World of Our Fathers

...But they were not without resources...

...They found a way for a time of linking the high moral fervor they had brought with them and the hope for social betterment America aroused in them...

...you're entitled...

...We take pleasure in having been related to those self-educated workers, those sustaining women, those almost-forgotten writers and speakers devoted to excitements of controversy and thought...

...Where did they come from...

...I trust they will enjoy the book...

...In most of these essays there was a sense of tournament, the writer as gymnast with one eye on other rings, or as skilled infighter juggling knives of dialectic...

...However, just as World of Our Fathers was perhaps not the book to do it, so this review is not the place to do anything more than to raise the question...

...Despite these two minor observations, I trust there is no doubt that I view World of Our Fathers as a work of absolute brilliance and that I frankly envy Irving Howe for being able to write it, and American Jews for their opportunity to read it...

...It is a kind of writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an unashamed vibration of bravura and display...

...The problem for American Jews is a bit different...

...We barely even know where we are now (some recent findings of the National Opinion Research Center suggest that Polish and Italian Catholics are far higher on the economic ladder than they think they are), and we have only fragmentary family anecdotes to explain whence we have come...

...Jews require synthesis...

...I would also have liked a larger section on the relationship between Jews and the rest of us in America...

...I dub you Sir Francis Drake...

...This outsider has to say that World of Our Fathers "feels" right...

...And they had, of course, strong faith in their own people-hood...

...Polemics were harsh, often rude...

...they will not need my urging to do so...

...They were physically, socially, culturally "poorly equipped for the proletarian life...

...The ideal, it seems to me, for anyone writing about the relatively immediate past of his own group, is to avoid both defensiveness and self-hatred which are, after all, the two sides of the same apologetic coin...

...Howe is not defending any-, one, nor does he need to be hypercritical...

...Nineteenth century immigrants from England, Scotland and Wales may indeed have had even more skilled workers...

...Obsolete artisans,.socialist firebrands, bewildered wives, religious fanatics, virtuosos of the violin, illiterate butchers, scribblers of poetry, cobblers, students, luflmenshn — above all, the numberless ordinary Jews, the folksmasn for whom being a Jew was not an idea or a problem but the vibrant substance of their lives — now began to ready themselves...

...It is perhaps not the time to do it yet, and the concerns which led Irving Howe to write World of Our Fathers perhaps preclude the treatment in this book of the mutual animosities and tensions...

...Struggling with one another like the good and bad angels of Jewish religious myth, they made their way into the immigrant streets and then even to suburbs extending like faint replicas of those streets...

...Any reviewer will be tempted to summarize World of Our Fathers...

...I have a couple of minor complaints which I hesitate even to mention after quoting such a brilliant paragraph of English prose...

...Millions would soon tear themselves away from the land that held the dust of their ancestors...

...The rabbis, the learned institutions, the political leaders, the burial societies, the intellectuals, the wealthy...

...He is free, then, to be sensitive and sympathetic to the suffering, the anguish, and the hopes of the Jewish immigrants and their children, while at the same time realizing that there were and are weaknesses, mistakes, imperfections in the culture of the Jews of New York...

...Our Fathers because the raw material doesn't exist for such an enterprise...

...Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transitions and other concessions to dullness, willfully calling attention to itself as a form or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle — such, at its best or most noticeable, was the essay cultivated by the Jewish intellectuals...

...Soon somebody must also raise the questions of the Jews' "Catholic" problem...

...It is perhaps a measure of how successful Jewish accomplishments in America have become that the question of apologetics never occurs to one when reading World of Our Fathers...

...Indeed, to this reviewer, relatively unfamiliar with Yiddish culture, some of the most useful sections of the book are Howe's sensitive commentaries on Yiddish culture...

...He would do well, however, to resist the temptation and to satisfy himself with the final two paragraphs of the volume which, in the elegant prose that characterizes the whole effort, summarizes the history, the present condition, and hints at the probable fate and future of American Jews...

...Indeed, I would be very surprised if there were not vigorous and even vehement arguments about matters of detail, and reviewers, of World of Our Fathers from within the Jewish community will probably line up according to patterns that could easily be predicted on the basis of various left-wing political factions of the 1930's...

...I am patently not a Jew, and while I have some familiarity with scholarly research on American Judaism, I can scarcely claim to be a specialist in that area...

...Indeed, the marvelous little essay on the "New York intellectuals" is a superbly detached and gently ironic portrait...

...And audiences nurtured, or spoiled, on this kind of performance, learned not to form settled judgments about a dispute until all sides had registered their blows: surprise was always a possible reward...

...you're entitled...

...And they finally made it in American life, made it "bigger" than any other immigrant group has ever done (even though some of them are now afraid to admit the magnitude of their success for fear of anti-Semitic reaction...

...No matter what the more Russified Jewish intelligentsia said by way of caution or how the handful of wealthy Jewish merchants hesitated, the masses made their own decision...

...They would quickly climb up and out, overcoming problems of language, poverty, and bigotry with skill and speed, if not with ease...

...As one who has never been able quite to chart the intricate map of such factionalism, I will sit on the outside and enjoy the fight, much as I enjoy the fierce ironies of the letters to the 'editor in Commentary (reading such letters is the next best thing I know to having dinner with a Jewish family...

...or fugitives from the czar's army and the shtetl's barrenness...

...The intense moral seriousness of Jewish life was shattered by a streak of madness, the purity of messianic yearning by an apocalyptic frenzy...

...And not merely because their life in common was weak, but because as Jews they knew themselves to be strong...

...Still, should we ever assemble all the raw material, we would be lucky to find an Irving Howe among us to so adroitly describe both the trees and the forest...

...Let us call it the style of brilliance...

...I have already quoted from the book perhaps as much as any reviewer ought properly to quote...

...He is a syndicated columnist and a prolific writer...

...Norman Podhoretz some time ago risked the wrath of the demons by raising the question of the Jews' "Negro" problem...

...I'm sure there is not a single reader of moment who will not have devoured the book shortly after publication...

...A sense of natural piety toward one's origins can live side by side with a spirit of critical detachment...

...For a time, Howe observes, the immigrant Jews created a life that was marked by both...

...But I serve due warning' to other goyim who sit back and watch the debate that Irving Howe will stir up with World of Our Fathers: it's a family fight and, while they may nitpick, most American Jews will quite justifiably be proud of Howe's accomplishment...

...Howe doubtless realizes that he is describing almost any given issue of-Dissent, and indeed, much of his own writing in that journal...

...It is not easy to smile at oneself...

...They lacked the stamina, the casual acceptance of burdens, the roughness of manner which working class communities in Europe and America have come to accept as being their lot...

...Perhaps the union of the two was the closest to a normal life that Jews could reach...

...In a time of heightened ethnic self-consciousness, most American groups — even more recently, Yankees — have begun to wonder about their past...

...Still, I must be excused one more paragraph on the pretext that such a quote may tempt the last few hesitant readers into buying the book...

...almost all the figures of moral authority remained in the old country...

...The scholar trying to put together the story of their years in America faces not a paucity of evidence, but a surfeit of it...

...Why do they come...

...Those who are specialists in Jewish studies, or those who know the Jewish community from the inside, may find matters of detail on which to fault Howe...

...or semi-urban environments, than any other group, and a smaller proportion of unskilled laborers...

...It is not my kind of history, relying as it does on literary sources and personal interviews...

...The kind of essay they wrote was likely to be wide ranging in reference, melding notions about literature and politics, sometimes announcing itself as a study of a writer or literary group but usually taut with a pressure to "go beyond" its subject, toward some encompassing moral or social observation...

...What has brought them to where they are now...

...They who came were the "dispossessed, the wanderers, the surplus population of a decomposing shtetl, those without a place in the old home or those whose homes had been destroyed . . . the adventurous and the adventurers...

...Howe doubts that the secularized messianism, which he thinks has produced much of what is best and much of what is worst in Jewish life, has reached the point of exhaustion...

...I cannot quite believe the Jewish religion played as small a part in the lives of the Jews of New York as it does in Howe's book...

...Only passing mention is given to the complexities of Jewish-Italian and Jewish-Irish political life in New York, and I think at some time soon, Jewish writers are going to have to address themselves not merely to the question of gentile anti-Semitic feeling but of Jewish anti-Catholic feeling in the City of New York...

...Who are they...

...Their migration was more a movement of families than that of other European nationalities...

...His latest books are LOVE AND PLAY, published by Thomas More, and SEXUAL INTIMACY, Seabury Press...

...It was overwhelmingly a movement of young people who, more than any other group, intended permanent settlement in the United States...

...Enjoy World of Our Fathers...

...A story encompasses us, justifies our stay, prepares our leaving...

...the New York intellectuals developed a characteristic style of exposition and polemic...

...Maybe there are two Irving Howes, or maybe the editor of Dissent has mellowed, or maybe he simply adjusts his style to the subject at hand...

...They had a higher proportion of skilled workers, many of them from urban I frankly envy Irving Howe for being able to write it, and the American Jews for their opportunity to read it...

...He has sailed around the world a couple of times, he has routed the armada, he has brought millions of dollars in gold to the Queen's coffers...

...They would create new institutions, find "succor in the surrogate faiths of anarchism and socialism," endure the violent disruption of immigration, rebuild a society which was part old and part new on the streets of New York and not within a generation, but within a decade, produce a number of Yiddish-speaking millionaires...

...We need not overvalue the immigrant Jewish experience in order to feel a lasting gratitude for having been part of it...

...Where are they going...

...For most of the immigrant groups that came to the United States after 1850, there is precious little primary research available...

...It would seem to me that more self-consciously and formally Jewish religious writers would give a good deal more attention to the religious elements of the New York Jewish culture...

...Like all stories of human striving, it ought to be complete, with its beginning and its end, at rest in fulfillment and at ease with failure...

...I would much prefer "hard" data, statistics, numbers, "empirical" evidence, but there are many different ways to approach an elephant, and I very much doubt that a social historian approaching New York City's Jews from my perspective would arrive at conclusions different from those of Howe...

...Obscure men, be it noted, have rarely deserved more praise, and have rarely received better praise...

...The word "entitle" can be best understood if one pictures Queen Elizabeth I knighting Sir Francis Drake...

...The serene and even mellow style of World of Our Fathers could only have been achieved by an author who not only has a pretty good grasp of who he is and where he is but also an easy and confident relationship to the story of his own people...

...I doubt that they would accept Howe's implicit judgment that socialism and anarchism, to a very considerable extent, replaced traditional religion...

...The rest of us require basic research...

...Even if we Irish had an Irving Howe, he couldn't write a book like World of Andrew M. Greeley is the Director of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism at the University of Chicago...

...Nor was it always possible to tell the two of them apart...

...At that- future time in the history of the Irish Americans — or the Italian or Polish or Croatian or Armenian Americans — World of Our Fathers will surely be the model to which the synthesizer will look...

...men without skills in search of elemental survival...

...I am at best an outsider concerned with what happens to third and fourth generation immigrants in American life...

...Howe's most important contribution to American intellectual life, or so it would seem to many of us, is his literary criticism, and World of Our Fathers benefits greatly from that skill both in its precise and penetrating analysis of Yiddish and English writing and in its own extraordinary literary elegance — an elegance which, incidentally, has a style completely different from that of the urgent polemic in the pages of Dissent...

...A story is the essential unit of our life, offering the magical imperatives of "so it began" and "so it came to an end...

...He is finally ushered into the throne room, she takes a sword and says, "Kneel down, Frannie boy," and taps him with the sword...

...Buddy Hackett has a routine in which he explains the special meaning that certain English words acquire when spoken by New York Jews...

...By us Irish, we should be so lucky to have an Irving Howe...

...Here, in these pages, is the story of the Jews, bedraggled and inspired, who came from eastern Europe...

...Let us now praise obscure men...

...The story of the immigrant Jews is all but done...

...millions would leave the shtethlakh and cities in which they built their life, their Houses of Study and burial societies, their wooden synagogues and paintless houses, their feeble economy and thriving culture...

...The Jewish immigrants were urban proletarians or the inhabitants of the shtetl who "left behind them, perhaps inevitably, a good portion of their culture and religion...

...Here perhaps Howe may be wrong...

...In the process, they would produce novels, poets, short stories, theater, and journalism — much of it in Yiddish — of the highest order of excellence...