Books: Vicomte De Brag Inside, Outside

When James Joyce wanted to symbolize exile, he did it with a Jew, Leopold Bloom of Ulysses. American Jewish writers did not hesitate to import this conceit, making the Jew-as-outsider one of the durable cliches in the national literature. But the facts of life were quite different from the fiction of alienation. By the end of World War II, the sons and daughters of ghetto immigrants were well on their way to becoming deeply rooted members of the middle class. Their semiofficial arrival can be dated to 1955. That was the year Herman Wouk published Marjorie Morningstar, the best seller about...