AN ETUDE IN EROTICISM

...Professional writers, however, do not learn to write by following the development of the novel, inquiring into its sesthetics, emulating famous styles and methods of narration...

...Whether Mr...

...the unobtrusive introduction of theology, ethics, religious mores, repentance (the amount of space given to this topic reflects, of...

...The wsr which ended little mors than 'a year ago, has already faded into v history...

...WhAT a slick book this isl Its author Is a newspaperman and propagandist who knows his business...

...Tho result is a study of a woman's overweening sexual attraction for s man and its evil consequences...

...And there Is one crucial queatlon which remains unansweredt- Just where doel the author of this book stand...

...And I think it will be found that their taste will call for somewhat lea...

...M. E...

...It is true, as the dust jacket says (in a gingered-up version of Dr...

...mainly in the imaginations of critics, and have little correspondence in reality anywhere else.'' • * * Although Cain sees no relationship between his novels and those of other writers who use the same method of terse, first-person, over-simplified narration, he does choose to evaluate his own "small morality tale" by comparing it to Hemingway's novels, terming hbvfictions "a foothill" beside Hemingway's "Matterhorn of literature...

...The professionals attempt to earn a Urine...

...But, if one thinks about the matter, it is hard to believe that for so long a time ("eighteen centuries of Jewish life and thought") any literature could be so obsessively preoccupied with eternity...

...He was a close friend and disciple of the most striking figure in the group, Franz Rosenzweig...

...The Midrash, however, is aphoristic...

...In this book, though, the criminal enterprise is only an incident in the story and carries little narrative force...

...But it is the character of Kady which is of greatest interest She is both madonna and prostitute—good in that she is a mother, bad in that she is a harlot and welcomes the advances of her "father...

...Originally a journalist, he learned to write mechanically, seeking and finding the tricks of the trade...

...In Cain's previous books one of the main themes has usually been the attraction of a woman...

...James M. Cain is such an author...

...All the other characters are two-dimensional...

...Jess does not recognize her as his daughter and is sexually attracted to her at first sight...

...It must be said that this task is considerably easier for the prophetic books of the Bible than for Midi-ash and other post-Biblical literature...

...Prophetic poetry relied largely on parallelisms of imagery in balanced strophe and antistrophe, and also on assonance...

...porter'n inside story...

...A Jewish Reader...

...But, unfortunately, some of the blame lies with the writer who often either wants his notions misrepresented or is quite unconscious of the difference between craft and art...

...He knows his business so well that he covered Washington for the Japanese news agency Domcl, wrote Tokyo propaganda broadcasts for American consumption, and has now produced a book on wartima Japan which has everything a United States audience could possibly aak for...

...and a system of close translation is bound to become diffuse and appear inflated and orotund in comparison with •¦the original...

...Of course," the pathos of Jewish writings is not entirely submerged in the anthology...

...2.75...

...226 pages...

...and the polished fidelity ot these translations, however much they may compare with the writ of the original, falls harmoniously into the-style of "grand" writing) _:_!_1__._ ________ which sounds especially fitting for Judaic literature in English...

...And still* something Is missing...

...2.75...

...Jewish literature is at once more opulent and more crabbed, sweeter and bitterer than this bland and mellow distillation...

...The best thing, of course, would be if Sehoeken would undertake te translate the two volumes, of Bialik and Rabnitzky's Aggddah, as a start...

...He learned to write by sitting at the feet of two significant litersry figures: Gertrude Stein and.Sherwood Anderson...

...The translations, most of which were done by Olga Marx, follow the method worked out by Buber^ and Rosenzweig for their German rendering of the Bible...

...The anthology covers nationalists and mystics, poets and scientists and lawyers...

...Cain is careful in this preface to define the "love-rack"—he includes a long example of how a bit of dramatic action can be pointed up by its use, can force the reeder to identify himself with the character...

...Technique is their god, and all literary prOb- ' lems are reduced to the level of craft...

...Cain knows is or not, the part of his novels that he has, in the past, succeeded in representing has been the part that deals with the mutual enterprise...

...and in the discipline, precision, and purity of the translation...

...This inherent rhythm is not too difficult to render by a close translation...

...However, novels like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice derived an essential subsidiary drive from the need for the man and woman to complete successfully a mutual criminal enterprise...

...These authors exist at the end point of one or more traditions—Cain's heritage is pstently naturalistic, materialistic— but they are not aware of their relationships to other authors and when charged with them may cry out—as Cain has done in the preface to this novel—"I belong to no school, hardboiled or otherwise, and I believe these so-called schools exist...

...Jess Is tho father of two girls, but has lived alone in 'an abandoned West Virginia mining town ever since his wife, Belle, ran off with his bosom enemy, Moke Blue, taking the two children with her...

...New York: Atfred A. Knopf...

...valuable but somehow dated...

...Ironically enough, the author has written his own criticism of this novel, although he did not mean it as such...

...if you shoot at passion and miss by ever so little, you hit lust, which isn't pretty.or even interesting...

...All 1 the same, those who enter upon even such a slim reader as this will want to temper its austerities with, perhaps, Sholem Aleikhem, some of whose storiel were recently translated into English...

...The Butterfly Is stripped of this representational element and has all the empty vulgarity of a dirty Joke with none of It* saving wit...

...the warmth, the human pride and rebelliousness of Levi Yitkhok Beditchever's Kaddish...

...So, the action 4 ot the novel roughly symbolised modern man's necessity to overcome his frustrating conditionings through violence...

...He is supposed to be deeply religious, but he expresses his carnality freely and is only frustrated by its incestuous complications...

...for a man, and the woman has also usually been a combination of good and evil (the author has likened his female characters to Pandora...

...No Mine' is taken...

...A sensitive literalneaa tries to reproduce the quality of the original Hebrew...

...and the artist...

...The author gives the Impression of political sophistication, snd there Is nothing ingratiating or embarrasslng about his approach...

...Here we read the Inside story of the Kurusu-Noinura negotiations with Secretary Hull, right up to December 7, 1941: how the Japanese envoys in Washington were being kept in semiIgnorance by their own Foreign Ministry...

...Although it was the msin conflict, it wsa driven by the subsidiary conflict of two against the law, and thus Its "feebleness" was clothed with the stuff of melodrama...

...See Glatzer's article on Rosenzweig in the excellent new annual issued by Yivo...

...The editor of this volume, Nahum N. Glatzer, is one of that school of Jewish scholars who were brought up in the tradition of Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantianism and Martin Buber's neoKhassidism...

...the basic conflict lies between the father and his supposed daughter...

...Suddenly, we reslize that this obscure term only connotes one of the basic facts of literary aesthetics: simple assertion of narrative events is not art—significant attitudes, emotions, conflicts, ideas, must be represented...

...The publishers and the book clubs promote commercial novels and serious novels as if they were one and the same: Kenneth Roberts and Ernest Hemingwsy, Marcel Proust and John P. Marc/uand are advertised as equally great Part of this is due to our cultural tendency to overuse superlatives, to apply them indiscriminately, to confuse enthusiasm with recognition and appreciation, in this way denigrating the meanings of words until it is difficult to tell what a reviewer intends when he says "greet," "promising" or "important" To an even larger extent, this confusion is the result of commercialism: the desire of publishers to create best-sellers...

...By Masuo Kato...

...The character of Jess Tyler is incredible from the opening chapter...

...Kato's volume la "a wsr book...

...NE may begin by referring to the striking excellencies...

...They are immediately apparent in the surface texture of this anthology: the grave beauty of the format and typography...

...The approac hand methods characteristic of this group are strongly marked in the anthology...

...The story begins when Ksdy returns to her father's cabin...

...Ho has said that in "intense tale...

...But the sexual conflict In his books hss always been only asserted...

...However, English, through the King James translation of the Bible, has a tradition of Hebraisms, closely carried over from the original...

...the hardness and juiciness of folk-Khassidism in the legends of Suaia of Hanipol...

...This is particularly hard to swallow when it is a question of the Jewish people...

...A Judaic revival among the German Jews, which waa forced Into bloom by the unforeseen catastrophe, found some of its chief sustenance In the brief, aesthetically turned-out volumes of the Buecherei, Both their conciseness and their (well-bred) inspirational quality were essential in a forced-draught apologetic effort which had to teach a whole generation in short order and on short notice, to like the Jewishaess which they were compelled to accept That the Buecherei Iiad to constitute a sort of accelerated curriculum in Jewishness only reinforced a tendency previously noticeable in Germany towards a new Judaism of essences and extract...

...course, its theological and ethical significance...

...on the other hand, it also seems to betray the preoccupation of the editor and publisher with the plight of the Jew in our time, a time of returning), filial piety, literary culture, clarity, the chosenness of Israel, its martyrdom, 'the Holy Land, and the Messiah, each in its topical place...

...WRITERS in America today can be divided roughly into two categoric*: the professional...

...Much of the material In this book Is presented to the Amerirsn public for the first timeStill, it doesn't seem very startling any longer...

...instead, they accept ready-made, tried and proved, devices of their predecessors and spend their time seeking a "gimmick...

...Glatzer's own remarks in his epilogue), that an attempt is made to show "the great variety that exists in Jiwesh literature...

...with their pens and the artiste attempt to create art with theirs...

...and the delightfully dry wit of Astruc's grim report on the great disputation of Tortosa...

...A Judaic Cornucopia Reviewed by BENJAMIN HALPERN IN TIME AND% ETERNITY...

...Now Hemingway, whatever his fallings, is an srtlst snd not s hack...

...As a matter of fact, especially towards the beginning of the Book, one is rather overwhelmed by the imposing array .of high-mindedness and sublimity, ascetic rectitude and well-checked mysticism which parades monotonously across the pages...

...This latest concoction Is a hillbilly hullabaloo concerning one Jess Tyler who falls In love with a girl, Kady, who.ho thlnki is his long-lost daughter...

...IN order to appreciate the character of this little "anthology of post-Biblical literature," one should know something both of its publisher and its editor...

...If this statement seems tautological, it is none the less necessary for never before has the literary scene presented more ambiguities to the reader...

...So when Jsmcs M. Cain compares himself .to Ernest Hemingway, no matter how modestly, he is implying that he, too, aspires to literature...

...how the Japanese army played Its own game, to the embarrassment and bewilderment of the diplomatic staff, and how the navy, then and later on, showed Its antagonism to army rule...

...Wr ».?»-¦ entitled to hope that A/nerican Jew* will have more time for their "return'' than was vouchsafed in Germany...

...eternity," for a diet of reading richer and rougher (less reduced by much cooking), than the concentrated Ewif keitslehre that appealed to metaphysical Germany...

...Yet his nqyela are unmitigated kitsch...

...One can .still sense the sheer power and cleanness of Maimonides' rectilinear thinking...

...The details of how to kill ¦ a husband to collect his insurance money hold a horrible fascination not unlike that of tho Inverse detective story...

...1*HE selection of readings, moreover, is in conformity with such a style...

...Edited by Nahutn N. Clatter, Nt* Yor%: Sehoeken Book...

...What one misses in this anthology are the passion, the rage, the irony and the intimacy, the pity and the terror to which the violent courses of Jewish destiny, for two thousand years, have so lavishly given occasion...

...Modern Jewish literature, of course, fell outside of the scope of the anthology...

...The Sehoeken Buecherei (now being reproduced in English, starting with this book) were originally published jn Germany in the early years of the Hitler rule...

...He*doe* not reveal his vlewa except in rare instances...

...And, of course, in a sense the history of the English and American novels is a record of the development of this basic premise...

...Cain ends up by saying sex Is no damn good...

...WAR BOOK ON JAPAN THE LOST WAR.' A Japanese re...

...A religious man, he is horrified by his incestuous impulse, and manages to resist it after she tells him who she is...

...Again the whole method, if the least touch of feebleness gets Into it, lends itself to what is perilously close to an etude in eroticism...

...This is evident in his preface to Three of a Kind where he admits his great debt to a Hollywood writer, Vincent Lawrence, who taught him the importance of the "love-rack," a device which he says has tremendously influenced the making of motion pictures...