The Disinherited

London/New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co.. Fair. 1929. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a reading/reference copy only; a well-worn book, hinges cracked but holding, slight exposure of boards at several corners, some staining to the first few pages; an ex-library book (rental library?), with the jacket blurb affixed to the front pastedown, the remnants of a removed circulation label on the front endpaper, and a pocket with circulation card on the rear pastedown]. Novel about a middle-aged Jewish lawyer in an unnamed American city (the only clue we're given is that it's next to one of the Great Lakes), whose "family has been rooted in an American community" for generations, and who "has been married for twenty years to a gentile, and [whose] two children are of the Protestant American world." In the course of the novel, triggered by a near-tragedy in his family, he gradually has his eyes opened to societal prejudice against Jews, and becomes involved in several cases -- a Jewish student denied entrance to a university, a Jewish contractor who's in a dispute with the city over his work on a bridge, and a Jewish woman seeking a divorce from her Gentile husband -- that compel him to put his Jewish heritage front and center. Despite the fact that it incorporates a lot of controversial themes, this book doesn't seem to have been much discussed (if at all) by scholars of Jewish-American literature, nor was it given much notice upon its original publication: the New York Times didn't review it, although it garnered some praise in the Jewish-American press, including a particuarly lengthy and laudatory notice in the Brooklyn Daily Times. (Hanna (3653) summarizes it rather blandly as "problems of an American Jew married to a Gentile.") It was apparently the only novel by this American-born author (1895-1976), who was more at home as a biographer of various figures in English and European history (Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Tudor, Catherine de Medici, Sir Walter Raleigh, etc.). He eventually ended up in England as a literary advisor and editor, where he secured a small (and not particularly honorable) place in literary history by declining to help J.R.R. Tolkien secure a publisher for "The Lord of the Rings," which Waldman had thought "too long." .