World of Our Fathers
Geltman, Max
Book Review/Max Geltman Let Us Now Praise Obscure Men • • This is the story, Irving Howe tells us, of the "journey of the east European Jews to America and the life they found and made." The...
...The religious life of the East Side persisted despite what Howe calls the "powerful" influence of the atheistic Bund, and the widely-read (if less zealous) columns of the Jewish Daily Forward, a unique East Side institution which, for most of the years when it was edited by the erratic Abraham Cahan, was the single most anti-Communist daily paper in all of America...
...Almost nothing is entirely neglected, from East Side gangsters to East Side saints, from the impact of Jewish comedians on American popular culture to the rise of the trade unions among the garment workers of New York...
...It is bad taste masquerading as humor in the crude style of Don Rickles—or worse...
...If the novel and the theatre elude him, Howe justly appreciates American Yiddish poetry...
...If Shakespeare was adapted, Ibsen was given straight, as was Hauptmann, and one of the best productions of a Lope de Vega drama I ever saw was produced by the Jewish Art Theatre, under Maurice Schwartz...
...Huge numbers, some two millions of them, chose the latter count", arriving by the tens of thousands each year during the next three decades...
...Let us now praise obscure men...
...Howe makes occasional historical and sociological errors...
...Now "Jewish socialism" is not to be confused with any other socialism known to partisan or opponent...
...But it was a vital theatre, rich in conception, and exciting in production...
...Despite the rise of socialist ideologies and the spread of a weary indifference among the masses, few could envisage a time when the shul would cease to be at the center of Jewish life...
...There was a kind of frenzied communalism embracing both actor and audience...
...But a hundred pages later he is compelled to admit that "in the communal life of the immigrants, the synagogue or shul remained the single institution everyone took for granted...
...Singer and Sholem Asch, donot quite hold up in translation as do their contemporaries in other languages...
...Here, in these pages, is the story of the Jews, bedraggled and inspired, who came from eastern Europe...
...He credits the Jewish Bund (the organization of Russo-Polish Jewish socialists) with achievements its most ardent partisans would not claim for it, now that it is only an ancient memory among a few octogenarian survivors...
...Admittedly, the Jewish drama, with its own verWorld of Our Fathers by Irving Howe Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $14.95 sions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and Lear, did not improve the originals...
...Suffice it to say that what Schwartz found in the play was what Ansky put into it as felt and appreciated by the shtetl Jews from whom and for whom he wrote it...
...But the Bund persisted in its misplaced idealism, preferring to remain the only "internationalists" in a world of national aspirations, to support the self-determination of all peoples on earth—except...
...In a slight thematic touch on page 93, Howe tells us that the immigrants on the Jewish East Side became "a secular community," adding: "It could not be otherwise...
...The relatively small section on "The American Jewish Novel-ists," for example, is as unsatisfying as it is meager...
...For it was these "obscure" immigrants who sent their offspring to study art (and otherthings) at the Educational Alliance on East Broadway, where Eugene Lyons found the German-Jewish atmosphere suffocating, but where that most sublime of our philosophers, Morris Raphael Cohen, found inspiration...
...It could well be that the poets were surer of their craft than the novelists...
...From this incredible institution there poured forth such distinguished men of art as Jacob Epstein, Jo Davidson, Max Weber, and William Zorach, among others...
...they sought to continue unbroken their culture of shted (town) and dorf (village) as much as to find their own way through the labyrinth of conflicting interests in a strange, sometimes frightening, environment...
...Not a comparative study of immigrant cultures in America, but a unique book about a unique people who made their way to America and helped to contribute an experience unique to our total cultural, social, and political life...
...World of Our Fathers is an indispensable book...
...Howe's patronizing attitude toward the Yiddish theatre is also rather surprising...
...It is realistic in the same sense that Chagall's paintings are seen literally by most east European Jews...
...What Howe does offer is worth cherishing and worth whatever its price...
...Like all stories of human striving, it ought to be complete, with its beThe Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 29 ginning and its end, at rest in fulfillment and at ease with failure...
...There was nothing for the Jews to do but seek a way out —to go to Socialism or to America...
...Perhaps it is Howe's nostalgia that makes him defy history when he tells us that the Bund withdrew from the party of Russian Social Democracy...
...These are not meant to be petty criticisms of an unimportant book, but rather serious observations on what is perhaps the single most serious work that has yet appeared on the subject...
...Most of them settled on the Lower East Side of New York, huddled in dark tenements, hungry for work as much as for freedom...
...Sirovitch, Sol Bloom, and Sam Dickstein seem to be tainted...
...And Howe's misconception of Schwartz's production of Ansky's magnificent drama, The Dybbuk, would take a whole essay to explain...
...After all they were Tammany men, London was a socialist...
...It isn't...
...Only some half-dozen names are brought to the fore, beginning with Henry Roth (Call It Sleep), an overrated Howe specialty, and ending with Philip Roth, to whom the author is unusually generous, referring to Portnoy's Complaint as a series of "very funny" skits...
...worse, the official and semiofficial pogrom was always a threat to life, limb, and livelihood...
...the Jews...
...Paradoxically, Howe is sometimes better in sociology than in the discipline he teaches at the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor of English Literature...
...It is a shame he devoted so little attention to the cafes, like the Cafe Royale on Second Avenue, as important a feature of East Side culture as the Left Bank cafes are important for Paris...
...30 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976...
...It is perhaps in describing how these workers struggled to forge their unique cultural and social organizations that Howe is at his best...
...Thus his socialist heroes of the early years of our century are described with gentle affection, while other, more representative Americans coming from the same milieu, are usually recognized for small virtues and gross behavior...
...But to be fair to the author one must agree that there was plenty of vulgarity on the Lower East Side, and that the faith of many immigrants in an evanescent democratic socialism did shine like a candle in the dark night during their transition to a better life, if not for themselves, then for their children and grandchildren...
...While many of them were not as "obscure" as Howe seems to suggest, what he is saying is true enough...
...Despite its theme of exorcism, it is not a diabolic drama steeped in mysticism, it is a realistic expression of the folk-feeling of the people...
...The subject is a treasure so rich it has been mined before in hundreds of monographs, memoirs, articles, and books, but never with so much feeling for a lost past and with so much hope for the future...
...Meyer London, the socialist Congressman from the East Side, is treated with much circumspection, despite his vigorous opposition to the Balfour Declaration for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while supporters of the mandate like Dr...
...The Bund did not withdraw, it was kicked out in 1903 when the party split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions and the first order of business was the expulsion of the Jewish socialists: Plekhanov called the Jews "snakes," while Lenin voted for their exclusion without benefit of epithet...
...and they worried lest their old way of a God-centered Yiddishkeit would be replaced by a Godless quest for what the author calls "Jewish socialism...
...At the end of his tale, Howe concludes: "The story of the immigrant Jews is all but done...
...But his fine appreciation of the Yiddish poetry written in America by Moshe Leib Halpern, Mani Leib, H. Leivik, and Jacob Glatstein is worth anyone's serious attention...
...One gathers that he feels this material without having to resort to other tracts...
...It could be he wanted to shed the sentimental aura that has bedeviled much of the pop writing on the subject...
...It is regrettable Howe did not write more fully about the Jewish-sponsored settlement houses that served as centers of acculturation, enlightenment, and fulfillment as richly as did the schools and libraries...
...For Howe it is rooted in edelkeit (refinement...
...But how much can you crowd into a book, even a book of 714 pages...
...In this it resembled more the Elizabethan theatre than what was being perpetrated on Broadway...
...After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, Russian Jews were subjected to a period of intense repression and second-class citizenship...
...Besides, they can best be appreciated in the original—as is true for most poets—while the novelists, except for I.B...
...Most of them were restricted to a "Pale of Settlement" outside the cosmopolitan centers of Russia...
...A story is the essential unit of our life, offering the magical imperative of 'so it began' and 'so it comes to an end.' A story encompasses us, justifies our stay, prepares our leaving...
...His feel for Yiddish prose tends to be tentative, cautious, and unduly restrained...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
