Volume 9, Number 7 · October 26, 1967
Trouble in the Family
By John Wain
The Manor
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 442 pp., $6.95
The Mimic Men
by V.S. Naipaul
Macmillan, 302 pp., $4.95
Ergo
by Jakov Lind
Random House, 150 pp., $3.95
Much of American writing at present is Jewish, and one of the probable reasons for this is that being a Jew gives one something definite to write about. The dissolving of beliefs and traditions has left modern life so flavorless that the flood of pornography we now endure was predictable all along: the sexual life still has conflict and urgency, pathos and comedy, which could hardly be said for anything else likely to be encountered in the plastic landscape we have made for ourselves. The Jew, whether orthodox or not, has to make up his mind among conflicting loyalties and values, and this gives his life a spiritual content capable of being explored in such a traditional medium as literature, whereas the puppet-movements that pass for action among the rest of us are best handled by television and the tabloids.
Review, 2872 words
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