jew. In all these novels, in fact, the definition of Jewish is almost entirely based on being a discriminated-against member of a minority within a majority white culture. And in two of the books, That Winter and The Wine of Astonishment, the mistreatment of the Jews forces the soldier protagonists to hide their Jewishness by changing their names and living under the false pretense of being Christian. Only after a crisis that shows them it is destructive to hide their true identities do the men proclaim those identities to the women they love. Though these novels may have been influenced by the popularity of the movie Gentlemens Agreement , also about a hidden Jew, they are also part of a larger pattern in Jewish American writing in the immediate postwar years of cloaking Jewish characters in the costume of WASP Anglos.63 This trend reflects the intense pressures that writers encountered as they sought to navigate the postwar literary landscape and felt unable or unwilling to assert explicitly the Jewishness of the world about which they were writing. Hiding ones Jewishness became, for many, a common and acceptable type of assimilation, and when the literature took this form, Jewishness went underground. In the case of the war novels, however, the Jewish character eventually comes out and proclaims his true identity and by so doing seeks to be accepted fully as a Jew. How to account for the great popularity of the books of 1948 with the American public?64 Although there is no historical data on the readers of these novels, we can nevertheless speculate on some possible reasons for their popularity. These works may have been widely read specifically because they were by and about Jews. In the immediate postwar years, the American public became interested in examining, and seeking to come to terms with, its own legacy of antisemitism.65 This was evident in a range of bestselling books about antisemitism in America and in two movies that competed for the Oscar in 1947: Gentlemens Agreement , about a journalist pretending to be a Jew in order to expose antisemitism, and Crossfire , about a Jewish soldier who is brutally killed, possibly because he is both Jewish and gay. Moreover, the founding of Israel in 1948 in the midst of war likely affected the popularity of the
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topic. American readers may have sought out stories about the new trope of the Jewish warrior. The novels set in Europe may also have been popular because they posited the Jewish American soldier as a counterimage to the Jewish European victim of the Nazis. Some may have found it inspiring and refreshing to read about Jewish soldiers who kill Germans rather than being exterminated en masse by them. As Martha Gellhorn notes in The Wine of Astonishment , It was like spitting in the krauts faces for Levy [the only Jewish soldier in the battalion] to survive.66 Intentionally or not, the Jewish American soldier contrasts with the negative stereotype of the passive Jewish victim; America has transformed him from a weak sufferer into a proactive warrior who fights and slays the enemy. The popularity of these books suggests that they were offering a mainstream readership an appealing vision of the American Jew. Where the Jewish soldier proves himself to be hypermasculine, the women in his path become personified as hyperfeminine. As Morris Dickstein notes, in the postwar years, the widespread trope of the fighter edged Rosie the Riveter and other icons of strong working women out of popular consciousness, leading to the dominance of masculine writing with very conservative gender notions.67 Yet in these novels, Jewish authors were responding to patterns of American masculinity and, in some cases, renegotiating them by imbuing them with more sensitivity and intelligence. The only flesh-and-blood Jewish woman who appears in any of the novels of 1948 is Lews immigrant mother in That Winter ; the other Jewish mothers and wives exist only in the memories of the Jewish soldiers. Interestingly, however, nearly all the novels have Christian women, most of whom are objects of the Jewish soldiers desire, as central characters. These new Jewish men do not seem to have female counterparts. Although numerous Jewish women served as nurses and support staff during the war, in these novels the Jewish soldiers only come into contact with Christian women. Though the new Jewish warrior was strong and capable, in The Naked and the Dead , The Young Lions, and The Crusaders he had to die, often pointlessly and outside the theater of war, in order to teach non-Jews how to become better men. A Christlike figure, his death purified the landscape and restored humanity. Alfred Kazin noticed this trend in Jewish war novels, asserting that [t]he Jew as the scapegoat and outsider is a perennial theme in our history; but the Jew as militant sacrifice, as the hero of death, impatient of complexity is a new feature.68 For Kazin, the Jewish warriors inevitable death is even more tragic because it symbolizes the universal hatred of the Jews.
Kazin also astutely suggests that the transformation of characters such as Noah Ackerman from the Jew as sensitif, as intellectual into a hypertough hero may be a kind of fantasy revenge for all the Jews who have been flayed, herded, burned in our time. He turns the tables on his enemies; he wins their grudging respect; he shows himself the best damned soldier in the army. 69 The collective fantasizing by traumatized Jews in the wake of the Holocaust thus may have been in part responsible for the ideal Jewish male taking on warrior qualities and may have brought on the literary trend of Jewish soldiers who were not herded but who fought back and were victorious. The Jewish protagonists heroism and subsequent death was another means by which all the novels, even those set in the Pacific, responded to the Holocaust. This may have been an attempt on the part of the authors to transform the portraits of piles of dehumanized corpses of Nazi victims into individual, very human, and beloved Jewish protagonists whose deaths alter the world around them. From a countless slaughter, unnoticed and evocative of nothing, the Jewish American soldiers death brings a range of important results. Conclusion The themes of the six Jewish American novels of 1948 highlight the complex and difficult relationship between Jews and the broader American public in the years right after the war. Though they sought to become part of an American mainstream promised to them in return for their military participation, once back in the States Jewish GIsboth those who wrote and those who populate these novels found little room to negotiate an identity that would allow for public displays of Jewishness. Enlistment brought them into a new world beyond their ethnic enclaves, where they were forced to confront their understandings of what it meant to be an American, a Jew, and a man. All depict different concepts of the enemy than were common in America at the time. In the Pacific novels, the Japanese are fellow members of a minority, objects of white American hatred. In the European novels, the experience of the liberation of Dachau brings the Holocaust home to Americans and reminds them of their own legacy of antisemitism. The Jewish soldier is the tool with which to challenge American readers over their poor treatment of minorities and to remind them that they must take whatever steps are necessary in order to transform the country from an Anglo-dominated culture into one that truly embraces the highest ideals of brotherhood.
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The novels of Mailer, Shaw, Miller, Heym, Gellhorn, and Wolfert delineate how in the postwar years Jewish men felt both a newfound confidence and also the return of many of their prewar fears. The confidence is revealed when the authors make explicit the anti semitism in the armed services; fear becomes evident when the authors have the Jewish protagonist die prematurely or survive by sacrificing any positive Jewish cultural and religious traits. Those set in Europe illustrate the first stage in an attempt to articulate the events of the Holocaust, which as yet had no label, through an American soldiers experience of a Nazi camp. These best-selling novels were therefore crucial in shaping how Americans after the war understood what the Nazis had done: an extermination program enacted specifically against the Jews under the cover of the broader war. It was the Americans, intentionally or not, who finally put an end to it by defeating Germany. They teach their readers that the Nazi slaughter of the Jews must be understood by all Americans as a singularly horrific event. This is shown in The Young Lions when the Nazi camp is first portrayed through the eyes of the Anglo character Michael, who is horrified at what he witnesses there. The expectation is that American mainstream readers will be similarly horrified when reading the descriptions of the Nazi camps and, like Michael, will realize that this was a widespread action against the Jews. The novels thus serve as historical monuments to what happened to the Jews of Europe. All were composed after the war, which meant that their intention was twofold. First, they aimed to draw attention to the unique and specific plight of Jews during the war. This meant showing that antisemitism was endemic in the American military and that, because of this, the experiences of Jewish soldiers were different from and more difficult than those of other soldiers. It also meant highlighting largescale extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Second, the novels sought to engage in cultural work for a postwar, mainstream readership, showing that antisemitism was a German strategy, not an American one, for which there was no room in postwar culture. It also meant demonstrating that Jews had been heroic soldiers and that they were equal to Americas bravest and must now be accepted into mainstream American life. Finally, it meant reasserting pluralism as a basic American value and insisting that all communities, including blacks, Jews, and Hispanics, be valued in postwar life.70 Jewish war novels played a key role in shaping the understanding of postwar Americans both of the events of the war and of how they should treat Jews and others in the coming era.
Notes
1 Statistics quoted in S. C. Kohs, Jewish War Records of World War II, American Jewish Yearbook 47 (1946): 15372; American Jews in World War II: The Story of 550,000 Fighters for Freedom , compiled by the Bureau of War Records of the National Jewish Welfare Board under the direction of Louis I. Dublin and Dr. Samuel C. Kohs, 2 vols. (New York, 1947), 2: 1328; and Jay M. Eidelman, ed., Ours to Fight For: American Jewish Voices from the Second World War (New York, 2003). Thanks to Deborah Dash Moore, Derek Penslar, and Hasia Diner for comments on earlier versions of this essay. 2 The best overview of Jewish American World War II service is Deborah Dash Moores GI Jews: How World War II Changed A Generation (Cambridge, 2004). Another good account of Jewish war service, appearing in conjunction with an exhibition on the topic at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, is Eidelman, Ours to Fight For. 3 See Dash Moore, GI Jews, 30. 4 For a discussion of the impact of the legacy of Jewish weakness on the Jewish GI, see Dash Moore, GI Jews, 2629. 5 See Edward S. Shapiro, World War II and American Jewish Identity, Modern Judaism 10, no. 1 (1990): 7677. 6 Charles Poore, For the Readers Christmas List: A Retrospective Look at the Results of a Prolific Year along Publishers Row, New York Times, Dec. 5, 1948, PR1. 7 The dominance of the five best-selling books about Jewish soldiers is even more surprising when one considers that none of them were chosen as Book-of-the-Month Club Selections, which often had an impact on the best-seller list (in fact, no books by Jewish writers were chosen that year). For the list of the 1948 selections, see Charles Lee, The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (New York, 1958), 18182. 8 By the following year the book was in its second printing. 9 There are numerous critical studies of American war literature, including: James Dawes, The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 2000); John Limon, Writing after War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism (New York, 1994); Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature: 1914 to Vietnam (New York, 1982); Peter G. Jones, War and the Novelist: Appraising the American War Novel (Columbia, Mo., 1976); Peter Aichinger, The American Soldier in Fiction, 18801963: A History of Attitudes toward Warfare and the Military Establishment (Ames, Iowa, 1975); Wayne Charles Miller, An Armed America, Its Face in Fiction: A History of the American Military Novel (New York, 1970); and Joseph Waldmeir, American Novels of the Second World War (Paris, 1969). 10 Gordon Hutners What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920 1960 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009) analyzes the reasons why so many
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best-selling books disappeared from critical and literary studies; see in particular the introduction, pp. 136. 11 See Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 19451962 (New York, 2009). A recent collection of essays expands upon Diners project by challenging the myth of silence in a range of countries; see David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (New York, 2012). 12 Ibid., 376. 13 For a history of the liberation of Dachau, see Robert H. Abzugs Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (Oxford, 1987), 87104. Deborah Dash Moore gives an account of the liberations from the perspective of Jewish soldiers in GI Jews , 200247. 14 As quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys; The Men of World War II (New York, 1998), 342. 15 Ernest Hemingway, Introduction, in Men at War: An Anthology, ed. Ernest Hemingway (1942; repr., London, 1966), 16. 16 This trope of the American soldier suffering fears that he must overcome harks back to Stephen Cranes young Civil War soldier in The Red Badge of Courage (1895). 17 For instance, even Norman Mailer, the most reluctant of the six to claim his Jewishness, enlisted as a means to oppose Hitler. See Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography (New York, 1991), 28. 18 Central works illustrating this trend include Richard Polenberg, The Good War? A Reappraisal of How World War II Affected American Society, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100, no. 3 (July 1992): 295322, and Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, 1994). 19 Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford, 1989), 81. 20 James Micheners Pulitzer Prizewinning collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), established the literary trend of drawing the landscape of the Pacific theater of war as a mixture of the exotic and the horrible, the beautiful and the terrifying. 21 See Louise Levitas,The Naked Are Fanatics and the Dead Dont Care, New York Star, Aug. 22, 1948, p. 3. David Dempseys review in the New York Times labeled it the most ambitious novel to be written about the recent conflict...[and] the most ruthlessly honest, and Orville Prescott described it as the most impressive novel about the Second World War that I have ever read; New York Times, May 7, 1948, p. 21. 22 For a discussion of the decision to use fug, see Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York, 1985), 1046. 23 For a compelling discussion of the manner in which Mailer recycled the literary styles of the previous generation and a consideration of how his book compares and contrasts with Jim Joness The Thin Red Line , see Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of
American Fiction, 19451970 (Cambridge, Engl., 2002), 2839. For a consideration of how The Naked and the Dead fits into the genre of American naturalism, see Donald Pizer, Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation (Carbondale, Ill., 1982), 90114. For an analysis of the impact of Dos Passos and Hemingway on Mailer, see John M. Muste, Norman Mailer and John Dos Passos: The Question of Influence, Modern Fiction Studies 17, no. 3 (Fall 1971): 36174. 24 In contrast to the portrayal in The Naked and the Dead , Mailer says of his actual war experience that the recons were always searching for, and never finding, Japanese soldiers. See Norman Mailer, interview by Glenn T. Johnston, Aug. 25, 2004, interview #OH 1560, transcript, University of North Texas Oral History Program, University of North Texas, Denton, Tex., 21, 3233. 25 See Josephine Hendin, Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction since 1945 (New York, 1978), 11824. 26 Norman Mailer, letter to Bea Silverman Mailer, April 26, 1944, container 513.12, Norman Mailer Archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. 27 Rollyson, Lives, 36. 28 According to J. Michael Lennon, the book directly influenced two other popular American World War II novels: James Joness From Here to Eternity (1951) and Joseph Hellers Catch-22 (1961). See J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailers The Naked and the Dead , in American Writers Classics, ed. Jay Parini (New York, 2004), 2: 246. 29 Ira Wolfert, An Act of Love (New York, 1948), 544. 30 Ibid., 180. 31 For a discussion of the standard typecasting, see Fussell, Wartime , 11529. 32 Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (Chicago, 2000), 488. 33 Ibid., 519. 34 Ibid., 646. 35 See Merle Miller, What It Means to Be a Homosexual, New York Times Magazine , Jan. 17, 1971, MM49. 36 Merle Miller, That Winter (New York, 1948), 220. 37 Stefan Heym, The Crusaders (New York, 1948), 532. The German version of the novel, Der Bittere Lorbeer, was also a huge best-seller in East Germany. 38 Gellhorns The Wine of Astonishment (New York, 1949) came out at the same time as her good friend Shaws The Young Lions , and the two competed for readers. See Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn (London, 2003), 310. 39 See Carl Rollyson, Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn (New York, 2001), 16576. 40 See Giovanna DellOrto, Memory and Imagination Are the Great Deterrents: Martha Gellhorn at War as Correspondent and Literary
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Author, Journal of American Culture 27, no. 3 (Sept. 2004): 306. This essay also provides a useful account of the ways in which Gellhorns reporting compared and contrasted with that of Hemingway. 41 See Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn , 284. 42 Ibid., 28485. 43 See DellOrto, Memory and Imagination, 310. 44 For an account of Gellhorns trip to Dachau, see Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn , 28386. For a discussion of how Gellhorn based the novel on her own journalism, see DellOrto, Memory and Imagination, 31012. 45 Ibid., 310. 46 Gellhorn, Wine of Astonishment , 215. 47 Gellhorn, Afterword, in Wine of Astonishment , 330. As Gellhorn notes here, Point of No Return was the title she wanted to give her novel, but her publishers forced her to change it to The Wine of Astonishment . 48 Thanks to Julian Levenson for his useful suggestion of this term. 49 Gellhorn, Wine of Astonishment , 230. 50 Marc Brandel, Three Men in the War, New York Times , Oct. 3, 1948, BR5. 51 The Young Lions, Time , Oct. 11, 1948, p. 40. 52 Diana Trilling, Fiction in Review, Nation , Oct. 9, 1948, pp. 40910. 53 See Harold U. Ribalow, The Jewish GI in American Fiction, Menorah Journal 37 (Spring 1949): 26667. 54 See Alfred Kazin, The Mindless Young Militants: The Hero-Victims of the American War Novels, Commentary 6 (1948): 497501. Leslie A. Fiedler levels an overall attack on Shaw in his essay Irwin Shaw: Adultery, the Last Politics, Commentary 22, no. 1 (July 1956): 7074. 55 Kazin, Mindless Young Militants, 499. 56 See Isa Kapps review, An Act of Love, Commentary 7 (1949): 19899. 57 Typical was the unnamed Time reviewer, who wrote that [t]oward his sad weakling of a hero, whom Wolfert tiresomely philosophizes over, the reader can feel only the sort of minor pity one feels for a sick puppy; Weakling at War, Time , Dec. 27, 1948, p. 25. 58 John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (New York, 1951), 102. 59 Ibid., 104. 60 The two Jewish characters that Aldridge views positively were both created by non-Jewish writers: James Joyces Leopold Bloom and Ernest Hemingways Robert Cohn. These characters are presented as human beings caught up in a concrete human dilemma and not merely as Jews reacting only when the forces of discrimination are in play; Aldridge, After the Lost Generation , 156. 61 The selection of Jewish GIs letters home can be found in Isaac S. Rontch, ed., Jewish Youth at War (New York, 1945). Since these are a selection, handpicked by the editor to be representative of Jewish soldiers, Rontchs own concerns certainly had an impact upon what was
included. For a full discussion of the many ways that war service caused Jewish men to embrace their Jewishness, see Dash Moore, GI Jews. 62 The original essays are housed at Y IVO. The analysis of the contest is given by Moses Kligsberg in Yivo-bleter 3132 (1948). The English translation appears as Moses Kligsberg, American Jewish Soldiers on Jews and Judaism: A Report of a Contest, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 5 (1958): 25665. 63 See Leah Garrett, Just One of the Goys: Salingers, Millers, and Malamuds Hidden Jewish Heroes, AJS Review 34, no. 2 (Nov. 2010): 17194. 64 For instance, The Naked and the Dead sold over 125,000 copies in 1948, selling at a rate of over 8,000 copies per week; The Young Lions sold out six printings of 15,000 each by the end of 1948; and The Crusaders was reprinted in numerous languages, selling millions of copies over the years. 65 For a discussion of the range of best-selling books about antisemitism in America published in 1947 and 1948, see Hutner, What America Read , 24860. Another sign of the interest in the topic was that Jean-Paul Sartres examination of antisemitism, Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), was translated into English in 1948. 66 Gellhorn, Wine of Astonishment , 24. 67 See Dickstein, Leopards , 2425. 68 Kazin, Mindless Young Militants, 499. 69 Ibid., 498. 70 Thank you to Julian Levenson for his illuminating comments on this essay, which I have developed in this conclusion.
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Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948 Author(s): Leah Garrett Source: Jewish Social Studies, Vol.

Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948

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