Word: fiedler
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...LAST JEW IN AMERICA, by Leslie Fiedler. In three comic novellas, a puckish critic-novelist plays conjuring treks with cards of racial identity. Fiedler's comedy is directed toward painful points of friction in U.S. life. He only laughs when it hurts...
Somewhat like the man in the sick joke who was recovering from radical throat surgery, and said it only hurt when he laughed, Leslie Fiedler, critic and novelist, only laughs when it hurts...
...Fiedler hurts from the raw places in contemporary life where the minority -Negro, Jew, social dissident or sexual deviate-is abraded by community judgment. In his latest book, which consists of three comic novellas, he laughs as he plays confident conjuring tricks with cards of racial identity...
...Last Jew in. America takes the assimilation into the American community of new-generation intellectual Jews and makes from it a sad-funny tale. In a college campus presumably similar to Montana State College, where Fiedler used to teach English, he gathers a handful of Jewish faculty members who have become more American than ham on rye and throws the tragic mysteries of Yom Kippur at them. They don talliths (prayer shawls) over their tweeds and attend the services of Louis Himmelfarb, dying unassimilated of cancer in a Catholic hospital. The old Jew scandalizes their skeptical liberalism by insisting...
...Last WASP in the World under lines Fiedler's conviction that the basic tone of U.S. creative intellectual life has become Jewish. He takes a poet, fashionable yesterday, hopelessly square today-a gangling, bearded figure of Protestant, romantic, outgoing, Western America-and sticks him in a Jewish wedding in New Jersey. The ushers are all Ph.D.s in physics, and the guests, if they are not Jewish, pretend to be on grounds of intellectual prestige. The poet hero, doomed to an academic lecture circuit where he recites his now-hackneyed verses, is the husband of one and the official lover...