Books: Disagreeable Gent

EAGLE AT MY EYES (252 pp.)—Norman Katkov—Doubleday ($2.75).

Norman Katkov, a glib, young (29) feature writer for the New York World-Telegram, has spotted a literary bandwagon and hopped aboard. Like Gentleman’s Agreement, his Eagle at My Eyes barges head-on into the area of Jewish-Gentile social relationships. But Katkov works the other side of the street. His heroine becomes the victim of her Jewish husband’s latent anti-Gentilism and the tribal animosity of his family.

Joe is a whiz of a newspaperman in St. Paul (Author Katkov’s home town), but too cowardly to marry the Gentile girl he falls in love with. He sees her on the sly, worries about being ostracized by his family, what other Jews will say. Mary Simpson has no such qualms. Her parents accept Joe. To marry him she is willing to be taken into his faith, vainly tries to approach his first-generation family. When they do marry, Joe defensively stays aloof from Mary’s friends and he splits with his own family when his mother insults his wife. He remains anti-Gentile to the end but finally accepts Mary’s world to save their marriage.

Whatever validity this theme may have is shredded by Author Katkov’s smart-aleck stridency, the plague-on-both-your-houses sputtering of his weak hero. Loaded as it is with irresponsible generalizations about racial animosities, Eagle at My Eyes will satisfy only those who have animosities of their own that they wish to preserve, and fortify.