Reviewing Wouk’s recent autobiography, Adam Kirsch compares the prolific novelist’s relatively low reputation among critics with that of American Jewish writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, and suggests that the differences might have something to do both with Wouk’s themes and with his life:
Why is it . . . that the American Jewish writers who were most successful, [whose work] we now regard as classics, did not make success their theme? On the contrary, they generally wrote about failure, alienation, neurosis, and guilt—to the point that these subjects came to seem stereotypically Jewish in American culture. If the American Jewish story is, on balance, a very happy one, why are our books so miserable? Where are the well-adjusted Jewish writers?
The answer is that such writers did exist, but the critics who dictate literary posterity had little use for them. . . . In [several of his books], Wouk presented a vision of Judaism at one with itself: proud of tradition, pious toward the past, devoted to Zionism, yet totally open to the American experience and all its rewards.
In his slight but charming new memoir, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author, Wouk shows that this description of his Judaism is also a description of himself. If ever a man lived the American Dream, it was Wouk.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/196318/herman-wouk-kirsch