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Closely related to his illusions about his typicality is Krim's complicated feeling about his Jewishness.

He writes, `` Most of my friends and I were Jewish ; ;

we were also literary ; ;

the combination of the Jewish intellectual tradition and the sensibility needed to be a writer created in my circle the most potent and incredible intellectual-literary ambition I have ever seen or could ever have imagined.

Within themselves, just as people, my friends were often tortured and unappeasably bitter about being the offspring of this unhappily unique-ingrown-screwedup breed ; ;

their reading and thinking gave an extension to their normal blushes about appearing ' Jewish ' in subway, bus, racetrack, movie house, any of the public places that used to make the Jew of my generation self-conscious ( heavy thinkers walking across Seventh Avenue without their glasses on, willing to dare the trucks as long as they didn't look like the ikey-kikey caricature of the Yiddish intellectual ).

'' At other points in his narrative, Krim associates Jewishness with unappeasable literary ambition, with abstraction, with his personal turning aside from the good, the true, and the beautiful of fiction in the manner of James T. Farrell to the international, the false, and the inflated.