50
MORRIS DIC KST E IN
tion -- a drama of pointless, horrendous suffering which revealed
the modem dimensions of terror and evil. Now, in the postwar
period, the relentless hunt for traces of Communism in American
life was bound to have an inordinate effect on the Jews, who had
been as deeply implicated as any group in the radicalism of the
thirties and the fellow-traveling of the forties. In the essays of
Fiedler and Warshow, as in the fiction of Bellow and Delmore
Schwartz, we feel the impact of these new shocks: we see evidence
of the Jewish psyche taking stock of itself, revising itself, recoiling
from its recent historical role.
Red-baiting did not begin with Senator McCarthy, a late–
comer who appeared when some of the battles had already been
fought . The forgetting of the thirties and of the wartime Russian
alliance had been in full swing in American society since 1946,
with liberals like Humphrey vying with right-wingers for initiative
on the issue. It was President Truman who created a massive loyalty–
review apparatus for government employees early in 1947, though
this probably affected Jews less than the purge of left-wing unions
in the CIa and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities
Committee on the entertainment industry. By 1949 the leaders of
the Communist Party had already been prosecuted under the
dubious terms of the Smith Act, which had been passed with
Communist support in 1940 as an instrument against Fascism.
6
When McCarthy made his famous list-waving debut as a Red–
hunter in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, he was
seizing and exploiting -- and soon personifying - - a situation
years in the making and especially ripe for a right-wing dema–
gogue.
It happens that 1950 was also the year that Bernard Malamud
began publishing the stories that were eventually collected in
The
Magic Barrel.
Nowhere do we see the revised version of the Jewish
psyche more clearly expressed, more poignantly imagined, than in
his work. Needless to say his books show no trace of the McCarthy
period, no trace of politics of any sort (at least until the flawed
historical novel
The Fixer
in 1966); this is one thing that helps
6. On this point and others see the spirited and generally fair-minded history of the
American Communist Party by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, published in 1957.
