14
 

Karl Beckson
 

central character, Elias, loves a Christian, a love that his uncle, an
orthodox rabbi, characterizes as a "spiritual disease" and inter¬
marriage as the "most deadly [sin] of all." During the marriage
ceremony, Elias suddenly has an epileptic seizure and collapses.
 

Poet and banker Edmund Clarence Stedman
in the librar\" of ills home in Bron.wiilc.

His uncle, who had foreseen that God would ne\'er permit such
a marriage to occur, tells Flias that his fiancee is "a Christian, a Goy,
despised and abominated of the Lord. She has served her purpose
[i.e., to bring Elias back to the fold]."

Harland was subjected to charges of anti-Semitism, particularly
by Jewish critics (his true identity, by then, having been widely