Yeshiva University - Masmid Yearbook (New York, NY)

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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.

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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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28 - M ASMI D The great disadvantage of a novel in this form is, that style, which so powerfully re- flects the individuality of the author, is rela- tively lacking. All we can gather from the book are some of his views: that he aban- doned religion, that he is a social iconoclast. A psychoanalyst might undertake to analyze the character of the author of such an original work, but such activity lies outside of our scope. One cannot help thinking that this form of presenting novels typifies, in some import- ant aspects, our entire age. We are a fast lot and an impatient one. We sweep through the pages of novels, omit descriptions of landscapes and of idyllic life but devour the plot and lose our breath when somebody ' s life is at stake. The talkies are our ideal. There we do not even have to read; scenes from the underworld, from upper society, from the end of the world — stories unreal, bizarre and absurd — are presented to us in a matter-of-fact way and we are pleased. This form of novel, moreover, represents our era from another angle. A story in draw- ing can be understood by people in all parts of the world, irrespective of the language spoken by them. The post-war movement to foster an international spirit is quite in conformity with this form of novel-writing. It is unlikely, however, that this sort of book will in any way advance the cause. In order to sympathize with another nation, one must appreciate its spirit, and this insight into the spirit of another nation cannot be gotten without words, idioms and style: for through them one perceives the subtleties, idiosyncrasies and inner struggles of a people. A speechless book will not do. But is not this very failure characteristic of all the effort expended today on the establishment of uni- versal peace? In our machine-age everybody is trying to wipe out all individual distinctions: our aim is mental equality, standardization of habits, and conformity. In concealing his own char- acter, the author of this book is typical of the age. CLASSIFICATION By Louis Engelberg After many forays into the various centers of canned education in our cultural metro- polis, I have become more and more con- vinced of the hypermechancial nature of our system of learning. Every daily recitation, every weekly quiz is marred by that inevitable query: into how many groups can so and so be divided. ' ' Every final examination con- sists of something like ten classification ques- tions, though once in a while some original instructor may vary the monotony by giving only nine classifications and perhaps one dif- ferentiation. It is to avenge myself upon these many pedagogues for having trans- formed me into a mimicking puppet, a memo- rizer of category and subdivision names, that I am turning the tables — and in a last des- perate rally, hope to gain an everlasting triumph. It is to receive that satisfaction emanating from a task well done that I pro- pose to give the instructor a dose of his own medicine — and classify him! In carrying out my design I shall be as subjective as possible, thus affording myself a protective shelter from the many potential objectors who surround me. I shall thus be able to answer any query by that impregnable reply. Well, that ' s the way it appears to me. For the sake of convenience, moreover. I shall consider you. dear reader, a pal of mine attending classes with me at one of our New York Universities — hoping against hope that we procure a degree of some sort. We may divide all instructors into three classes: The young, the middle aged, and the old: that is. the inexperienced, the disillu- sioned, and those having relaxed into com- plete placidity. But let us leave abstractions and come down to facts.