Intellectual in Search of Faith

...This kind of literature has always been the background for thought with political overtones, and its outstanding exponents have been Jews: Feuchtwanger, Zweig, Koestler, Sholem Asch and Howard Fast...

...It is their eternal search, and particularly the quest for God and godliness by the hero of the book, which is in the very essence of the Biblical tradition...

...Fry, on the other hand, can give us nothing better than a Moses who is a psychologically tortured 20th-century intellectual, revolted at the consequences which his own belief had for his basically kind Egyptian acquaintances ! Fast has tried to find a natural place in historical evolution for Hebrew monotheism...

...Thus, in this book Moses, the isolated Jew from the Egyptian Court, is in search of his people...

...Reviewed by Herbert Felix Israeli editor and journalist Few really interesting works of our generation have been able to avoid the theme of the intellectual's search for a philosophical framework or political system...

...The dejected Moses, seated alone on a stone, sees his nation with a stark and unfriendly realism, typical of one who has not yet learned to belong...

...Perhaps, therefore, Fast would have been wise to say in his introduction: "This is my version, I have convinced myself of its plausibility, I believe it to stand in accordance with one possible, consistent interpretation of the facts, but I ask you to judge it only insofar as it helps or hinders my Moses to come to life for each one of you...

...He has created an individual endowed with those very qualities which make any character in literature endure...

...But Moses does not deal with a relatively well-known historical period...

...This may be more than mere coincidence...

...He sees such a link in the short-lived Aten-worship experiment in Egypt...

...He did not fall into the old trap of simply treating the worship of At en as early Judaism...

...The most significant scene concerns his first visit to the village of the Hebrews, where he discovers that, although he is no longer an Egyptian, he does not yet have anything in common with his own people...

...Far removed though the details of Fast's story may be from the facts given in the Book of Exodus, his Moses is pervaded by the genuine spirit of the Bible...

...So while much in Moses is a result of painstaking and new work on the sources, it should not and cannot be judged on the basis of scholarship...

...This is an uncommonly penetrating analysis of the old self-hatred of the Jew who thinks himself assimilated and finds that he does not belong to any world...

...This is what made My Glorious Brothers (which dealt with the Maccabees) stand out from his other works, and it can hardly be accidental that he hac now returned to a subject similar to that which caused some of his most serious clashes with Communist leaders...

...It can only be judged in terms of its dramatic and philosophic impact...

...And Fast's Moses does come to life...

...This is not an entirely new idea, of course, but he has given it a most sophisticated treatment...

...The social dispersion of the present era is sharpened for the Jew by the international dispersion of his people...

...By linking this wider search to Moses's own pursuit of his ancestral, national root9, the book displays a very real understanding of one of the most important aspects of Judaism...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that among the most flourishing branches of literature are the political novel or play and the historical novel...

...The deep philosophic and moral problem of the individual in search of a wider, suitable entity is all the more poignant in the case of the Jew, who, in the diaspora, has not been left with even those shreds of an organic social body in which other intellectuals can find compensation...

...Of these the historical novel, sub specie aeternitatis, has generally been of more lasting value...

...Consequently, any but a version based on the Book of Exodus must of necessity confine itself to a subjective interpretation of a few scanty facts...

...It is in such scenes (as well as in that revealing moment when Moses discovers that his "victory" over Nun was a cowardly assault on a chained slave) that Fast displays some of his intuitive grasp of other men's emotional reactions...

...It encountered such bitter opposition, however, from the Theban priesthood of Amon that the young Pharaoh and all his supporters left Upper Egypt and had to find a new capital in Central Egypt...

...Unlike Moses, The Firstborn does violence not only to the factual detail but also to the very spirit of the Bible...

...Fast manages to do this without in any way neglecting the obvious drama in the upbringing, at the very pinnacle of Egyptian life, of the offspring of enslaved Hebrews...

...it discusses an era which is hardly referred to outside the Bible and rabbinical literature—and even there in many contradictory ways...

...There is probably some significance, too, in the fact that he wrote the first part of his projected Moses trilogy while working on the film version of My Glorious Brothers...

...He makes one of the late and secret devotees of Aten shrug his shoulders and concede that it is doubtful whether this worship of the sun concerned "the lamp or the maker of the lamp...

...The bold treatment of any subject associated with theology is likely to arouse bitter controversy...

...There is a slight historical oversimplification in the treatment of Aten-worship as an "Upper Egyptian" cult which was later persecuted by a "Lower Egyptian" dynasty...

...Moses is full of men "haunted by God...

...It has a curious echo of "Slaves we were in Egypt," which was the underlying sentiment of the earlier book...

...It is especially on this point that his work must be contrasted with Christopher Fry's The Firstborn, now being performed on Broadway...

...Far more important, though, is the fact that in Moses, Prince of Egypt Fast again shows himself to be a superb raconteur, a story-teller whose narrative unfolds effortlessly and with great facility and felicity...

...Thus Aten-worship was cast out of Upper Egypt long before being persecuted by Lower Egypt...

...Here we are concerned with the "modern" historical novel—in the sense that the author realizes that his characters are contemporary to his own political, social and philosophical framework and must not be treated as colorful anachronisms...

...Aten-worship was propagated by Amenhotep IV, a Pharaoh of the XVIII Dynasty, and originated in the upper Egyptian city of Thebes...