Compulsion

The child of East European immigrants, the novelist and journalist Meyer Levin was born and raised in Chicago, the setting for his masterpiece The Old Bunch (1937), a realistic novel about young Jews in the Jazz Age and during the Great Depression. While his earliest fiction was not concerned with Jewish themes, his writing from the early 1930s on was passionately engaged with the trials and tribulations of contemporary Jewry. He was an outspoken critic of the dejudaized version of Anne Frank’s diary that was presented on Broadway and later filmed by Hollywood and described the troubles he encountered thereby in The Fanatic (1964).