Between “the American Dream of Success” and the “Jewish Idea of Respectability”: the Case of Marjorie Morningstar’s Path to Responsibility

Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk was the first novel on Jewish themes to gain popularity with a general audience in the United States. Yet, at the time of its publication, in 1955, the novel endured a disproportionately harsh critical reception, and, to this day, is still deserving of a proper scholarly evaluation. In the present essay, I argue that Marjorie Morningstar showcases Wouk’s ability as a social historian by aptly capturing the spirit of Jewish New York in 1930s. More precisely, the book reconstructs a transitional era, during which U.S. Jewry, having gradually turned into a native-born rather than an immigrant population, chose the path of acculturation and began to negotiate a new identity in America. In so doing, American Jews underwent a crisis in the Gramscian sense: trapped in a cultural and spiritual “interregnum” where “the old” values and principles were “dying “and “the new” ones could not yet be “born”, they displayed “morbid symptoms” in the form of superficial attachments to a wide range of empty ideologies, a phenomenon which Wouk depicts with an exquisitely satirical hand. The novel’s protagonist is Marjorie Morgenstern, a beautiful young woman, who, despite having been born and raised in an observant Jewish family, is devoured by the ambition to make it on Broadway with the stage name of Marjorie Morningstar. Her twisting path from adolescence to adulthood is marked, on the one hand, by her burning passion for a libertine Jewish apostate, and, on the other hand, by the pull of her observant family’s traditional principles. Thanks to Marjorie’s quest for identity, Wouk figuratively balances the seductive sirens of the American way of life against the ancient tribalism of the Jews. Eventually, the tribal roots triumph as the protagonist, after a brief but life-changing brush with the then-ongoing Holocaust in Europe, chooses responsibility – toward tradition, her family, and her people – over the seductive lure of modernity.