Adam Kirsch. The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century.

     

Isaac Babel (1894-1940), a Soviet-Russian Jewish writer as distant from Judaic religion as possible.

       Adam Kirsch is very insightful in his study of the (secular) literature created by the Jews. His penetration into literary genre is deep and enlightening. However, his partiality as an art critic of the Wall Street Journal is showing. All the discrimination and oppression of the Jews is attributed to the Germans and Russians and, a little bit, to the French. Supposedly, the Jewish life in the Anglo-Saxon countries was all sunshine and roses. In fact, until the end of the World War II, in the US and England, there was little of the educated Jewish middle class. All Jews were either business and banking tycoons, who imitated the tastes of the upper classes of their respective countries, or lower classes struggling for surviving. The Jewish experience was framed by others, e.g. Fagin in Dickens. Only when the reader of the Jewish books appeared, so did the writers (P. Roth, S. Bellow, I. Asimov, N. Mailer, etc.).