SOURCE: "African American Anti-Semitism and Himes's Lonely Crusade, in Melus, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 47-68.

In the following essay, Rosen discusses the presence of anti-Semitism in Himes's Lonely Crusade and its sources and implications.

Most critics have considered Chester Himes's second novel about racial conflict at a Los Angeles war industry plant, Lonely Crusade, to be his most ambitious and substantial work. However, the novel has attracted little notice since its reissue (1986), having long been unavailable after its initial publication. Were it known as it deserves, Lonely Crusade would still stir controversy.

Himes maintained that the Communist party—excoriated in Lonely Crusade—had effectively suppressed it. However, as he also acknowledged, "Everyone hated it…. The left hated it, the right hated it, Jews hated it, blacks hated it." According to Himes, black reviewers (such as James Baldwin) had been offended by his hero's discovery that "the black man...