A dedicated reader of American Jewish literature, no matter how enthusiastic, will inevitably feel, at one point or another, that he or she would rather browse the tax code than read yet another book about intermarriage. Perhaps that explains why Myron S. Kaufmann’s outstanding novel, Remember Me to God, is so rarely mentioned anymore; it is, after all, a book largely concerned with the question of whether Richard Amsterdam, a Harvard student, will marry a Christian girl. With that said, it is tragic that Kaufmann’s novel is not more widely read. As is the case with many authors, for Kaufmann intermarriage is simply a justification for exploring the feelings, frustrations, and philosophies of American Jews about their Jewishness. He takes this as his starting point and produces a fiction of extraordinary insight and emotional depth.

Richard’s love interest is Wimsy Talbot, a doltish blue-blooded Radcliffe student. Richard’s desire for her grows out of his fascination with and envy of the wealthy, pedigreed Protestant community of Boston, who are known to Richard’s suburban Boston family as Yankees. Egged on by the sly and genteel anti-Semitism that dominates the most prestigious Harvard institutions (he gains acceptance to the Lampoon and the Hasty Pudding Club), as well as his own boyish insecurities, Richard imagines not only that he needs Wimsy, but also that he should convert to Christianity. His parents, as one might expect, throw a fit. The prominence accorded to Richard’s dilemmas should not obscure the book’s careful attention to his sister, Dorothy, a high school misfit—too smart and not confident enough to be popular—as well as his father, Adam, son of immigrants, orphaned as a child, who has risen from a butcher to become a judge, even though he still harbors doubts about his own intelligence. While many of the book’s long speeches, rendered in the distinct voices of various characters, center on questions of Jewish distinctiveness and survival, the novel ultimately is a family story, in which the intricate psychologies of each member reflect their complex relationships to the rest.

Kaufmann’s massive novel has much to recommend it. A finely detailed portrait of Harvard during WWII, the book is deeply empathetic to its characters, and is, furthermore, an unappreciated masterpiece of literary realism. Kaufmann’s prose is simple, unassuming, but astonishingly precise; he learned from Hemingway how to write sentences and paragraphs in which everyday words resound with meaning. Kaufmann never tells his reader how to feel about the action he describes—and the book does not finally offer any didactic solutions to the question of intermarriage—but he orchestrates his scenes so thoughtfully as to make each a powerful window into the minds of his characters. Given its technical accomplishment and intellectual ambitions, it is no surprise that Remember Me to God spent more than thirty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; what is shocking, and unfortunate, is that so few people know of it today.