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Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade (review)

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.0.0077

1086-3141

Tony Michels,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Reviewed by: Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade Tony Michels (bio) Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade. By Alan M. Wald. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiii + 319 pp. Alan Wald has written a fascinating, yet frustrating, book about Communist and pro-Communist writers during the 1930s and 1940s. He focuses mainly on overlooked figures with important exceptions—such as Henry Roth and Arthur Miller—who populated the "substructure" of American literature (237). Unfortunately, Wald does not explain that crucial concept, which forms the rationale for his choice of subjects. Nonetheless, Trinity of Passion offers a vivid tour of writers—mostly [End Page 255] Jews and, to a lesser extent, African Americans—inspired by the anti-fascist cause. Trinity of Passion starts off running with an engrossing discussion of a novel from 1967 called In Black and Whitey. Written by Ed Lacy, an enormously popular novelist considered to have been the creator of the first black detective character, In Black and Whitey tells the story of an African American cop and his Jewish partner, Albert Kahn. Kahn appears to be a sympathetic leftist throughout much of the story, but in the novel's denouement it turns out that Kahn is a racist who intends to ignite a riot in Harlem. Soon thereafter comes a second revelation: Kahn is not actually a Jew, but the son of a former German Nazi Party member. The person who exposes him is a Jewish shopkeeper, whose daughter is active in the civil rights movement. To make this story of race and identity more interesting, Wald explains that the author Lacy was not black, as many individuals (including an editor of an anthology of black writers), have supposed. Lacy is actually a Jew named Leonard Zinberg, a former Communist who began his career writing proletarian literature before moving to pulp fiction after World War II. In a final twist Wald writes that Zinberg was married to a black woman who worked in the office of the Yiddish communist daily Di morgn-frayhayt. The example of Leonard Zinberg highlights several of the book's main themes: the formative influence of communism on a high number of writers; the persistence of radical themes in popular, postwar American literature; the widespread identification of Jewish leftists with African Americans; and the possibility of a left-wing, secular Jewish identity free from what Wald would consider Jewish group chauvinism. Wald pursues these themes over the course of seven chapters, which aim to create a "humanscape": a series of informative minibiographies and plot summaries that "re-create attendant conditions and patterns" and "convey the sweep of a literary and personal life" (xiv). The result is a panoply of intriguing individuals and texts dealing with the Spanish Civil War, Nazi Germany, racism and antisemitism in America, and Marxist literary criticism. Trinity of Passion is replete with biographical details and suggestive ideas. Yet the book's analysis is stunted. This is especially so in Wald's treatment of Jews, Trinity of Passion's major subjects. "Jewish Americans and African Americans were markedly conspicuous in the cultural field," Wald notes in the preface, but offers no explanation as to why this was so and why this was significant (xiii). This failure to follow through on an important point continues throughout the book. In the first chapter on "tough Jews," Wald promises to explain how the problem of masculinity, caused by stereotypes of Jewish physical weakness and cowardice, [End Page 256] shaped novels about the Spanish Civil War. Tempting subheadings like "Jews With Guns" and "Golems and Gimpels on the Barricades" raise expectations. Wald, however, offers only passing observations. Thus, on the penultimate page of the chapter, Wald concludes, "the protagonists in these [Spanish Civil War] novels challenge the popular idea that twentieth-century Jewish American culture primarily carries forward the 'ethic of mentshlekhkayt'" (44). This is a potentially important insight, but it appears as an afterthought without any attempt to engage the relevant scholarship produced by Jewish studies scholars. Wald returns to Jews in two subsequent chapters, but not until chapter six ("The Conversion of the Jews") does he discuss the...