LETTER: ALS on Jews to Mrs. Posner, April 19, 1937.
Cather on Jews
Cather, Willa. Typed letter signed, “Willa Cather,” to Mrs. Samuel Posner, April 19, 1937, two leaves of “WSC” letterhead, with franked envelope postmarked April 22, 1937. Together with a typed letter carbon of Posner’s letter which prompted her response.
An unusual and persuasive letter by Cather in which she defends herself against a charge by Mrs. Posner that she has not fully grasped the “Jewish mind.” In the essay “Miss Jewett,” included in the collection Not Under Forty, Cather had described a hypothetical young man “perhaps of foreign descent: German, Jewish, Scandinavian” who merely used the English language as a means of communicating his ideas. Despite his ability to speak American English correctly, he would be unable to understand the subtleties of a New England dialect, or “the temper of the people” behind the language. To Posner’s mind, the linking of the German with the Jew was unfortunate. The Jew, she explains, possesses a “unique assimilative power,” which makes it possible for him to adapt to any environment while at the same time keeping his own. So, if a “German, Scandinavian, and the New American were bought in touch with the life of Maine equally foreign to all of them, the Jew would probably be the one who would come to closer understanding of inner life.”
In her very cordial response to Mrs. Posner’s letter, Cather agrees with her that “Jews have a remarkable facility in assimilating the determining characteristics of various languages.” She tells of her pleasure in assisting a young Jewish boy from Maine whose “speech was absolutely North-of-Maine speech, with all the characteristic peculiarities of pronunciation—and, all the while, he looked as unlike anything that ever came from the North-of-Maine.” What’s more, Cather writes, she was specifically speaking only of the
Jewish boy born in New York City, and educated in a New York university. Within the last few years, a number of these young men have expressed themselves in a very cocky and patronizing fashion about the older American writers whom we were trained to respect. Miss Jewett, Mr. Howells, Henry James, have been treated with very lofty contempt by a group of these young men. I thought I made it clear in my article that I was speaking of this particular group of young Jews, who have practically never been outside of New York, and hold in the lowest esteem our provincial towns and country people.
As to her personal feelings about Jews, continues Cather, they can best be seen in a story called “Old Mrs. Harris,” in Obscure Destinies. She concludes her letter by reinforcing her defense: she cites among her best friends and colleagues a Jewish publisher, oculist, and physician. And, not least, another reminder to read the story “Old Mrs. Harris.”
A sympathetic portrait of the Rosens in “Old Mrs. Harris” lends some credibility to Cather’s claim that she did indeed understand and admire Jews. In contrast to the Templeton house where books were not treated with reverence, the Rosen house was a sanctuary of art and culture—a repository for the “world’s masterpieces.” The childless European couple befriended their neighbors, became a part of the gentile community, and introduced Grandma Harris’s granddaughter, Vickie Templeton, to a rich intellectual environment. In addition, their support and financial assistance made it possible for her to accept an offer to attend university. On the subject of Cather’s alleged disparagements of Jews in her fiction and her critical detractors, many of whom were Jewish, see Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, p. 98.
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