Reviewed by Ed Lengel

Eighty years on, the idea of publishing a novel about antisemitism and the Holocaust just after World War II, hardly seemed like a stretch. With images of the Nazi death camps fresh in their memories, thanks to the determination of General Dwight D. Eisenhower that documentary film footage be widely distributed; and with the Nuremberg war crimes trials just underway, surely Americans were prepared for an internal reckoning with bigotry and hatred. Judging from novelist Laura Z. Hobson’s initial experiences as she prepared to write her book Gentleman’s Agreement, however, calling attention to antisemitism in the United States even at such a time would be anything but easy.

Born Laura Kean Zametkin in New York City in 1900 and becoming Laura Z. Hobson after her (brief) marriage to Thayer Hobson in 1930, she was the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, a graduate of Cornell University, and a journalist who made the transition to writing full time during the Great Depression. Although prolific from the very beginning, Hobson was only modestly successful. As an intellectual woman from a family of urban Jewish socialists, Hobson’s popular appeal was always going to be limited by her identity. Her initial eagerness to take on issue-focused fiction didn’t help. Hobson’s first novel, The Trespassers, a story of European refugees seeking entry into the United States that Simon and Schuster published in 1943, failed to gain much traction with the American reading public.

In 1944, with the United States in the thick of the fighting in the Pacific and Europe, Hobson pondered her next novel and decided that she wanted to write about antisemitism in America. At the time, the public was not widely aware of the nature and scale of the Holocaust then culminating in Europe. That year, Canadian author Gwethalyn Graham, who was not Jewish, published a novel, Earth and High Heaven, about an intimate relationship between a male Jewish lawyer and a non-Jewish woman in Ontario. The novel did well in the United States, reaching the New York Times bestseller list; and Hobson might reasonably have expected to enjoy success with a similarly themed novel of her own. Her literary agent and her publisher, however, attempted to dissuade her, arguing that another “issue” novel, especially one about antisemitism not in Canada but the United States, would touch all the wrong nerves at a time when the country was focused on feel-good patriotism, and flop badly—especially since, as a Jew, Hobson might be construed as having selfish motivations.

Hobson took their advice seriously enough to consider abandoning the project, but her close friends advised her to think again. As recently as the 1930s, antisemitism in the United States had been practically de rigueur—not because most Americans had Nazi sympathies, but because stereotyping and contempt for Jews pervaded popular culture and was uncritically accepted. Hobson’s circle said her that her objective should not be to attack fanatical antisemites—such as the Ku Klux Klan—in the country, but to ask everyday Americans to take stock of and reconsider prejudices that they had long accepted. Hobson decided to go ahead with the novel, and—fortunately—her agent and publisher relented.

Gentleman’s Agreement, surprisingly, is told not from a Jewish but a gentile perspective. Journalist Phil Green, a widower writing an article about antisemitism for a popular magazine, decides to reverse the usual dynamic by which American Jews pretend to be gentiles, by being a gentile pretending to be Jewish. In assuming this new identity, Green uncovers not the thuggish antisemitism of the streets, but the gentile, polite “gentleman’s agreement” of American high society by which known Jews were kept firmly out of clubs, ivy league colleges, social circles, and senior employment opportunities. For Green the cost is easy enough to bear, since he has chosen the charade deliberately, and knows that he can drop it any time. More troubling is the impact that his assumption of a Jewish identity has on his social status-conscious fiancée Kathy, and on his teenage son, who is bullied and excluded at school. The boy learns a lesson in courage by not taking the easy way—revealing to his schoolyard tormentors that he is in fact a gentile.

Laura Z. Hobson cannot be counted among the great American novelists. Never a master of great narrative pacing, characterization, or dialogue, she wrote at times tediously and tendentiously. Gentleman’s Agreement, ponderous and at times preachy, displays many of her less-than-stellar characteristics as a writer. Indeed, none of the nine novels she would eventually write over the course of her career are well-remembered today—except for Gentleman’s Agreement. Originally published in serial form in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1946; a novel the following year which sold more than a million copies, and a hit 1947 movie that starred Gregory Peck.

Clearly, the novel did touch a popular nerve, but by the end of the 1940s the American public was far more receptive to its central theme than Hobson’s publishers had feared. One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, Gentleman’s Agreement may be becoming more relevant than ever as the specter of antisemitism rises—again.

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Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.