Books: Three-Card Trick

• Share

THE LAST JEW IN AMERICA by Leslie Fiedler. 191 pages. Stein & Day. $4.95.

Somewhat like the man in the sick joke who was recovering from radical throat surgery, and said it only hurt when he laughed, Leslie Fiedler, critic and novelist, only laughs when it hurts.

Fiedler hurts from the raw places in contemporary life where the minority —Negro, Jew, social dissident or sexual deviate—is abraded by community judgment. In his latest book, which consists of three comic novellas, he laughs as he plays confident conjuring tricks with cards of racial identity.

∙The Last Jew in. America takes the assimilation into the American community of new-generation intellectual Jews and makes from it a sad-funny tale. In a college campus presumably similar to Montana State College, where Fiedler used to teach English, he gathers a handful of Jewish faculty members who have become more American than ham on rye and throws the tragic mysteries of Yom Kippur at them. They don talliths (prayer shawls) over their tweeds and attend the services of Louis Himmelfarb, dying unassimilated of cancer in a Catholic hospital. The old Jew scandalizes their skeptical liberalism by insisting on removal to the bathroom of a crucifix that hangs on the wall. Later, a man who had refused to make one of the minyan (sacramental quorum) jeeringly sells his "chance in the world-to-come" for a nickel. But Himmelfarb's stubborn faith has confounded him, and now, it seems, he would like his nickel back. It is a nice story, and Fiedler, who is on the editorial board of Ramparts, the San Francisco Catholic periodical, knows enough about the Jewish and Catholic faiths to understand that while neither is intrinsically funny, they may have their comic aspects when seen in social juxtaposition.

∙The Last WASP in the World under lines Fiedler's conviction that the basic tone of U.S. creative intellectual life has become Jewish. He takes a poet, fashionable yesterday, hopelessly square today—a gangling, bearded figure of Protestant, romantic, outgoing, Western America—and sticks him in a Jewish wedding in New Jersey. The ushers are all Ph.D.s in physics, and the guests, if they are not Jewish, pretend to be on grounds of intellectual prestige. The poet hero, doomed to an academic lecture circuit where he recites his now-hackneyed verses, is the husband of one and the official lover of two other voracious, intellectual Jewish women. On circuit, he tries to sleep with the prettiest girl to show up at his readings: he nurses the hope that one of them will restore his own lost innocence. He has met such a one, and treasures a letter from her that he will reread when the awful wedding (at which his beard causes him to be mistaken for a rabbi) is finally over. After drunken humiliations in which he is literally stripped by his wife and two mistresses, he is left to sleep alone. He opens the letter that should have promised innocence. It proposes—and in the crudest way—just some more sex. There is no hope. The poet goes mad. Innocence, which Critic Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel, suggests is the basic American obsession, is just not to be had.