Word: wouk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Thus Novelist-Playwright Herman Wouk, now 44, who started out as a gag writer for Fred Allen, went on to write The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar, tells how he came to give a second try to the Judaism in which he was born. That "gamble," as he calls it, resulted in a steadily deepening faith and practice-Sabbath, dietary laws and all-which survived the rigors of three years at sea in the Navy and continued citizenship in the realms of gold. It also resulted in Author Wouk's latest book, This Is My God (Doubleday...
...Oasis of Quiet. Wouk wrote the book for his fellow laymen. Gentile as well as Jew, but many a rabbi will read it for pointers on how to present and explain the meaning of the Sabbath and the holy days, the sacred symbols and rites of the Torah, the Talmud, and the lines of division in modern Judaism. Again and again Wouk draws on his personal experience. After describing the negative injunctions of Sabbath observance, which cuts off the outer world from Friday's sundown to "the end of twilight on Saturday," he demonstrates its positive side in terms...
Extinction in a Station Wagon. As an Orthodox Jew, Author Wouk (who now lives in the Virgin Islands during the winter) is not overly sympathetic to the "improvisations" of Reform or Conservative Judaism, and he finds Orthodoxy hale and hearty despite the stringencies of its demands in the world of the barbecue pit and the P.T.A. There has been, he admits, "a well-known cascading-from orthodox to Conservative, and from Conservative to Reform groups. But Reform does not swell as it might, because of attrition into disinterest and loss of identity. Nor, curiously, does orthodoxy seem to diminish...
...Wouk feels, though, that Judaism is gravely threatened today in America, and he threat is not the traditional one of exclusion or persecution. He personifies Judaism as "Mr. Abramson" disappearing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs piled in the back. Wouk puts it in terms of an imaginary news tory: "Mr. Abramson left his home in the morning after a hearty breakfast, apparently in the best of health, and was not seen again. His last words were that he would get in a round before going...
...combination--necessitates a meeting-ground. Someplace, literature must be taught as history and vice versa. There is some consensus as to when this is valid--as, for example, that the art of a Shakespeare can be studied as craftsmanship whereas it is more profitable to approach Herman Wouk as a statement of group adjustment; but the dividing line never really becomes clear...