Books

“Yisroel” is what Joseph Leftwich calls the first Jewish omnibus which he has edited for the London publishing house of John Heritage. It is of course the first omnibus of Jewish writers, creating in many languages, in the English language, but such anthologies have been published in other tongues.

Limited as it is chiefly to prose fiction, “Yisroel” comes almost to 1100 pages. When Mr. Leftwich was compiling the list of names for inclusion in this “carry-all,” his publisher asked him whether there were any writers who were not Jews, and Mr. Leftwich alludes to the humorous suggestion of Professor Roback that a publication be brought out under the title of “Great Men Who Are Not and Never Were Jews.” Although such is not his intention, this compilation of Mr. Leftwich’s is calculated to make the jingo Jew glow anew with the reflected achievements of more or less contemporary members of his race.

In a foreword to this anthology, and a brilliant one it is, Mr. Leftwich holds out little hope for the jingo Jew, a phrase I use not in a militaristic sense, but as a convenient label for the type of Jew who has a habit of referring all types of achievement to the Jewish strain in the achiever. For Mr. Leftwich believes that even in Jews non-Jewish influences mingle with the Jewish, non-Jewish blood with Jewish, non-Jewish mentality and morality with Jewish, national characteristics with racial. Let us leave it to others to draw knife-like lines of demarcation between peoples and races.

“You cannot draw your frontiers here or there, and have them stay where you have put them. There is everlastingly a process of shifting going on; what was here today is there tomorrow; the air we exhale, others inhale; out of our bones where they are laid to rest new life springs up; there is unceasing action and reaction.”

He suggests a theme contrary to that which the jingo Jew stresses. “Was it Jewish blood,” he asks, that made Angelo and Rembrandt the most Jewish artists the world has had, or Milton the most Biblical poet in literature outside the Bible?” In brief, a man’s work is not drenched with Jewishness because he is a Jew, or a part-Jew, and a man’s work is not necessarily non-Jew because he is a Gentile. The Jewish river, as Mr. Leftwich poetically suggests, feeds the universal ocean into which other rivers also have poured their waters. “Must a great river, always as it flows continuing to be a river, suddenly repent of carrying its waters out to sea and turn and flow back to its source?” Cannot there be identity in the river and the merging of identity with the sea?”

Mr, Leftwich says we can have both, that the Jew may produce as Jew and that he may produce as citizen of the world. On that assumption it is therefore possible for him to include the work of a greater number of Jews than if the limitation were more stringent; it also justifies the inclusion of many Jews in their non-Jewish aspects, including those whose writing’s constitute a disguised repentance and apology for the accident of their birth—evaders of racial responsibility the might be called. Explaining several of the disabilities under which he suffered in compiling this work, Mr. Leftwich tells us:

“Not all writers have short stoies…. Some could not be traced in time. A few were not anxious to be included.” Is that, perhaps, why Fannie Hurst is missing from the American section? By the same token, then, it should be cause for surprise that Edna Ferber is represented. The American section, incidentally, is extremely thin and weak, including only Herman Bernstein, the political Jew; John Cournos, Ludwig Lewisohn, Waldo Frank, the aforementioned Ferber, Thyra Samter Winslow and the decidedly second-rate Anzia Yezierska. Incidentally, the title is unfortunate, for “Yisroel” suggests lamentation and prayer, and there are too many writers whose work suggests rather the boulevard and race evasion.

The names of many of the Jewish writers whose work graces this anthology will come as a great surprise. In the English section, for example, there are W. L. George, Gilbert Frankau and of course G. B. Stern. Leonard Merrick, a superb, if sometimes flashy, short story writer, is missing. Then there are Disraeli, Grace Aguilar, Alfred Sutro, the Zangwill and his brother, Louis, Hannah Berman, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Louis Golding and Cecil Roth.

The German section is richer, meatier, more varied, containing, as it does, work by the great Heine, Nordau, Herzl and, among contemporaries, the late Schnitzler, Jacob Wassermann, Alfred Doeblin, Stefan Zweig, Frank Kafka, Max Brod, Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, Franz Werfel, Ernst Toller and Vicki Baum. For some curious reason, one of the most Jewish of German writers, Neumann, author of that marvelous novel, “Reubeni,” is not included. The inclusion of Miss Baum surprises, for she is not one of those who is eager to publish her Jewishness.

The Yiddish and Hebrew sections constitute the raison d’etre for this compilation. They contribute, in less muddied fashion, the racial note which justifies “Yisroel.” In the Yiddish section we have a selection from the Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln; Rabbi Nachman, Seforim, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, Pinski, Reisen, Sholom Asch, Peretz Hirshbein, Bergelson, Fuchs, Singer and Moysheh Oyved. In the Hebrew division, we have Bialik, Schneuer, A. Reubeni, Tschernichovsky and H. Hazaz.

The French contribution is rather thin, including only selections from the work of Tristan Bernard, Andre Spire, Edmond Fleg, Jean-Richard Bloch, Andre Maurois, Benjamin Cremieux and Joseph Kessel. Vladimir Jabotinsky is in the Russian section, together with An-sky and Babel, while eleven others, in the Dutch and miscellaneous sections, close the volume.

Mr. Leftwich suggests in his introduction the possibility of bringing out a second volume; he has the material for it; all that is lacking are means to make it available to the reading public. As a matter of fact there is a shelf-ful almost in this one book, and too many writers whose essence cannot be communicated in only one story, or sketch. Nevertheless, we are grateful for this token of Mr. Leftwch’s abilities as a master of ceremonies of so crowded a stage as is that on which Jewish expression in letters holds forth.