I think worth noting also Dr. Harap's readiness to consider women writers and women characters a major factor in the web of literary expression documenting American-Jewish life. It is impressive to see him calling our attention to Clara Yavner in Abraham Cahan 1905 novel The White Terror and the Red; Clara, he observes, "is among the distinctly new figures . . . in all American fiction" and is "of special interest because she anticipates the new place of the Jewish woman in radical fiction of the first decades of the century -- the courageous, effective, able Jewish woman labor organizer and socialist." Dr. Harap notes with approval James Oppenheim's incorporation into his 1911 novel The Nine-Tenths of a "recognition that the waistmakers' strike in 1911 had brought forward perhaps for the first time in the United States the 'New Woman,' the active and heroic participant in labor struggles and the struggle for a better world." The illumination of Jewish women by non-Jewish writers is not overlooked. He takes into account, for instance, Albert Edwards (né Arthur Bullard), who in 1913 published Comrade Yetta, a novel about Jewish radicalism, and speculated about Jewish "single-mindedness and consistency of purpose" in contrast to "Anglo-Saxon . . . compromise and confused issues."

In general, it may be said, Dr. Harap is fully and commendably alive to the documentary potential, the documentary implications, of fiction by nonJewish writers. He is as much interested in Judeophobic writers like Frank Norris, Owen Wister, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and David Graham Phillips as he is in more sympathetic fictionists like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, O. Henry, Thomas Nelson Page, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher. He understands that, "to achieve a comprehensive picture of the status of the Jew in our literature . . . it is not enough to study how the Jewish writer regarded his own Jewishness." He wants us also to "look at the way . . . non-Jewish writers depicted the Jew and met the challenge of anti-Semitism." As Dr. Harap points out, "the responses varied widely."

Readers may rely on Dr. Harap for formidable learning, and also, it is a pleasure to add, for a most accessible expository style. It is an honor to help bring these volumes to print; they will in time to come, I am confident, be recognized for the classics they are.

Jacob Rader Marcus American Jewish Archives Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Cincinnati, Ohio

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