Dilemma and Love of a

JEW in IRELAND
By W. J. IGOE
TO NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM, by David Marcus (Macmillan, 12s. 6d.).
THE DEEP SLEEP, by Wright Morris (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 12s. 6d.).
AFRIEND of mine who is a Jew recently asked me why so many Catholics of the educated classes are anti-Semitic and I could not answer him.
The number of anti-Semites in the Church is naturally exaggerated, simply because those of us who take Jews for granted as fellow human beings in this vale of tears don't run around shouting that we love them. The anti-Semite, on the other hand, never loses an opportunity to switch on that leer. worse than the pathetic, professionally glittering, smile of a street girl in Soho. and insinuate his poisonous nonsense even into conversations where he should know, if he is not a lunatic, that it will be embarrassing, at best, and at worst may make someone. like myself, who has friends, want to throw at him the heaviest and most lethal thing to hand.
I have noticed that anti-Semitism is more prevalent among Catholics who have passed their half-century and wonder if it is a disease that comes with age; but then the most gallant defender of Jews among my Irish acquaintances is a man in his early fifties. and Pope Pius XI was in his seventies when he condemned anti-Semitism for the vile thing it is.
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MR. DAVID MARCUS, who is a young Irish writer, has not simplified the puzzle for me. To Next Year in Jerusalem (the title comes from a Jewish prayer) seems to set out to dramatise conflicts between Jews and Catholics, but does not get very far with that issue. It retreats very quickly and becomes a study of one young Jew's reaction to the setting-up of an anchorage, home and country for the Jews in Israel.
Mr. Marcus has written a decent, intelligent and interesting novel;
but he has raised many problems and solved none. Jonathan Lippman, his Jewish hero, does pot look to Israel, in the ending, as a young Irishman might look to a United Irish Republic, as a racial and national achievement; but rather as a young seminarian from Maynooth might look forward to his labours on a foreign mission.
The task he has set for himself is spiritual.
JONATHAN is an Irishman and
a Jew, His old grandfather, a wonderful portrait this of a Jewish patriarch, is a refugee from Russia who, with the boy's father when a child, built a modest business in an Irish town. Other Jews live there; they have their synagogue but the community is too small to own a school of its own. Jonathan is educated by Brothers, Christian Brothers one assumes, and superimposed upon his Hebrew culture are the cultures which grew from the Irish language and the AngloIrish "pace" which unite the contemporary Republic.
He loves a Catholic girl and, under the influence of a priest, becomes the chairman of a youth club in which he is the only non-Catholic member. But he goes among these Catholics as a stranger; Fr. Jim, the friar, with his cigarette holder and his understanding of the young. is affectionately created from the outside. And Aileen, the Catholic girl whom Jonathan loves, is seen too much through the eyes of an infatuated youth. Most men see their first loves in this veiling and flattering light. It is one of the tender illusions that make growing-up less painful. The problems inseparable from such a love affair arc not even touched by the writer.
He is at his hest, which is extremely good, in his studies of the family of Mordecai Lippman and the tiny Jewish community, his interiors of the good Jews at prayer, their delightful social gatherings, and a fine description of a Jewish meal, alien entirely to the environment of Drumcoole, an Irish town drawn with such a passion for anonymity that the artist fails to achieve local character.
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POIGNANT is Jonathan's attitude when confronted by his father's failure to appreciate that all Goys do not hate Jews; his mental paralysis will be appreciated by Catholics who have faced the same bovine stupidity in Christians. But the Jew facing this problem knows. at lease that while Jews have not persecuted Christians, many, many thousands of Jews have been tortured and murdered by people who were, nominally at least, Christian.
In the ending of Mr. Marcus's novel, Jonathan prepares to depart from Ireland to seek work in the Holy Land, but he goes warmly remembering his two Catholic friends. "The way he felt. it was as if he were riding forward on the love he bore his two friends, and the love they bore him."
This is a sincere and affectionate hook. a good hook which raises many problems that disturb Jews and Catholics who wish to live in friendship and peace. Rut the problems all centre on those people who live to hate. Could it he that David Marcus is riding his pen on a snaffle?
AR. WRIGHT MORRIS'S novel is an ironic comedy, finely apd craftily constructed, which. like Ulysses, takes place in a single day.
"The Judge" is dead and his family prepares for the funeral, an artist son-in-law, "The Judge's" mother. who is 99, his wife, daughter and hired man.
The entertainment is in the writing for it all adds up to that anecdote which might he described as the ghost of Fran Dodsworth. I enjoyed Mr. Morris's book.