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PARTISAN REVIEW
brilliant and penetrating study of Buber's pursuit of the holy." Other
theological works followed: they include
The Natural and the Super–
natural Jew; A People Apart: Hasidic Life in America
(Cohen's commen–
tary accompanying Philip Garvin's photographs);
The Tremendum: A
Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust;
and
The Myth of the Judeo–
Christian Tradition,
a collection of essays more concerned - as its mili–
tant title indicates-with pondering how thoughtful Jews might find
their way to a viable spirituality than with perpetuating any sense of
continuity with Christianity. During the sixties and early seventies
he also edited, and wrote introductions for, a great many books on
related subjects; perhaps the weightiest of these was
Arguments and
Doctrines: A Reader
oj
Jewish Thinking in the Aftermath
oj
the Holocaust.
Cohen's concern with 'jewish spirit" rather than 'jewish
religion" (a distinction he was at pains to make) informed all but one
of his five novels. The first,
The Carpenter Years
(1967), described the
protagonist's unsuccessful attempt to turn his back on New York
"Jewish mediocrity" and begin a new life as a WASP in small town
Pennsylvania. In 1973 Cohen published what many consider to be
his finest novel (and a recipient of the Edwin Lewis Wallant Award),
In The Days of Simon Stern,
the story of a messianic Jew who estab–
lishes a haven for Holocaust victims on New York's Lower East
Side.
A Hero in His Time
(1976) related the serio-comic adventures of
a Soviet Jewish poet visiting the United States, and his final novel,
An Admirable Woman
(1983), was considered to be a fictionalized
treatment of Hannah Arendt.
But the 1980 novel
Acts of Theft
represented a departure. It
centered on the theft of pre-Colombian art by a European sculptor
living in Mexico, and the pursuit of the miscreant by a police inspec–
tor who was himself a collector of art. The subjects here were the
meaning and value of art itself, the artist as moral agent, and the ex–
ploration of his inner life .
If
these themes took Cohen's fiction in
what seemed to be a new direction, one he continued to pursue in
the novellas collected in
Artists
&
Enemies,
the necessary expertise was
already evident in his 1975 biography,
Sonia Delaunay,
as well as in
The New Art of Color: The Writings
oj
Robert
&
Sonia Delaunay (1978),
which he edited . In these books Cohen showed himself to be as adept
at portraying the lives of actual artists, at capturing the flavor of an
artistic movement, at conveying what a painting looked like, or
reinventing Paris at the turn of the century, as he was at the practice
of what some reference works call 'jewish theology," or at the inven–
tion of novels.
