April 1961
This is a good first novel, set in Louisiana - one day in the lives of a Jewish family in a provincial town. Julian Black has inherited a large store, much money and considerable position in the town from his father, who is dead. He has married a Gentile; has two children called David and Charlotte. His wife Evelyn, despises him and drinks; his son, who looks very like his mother, has passed in New York as a Gentile, got a young Jewish girl pregnant and come home in a panic; his daughter has fallen in love with a young Jew - the son of a new family in the town whom Julian, as a ‘tolerated’ Jew, is being urged to combine in ostracising. The day is the Jewish New Year, and during its drawn-out conflicts of ritual, public argument and private distress, Julian’s essential weakness is revealed to him.
Mr. Ansell’s strong suit is his depiction of this hot-bed of conformity - the living by appearances with dark glasses and the blinds drawn. Everybody in this community is so riddled with the desire to fit in with society’s view of what he ought to be, that his own needs and feelings are strangled for lack of any continuous air. Many of the main tenets of being a good Jew are, in fact, held by many householders: the importance of family life and the family; the desirability of virtue in young women; the necessity for obeying the laws of whatever religion is being practised. The dislocations occur further out, so to speak, on the limb - at the point of the social and/or civic rights of each individual; discriminate there, and distortion of the other more private and significant values inevitably follows. This is what Mr. Ansell’s novel makes clear, and it is a theme of some interest, because while convincing one of the situation, he makes one wonder at the unnecessity of it all: the pressures which drive the Julian Blacks to their impasses of paralytic ineffectiveness are all symptomatic of an artificial and partial life. The rabbi in the novel says to Julian, ‘there are two things certain in life; death and taxes. For a Jew there are three ---- death, taxes and being a Jew.’ The assumption here is that all certainty is a frightful business, which is interesting when it is put beside a society hell-bent on security.
Mr. Ansell knows his country and understands his people: he reiterates too much, which may truthfully be the Jewish form of protest, although it needs, in a novel, to be implied rather than actually experienced, but this is a book well worth reading for its intelligent treatments of a universal predicament.