The Fugitive

My “retrieval” of Ezra S. Brudno’s 1904 apostasy novel The Fugitive, published in 1904 by Doubleday, Page, appears this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily.

The novel is a 400-page Bildungsroman on the theme “Once a Jew always a Jew.” Although born in Volozhin, home to the “mother of yeshivahs,” Brudno had become thoroughly secularized by the time he came to write The Fugitive in his late twenties—an expert in case rather than rabbinical law.

For Brundo, then, “once a Jew always a Jew” means that a Jew can assimilate into the vernacular culture, and can even marry a Christian, and still remain a Jew. Indeed, in his close knowledge of Jewish religious and literary tradition—his references range from Mishnah and even Tosafot to the classics of Haskalah literature—he himself is obviously comfortable in his Jewishness.

What never occurred to him is that a generation might arise without a similar knowledge of Jewish tradition. And for that generation, “once a Jew always a Jew” would not be so obviously a given.

That’s why I say, in my review, that the novel’s effect outruns its conception. Its effect is to underscore the necessary dependence of Jewish identity upon Jewish knowledge.