ideological constructs. 156 There were, of course, other reasons why associating Communism with Jewishness might not be a very good idea. The most pragmatic of them was the observable fact that the Jewish association with Communism was coming to an end. A high proportion of Communists and Soviet agents in the United States were still Jews, but the absolute numbers of Jewish Communists were falling steadily, and their place in the Jewish community was becoming marginal. At the Rosenberg trial, both the presiding judge and the prosecutor appointed to the case were Jews. This was the result of a concerted political effort to create a visible counterweight to the accused (who used their Jewishness in their defense), but it was also a faithful reflection of the new postwar reality. Beilke’s children began to turn from Communism to Jewish nationalism at the same time and for many of the same reasons as their Soviet cousins: the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the destruction of European Jewry, the creation of Israel, and the Soviet purge of Jews from elite positions. But mostly, they turned away from Communism because they were doing so well in America. The two postwar decades saw the emergence of the Jews as the most prosperous, educated, politically influential, and professionally accomplished ethnoreligious group in the United States. As in fin de siècle Vienna and Budapest or early-Soviet Moscow and Leningrad, the children of Mercurian immigrants moved en masse into the professions that define and underwrite the modern state: law, medicine, journalism, entertainment, and higher education. Unlike their predecessors in Vienna and Budapest, they encountered little anti-Semitism; unlike their cousins in the Soviet Union, they were free to pursue both traditional Jewish vocations: learning and wealth. 157 They moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side, from the cities to the suburbs, from Weequahic High in Newark to Arcady Hill Road in Old Rimrock. In Philip Roth’s American Pastoral , a “slum-reared” Jewish entrepreneur with the ruthless drive of Sholem Aleichem’s Podhotzur or Mordecai Richler’s Duddy Kravitz begets a “household Apollo” nicknamed “the Swede.” The father is one of those “limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up.” The son is gentle, even-tempered, and considerate. The father is “no more than five seven or eight”; the son is “handsome as hell, big, carnal, ruddy as Johnny Appleseed himself.” The father cannot stop climbing; the son marries a Gentile Miss New Jersey, settles in a dream house on Arcady Hill, and celebrates his American fulfillment on the “dereligionized ground” of “the American pastoral par excellence”: Thanksgiving. 158