Hemingway Hero in 'Morningstar' Country
WINCELBERG, SHIMON
A Hemingway Hero in 'Morningstar' Country The Strong Hand. By Michael Blankfort. Little, Brown. 317 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Shimon Wincelberg Contributor, "Punch,'' "Commentary,'' "Jewish...
...His unmistakable sympathy for the values of a religious Jewish life in America is weakened again and again by an understanding of it which sounds far too often like undigested research...
...But where Wouk wrote about his West Side Jews with far more knowledge than sympathy, Blank-fort's problem is almost precisely the opposite...
...Later, in the Philippines, Leo has the touching experience of meeting a Jew, living in the jungle, who has not seen another Jew for forty years...
...This is a law which, in view of the millions of Jews recently killed by the Germans, and the missing-in-action fate which aerial and amphibious warfare have made more common than ever, has created some agonizing problems among wives who lack absolute proof of widowhood...
...To Blankfort's credit, he has sought no cheap solution...
...The only trouble with all this is that, while Mr...
...His theology is an odd mish-mash of Reform, Reconstructionism and other hearty compromises, while his sexual conduct is almost as dubious as his taste in women...
...Katy, next day, turns down the bewildered and reproachful Leo's proposal, and soon afterward, for plot reasons if not for love, marries a flier...
...This has unfortunately made it easy for several reviewers to lump the book with Marjorie Morningstar in concluding that perhaps good fiction and what has been presented as an Orthodox Jewish point of view don't mix...
...It is the first Hollywood novel I have read in which the author names his actual studio, confident that, after publication, he will still be persona grata there...
...This solution has long ago been rejected by the Orthodox rabbinate, because of the corrosive effects, psychological and practical, it might have on the stability of Jewish marriage...
...beyond a painful tendency to put religion on a regular-fellow basis through the half-joking use of psychological jargon...
...And so, one day in wartime San Francisco, the author, giving in to Katy's brandy-blurred groping, writes one of those poetic sex scenes and puts them to bed...
...For, after setting up this handsome wooden idol, the narrator proceeds to examine it for feet of clay...
...At this point, more or less, the story begins...
...From this the author draws the curious conclusion: "We [Jews] are kept alive even by a deck of greasy cards to play on a Friday night to sanctify time, to become aware of life...
...Yet, while more than hearsay evidence is obviously required, a Jewish woman whose husband is sincerely assumed to be dead will rarely remain deprived of the right to remarriage, inheritance, etc...
...Though his story might seem designed to create the opposite impression, he himself affirms, at least editorially, that the sanctity of Jewish marriage must not be undermined even by possible injustice to an individual...
...Though basically shy, naive, and content to sermonize only in the most self-deprecating, unobtrusive way, Leo falls in love with the very girl the narrator has been unsuccessfully courting for years...
...Moreover, as the narrator acknowledges, "it was clear that he was not a sportsman with women as she was a sportsman with men worthy of her...
...At this point, the "strong hand" of Jewish law moves in...
...The similarity to Hemingway's magnificently tragic and foolish Robert Cohn ends right here...
...Actually, Blankfort's book hasn't much in common with M.M...
...To me, The Strong Hand had at least one distinction...
...Leo is orthodox in little but name and superficial observance...
...In fact, his story almost appears designed as a preachment for the "conditional divorce" Jewish Conservative groups have proposed to incorporate into the marriage document...
...Katy is an agunah (literally, "tied," an abandoned woman) and, until her husband's death can be definitely established, is not permitted to remarry...
...The law of the agunah appears primarily to have been designed as a safeguard against bigamy for women whose husbands might have deserted them, or whose death was questionable...
...The plot revolves around a young Orthodox rabbi named Leo Berdick, crew-cut and prizefighter-nosed, who "seemed to fill up the office when he came in," and who, at first sight, left the narrator "with an automatic distaste...
...Leo, for all his wry and mildly humorous lines, is an utterly wooden creation, at time boyishly appealing in his unworldliness, at times just irritating in his passive conformity to the author's rigid plot-line...
...There is also a subplot of sorts, involving vague references to Communist party activities in wartime Hollywood, but these are always glossed over with amused detachment...
...Leo and Katy consult with rabbinical authorities, Pentagon brass, a man who might have witnessed the missing flier's death, and Leo's father, a saintly and affecting figure, if at times given to unlikely quotations...
...But by now Katy's conversion to orthodoxy is so sincere that she not only accepts the verdict, she even foregoes an opportunity to circumvent it, and returns to her magazine work, at which she later gets killed...
...Blankfort's technical advisers have kept him clear of literal errors in describing the law of the "tied" woman, his manipulation of it is utterly atypical of contemporary case histories...
...In spite of its shortcomings both as fiction and theology, the book has a good deal of simply and warmly presented material on Jewish observances, and, again in contrast with Morningstar, it is written economically enough not to invite skimming...
...The outcome is a heartbreaking No...
...Katy Waterman is a world-famous magazine photographer, as shadowy as the world-famous sometimes are...
...But, after clearing a number of casual hurdles of time and geography, Katy decides, half-drunkenly, that "it might be fun experimenting with a rabbi, after all...
...Now that her husband, reported missing in action, is presumed dead, she realizes that it was Leo she really loved all along, and the happy pair begin to plan for their future...
...Even the best parts, however, are handicapped by the personality of the narrator, whom the author has chosen to characterize as a humorless, petulant, self-important screen writer, possessed of more than average talent and a self-conscious determination to avoid cliches...
...Leo goes off to war as a chaplain, experiencing a number of unique hallucinations on his way to combat...
...They're a fabulously ill-matched pair from the start, impelled by scarcely more than a kind of sexual curiosity...
...After the war, Katy turns up in New York, where Leo, who clearly has not looked upon another girl since the night of his defloration, is assistant rabbi at a fashionable congregation in "Morningstar" country...
...Reviewed by Shimon Wincelberg Contributor, "Punch,'' "Commentary,'' "Jewish Horizon," "New Yorker" The Strong Hand bears Herman Wouk's jacket endorsement as "an original, daring novel about American Jewry with an affirmative religious note that is startling...
...Less amusing, elsewhere, is the author's naive comparison between Judaism and Communism, in which, you will be glad to hear, Judiasm comes out ahead, because it is more consistent...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 27
