Yeshiva University - Masmid Yearbook (New York, NY)

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26 M ASMID In Beatrice. Lewisohn offers a symbolical study of woman ' s position when she has separated herself from the herd. She does not marry because she refuses to be dominated by man. She drives love back to its purely physiological limits. Love in the higher sense has no place in her life. Thus she may play, but must forget. Love fills only a brief hour in her life while her other hours are passed without tenderness, solicitude, companion- ship or affection. She is driven from situa- tion to situation not by her strength, but by her weakness, not by her crude power but by her spiritual and emotional impotence. Es- cott fails to extract any contentment from his companionship with Beatrice and settles into a life of resignation. Escott ' s friend and law-partner, David Sampson is blest by a happy marriage which has been made and kept perfect by acts of will rather than by gook luck which most people regard as the cause of happiness in marriage. Escott ' s and Sampson ' s practice as divorce lawyers brings them into touch with many phases of American marriage. Escott ' s under- standing ripens with his practice, under David ' s wise counsel. The last cause handled by the firm is the defense of Paul Gordon for the murder of his wife ' s lover. Gordon ' s wife has been for him the fulfillment of a yearning for beauty. From his passion for her his poetry has sprung. Incapable of such love, she allows herself to be seduced into a love affair with a man who will take any- thing brief and cheap. In defense of his poetic ideals of love, Gordon kills him. Lewisohn thus indicates that passion, romance and adventure of love are being grossly overestimated and that this age, with its curious psychical cross-currents and its un- happy competition between the sexes, is espe- cially unfavorable to the poetry of the pass- ions. He believes that woman should be- have exactly as woman has always functioned — as tradition has moulded her. He sym- pathizes with the individualistic woman, but sincerely and stringently announces that woman must let her instincts become neither atrophied nor perverted, but use them under strict intellectual control. Through the Escotts, Lewisohn shows the appalling results of sex ignorance; through Paul Gordon and his wife we see the futility of passionate love and of poetic romance. Through the Sampsons, Lewisohn points to his thorough belief in the Jewish view that the basic instinct for marriage is not sexual desire but reproduction. THE DUAL CHARACTER OF THE JEW THE LAST DAYS OF SHYLOCK By LuDwiG Lewisohn Harpers H Bros. By Hugo Mantel In The Last Days of Shylock, Lewisohn attempts to describe the life of Shylock from the point where Shakespeare left him. After the formal baptism which was forced upon him by the court of Venice, he escapes from the town and settles in Constantinople. His life there is among Jews only and we see be- fore us an entirely different Shylock. This divergence from the original character of Shy- lock has moved many to decry Lewisohn ' s novel as a pious wish to vindicate the Jews. His wish was not realized, it is claimed, be- cause the original character disappears in the novel and another Jew, Reb Shylock, comes upon the scene. Others, on the contrary, criticize Lewisohn on the ground that he en- tirely missed Shakespeare ' s point. Shylock, they say, was never intended to represent any living human being: he was a mere buffoon whose behavior, claim and fate were supposed to amuse the public. One can hardly be patient with this last attitude. Shakespeare ' s characters, be thoy buffoons or not, are always taken from life. One of the aspects of the genius of Shakes- peare, as is well known, is that even his most eccentric characters, under the most fantastic conditions, are full-blooded human beings. The assertion that Shakespeare never saw a Jew is somewhat improbable in the light of the recent discovery of Sil Sidney Lee and the late Lucien Wolf that there was never a time even before Cromwell when ther: wcr.- no Jews in London. It is. 1 believe, by no means a compliment to Shakespeare to sup- pose that he was not curious enough to get acquainted with this rare type of people.

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M ASMID 25 Torah-true Judaism, as he prefers to call it. Describing eloquently the tragedy of the mod- ern man — during the week he is a mere ma- chine, on Sunday he attempts to escape his worries by giving himself up to violent pleas- ures — the rabbi continues: ... a restless week is followed by a restless Sunday, an exciting Sunday by a hard week, and the strain of our vital forces becomes tremendous. The Jews in the Torah have been given a day of rest that is different from any other day of rest . . . On the Sabbath, the Torah-true Jew not only rests but he is free from the strain of the mechanical devices of industry. The superficial mind considers it ludicrous that we are forbidden to press an electric but- ton on the Sabbath, to answer the telephone, to write, to ride, to buy, to handle money. All these prohibitions, they feel, in modern times, should be done away with. These ob- jectors do not realize th3 tremendous protec- tion afforded us by these strict enactments. On the Sabbath, by reason of these strict laws, the Jew is freed from the life-destroy- ing strain which modern industrial life has put upon him. On Shabbos, the Jew has a neshama yethera, an extra soul which re- vitalizes his heart and mind. It is a day which affords his creative genius opportunity for reassertion of hopes and aspirations. After presenting the Jewish conception of marriage and of social justice, he proceeds to discuss the Jewish Question. Here he makes a statement which so remarkably expresses the attitude of all traditional Jews and which has been their rock throughout the ages: Anti- Semitism, intolerance, are Gentile problems. Ours is the task to raise Jewry to the heights of Judaism. Other high-lights of the series are the fas- cinating chapter by the Reverend Dr. Gaster on the Romance of the Hebrew Alphabet, The Ccntrality of Palestine in Jewish Life by Dr. David De Sola Pool, Faith and Science by Dr. Moses L. Isaacs, Schechita by Dr. M. S. Lieber, a summary of Bachya ' s Duties of the Heart by the Rev. E. Collins, Scientific Aspects of the Jewish Dietary Laws by Dr. D. I. Macht, and the genial application of judicial reasoning to The Great Preamble — a Rereading of Genesis by Prof. Nathan Isaacs of Harvard University. The Jewish Library is doing fine service in disseminating the orthodox ideal in Amer- ican Jewry. Let us hope that it will grow. The powers of Orthodoxy in this country and abroad have by far not yet been exhaust- ed. If these essays will be backed by activity in the field of propagating tradition, Judaism may yet come to its own even in this coun- try. Mr. LEWISOHN ' S VIEW ON MARRIAGE STEPHEN ESCOTT By LUDWIG Lewisohn By Louis Barishnikoff STEPHEN ESCOTT, a psychological novel, treats of the much-discussed problem of sex relations with a deep penetrating vision, an idealistic temperament and a humane spirit. The discussions are never marred by platitudes or slovenliness. The language is frank and emphatic: always vivid and stimulating to both the emotion and the mind. Lewisohn casts an all-embracing commen- tary on modern love and marriage in the form of a story told by Stephen Escott. Stephen Escott is an American youth brought up by parents to whom sex is asso- ciated with filth and sin. Because of his de- sire for sexual satisfaction, Escott, falls in love with Dorothy, a girl who typifies Amer- ican young womanhood. Stephen deifies her. He makes romantic love to her in the solitude of his walks and dreams. He thinks at once of the possibilities of marriage, and soon casts his sail on the high sea of matrimony. The Escott marriage assumes on the sur- face a countenance of contentment. Theirs is apparently a pleasant home and there are children: but husband and wife are miser- able. The man takes refuge in sensual dreams, the women in bitterness which turns to ill- ness. She is always pale, quiet and down- trodden, and has about her a certain dignified pathos. She cannot resign herself to the de- gradation to which the holy institution of marriage has been debased. She fears all thought of the biological consequences mar- riage involves — not because she is revolution- ary, but because she is pure, frail and modest. She despises Mrs. Sampson, the Jewess, who is plump and pregnant. She cannot bear her jollity and calm acceptance of everything ne- gative marriage offers. Mrs. Escott does not complain much to Stephen. She is. however, sad and sullen and does not realize that her sad-eyed silence must be acutely irritating to Stephen. We become aware of his feelings at her death. He immediately goes in search of Beatrice, a woman who can offer him physical delight and sensual satisfaction.

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M A SM I D 27 That he did not appreciate the real character of the Jews needs no further discussion. He looked upon the Jew as one who is incapable of virtue, whose heart is the hardest thing in the world (Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I) and who is the very devil incar- nate . (Lancelot in Act II, Scene II). Yet this view was nothing but the general atti- tude of his age toward the Jew. If Shakepeare gave a very vivid and true picture of how the Christian world regarded the Jew, Lewisohn carries us to the Jewish world and invites us to note the Jew there. The Christians saw in Shylock a base crea- ture, crafty and cruel, selfish and material- istic; among the Jews, however, he was pious and charitable, patient and wise. In the Ghet- to, he walked among friends: outside it, he dealt with enemies, with people of a different attitude towards life, with men who consi- dered him no more than a dog. His reac- tion towards people, therefore, was of a dual character. To the Christian who called him dog and spit upon him and spurned him, he retorted with a demand for a pound of flesh as surety; his fellow Jews, however, who respected him and sympathized with him, re- ceived from him kindness and devotion. Thus, while Lewisohn admits all that Shakespeare had to say about the Jews, he in- sists that that was a one-sided picture of them, a description of their so-called second- ary nature . He points out that although the Gentiles saw in the Jew a miser and observed also his attachment to his people, they did not recognize the connection between these two characteristics. The reason why the Jew sought wealth, Lewisohn explains, was his desire to make the position of his community secure. It was money that the dukes exacted of the Jews and it was money with which princes could be bribed into the withdrawal of harsh proclamations. Again, while Shakespeare justifies, in a way, the revenge of the Jew, and attributes it to his manliness, Lewisohn makes it clear that vengeance was not the rule with Jews. Shylock ' s desire for revenge was a mere tem- porary outbreak ;.fter a long chain of insults and injuries had been hurled at him. Jews have been so crushed by the Gentiles that they took persecution as a matter of fact and merely hoped that ultimately the oppressor: would change. As for the novel itself, The Last Days of Shylock both in style and content, succeeds in creating an atmosphere of medievalism. Historic characters and . events are called to life, and Jewish life and suffering become vivid before us. The book is a real contri- bution to modern Jewish literature. OUR TIMES REFLECTED MADMAN ' S DRUM A novel in woodcuts By Lynn Ward By Hugo Mantel This novel is the result of an experiment. In a series of woodcuts the author relates the story of a man who cuts himself off from the turmoil of life and absorbs himself in his books, thus bringing about the destruction of his family. His youthful wife, whom he had neglected, becomes faithless to him and, being keenly sensitive, commits suicide. His elder daughter, an idealist like her father, falls in love with a communist who becomes the scape-goat of politicians and is tried for mur- der. The girl ' s father vainly appears before the court to prove conclusively the innocence of the man; the influence of the politicians is stronger and the verdict is capital punish- ment. The unhappy girl follows her lover to the other world. The younger daughter who, due to the father ' s negligence and the mother ' s early death had grown up without proper breeding, is ultimately led astray. The father finally recognizes the fallacy of leading a sec- luded life and throws himself into the stream of life. The story is simple and its moral is plain. A novel in this form, being intended for the general public, must of necessity be simple; subtleties and complications, either in theme or in form, are not practical. The pictures must be vivid and suggestive.