Herman Wouk, who died May 17 at age 103, would not make most critics' shortlists of great American postwar novelists—or even Jewish American ones. At a time of literary experimentation, his prose style and plot structures were conventional if not downright retrograde; in an era of radical critique, his sensibility was one of bemusement rather than outrage. His was not the voice of the jeremiad against postwar suburban conformity but of gentle mockery at the shopworn pretensions of bohemian poseurs and ethnic Jews passing as nonhyphenated Americans. Wouk, whose name is pronounced “woke,” was anything but.
Yet, as literary historian Leah Garrett points out (citing a 1955 Time cover story on the bestselling author), though Wouk's novels rejected the dominant trends in recent U.S. fiction of “skeptical criticism, sexual emancipation, social protest and psychoanalytic sermonizing,” Wouk was not only a popular author but also a surprisingly innovative one. Without ideological fanfare, his works injected the New Deal and Popular Front agenda of ethnic pluralism into a new, more inclusive definition of American patriotism, one that gently edged WASPs from their pedestal without violently overturning it.
It was Wouk's insertion of Jewishness almost seamlessly into the postwar American tapestry that constituted his signal achievement. Even his breakthrough work, the 1952 Pulitzer Prize–winning The Caine Mutiny, managed to derive a counterintuitive Holocaust lesson from the admonition to “just follow orders”—even when issued by irrational, shaky authority. Jewish naval lawyer Barney Greenwald, after he had won the acquittal of the court-martialed officers who had seized command of a ship from its incompetent and evidently insane captain, said American soldiers “going by the book” was precisely what saved his “little gray-haired Jewish” mother from being “turned into soap” by the Nazis.
The Caine Mutiny was sandwiched between two far more overtly Jewish novels by Wouk. Still remembered today in part through the film version in which Natalie Wood embodied its beautiful eponymous Jewish heroine, Wouk's subsequent effort, the bestselling 1955 novel Marjorie Morningstar, intertwined the midcentury subcultures of Upper West Side affluence, downtown bohemianism, and summer stock theatrics in a manner that highlighted their Jewish inflections without either sentimentalizing or burlesquing them.
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