Jewishness & Younger Writers
Jewishness & Younger Writers
To the Editor:
Mr. Benjamin DeMott [“Letters from Readers,” August] interprets your recent symposium as another “indication” that the “new generation” of American intellectual Jews cannot relate themselves to the Jewish traditions that nourished Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem. He suggests Emerson instead.
Your symposium, obviously flawed by a denial of intellectual status to Jews who do in fact relate themselves to traditional Jewish thought and ways, was a sad but realistic portrait. It was, in its one-sided way, a fact. Mr. DeMott’s suggestion is to my knowledge absolutely false; no matter how true it may seem—and indeed be—of some younger Jewish writers in this country, it is factually erroneous as to others and necessarily invalid as a critical generalization. Mr. DeMott has not read enough of the prose of Cynthia Ozick; not enough of it has yet been published and, at thirty-three, Miss Ozick is perhaps still too new a generation to have established herself. Mr. DeMott has not read enough of the poetry of Florence Victor—some of it, I believe, once printed in COMMENTARY’s pages. . . . Mr. DeMott cannot have read my recent, very unpublished poem, “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in America”: its 1,600-odd lines might interest him, since I think the work shows a clear preference for Judaica rather than home-grown adaptations of Emerson or “the rich radical vein of the American past.”
May I suggest to Mr. DeMott that Eugene Debs is very dead, and so are six million of Europe’s Jews, and that these facts not only can be juxtaposed but have already been fused into the brain and bone of more young Jewish intellectuals than he knows? There is no need to suggest this to COMMENTARY, which knows it, but wishes it didn’t.
Burton Raffel
New York City
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