by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
But for young would-be writers growing up in a Jewish slum in New York or Chicago during the twenties and thirties, the main figures of American literature, as well as the main legends and myths carried through their fictions and stories, were not immediately available. What could Emerson mean to a boy or girl on Rivington Street in 1929, hungry for books, reading voraciously, hearing Yiddish at home, yet learning to read, write, and think in English? What could the tradition of American romanticism, surely our main tradition, mean to them?
Together with the poems of Browning and Tennyson, such young people took in the quasi- or pseudo-Emersonian homilies their Irish teachers fed them at school. They took in the American legends of an unspoiled land, heroic beginnings, pioneer aloneness, and individualist success. All of these had a strong, if sometimes delayed, impact. In the course of this migration of myth from lady teachers to immigrant children there had, however, to occur twistings, misapprehensions. Besides, we immigrant children did not come as empty vessels. We had other stories. We had stories about legendary endurance in the Old World; stories about the outwitting of cruel priests; stories about biblical figures still felt to be contemporaries though by now largely ripped out of their religious setting; stories about endless martyrs through the ages (while America seemed to have only one martyr and he, in beard and shawl, had a decidedly Jewish look).
These stories of ours were the very material out of which cultures are made, and even as we learned to abandon them with hurried shame and to feign respect for some frigid general who foolishly had never told a lie, or to some philosopher of freedom who kept slaves, we felt a strong residue of attachment to our own stories. We might be preparing to abandon them, but they would not abandon us. And what, after all, could rival in beauty and cleverness the stories of Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and the angel, Joseph and his brothers?
Raised to a high inclusiveness, a story becomes a myth. It charts the possibilities and limits for the experience of a people, dramatizing its relations with the universe. We are speaking here of possession: that which we know, or remember, or remember that we have been forgetting. We are speaking about those tacit gestures, unseen shrugs, filaments of persuasion which form part of subverbal knowledge.
For a time, then, we tried to reconcile our stories with the American stories. The two of them would coexist in our minds, awkwardly but fruitfully, and we would give to the one our deep if fading credence and to the other our willed if unsure allegiance.
With American literature itself, we were uneasy. It spoke in tones that seemed strange and discordant. Its romanticism was of a kind we could not really find the key to, for while there were figures of the Jewish past who had striking points of kinship with the voices of Concord, we had partly been deprived of the Jewish past. (When the comparison was first made between Whitman’s poetry and the teachings of Hasidism, it came from a Danish critic, Frederick Schyberg; but most of us, who ought to have noticed this immediately, knew little or nothing about Hasidism, except perhaps that it was a remnant of “superstition” from which our fathers had struggled to free themselves.)
Romanticism came to us not so much through the “American Renaissance” as through the eager appropriations that East European Jewish culture had made in the late nineteenth century from Turgenev and Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. The dominant outlook of the immigrant Jewish culture was probably a shy, idealistic, ethicized, “Russian” romanticism, a romanticism directed more toward social justice than personal fulfillment. The sons and daughters of this immigrant milieu were insulated from American romanticism by their own inherited romanticism, with the differences magnified and the similarities, for a time, all but suppressed.
American romanticism was more likely to reach us through the streets than the schools, through the enticements of popular songs than the austere demands of sacred texts. We absorbed, to be sure, fragments of Emerson, but an Emerson denatured and turned into a spiritual godfather of Herbert Hoover. This American sage seemed frigid and bland, distant in his New England village—and how could we, of all generations, give our hearts to a writer who had lived all his life “in the country”? Getting in touch with the real Emerson, whoever that might be—say, with the Emerson radiant with a sense of universal human possibility yet aware enough, in his notebooks, of everything that might thwart and deny—this was not for us a natural process of discovering an ancestor or even removing the crusts of misconstruction which had been piled up by the generations. It was a task of rediscovering what we had never really discovered and then of getting past the barriers of sensibility that separated Concord, Massachusetts, from the immigrant streets of New York.
These were real barriers. What could we make of all the talk, both from and about Emerson, which elevated individualism to a credo of life? Nothing in our tradition, little in our experience, prepared us for this, and if we were growing up in the thirties, when it seemed appropriate to feel estranged from whatever was “officially” American, we could hardly take that credo with much seriousness. The whole complex of Emersonian individualism seemed either a device of the Christians to lure us into a gentility that could only leave us helpless in the worldly struggles ahead, or a bit later, when we entered the phase of Marxism, it seemed a mere reflex of bourgeois ideology, especially that distinctive American form which posited an “exceptionalist” destiny for the New World.
Perhaps a more fundamental way of getting at these matters is to say that we found it hard to decipher American culture because the East European Jews had almost never encountered the kind of Christianity that flourished in America. The Christianity our fathers had known was Catholic, in Poland, or Orthodox, in Russia, and there was no reason to expect that they would grasp the ways or the extent to which Protestantism differed. We knew little, for instance, about the strand of Hebraism running through Puritan culture—I recall as a college student feeling distinct skepticism upon hearing that the Puritan divines had Hebrew. (If they had Hebrew, how could they be Gentiles?) It was only after reading Perry Miller in later years that this aspect of American Protestant culture came alive for me. All that was distinctive in Protestant culture, making it, for better or worse, a radically different force in confrontation from Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, we really could not grasp for a long time. We read the words but were largely deaf to the melody.
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For most of us, individualism seemed a luxury or deception of the Gentile world. Immigrant Jewish culture had been rich in eccentrics, cranks, and individualist display; even the synagogue accepted prayer at personal tempos. But the idea of an individual covenant with God, each man responsible for his own salvation; the claim that each man is captain of his soul (picture those immigrant kids, in white middy blouses, bawling out, “O Captain, My Captain”); the notion that you not only have one but more than one chance in life, which constitutes the American version of grace; and the belief that you rise or fall in accord with your own merits rather than the will of alien despots—these residues of Emersonianism seemed not only strange but sometimes even a version of that brutality which our parents had warned was intrinsic to Gentile life. Perhaps our exposure to this warmed-over Emersonianism prompted us to become socialists, as if thereby to make clear our distaste for these American delusions and to affirm, instead, a heritage of communal affections and responsibilities.
Then, too, Jewish would-be writers found the classical Americans, especially Emerson and Thoreau, a little wan and frail, deficient in those historical entanglements we felt to be essential to literature because inescapable in life. If we did not yet know we surely would have agreed with Henry James’s judgment that Emerson leaves “a singular impression of paleness” and lacks “personal avidity.” Born, as we liked to flatter ourselves, with the bruises of history livid on our souls, and soon to be in the clutch of New World “avidities” that would make us seem distasteful or at least comic to other, more secure, Americans, we wanted a literature in which experience overflowed. So we abandone
d Emerson even before encountering him, and in later years some of us would never draw closer than to establish amiable diplomatic relations.
Hardest of all to take at face value was the Emersonian celebration of nature. Nature was something about which poets wrote and therefore it merited esteem, but we could not really suppose it was as estimable as reality—the reality we knew to be social. Americans were said to love Nature, though there wasn’t much evidence of this that our eyes could take in. Our own tradition, long rutted in shtetl mud and urban smoke, made little allowance for nature as presence or refreshment. Yiddish literature has a few pieces, such as Mendele’s “The Calf,” that wistfully suggest it might be good for Jewish children to get out of the heder (school) and into the sun; but this seems more a hygienic recommendation than a metaphysical commitment. If the talk about nature seemed a little unreal, it became still more so when capitalized as Nature; and once we reached college age and heard that Nature was an opening to God, perhaps even his phenomenal mask, it seemed quite as farfetched as the Christian mystification about three gods collapsed into one. Nothing in our upbringing could prepare us to take seriously the view that God made his home in the woods. By now we rather doubted that He was to be found anywhere, but we felt pretty certain that wherever He might keep himself, it was not in a tree, or even leaves of grass.
What linked man and God in our tradition was not nature but the commandment. Once some of us no longer cared to make such a linkage, because we doubted either the presence of God or the capacity of man, we still clung to the commandment, or at least to the shadow of its severities, for even in our defilements it lay heavily upon us.
I think it ought to be said that most of us were decidedly this-worldly, in that sardonic Yiddish style which, through the genius of a Sholom Aleichem or occasionally a Peretz, can create its own darkly soothing glow. Our appetites for transcendence had been secularized, and our messianic hungers brought into the noisy streets, so that often we found it hard to respond to, even to hear, the vocabulary of philosophical idealism which dominates American literature. Sometimes this earth-boundedness of ours was a source of strength, the strength of a Delmore Schwartz or a Daniel Fuchs handling the grit of their experience. Sometimes it could sour into mere candy-store realism or sadden into park-bench resignation. If the imagination soared in the immigrant slums, it was rarely to a Protestant heaven.
I am, of course, making all this seem too explicit, a matter of words. It went deeper than words. We had grown up, for instance, with the sovereign persuasion, which soon came to seem our most stringent imprisonment, that the family was an institution unbreakable and inviolable. Here, though we might not yet have known it, we were closer to the Southern than to the New England writers. For where, if you come to think of it, is the family in Emerson, or Thoreau, or Whitman? Even in Melville the family is a shadowy presence from which his heroes have fled before their stories begin. And where is the family in Hemingway or Fitzgerald? With Faulkner, despite all his rhetoric about honor, we might feel at home because the clamp of family which chafed his characters was like the clamp that chafed us. When we read Tolstoy we were witness to the supremacy of family life; when we read Turgenev we saw in Bazarov’s parents a not-too-distant version of our own. But in American literature there were all these strange and homeless solitaries, motherless and fatherless creatures like Natty and Huck and Ishmael. Didn’t they know where life came from and returned to?
Glance at any significant piece of fiction by an American Jewish writer—Schwartz’s “America, America,” Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel,” Bellow’s “The Old System”—and you will see that the family serves as its organizing principle, just as in Jewish life it had become the last bulwark of defenselessness. Even in the stories of Philip Roth, which herald and perhaps celebrate the breakup of immigrant culture, there is finally a crabbed sort of admiration for the family. The Jewish imagination could not so much as conceive a fiction without paying tribute, in both senses of the word, to the family.
We had, to be sure, other and more positive reasons for keeping an uneasy distance from American literature. We felt that together with the old bedclothes, pots, and pans that our folks had brought across the ocean, they had also kept a special claim on Russian culture. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov—though not the sensationalist and anti-Semite Dostoevsky—were very close to us. They had been liberally translated into Yiddish and read by the more advanced Jewish youth of Eastern Europe. Breathing moral idealism, they spoke for humanity at large; they told us to make life better and, as it seemed to us then, what better word could literature tell? The works of these masters revealed a generosity of spirit at the very moment that the spirit of the East European Jews was straining for secular generosity. In the devotion of the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia to Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov it almost came to seem as if these were Jewish writers! Tolstoy presented some problems—perhaps we regarded him as a Jew for Jesus. But the other two, they were ours! I remember Isaac Rosenfeld, the most winning of all American Jewish writers, once explaining to me with comic solemnity that Chekhov had really written in Yiddish but Constance Garnett, trying to render him respectable, had falsified the record. Anyone with half an ear, said Rosenfeld, could catch the tunes of Yiddish sadness, absurdity, and humanism in Chekhov’s prose—and for a happy moment it almost seemed true.
Coming as strangers who possessed, so to say, the Russian masters, we could afford to be a little cool toward the American ones. What was Dreiser to Tolstoy, Anderson to Turgenev, and the sum of all American short stories to one by Chekhov? These Russians formed a moral dike guarding the immigrant Jewish intelligentsia and then their children from the waves of American sensibility and myth. Like the Yiddish culture from which we had emerged, we were internationalist in our sentiment before we were part of any nation, living in the exalted atmospheres of European letters even as we might be afraid, at home, to wander a few streets away.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that the young would-be Jewish writers were themselves only tenuously connected with the Jewish culture from which they had emerged. They were stamped and pounded by the immigrant experience, but that was something rather different from the Jewish tradition. Brilliant and vital as the immigrant experience may seem to us now, it was nevertheless a thinned-out residue of the complex religious culture that had been built up over the centuries by the East European Jews. A process of loss was being enacted here—first, the immigrant culture was estranged from its Old World sources, and second, we were estranged from the immigrant culture. Especially were we estranged from—in fact, often ignorant of—those elements of religious mysticism and enthusiasm, ranging from the Cabalists to Hasidism, which had wound their way, as a prickly dissidence, through East European Jewish life. It was, for many of us, not until our late teens that we so much as heard of Sabbatai Zevi or Jacob Frank, the false messiahs who had torn apart the life of the East European Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even as the fierce self-will of the immigrant culture kept us at a certain distance from American literature, so did it also screen out “reactionary” elements of the Jewish past.
I sometimes think that respectful Gentile readers have been badly gulled by the American Jewish writers into believing that they, the writers, possess a richer Jewish culture than in fact they do. The truth is that most of the American Jewish writers are painfully ignorant of the Jewish tradition. When they venture to use a Yiddish phrase they are liable to absurd mistakes. There is a delicious bit revealing this condition in a story by Irvin Faust about a Brooklyn boy who has gone for a season to Vermont and is asked by the farmer’s daughter, “Myron, talk Jew to me.” He has to scramble in his memories to find a phrase: “Ish leeba Dick.”
“Oh,” Rita Ann moaned softly, “say that again.”
“Ish . . . leeba . . . Dick.”
“Oooh. What’s it mean?”
This I remembered, at least to a point. “I love you . . . Dick.”
