Robert Nathan (1894-1985), an American Sephardi Jew whose ancestors had first come to America before the Revolution, was a prolific author of fiction, most of it with supernatural themes. Although little remembered today, his work was very successful in the first half of the 20th century. In 1935, he wrote Road of Ages, which imagines a massive caravan of Jews—having been expelled from Europe, Palestine, and everywhere else—making their way to a safe haven promised them in Mongolia. Michael Weingrad writes:
The caravan includes atheists and believers, radicals and capitalists, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, aesthetes and laborers, hasidic rebbes and German concertmasters. . . . Thus, one of the running themes in Nathan’s episodic little novel is the extent of Jewish differences, the other is the process of cooperation and even fusion.
Two years earlier, Nathan had written an essay for Scribner’s titled “On Being a Jew.” There, Nathan explains that, lacking a normative Jewish religious faith, he has little sense of himself as a Jew by religion or as an active part of the organized Jewish community. He has found himself the object of hatred and prejudice in the Christian world, but also mistrusted by “the good bourgeois Jews themselves, because I was a poet, an artist, a bohemian, and a bad business risk.” Tepidly, he writes that the answer to the question of whether he is proud to be a Jew is “both yes, and no. . . . I am a Jew, I was born a Jew. Very well, let me neither deny it nor boast of it, but simply and gently accept it.”
David, the poet-character in Road of Ages, has some of this standoffishness—but sheds it. At first he identifies most strongly with the non-Jewish Amanda, who accompanies the caravan because she is married to a Jew, but says that she can never feel that this is her people. Yet in the course of the novel David finds himself caught up in the life of the caravan; sharing their sorrows and striving, he “no longer felt alone among the Jews.”
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