In the Realm of Authors and Literature

Road of Ages. By Robert Nathan. 232 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. We Jews. By George Sokolsky. 304 pp. New York: Doubleday, Doran. $2.50.

These two books have a subtle relationship to each other, although the one is fiction of the most fanciful sort while the other sets out, armed with an imposing array of facts, to slaughter all the fictions that have accumulated about the Jews. The point of relationship lies in the central fact of discrimination against and segregation of the Jews. Both Mr. Nathan and Mr. Sokolsky find this fact uncomfortable; but the one seeks to escape the fact by coating it over with pearly fancies, as an oyster protects itself from a grain of sand, while the other seeks to bludgeon the fact out of existence by sociological, ethnological and economic explanations. Paradoxically enough, I think that Mr. Nathan, of the two, is the more realistic.

Robert Nathan has written a good ten novels, and a good nine of them have assiduously been neglected by the public. Critics have praised them almost without stint, his publisher has promoted them generously, and still the public response has been negligible. The explanation is not hard. Mr. Nathan’s art consists more of what he does not than of what he actually does put down in words.

As he refines his style, he leaves more and more unsaid, casting out a multitude of the slenderest implications and the briefest suggestions. He requires more and more effort, more and more of what Emerson called creative reading, on the part of his audience. Sad fact though it is for a book critic to acknowledge, the American public will not make this effort. It prefers to have all the pabulum of its dreams supplied.

“The Jews were going into exile. Eastward across Europe the great column moved slowly and with difficulty toward the deserts of Asia, where these unhappy people, driven from all the countries of the world, and for the last time in retreat, had been offered a haven by the Mongols. Whole villages marched together, led by their rabbis; and with them walked or rode the remnant of the race, men and women who had once been citizens of all the nations of the earth. They went slowly, for many of them were on foot, and almost all of them had lost their possessions. . . . The new world and the old met and embraced with caution in the shadow of exile. On the roads an entire people moved, drawn from the four quarters of the earth. They were dissatisfied because they were being led to Asia, and not to Palestine. They would have liked to return to Zion, to live a life of glory again. But Jerusalem had been taken away from them, so vital was it to the world’s great empires. In the whole world there was no land poor enough for the Jews. Only the Gobi was offered them; and so to the Gobi they went. But not without many arguments and discussions.”

There, in quotations from the first four pages, you have not only the background, but the entire story of this slender novel. Nathan, with his inimitable ability for selection of detail, does nothing more than sketch in a highlight here, a shadow there, of this gigantic pilgrimage across the face of Europe and Asia.

He plays lightly on the difficulty of language barriers between Jews who do not speak Yiddish. He shows how M. Perez, from the French Bourse, and Mr. Solomon, a London industrialist, bring with them their notions of business, security and comfort, and how they are shattered. He shows how Mr. Alberg, the clothing-worker organizer brings his communism and hatred of the Socialists with him. There is a marriage, a romance, a birth, a death, a riot and frequent skirmishes with the mistrustful peasantry of the lands through which the migrating horde passes.

And in every episode, every twenty-line incident, there are many things left unwritten—things about which the reader must speculate for himself, memories, situations and references which the Jews know only too well. The marriage of the daughter of the Kovnitz Rabbi, the death of Mrs. Blumenthal, and the love of Amanda, a Gentile who followed her Jewish husband into exile, for David Weiss, the young poet, are particularly touching. A delicate and a wistful book, albeit one with but the scantest substance.

Mr. Sokolsky, on the other hand, says too much. He is full of statistics. He bubbles with the names of every Jew who has ever appeared in print in America. His pockets and his files are filled with letters from telephone companies and restaurant chains on personnal statistics and the employment of Jews. In all this mass of evidence the point he is trying to make gets a little lost. He writes, near the end of the book, where it can be taken as his final thought:

“At all times the Jew must have a haven of refuge; he must have a spiritual home. That home can only be Palestine. That, then, is the only feasible solution of the Jewish problem, the spiritual return of the Jew to Palestine, to his God, to his tradition.”

The italics are mine, for it is plain that Mr. Sokolsky is not envisioning any such mass migration as Mr. Nathan describes. He takes the mystical view that the existence of a Jewish Palestine can give Jews all over the world the dignity and pride and forthrightness which years of suppression and persecution have deprived them of. His vilifications are lavished on “Jews that pass,” Jews who deteriorate morally and mentally in trying to escape their Jewish blood. His praise is for Jews, whether Orthodox or not, whether religious or not, who have acknowledged their heritage and earned the respect of the community. His most interesting chapter is his summary of statistical research on the role of the Jews in the United States from pre-Revolutionary times down. All that, however, fails to clarify the main point of the book. For no sooner has Mr. Sokolsky stated the need for a spiritual home in Palestine than he makes this strange remark: “Practical problems will be worked out if the Jew avoids political nationalism.” Surely Mr. Sokolsky would have his spiritual home be more than an escapist dream?