‘Marjorie Morningstar’ continues to reshape Jewish lives

"Marjorie Morningstar" may offend women of the Gloria Steinem/Betty Friedan generation, for its sell-out ending and a patriarchal view of religion, but it still ranks near the top 10 percent at the online bookseller, a perennial classic.

As one who has given talks on the book's "tragedy" and as a member of the Morning Star Commission designed to expand the image of Jewish women in media beyond its namesake, this is an amazing state of affairs. But so it is, and I feel compelled to explain it.

In a nutshell, "Marjorie Morningstar" is the story of an affluent Jewish girl, the daughter of immigrants, who pursues Noel Airman, a judge's son and would-be playwright afflicted with a serious case of Jewish self-hatred into a passionate but ultimately dead-end love affair. Marjorie hunts Noel through every strata of American Jewish life, from summer camp to volunteer organizations and even to Europe as Jews flee Hitler. The book was Wouk's follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Caine Mutiny," and an instant best seller.

The appeal of the story today cuts across every age and spiritual demographics: It is required reading in college Jewish studies courses, the gospel for Jews-by-choice, and a staple of synagogue book clubs.

Marjorie speaks closely to observant women, who are seeking support for today's much-touted "return to modesty."

Moreover, Al Pacino optioned the book for a remake of the 1958 Gene Kelly-Natalie Wood movie, and a new screenplay has been written by Frederic Raphael.

No two ways about it, the book, though padded and frequently without focus, has staying power. The question of course is why?

The love story is a big part of it. Marjorie and Noel are like Jacob and Leah, two doomed partners, eternally attached to each other. We watch Marjorie pursue Noel and see in it every heartbeat wasted on the wrong guy.

Beyond that, time has been kind to "Marjorie Morningstar." Older readers can examine the story as history. Younger readers can find in it those glimpses of true wisdom that come from Wouk's understanding of the human heart. Finally, it survives because it captures a world that is compelling and real.

Noel resists Marjorie, calling her a "Shirley," a castrating typewoman who seeks to trap men into a life of conventionality. But other men, more competent and stable than Noel, pursue her with passion and drive. Sections of the book read like class warfare, as men with intellectual, professional and artistic ambitions fight over Marjorie.

And yet we must account for that disaster of an ending.

Wally Wronken, the book's narrator and young playwright à la Neil Simon, has loved Marjorie with unrequited ardor. Two decades and 750 pages later, he visits Marjorie years at her home in upstate N.Y. She is prematurely gray, the mother of four, a hausfrau, keeping a kosher home and attending community meetings. Every ounce of her appeal is gone. She cannot remember being "Marjorie Morningstar." She has become nothing more than Mrs. Milton Schwartz.

"I know now that she was an ordinary girl, that the image [or her talent] existed only in my mind," concludes Wally, destroying in one sweep the image of the woman he, and the reader, has loved.

If it's any consolation, I think even Marjorie's creator knows now that she deserves better. The 16-year-old Marjorie has an epiphany at her brother Seth's bar mitzvah. She understands that "this religion was a masculine thing...the very Hebrew had a rugged male sound to it."

In his most recent book, "The Will to Live On," Wouk, now in his mid-80s, praises the participation of women in serious learning as "one of the true breakthroughs of our time." If Marjorie were to come back, if she were allowed a life truly reflecting of where Jewish women have gone in the last 50 years, perhaps he'd let her be a...scholar!