BOOKS

...It does lack the sharply enlightening conceptual power of Nathan Glazer's American Judaism, and it is devoid of the throbbing, unrelenting lyrical and dramatic intensity of Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted...

...certain hapless Gnostic antinomians were again set upon with an indignant brilliance...

...If we take Illich seriously, when we go to the hospital we should now worry not only about whether the doctor will kill us, take out the wrong kidney, or sew in a sponge, but whether our very presence there betokens an abject capitulation to professional hoodlums, an abdication of personal responsibility for pain, suffering, or death, and a craven sell-out to medical consumerism...

...The net result is "a morbid society that demands universal medicalization and a medical establishment that certifies universal morbidity...

...Important material on many areas, especially "The Culture of Yiddish," does go well beyond 1922...

...Overall Medical Nemesis is ingenious, flawed, irritating, challenging, broad-ranging, narrow-minded, glib, insightful, and altogether worth reading...

...The anthologies of translations edited by Howe and Eliezer Greenberg form an excellent foundation for first acquaintance...

...Culture also plays a part...

...Any analogy, in the content of Martin's scarifying reflections, to a complexity of thought, or philosophically adept insight, is unintended and rendered absurdist...

...Long-time Illich watchers will also find the familiar metaphors that have become his stock-in-trade: the doctor as priest, the medical establishment as church, professional ministrations as magic, ritual, and liturgy, and other ecclesiastical carry-overs...

...The dubious is here accepted as unquestioned fact, inner disintegration as a strident invasion of discarnate genies, while the reactionery Joseph von Gorres rubs shoulders with Scaramelli (Venice, 1754) as muddy authorities on the 'mystical' connotations of such eruptions...

...The verminous, or suspect, miscreant found herself laden with venomous resentments "good" and respectable people only dared express via displacements of hidden nihilism upon scorned sinners...

...Indeed, insights of Freud and Jung notwithstanding, even in the 20th century the Rev...

...In ages before ours, Judaism meant that you testified to the existence, the power and the righteousness of God in as much as your daily life as you could manage...

...Cultural iatrogenesis sets in when the medical enterprise saps the ability of people to deal with the vital experiences of pain, sickness, and death...

...Martin could ever release them without being impeached)-the sad defeat by the Devil of the overexuberant young priest follower of Teilhard de Chardin...

...Martin and his devils are determined there shall ever be that void...

...The book's title promises too much, and so does the subtitle which appears on the jacket though not on the title page: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made...

...Answers seem needed even more desperately by today's young Jews: how did you, our immigrant mothers and fathers, survive both want and plenty...

...Professor of English" labels him far too narrowly...

...Social iatrogenesis, in turn, is disease arising from the over-medicalization of life, especially from an excessive dependency on professional diagnosis and treatment...

...Any resemblance, of course, to "the Devil," as represented by probing Christian analysts of evil and the diabolic, like Denis de Rougement (The Devil's Share) or to such notoriously evil-aware souls as Kierkegaard, or Reinhold Niebuhr, is purely accidental...

...No one will need to create again the fullness of record and commentary fashioned in this book by Howe...

...Too many human possibilities, too many pleasures, too much stretching of human capacities had to be denied and abandoned...

...Some of these questions, such as the interaction problem, are only now being studied in any depth...

...The "Devil," or devils, pour forth, as per expectation, and everyone is malignly reconfirmed in a somnolent and terrified conservatism, more stuporous in fact than before...

...Not given to understatement, the book claims that the damage produced by medical interventions now rivals the morbidity due to traffic, industrial accidents, and war...

...On the other hand, a definite parallel with the tactics of orthodox psychoanalysis exists: the weakened victim, invaded by "the Devil" and his angels, easily compares to the socially dislocated sick mind, who turns for relief to the self-assured professional...

...Illich documents in vivid detail how manufacturers dump outdated, surplus, or flawed drugs into overseas pharmacies, and continue to push lucrative products such as Chlor-amphenicol after they have been proven lethal...

...Morris Hillquit, the Socialist leader...

...And indeed, it frequently does, according to these accounts...

...and, not surprisingly either, his Eros seems to have been of the kind that his own tortured piety "gave poison to drink" (as Nietzsche put it) and thus, typically, in an upsidedownwise transformation of longings into bitterness he passed on that poison to mankind in the form of an obsessive demonology...

...Simultaneously, through the democratization of medicine and the spread of consumerism in health-care, people have come to regard ever more specialized medical services as a basic human right...

...In both instances the professional's handy vademecum contains a certified ideology to explain the invalidated one's derailment...

...As in the sociology of knowledge, the danger with Mich's search for higher-order institutional effects is that the process is interminable...

...Knowing full well that if he issued specific prescriptions he would be impaled on the nearest lancet, Illich heads for the high road of legislative nostrums, homilies on self-responsibiiity, and jeremiads on our industrial civilization...

...The vision also fell victim to economic crisis: a nascent Russian middle class began to push Jews from many occupational footings, and Jews displaced from the shtetl exchanged one misery for another as they became proletarians in Warsaw or Lodz...

...There are few today who can execute a polemic with the rhetorical flourish, gusto, and sheer malice of Ivan Illich...

...In the shtetl, the eastern European small town with a heavy Jewish population, life meant struggling to exist in poverty for many, in the face of the outside world's hostility to most...

...Martin never seems to ask why, as he so naively discloses, the work of priest-exorcist appears not to be the vocation of the saintly or the learned, the original or the outstanding...

...and Summers doubly anathematized the witches in retrospect, as having been dangerous heretic anarchists, for the most part deserving the Christian Inferno they got...

...Howe's decades of literary work as an outstanding critic and a skillful editor have fused with his deep gratitude at being an heir of the East Side to yield the vision which shapes and stamps this book...

...Caught in the grip of medical machinations and the larger ethos of technique, man fears to be autonomous when faced with suffering, impairment, and dying...

...If the former he joins (he doctors in being "monopoly custodians of scarce and precious knowledge...

...When I first met him in 1962 he was busy immunizing American Catholic missionaries against the toxic evangelism of their Church and country...

...Industrialization breeds unbounded desires for material progress, ravages the time-honored mechanisms of health care in traditional societies, and places a premium on technical answers to personal problems...

...Short of fairly intensive training, how is the ordinary person to know the correct usage and dangerous side-effects of the thousands of products now available, not to mention the complex interactions seen, for example, between heparin and barbiturates...

...As Irving Howe has observed, time floated in the shtetl...

...Hope resided with the Messiah, the all-subduing redeemer who would bring at last triumph to the Jews...

...Thus, the Devil's truly ironic victories...

...The 556 footnotes are in themselves a dazzling oeuvre of multi-lingual bits and pieces...

...Martin has graphically rendered the capitulation of five living Americans to the procedures of ritual exorcism...

...Howe both preserves and probes nobility, perseverance, and meanness, to the end that some answers may arise to questions which have beset American Jews...

...you watched them, they watched you, each supported and goaded his neighbor in carrying out the virtual infinity of prescribed deeds which for Jews replaced creeds...

...As for the possessed-or the patient-his position has been rendered untenable by his submission-on the couch, or before bell, book, and candle...

...Eventually of course the divided ones submit-to various alarmed relatives and threatened metaphysicians-and take their exorcism...

...Anyone searching out meaning in the Holocaust, for example, simply cannot content himself with the writers in "major" languages surveyed in Lawrence Langer's recent The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination...

...Medical Nemesis is long on diagnosis and short on treatment...

...The hour may be upon us of the writer whose insights into vast subjects must lead him to call upon others for aid if these great themes are to receive the expounding they need...

...the transsexual who sundered his soul, in a no man's land where as yet there is a void of maps (and Dr...

...With the publication of two new results of the perennial seductions of the realm of darkness, it has become chastening to discover how much flavor insolent certitude once imparted to style...

...From there he moved to the bureaucratized Church more generally, school systems, transportation, and the follies of the media and development models...

...The other cities...

...After the grand intimations, his silence places him in the enviable position of meta-medical mes-siah, holding the keys to a new kingdom of health care...

...This mind-set carries over to medicine, where in a perverse conspiracy doctors hold out and patients demand a constantly improved medical product...

...Man of letters," a term by which he has been linked to Edmund Wilson, suggests too much the single lonely toiler...

...With a barrage of footnotes and considerable malice aforethought, Medical Nemesis applies the same anti-institutional paradigm to the medical establishment...

...Howe acknowledges the pioneering book by Moses Rischin, The Promised City, and from that work he has gone forward creating a rich web of analysis, anecdote, and quotation...

...Carl Sandburg captured the essential idea in his line: "I took so much medicine I was sick a long time after I got well...

...The book's pivotal concept is iatrogenesis, diseases traceable to physicians and the surrounding health system...

...Such mockery of the Evangel has, before, rightfully brought Christianity to discredit...

...By implying that the medical establishment is a prime source of social evil and that from birth to death doctors contaminate nearly every sphere of modern life, the book could kindle new anxiety for an already fretful world...

...World Of Our Fathers IRVING HOWE (with the assistance of Kenneth Libo) Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95 RICHARD L. SCHOENWALD What is the essence of Judaism...

...the horrible end of a feckless girl who once brazenly questioned certain Aristotelian ontologic rigidities in her philosophy class-and invited the guest of guilt into a Catholic conscience...

...Them-on them He laid the burden, the yoke of carrying out His law, because only by the evidence of their conduct would the rest of the scornful and scurrying world understand that He existed...

...Oh yes, in other cities there are the moves from areas of first settlement like the East Side to second resting places like the Bronx, and then the suburbs . . . but New York was the biggest, always crowded, an un-equaled and unrivaled cultural center, a cauldron for stoking up modernity...

...The book's one concrete proposal is that governments lift all restrictions on addictive, dangerous, or useless drugs and procedures, shifting the burden for their use onto the sick person or his kinsmen...

...Yiddish literature created in America emerges from Howe's presentation as a treasure whose ignoring a cultivated person can no longer tolerate...

...Alternative theories to account for possession, when Father Rodewyck is aware of them, are hastily and curtly dismissed, that the author may at once return to his metaphysically overcast universe, slightly tinged with the lurking threat of heresies ready to incarnate...

...Montague Summers' unwittingly exposed the darker side of a deadly but putatively Christian mentality in his History of Witchcraft (1925...

...The elegant apostle only regretted his inability to lay inquisitorial hands on spiritualists, occultists, and other modern exemplars of a righteous priest's professional enemies...

...A decision by a sixteenth century rabbi clearly would stand as valid in the nineteenth given the fundamental assumption that all time, all the past, would be discarded one day...

...Father Rodewyck, it is true, does his share of basic scriptural spadework in support of exorcism rites, however oblivious he is to the equally zealous Biblical justifications proffered on behalf of anti-witch terrorism, or in favor of exorcising diabolically induced thunderstorms (especially before Franklin's lightning rod brought an unwonted protection to church towers...

...The priest, like the doctor, knows he can or should win, as he possesses the appropriate exorcistic key...

...Each of these has appeared in the last few years in an enlarged second edition whose new material continues to justify what I have said...

...Many of these Jews had come to feel that the cost of living for God, at least in a shtetl, was too great...

...In another age it was a Jesuit whose whitened hair proclaimed his horror not at devils, but at those who crudely sought them in witches...

...He wields the metaphysical open sesame...

...Although the logic is vague and the evidence even more so, the argument runs as follows...

...With such hope, much in the way of torment could be borne, many human dreams and passions could be foregone...

...Martin or Father Rode-wyck, the "other yew" is not to be allowed its time in court...

...But anyone interested in the deeper issues will long impenitently for a terse and precise report, founded on a broader vision of life than that which would justify a vapid Christian counter-intelligence network, in its gruesome exorcistic mission to expel metaphysical subversion...

...The illuminating suggestions of Teilhard on this problem have already been dismissed as part of the illness...

...They wanted to exchange the world of tradition, heartfeltly opposed to change-for what...

...Do we really need a new monster to tame the old...

...But Illich fails to realize that even non-medical regulatory bodies, which are usually headed by lawyers, have their own bureaucratic inertia and pathologies...

...When the book does descend to particulars, it wiggles, wobbles, and waffles to eschew concreteness...

...Such and such a saint had thus and such a tussle with devil or demon (succubi and the like having been gloriously excised from this up-to-date treatment of the Fiend), ending victoriously, sanctifiedly...

...The core of his material, purportedly tape recordings of actual exorcism proceedings, promises to occasion interesting reflections by theologians and psychiatrists, should it ever be released unadulterated...

...Potential troublemakers, take note: it's all manifest, right there on the tapes (we cannot believe that Dr...

...Howe's assumption that a fundamentally similar experience proved to be the fate of Jews in other large American cities overreaches the realities of Jewish history in America as they are now grasped...

...Necessarily so, for who can play at such ruthless Man-ichean metaphysics without suppressing his doubts, his own legitimate shadow side...

...Those who delight in Gothic evil, updated, in souls twisted or gnarled by self-division, set upon by hero-priests on a spiritual kamikaze mission, will find the tales absorbing...

...They hardly knew, but they came...

...Instead, what emerges is a chilling spiritual thriller with disturbing appeal-especially, one would think, to the Devil's fans...

...It is Absolute Evil, localized, and none so Publican as to claim that he too is a more than vulnerable human being and thus entitled to such scandalous presumption as daring to allow that evil has been tentatively objectified inside another person...

...Doubleday, $6.95 Hostage to the Devil MALACHI MARTIN Reader's Digest Press, $9.95 NORRIS MERCHANT Apparently the psychology of witchcraft accusations regularly used to include projections of malice onto the socially disreputable...

...Wilson accepted bits of help, on Patriotic Gore, for instance, but usually he read, read, read...

...certainly his Hostage to the Devil, in its racily contemporary encounter with the diabolic, represents an advance over Father Rodewyck's odd scraps of learning...

...For a work addressed to the layman in medicine, the book at times outdoes the doctors in terminological mystification, as in this gem: "the idea of health-as-freedom has to restrict the total output of health services within subiatrogenic limits that maximize the synergy of autonomous and heteronomous modes of health production...

...In part, Howe has overcome the sense of fragmentation which must result by inserting compact yet fascinating sketches of the lives which important individuals managed to hammer out-Belle Mosko-witz, Al Smith's close adviser...

...Could it be, though, that Ivan Illich is becoming- dare we say it-professionalized...

...Clinical iatrogenesis comprises the pain, sickness, and death inflicted by doctors, nurses, hospitals, and dangerous drugs...

...It is rather to be driven forth in scorn and shame...

...He simply recounts stock modern examples of possession (especially the Illfurth boys of Alsace, and two girls in South Africa whose experience conveys all too clearly the pre-Christian origin of their obsessions), mingled indiscriminately with frightening bits and pieces of hagiologic memoirs from scattered centuries...

...Howe has recreated their struggle to learn some English, their fight to squeeze out a subsistence, their skirmishing to maintain an anciently cramped family life against modern seductive openness...

...It is a good point, one made earlier by Oscar Handlin and now also by Howe, that Jews did not leave Russia only to escape conscription or to scoop up wealth lying beside the American streets paved with gold...

...Following an earlier diatribe against the mortality and morbidity wrought by the pharmaceutical invasion, this suggestion seems both curious and irresponsible...

...If Thomas Mann was right, that the realm of the demonic involves the servility of high intelligence to the spiritually retrograde and obscurantist, then Dr...

...Further, consumerism at home and abroad everywhere fuels mounting demands for new and better medications...

...Meanwhile, when time made available the full range of our inquisitor's writings, it was most demonically enlightening to discover that Summers' own intrigue with Satanic liturgy was far more than academic...

...Four out of Martin's five victims represent, it would seem, types of 'heresy' obviously grating to the author, providing him an opportunity not only for a propaganda attack on "hell" and its emissaries (the epigoni of Teilhard de Chardin, and the like), but also an opening for exorcising his, philosophical betes-noires right out of the church...

...But one knows, of course, Martin would reply, in the language of arsons at their autos-da-fe, or of the needlers of witches: "This hurts me more than it does you...

...The industrial mentality shatters the mythical framework of limits to unchecked desires and substitutes a cheery faith in engineered solutions to mad dreams...

...Apparently because, as de Rougement suggested, in another place, it is the "solid," so often imagining they have the Devil by the tail in some notorious criminal or fallen innovator, who, historically, have been all the more easily betrayed into becoming that "Devil's" unself-reflecting accomplices: obedience turning into an unacknowledged rampart of hate, and unquestioning faith itself the parapet of a vengeful heresy-hunting...

...It is a long way back from this ingenuously defensive justification of exorcism to the Malleus Malefica-rum, but one rather imagines the latter work to have been the superior one in sheer analysis, however malevolent...

...When "possessed" (or obsessed) persons speak, it is always "the Devil" who comes through (sometimes, of course, as the result of a written pact), and Father Rodewyck appears willing to give him quite literal credit for every banal or impish remark with which, for centuries, the defeated and the pathetic have adorned the argot of an ecclesiastical underworld...

...The author can be forgiven both the jargon and the passages of formula-writing for, as educators and doctors have found, it is difficult to encapsulate complex problems in simple language and to handle analogous situations with varying vocabulary...

...His whole being now has only to undergo the final rite of total surrender to another cosmos of values, in spite of the lingering cries of an alternative reality wailing obscenely in the final stages of their ugly expulsion (or exorcism), leaving both doctor-priest and victim-survivor somewhat invalided at core, it would seem...

...Martin's scenario may in fact be the model of a kind of reporting not only non-scientific, but anti-scientific - in spite of the "tapes...

...Very wisely, Howe returns repeatedly to the question of morale: "What kept these people going was that most families had more than one worker, that they were well trained in the arts of self-denial, that they lived by a goal of expectation that gave some meaning to deprivations of the moment...

...The present medicalization of drugs obviously has its perils, but it is far from clear that de-medicalization would be a boon to health...

...But few could read these briskly partisan transcriptions without suspecting the transgression of a certain expectable artistic license-after all, hasn't The Exorcist generated a ready audience for demonologic drama?-in the direction of ideological mayhem...

...Howe's recognition of the importance of his several research assistants (one is named on the title page) suggests that the time of the man of letters is passing...

...One longs in reading these novelistic-type accounts of fatal obsessions and devil indoctrinations, to call out Eliot's line from Ash Wednesday: "Let the other yew be shaken, and reply...

...Illich links all three forms of iatrogenesis to industrialization...

...Now either Illich knows and is not telling or he is an iatrogenic windbag...

...Given expandable supply and increasing demand, together with the difficulties faced even by physicians in understanding what drugs do, one wonders how the sick layman is to cope...

...The resulting interaction produces the monster of medical nemesis, the step-child of a more encompassing industrial nemesis...

...Lesser vessels, hissing and bubbling, none a metropolitan conjunction of inferno, purgatory, and paradise . . . A part of the story of New York is already familiar...

...It happens in every age, though the dancing demons, in their allure, change faces to the inner victims who must damn them-or live...

...Illich deftly shows how the medics have won monopolistic control over definitions of health and illness as well as socially approved cures...

...As a recent resident of Canada I was curious to learn what the government and I had been missing for five years, but again drew a blank...

...Past and present blended into an amalgam: that which must be gotten through...

...The battle of wills is hence disguised as war between light and darkness...

...Someone, of course, should pass laws to break the stranglehold of the medical mafia and give the public a voice in the selection of their healers...

...but as for the author of these forebodings-no Friedrich von Spee, he...

...But levels of interpretation of alleged phenomena are largely absent from Father Rodewyck's rendition...

...But alas, to Dr...

...In Latin America and Thailand one could peddle almost any remedy administered by needle...

...With malignant delight, in rare ecclesiastical form, wielding a style that intertwined triumphant erudition with disdainful arrogance, Summers managed a breathtaking vindication of history's most baleful exterminations in the name of Christ...

...The industrial civilization, Illich claims, is designed to kill pain, eliminate disease and, worst of all, stave off a personal, non-institutionalized response to death...

...Finally, enlightenment in the form of smatterings of knowledge about science, literature, philosophy started to sap the structure built in order that life should manifoldly embody faith...

...Blight and suffering, then, now, once upon a time, would pass away when a great new age broke upon the world...

...This is the sense of unease growing out of a generalized suspicion of medicine and its practitioners...

...God had promised a glorious future to the Jews, some time, somehow, if only they continued to do all that He had commanded them...

...You were not alone: you lived with others in a community aimed at total holiness...

...By reinforcing the already strong sense that we have been had and can trust no one, not even the family doctor, the book may be aggravating the very maladies it decries...

...In fact, the title announced for the book's English edition is much more accurate: The Immigrant Jews of New York 1880-1922...

...In this book's world, conformity is of the essence of the spiritual, and traditional stolid belief, airtight but never self-interrogating, is justified in foisting off "the Devil" onto those weak souls who break down, in trying to break forth...

...Illich says: "The new tricks that have frequent application are so simple that the last generation of grandmothers would have learned them long ago had they not been browbeaten into incompetency by medical mystification...

...But nowhere does he tell granny or us what these simple tricks are...

...This vision of holiness, lived out because redemption would come soon, vanished in the face of increasing violence directed against the Jewish communities as Russian autocracy rigidirled in the nineteenth century...

...How did you, our immigrant mothers and fathers, bring to us from the old world a hankering for values beyond riches, a sense for prices by which to judge the costs of this new world...

...In addition, the final chapters trace the "Journeys Outward" of Jewish comedians, artists, writers and intellectuals after 1922, and ask whether Jews even now are "At Ease in America...

...Instead he wants his reactions to be engineered by the health managers...

...Illich argues that health care has become sickening, and that its ills, are coupled to those spawned by industrialization...

...A depreciation in sacerdotal grandeur accounts, perhaps, for a certain creeping naivete in Father Adolf Rodewyk's Possessed by Satan, published in Germany in 1963, and now translated...

...Illich can rightly be charged with marshaling rather than weighing evidence, but it is a thoroughly delightful process to watch...

...The so-called recordings have been so mischievously interpreted, and supplied with prejudicial scenery and moralistic foreground that the raw facts are difficult to reconstruct...

...That the church should continue to tolerate these proceedings suggests the need of a more legitimate exorcism- at the highest levels: of manuals, and rites, of theological guides too clearly "possessed," themselves, by reports of a supposedly objectivized evil and by projections and fears, and the language of a childishly sundered universe- clearcut ontological good, versus evil, in transparently intelligible combat...

...Applying his own model to Medical Nemesis, we could add a fourth level: critical iatro-genesis...

...He studies segments of lives under topical headings (education, unions, sex and family, socialism and politics, culture...

...Howe is a writer...

...the parapsychologist who tampered with spiritual borderzones and aroused the suspicions of a torpid but anguished priest who could admit no shadings (and here, enthusiasts for Eastern religion likewise get their comeuppance, for the Devil also sponsors pantheistic inclinations...

...Elsewhere he writes: ". . . the price of what is significantly health-furthering in Canadian medicine is so low that these same resources could be made available to the entire population of India for the money now squandered there on modern medicine...

...The Catharists were resurrected, only to be reflagel-lated and burned again in offering to unsatisfied Providence...

...Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health IVAN ILLICH Pantheon, $8.95 DONALD P. WARWICK Ivan Illich has become an ambulatory antibody, relentlessly combating the antigens of over-blown and self-serving social institutions...

...There are three varieties: clinical, social, and cultural...

...a brash adventure on uncharted psychic seas, exorcism calls for a suicidal heroism...

...But secularization, and the demonic Enlightenment, had in the meantime intervened...

...and it is as distant from the instantaneous healing activities reported in the Gospels as Voodoo is distant from a loving glance...

...Howe commands the words, the style, a delicate sureness of touch which make a reader want to follow his treatment of tough subjects: political infighting, squabbles among trade union leaders, new material on shifts in occupations derived from the work of a contemporary historian as quantitatively sophisticated as Herbert Gut-man, the complex analysis of moral issues such as the survival under bitter stress of menshlichkeit-the feeling that the people around you are your brothers, and to them you owe brother-liness as you all struggle on...

...Abraham Cahan, editor of The Jewish Daily Forward...

...Why are "solid" mediocrities to the fore, and even these seldom emerge unscathed from the simplistic drama...

...Malachi Martin would seem a slightly more qualified adjutant of things infernal...