“What Mayer did in the thirties – what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong – was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith – a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.”
