Wright Morris and the Jews. (2024)

Wright Morris was born in Nebraska in 1910 and left the state by 1925. Despite the relatively short contact, the Midwest was a formative influence as rural and small-town Nebraska and ethnic diversity in Omaha frequently provided material for many of the essays, novels, and photographs produced from 1942 to 1985. The Jewish aspect of Morris's production lies in the characters, plots, and world events generated by Jewish issues including his 1933 residence in Vienna, fascism, the Holocaust, and antiMcCarthyism. Morris acknowledges a deep reading influence of Jewish writers including Isaac Babel, Ettore Svevo, and Marcel Proust. Morris died in 1998. Although much has been written about Morris, this essay provides the first recognition of the Jewish motif in his work.

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Wright Morris was born in 1910 in Central City, Nebraska, where he lived for his first nine years. He died in 1998, in Mill Valley, California, his home for the last 36 years. His Omaha childhood, college experience, and 1933 Viennese sojourn captured his imagination and conscience, especially as incidents in his early life highlighted the changing status of the Jews from outsiders to endangered. Jews play an overlooked role in thirteen of his nineteen novels, two short story collections, four works of literary criticism, five books of photographs, and his three-volume memoir. Jews provide vital material evoking the tensions of small-town antisemitism, ethnic neighborhoods, leftwing idealism, rise of fascism, refugees, humanities darkest side, the Holocaust, survivors, McCarthy's red-baiting, and the State of Israel.

Morris's experience and his use of stereotypes of the Jewish body, sexuality, intelligence, and the vagaries of national origins echo James Joyce. (2) In his view Jews were intelligent and likable victims of local and international hostility, constantly adjusting to survive. Without the Jewish characters and their ambiguous national-religious identity, some works by Morris would not have been written, and others would be less potent. Morris's ancestry, mother's family name, childhood, adult life, and outsider status permeate his sixty years of writing. In 1981 he published Will's Boy, the first volume of his life, followed by Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe: 1933-1934 and A Cloak of Light. (3) His mother, Grace (Osborn) Wright, died six days after he was born, leaving him "half an orphan." His father, William Henry Morris, worked for the railroad, tried farming, and had an egg business. He married Gertrude and in 1919 moved from the Platte Valley to Omaha, where Wright entered the fifth grade at Farnam S chool. Gertrude left William, who "farmed out" Wright as a foster child to the Mulligans for $5 per week. (4) The mother-loss issue recurs in Morris's fiction and memoir.

The earliest drafts regarding Jews date from around 1936-1937 and record Omaha experiences from 1921 to 1925 in experimental single-page stories called "Profiles and Refrains," later regarded as epiphanies. (5) These drafts, including the Omaha neighborhood Mulligan-Goodman feud, ethnic stereotypes about Jews and Blacks, and their threat to whites, reveal several strains of nativism. First World War anti-German feeling appears in descriptions of Germans as "a goddam German spy. Tell you a man aint safe anymore, spies everywhere," and German doctors traveling around to schools "noculatin 'em for T.B. by shootin the T.B. bug right in 'em--giving 'em T.B. instead of killin it. . . some of them give the kids the syph., (6) Morris saw the film The Beast of Berlin, and the "Kaiser Devil" being "burned in effigy." Saying "AufWiedersehen" was the nicest thing about meeting Germans. (7)

The parents' nationality, ethnicity, and race marked the child. The 1930s Depression eroded the status of "real" Americans. Joey Mulligan was "seven-eighths Irish one eighth scannavian. Scannavian mostly on my mothers side." why'd you let the jews run the country back there. Irish looking boy like you, why'd you live back there. Ever see a Jew doin mnul labor in you life--havin hands like that? No bygod there fingers is smooth from folding bills. The Cathlics run it an the jews furnish the gas. Yes sir, the cath'lics run it, the jews own it, and the nigg*rs enjoy it--I never seen anything like a nigg*r havin fun. Goddam if he don't even enjoy his betin sometime. America's for everybody but us Americans. Ros'velt made the rich guys hand down some of it to the middle class--but where the hell do we come in--what about us. It aint our country anymore. (8)

The Jewish Goodmans and their many children, lice, and rats threatened the Irish Catholic Mulligans. (9) The Mulligans had one child, Joey; his older brother Louie had died. Mr. Mulligan drank and was abusive and may have envied the Goodmans with a dozen children. The adult Goodmans did not mix, generally remaining in their yard, and Mrs. Goodman never left the front porch. (10)

Morris distinguished himself and his father from the prejudices of fictional characters. Mrs. Mulligan described the Goodmans to Will Muncy (Wright's fictional father), "Jew-ish, she said with emphasis--pee-pul. When he said nothing she went on, Not that we've anything against the Jews but you can see for yourself how filthy everything is." Muncy saw a co*ckroach on Mrs. Mulligan's sinkboard, and "saw that all the backyards were filthy" and "wondered which one the Jewish one was." (11)

The crisis of Morris's friendship with Davy Goodman appears in four typescript pages, each containing one paragraph. In "THE JEW"

HE [Morris] was buying cheese at Weinsteins. HE said Hello an the Jew [David Goodman] said Hello too an through buyin they walked out together, clear to Capital an down the hill together, feeling it so much they couldn't talk. But followin that it'd all been easy an he even played catch right in fron with him but when he'd come in there'd been hell.

The Mulligans were enraged at Wright's fraternization with Davy Goodman.

Joe didn't bump him all night. And in the morning they began to talk ... how he was so good that even good Irish people ... good Irish and Sweidish people were't good enough for him, good clean Irish people who's given him a home an here he was messin with a Jew. An Joe got so hateful he couldn't believe it was him, wouldn't sleep with him an lay on the floor, an said the lowest things so he'd just hear them till he was all set to smash him one. And when he came home to eat they all got up and left him an he was so weak he couldn't move. An Mr. Mulligan came an stood off and talked at him an when he bawled Mrs. Mulligan touched his arm but he couldn't stand it and struck out at her an with them all standing popeye'd he'd run off. Clear to the park wher he hid under he shack an crawled out after it was dark. "You got to learn to take it," said the Jew. He went over and sat beside him. (12)

Davy, "good looking if you just saw his eyes but his mouth was bent from too much snickerin," held his own with the neighborhood toughs. "In two years of all corners he'd never himself said 'enough,' takin his beatin until they said it for him. People like Davy made a fellow wonder. About good Irish, Scotch and Swedish people like he was." (13) The Mulligans cursed Wright for befriending a Jew and insulting his Irish "foster" family. Joey forced Wright to sleep on the floor as a form of penance. Morris, a foster child, established a sympathetic identification with Davy Goodman the Jewish outsider.

The 1920s Omaha memories appear sketchily in the photo-texts the Inhabitants (1946) and God's Country and My people (1968). The latter parodies Mulligan's prejudices, "Jews were dirty, Pollacks were dumb, but they were next-door neighbors and fun to play with." (14) The Mulligan are developed further in "How I Met Joseph Mulligan, Jr." (1970), where Morris recounts his friendship with Joseph and life in the Mulligan home. Mr. Mulligan bought hops and malt from Weinstein's grocery to make beer. "Ordinarily Mr. Mulligan distrusted Jewish people but he could turn right around and spend all day discussing malt and hops. (15)

The Goodmans appear in Will's Boy, which describes the Omaha working-class neighborhood and social interactions between Christians and Jews. Although David Madden found that in Morris' Nebraska "geography doesn't always jibe," the Omaha City Directory lists the Mulligans, Goodmans, and two of his farnam Elementary School teachers. Joseph Mulligan worked as a pressman for the Omaha Bee and lived at 2628 Capitol Avenue. (16) Just up the hill from the Mulligans, at 2622 Capitol, were the Goodmans with nine daughters and three sons. Mr. Goodman worked in the streetcar barns, Sarah as a typist for the Western Union Telegraph, Fred as a houseman for the 0 & C Street Railway, Israel as a clerk at Omaha Hardware, and Sophie for E. & H. Baking. Mrs. Goodman spoke no English and shouted orders at her daughters in Yiddish from her front porch swing.

Davy Goodman, the oldest child, did not get along with Joey Mulligan. He used secret curses of the Yiddish language, which were pretty good." Joey had a loud voice, but not Davy's vocabulary. Joey would "break every bone in his yellow Jewish body." Although Wright took Joey's side, he said "I had never heard or seen in a boy so small such fluent, venomous, wonderful curses. Davy had the scathing looks and gestures." As Joey's loyal friend, he was "also confused by so much talent." It shamed him, but he admitted admiring Davy Goodman. Wright "could have out-wrestled him in a jiffy, but if I didn't grab him he would give me a nose bleed, being quick with his fists" (pp. 49-50). Mr. Mulligan was arrested for throwing firecrackers at Goodman's porch.

Davy and his sisters went to a neighborhood grade school. A visiting nurse sent them home when they had lice in their hair. The Goodman house, according to Mrs. Aheam who had visited, lacked rugs and furniture, and strong odors blew out of the kitchen. Esther and Ruth, the older girls, fought over the boys who came to see them. "On hot summer nights Esther might be seen dousing herself with the sprinkler naked as a baby." A neighbor called the police, who parked in the squad car in front of the house and watched (pp. 50-1). During the summer five to seven neighborhood kids gathered. At night under the streetlight, the number doubled, "including most of the girls but not Davy Goodman's sisters" (p. 54).

Wright's father found him "a new mother," Ann Van Meer, who had a daughter, Claudine. (17) Claudine had been going for a year with Otis Kahn "of Jewish extraction," who earned twelve dollars a week as a soda jerk (also identified as Max Cohn). Claudine planned to marry him in November when she was old enough. "Did it occur to me that in marrying my father" Mrs. Van Meer "had hoped to head off Claudine marrying Max Cohn?" Wright liked her beau; they worked together building a superheterodyne radio, "the tubes cost five dollars apiece" (pp. 81-83). Mrs. Van Meer objected to the engagement. They may have eloped to Council Bluffs assisted by Wright's father.

Father and son moved to Chicago. Wright worked for Montgomery Ward and the YMCA. At the City College of Chicago he acknowledged that "I had never had to compete with Jewish boys before, and they ran circles around me" (p. 157). He spent a few weeks at Seventh Day Adventist Pacific Union College, was asked to leave, and attended Pomona College in Claremont but did not complete his senior year. He took a ship from New York in early October 1933, stayed a week in Paris, spent several months in Austria, traveled in Italy, and returned to America in 1934. Other than being jailed by the Italians for taking pictures he makes little comment on the rise of fascism.

Morris married Mary Ellen Finfrock, a Claremont student from Cleveland, in 1934. The young couple visited Omaha, and he wrote:

The other half of the duplex stood empty, with a FOR RENT card propped in the window. In my time it had never been rented. Had this been the curse of the large, shouting, Jewish-speaking family who lived in the house next door, the kids known to have head lice? My friend Davy Goodman, with his spindly legs, would peer down to taunt me with his Jewish curses. The wall was crumbling. What had been the meaning of the word took-us? (18)

Morris, cautious of nostalgia, mined his memories. "If I attempt to distinguish between fiction and memory, and press my nose to memory's glass to see more clearly, the remembered image grows more illusive, like the details in a Pointillist painting. I recognize it, more than I see it." (19) Madden identified "the common memory store of the central characters." (20) Morris shifted "his raw material around from character to character," (21) then compressed "several perspectives into a single personal awareness." (22) Names and characters appear in more than one novel. Morris' 1936--41 drafts are consistent with his memoirs, notwithstanding the vagaries of memory and fiction's literary license. In response to people's marveling "How well I remember!" and "What a memory you have!" Morris wrote:

[W]e invariably remember rather poorly. It is the emotion that is strong, not the details. The elusive details are incidental, since the emotion is what matters. In this deficiency of memory, in my opinion, we have the origins of the imagination.... It is emotion that generates image-making: it is the emotion that processes memory,... it is what escapes the memory that stirs the imagination.

During the lapse of over forty years the author concedes, "what I have imagined has replaced and overlapped what I once remembered. The fictions have become the facts of my life." (23)

Morris, a "confirmed nonjoiner," unswayed by the left or right, "accepted things" as he "found them." (24) He recalled the 1933 swastika in the snow as "another time I failed to read correctly." (25) Following Thoreau he resisted the Second World War as not "worth fighting and dying for," but to avoid the draft he volunteered for the Army and Navy and was rejected for medical reasons. (26) He dedicated The Man Who Was There (1945) to Geddes Mumford, Louis's 19-year-old son, killed in Italy. The Inhabitants (1946), a photo-essay advocating freedom from want, asks rhetorically "how much gravy you find on the men from Buchenwald?" (27) The photograph, "Drawer with Silverware," (Norfolk, Nebraska, 1947) in The Home Place, reveals the forehead of "Hitler's Army Chief" from Capper's Weekly for April 29, 1939. (28) Man and Boy (1948) divides public opinion into Democrat or Republican, "a Gentile or a Jew" (p. 165).

Wright treasured the content, power, and physical character of books. He wrote with awe that one of his college teachers "had actually known a writer who had sent him his novel, with his name written in it, and I had felt both privileged and honored to be shown that book, and turn its pages." (29) A frequenter of used bookstores, he sold his collection of first editions, fine bindings, and signed copies to his friend and neighbor Loren Eiseley to help make the down payment on his house. "The Character of a Lover" (1951) develops the loss of the people of the book. Dr. Hodler, who looked like the Viennese Jewish (Prague-born) writer Franz Werfel, mentors Robert Gollen, a bookstore clerk. Hodler fails to find Robert in the store and is informed that he refused to sell a customer "one of these anti-Jewish books," and told him "to buy it somewhere else." The customer made some anti-Jewish remark, Robert asked him to step outside, and "he slapped him in the face." "Now, you can't treat the public like that." Robe rt was fired. (30) The reader fills in antisemitism, the Holocaust, and outrage at the hero clerk's mistreatment.

The Huge Season is Morris's Jewish-centered work. (31) The narrator, Peter Foley, a thin disguise of Wright Morris, flashes back to the early 1920s, to days at Colton (Pomona) College, and Paris in 1929. Foley's encounter with Jesse Lasky Proctor in college was its own education. Proctor's "face was more--well, it was more Jewish, whatever that was" (p. 21). (32) Another stereotype described "male Jews" as "hairy young men with good legal training, preferably Harvard, physical type prone to peanuts and growing bald early" (p. 82). (33)

All this time this fellow Proctor sat there and talked. When the upperclassman asked him where he was from, he said the Jewish Alps. I didn't know at the time that he meant the Catskills above New York. I didn't know how to take it, for it was clear that Proctor was a Jew himself. I never met a Jew who talked like that about himself. Proctor told one story after another, most of them pretty funny, but nearly all of them having something to do with comical Jews. (p. 45)

Proctor worked his way through college washing dishes four hours a day in the mess hail and wrote papers for lazy students like Charles Lawrence, a gifted but lazy WASP and heir to a barbed wire fortune. Lawrence took Proctor home for Christmas. "If his family didn't like Jews, would he ask me?" (p. 118). "And as for himself [Foley], he might forget to notice that Proctor was a Jew" (pp. 123, 206). Proctor was a facilitator, a go-between taking isolated but prophetic positions (p. 72).

While Morris "had no model in mind for Lawrence," (34) Omaha's Davy Goodman provides material for Proctor. Davy was quick witted, financially resourceful, with a keen sense of Jewish oppression. "You got to learn to take it," is echoed by Proctor, who shoots himself in the foot, cutting short his track career as a sprinter, and says, "Any Jew can take it. I wanted to show him a Jew who could give it up" (p. 274).

Proctor's opportunistic values should not be denigrated. When he asked a friend to borrow a pair of tennis shoes he was asked, "What size, old man?" He responded, "I wear any size" (p. 91). Proctor organized Seventh-Day Adventists according to the Gospel of Marx, he was in Eleanor Roosevelt's choir, he entered the Spanish Civil War and lost two fingers to a grenade, he left the fellow-travelers and became a Chasidic Jew, and he imported Jews (presumably rescuing Jews in the 30s from the Nazis) (pp. 53--4). With a cynical sense of humor he answered the phone in a falsetto voice, "Good morning, Goldberg's Spa and Breast Developer on the Boardwalk" (p. 81). Proctor started writing novels in college, though in later life he looked "more like a rabbi" than a writer (p. 257).

Richard "Dickie" Livingston, an archetypal playboy, answered the phone, "Finkel's Fortifying Leechbake on the Hudson, good morning! Patrick O'Casey speaking." He proclaimed himself as "the only man you know without a trace of concealed anti-Semitism. All out in the open," though was closer to a misanthrope (pp. 100-1).

"Fear of sex and Semitism," Dickie had continued, "allergic symptom nine-oh-five! Refer you to Glossary, New and Revised Edition of 'Livingston's Manual Modern Semitic Warfare.' There you will find that Livingston is a bastard, Lou Baker is a bitch, Foley a spineless egghead, but Jesse L. Proctor is a long-suffering, wall-weeping Jew. He cannot be a bastard, an egghead, or a bitch, because that would be anti-Semitic. All men are brothers, saith Saint Gide, except those who are really fond of each other" (p. 100). (35)

Proctor, a Jew and alleged Communist, and characterized as the unmasked Voice of America, received front page New York Times coverage, two columns and a photograph, in 1952 for his defiance of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Committee. The "obscure Jew was in the eye of the TV camera" (p. 101). (36) Foley sees the newspaper headline, "Witness cited for contempt," and reads:

"I was eroding," the witness had said, and that was how he looked. All the soft gentile topsoil, the nonfurrowed regular guy, the comical Jewish Clown, had eroded away. Leaving bedrock. A flood-scored Jewish bedrock showing beneath. Foley remembered the first joke Proctor had told them--might have been the first thing he said--about a house full of Semitic baroque in the Jewish Alps. (p. 55)

"Dickie" says to Foley and Lou Baker in Proctor's presence:

"The rules of the house, old man," he continued, "are not to put corn on grape, or grape on corn, or pour corn on the uninvited guest." He smiled at Lou Baker. "Madame Swann's Way is serving Medoc tonight, and our distinguished guest, well known for his palate, would vomit down his corset at the thought of corn on grape."

Foley turned to the tables, the five places, and Lou Baker said, "If I'd known that I'd invited some pickled gentiles to a quiet Jewish wake--"

"If you hadn't known," said Proctor, bowing, "there'd have been damn little pleasure in it" (p. 213, emphasis added).

Swann, the main character in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time, like Proust is at least half Jewish. The plot includes unrequited love of a courtesan, class snobbery, and hom*osexuality. According to Julia Kristeva, "It is clear that the Jewish problem is the open secret...like 'Swann's punchinello nose'." The irony of antisemitism is that Jews are accused of being Socialists and Communists and money-grubbing capitalists and of being hypersexual and hom*osexual. Hannah Arendt observed that the "vice" of hom*osexuality is conflated with the "vice" of Jewishness. (37)

Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960) is built around Tom Scanlon's 90th birthday party and the 1958 Starkweather murder rampage. Small-town antisemitism is conjured with Scanlon listening to the radio. He felt that "the men who talked all night, against the Jews or the liberals or something, had stayed up until that hour just to talk to him" (pp. 55-9). Radio antisemitism appears again in In Orbit (1967). "Irwin was in the war where he met this cat who opened the freight cars full of gassed people" (pp. 254-55).

What a Way to Go (1962) asks who is a Jew. National, ethnic, and religious origin appears in "Here is Einbaum" (1971) and About Fiction (1975). The American Joey Mulligan is marked as part Irish and Scandinavian. Pseudoscientific racism and the Nuremberg laws identified Aryan, Jew, and mischling, the product of intermarriage. Herr Adrien Perkheimer in What a Way to Go "was an Austrian--but echt Deutsch." German, Viennese, and Swiss identity and fractional Jewish ancestry appear in several stories. Perkheimer, an avid photographer, carried five cameras of different sizes, each loaded for a different country.

Small cameras would suffice for small countries. Switzerland, Monaco, Albania--and recently Israel. The Jews were a problem. Would they consent to be a mini-country? Or would national pride insist on larger cameras? A touchy subject. One he [Perkheimer] well understood being three-sevenths Jewish. (pp. 158-59)

He asserts that Soby, a fellow tourist, might also be part Jew. The calculation of the Jewish blood, heritage, and culture, of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents recalled Hitler's Nuremberg laws and the search for religious identification on birth certificates.

Cause for Wonder, started in 1935 as "The Madmen of Ranna" but not published until 1963, draws from Morris's 1933-34 European Wanderjahr. (38) The intervening years witnessed the apocalypses of Hitler and the Holocaust. Cohn suggests that "[t]he evolution of Cause for Wonder parallels the course of Morris's progress as a novelist that is inferable from the published books; but it also dramatically describes the writer's private struggle with his raw material" (p. 96). Extending the timeline transformed the story. The final script included the destruction of Jews, unimaginable during the 1933 Wanderjahr.

In Cause for Wonder Warren P. Howe (Morris), a writer whose mother's family name is Osborn, receives a card, "Etienne Dulac 1887-1962." He had not seen Dulac since the early 1930s when he had stayed a few months at his castle Schloss Riva, near Vienna. Howe, believing he was dead, and another acquaintance, Sol Spiegel, owner of Spiegel's Salvage in Santa Monica, out of a mystical respect, travel to Europe for the funeral. (39) Dulac, alive though ailing, hosts a reunion, not a funeral. Dulac's speech is slurred, and about five pages discuss the "Choos." During the war Dulac harbored about 50 or 60 Jews in the castle. Spiegel presses the discussion, "What's this about the Jews? ... Mind my askin?" (p. 161). The Nazis used the castle for field headquarters rather than blow it up. The Jews were removed. "What happened was that Monsieur Dulac went with them. He was one of them. He never suggested that he was not" (p. 162). Dulac is not identified as a Jew, but as a fellow victim. Spiegel, however, declared, "Ten to one he's a Jew," and Frau Dulac would "make a good housemother at Auschwitz" (pp. 234, 145). Rice concluded that "Dulac, who apparently is not Jewish, accompanied his charges into German captivity." Morris says the real-life character was imprisoned. (40)

Morris, a road writer and car enthusiast, observed the German Volkswagen enter the American market in the 1960s. The prevailing post-war Jewish attitude to avoid German goods conflicted with the begrudging purchase of the efficient, moderately priced and dependable bug, a dilemma captured in One Day (1965) (pp. 152-53, 420-21) and In Orbit.

The archtypal nineteenth-century Jew was Benjamin Disraeli. His father had converted him to the Anglican faith, but exaggerated caricatures depicted him as an oriental, a Jew. In One Day, Evelina Cartwright(nee Soyer) describes Miriam Horlick's "beaked nose," and said of her face that "a good barrister's wig would have been its crowning glory, emphasizing her close family resemblance to Disraeli" (p. 112).

In Orbit takes place in Pickett, a midwestern town large enough for traffic signals, parking meters, and a white Porsche (p. 99). Felix Haffner, from Vienna, teaches French, German, and existential theater, has a "resemblance to Disraeli," and is identified as a Jew when he purchases a VW (pp. 28,37). "But it is not funny to Hodler [appeared in "Character of a Lover"] that Haffner, a Jew whose life was perverted by Nazi persecutions, should go all the way to Munich to buy himself a Chinese-red Volkswagen, cut-rate." He was "high camp." To Hodler he is "mad but unique," with a prominent nose and frizzly hair. "Dimly and with embarrassment Hodler senses that this queer, childish creature, impudent and half-crazy, has something more on the ball than himself" (p. 49). Haffner was "more AC than DC" (p. 74). Dr. Haffner, who "never missed the German broadcasts of Hitler" and knew all about poison gas, bugs, and germ warfare, appears later as a fellow passenger enroute to Europe in Solo (p. 15).

In Orbit imagines a Zionist conspiracy. Oscar Kashperl, born in Odessa, is an accountant and owner of Kashperl's Army and Navy. Curt Hodler, with echt Swiss lineage, editor of the Pickett Courier, is talking to Pauline Bergdahl about Kashperl. According to Hodler, "A large segment of her [Pauline]s] simple uncluttered nature is a simple-minded uncluttered dislike of all Jews. They cause wars. They run the country. An actress had to sleep with them if she wanted to be famous." She got her information from a midnight Christian radio program out of Nacogdoches (pp. 109-110). When there was a twister (tornado) she asked, "Who you think gives the twist to the wind, Mr. Hodler, the movie folks?" (pp. 111, 127). In small-town antisemitism Jews controlled the weather.

A Bill of Rites, A Bill of Wrongs. A Bill of Goods (1968) contains fifteen essays including discussions of the Eichmann trial (pp. 96-7), Nazi medical experiments (p. 147), and the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto (pp. 167-68, 170). In the short story "Drrdla" (1969) the German-Swiss Jew Herman Lewin cuckolds a passive Gentile German-Swiss. "They were all agreed that German culture could not be held responsible for a few madmen, anymore than all Americans could be held responsible for Huey Long" (p. 76). The story refers to bagels, before they were ubiquitous, and cold matzo-ball soup (p. 87). (41)

In the Fire Sermon (1971) bippie hitchhikers from the San Francisco Bay area come upon a cemetery in Chapman, Nebraska. There were gravestones for Sewell, Wells, Horde and Youngblood.

"Where are the Jews, Dad? Don't they bury the Jews"

"One of the Hordes married a Jew" and "They went to live in Grand Island."

"You hear that?" Stanley yelled to Joy, "One ran off with a Jew, Pretty lucky, right?" (p. 120).

"Here is Einbaum" confronts the national, religious, and personal identity of many German and Austrian Jews fleeing Hitler. (42) Viennese Mendelssohn Einbaum and Countess Sophia Horvath-Szapati were escaping Austria in August 1939, one month before Hitler invaded Poland. Einbaum asks the question, "Is it possible to be a German and a Jew?" "With shame he admits" being Jewish, "but a German first." He repeats the common sentiment, "A German, unmistakably, and more or less mistakably, a Jew" (pp. 11-12). The Countess, a devout Catholic,

[i]n diplomatic French ... admitted to Einbaum that they had more in common than met the eye. In her father's blood Sophia Kienholz, a Jewess, had left the strain that his daughter, among others, thought apparent. Not anything in particular--no, nothing like that. One simply sensed it was there, as one sensed it in Einbaum. The Jewishness. The je ne sais quoi, as the French would say. (pp. 15-16) (43)

Deracination reinforced Jewish identity--"Had Einbaum forgotten that he, too, was a Jew? Perhaps he had never felt it so strongly" (p. 17). The demands of Jewish survival in a hostile gentile world bred chameleon-like responses--"This remarkable woman, known to him as a countess, could change her spots when the script called for it. The word 'script' was Einbaum's" (p. 21). Sophia is murdered in Spain, her jewelry stolen and the gold crowns removed from her teeth--she failed to reinvent herself as a Christian. Einbaum survives, sells greeting cards in New York, and lives with Bettina, a survivor of a Jewish brothel in Cracow.

War Games, published in 1972, was started in the early 1950s. The first chapter appeared as "The Safe Place" in the 1954 Kenyon Review. In the Preface to the 1978 edition Morris acknowledges the Vienna autumn of 1933 as the source of "unforgettable impressions" leading to the character Hyman Kopfman. Colonel Foss is in a hospital bed next to Kopfman, a Vienna-born multiple amputee with a blood disease or diabetes. The name Kopfman, Austrian origins, and his father's name Mandel establish a Jewish sensibility. Colonel Foss's wife, Claudine, responding to the question, "You remember Hyman Kopfman?" says, "'Kopfman--Isn't that Jewish?"' (p. 41). Claudine declares,

"The Jewish taking it over" ... She said this flatly, a matter of fact that held, for her, no particular interest. There was nothing implied, nothing concealed, and the Colonel had the curious feeling that it gave the observation greater weight. That it seemed to come from some impersonal source. (p. 54)

Mrs. Kopfman remarries Mr. Tabori, a bellhop and extortionist. Kluger, a janitor, Mr. Tabori, and Claudine die under strange circ*mstances. Mrs. Tabori is ambiguously identified as a Viennese, Jewish, transvestite, hom*osexual, or murderer. Morris belies the reader's expectations: Kopfman was not Jewish. (44)

The Field of Vision (1956) has no direct Jewish identity but like its close contemporary in conception, War Games, is filled with transformation. In Vision's five voiced interlinked narratives, the Austrian or Swiss, sometime resident of Vienna and New York, physician cum psychiatrist Dr. Leopold Lehman cares for the sexually ambiguous or transformed Paula/Paul Kahler, a chambermaid who had strangled an amorous bellhop. (45)

In Love Affair--A Venetian Journal (1972) Giuseppe sings silently, dances, and does card tricks. "No one in Venice gets such total attention." His "melancholy performance" held "something older than Venice." An anxious perfectionist who sits in the Piazza reading the London Daily Mail and sipping cognac, he fishes and lets the cats eat his catch. "What is one to make of him? Is he merely crazy? He is also a Jew, and that might explain it. An Italian would sing, once he had opened his mouth." Venice may have invented the ghetto, a "word too charged with history not to feel its awesome presence." (46)

The Fork River Space Project (1977) flashes back to an American visiting Paris in the summer of 1939 and an elderly Jewish artist, affectionately described as one of those

big shaggy-dog types of people with the touch of something sweet and hopeless about him. I felt drawn to him. He had a pelt of black hair on his chest that made it hard for him to button his collar, gray eyes, and a big, soft Jewish mug.

Hitler shortly sent the narrator packing to the States (p. 173).

In "Wishing You and Your Loved Ones Every Happiness" (1985) Charlotte took a seat on a New York bus on Broadway next to "a youth so pale he looked ghostly. He wore a black suit, a wide-brimmed black hat, and dangling coils of hair at his ears" (p. 240). Shortly thereafter Charlotte changed her hairstyle to a pageboy.

Morris, novelist, literary critic and educator, recommended books, identified the impact of old writers on new writers, and acknowledged his literary debts including several Jewish writers. Melville read Shakespeare, Fitzgerald read Joyce, Mann, and Proust, and Richard Wright "had surely read the French writer Celine. (47) The critical work Territory Ahead (1957) places Proust in the pantheon with Henry James and James Joyce. "A Reader's Sampler" of "good fiction" in About Fiction enlarged Morris's canon to include twenty-one authors: Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, James Agee and Walker Evans, Janet Lewis, Malcolm Lowry, and Robert Stone. The continental writers Rainer Maria Rilke, philosemite Thomas Mann, (48) Italo Svevo, Isaac Babel, Louise-Ferdinand Celine, were available in English translation during the 1930s, as were Albert Camus, Max Frisch, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez shortly af ter they were published.

Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments (1978) added nineteen American authors to the canon. Morris, however, declared that "Modern literature is largely identified with three non-American masters Proust, Joyce and Mann" (p. 17) through whom the European novel approached its summit (p. 114). Morris refers to over a dozen additional European writers including Madame Blavatsky, Albert Camus, Vittore Carpaccio, Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Stein, and Emile Zola, the photographer YousufKarsh, and the Lithuanian-born Parisian artist Chaim Soutine, who "combined the impotent rage of the concentration-camp survivor with the American innovation of lynching." (49)

Proust, Babel, Svevo, and Celine influenced Morris. He invoked Proust's Swann's Way in The Huge Season. In About Fiction he writes, "The world of Guermantes Way did not lack for fiction, and the butchers of Buchenwald knew their Rilke and Goethe hummed the arias of Mozart...there is always the chance the bad fiction will succeed where the good fails, as in Mein Kampf." (50)

Babel explicated the relationship between fiction and the imagination. Recalling his youth in the Moldavanka Jewish ghetto of Odessa, the Russian describes his addiction to reading:

As a boy I was given to lying. It was all due to reading. My imagination was always on fire. I read in class, during recess, on the way home at night--under the dinner table, hidden by the folds of the cloth that reached down to the floor. Reading made me miss all the important doings of this world. (51)

Babel's talent, according to Lionel Trilling, "like that of many modern writers, is rooted in the memory of boyhood." He had a Jewish handicap to overcome. According to Morris, "[p]recisely where memory is frail and imperfect, imagination takes fire." (52) Violence and surprise in Babel's Red Cavalry leaves the reader to intuit, speculate, imagine, and conclude.

Italo Svevo, born Ettore Schmitz, a German-Italian Jew, was taught English in Trieste by James Joyce. (53) Could Will Brady's courtship in The Works of Love (1952), asking unsuccessfully for the hand of "Opal Mason, a 'very unsuitable woman,"' and then asking a number of other women before he settles upon the pregnant fifteen- or sixteen- year-old Mickey Ahearn (pp. 25-28), be written without having read about Proust's Jewish protagonist Swann and Odette, and Svevo's protagonist half Jewish Zeno asking to marry three sisters in succession?(54)

Morris calls Celine the "Prince of Darkness," and "master of the grotesque." Celine owes a slight debt to Proust, but Celine's racism in 1932 is attributable to Gobineau and misanthropy. The racism did not appeal to Morris, though the well phrased pithy bitterness had an ironic attraction.(55) By the end of the thirties Celine was a fascist and antisemite. Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night) may be further impressed on Morris's memory as he was apprehended shoplifting a mint copy on Paris' Right Bank.(56)

Morris records in A Cloak of Light that while looking at some remaindered books in a New York shop, Saul Bellow, recognizing him from a picture on a dust jacket, asked, "You're Wright Morris?" They chatted about various writers. "He liked the writer [George Borrow], and I the one I had just met. A splendid nose, to my taste (I'm a believer in noses), the pupils of his large eyes dilating as they took my measure" (pp. 161-2).(57)

Conclusion

Morris recognized the dreams of "a great variety of midwestern, eastern, far western, and southern Americans." His novels include French, Germans, Austrians, Italians, Greeks, and Mexicans.(58) He criticized Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers for lacking color and tension. "They are all, needless to say, good American types. The democratic process is also at work, since we see no black men, no yellow men, no obvious Jews, Italians, or roughnecks--just plain folks, one of us."(59)

The Morris novels and memoirs maintain their integrity. His childhood-years memoir deals with nativism and antisemitism, his 1933 sojourn in Vienna touches only marginally on fascism; neither anticipates the Holocaust. Morris may have identified with Jews; his own experience as half an orphan resonates with the Goodmans' who were half in society, and Jewish Perkheimer and Countess Sophia Horvath-Szapati.

Hordes married a Jew, Dulac and Soby were potentially Jewish, and Kahler and Tabori are half male and female.

An obituary repeated the long-standing appraisal that Morris with over thirty published volumes was "one of the nation's most unrecognized recognized writers." (60) John Aldridge suggested that Morris had "become arrested permanently on the brink of a major reputation," and that his status "as the least well-known and most widely unappreciated important writer alive in this country" was assuming "the proportions of a literary Dreyfus case." G. B. Grump suggests that a reason for Morris's public neglect is that the niche of books about the plains was not as fashionable as, say, "Jewish novels" that "have an extraliterary appeal to Jewish critics." Morris acknowledged that "the urban drama of Jewish life is the only intellectual drama we have," but added, "That may be changing." (61) These assessments were framed before the scope of Jewish social and literary influence was disclosed and before an inventory of Jewish content was apparent. Morris's work would have been significantly smaller and different if the J ewish content were absent; he nurtured but did not exploit the Jewish connection.

(2.) Ira B. Nadel, Joyce and the Jews (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989).

(3.) Wright Morris, Will's Boy: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe: 1933-1934 (New York: Harper & Row, 1983); and A Cloak of Light: Writing My Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).

(4.) Will's Boy, p. 42, and Cloak of Light, pp. 82, 90.

(5.) Jack Rice Cohn, "Wright Morris: The Design of the Midwestern Fiction," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1971), pp. 61, 104. Cohn corresponded with Morris as he organized the Morris collection at the Bancroft Library. "Epiphany" appears in John W. Aldridge, "Wright Morris Country," Conversations with Wright Morris, Robert E. Knoll, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), p. 6, and Cloak of Light, pp. 25,227.

(6.) Bancroft Library, University of California, Wright Morris Collection, D10: 1 (henceforth cited as BL). Here and below Morris's dialect spelling is preserved. Morris lived in Central City about 21 miles from Hampton, where the anti-German language case, Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) started. The U.S. Supreme Court found Nebraska's anti-foreign language legislation unconstitutional. See Jack W. Rodgers, "The Foreign Language Issue in Nebraska, 1918-1923," Nebraska History 39 (1958): 1-22.

(7.) Will's Boy, pp. 12-13; and Solo, p. 135.

(8.) BL, D10:1. Joey Mulligan's mother, probably born Ola Lindgren, had Swedish origins. Wright Morris, The Inhabitants (New York: Scribners, 1946), unpaginated.

(9.) BL, "MR. MULLIGAN," D9 and D10:1.

(10.) BL, MS A6:1, 72/246 No. 10, pp. 165, 226.

(11.) BL, MS A6:1, 72/246 No. 10, p. 160.

(12.) BL, "THE JEW" in "Profiles and Refrains," D10:1, and 74/246, Carton 1, Item 1, p. 48.

(13.) BL, "DAVY," D10:1, XXVI, and 721246 Carton 1, p.49.

(14.) God's Country and My People (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981, first pub. 1968), unpaginated.

(15.) "How I Met Joseph Mulligan, Jr.," Harper's Magazine, 240 (Feb. 1970): 84.

(16.) David Madden, Wright Morris (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 29, and Omaha City Directory, 1921, 1923, and 1925.

(17.) According to the 1923 City Directory, Ann Van Meer, the widow of Ernest, lived at 2122 S. 35th Ave.

(18.) Cloak of Light, p. 91.

(19.) Wright Morris, Earthly Delights. Unearthly Adornments, American Writers as Image-makers (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p.3.

(20.) Madden, Wright Morris, p. 81.

(21.) Cohn, "Wright Morris," pp. 262 and 186, n. 21.

(22.) Rodney P. Rice, "Wright Morris' Second Thoughts: The Novelists Reuse of Autobiographical Material," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1987), p. 145.

(23.) Morris, "Origins, Reflections on Emotion, Memory, and Imagination," in Conversations, pp. 155-57.

(24.) Writing My Life, an Autobiography (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), p. 136.

(25.) Solo, p. 109.

(26.) Cloak of Light, pp. 76, 107-8.

(27.) The Inhabitants, unpaginated.

(28.) This picture also appears in Wright Morris, Structures and Artifacts, Photographs 1933-1954 (Lincoln: Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 61, and on the dust jacket and plate 15 in James Alinder, ed., Wright Morris: Photographs & Words (The Friends of Photography in Association with Matrix Publications, 1982). A slightly different photograph of the same material appears in God's Country.

(29.) Solo, p. 156.

(30.) Wright Morris, "The Character of a Lover," American Mercury 73 (August 1951): 49; and Collected Stories, 1948-1986 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 37.

(31.) Wright Morris, The Huge Season (New York: Viking Press, 1954). "Huge season" refers to the 1920s (Morris, The Territory Ahead [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958], p. 13). Murray Blackman, A Guide to Jewish Themes in American Fiction, 1940-1980 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1981), p. 147, described it as "effects of jazz age generation from college days to exploits in Paris."

(32.) Jack Rice Cohn suggests that Proctor's name Jesse may be linked to the Biblical father of David, and Lasky to Harold Joseph Laski (1893-1950), a British Labour party leader.

(33.) On stereotypes see Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.5, 125, 127, and 231, and Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), pp. 12-13; and Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p.7, where Nochlin writes about contradictory representations, "Jews are too smart and innately incapable of genius; Jewish women are natural wantons and asexual or frigid, Jews underhandedly control the international banking community and yet pollute the great cities with their fetid, crime-ridden slums. Jews are over-intellectual but over emotional, hyper-rational but superstitious." Jewish deviance threatened society. These were "paranoid fantasies... fueled by selective fact-finding" (p. 10). Morris with a sense of disbelief reports on several alleged Jewish facial, hirsute, and bodily characteristics.

(34.) Cloak of Light, p. 379.

(35.) Foley chased Montana Lou Baker (Bryn Mawr, 1927), who married Proctor. Baker is based on Alec Taylor, "Double-Dukes," a left-leaning widow Scripps house mother (Cloak of Light, pp.76, 165).

(36.) Does this invoke Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure? See Roy K. Bird, Wright Morris, Memory and Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), pp. 52-3, where he notes that Hardy has a hogbutchering scene. The "eye" suggests Morris's Uncle Dwight shooting hogs between the eyes.

(37.) Julia Kristeva, "Proust in Search of Identity," trans. Claire Pajaczkowska, in Jew in the Text, p. 152. See also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 2nd enlarged edition, 1958), pp. 80-97. In The Brick Foxhole (1945), by Richard Brooks, a hom*osexual is murdered, while the film Crossfire (1948) changed the murder victim to a Jew.

(38.) Cohn, "Wright Morris," pp. 33, 60, 88.

(39.) Army Surplus first appeared in The World in the Attic (1949), p. 25. Salvage was tied to Jews in Cause for Wonder (1963), and in Huge Season Proctor salvaged Jews.

(40.) Rice, p. 135; Cloak of Light, p. 263.

(41.) See also In Orbit, p. 74, for another reference to matzo balls.

(42.) Wright Morris, "Here is Einbaum," New Yorker 47 (26 June 1971): 35-41. "Einbaum" means "one tree," close in meaning to the title of his 1960 novel, Lone Tree.

(43.) On taint and racism see Nancy A. Harrowitz, "The Taint of the Quagga: A Relation of Race, Science, and Literature," in Antisemitism, Misogyny, & the Logic of Cultural Differences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

(44.) Cohn, "Wright Morris," pp. 224-25, 29, 274, 308, and War Games, pp. 21-23, 118. Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and bouncer at a cafe frequented by hom*osexuals or intellectuals, was killed on June 28, 1934, preliminary to the blood purge against Chief of Staff Ernst Roehm on June 30. See William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 220, New York Times, and The Times, London.

(45.) Morris met Erich Kahler, a Jewish historian, and his mother in the spring of 1945 (Cloak of Light, pp. 126-27; Erich Kahler, Man the Measure [Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967, first published 1943], p.3). He attempted to "write history as the biography of man and from it to gain a view of the future of man." A native of Prague, deprived of his German citizenship in 1933 and dispossessed of his German house, he came to the U.S. in 1938. His wide-ranging book, endorsed by Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, and Albert Einstein, includes discussions of Proust, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann.

(46.) Wright Morris, Love Affair--A Venetian Journal (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) unpaginated.

(47.) Cohn, "Wright Morris," suggests some European writers, pp. 28-29, 40-42 (Morris, Earthly Delights, p. 153). He dedicated The Works of Love to Sherwood Anderson, whose "influence is everywhere apparent," according to Granville Hicks, Literary Horizons, p. 10, citing "The Works of Love," The New Leader, March 24, 1952.

(48.) Ritchie Robertson, The German-Jewish Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 152.

(49.) Earthly Delights, p. 133, and see Territory Ahead, p. 173.

(50.) Wright Morris, "What Good Is It?," in About Fiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 9. Guermantes Way is in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. One Day contains another Buchenwald reference: "They have the faces of the matrons at Buchenwald, doing their oven job" (p. 426). Morris names a cat Bloom in "The Cat's Meow" (1975).

(51.) Isaac Babel, Benya Krik, the Gangster and Other Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 65, cited by Morris in "About Voice," in About Fiction, pp. 132-33, "Origins, Reflections on Emotion, Memory, and Imagination," in Earthly Delights, p. 1, and "How I Put in My Time," in Growing Up Western, ed. Clarus Backes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 107.

(52.) Isaac Babel, Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, introduction by Lionel Trilling, trans. Walter Morison (New York: New American Library, 1974), pp. 20, 24, and Morris, "Origins," Conversations, p. 159. Oscar Kashperl in In Orbit, like Babel, came from Odessa.

(53.) About Fiction, p. 154.

(54.) Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, trans. Beryl de Zoete (New York: Vintage Books, 1989, first English ed., 1930).

(55.) Wright Morris, "The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet," Kenyon Review 27 (Autumn 1965): 734-35.

(56.) Solo, p. 175.

(57.) Saul Bellow held Morris in high regard. See Granville Hicks, Literary Horizons, A Quarter Century of American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 7.

(58.) Leon Howard, Wright Morris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968, p. 6.

(59.) Territory Ahead, p. 119.

(60.) Ralph Blumenthal, "Wright Morris, a novelist of Nebraska Prairie, dies at 88," New York Times, April 29, 1998, D23.

(61.) John W. Aldridge, "Wright Morris's Reputation, 1970," The Devil in the Fire (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1972), p. 257; G. B. Crump, The Novels of Wright Morris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 230; and "The American Novelist and the Contemporary Scene, A Conversation between John W. Aldridge and Wright Morris," in Conversations, p. 22.

Oliver B. Pollak (1)

(1.) The author would like to thank Josephine Morris, Joseph Wydeven, Frances Kay, Robert Knoll, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, and Karen Pollak, for their gracious assistance, and especially Jack Rice Cohn for a close reading of an early draft.

Oliver B. Pollak is a professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He earned his doctorate at UCLA and his law degree at Creighton University. He has published over 100 scholarly articles regarding colonialism in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, Jewish history and bankruptcy. He published Jewish Life in Omaha and Lincoln in 2001, and his volumes A Year at the Sorbonne, A Proustian and Nebraska Courthouses, Conflict, Compromise and Community will appear in 2002. He is cofounder of the Nebraska Jewish Historical Society, a former board member of the Nebraska Humanities Council, and current board member of the Nebraska Center for the Book.