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The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.1996.0046

1086-3141

Edward S. Shapiro,

Race, History, and American Society

The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity Edward S. Shapiro (bio) Students of contemporary American literature have not been kind to Herman Wouk. In their view, the author of The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, Youngblood Hawke, War and Remembrance, and other novels is a mere storyteller with little feel for language or ideas. Thus Pearl K. Bell’s describes War and Remembrance as a “good-bad book,” bereft of “any daunting complexities of thought, craft, or human behavior,” and suffused with a cloying sentimentality. The novel’s major characters are “preposterous and irritating,” and the book itself “never rises above the sentimental level of best-selling romance.” This volume, she claims, is part of a “sub-literary” genre which serious readers could safely ignore. Bell is particularly put off by Wouk’s praise of “valor, gallantry, leadership, patriotism,” traits which fail to resonate among a current generation aware of the lunacy of all war, including World War II. Bell is correct. Wouk did believe that World War II was a good war won by good men. 1 Even those critical of Wouk’s literary pretensions, however, admit that he is a brilliant military historian of World War II, particularly when recounting the naval history of the war. Bell notes that Wouk frequently provides the readers “a brilliantly evocative account of battle.” Paul Fussell, a veteran of the Pacific Theater of World War II and a professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. For him , War and Remembrance is both a literary disaster and an historian’s triumph. The novel is so “bad” and “embarrassing” that Fussell claims its author was in reality an historian who had been attracted to fiction “by the emoluments now attaching to it and its residuals.” In contrast to the novels of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, Wouk’s war novel “lacks the crucial dimension of the lunatic, the cruel, and the self-destructive.” Fussell balances his criticism of War and Remembrance as a literary work (“trash” and “soap-opera”) with praise for Wouk the historian. As an historian of the war he ranked alongside Samuel Eliot Morison and B. H. Liddell Hart. 2 [End Page 333] Wouk has been a controversial figure within American intellectual circles since the appearance in 1951 of The Caine Mutiny, his Pulitzer Prize winning novel of a mutiny on board a World War II destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific. The mutiny against the insane Captain Queeg is encouraged by Lt. Thomas Keefer, a playwright, budding war novelist, and intellectual. The novel’s conclusion, which defends Queeg, attacks Keefer, and argues that the ship’s officers should have rallied around their captain, startled its readers, who had become accustomed to American novelists describing the military experience as dehumanizing. In Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, for example, the commander of American forces on a Pacific island is a fascist obsessed with power. And in both The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions the United States Army is permeated with anti-Semitism. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. calls The Caine Mutiny “the great anti-intellectual novel, dedicated to the thesis that Keefer, the rootless critic, was a far greater threat to society than Queeg, the mad and cowardly embodiment of authority.” Leslie A. Fiedler agrees: Wouk defends “the whole military, the whole social order in all its smug security.” 3 Wouk’s reputation as an enemy of the intelligentsia and a spokesman for conformity was solidified in 1955 with the publication of Marjorie Morningstar. This novel traces Marjorie’s life from her rebellious teenage years, when she longs to become a “morningstar” and part of New York’s bohemian culture, to her mature years when the morningstar has burned itself out and she is safely ensconced in Mamaroneck with her house, her attorney husband, Milton Schwartz, and her children. Marjorie, Fiedler notes, embodies “hundred per-cent Americanism.” She is “the first fictional celebration of the mid-twentieth century detente between the Jews and middle-class America.” In fact, Wouk’s attitude toward his heroine is one of pathos and ambivalence. The most pitiful aspect of Marjorie’s life, as one of...