In his seminal essay “Jewish-Americans, Go Home” (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled “crypto-Jewish characters,”

The essay castigates the trend of an entire wave of postwar male Jewish writers—Miller, Salinger, Wouk, Bellow, Roth, Mailer—who reinvented Jewish protagonists as non-Jews, or gave them “goyish” qualities in order to represent a “universal” form of American alienation. The writings of this generation, according to Fiedler, are negatively “marked by the abandonment of the Jewish character as a sufficient embodiment of the Jewish author's aspirations and values, and by the invention, beside him or in his place, of characters who are not merely non-Jewish, but are, in fact, hyper-goyim, super-Gentiles of truly mythic proportions: specifically, sexual heroes of incredible potency.” For Fiedler, these prototypes are found in a vast corpus of works, from the Loman family of Death of a Salesman, to the half-Jewish protagonists of Salinger's short stories, to the Hemingwayesque, Gentile Henderson of Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and Norman Mailer's Sergius O'Shaughnessy in The Deer Park.

Fiedler never questions the place of these works within the Jewish American canon or asks whether they should be excluded from the rubric of Jewish American literature simply because the characters are not overtly Jewish or because the authors, such as J. D. Salinger, had abandoned Judaism as adults. Rather, Fiedler shows how these works are absolutely rooted in, and are the result of, the anxieties of postwar Jewish American life. For Fiedler, there is likely no trope more “Jewish American” than these “hyper-goy crypto-Jews.”

Surprisingly, forty-five years later the works that Fiedler discussed in his essay as most representative of the postwar Jewish experience have been excluded from the canon of Jewish American literature.Footnote ² Yet, as this essay will show, to neglect them is to overlook a central movement in Jewish American writing of the 1940s and 1950s. That age produced a trend that catalogued the intense pressures writers encountered as they sought to navigate the postwar literary landscape and felt unable or unwilling to explicitly assert the Jewishness of the world they were writing about. Hiding one's Jewishness became for many a common and acceptable type of assimilation in the immediate postwar years, and when the literature took on this form, Jewishness went underground.

It is my purpose here to show how three major works, Death of a Salesman (1949), Catcher in the Rye (1951), and The Natural (1952), while not overtly describing Jewish life, appropriate and subvert iconic American tropes such as the sportsman and jock as a means of examining the stresses Jewish men faced in the postwar years. Each work sheds light on major concerns of second-generation Jewish men: Miller's play delineates how the Depression and anti-Semitism in America affected the progeny of immigrants; Salinger's novel demarcates the fissure between American and Jewish notions of masculinity; and Malamud's novel critiques the American obsession with sports culture in order to negotiate a space for intellectual pursuits.

Fiedler used the term crypto-Jewish in a historically inaccurate and simplistic way so as to imply that the literature was a manifestation of the writers’ Jewish self-hatred. However, I suggest that these writings are instead appropriating iconic American tropes, such as the sports jock, and giving them a Jewish spin. By so doing, the writers infuse Jewish characteristics (Yiddish speech habits, immigrant concerns, intellectualism) into the dominant culture. Instead of seeing these works as expressions of the minority Jew assimilating into the majority Anglo world, we can view them as creations in which the majority culture is assimilated into a Jewish worldview.

These plays and novels indicate a subversive and powerful form of Jewish American cultural appropriation that has been neglected, or castigated, because it is not easily categorized as overtly Jewish. To quote Robert Alter from his groundbreaking 1968 essay, “Jewish Dreams and Nightmares” (which was a response to an essay composed by Fiedler one year earlier):

Jewish American writing in the postwar years demarcated in subtle, “unsymmetrical” ways the manner in which categories of “Jewishness” were breaking down for second-generation Jews. Scholars need to take this into account and be open to the varied ways that second-generation Jewish American writers accounted for a postwar reality in which Jewishness was not easy to define. As Alter noted in his essay, the attempt to locate Jewish characteristics in modern writing can be difficult, as we must “translate such vague intuitions into clear descriptive statements about what actually goes on in the literary works.”Footnote ⁴ Perhaps this is one reason why these works have been excluded: They require us to challenge how we define our terminology. Moreover, when seeking out nonovert representations, we risk over-reading or essentializing the texts.

Nevertheless, I believe that this is a risk we must take to truly understand postwar Jewish American life. To define Jewish American discourse adequately requires that we include these writings, because in many ways they present forceful expressions of the specific pressures of being a male Jewish American in that era. Hence, I will present a Jewish reading of Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural, seminal texts in American literary history that, I believe, should as well be viewed as seminal in Jewish American literary history.

Throughout their literary careers, Miller, Salinger, and Malamud asserted that they were “universal” rather than specifically Jewish writers. With these characterizations, each writer correctly reckoned that he would gain admittance to the American literary establishment, would increase his readership from just Jews to the larger public, and would connect himself to a whole range of world writers—Dostoevsky, John Dos Passos, Hemingway—rather than just Jewish ones. For them, universal meant someone shorn of Jewish or ethnic specificity, which, as Fiedler suggests, really meant Gentile. Nevertheless, while the authors sought to write “universal” stories and be “universal authors,” they clearly exhibited Jewish facets in these very first writings. As I will argue, we see this in many ways: a style of discourse that uses Yiddish inflections, a focus on assimilation, a use of story lines that mimic Jewish American literature of the previous generation, an infusion of intellectualism into the arena of American sports culture, an inclusion of attacks on American Christianity, portraits of fathers as first generation immigrants, and so on.

These types of writings served a number of purposes for the authors. First, given that English works (unlike those in Yiddish) would be read by non-Jews, the authors were uncomfortable creating Jewish characters with negative qualities such as money grubbing. The desire to avoid negative Jewish representations was particularly acute in the post-Holocaust years when writers were understandably sensitive about critiquing Jewish life.Footnote ⁵ The convention also enabled Miller, Salinger, and Malamud at the beginning of their careers to represent themselves as “universal” and part of the Anglo-American conversation. Moreover, they were employing a tool to render an attack on American society from within, rather than from the angry bitter voice of the outsider Jew. Thus, instead of having a Jewish protagonist who would be an ethnic “other” critiquing American life, these authors created WASP insiders to do the job for them. And in all three cases, the attack on mainstream America was leveled specifically against its sports and jock culture, where athletic oafs were deemed as popular and worthy of emulation while intellectuals were bullied and excluded from the dominant vision of positive masculinity.

All three authors were young men seeking their way in a confusing postwar world, and the concerns and pitfalls of growing into a man became the central theme of the three texts. Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural establish a new form of masculinity. In a literary era dominated by “hard boiled-dom” (as Saul Bellow labels it in Dangling Man), Miller, Salinger, and Malamud challenged mainstream Anglo notions about masculinity that rewarded the tough guy athlete and jock at the expense of the intellectual.Footnote ⁶ These Jewish authors thus rewrote the rules of the game so that the popular sports jock was transformed into a corrupt vision of a crooked country that did not offer all young men the same opportunities of limitless success and reinvention; these were, in fact, granted only to white male Protestants. The Jewish texts showed that the prep school brotherhood was in reality riddled with bullying; that the elevation of sports in high school left jocks with few options upon graduation; and that the pursuit of the American dream was not always as important as self-fulfillment.

The early writings of Miller, Salinger, and Malamud thus paved a way for a new vision of masculinity that rewarded such qualities as intellectualism and self-reflection. “Hard-boiled” men were shown to be hollow and corrupt; instead, they were replaced by reflective and psychologically astute individuals. And the writing itself shifted from the Hemingwayesque terse prose, to verbose, psychologically deep, and profoundly textured discourse.

As outsiders desperately trying to be seen as insiders in Anglo-American culture, Jewish authors presented a new range of images about the anxieties of postwar life. The extraordinary popular and critical success of Death of a Salesman, Catcher in the Rye, and The Natural makes sense: In an era when Hemingway's writings still dominated the American scene, it must have been refreshing for a generation of readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, to come across protagonists who constantly ruminate over their attempts to become fulfilled adult men in an uncertain era.Footnote ⁷ In these works, and countless others by postwar Jewish men, a sort of sensitive yet hyper-masculine figure takes hold, who desperately seeks out greater meaning to his life. It is not my intention to replicate the stereotype that Jews are physically inept intellectuals and that Christians are the opposite. Instead, I will indicate how Miller, Salinger, and Malamud challenged America's obsession with sports culture in order to show how it could be detrimental to all men.

In looking at these writings in conjunction with one another, one might discern very clear trends that delineate the particular and peculiar anxieties of postwar Jewish life.Footnote ⁸ A Jewish reading is absolutely essential, for a number of reasons. It increases our literary understanding by enabling us to uncover a broad range of important but neglected themes. It deepens our historical understanding of the immediate postwar years, as each work delineates a response to the crisis in Jewish American life in the wake of the Depression and the subsequent war. And it assists our biographical understanding of these major Jewish writers, shedding light on the struggles they underwent at the start of their literary careers when they sought to define the relationship between their ethnic and cultural background and their art.

Hence, with each work I will discuss how the Depression and the war that followed it influenced the author's decision to use a Gentile protagonist. I will point out the type of critique that was being leveled with such a figure and will indicate how the texts have Jewish resonances that show us the complex nature of postwar American life. Overall, these three works reveal how these influential writers challenged the dominant Anglo construct of masculinity as delineated in the sports hero in order to offer a Jewish critique on the mainstream culture. My larger aim is to persuade my readers that these works are essential documents of the postwar male Jewish experience in America and that they point to a need to expand our existing understanding of the definition of Jewish American literature.

To suggest this is to accept what is common practice elsewhere. Writings without overt Jewish content are often viewed as part of the canon of European Jewish writing, as we see, for example, in the common inclusion of Franz Kafka's works, even though they do not explicitly describe Jewish life.Footnote ⁹ The trend with Jewish American literature, in contrast, often relies on a more exclusive definition that requires the writing to explicitly address Jewish matters. I believe that we need to drop the requirement that texts be explicitly about Jewish life and consider works on a case-by-case basis to see whether and how a Jewish reading might enlarge and deepen our understanding of the work. I know this suggestion will be problematic to some,Footnote ¹⁰ but if we are to fully understand how Jews wrote about postwar American life, we need to see that for many the Jewishness of the text was not explicit, but was instead cloaked in a rhetorical strategy of meaning.

I. Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller composed Death of a Salesman in April 1948. It was first staged in London in 1949 in a production overseen by the legendary director Elia Kazan.Footnote ¹¹ The character resonating most with the jock icon is the son, Biff Loman, an extremely popular football captain who is lured by three colleges with sports scholarships. Instead of fulfilling the jock's dream, however, Biff fails his Regent's exam and spends his college years drifting between bad jobs and petty theft. At the play's end, Biff rejects New York to follow his own dream to head west and work the land on a ranch.Footnote ¹²

The reason behind Biff's failures are gradually revealed in the course of the play. In a flashback to an incident from his adolescence, Biff has dropped in unexpectedly on his father, Willy, at a Boston hotel. There, Biff recounts to his dad how Biff had teased his neighbor, Bernard, in front of his high school class. Willy finds the story hilarious and begins laughing aloud. Hearing this, a woman with whom Willy is having an affair, who is hiding in the bathroom, begins to laugh as well. Biff hears her and realizes that his father is cheating on Biff's beloved mother. In this moment of reckoning, the pain that the jock's family inflicts on the intellectual Jewish nerd, Bernard, catches up with them. After the discovery of his father's affair, everything starts to go downhill for Biff: He drops out of summer school, fails his exams, and loses his college football scholarships.

One might view the Loman family in large measure as a response to the cataclysm that Miller saw leveled on urban life during the Depression. Miller's own family suffered the greatest impact of our three authors when his father's business was ruined. His upper-middle-class family became part of the working poor.Footnote ¹³ Miller's father's generation “blamed themselves, not the system, by and large.” The Depression caused Miller and other children of immigrants to realize that “there was nothing to lean on. There was no security anywhere. The country was a fraud.”Footnote ¹⁴ The absolute destruction of belief in the United States is tangible in Death of a Salesman, because, as Miller stated, “The psychology of the audience was still that of Depression people.”Footnote ¹⁵ As Miller wrote, Willy's great tragedy was that he “has broken a law without whose protection life is insupportable if not incomprehensible to him and to many others; it is the law which says that a failure in society and in business has no right to live.”Footnote ¹⁶ For Willy Loman, the American dream is shattered, and he must die.

In Miller's play, the formula of the self-made man is undermined, both with the father (who fails at work) and the son (who fails at work and sports). Death of a Salesman charts the ruinous repercussions of American capitalism on a couple, Willy and Linda, who have bought into it completely. A Jewish reading of the play shows that this ideal was particularly catastrophic for Jewish immigrants who exchanged the European Jewish belief in intellectualism for a vapid obsession with emulating mainstream America: They sold out their values for the dubious benefits of consumerism.

Over the years, a few critics have claimed that Willy is a Jewish man cloaked within a universal one, although the vast majority of the analyses do not posit this connection. The Jewishness of the Lomans was most famously asserted by Mary McCarthy, who in 1959 wrote the following in an introduction to her collection of essays Sights and Spectacles: 1937–1958:

McCarthy believes the audience feels discomfort because the play does not admit something so obvious to them, that is, the Lomans are New York Jews.

Leslie Fiedler, as discussed, attacked the “hidden Jewishness” of the Lomans because “works influenced by pseudo-universalizing lose authenticity and strength.”Footnote ¹⁸ In an interview, Miller responded to Fiedler by stressing that he did frequently write about Jewish characters, and that “where the theme seems to me to require a Jew to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness, he does so. Where it seems to me irrelevant what the religious or cultural background of a character may be, it is treated as such.”Footnote ¹⁹ Miller claims that Fiedler's problem is that he does not find Miller to be quite Jewish enough and that he wrote about the “wrong” type of Jews. The interview makes manifest Miller's desire to seem a writer of both Jewish and universal narratives. For Miller, to be universal necessarily means to sublimate the Jewish. The universal man is thus the Christian man, which is in stark contrast to the reconfiguration of this notion over the past thirty years, when American and “universal” can also include a variety of ethnic aspects.

What is it about Death of the Salesman that makes it resonate as a Jewish text, and why did Miller possibly choose to hide the ethnicity of the Lomans? The Jewish resonances, as I will discuss, include the infusion of Yiddish mannerisms into the speech (a factor that makes it sound as if New York Jewish immigrants are talking), the employment of the iconic Jewish image of a traveling salesman, the father who resonates as a first-generation, insecure immigrant, and the idealization of Bernard, the Jew, as the most positive and fulfilled character.

The character's speech habits contain numerous Jewish New York resonances, including Willy Loman's constant repetition of stock phrases common in Yiddish such as, “Do you know?” (Veystu?), and his regular use of “nothing” for “anything,” as in “You can’t see nothing out here.” Some critics believe that this makes the play seem like an English rewrite of a Yiddish-based original. Typical is George Ross's 1951 discussion in Commentary of a Yiddish version of the play, Toyt fun a Salesman:

And nearly fifty years later, Harold Bloom noted that “the most satisfactory performance I have seen of Death of a Salesman was in Yiddish translation,”Footnote ²¹ and David Mamet asserted in his 2005 piece for the Guardian that “it is a Jewish Play.”Footnote ²²

Moreover, a play about a traveling salesman resonates with the iconic traveling salesman of Jewish literature: Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman.Footnote ²³ Whether or not Miller was consciously rewriting Tevye, the Yiddish author was on his mind the year he wrote Death of a Salesman, as he mentioned Sholem Aleichem in an essay of March 1948 (based on a November 1947 speech).Footnote ²⁴ And as one critic astutely noted: “Well, maybe Tevye was swept to America, and there one of his literary descendants turned out to be Willy Loman, weakened by time and an alien culture.”Footnote ²⁵

Willy Loman also has numerous traits that mark him as either a Jewish immigrant or a child of immigrants. Miller's own father, typical of his generation, “wanted me to succeed. That was a basic immigrant's idea anyway. And once you did that, anything else was gravy.”Footnote ²⁶ Willy suffers profoundly when he senses that he is not fully accepted and is a joke to his fellow workers. This suffering translates into his unrelenting pressure on his sons to succeed as WASP icons: football captains, popular, and with an array of girlfriends. Willy's actions express an insecure Jewish father's frantic attempts to have himself and his sons fit into mainstream culture. Willy knows and hates the fact that he sticks out, and thus he struggles at all costs to assimilate and have his sons do so as well. Perhaps Miller was drawing on the experiences of his own parents who, as he wrote, knew that “if you wanted to move up in society, you’d better take on a coloration like the society.”Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, as Miller states in his autobiography, from a young age he “had already been programmed to choose something other than pride in my origins.”Footnote ²⁸ Miller had learned two lessons from his parents about being Jewish: To succeed one needed to assimilate, and sticking out as a Jew was problematic. These lessons are personified in Willy's anxieties over himself and his sons, and are evident in the desperate (and eccentric) Americanization of the sons’ names: Biff and Happy.

Miller noted that he had written the play when he was the same general age as the rebellious son Biff.Footnote ²⁹ Biff is struggling, much as young Miller did, to resist the pressures placed on him by his father. And like Miller, who left Brooklyn to go to college in Michigan, so too Biff in the end clearly has decided that he will define “success” on his own terms and will also leave Brooklyn and head west. Miller explained that he created Biff at a time when he had “no cultural” tools to help him construct a character trying to break free of traditional constraints placed on him. This, after all, was before rebellious men came to dominate American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. As Miller notes, Biff was “a precursor of the hippy movement in a way.”Footnote ³⁰ Biff represents the struggles of a generation of sons who tried to reinvent themselves but found no models to help them do so.

Miller is not only showing the despair of the jock, Biff, but as well the revenge of the Jewish nerd, because in the end, the play's only successful young man is the very Bernard who was teased by Biff in high school, and who yet grew up to find a fulfilling career as a lawyer, while the jocks, Biff and Happy, become troubled and lonely adults without good jobs or families. It is as if Miller is warning his audience that in America, if Jews downplay traditional intellectual pursuits to try to gain popularity, they risk a future of loneliness and failure. Bernard, who at first glance seems to be a manifestation of the caricature of the nerdy, intellectual Jew, is much more well rounded than a simple stereotype: He is a physically adept tennis player and also a fulfilled husband and father.

So why did Miller hide the Jewishness of the Loman family? There were likely three primary reasons behind his technique: Miller was worried about employing negative stereotypes that would encourage anti-Semitism; he was trying to develop his own voice, rather than mimic the social realism of his literary predecessor, the Jewish playwright Clifford Odets; and he wanted to distance the play from his own family upon whom many of the characters were based.

Although Miller had no firsthand experience of the Holocaust, he believed that the Shoah created shock waves in America. He noticed, and directly experienced, a large increase in anti-Semitism.Footnote ³¹ In November 1947, five months before he began to write Death of a Salesman, Miller gave a talk at the Jewish Committee of Writers, Artists and Scientists. His speech was reproduced in March 1948 in the journal Jewish Life. Footnote ³² Thus, in “Concerning Jews Who Write,” Miller states that his writing changed once his awareness of anti-Semitism made him know “I was a Jew.” He then decided to no longer “go on writing about Jews.” This radical decision came about because of “Hitler…. I felt for the first time in my life that I was in danger.” Miller adds, “I think I gave up [on] the Jews as literary material because I was afraid that even an innocent allusion to the individual wrong-doing of an individual Jew would be inflamed by the atmosphere, ignited by the hatred I suddenly was aware of, and my love would be twisted into a weapon of persecution.” Miller thus turned away “from the Jews as material for my work.”

Thus, just months before composing Death of a Salesman, Miller asserted in the clearest way possible that he was no longer going to write about Jewish topics because he was fearful of an anti-Semitic backlash. Christopher Bigsby has made a groundbreaking discovery of a 1932 memoir/short story that Miller wrote as a prototype for the play, in which the salesman is given the Jewish name of “Schoenzeit.”Footnote ³³ Between 1932 and 1949, the horrendous increase in anti-Semitism worldwide, and in the United States, likely caused Miller to change his protagonists’ names from Jewish to indistinct ones. Willy's neurotic cloying for monetary success would have likely made him the type of Jewish villain Miller did not want to represent.Footnote ³⁴

Miller's distancing of the Lomans from any distinct ethnicity was also tied to his desire to create a new voice for himself, in contrast to one that piggybacked on the social realist plays about Jewish families by Clifford Odets with which his writing resonated so strongly.Footnote ³⁵ Also, by making the family not seem overtly Jewish, Miller could deflect the obvious suggestion that they were based on his own family.Footnote ³⁶ While Willy shared numerous traits with Miller's father, he also was a reflection of two of the playwright's uncles, both of whom were salesman, and one of whom committed suicide, although Arthur Miller noted in an interview that “I’m sure he [Manny] would never recognize himself [in Willy].”Footnote ³⁷

In 1999, with the fiftieth anniversary edition of Death of a Salesman, Miller finally admitted that the Lomans were in fact supposed to be Jewish:

The Lomans, according to Miller, are Jewish outsiders who desperately want to be insiders. Like many Americans, their religious and ethnic specificity has been deracinated, and they find themselves looking for a better place.Footnote ³⁹ This Jewish family is made American by the adoption of English and the watering down of their culture, and although according to Miller this experience is not specifically Jewish, “this play seems to have shown that most of the world shares something similar to that condition.” The merging of Jewish and American within the text is thus the truest reflection of the situation of postwar Jewish life. Moreover, fifty years after the play's appearance, Miller not only asserts the Jewishness of the Lomans but also shows that the Jewish loss of culture in America represents a universal condition. Miller has finally found a way to breach the binary of the Jewish and the universal by stating that he is using a Jewish form of particularity as his basis for universalism.

Miller's play levels an intense critique on Anglo-America's obsession with the sports jock as the masculine, sexual, popular figure to emulate. Miller instead shows the American jock as deeply lost outside the halls of high school and suggests that he must reject that vision of masculinity to find fulfillment. By making Biff become cognizant of himself and his negative traits, Miller provides the sports jock with a deep internal world that is a counterbalance to his physical abilities. Miller is making him more humane, more intellectual, more sensitive, and more a figure to whom outsiders who feel weak and bullied can relate. He thus grants Biff the ability to see outside himself and his actions and to understand forcefully the negative repercussions on everyone—including Jewish Bernard, and even himself—when a culture allows this type of jock to reign. Rejecting the immigrant Jewish fathers’ vision of fulfillment that is based on a daily trudge at a 9-to-5 job, and the Anglo culture's vision of jock popularity, Miller clears a space for the sons of immigrants to constitute a new, more astute, and articulate form of manhood not based solely on the standard American dream. Here rebellion against the norm is the one and only means of happiness.

II. Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is considered one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. A masterpiece that forever changed youth culture in America, the novel is almost never considered as part of the Jewish American canon.Footnote ⁴⁰ This is for two reasons: Salinger's Jewishness is questionable, and the text itself seems not to have explicitly Jewish qualities.

Even though Salinger was raised in a Jewish home, had a grandfather who was a rabbi, and unlike many Jewish American men of his generation celebrated a bar mitzvah, he is not often considered to be a Jewish author. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that after his bar mitzvah he learned that his Jewish mother Miriam had in fact been born as Marie, a Catholic. His mother had never formally converted, but she did practice Judaism and raised her son Jerome as a Jew. Attending prep school in New York and Pennsylvania, Salinger faced a great deal of anti-Semitism; these experiences resonate throughout his writing, particularly in “Down at the Dinghy,” a story dealing explicitly with anti-Semitism in America.

As an adult, Salinger distanced himself from his Jewishness, and like many other American Jews, found religious affinity with Buddhism. Yet if we excluded nonpracticing Jewish Americans from the rubric of Jewish authorship, we would probably reduce the field by at least a third.Footnote ⁴¹ Even though Salinger was personally distanced from his Jewishness, the topic comes up explicitly in his writings, particularly in his tales about the Glass family.

If we grant Salinger his Jewish status, as Fiedler did, because Salinger was raised as a Jew and frequently wrote about Jewish topics, how might we then read Catcher in the Rye?

With Holden Caulfield, I believe, Salinger created an iconic Jewish dangling intellectual—funny, sarcastic, depressed, weak, empathetic, intellectual, well read—of the type that shows up regularly in male Jewish American culture, from Philip Roth to Woody Allen to Larry David. Yet, if Salinger is tapping into the tradition of the Jewish American dangling intellectual, physically weak but rich in mind, why, then, hide his Jewishness? Although generally ignored, Holden is in fact potentially Jewish. He notes, for example, that his “parents are different religions, and all the children in our family are atheists.”Footnote ⁴² And later he tells us that “my father was a Catholic once. He quit, though, when he married my mother” (the italics are Salinger's, p. 112). There is thus a good chance that Holden is Jewish because his mother is, whereas his father possibly converted to Judaism. Moreover, throughout the text Holden levels some of his most sarcastic attacks on Christians. For example, he describes the lecture of a wealthy donor to his prep school in the following way:

Why this tactic of obfuscation, of suggesting but not stating outright that Holden might be Jewish? Foremost, Salinger is doing what Fiedler suggested was commonplace at the time, a standard trope throughout the pages of Commentary in the mid- and late 1940s: conflating the alienation of the male Jewish intellectual in America with the general alienation prevalent in society.Footnote ⁴³

Moreover, Salinger may have downplayed Holden's true identity because he might not have wanted to place him in the oppositional position of the repressed minority. Instead, he draws Holden as a member of the center, one of the WASP culture's very own, down to the boarding school education and the Upper East Side apartment. As a member of this power center, Holden is able to look at and verbalize the foibles of that society from a seemingly insider's position.

However, our reading of Catcher in the Rye is altered if we follow Salinger's hints and consider Holden to be Jewish. We get, instead, an insight into the world of postwar Jewish youth. In Catcher in the Rye, the jock trope is treated quite differently than in Death of a Salesman and The Natural. Rather than having a jock figure as the protagonist whose image could be undermined from within, Salinger places that stock figure in direct opposition to the hero, the intellectual Holden Caulfield. In so doing, Salinger delivers a direct and intense critique on how WASP jocks make life difficult for those who do not share their values. In this case, Biff and Happy Loman are transformed into nonintellectual, bullying oafs at Pencey Prep, who are so cruel that they even provoke the suicide of one of their victims.

Like Holden, Salinger attended prep school, first McBurney in New York, where he was the manager of the fencing team, and later Valley Forge Military academy.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to his teachers at Valley Forge, Salinger was “quiet, thoughtful, always anxious to please.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He was so good at being “pleasing” that he composed a sickly sycophantic song about the wonderful virtues of the school that remarkably is still “enshrined in the Valley Forge school hymn book.” Yet as Ian Hamilton notes, Salinger's school song “is almost certainly a spoof—an act of mimicry so consummately straight-faced that no one could possibly see through it.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Below the surface of seeking always to fit in, Salinger was mimicking and subverting the school credo of Valley Forge. Perhaps, as his daughter asserts, Salinger likely faced horrendous anti-Semitism at the school.Footnote ⁴⁷ One gets some sense of the hardships he must have undergone at Valley Forge in Salinger's attempt to mimic and undermine its most cherished virtues.

Holden, unlike Salinger, does not aim to please at school. Instead, he rebels in small and large ways, including failing most of his classes. And as manager of the fencing team, a Gentile sport resonating with all the boys’ literature of swashbuckling heroes with phallic weapons, he is given the role of manager, a comic antithesis of the sport's participant. Yet Holden, in a hilarious act of passive-aggressive revenge against the dominant jock culture, manages to leave the team's equipment on the subway before a big match.

Pencey Prep's brochure asserts that “Since 1888 we have been molding boys into clear-thinking young men” (2). In practice, the school works the opposite way: Pencey provides an environment where boys learn to sublimate their intellect for the jock sports culture that dominates every aspect of the school.

Neither the broader world of the prep school nor the smaller world of his family can offer Holden a safe space in which to grow into a man. In prep school, the WASP jock culture regards Holden and other weak intellectuals as outsiders. In his family, his parents have been too depressed following the death of their youngest son to focus on Holden's needs. Only his siblings Phoebe and D.B. can, and do, help him find comfort in himself. As with Biff Loman and Roy Hobbs in The Natural, when parents are absent or overwhelmed with their own problems, sons turn to their siblings, reflecting the intergenerational conflict felt by many second-generation Jewish men against the world of their immigrant parents. Sons would seek out peers their own age to help them construct a new vision of America.

The impact of the Depression on Catcher in the Rye is less overt than in the other works I considered. What little biographical information we have on Salinger's family suggests that in 1932, during the midst of the Depression, they somewhat surprisingly moved from the Upper West Side to upscale Park Avenue.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Catcher in the Rye, Holden and his family do not have financial insecurities and seem to embody upper-middle-class life. Yet Holden's constant ruminations on issues of class suggest the discomfort that the sensitive Salinger must have felt when his family was doing so well while so many others suffered.

Of the three authors, however, World War II had the most direct and profound influence on Salinger. He signed up for combat and experienced the destruction of Jewish life in Europe firsthand.Footnote ⁴⁹ As a sergeant, Salinger was part of the bloody Normandy campaign, and also spent months fighting nightmarish battles in the Huertgen Forest, where a number of his fellow soldiers and friends were wounded or killed.Footnote ⁵⁰ Another way of looking at the angst expressed in Catcher is thus to read it in light of Salinger's very recent military service. I find it hard to accept that his powerful personal experiences of anti-Semitism—at school and at war—would not have been channeled into the book's critique of upper-class Christian America.

Holden's radical disorientation expresses a young man's troubled search to find an intellectual, verbal means of self-realization, a form of identity far from the hyper-masculine group mentality of prep school and sports culture. He is “lonely as hell” and not a member of the pack, and his voice is that of the “crazy” outsider until he finds others to join him in a normative chorus. Holden, like Salinger himself, is an Upper East Side prep school boy who finds himself an outsider in upper-class Christian culture, experiencing a constant sense of alienation. Although perhaps Salinger sought to show the universal alienation of Holden, all of his rages are directed specifically against Christian upper-class culture, and reflect the particular status of the out-of-place Jewish intellectual in a society dominated by wealth and sports. While Salinger in his own life responded to Gentile America by trying to show that he was just like everyone else, his Holden continually reiterates the notion that fitting in at all costs is a fake way to be. When Holden speaks up and is authentic, just like Philip Roth's Eli the Fanatic in his 1959 story of the same name, he ends up institutionalized. The extraordinary and impossible pressure on Jewish men to conform to Anglo norms is represented as so overwhelming that not to conform is to be labeled as, or to feel oneself to be, insane. If we neglect Catcher in the Rye as a Jewish text, we overlook the extraordinary, soul-destroying pressure that many Jewish men faced in the postwar era.

III. The Natural

Bernard Malamud's 1952 classic, The Natural, was based on popular sports fiction and, in particular, on the Frank Merriwell series. Malamud himself stated:

Frank Merriwell was the protagonist of the most popular and highest-selling dime-store series in American history, with weekly sales, during its heyday, topping 500,000 copies.Footnote ⁵² Composed for young men, the series tells of a Yale student who undergoes a range of exotic adventures while excelling at a variety of college sports. Merriwell is a protean version of a superhero, famous for his strength, ability to remain unhurt, and genius at solving crime. Frank is both a thinker and a doer who not only sails through advanced courses at Yale, but also is the university's very best fencer, baseball player, football player, rower, boxer, and runner. As we shall see in The Natural, Malamud subverts all of the idealized aspects of the Merriwell icon.

Readers are less familiar with The Natural than with Malamud's other works. The book has also been eclipsed by its film, which recreates Roy as a positive WASP hero, although in reality, the character is “one of the most thoroughly unsympathetic heroes in the history of American literature.”Footnote ⁵³ In brief, the plot of The Natural concerns Roy Hobbs, who is shot by a mentally unstable woman while on a trip to try out for the Chicago Cubs. Many years later, he returns to baseball as a member of the major league New York Knights and quickly becomes the team's top batter. Roy falls in love with Memo Paris, a money-hungry woman, as opposed to the much more virtuous Iris with whom he spends one beautiful night in Chicago. In the final section, Roy is bribed by a bookie and the team's owner to strike out during the pennant game. At the last minute, when he is just about to throw the game, he fouls the ball off into the stands and hits the virtuous Iris, whom he has not seen since their one-night stand. He runs to her, and she reveals that she is pregnant. Roy returns to the field, determined that he will not throw the game. Yet, even though he is trying to hit a home run to win the pennant, he strikes out. In the street, a newspaper boy hands him the paper stating that Roy threw the game. The boy says, “Say it ain’t true, Roy,” directly echoing “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” and the Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox scandal of 1919. The book ends with the following statement: “When Roy looked into the boy's eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t, but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears.” (In contrast, the movie version ends with Roy winning the pennant game and getting the girl.)

In both form and content, Malamud created a text in opposition to the Merriwell series.Footnote ⁵⁴ In form, Malamud used prose that combined, often quite strangely, naturalistic Yiddish-tinged dense writing and romanticism. His is the converse of the dime-store writing that is simplistic, not descriptive, and heavily reliant on dialogue. In content, he created Roy Hobbs who, like Frank Merriwell, is a sports hero. However, Roy's personality is Frank's opposite: Roy is corrupt, emotional, unpopular with his peers, and causes problems rather than solving them.Footnote ⁵⁵

Unlike the cardboard figure of Merriwell, who never experiences deep suffering, Roy is a tortured soul.Footnote ⁵⁶ Throughout Malamud's works, redemption only comes through great pain, and while The Natural ends on a sad note, Roy has for the first time owned up to what he has done by nearly selling out the pennant race for a bribe. He begins to weep and therein begins to change, an act that brings with it the possibility that his life will improve. While Roy no longer will have fame and a baseball career, he will be with a woman who loves him, will have a child, and will have an honest approach to himself and his life. Roy Hobbs, like Malamud's Jewish characters, in the end thus replaces self-delusion with honesty.Footnote ⁵⁷

Hobbs is a figure who shows the dangers of a life focused entirely on the needs of the body: He overtrains and overplays, he is oversexed, and he can never eat enough. Where there is an (often problematic) literary stereotype of the intellectual, physically inept Jew, in this case we also see the opposite trope of the ba’al-guf or man of the body, a boorish, physical, nonintellectual Jewish oaf.Footnote ⁵⁸ As a representative of this trope, Hobbs is hyper-masculine, and all the women in the novel are sexist constructs who are confined to “archetypal roles as temptress, mother, or commodity.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Only at the end, when he weeps, is he transformed from a Greek god with superhuman strength into a mere man. Malamud imbues his hero of the physical, Roy Hobbs, with aspects of the artist who on a good day uses baseball as a brush and the field as his canvas. Malamud thus intellectualizes the physical, male realm of baseball by making it the material for high art in his literary novel about the game. In this case, sports are to be appreciated not only for physicality, but also are to be enjoyed for their cerebral aspects. Baseball has been traditionally seen as the most intellectual of American sports, and its statistics and batting averages form a lure of their own for many fans. Malamud's novel was one of the first literary representations to note the intellectual potential of the game.

The Natural has been called a modern-day rewrite of a medieval romanceFootnote ⁶⁰ and has also been correctly linked to American writing about protagonists seduced by the American dream, as was Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (also played by Robert Redford in the movie version) or in the Horatio Alger story.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet Malamud's book has never been considered part of Jewish American writing. Because none of the characters are explicitly Jewish, the novel has been viewed as Malamud's flawed foray into the Christian world.Footnote ⁶² However, to fully understand the book I believe it is necessary to consider why and how Malamud sought to construct (and deconstruct) a WASP sports figure from a Jewish perspective.

In the first part of the book, Roy Hobbs is continually called a “Greenhorn,” because he is a country bumpkin who knows nothing about city life. The novel shows the bumpkin's transformation into the confident city slicker who then meets his downfall, and it matches the story of Abraham Cahan's 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky. Footnote ⁶³ In Malamud's version, as in Cahan's story, the protagonist sells out for money. In both cases, capitalist materialism is evil. The way to reconnect with the virtuous life is to downplay material lusts and focus on being fulfilled in other ways.

The Natural mimics numerous other instances of Jewish American writing that challenge the values of American capitalism; examples include Michael Gold's Jews without Money and Anzia Yezierska's The Bread Givers. Footnote ⁶⁴ But the critique here is different: The lust for money is not an immigrant's problem but an American's. Thus the United States offers myriad forms of capitalist seduction, with even its iconic game, baseball, up for sale. Nothing is sacred here, and the only means of resistance is through individual acts of rebellion against the pressure to sell out. For Malamud, Roy becomes an American hero not when he is the rising star of baseball, but instead when he weeps for his sins and is reborn to a life outside the game.

Roy often interacts with others in a way that mimics the ways of Jewish–Yiddish New York. He intersperses his speech with Yinglish terms such as shyster, or resorts to humorous dialogue straight out of Yiddish writing.Footnote ⁶⁵ Here, for example, the greenhorn, Roy, and the porter, Eddie, sound like two Jews on the Lower East Side, with the long-term resident making fun of the newcomer:

Their quick banter with double entendres resonates with Yiddish humor (as found, for example, in the works of Sholem Aleichem and others).

Malamud was the child of Yiddish-speaking immigrants; he grew up in a working-class, Jewish enclave of Brooklyn.Footnote ⁶⁷ For his family, who ran a “rather dreary and depressing” delicatessen, the Depression was less of a shock than it was for Miller's family. As Malamud stated, “it was not good anywhere until the Depression and then it was bad.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Malamud found the economic downturn a catalyst for the soul-searching that can lead to writing: “The good thing about the Depression was everything went down to bedrock. Experience that deprives you of something can make you realize what it is that you need most, and it sends you inward, and that to a writer is important.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This concept of suffering that propels internal growth is the primary theme of Roy Hobbs's story in The Natural.

Malamud had to make Roy a Christian because a Jewish baseball hero who sells out would have diverted his critique away from American materialism in general, causing him to expose Jewish materialism. This crucial idea reflects how in the years after the Holocaust, first-generation Jewish portraits of money-obsessed Jews all but disappear. As with Miller, who in the post-Holocaust era was uncomfortable creating a greedy Jewish protagonist, so too in Malamud one can read the figure as born at a time when Jews were reluctant to portray their people negatively. So, too, Miller's decision to critique the American dream from a post-Depression perspective can be seen in Malamud's desire to shed light on the more destructive aspects of American consumerism.Footnote ⁷⁰

Kevin Baker recently suggested a connection between The Natural and Death of a Salesman when he asserted that Roy Hobbs is the “mirror image of Willy Loman.”Footnote ⁷¹ Hobbs is a member of the first generation of immigrants, the greenhorns, who, like Loman, swam, and drowned, in the promise of the American dream. He becomes an American hero when he finds redemption outside the great game that is up for sale. Malamud in this work thus clears a space in which young men who are physically inept can create a meaningful life beyond the pitch.Footnote ⁷² As Miller does with Biff, Malamud presents the sports icon as a deeply flawed figure who has believed all the hype about the importance of being a jock, but who has found that it led to a deeply unfulfilled life because his body now dominates his soul and intellect. And as with Biff, Malamud is humanizing and reinventing the jock as a much more sensitive and intellectual soul. He projects onto the Merriwellian hero the values and virtues of self-reflection and intellectualism.

By making his protagonist a WASP representative of America's most iconic game, baseball, Malamud extends his critique of the United States: Not only does America seduce the immigrant with the destructive lure of money, but the country also shatters the lives of the archetypal Americans—the WASPs. In The Natural, Malamud creates a massive indictment of success: Even the game of baseball is up for sale, and our sports heroes can fail like classical icons of old. In this case, Frank Merriwell has been transplanted from the fantasy space of the dime-store realm into a real, and corrupt, American world where his only hope for finding a fulfilling life is in quitting the game and reconnecting with his neglected brain and emotions. In this way, Malamud mischievously turns the jock into the nerd.