BOOKS
Cohen, Arthur A & DeFeo, Ronald & Cronin, Sean
BOOKS Power Struggle RICHARD L. RUBENSTEIN Scribner's, $7.95 ARTHUR A. COHEN An autobiography is a narrative of the self. Presumably an autobiography which is, as well, "confessional"...
...In 1932 the senior class of the State Normal School put together a history of their city and blamed "foreigners" and "Reds" for its decline...
...Police behaved with little respect for law in the city's black ghetto...
...Life is Elsewhere is a comic novel that traces the life of a poet, Jaromil, from his birth to his death...
...Industry is leaving, the tax base is narrowing, the welfare rolls are growing...
...When Kundera notes that "This time the room was full of light," he is not only contrasting the old sexual encounter with the new one, but he is also suggesting that the couple now fully understand the implications of their act...
...The psychological conditioning of the Jew, his demasculinization, his impotency, his inverted rage, turned more against himself than against his oppressors, made it inevitable that when the moment came, the enemy-world would strike him dead...
...Worse still, the poor Jew-struck dead!-will somehow thank the murderer for executing God's judgment upon him and his derelictions...
...It's clear...
...A victory might have turned Paterson around...
...About Paterson: The Making and Unmaking of an American City CHRISTOPHER NORWOOD Saturday Review Press/Dutton, $8.95 SEAN CRONIN The lower ranks which inhabit these cities constitute a rabble more formidable than the populace of European towns...
...In July 1967 when nearby Newark blew up, Paterson was quiet...
...The author, by the way, calls the Wobblies the International Workers of the World...
...If it were that simple it would neither have been worth believing such a God or even serving as his mortician...
...It was a police conspiracy and he knew nothing about it, but his credibility was gone...
...They are too knowing to engage in blind passion...
...Rubinstein, in a certain sense, is asking in Power Struggle that these institutions become familiar with the processes of life and thought which brought him from adolescent aspirant to the Unitarian ministry, through Reform Judaism, the Conservative seminary from which he was ordained, the strictly orthodox praxis which he assumed, to the breakdown of traditional belief and practice, the break-up of his marriage and home, and his repudiation of connection with official Jewish life...
...In 1960, Paterson fell into the hands of a "law and order" Mayor, Francis X. Graves, a minor-league Frank Hague, who proceeded to turn the police into a "private army," according to his critics...
...As in New York in the same year, a Republican reformer managed to defeat the Democratic machine...
...The evidence of Rubinstein's unhappy consciousness, his own self-victimization, the short-lived triumph of ressenti-ment in his own person and its fortunate dissolution, does not convince me that the real enemy is the God of the Jews or of the tradition which he commanded...
...He became something of a "law and order" man and a school riot which he subdued with a firm hand helped his image...
...The result of this moil is difficult to appraise...
...some of the Mayor's own supporters felt he had betrayed them...
...The attack lacked even the excuse of being a spontaneous outburst taken in the midst of a riot...
...Two years later his chosen successor was defeated by a Republican, Lawrence Kramer...
...The characters in the short story collection, Laughable Loves, are a very dissatisfied group who long for some change in their everyday lives, anything that will enable them to achieve physical and psychological freedom...
...the statistics are dreary and depressing...
...The young couple failed to realize what a potentially dangerous and unpredictable game they were playing...
...mayhap, even the logos himself, come to earth in the aspect of a German academic and intellectual...
...As is often the case with Kundera's people, they allow the game to get out of hand...
...His sexual impulses lead him to assume the identity of a lyric poet...
...I was struck countless times in reading his book by the identification of his own despairs and miseries with the groanings and agonies of history...
...It is for the most part plainly written with occasional lapses into the vivid reporting style of television...
...For others the revelations are cause for wonder and joy-a form of beauty has entered their lives...
...It is impossible to judge therefore whether his confession confesses...
...Rubinstein regards-and it is one of his recurrent historical metaphors-the second century bargain struck by Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai with Vespasian, to resign the national ambitions of ancient Israel in return for permission to build in Yavneh a house of study to conserve and transmit the moral, ritual, and theological teachings of Judaism, as necessary then, but suicidal now...
...As a result, they lack the impact and intensity of the earlier tales...
...In April 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated, Paterson simmered but did not erupt...
...For some the revelations result in confusion and pain-ugliness and desperation have been exposed...
...And the change paid off for a time...
...Kramer spent the following fourteen months mending his political fences...
...The psychoanalytic jargon to which he is prone leaves the language of the affects hidden in the underbrush of repressions, rages, impotencies...
...Christopher Norwood quotes him approvingly...
...They long for their youth, but a return to the past-perhaps an idealized past-is impossible...
...Hegel could talk about the logos of history and leave it to the reader to discern that, indeed, if Hegel perceives the logos of the universe, describes its dialectic, masters its intricacies and reads its entrails like a haruspox, somehow Hegel, the thinker, is one with logos...
...Jaromil's sexual impulses find expression in his poetry...
...headquarters, smashing the windows and throwing tear-gas bombs inside...
...We follow Jaromil's early creative attempts and the comic manner in which ' his art matures...
...They find freedom and release, even creative inspiration, in sex...
...The comment is from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America written in the age of Jacksonian Democracy...
...Lite is Elsewhere MILAN KUNDERA Knopf, $6.95 Laughable Lovers MILAN KUNDERA Knopf, $.695 RONALD DE FEO Many of the characters who populate these two volumes by the Czech writer Milan Kundera are deeply affected by the erotic element in their natures...
...They also contain a multitude of Europeans who have been driven to the shores of the New World by their misfortunes or their misconduct...
...They may play various games and adopt various roles to free themselves from their repressed skins...
...and almost always as tragedy despite Hegel's remark...
...In this case at least, eroticism and art are closely related...
...Often their strong sexual instincts surprise them...
...There are still," Kundera reminds us, "thirteen days' vacation before them...
...The Jews made peace with the enemy-world, withdrew into an interior life and discipline, and for its self-restraint was paid by history with unending murder-ousness...
...Norwood worked in Paterson as a reporter from 1968 to 1970...
...In a sense, then, the confessional aspect of Richard L. Rubinstein's new book, Power Struggle, must be set aside...
...The Spanish section of Main Street rioted for three days...
...He brought in a new police chief from Phoenix, Arizona, and gave jobs to old political foes...
...REVIEWERS lisa H. newton, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University in Connecticut...
...And yet William Carlos Williams lived there and wrote a six-book poem on the city called Paterson...
...Rubinstein's life is a mini-Auschwitz- the torments of the self are the microcosm of an historical drama which consummates in the deathcamps...
...mass meetings, mass funerals-two workers were killed by police-the strikers lost...
...All language is artifice: it says what its employer knows how to say and very often (in this case no less than in others), one suspects, the gaps and lacunae (the silences, the breath between words) reveal what is really meant...
...Herman Badillo said on television the other day that there is no support in Congress for the cities...
...The discontent was there, however, and the cops didn't help...
...These two new books reveal a different side of the artist's sensibility and talent, and they are very welcome indeed...
...He is a kind of demi-Hegel with a vengeance...
...The old European immigrants have been succeeded by blacks and Puerto Ricans with even more rights on paper than their predecessors...
...Later he even emulates a fictional character he himself has created, for that character possesses the freedom that Jaromil has not quite Seen able to attain...
...In the end each did nothing...
...Meeting for the first time after fifteen years, the couple (a man and an older woman) try to recapture the passion of their first and only sexual encounter...
...At times the structure of Life is Elsewhere grows too slack-particularly towards the end-and at other times the action is not quite convincing: Jaromil's political activities, for example, or the episode in which Maman works with a photographer who is making a film about Jaromil...
...The dialectic of Power Struggle is, to my view, an endless petitio principi...
...the correct term of course is Industrial Workers of the World...
...Perhaps we have lost our...
...Hamilton's experiment has ended, if not in nightmare, certainly a long way from Utopia...
...then they rampaged down Graham Avenue, the commercial area of the Fourth Ward, wrecking black-owned stores, leaving victims beaten senseless behind on the streets...
...Allen Ginsberg is a native son...
...The traditions of Israel, in Rubinstein's view, reflect an unreal perception of history and its aggressivity...
...ronald de feo contributes to The National Review, The Nation and other journals...
...The future looks grim...
...Rubinstein, the angered boy looking for authority and sacral power, with which to administer God's and his own judgment upon the misfortunes of parental mismanagement, becomes in his maturity, the receptacle of impotencies and submissions which, he believes, reflect the exactions of the Jewish God and his revelation upon a too supine and passive people...
...The issue of Power Struggle is Richard Rubinstein's struggle to self-mastery and definition, his progress from infantile envy and anger to self-reconciliation...
...Her book is a study of urban decay...
...On the last day of the outbreak a group of policemen decided to take "the law" into their own hands and invaded the black Fourth Ward...
...Havel, are entertaining, but a little too casually developed, a bit too sketch-like...
...What Tocqueville is saying, I suppose, is that the poor are always a threat to the rich...
...The author says: They first assaulted the S.C.L.C...
...Jaromil's mother, Maman, on whom the author focuses first, is a typical Kundera character...
...The end of politics is "the good for man," Aristotle wrote more than 2,300 years ago...
...Back in 1913 when Paterson lived by silk weaving a great strike closed down the mills for five months and a couple of thousand strikers and sympathizers were arrested in the course of it, including Big Bill Haywood, John Reed and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn...
...Foes of the Mayor were labeled "dissidents and troublemakers" and had the feeling they were watched...
...Graves' "law and order" people blamed Kramer for the riot...
...Since he will have nothing more to do with such a sick self, he will have nothing more to do with a tradition and a divinity which makes men sick...
...Presumably he intended it merely to apostrophize what he takes to be the startling revelation of his psychological disorders, although finally they seem tame enough...
...The defeat meant everyone lost, for the employers were bankrupt at the end and the workers impoverished...
...Though one may occasionally tire of the author's concern-perhaps obsession is a better word-with the erotic, Kundera's originality, intelligence and witty narative voice are irresistible...
...The compulsiveness of Jewish praxis, the enormity of guilt visible when observant Jews make a mistake in the fulfillment of commandments or the avoidance of transgressions, has its consequence in world history...
...There is corruption and injustice and not much hope...
...Each agreed that the law as well as the civil rights of citizens had been violated," the author reports...
...As they make an effort to explore erotic possibilities, they discover sides of their personalities that have previously remained hidden...
...the riot in the Spanish section on the other side of town, which the rest of the force was working to quell, in fact, served as a convenient cover...
...Democracy sprang from the City State...
...The Jew can even make Hitler an instrument of providence...
...It helps one understand Rubinstein, but it doesn't persuade one that the insight is true nor is Rubinstein the charismatic persuader who would win assent by personal charm or rhetoric in the absence of intellectual capitulation...
...Tocqueville, who admired the town meetings of New England, called municipal institutions "the strength of free nations...
...Even the Main Street of the once-proud "Silk City" is now a slum...
...The rest is a wasteland inhabited by some 150,000 souls packed together in an area of 8.36 square miles...
...The police riot ended reformer Kramer's efforts to rebuild Paterson...
...They attain their freedom, but they completely sacrifice their identities while doing so...
...And there the book ends...
...In the excellent story "The Hitchhiking Game," a young man and his girl friend assume the roles of driver and hitchhiker to free themselves from their particular identities and to give vent to their hidden erotic impulses...
...Their desperation haunts them...
...In 1964 there was a riot and Graves blamed "hooligans...
...But such is, at the moment, an irrelevant conjecture about the metaphysics of language and silence...
...Presumably an autobiography which is, as well, "confessional" underscores the elected genre by instructing the reader that, in addition to narration, the author promises to tell the truth...
...sean cronin is a journalist in New Jersey...
...County, state and federal investigations followed...
...One hot Monday in June 1968-the date given, June 31, is obviously wrong-a Puerto Rican who opened a fire hydrant was arrested and it took 32 stitches to close his wounds...
...They consist of freed blacks, in the first place, who are condemned by the laws and by public opinion to a heredit-tary state of misery and degradation...
...Chris Norwood quotes it in her study of Paterson-the rundown New Jersey city sixteen miles from New York that Alexander Hamilton imagined would become an industrial model for the young republic-perhaps to show that the threat of the slums is not a product of the 1960s or the 1970s...
...But the word hasn't yet reached Paterson...
...The girl behaves like a whore and the young man begins to treat her accordingly...
...She says change is difficult because local government is powerless...
...And now that the game has ended and they have exposed highly unattractive sides of their personalities, what next...
...The autobiography can be judged by the reader according to canons of narrative sophistication, novelty, illumination, but obviously he cannot know whether the author is telling the truth...
...If we cannot change the world," he tells her, "let's at least change our lives...
...Jaromil is somewhat similar to many of the characters in Laughable Lovers whose erotic urges cause them to adopt various roles...
...Presumably the urgency to this self-disclosure, on the face of it neither promising nor unique, is that for more than a decade he has been regarded as an enfant terrible of American Jewish thought, the dreadful young man who was trained by American Jewish institutions to serve its pulpits and platforms and has repaid such succor by a series of books which have ostensibly undermined them...
...For me at least, Kundera's stories work best when they are very tightly structured and narrowly focused...
...Jaromil eventually adopts this very philosophy ("the religion of The New"), but he does so, the author suggests, to disguise his longing for physical love...
...For a city its size, Paterson's pollution is the worst in America...
...The couple in the equally superb, "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the New Dead," also play an erotic game, though here the results are somewhat more satisfying...
...Although Graves added "justice" to "law and order" on his banner, Kramer won the 1969 election...
...Ashamed and unsure of her body for years, she has an affair with an engineer and rapidly becomes aware of her sexual potential, learning "to savor the pleasures of physical existence...
...After recording this phase in the life of her body, the author notes the next important change-her pregnancy: "It [her body] ceased to be a mere object of someone else's eye, and became a living body . . ." Two beings then are born: Jaromil, literally, and Maman, figuratively: Kundera wonderfully describes the physical and emotional bond that exists between mother and child...
...Christopher Norwood's study of Paterson is also a political treatise...
...And what we can conclude is that history repeats itself endlessly...
...But these are minor qualms when one considers Kundera's fine ability to dramatize ideas and to stimulate and entertain the reader in the process...
...Richard Rubinstein is the principal, indeed it would appear the sole, spokesman of a position which pronounces the death of the traditional God of the Jews and the restoration of an archaic, paganic order of divinities and powers from which men and women, most particularly Jewish men and women, can nourish and strengthen the resources of character which would remove from the Jewish people the blemish of complicity in its own destruction...
...Despite mass picketing...
...The game ends in mutual disgust...
...After spying on the family maid in the bath, Jaromil is inspired to record the stimulating experience, to give it a certain permanence...
...It would be interesting to know what has happened in the meantime...
...The proof text to this thesis has been and remains Auschwitz, where Jews renewed the bargain of Johanan, although, betimes, Vespasian had become Hitler...
...The theodicy which is implicit in Rubinstein's account of the theological argument is explicit in his narrative of the cramped ego looking for its proper pasture...
...His stories exploring various Don Juan types, like Dr...
...Once again we have the link between mother and child-as a painter inspires Jaromil to develop his artistic talent, he inspires Maman to toss off any sexual inhibitions she may still have and to live freely...
...Let's reject everything that is not fresh and new...
...The only other work of Kundera'sthat has appeared in English was his famous political novel, The Joke (which he made into a film...
...Arthur a. cohen, is the author of In the Days of Simon Stern, recently reprinted in Delta paperbacks, and of Mandelstam: An Essay in Antiphon (Ardis...
...We can understand why Maman later becomes an almost unbearably possessive mother and why Jaromil comes to regard her with so much reverence and fear...
...During the creative process, however, the concrete is transformed into the abstract, an intensely private experience is concealed by the veil of art...
...While sexual freedom is an admirable goal, it can sometimes have devastating results...
...The other stories in this volume are perceptive and quite delightful and they are well worth any reader's time, but I don't think that any of them really succeeds as well as the first two tales...
...Though they are moderately successful, there is more than a degree of desperation in their effort...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 11
