A Generation Between Two Worlds

...John F. Kennedy...

...Marvin," she asked, "you think maybe you'll work for the President some day...

...These encounters between the successful son and the wielder of international power frame the book, beginning and end, reflecting Wouk's relentless theme...

...They are clearly this volume's intended audience...

...middle school English teacher When I was a graduate student at Harvard in the early '60s my mother approached me tentatively with a question...

...The affair, described in refreshingly discreet terms by today's standards, drags on far too long...

...Finally, the conflict of the Inside-Out-side theme is embodied in the j oke of the novel's closing line, "Call me Israel...

...I will exit from this risky metaphor, though, to admit that most of the novel is fun to read...

...all discussing or annotating a single point of law...

...It's not a dull tour...

...The important fact is that Israel David Goodkind has moved from Outside to Inside, a position permitting him to lecture the President on the joys of Talmud study: "I showed him the text, told him the dates and nationalities of the commentators, the printing history of the Talmud, and so forth, my standard quick tour for outsiders...

...I'm coming back to my brother Elye's ink...

...Never mind that he is working for the "wrong" President, or that he has so little to do he spends long uninterrupted hours in his office writing this novel in the first person...

...But obliging child that he is, I. David Goodkind, the hero of Herman Wouk's latest saga, Inside, Outside, satisfies a dream of immigrant Jewish mothers for their sons second only to doctoring: He caps a lucrative legal career by becoming an adviser in the Nixon White House...

...Here I sit, for example, writing a review for a magazine long associated with a union that my father, a sewing machine operator, belonged to for 50 years, whilein the next room my daughter sits at her desk trying to decide whether to go to Oberlin, the old Abolitionists' college, or to Wesleyan—Wesleyan?!— in the fall...

...The elder Goodkind handles his grief delicately and diplomatically, helping us understand why the son considers the book "a Kaddish for my father, from beginning to end...

...You float effortlessly in it, buoyed by the schmaltz, and only later become aware of the somewhat unclean feeling that clings to you...

...These parallel Sholem Aleichem's "Go be a prophet and guess what a tragedy would hit us," or "All right...

...Although he struggles to give his Inside-Outside construct a variety of psychological and social meanings (the bully versus the bullied, the initiated and the virgin), the Second Generation American Jew is his central subject...

...Even if JFK had remained on the scene longer, it is not likely that I would have given my mother any nachas on this score...

...If you order an airlift no w to match the Soviet shipments, now, Sir—then the world's historical memory will honor you forever...

...When he insists on publishing his latest novel under the title My Cock, he has gone about as far as he can go...

...At this point David quits the predictable path leading straight to law school...

...His message may be thin but it is positive: For this generation, Out is In...

...Yet this outrageous amalgam of Philip Roth and Norman Mailer has chosen a path that is not merely outside Judaism but against it, while Goodkind, a la Wouk, has circled back into the fold...

...From the new vantage point his daughter can snare an eligible husband...

...Goldhandler's money enables Yis-raelke (aka Israel, David, Izzy, our narrator) to experience the Inside world for the first time, particularly in the person of Bobbie Webb, asM&seshowgirl who crosses his path, as do George Gershwin, Billy Rose, John Barrymore, and other real-life figures...

...many of the chapters are cleverly crafted short vaudeville routines...

...President, the people with the longest historical memory in the world are the Jews...

...Along the way Quat, who had left Goldhandler, launches a literary career that brings him great fame and notoriety because of the self-hating, anti-Semitic color of his material and his relentless pursuit of the obscene...

...Hefocusesonthe"marginalmen" uneasily straddling two worlds—that of their immigrant parents, eternal outsiders, and of their American children, who move comfortably in a milieu they rightly or wrongly feel part of, alienation having given way to a cheerful and unselfconscious pragmatism...

...His son escapes the neighborhood bullies by going to an American summer camp (the primary location of an obscure early Wouk novel, The City Boy, that is the source of some of the characters and atmosphere here), and then to Columbia, graduating at age 19...

...Various family members subsequently crowd their quarters further, including a bubbeh who makes huge vats of smelly sauerkraut, a zaideh determined to carry on his Talmud study in the GoldenehMed-inah, and an aunt who rewards David's father for giving her a job in the laundry he runs by organizing a strike of its employees...

...David's parents and an array of colorful relatives make their way from Minsk to the Bronx, where they suffer the travails of a life on limited means...

...Saul Bellow, Roth (both Philip and Henry), Bernard Malamud, and many other novelists may have treated this material in more complex and serious ways...

...Wouk, however, speaks to a much larger audience and is the only voice of an eroding heritage likely to reach it...

...Lawrence and Henry Miller...

...An old camp acquaintance named Peter Quat talks David into joining him in working for Harry Goldhandler, a brilliant comedy writer who long ago published in literary quarterlies but went on to build an empire around a card file of old jokes that his hirelings use to churn out radio scripts read by second-rate entertainers...

...His position on the President's staff lets him shuttle back and forth to Israel, where his mother has moved to live her last years and his daughter has come to carry on an intermittent relationship wtih an American-Israeli andthecountryitself...

...No less than in ThisIsMyGod, Wouk's popular compendium of Jewish law and practice, we are being educated here about Judaism, except this time we are also being entertained by a wily, experienced popular novelist...

...Thus we arrive at 1973 and a victorious Israel not confronted by the moral dilemmas of the next years, as well as an America whose President is about to resign...

...During the Yom Kippur War Good-kind makes an appeal on behalf of Israel: "Mr...

...Even his style in much of the book imitates the tragicomic tone of the Yiddish writers, particularly their device of directly addressing the audience with tag lines that introduce and conclude the chapters: "Now for my father's departure from Minsk," or "Okay, short visit tothehomeof my Bay Ridge uncle, the Haskalist...

...The elder Goodkind had himself been hired there as a menial laborer by two bungling partners and soon began carrying the business on his shoulders, developing it into a flourishing moneymaker...

...I know of nothing else like it in the world...

...On one page of the Talmud, you encounter authorities from many lands...

...They gratify certain nostalgic impulses possessed by readers of their own age, and provide exotic information for younger people eager to find some content to fill out the uncomfortably empty shell of their Jewish identity...

...Goodkind comments that "Jews buy about half the hard-cover books in America...

...At considerable cost to his health and sanity, he starts moving the family through a succession of increasingly better apartments, eventually depositing them on the Upper West Side facing Central Park...

...Yet Wouk knows he must nonetheless explain what a shofar is and spell out the laws of kashrut when Goodkind agonizingly thinks of violating them...

...The Second Generation has fueled, participated in and borne witness to a dizzying, bewildering ascent that occurred so rapidly, writers like Wouk act virtually as anthropologists...

...A lot of us who are serious readers do not often allow ourselves the indulgence of bathing in the warm chicken soup of works MYs Inside, Outside...

...In 1961, however, the equation was clear: Harvard = Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...

...Let me tell you the whole elaborate story...

...Her natural style was hardly tentative, so I knew that she must have been mulling over something important...

...David is his lawyer and agent, enabling the author to establish Quat as Goodkind-Wouk's literary alter ego...

...Now that may seem a bizarre leap of illogic to the 1985 mind...

...Sir, my point is that it's truly touch and go in Israel...

...Wouk's literary models are Outsiders, Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim, not Insiders like D.H...

...This at once affirms Jewishness by its insistence on the Outside name, and acknowledges the power of the Inside by providing us with a literary reference we all recognize that is a part of the general culture...

...But wait, as I. David would say...

...I don't know the latest intelligence, but I know how I felt when I saw Golda Meir's face...

...In time, Goldhandler dies, liberating David to go to law school and pursue the course that leads him to his perch in the White House...

...several hundred pages of the novel air David's ambivalence toward this ultimate symbol of the Inside, and his parents' agonies over the possible loss of their son...