IT’S G-D’S BLOODY RULE, MA

Abstract

The title character of E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) is a graduate student in political history at Columbia University in the late sixties; he is also the son of fictional versions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were tried together for treason in1951 and executed in 1953.  The time present of the novel is 1967, when Daniel’s long effort to relieve himself of the burden of memory is morphing into an obsession with figuring out guilt and thus distributing blame, for his own victimization as much as that of his parents.  This essay argues that Daniel’s “trouble breathing” is a function of the utter and unvanquishable co-determination of the public and the private, household and nation-state, the socialist dream of equity and the ethical obligations of Judaism; that the interpretive strategies of Marx and Freud deliver superb insight into the over-wrought, over-determined family dramas of McCarthy-era Anti-Semitism and Abbie Hoffman’s Radical New Left; but that epistemological insight, even if it is as effectively domestic as it is socio-political, doesn’t mean release from ontological suffocation, especially not for Daniel.  Cultural critique, however informed in its modern secularity by Judaic origins, doesn’t address all the matter in his heart.  And it is Daniel’s ultimate embrace of the fiercest dimension of Chosenness, his ancestral ethos of suffering, including his grandmother’s bequeathing of the martyr’s pursuit of justification, that paradoxically drains his anguish, his anger, and his viciousness—with the help, in the book’s final spiraling turn between public and private, ethnos and ethos, of we readers who bear witness to the history written in Daniel’s Book.