The Life of Mr. Abramson

"It was my lot to reach quite young what many people consider the dream life of America: success by my own efforts, a stream of dollars to spend, a penthouse in New York, forays to Hollywood, the companionship of pretty women, all before I was 24 ... There I was in the realms of gold . . . But even as I lived this conventional smart existence of inner show business, and dreamed the conventional dreams, it all seemed thin."

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; $3.95), a warm, readable, and admirably clear account of the fundamentals of the Jewish faith.

The 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 of a Sabbath during the crisis-fraught readying of a Broadway play. "Leaving the gloomy theatre, the littered coffee cups, the shouting stagehands, the bedevilled director, I have come home. It has been a startling change, very like a brief return from the wars. My wife and my boys, whose existence I have almost forgotten . . . are waiting for me, gay, dressed in holiday clothes, and looking to me marvellously attractive. We have sat down to a splendid dinner, at a table graced with flowers and the old Sabbath symbols: the burning candles, the twisted loaves, the stuffed fish, and my grandfather's silver goblet brimming with wine. I have blessed my boys with the ancient blessing; we have sung the pleasantly syncopated Sabbath table hymns."

Saturday is healing for the whole week. "The telephone is silent. I can think, read, study, walk, or do nothing. It is an oasis of quiet. When night falls, I go back to the wonderful nerve-racking Broadway game. Often I make my best contribution of the week then and there to the grisly literary surgery that goes on and on until opening night. My producer one Saturday night said to me, 'I don't envy you your religion, but I envy you your Sabbath.' "

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 ... It is, if anything, on the rise."

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 on to the office." Of course, adds Author Wouk. "Mr. Abramson will not die. When his amnesia clears, he will be Mr. Adamson, and his wife and children will join him, and all will be well. But the Jewish question will be over in the United States. If this should happen--and I do not for a moment think it will--would it be a solution that either the Jews or the United States would welcome? Does America want the disappearance of its people of Abraham?"

Wouk is sure that the answer to both questions is no. and that the only hope lies in training the best brains among the young in the law. And this to him means Orthodoxy. "If I stand up to be counted in that communion, it is not because I hold it perfect, or because I miss the stresses that have sent many into dissent and assimilation. It is because I sense in my bones that Jewish survival rests with the law . . . The formulas of dissent make a pleasant compromise for people who want an easier life than the law asks, or who have little training and yet want a taste of Judaism. But the formulas die away in the training of the young. They are of the hour. The law is of eternity."

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