The Outrider

“The Outsider,” By Howard Fast, 1984

There are many literary outsiders.  This is not the outsiders of S.E.Hinton fame, working-class teens in Oklahoma getting into trouble with Socs and cops.  This is not the existential stranger of Albert Camus, wandering on Moroccan beaches.   This is not Dostoevsky’s underground man, hidden from society in a St. Petersburg warren. Nor is it the dark skin of Ellison’s invisible man in Harlem.  Or Kafka’s human cockroach in Prague.  And definitely not a supernatural phantom from Stephen King.

This is a middle-class outsider.  He is a low-paid Jewish Reform rabbi, David Hartman, living in a small town in Connecticut.  He never really reconciles with his job as a rabbi.  Over the years he loses his belief in God and even in his wife.  His basic problem is that he served as a rabbi in World War II and was part of the gruesome liberation of Dachau, which haunts him for the rest of his life.  He can’t just be a small-town family man.  His wife Lucy is an apolitical atheist and doesn’t understand his concern for issues beyond them.  She eventually leaves him because of his job, his unrest and the town they live in, which is limited and stultifying to her. At one point he can’t explain ‘evil’ to one of his synagogue members, and this finally trips him up.

Instead he gets involved in politics in various ways. Hartman has to deal with local anti-Semites in his own gentle way.  He defends a congregant who is on the McCarthyite ‘black list’ from his Republican Jewish colleagues.  He has to counsel the Jewish hanging judge in the Sacco & Venzetti trial.  He marches for civil rights in the South with Christian ministers and gets beaten by police.  He opposes nuclear weapons and the nuclear cold war.  He sits down across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a candle to protest the Vietnam War as a pacifist.  Yet he’s not allowed to get angry or ‘pass judgment’ in his personal life.

This is one of Fast’s last books.   He was a left-wing writer who wrote Spartacus and was blacklisted in the 1950s.  At one point he edited the Communist Party's "Daily Worker" but broke with the Party in 1956.  The book is saturated in Jewish identity and religion in the period 1946 to 1971.  I’m third-generation Finnish-Welsh-French.  I do not labor over my ethnic European roots like this, but then I’m not Jewish.  Instead this book demarcates everyone into religious boxes.  It is full of Jewish religious debates, atheist remarks and conversations with David’s friend, a Congregationalist minister. Reform Judaism has to contend with Conservative and Orthodox Judaism.  Hartmann has to stand against the Pentagon and the war-mongers.  He has to avoid the rationalist barbs of his wife.  In a way the book makes all religions function as separatist, tribal forces, which they have ended up being.

It is all somewhat wearying for him.  He feels distanced from the WASPY, middle-class Jewish synagogue goers in his congregation in fictional Leighton Ridge, Connecticut.  His wife and kids don’t really fulfill him. The town has its limits, though he enjoys nature.  Through it all he remains alienated from everything that is happening.  It is not his static, dark world, even though many have high opinions of him.  This I think is what Fast was getting at with the title The Outsider.  His knowledge of the criminal nature of the powerful in society never leaves him.  Not quite an existential Sartrèan character, but close.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box upper left:  “Spartacus,” “Citizen Tom Paine,” “April Morning” (all by Fast); “I Married A Communist,” “American Pastoral” (both by Roth).

And I bought it at Chapman Street Books, Ely MN USA

Kulture Kommissar

August 7, 2020