Word: kampf
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...select the "Hatemonger." He should be shown as a young man with two rifles under his arm (Oswald's and Beckwith's), copies of Das Kapital and Mein Kampf in the other hand, and a police dog at his side. This would cover the haters from Southeast Asia to South Africa to Alabama...
...with 4,000,000 volumes stashed in seven London buildings, a flamboyant cockney who once shocked bibliophiles by selling his wares at tuppence per pound, another time offered to buy the books Adolf Hitler was burning (no reply), and subsequently got his own revenge by using copies of Mein Kampf to protect his roofs during the blitz; of a stroke; in Essex, England...
This issue of Mosaic includes no undergraduate fiction or poetry, but does contain an essay, "The Relevance of Jane Austen: Remarks on Jewish Writing in America," by Lewis Kampf, and a memoir by the Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer...
...Kampf's piece is excellent as an historical examination of the traditional problems of Jewish writers in America. By the way, Daniel Fuchs' novel, Homage to Blenholt, whose obscurity Kampf laments, has achieved enough renown to make the supplementary reading list of History 163. Perhaps next year it will be required, and really have status...
Unfortunately, however, the "relevance of Jane Austen" is not at all clear. It is only mentioned once, in the next to last paragraph. Kampf claims that the solution to the dilemma of the Jewish writer, who either had to assimilate and lose his Jewishness, or get stuck in the dead-end of "ghetto literature," is "the novel of manners." But he never does explain what he means. He says Bernard Malamud's writing, for instance, is "claustrophobic" and smacks too much of the ghetto. But is anyone's writing more claustrophobic than Jane Austen's? Is The Magic Barrel...