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legal action with profound consequences for America. Also, we are
American, not given to Napoleonic rhetoric. We judge McCarthy
by our own standards: was his behavior constitutional? Did it mesh
with our value system? For me the answer always has been no.
In the early thirties, Abel points out, the crowd in the Jumble
Shop referred to "Charlie Marx.» How much more American than
Karl Marx! That was the time when "Communism was twentieth–
century Americanism.» In Abel's and other accounts of the period, it
is clear that for the generation of Jews who came of age during the
Depression, between the two world wars, communism, because of
its emphasis on internationalism, and because it put Jews in contact
with other Americans and other parts of the country, including farm
people and union organizers, gave the illusion that they were becom–
ing "real Americans.» To have in one pot the idea of moral goodness,
becoming a real American, a real Russian, a real poet, a mover and
shaker in changing the course of the world was incredibly heady;
how hard it must have been for the left to give up their original ticket
into America.
Mailer is the first significant Jewish writer to become a main–
stream American novelist;
The Naked and The Dead
is a war novel,
and war always, for all immigrant groups, has been the ultimate na–
tionalizer. On the whole, the Depression group, because of their age,
didn't have this experience, which is probably what made them cling
so desperately to their socialism. I remember, during my early days
as a writer, in the late 1950s, being baffled by being asked in a
Dis–
sent
symposium which addressed itself to my generation's identity,
how I had been affected by the Jewish experience of the pogroms.
But, ironically, I felt my own sense of identity erased by the ques–
tions asked. My father had been a Jewish kid from deWitt Clinton
High School; after a stint as Woodrow Wilson's youngest campaign
manager, he ended up as a private in the trenches in Ardennes,
Chateau Thierry. He was gassed, spent three years in a French hos–
pital, then came to New York and started legal practice in the palmy,
optimistic 1920s. When he died, in his eighties, he still was remem–
bering his army buddies who got blown up in the trenches.
Thus, I always knew I was the child of a World War I hero; the
trenches, not the pogroms, were my father's crucial experience: I
could trace my parents' essential lives in the novels of E. E. Cum–
mings, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and I was the child of all that. I was
struck that in
The World of Our Fathers,
Howe makes no reference to
World War I as a profound landmark Americanizing experience for
