With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.
Herman Wouk deserves more critical acclaim than he’s enjoyed.
By David Frum for The Atlantic
On
May 27, the American novelist Herman Wouk will attain the prodigious
age of 100. Over his long career, Wouk has achieved all the wealth and
fame a writer could desire, or even imagine. His first great success,
The Caine Mutiny (1951), occupied bestseller lists for two consecutive
years, sold millions of copies, and inspired a film adaptation that
became the second highest-grossing movie of 1954. Wouk’s grand pair of
novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, likewise found a
global audience, both in print, and then as two television miniseries in
the 1980s.
Wouk won a Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny.
From then on, however, critical accolades eluded him. Reviews of the two
“War” novels proved mostly dismissive—sometimes even savage. Critics
assigned the proudly Jewish Wouk to the category that included Leon Uris
and Chaim Potok rather than Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
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