Word: nathans
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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ROAD OF AGES-Robert Nathan-Knopf...
Time was when Robert Nathan toyed gently and amiably with his congenital melancholia. Always a writer who preferred fantasy to strict realism, he once put his deepest convictions into the mouths of dancing dogs, unwed mice and such philosophical creatures as Isaiah, the stoic horse of The Woodcutter's House. When he was not bringing wisdom out of the mouths of baby tumblebugs and suckling pigs, he was engaged in mild satires on religion (The Bishop's Wife, There Is Another Heaven). But Depression, if it did not quite succeed in bringing him down to solid earth...
With Road of Ages Author Nathan hits a wholly serious, grave note even though he is still technically engaged in writing fantasy. The book's title refers to the path to exile which the Jew has trod in many ages, from the time Edward I drove him out of England down to the latest edict of Realmleader Hitler. When Mr. Nathan picks up the thread of this millennial-long Diaspora, every country on the face of the earth, with the single exception of Mongolia, has ordered the Jews into banishment. Readers first meet the race in Road of Ages...
...nation. The Communist Jews insist that all property be pooled. The Socialist Jews do not know what they want. And the liberal Jews are occasionally wounded in trying to keep the Socialists and the Communists from killing each other before they have even reached the new Promised Land. Mr. Nathan seems to be protesting that there is no such thing as the typical Jew, that as a race they, too, have their class differences and tend to take on characteristics dictated by different environments; that, in short, it is idiotic to set the Semitic nation apart, label...
...Author is a descendant of Rabbi Gershom Seixas, who came to America in 1710 and helped incorporate Columbia College, a nephew of Maud Nathan, founder of The Consumers' League, and of Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College. But as a Jew, Robert Nathan found things difficult at Exeter and at Harvard. His ancestry supposedly kept him from being president of the Harvard Monthly. As a poet he found the "good bourgeois Jews themselves" against him because he was "a bad business risk." Fear of what the "good bourgeois Jews" might say has made Mr. Nathan sensitive about...