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PARTISAN REVIEW
Halsey. Mercado has made no secret of his Jewishness in the United States.
A former student addresses him, drunkenly: "You're a Jew, aren't you,
Mercado?"; yet "in all the years they had known each other," John
Mercado "had been so lacking in racial consciousness that Halsey usually
forgot he was of different stock than himself." In fact, "though he was a
pure-blooded Jew, he had just about forgotten it. He supposed it was
because his family had not been religious for several generations and nei–
ther his looks nor his name denoted his race. Perhaps it was only natural
that the fact of his Oriental origin should have dropped back into the dark
corners of his consciousness ..." Of course, Loeb had chosen to give his
hero a Sephardic name that stretches back to the original twenty-three
Jewish settlers of New Amsterdam in 1654 but which was so unusual as to
be unidentifiable as Jewish except to the cognescenti. Loeb knew what he
was doing by endowing his hero with a name going back to seventeenth–
century New York, for his own link to the so-called "first American
Jewish families" came by virtue of his first marriage in 1914 to Marjory
Content, a direct descendant of one of the "twenty-three." It is through
this connection that Loeb makes his one appearance in "The Book,"
Malcolm H. Stern's
First American Jewish Families (1991).
Mercado's Jewish consciousness asserts itself in Paris, however, when
he discovers that his Russian coquette hates Jews. He agonizes over
whether to reveal himself as one of those she hates and claims to have mur–
dered ("they're not people," she insists) or to keep his racial identity under
wraps. He vacillates.
He was a Jew. Her attitude rent the screen that hung between him and
his ancestry. His mind hurtled back through the centuries. He stood,
in vivid mental snapshots, beside Saul and David, the warrior kings. He
served as a soldier under the Maccabees, fighting victoriously against
stupendous odds. He manned a rampart at Jerusalem, while Titus,
with the whole Roman Empire behind him, drove his cohorts to one
assault after another. His race was not only a warrior race but the only
ancient race of importance which had kept its virili ty down to his day.
Poets, philosophers, scientists, prophets, musicians! And this charming
blue-eyed creature had killed Jews because they were not people. He
suddenly grew very tall. This prig of a muddied upstart nation dared
to be contemptuous of his people...He had always thought of himself
as a teacher of literature, drowsing through uneventful days in an
American college town.
All
at once he was the last of a mighty race,
courting a murderess who had tortured his brethren.
