To read about American Jews this summer, you only need to open the newspaper. For better or worse, and probably for worse, Jews have been all too much in the news of late.
Seventy years ago, the situation was quite different. With World War II moving into the realm of history, in the mid-1950s Jews were being depicted not as alien or disreputable immigrants but rather as members of a respected American religion, reflected in a middlebrow literary culture that reached a mainstream audience. That was true at the end of the 1955 beach reading season when an unlikely pair of popular novels made a splash on the New York Times Bestsellers list.
Patrick Dennis (the pen name of Edward Everett Tanner III) published his first novel, “Auntie Mame,” in August of 1955. “Mame” quickly reached number one on the fiction bestseller list. A few weeks later, Dennis’s novel ceded the top spot to Herman Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar.”
Other than featuring female protagonists whose name started with M, it was not obvious that the two books — one by a WASP from Evanston, Illinois, and the other by a Bronx-born Jew — had anything in common. Wouk’s novel followed Marjorie Morgenstern, a young Jew coming of age on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and her adventurous dating life. Time magazine called Marjorie “an American Everygirl who happens to be Jewish.” The Morgensterns’ journey from the Bronx to Central Park West was not only the stuff of Jewish dreams; postwar Americans from all over the country could identify with their desire to move up in the world.
In Marjorie’s case, the family’s new home in the famous El Dorado building provided a feeling of luxury every morning when she woke to a sweeping view of Central Park. It was also the perfect address for launching a Manhattan social life — just as soon as she managed to disentangle herself from her old life and Bronx boyfriend. Readers follow as Marjorie negotiates her social and religious life, including observing kashrut.
The “will she or won’t she” question of the novel mostly concerns Marjorie’s virginity, but Wouk manages to tie the suspense to Marjorie’s keeping kosher. Bacon and eggs brunch at Tavern on the Green with her new uptown friends is just one of many hurdles confronting Marjorie as she figures out how to be a Jew in her new world. At the end of the story, the reader catches a glimpse of the heroine at 40. To an old beau who is visiting, this more mature Marjorie appears greying but otherwise recognizably herself. The real change is in her great loves, which are now family and Judaism. Once thrilled by the life her El Dorado address made possible, married Marjorie makes her home, more contentedly than ever, in Mamaroneck, Long Island.
With its message about the saving power of traditional family and religious values, “Marjorie Morningstar” seemed, to some readers, like the perfect antidote to “Auntie Mame.” Dennis’s protagonist is an avante garde divorcee who celebrates her chosen family, delights in shocking the buttoned-down and, while presumably a Christian, has little use for religion. As the New York Times reviewer described Mame, “Though she reads [André] Gide in bed, to call her an intellectual would not be strictly fair to the intellect. Yet she is something more than a bohemian.”
Mame may have been, as novelist and playwright Paul Rudnick observed, America’s diabolical answer to Mary Poppins: She is a woman festooned in vibrant colors, feathery fringe and an elegant cigarette holder dangling from her fingers — anything that allowed her to stand out. But she was also a woman with a social conscience, teaching those around her to find the fun in life — and how to see the world, including its Jews, more empathetically. Only in the novel’s opening chapters does Mame appear as a spectacularly wrong choice to care for her suddenly orphaned nephew, Patrick. By novel’s end, Dennis has successfully convinced the reader we all would be better off with an aunt like Mame.
Both books were written by authors with something to say not only about their female protagonists, but about Jews in New York. In “Marjorie Morningstar,” Wouk revealed the compromises made by upwardly mobile Jews as religion became a tool for social climbing. Back in the Bronx, the Morgensterns belonged to an Orthodox shul, but the move to Manhattan requires adjustments, including joining a Conservative congregation. “The wealthiest Jews were Reform,” Wouk observes. However, “the Morgensterns were not ready for such a bold leap away from tradition, to praying with uncovered heads, smoking on the Sabbath, and eating pork. The Conservative temple was a pleasant compromise with its organ music, mixed sexes, shortened prayers, long sermons, and a young rabbi in a black robe like a minister’s.”
Rosalind Russell starred as “Auntie Mame” in the 1958 film adaptation of the bestseller by Patrick Dennis. (Warner)
While Jews are not central to “Auntie Mame,” Dennis’s novel nonetheless validates the notion that New York might just be a synonym for “Jewish”; one cannot escape Jews in this city and its environs. When Mame’s nephew Patrick proposes marriage to Gloria Upson, a young woman from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Jews become part of the story in the person of his antisemitic future in-laws.
Mame, who lives chicly on Washington Square, is immediately suspicious of the Upsons’ Park Avenue address (“that graceless canyon of dying grass, carbon monoxide, and bad architecture”), which Mame finds unimaginative; she judges their furnishing gauche (“a little too B. Altman”). But it is not their sins of bad taste that truly offend Mame. It is their antisemitism.
When Mr. Upson discovers that New York Jews are planning to move next door to his Connecticut weekend home, he declares his intention to “keep these dirty kikes and all the rest of their lousy, stinking race out.” Shocked by his bigotry, Mame replies calmly with a lesson appropriate for mid-century Americans: “You can’t really be so naïve as to believe the Jews are a race… Why any anthropologist…” Mr. Upson can only reply: “Don’t give me none of your high-toned anthropology! I just know that as long as I have a breath left in my body I’ll fight every goddamned last one of these Izzys and Becky’s trying to muscle in on white man’s territory.”
Here, Patrick Dennis continued a trend typical of anti-antisemitism novelists of the 1940s who brought the anti-racialist lessons of Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his students into the realm of popular culture. As the anti-antisemite of the story, modeling liberalism for her nephew, Mame responds with perfect retorts, such as when Mr. Upson rails at her: “You sit and talk like the New Republic or some parlor pink when another Christian faces a serious….” Mame interrupts him: “I wish you wouldn’t use the term Christian where it is so obviously misapplied.”
The Manhattan of “Mame” is a big, diverse city, with its share of boorish racists and sophisticated liberals. The enlightened, liberal Manhattanites of Dennis’s novel understand that Jews are members of a respected religion — not members of an inferior race.
These popular 1955 novels portray the Jewish situation from two different perspectives. “Marjorie Morningstar” depicts what the literary critic Leslie Fiedler called “the first fictional celebration of the mid-20th-century detente between the Jews and middle-class America.” “Auntie Mame” shows readers what is being said about Jews behind the closed doors of the Park Avenue dinner parties where Marjorie is not invited.
Today Jews are distressed about the things that are said in public — and one need not turn to fiction to find the kind of attacks on American Jews that felt nearly impossible in this country in the decades immediately after World War II. Even as Jews ascended America’s postwar socioeconomic ladder, moving from the Bronx to Central Park West, “Auntie Mame” made clear that not all Americans were cheering them on. In 1955, both trends were in evidence. Seventy years later, Jews continue to prosper, and the jeers have only grown louder.
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