"It was my lot to reach quite young what many people consider the dream life of America: success by my own efforts, a stream of dollars to spend, a penthouse in New York, forays to Hollywood, the companionship of pretty women, all before I was 24 ... There I was in the realms of gold . . . But even as I lived this conventional smart existence of inner show business, and dreamed the conventional dreams, it all seemed thin."
Thus Novelist-Playwright Herman Wouk, now 44, who started out as a gag writer for Fred Allen, went on to write The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar, tells how he came to give a second try to the Judaism in which he was born. That "gamble," as he calls it, resulted in a steadily deepening faith and practice—Sabbath, dietary laws and all—which survived the rigors of three years at sea in the Navy and continued citizenship in the realms of gold. It also resulted in Author Wouk's latest book, This Is My God (Doubleday; $3.95), a warm, readable, and admirably clear account of the fundamentals of the Jewish faith.
The Oasis of Quiet. Wouk wrote the book for his fellow laymen. Gentile as well as Jew, but many a rabbi will read it for pointers on how to present and explain the meaning of the Sabbath and the holy days, the sacred symbols and rites of the Torah, the Talmud, and the lines of division in modern Judaism. Again and again Wouk draws on his personal experience. After describing the negative injunctions of Sabbath observance, which cuts off the outer world from Friday's sundown to "the end of twilight on Saturday," he demonstrates its positive side in terms of a Sabbath during the crisis-fraught readying of a Broadway play. "Leaving the gloomy theatre, the littered coffee cups, the shouting stagehands, the bedevilled director, I have come home. It has been a startling change, very like a brief return from the wars. My wife and my boys, whose existence I have almost forgotten . . . are waiting for me, gay, dressed in holiday clothes, and looking to me marvellously attractive. We have sat down to a splendid dinner, at a table graced with flowers and the old Sabbath symbols: the burning candles, the twisted loaves, the stuffed fish, and my grandfather's silver goblet brimming with wine. I have blessed my boys with the ancient blessing; we have sung the pleasantly syncopated Sabbath table hymns."
Saturday is healing for the whole week. "The telephone is silent. I can think, read, study, walk, or do nothing. It is an oasis of quiet. When night falls, I go back to the wonderful nerve-racking Broadway game. Often I make my best contribution of the week then and there to the grisly literary surgery that goes on and on until opening night. My producer one Saturday night said to me, 'I don't envy you your religion, but I envy you your Sabbath.' "