MISS TAYLOR FEARS LIFE
Gladstone, Gabriel
Miss Taylor Fears Life Reviewed by GABRIEL GLADSTONE A WREATH OF ROSES. By Elizabeth Taylor. Knopf. 243.pagc«. $3.00. DEPRECATION OF WHAT is human, or idealization of what is inhuman, can be...
...Indeed, Miss Taylor's attempt at the echoes of a fugue is really a series of tricks...
...Rabbi Baeck's two books make , it impossible for Jew or non-Jew to offer excuses for ignorance of the meaning, Ideals 'arid ways of Judaism...
...These are the bones of the story...
...He does not, however, indicate very clearly what is to be done when an important partner in diplomatic negotiations has proved over and over again that its word, signed to international treaties, is worthless and acts in every way with the utter amoralism of the fanatic...
...Camilla, in her early thirties, is confronted, for the first time in her life, with the terror of her future as a retreating spinster...
...her characters almost never call forth from her the individual touch they would require to make them believable...
...George Foote Moore has given us more scholarship...
...It isn't that Miss Taylor's characters aren't sentient human beings, capable of profound emotions...
...Fiction of this sort indicates how very undemocratic our thinking has become...
...Judaism is a religion of inquiry: "What characteristic differences there are between what a Philo, an Akiba, a Maimonides, a Mendelssohn have found in the Bible...
...It was thus, in the spirit of- Jewish tradition for Spinoza to call his philosophy EtWca, "to show that he considers ethics its ultimate objective...
...Anyone interested in religious philosophy ought not to by-pass this discussion...
...Martin Buber has given us more original books...
...it is a permanent quest...
...Schechter and Baeck, more than others, however, have given us sympathetic insight and imaginative reconstruction based on sound scholarship and infused with devotion to the heritage and promise of Judaism...
...They are, but within a circumscribed area defined by an attitude...
...Her writing is uniformly good, sometimes positively thrilling...
...288 pp...
...Miss Taylor's very sincerity and seriousness indicate how desperately we need to believe the myths we create...
...It might well be called a primer lor Utopians...
...The Essence of Judaism is rightly concerned with the religious philosophy, and not with the theology, of Judaism...
...In Judaism the deed comes before the word...
...In place of creed was the deed: "The deed becomes proof of conviction...
...Through this approach Judaism was saved from sacerdotalism and priestcraft...
...In Judaism salvation is not dependent on binding formulas or established authority...
...New York: Schocken Books...
...At a time when inexperience in international affairs lends a strong Utopian coloring to much American thinking, writing and speaking on the subject we are fortunate in having such a sound and erudite study of international relations as Professor Morgenthau has prepared...
...man's duty towards man "comes before his knowledge of God, and the knowledge of Him is a process of seeking and inquiring rather than an act of posses-' sion...
...His comment is pungent and shrewd: "The erection of a structure of international government upon what proved to be no political foundation at all has been a failure which threatens to come crashing down and bury the peace of the world beneath its ruins...
...Judaism: Religion of Inquiry Reviewed by MILTON R. KONVITZ THE ESSENCE OF JUDAISM...
...But, anticipating John Dewey, Jewish tradition placed the deed on a priority basis: "the basis of understanding is the right deed, and with the deed is revealed knowledge...
...and thirdly, the belief in mankind...
...He is to be known through experience, through love and suffering, through, as the existentialists would say, total involvement in the process of living—living as a constant quest for justice...
...Nor does sincerity exhaust the list of MissTaylor's'attributes...
...This does not mean that Judaism is indifferent to conceptions...
...M. M. Kaplan has given us more challenging books...
...It is these very excellencies of Miss Taylor's which lead one to the question why she did not write a better novel, and why "A Wreath of Roses" fails in the particular way that it does...
...so, when their commitment to life is no deeper than an attitude and subject to a change of a mind...
...By Hans J. Morgenthau...
...He is able, for instance, to study the United Nations on a basis of his familiarity with the Holy Alliance, which followed the Napoleonic Wars...
...To make life a question of attitudes, a matter of right and wrong, is to lend a certain moral cheerfulness to the bitterest tragedy, and I suppose this is what really appalls us about characters such as Miss Taylor has given us...
...Anyone who believed in the unity of God could claim to be a proselyte...
...Not since the publication of Solomon Schechter's Studies in Judaism a generation ago have we benefited from such deep philosophic and imaginative understanding of so highly complex a phenomenon as Judaism...
...But he then dashes their hopes by realistically observing that the peoples of the world are not willing to accept world government and would not be willing and able to do what is necessary to keep world government standing...
...The author, out of his scholarly knowledge of what has happened in the past, is able to evaluate forcefully and convincingly the institutions which are being tried out at th epresent time...
...The doors of interpretation," said Maimonides, "are not closed...
...right (icing leads to right thinking...
...By Leo Baeck...
...women, the two friends, Camilla and Liz, and Frances, the elderly and aging ex-governess of Liz, whom they are visiting...
...For the United States to eschew "power politics" would be equivalent to resigning from membership in the world...
...Quite the contrary...
...The Bible offers fluid concepts, not rigidity of meaning or fixity of tradition...
...The Bible is a book to be explored, studied...
...it is "a challenge rather than a gift...
...Miss Taylor is a writer of unquestioned sincerity, and it is precisely because of the honesty of her intentions that I ---------------- ------------have elected her to serve as the basis for my remarks...
...and even the belief in the unity of God was more a matter of denying idolatry than a matter of any affirmation...
...Beneath all the talk of life in Miss Taylor's novel lurks a fear of life and a need to circumvent, rather than confront it...
...Primer for Utopians Reviewed by WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN POLITICS AMONG NATIONS: THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER AND PEACE...
...God's covenant is with each man who claims Him, and the covenant is made through nq middleman...
...5.50...
...This might seem an attractive prospect in some of the more discouraging moments of the postwar world...
...Judaism too has its doctrine, but it is a doctrine of behavior, which must be explored in action in order that it may be fulfilled...
...DEPRECATION OF WHAT is human, or idealization of what is inhuman, can be observed on every level of our culture.- It can be observed in the screen personality of a Humphrey Bogart or an Alan Ladd, and it can be observed ^especially clearly, because the intentions are finer, in a novel such as "A Wreath of Roses" by Elizabeth Taylor...
...The author takes a special attitude towa/d them and they take a special attitude toward life...
...It is impossible to take them very seriously when they refuse to take themselves...
...But it is not feasible in the atomic age...
...Milton R. Konvils la a Cornell University professor, and author and editor of many books...
...It makes no distinction between "persons consecrated and profane, initiated and uninitiated," between priest and layman...
...We have grown unable to trace the individualities which bind one to existence and we are compelled to force human beings into the uniformity of ideologies...
...Though I may disapprove of the direction of her novel, Miss Taylor- knows every moment of the time just where she is heading...
...Wit the publication of The Essence of Judaism author and publisher again become oiir creditors...
...4.00...
...He looks more favorably on the prospects of a reversion to old-fashioned diplomacy and suggests a number of rules for the successful conduct of foreign affairs...
...Space does not permit a summary of Rabbi Baeck's discussion of the role of optimism in Jewish ethics, and hi« derivation therefrom of a threefold relationship: first, the belief in oneself...
...But power, after all, is what politics is about...
...She gives every indication, like so many other English writers, of having studied her craft and learned her lessons well...
...The emphasis is on man, man's nature, man's needs, man's ideals, man's mysteries rather than on the nature or mysteries of God...
...Morgenthau agrees with advocates of world government that "there can be no permanent international peace without a state coextensive with the confines of the political world...
...The work is almost encyclopedic in scope and covers a wide range in history, in theory of government and international law...
...She experiences a futile passion for an aggressive degenerate and gets estranged from Liz over a deep jealousy of her child and "the physical experiences it symbolized...
...Rheumatism at last overtakes Frances and destroys her refuge as a painter, while Liz gets deeper ensconced in her indifferent marriage to a clergyman...
...The emphasis is on justice...
...for the essence of Judaism is not—unlike Catholicism and Protestant Chistianity—to be discovered in dogmas...
...and with the League of Nations, which grew out of the First World War...
...A Wreath of Roses" is about a quietly dramatic summer in the lives i>f three...
...He makes the very useful point that, whereas the Holy Alliance and the League were supposed to preserve peace settlements which had been agreed on, the United Nations is really the guardian of a vacuum...
...The PHRASE power polities is apt to excite horrified revulsion in liberal American circles...
...and justice since it is God's supreme command, takes on the quality of holiness...
...Beyond this belief, Judaism did not ask for a confession of faith or answers to a catechism...
...IN 1947 SCHOCKEN ENRICHED our literature on Judiaism by publishing Rabbi Baeck's The Phansees...
...489 pp...
...So long as the system of sovereign independent national states continues competition in terms of power will continue...
...secondly, the belief in one's neighbor...
...God is not to be known abstractly, through the repetition of abstractions...
...The Oral Tradition, interpreting and supplementing the Bible, can never be brought to completion...
...No conception is finished and complete...
...It is as if all her people were encased in ice...
...BUT WHERE MISS TAYLOR really errs is on the side of plausibility...
...There are, besides, dozens of inter-relationships which recall Forster but they have not Forster's undulating naturalness...
...Alfred A. Knopf, New York...
...Reading her clean prose, one gets the feeling for perhaps the hundredth time that in England, at least, the frank illiteracies of some of our American authors would be unthinkable...
...Revised edition...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 15
