REVIEWS
Mandler, Peter & Walzer, Judith B. & Ettinger, Elzbieta & Conant, Oliver
JOSEPHINE HERBST: THE STORY SHE COULD NEVER TELL, by Elinor Langer. Boston: Little Brown/Atlantic Monthly Press. 374 pp. $19.95. Simply by choosing to write a biography of Josephine Herbst, an...
...Herbst seems the very opposite of more famous contemporaries—Lillian Hellman for example...
...His political involvement also goes back a long way: he was a committed Trotskyist until 1941, when he rejected the Fourth International's position on the Second World War...
...In this introduction, Stedman Jones praises the new social history for loosening the reductive link between "social being" and "social consciousness"— the link between, to take the most obvious example, economic exploitation and class consciousness...
...Will the day come," he had then asked, "when people will drift on the Black or the Baltic Sea, begging for asylum up and down the coast . . . ?" He had also noted that "the Jewish financier B." confronted several prominent Jews in the Bucharest community with a plan that would allow the wealthy ones to leave Romania at the price of 20,000 lei per person...
...Abel is not Norman Podhoretz, who in his memoir Breaking Ranks resembles no one so much as Dickens's Mr...
...Fighting bouts of depression, he continued his diary because "someone must go on jotting down all he sees and hears, the daily comments, all the military and political events, for as long as he can hold a pen in his hand...
...Dorian entitled the novel Wanted: Homeland...
...There has been a new emphasis on national differences, as the experience even of similar economic processes has registered differently against different cultural backgrounds...
...He now gave more and more thought to the history of the Jewish people, its heritage, and his relation to it...
...Herbst knew of the investigation but not of Porter's role in it...
...What inscribes and then outmodes the "languages of class...
...Other fiction (Nothing Is Sacred, Money for Love) demonstrates more about the "hard times" of the Depression than the lives of the fictional characters...
...Langer confronts all of this with an enviable integrity...
...353 THE QUALITY OF WITNESS, by Emil Dorian...
...Or hear him on the late and (at Commentary, anyway) lamented Senator Joseph McCarthy—Abel praises him for his "often talented anti-Communist orations...
...Recently, however, "transition" has given way to "crisis...
...These are the classic insights of the new social history, and they needed to be applied to the Chartists...
...and, in replying, "you had to account for what you had done with yourself since the last time that friend had seen you...
...For the novels, in their own way, are tremendously revealing of Herbst's political and personal state...
...She was a representative figure whose life reflected the experience—particularly the political experience—of a generation...
...perhaps the fate of Chartism awaits...
...Dorothy Thompson does what the new social history is best at—she goes inside the Chartist movement to plumb the sources of its nationwide appeal, its means of internal communication, the character of its leaders and followers...
...When the volume was finished, he noted with pride that it "has become a historical and critical anthology...
...We crammed the Latin classics, he worked on his anthology...
...Was scholarship, education, an almost fanatical pursuit of intellectual life in the Warsaw Ghetto a flight from reality...
...One thing is: unlike the transitional period of the early '60s, the middle '80s are witnessing a true crisis of Marxism as an intellectual discipline...
...She knew she had something to say and wanted to test 347 herself in argument...
...A kind of faith links Dorian and the youngsters of the Warsaw Ghetto, though his identification with "history" was conscious and ours was not...
...All the poets whose works I have searched out over the last two years have been published in its pages...
...Within the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, too, a Jewish community clung to its intellectual life...
...Her answers are inconclusive and confined to a nine-page epilogue, at one point maintaining that the very question of failure is "unhistorical...
...0 THE INTELLECTUAL FOLLIES: A MEMOIR OF THE LITERARY VENTURE IN NEW YORK AND PARIS, by Lionel Abel...
...His last chapter is in the form of a letter to a son who has left New York and is now living in Santa Monica, California, urging him to return "to the city where it is still possible to talk about something that is not purely practical . . . where you first have to prove something about yourself to know that you are needed...
...His disenchantment with even the loosest of Marxist categories shows clearly in Languages of Class, a collection of essays on English working-class history, written over the last ten years, two of them now revised and the whole equipped with an agonized introduction, in order to reflect the author's reconsideration of labor history...
...As a result, her subject comes alive authentically with all her contradictions...
...Yet by the age of 18 he had published poems in Romanian, and Romanian translations of Heine...
...One is a man of fine discrimination, immersed in not one but several intellectUal communities and daring enterprises, who admires the European savant and radical Andrea Caffi for embodying the Parisian "prejudice for the moral" and for his "spontaneous sociability and good manners...
...Although often ambivalent about the burdens of her freedom, Herbst fought to construct an independent existence for herself and clung to this struggle in spite of repeated, bitter disappointments...
...Orations...
...Dorian was offered a job in France, but he chose to stay in Romania with his wife and two daughters...
...Again, whatever one thinks of the formulation, the man who wrote it can be talked to...
...350 pp...
...What was the point of a "European education," which did not include military training, but taught us the history of Sparta...
...Actually, despite his title, Abel proves to be little inclined to say, "thou fool," to his past self and associates...
...Freezing musicians played Bach and Beethoven in a freezing-cold hall to a freezing audience on what were for many the last days of their lives...
...Marcel Duchamp had exclaimed to the author, as they sat in a box seat at Carnegie Hall, about to hear Sartre lecture, "We are now before the Sartre Cathedral...
...The English middle classes had been reintegrated into a new elite consensus...
...In time he enrolled in medical school in Bucharest and became a physician...
...In this period (1956-79), British New Left intellectuals assumed the task of setting the march of labor in historical and political context...
...Herbst was by no means a g1 eat novelist...
...Its principal ambition has been to rescue historical actors— primarily those on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy—from both Whig and Marxist determinisms or, to recall E. P Thompson's famous phrase, from "the enormous condescension of posterity...
...examines the decline and fall of that new approach in the 20th century...
...Cloth, $22.50...
...He wants to sever completely the comforting umbilical cord that reassures historians of "soft" phenomena— such as political movements and cultural forms—that their subjects are still somehow determined by goings-on in the "hard," material, scientifically knowable realms of economic development and relations...
...Langer also presents her as compelled to seek out political crises and to write about them in an independent spirit (as she wrote on Cuba and on Spain), and at the same time sufficiently absorbed with the drama of the present, with her own feelings and literary instincts, so that she did not always leap to the ideological...
...He had felt "no great affinity" for the language...
...Here at last are revealed Chartism's affinities to the triumphant revolutionary ideologies of the 18th century, such as American republicanism and French Jacobinism...
...Even with that tension, it would not be such an interesting book had Herbst not possessed character, a keen expressiveness, and an intensely vivid style...
...Dorian knew something we did not know: that living on a profound level involves profound danger...
...And it is this Abel whose nervous hand pulled the lever for Reagan...
...She writes in a footnote: I have frequently been asked during the course of this work whether or not Josie was a "Stalinist," and there are those who believe, primarily on the basis of her connection with the Communist party during this period, that she was...
...Yet until the end of the First World War most Romanian Jews remained "resident aliens...
...Like the historian and scholar Emanuel Ringelblum, who took upon himself the task of chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto—a death sentence hanging over his head—Dorian had the tragic distinction of recording life that, while being recorded, was turning into history...
...As for the middle classes, though there is a chapter devoted to them, they are either evil genii or spear-carriers in an opera dominated by the coloratura of Feargus O'Connor...
...Yet she looks backward too much, harping too often on the inadequacies of the old social history, insufficiently pressing on the limits of the new...
...the source of our strength, however, a historical consciousness, was the same...
...LANGUAGES OF CLASS, by Gareth Stedman Jones...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed,, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Dorian—like many European Jews—was fascinated by the idea of Europe as a vibrant intellectual community, fount of Western culture and civilization...
...Podhoretz, is supremely confident that the least details of his quarrels with rival editors excite universal interest...
...Is nothing certain...
...To UNDERSTAND DORIAN'S PRIDE in salvaging for posterity poetry written in a doomed language, one has to realize what the concept of "European education" meant for many Jews...
...In college, he had suffered the anti-Semitic outbursts of his fellow students, and the principal's reprobation for daring to write a dissertation on Romanian folk poetry...
...Upon his discharge, he had not only been rejected by the Romanian Writers' Association, but his volume of poetry was not even considered for the annual prize—"because I was a Jew...
...This project of rethinking Marxism remained, throughout the 1960s and '70s, closely linked to the political fortunes of British labor...
...Abel has never quite relinquished the fantasy, in the past knowingly satirized by Dwight Macdonald, that intellectuals, by virtue of their superior acumen, are a kind of elect, uniquely qualified to rule, to seize and use power...
...and that so long as they remained everywhere a semi-helot population, relegated to an inferior and dependent status, which produced in them the virtues and vices of slaves, their neuroses, both individual and collective, were not curable...
...But what turns the wheel...
...The passages that dramatize this are the best in the book...
...The centrality of the Chartist orator Feargus O'Connor and his paper, the Northern Star, is rightly restored...
...The failed writer presents yet another difficulty...
...As Hilton Kramer (Herbst's friend and literary executor) observes in his review of Langer's book (New Criterion, September 1984), whatever is written about Herbst cannot conceal that she was a failure and that it was "as a failed writer and a failed woman" that she was known...
...Breton himself is described as "powerfully built," even "brutal...
...352 Pointing first of all to the People's Charter itself— each of its Six Points aimed in different ways at reformulating the composition of Parliament— Stedman Jones reinterprets Chartism as a movement of workers who saw themselves as independent producers challenging an authoritarian state (and its parasitic classes, few of whom are capitalist employers) with a program of political renovation...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Even after World War II, her occasional renewals of political interest—for example, in the student movements of the '60s—were a way of trying to recapture the past and suffered from her considerable isolation and, as Pearl Bell has noted, an "intractable romanticism...
...In an earlier diary entry, Dorian had written of a boatload of German Jews "floating aimlessly on the Danube," refused asylum by all neighboring countries...
...For all the interest of her character and political opinions, she was a difficult person...
...Her own loyalties, as she grew older, may have been linked to a desperate need for a better past than she had known, but they were always expressions of a real generosity...
...The editors of the New Masses talked Herbst out of the group protest and instead a letter was written by Herbst alone, with characterizations of Gold's "anti-intellectualism" as "fascist" deleted...
...But no sooner was the wall erected than classes sprung up...
...Something of Abel's own sense of the moral may be inferred from his report on what it was like to live in Paris right after the war...
...Yet novels were the main work of her career, and clearly she was very talented...
...260 pp...
...She began to sense that as there was more to politics than simply ideas and events, there could be more to a generation than the catalogue of its ideologies and public images...
...Understandably, the refugees refuse to disembark...
...Thompson does the job superbly...
...Langer uncovered FBI reports on an interview, almost certainly with Porter, in which Herbst's political history is wantonly distorted— toward what end no one has discovered—in a way that may have given support, even after the fact, to her dismissal from her wartime job in Washington...
...The phrase is "The Jews need the Jews," which Abel interprets to mean that Jewishness is a fatality, comprising ancestors and descendants...
...As he puts it, "In the small community of Saint-GermaindesPres, at the end of the '40s and in the early '50s, one lived in a kind of moral mirror in which one saw one's own actions and also the manner in which others responded to these actions...
...Yet Stedman Jones wants to go further...
...But I have learned a damned good lesson...
...IT WAS IN THIS ATMOSPHERE that Yiddish began to intrigue Dorian...
...My 80-year-old grandfather—he played a good game of poker and never went to the synagogue— lectured his grandchildren in the ghetto on their scholarly future in postwar Europe...
...and in doing so she discovered Herbst's fiction and in it a kindred spirit...
...These statements obtrude unpleasantly in what is for the most part an agreeable book...
...Far from being a sectarian demagogue and using the paper to impose his leadership, O'Connor comes across as a man who cut the figure his constituents would have liked to cut themselves, that of a robust, educated, opinionated engagè, who used the Star imaginatively to weld together a national movement in a society still badly fragmented by trade and regional and religious distinctions...
...Her one serious relationship after her marriage—with a woman, a poet—was an unhappy struggle continuing through the last two decades of her life...
...The labor historian's horizons have moved beyond the workplace to the family, the community, the polity...
...And what has given critics (Pearl Bell in the New Republic, Hilton Kramer in the New Criterion) the most difficulty is Langer's handling of this complicated identity...
...At 10,000 lei per head, the man stands to gain a profit of 5 million lei, to be deposited in hard currency in his account, abroad...
...It is strange how restraints and oppression affect all aspects of human life...
...Cloth $31.50...
...Occasionally a German policeman fired, just for the fun of it, into the crowd crossing the bridge...
...The question one heard most from one's friends, apparently, was "Qu'est-ce que to deviens, mon cher...
...He never talked to us about our Jewish heritage because, I suppose, he never ceased to believe that Heine's "ticket" was still valid...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...In a period when biographies are dealing with the bisexuality of creative people, Langer is careful not to push the compass of Herbst's feelings toward a true direction...
...But this passion was a private one...
...The new social history left the job of "rethinking Marxism" incomplete...
...Yet the walls Dorian had built to safeguard his world were breached: he was forbidden to practice his profession...
...There was a cheap wooden bridge looking misplaced among the tall, concrete buildings of the modern city...
...q To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...Most striking of all was her response, at the end of her life, to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook...
...For Langer and her critics, the most difficult possibility of all seems to be that Herbst was often apolitical in her instincts and at crucial moments tended to want to move out of the sphere of political argument, particularly when it threatened old loyalties...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Though she never lacked friends and colleagues, intimacy became more difficult for her as time passed, and she withdrew from its possibilities...
...Women who lead "lesser lives" are not sure bets for full-length biographies...
...This was a stunning blow...
...her importance was less as a political figure and more that of a complex combination of literary, political, and personal interests illustrating some of the key dramas of her time...
...It is certainly not in this predilection for the examined life that Abel resembles the neoconservatives...
...If there was such a close match between the workers' experience and the Chartist discourse, why did Chartism suddenly fold up after 1848...
...Industrial militancy drives a wedge between working and professional classes, but so does social peace: if the workers are prosperous and satisfied, the professionals lose their service ethic and their paternal attachment to the masses...
...In "Rethinking Chartism," he turns to the deus ex machina of the state, suggesting uneasily that the ruling classes were adapting their discourse more successfully than the ruled...
...As his parents were unable to pay the tuition that the public schools required of "foreigners," he received his early education in Yiddish classrooms...
...Hard to tell in the dark, you see...
...So it would appear that there are two Lionel Abels...
...He has ego aplenty—what self-respecting member of the dwindling fraternity of New York intellectuals does not?—but he exhibits none of the fantastic conceit that we are coming to expect from the neoconservatives...
...My existence," wrote Dorian, "unfolded between the cry 'Down with the kikes!' in 1800-andsomething and . . . 'Down with the kikes!' in 1940...
...She did not relish an ideological fight, it seems, when the prospect of severed ties cutting her off from her own history was a distinct possibility...
...I know," he explained, "that Romanians do not want us, but as long as we are alive we must try to achieve this kind of contact...
...Pott, like Mr...
...If her relationship to the American Communist party and in turn its relationship to the Soviet Union automatically makes her a Stalinist, so be it, but for her long record of independent thought and action—albeit in association with the Communist party—for my part I find "Stalinism" not only a meaningless, but, indeed, a misleading description...
...Some of Dorian's enthusiasm derived from his sense of just defiance: "The harder the blows rained on Jews, the more passionately I plunged into work reaffirming the permanence of Jewish contribution to art...
...In 1939, Dorian became obsessed with writing a satirical novel, in his words, a book of "black humor," based on the life of Romanian Jews...
...his speech was sharp, crisp, virile . . . " Ortega y Gasset has "solid shoulders" and looks "like a matador...
...ABEL'S CHIEF INTEREST lies in satisfying his own curiosity about a central yet subtle and difficult-todetermine thing: the relation his friends maintained to the moral life of their times...
...she was never actually a committed Communist or a party member...
...But to describe her political beliefs accurately seems to me about as easy as walking through a minefield...
...The biography chronicles two other affairs, one with a man and one with a woman, both deeply troubled...
...The Germans could kill us, we knew —but, really, they could not touch us...
...A Jewish theater performed while the ghetto dwellers were starving...
...She refused the compromises required to earn a living...
...What is this new social history...
...Sartre Cathedral" does not seem inappropriate after all when applied to either of his two systematic treatises...
...McCarthy, it seems, was a necessary scourge: " someone had to warn a rather complacent America of that period about the penetration of the Communists into American institutions...
...Elinor Langer was drawn, in turn, to this representative life as she looked for the roots of her own New Left experience of the '60s...
...304 pp...
...The stories in The Intellectual Follies bring the author's many talented friends and acquaintances —among them Andre Breton, Phillip Rahv, JeanPaul Sartre, and Robert Motherwell—vividly to life for the reader...
...She may have started from a fixed idea about her subject, but her response to the reality of the life before her changed as she ploughed through the evidence...
...THE CHARTISTS, by Dorothy Thompson...
...In contrast, the starving children I knew who day in day out went to our illegal classes, were spiritually healthy, strong, dignified people...
...The natives are "decent human beings," Dorian notes wryly, "for they don't eat only Jews, but any people...
...17.95...
...But then, in 1938, just about the time when Dorian was starting his diary, the government introduced the "Revision of Citizenship decree," once more depriving most of Romania's Jews of their recently gained citizenship status...
...But English Jacobinism reached its peak too late...
...Yet once he "stepped into this unfamiliar universe," he was caught up in it...
...Your daily revolt treads mud, cries out to a steadily leaden sky...
...The Labour party is in a mess, Stedman Jones suggests, because the old language of "labourism" no longer connects people in a common political project...
...EMIL DORIAN DID FORCE HIMESELF TO WRITE, conscious that writing was both his salvation and his responsibility...
...Though economic exploitation had hardly slackened, the movement's political discourse had become outmoded, and a generation would pass before a new approach could be constructed...
...He recounts his break with the SWP in a chapter called "Through a Glass Darkly" (it appeared in the Fall 1981 Dissent...
...ONE FEELS ONE COULD TALK LO the Abel who wrote "A Letter From—And For—New York" and the chapter preceding it, "Jews Without the Jews," in which he memorializes his father, a stern, zealous rabbi who was not so disappointed in his faithless son that he neglected to give him a phrase that will protect him "like a talisman" and prevent him from "becoming a complete shegetz...
...Today his criticism is much sharper...
...The works of writers and poets, philosophers and scientists, painters and musicians of many European countries charmed and seduced the Jews, who rushed to study and embrace them—seeing no incongruity in both appropriating that universe and also remaining staunchly loyal to their native countries...
...The objection is lodged, quietly and firmly, amidst a fineness of perception that is entirely without rancor...
...For with all her natural gifts and penchant for adventure, Herbst had a hard time...
...Her complex relationships with the people she was closest to often became painfully unsatisfactory, and she did not seem to grow in wisdom...
...Labourism," or welfarism, as it emerged in the first half of this century, is described as a pact between the labor movement and the professional classes for the delivery of certain social goods and services by the latter to the former...
...According to Langer, in the 1950s Herbst became more aware of "the singularity of her position as a woman," an awareness that developed during her relationship with the poet Jean Garrigue...
...The Chartists have since gained historical prominence: too much prominence, perhaps, for Thompson has allowed them to preempt her attention at the expense of the classes and the state against which they struggled...
...Consciousness, he says, can just as easily shape being as vice versa (since, for instance, "language . . . is itself part of social being")—a notion that in old-fashioned Marxist jargon might be called an idealist heresy...
...HERBST DID SUSTAIN ATTACHMENTS to Old friends, ignoring or forgetting disagreements in her anxiety to hang on to some continuity in her life...
...The British New Left—at least in its first stage, from 1956 to the early 1960s—did not so much break with the old left as move beyond it...
...He makes a halfhearted attempt to impress the insights of French structuralism and discourse analysis on the new social history, and yet he seems to realize that this "analysis" is primarily descriptive, not explanatory...
...or, worse, two sides of the same coin...
...Chartism was written off as absurdly anti-industrial, the temporary by-product of skilled demagoguery, inevitable victim of capitalist prosperity and incorporation...
...399 pp...
...Some of the best work in American history today bears the mark of Britishstyle social and labor history, as witness the University of Illinois Press series on the history of the American working class...
...LESS HAS BEEN MENTIONED about feminist ideas in Herbst's life, perhaps because feminism is not yet considered real politics or because current feminist ideas were not part of Herbst's vocabulary...
...But the man who writes as Abel does of McCarthy and anti-Communism is not carrying on a conversation...
...Many non-Jews, however, were disturbed, even disgusted by the Jews' allegiance to Europe...
...What their methodology might be remains a mystery...
...With equal success Abel reconstructs the various milieus of the people he writes about: the bohemian Greenwich Village and its gin mills that he frequented as a young man, Depressionera cafeterias and political meetings, cafe society in postwar Paris, the famous Cedar Bar, second home to the abstract expressionists...
...A year later, Romania entered the 354 war on the side of Germany and instituted antiJewish legislation that outdid even the Nazis...
...How neatly this diverting formulation elides the real, tragic, staggeringly complex circumstances that entered into the creation of the U.S.S.R.—serfdom, centuries of autocratic rule, the war with Japan, the First World War, Bloody Sunday, the savage exploitation of Russia's peasants and factory workers, hunger, disease, mutinies, cossacks, the vast bureaucracies of the czars...
...It also served as a base from which new social historians could raid traditionalist ground, such as political and diplomatic history...
...They were made in a different spirit and have a different quality from Abel's cultural conservatism, which, if its judgments are sometimes purblind—the theater, today for instance, is nowhere near as dead as he seems to think it is, and the '60s and '70s are not so barren of cultural significance—is here honorably occupied in defending whatever culture still survives in New York...
...I opted for the gun...
...In what way, then, does this longtime liberal, onetime radical, proponent of the highly adversarial surrealists, admirer of Jean-Paul Sartre, friend to men and women of the left share the bitter reactive passions of neoconservatism...
...The ship wanders on, from sea to sea, till war breaks out and "all human flesh is nationalized...
...One of the strong attractions of this book is the tension between the reality of Herbst's life as it unfolds before us and the biographer's need to find in it a pattern or an example...
...At the core of her friendship with Katherine Anne Porter was a feminist view (though neither would have called it that) of the literary world and the difficulties that both had to put up with in it...
...German, Polish, and Jewish policemen stood guard...
...Dorian wrote...
...Although she does not use the term Stalinist herself (except in this footnote), Langer does little to dissociate Herbst from the meaning behind it, nor does she conceal the many problems presented by Herbst's political opinions...
...The knowledge of what happened to Herbst and her peers changed any simple notion she may have had of the history of her own generation...
...In the Labour party essay, dealing with a period when rulers and ruled are not so easily distinguished, he reverts to a more conventional (though subtle) Marxist analysis, ascribing political decline to a complex process of class decomposition...
...Cause and effect in politics are now thoroughly scrambled...
...After centuries of isolation and ostracism, Jews had finally received what Heine had called in a different context "the ticket of admission to European culture...
...my picture of it is entirely from her book...
...The same might be said for a biographer who comes to the subject with biases of her own...
...Langer hides none of this...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Consider his thoughts on the meaning of antiCommunism: "to be consistently anti-Communist," he assures us, is "almost the same thing" as or "pro-American-government attitude...
...Not that we were unafraid of death...
...Dorothy Thompson's immersion in the experience of the English working class has led her to neglect the impact on that class of other classes and the state, and to neglect, too, the distance between that experience and the political language of Chartism...
...This may have been adequate in 1964, when an immersion in the history of the working classes served as a valuable antidote to the customary diet of liberal or fundamentalist Marxist dogma...
...Like a moth to a flame, Herbst was drawn, as writer and intellectual, to where history was being made...
...His comrades who tell him, in April 1940, with Hitler's armies smashing through the French lines, that the best thing to do is foment mutinies in the French army and British navy were at that moment clearly fools...
...His analysis of Sartre is memorable in this way, particularly its conclusion...
...What she learned in her search for ancestors led her to reconsider her own view of politics, and to begin to look at the political world in a broader human context...
...In addition to the skill and temperament that bade her to write about everything, she had a restless need to know the world, which compelled her to get at it however and wherever she could...
...Langer's success in capturing the strains of feminism in Herbst's history is typical of her accomplishment in the biography as a whole...
...It was also impressed on us that only our regular class attendance could save our teachers from starvation...
...In 1878, the great powers had tried in vain to persuade the Romanian government to recognize its Jews as Romanian nationals...
...Sartre, builder of cathedrals, is "stocky, thick-wristed and broad-chested...
...The other Abel is rigid and coarse, has a power-worshiping streak, and seems as full of certitude as he must have been 350 in the days of his militant youth...
...Stedman Jones's specific criticisms of the new social history are well-taken...
...We start with the title...
...But this was expressed privately, as was her confusion about the Moscow Trials, her "shaken" feelings at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact...
...Where they do appear, they are sometimes identified inaccurately or crudely...
...And we did make grandiose plans for "after the war": we would go back to the gymnasium, study at universities—become scholars, scientists, poets, musicians, writers...
...So were their elders who made them do it—knowing that intellectual endeavor per se has been the source of strength and solace for the Jews in the darkest moments of their history...
...if anything, these pursuits amounted to a recognition that the only way to live a human life was not to succumb to preoccupation with daily existence—that we could defy the Germans, not through mere physical survival, but by study...
...The riddles of her childhood in Sioux City became ghosts haunting her adult life...
...In politics, as in her personal life, loyalty dominated all other values, an unreasoning, stubborn passion...
...Mr...
...This new formula accounts more satisfactorily for both the movement's success and its failure...
...The postwar breakdown of this pact is, again, not explicable simply in social and certainly not in economic terms...
...for instance, Max Shachtman reading Trotsky's "I Stake My Life" before a large 348 audience at the Hippodrome in New York...
...when the whole world is collapsing, individual tragedies are part of a natural course of events...
...It's a very bold book—really good—" she wrote, "It's so jolting and provocative, and I don't know who has written so openly and frankly about women—she really puts it on the line...
...Upper-class Britons rarely enter Thompson's pages, except in the Houses of Parliament to deny the Chartists' petition or at the head of armed detachments to deny their right to petition...
...He included among our papers a banknote "for tuition...
...Politically, the British labor movement, though battered, remained a sufficiently seaworthy vessel for radicals...
...Over the last 20 years, a fleet of Ph.D...
...Abel, however, has of late been doing rather too much of this looking-through-a-glass-darkly business...
...The only consistent lesson we can draw from these essays is that we need a new social history of the upper classes and of the state—a new political history...
...It is almost unthinkable that what Katherine Anne Porter did to her, Herbst would ever have considered doing to anyone...
...Dorian spent the next three years—years of mounting horror at the atrocities committed against Romanian Jews by the Iron Guard, years of Nazi annihilation of Jews all over Europe—translating Yiddish poetry into Romanian...
...One has the impression of an insistent, garrulous voice, by turns affectionate, ironic and hectoring, digressing, pronouncing, repeatedly circling subjects, telling story after story...
...She never transformed her devotion to old friends into a cause cHg,bre, nor her refusal to reveal their histories into opportunities 346 for self-aggrandizement or martyrdom...
...Langer shows Herbst to have been enthusiastic about communism early on but, although loyal to her former husband (a party member) and their Communist friends, never a simple "true believer...
...And folly, unless it's of the rather special kind recommended by Erasmus, is ordinarily meant to be sneered at, laughed at, at best considered an amusing spectacle alien to one's best nature, but always reacted against...
...The two most recent essays in the collection illustrate the point...
...Abel looks back over a long lifetime compounded of intellectual energy, talent, exhilaration, artistic partnership, joy, clevernesses, love of justice, rebelliousness, art, beauty, and truth and finds . . . folly...
...At first, we children rather welcomed our unexpected vacation...
...but all the while I rehearsed my assignment—a strophe from Horace, a poem by Goethe...
...In all fairness, it does not seem that such an assessment represents an attempt at a whitewash...
...Langer alleges (though there is no proof) that even in the case of Alger Hiss, where close friendship was not involved, Herbst may have acted protectively when refusing to identify his connections to her circle...
...This burst of annoyance emerges from her discussion of James Farrell's attacks on Herbst...
...Langer browsed in the literature of the 1930s—"something I had always done . . . because the 1930s had felt like family history to me even before the 'New Left' was born...
...Class, in particular, has been reevaluated as a cultural rather than an economic category: an active, creative expression of common experiences, not a brand burned by the forces of industrialization onto the foreheads of passive proletarians...
...Though that march took an increasingly erratic course, it encouraged New Left intellectuals to seek further theoretical refinements: so long as labor's march remained on a roughly "forward" itinerary, they remained confident in a flexible, modernizing Marxism...
...DOROTHY THOMPSON'S history of Chartism is a fine example of the genre...
...Small as this "European" cultural elite in the ghetto was, it was visible and influential...
...It is hard to decide whether Langer should have spent more time on these books, with their tendency toward blunt oversimplification, or whether she properly gauged the amount of attention they required...
...Thus new social historians of the 1960s and '70s were much concerned to establish the peculiarly English and preindustrial roots of modern radical movements, such as Chartism and ethical socialism, just as, more recently, American labor historians have been considering late 19thcentury labor and Debsian socialist movements as one line of development from an older, republican tradition...
...Later, in the army, he had nearly been court-martialed for mishandling an officer's luggage...
...very dark...
...he writes "orientated" instead of oriented)—the book provides some literary satisfactions...
...GARETH STEDMAN JONES, LONG A FRIENDLY CRITIC Of the new social history, in the late '60s was sniping constructively from the pages of the New Left Review under the influence of Althusserian structuralism, and in the '70s writing almost in E. P Thompson's vein on the "re-making" of the English working class in the years between Chartism and Labourism...
...356...
...She tries to follow the facts without judging them in a way that would of necessity be facile...
...When the liquidation of the ghetto started, my grandfather, determined that they will live, managed to buy his grandchildren faked identification papers and sent them of to "the Aryan side...
...Abel has been discussing Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason.] Perhaps instead of saying "Sartre Cathedral" we should speak of Sartre's cathedrals, for there were two of them, places of reverent yet modern decision, where, surrounded by emblems of the most refined intelligence, one could force one's spirit to sustain the stress of resolute ironic dubiety, or a fanatic faith...
...As for the cargo of refugees, Dorian imagined them approaching an exotic, distant shore, inhabited by cannibals...
...But the title, The Intellectual Follies, stands, implying at least a stance...
...The centerpiece—"Rethinking Chartism"—upsets the conventional view (shared by old and new social history) that Chartism was a movement of self-conscious, exploited workers challenging capitalist employers with an economic program aimed against industrial capitalism...
...It was unshakable in its faith in the future of a "European culture" and determined to bestow it upon every child who might ultimately escape the carnage...
...New York: Cambridge University Press...
...Herbst's continual comments on what she saw, her characteristic voice-in-prose, reveal the vitality of her personal vision and enliven the often depressing story the biographer uncovered...
...Cars, trucks, streetcars passed underneath: the Poles who crossed the street under the bridge seldom raised their heads to look up...
...Herbst's attachment, in one form or another, to the radical causes of her time was central to her life...
...Not for the threat of world war...
...After the incident with the New Masses, Herbst felt herself withdrawing from the movement, concluding "I don't know politics and don't want to...
...Not merely the idea of power or the claim to power but the physical appearance of power figures prominently in his discussion—often critical, to be sure—of intellectual politicians, including the 349 "Old Man" himself, Leon Trotsky, whose "nervous hands," Abel writes, citing a perception of Breton's, had "held the levers of history...
...Early in her marriage she resented—but not openly—her exclusion from political activity and conversation reserved as the province of men...
...Abel was of a select circle of playwrights in the early days of the off-Broadway movement...
...As Langer sees it, Herbst was shaken by the Hitler-Stalin Pact but chose again to withdraw rather than make public statements or engage in important political disputes...
...Or, as a '60s radical, is she evasive about Herbst's Stalinism because she is "soft" on Stalinism altogether...
...In 1936 Herbst and some other writers attempted to protest an attack on Farrell by Mike Gold...
...In November he voted for Reagan...
...Abel is an excellent raconteur...
...Paris then, observes Abel, displayed a "prejudice for the moral...
...That's what the left was unwilling to do, Abel insists, see through a glass darkly, accept the weapons of "fraud and mass violence" necessary in modern war, align with the hated capitalists for the sake of the survival of the democracies and to defeat the Nazis...
...With the forward march of labor halted, the new social historians are now under criticism for sentimentality, theoretical flabbiness, and for insufficiently revising the old Marxist dogmas, especially the "forward march...
...Finally—though less convincingly—Thompson meets the charge of anti-industrialism by providing glimpses of a Chartist program of industrial regulation informed by an "alternative political economy," not merely by a destructive rage...
...And whenever a child failed to appear in class, we assumed it was either too hungry or dead...
...he is just deliberately provocative— intellectually foolish, in effect...
...This confidence was nowhere more obvious than among historians...
...Moving from this possibly unconscious material to the realm of conscious fantasy, we find Abel willing to believe not merely that intellectuals are chiefly responsible for the horrors of the U.S.S.R.—an arguable point—but that it is the exclusive creation of intellectuals, that the Soviet Union is "their product, the product of their intelligence, born of their speculative historical thinking as Athena was from the head of Zeus...
...Simply by choosing to write a biography of Josephine Herbst, an almost forgotten American writer (1892-1969), Elinor Langer demonstrates both courage and an eye for an unconventional subject...
...Indeed, its persistence is the labor movement's most crippling political hobble...
...He is also what the French call a raisonneur, one who supposes that anything reasonable is his to command...
...One can hardly reject Weizmann's proposition or Berlin's version of it...
...Out in the streets, on the way to classes, I always looked out for the khaki truck that signaled a roundup...
...The street below was "Aryan," and off-limits to Jews...
...In 1937, when he was 44 years old, he began to keep a diary, and continued it until his death in 1956...
...The love [of which] Jewish poets sing is full of sadness," he wrote, "and more often than not, it is used as a secondary element, framed by the broader themes of death, remembrance, or social revolt...
...Marxists whose faith was shaken by the political and cultural currents of the 1950s—such as the New Reasoner group around E. P. Thompson— could shrug off a fundamentalist economic determinism, abandoning neither their socialist faith nor class analysis...
...nor in his basically modest sense of himself...
...He is aware that this may be substituting one simplistic mode of explanation (the political) for another (the social...
...the thrust of his shoulders gave one a sense of physical power...
...He is tender about his former ardor, both political and creative...
...By the 1970s, this influence made itself felt decisively on this side of the Atlantic...
...Abel has a dramatist's ear for dialogue and a sense of theatrical occasion...
...a fresco of the whole of Jewish poetry...
...The second essay—"Why Is the Labour Party in a Mess...
...She saw in Herbst the commitment to social change and to the struggle against poverty and injustice that she felt were the goals of her own generation of radicals...
...We remained guided, intuitively, perhaps, by a tradition about which we understood very little...
...Yet] most of the time you can find some support in a historical explanation of events...
...From her trilogy (Pity is Not Enough, The Executioner Waits, and The Rope of Gold) only a few characters— versions of the women in her family—and a concept of the determining power of economic history linger in one's mind...
...Chartism had suffered badly at the hands of the old social historians, even the Marxists...
...To this, one single exuberant entry in the diary, dated December 16, 1941, gives testimony: I have come upon a real treasure: a large number of issues of the Literarishe Bleter, a magazine which used to appear weekly in Warsaw, in Yiddish, and which became the focal point of all movements in literature, the arts, and the performing arts that flourished in Jewish centers throughout the world...
...It is rich but also crowded and somewhat chaotic, bearing a curious resemblance to the life of a figure in the entertainment or publishing worlds, a famous impresario or press agent, perhaps, rather than that of a notable literary man...
...In her preface, Thompson disclaims responsibility for these superior classes, bent as she is—like her husband, 20 years ago—on rescuing her subjects from historical condescension...
...She is sensitive to the fact that Herbst never was explicitly a feminist but sees that in many ways she led a feminist life...
...Only in 1919, pressed by the Allies, the government finally granted its Jewish minority citizenship...
...The bridge was erected on German orders and it connected two parts of the walled Warsaw Ghetto: the "small ghetto" and the "big ghetto...
...children studied ancient history, languages, literature, before the next decree put them on a train to Auschwitz...
...He quotes in full a poem, a bad poem, bearing the plangent title "How Comrade the Present Addressed Our Party," which he wrote in 1937 while on the staff of the New York Writers' Project...
...She fought painfully and unsuccessfully, but she fought nevertheless...
...Poets wrote to the sound of gunfire...
...On the other side of the argument, it is true that Langer is impatient with the label "Stalinist...
...The smoothness of this transition, in contrast to the American experience, is most simply explained by the left's relative strength before 1956...
...In Romania, as in many other European countries, Jews were accused of divided loyalties and, indeed, the accusation was not altogether unfounded...
...By a paradox that is rapidly diminishing in what remains of our intellectual life, Abel is closest to the neoconservative temper when he betrays habits of thought and feeling acquired during his long sojourn in the sectarian anti-Stalinist left...
...Pott in the Pickwick Papers, the splenetic editor of the Eatanswill Gazette...
...We were afraid yet we planned to live forever...
...before and during World War II, and the New York literary world...
...And his discussions of peers living and dead whom he must now regard as ideological adversaries—Mary McCarthy, William Phillips, Paul Goodman, Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald—are remarkably free of the vindictiveness displayed regularly in the New Criterion, and for the most part balanced, discerning, and tactful...
...As long as the labor movement appeared to be in transition—say, from 1956 to 1979—such an immersion could be expected to provide useful clues to the next stage of "the forward march of labor...
...paper $12.95...
...theses has rectified this piece of condescension, and Dorothy Thompson neatly sums up a 351 generation of work in a single, manageable volume...
...Stedman Jones answers this question by pointing to "the changing character and policies of the state" which undercut Chartism as "a coherent political language and a believable political vision...
...New York: Pantheon...
...But in this case, it is the biographer (a member of the generation that was not there) who has been uncommonly candid about her approach and who reined in her own political views as she moved closer to the subject's life...
...Herbst turned out to be different from what Langer "first imagined her to be...
...Does she avoid this crux of Herbst's political life because she does not care about it as she should...
...The new social and labor history, the characteristic intellectual product of the British New Left, gained a reputation for methodological innovation...
...Her itinerary was an archetypal one for the left-wing American intellectual of the 1930s: a poor Midwestern childhood, an education in the Midwest and Far West, New York in the early '20s, then Berlin in 1922 and Paris, the Soviet Union in 1930, Germany again in 1935, an agricultural commune in Cuba (1935), Spain during the Civil War, Washington, D.C...
...Taking off from this joke, Abel writes...
...Had we had guns earlier, might we not have helped save some more Jewish lives, and killed more Germans...
...The overall picture may differ somewhat from era to era, but the same causes have the same effects...
...Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America...
...Stedman Jones has no systematic answer: no "new" new social history...
...She was hard to live with—direct and down-to-earth, but also intensely sensitive and in some things strangely romantic...
...If the Jews had any courage and dignity left," reads Dorian's January 25, 1938 diary entry, "not a single one would stand for it...
...His book has its own charm and merits, but organization is not one of them...
...Its equally rapid waning in the late 1840s provided an excuse for its subsequent dismissal by the old social history...
...Who the Chartists were is more important to her than what they said, and what they heard their leaders saying...
...With hindsight, it is perfectly obvious that Abel was right to insist on compromising radical purity...
...Dorian was at first unable to give up his life-long dream of "bringing the Romanian and the Jewish populations closer to each other through a better knowledge of their respective cultures and traditions...
...It is the latter Abel who can (in his piece for Partisan Review's 50th-anniversary issue) dismiss the whole of Carter's human rights policy as "welfare state values...
...But even though forgotten, Herbst knew everyone and went everywhere...
...it was much easier with the gun, much more gratifying...
...gentile colleagues shunned him...
...Her insights are disciplined by the limits of her knowledge, and she avoids excessive reliance on psychological interpretation—that would also be facile...
...He is intensely concerned not only with how his subjects acted and lived but also with how they perceived the way in which others acted and lived, and how they felt or thought others should act and live...
...and publishers were afraid to handle his literary work...
...There are enough examples given of her distaste for Communist activities, her distrust of Popular Front methods, and her tendency, constitutionally, to drift away from politics altogether, to make Herbst's political views neither as deliberate nor as stolid as the critics seem to suggest...
...Herbst was conscious of much that constrained her but did not see those constraints as gender-based, even though from hindsight it may be easier for us to define them...
...WHAT REMAINS MOST INTERESTING about Josephine Herbst is her political identity, problematical as it was...
...There are probably three or four...
...Earlier she had written to Katherine Anne Porter of the Spanish Civil War: ",..and what I know is that Russia should not have let Spain down, not for anything...
...This working-class movement burst forth suddenly and with astonishing organization in the late 1830s, inconveniently competing for political power at just the moment that both Whig and traditional Marxist historiography reserve for the triumph of the middle class...
...Our elders told us that it was our duty to improve our minds—a "sacred" duty...
...You can tell yourself that...
...Unfortunately, her extraordinary capacity for loyalty outstripped that of some of her friends...
...Yet for such Jews as Dorian the offending allegiance was rarely to Zionism, Judaism, or the Jewish people...
...I am "a corpse holding a pen in his hand," he wrote...
...In 1940, Marshal Ion Antonescu, head of the Iron Guard and the government's newly appointed premier, issued a decree once more stripping Romania's Jews of their citizenship and rendering them stateless...
...But in my view this is an interesting matter, and far from making Herbst into a "martyr of the feminist movement" (as Hilton Kramer sourly puts it), Langer faces up very well to the complex task of looking at Herbst's evaluation of her situation as a woman...
...A left-liberal for many years afterward, he says things in this book that sound a lot like neoconservatism...
...His thinking, as it appears in various political pronunciamenti, is certainly dark enough...
...Emil Dorian, a Romanian Jew, was born in 1893...
...only former officers were exempt...
...A moment comes when that proudly chosen way betrays you, and you no longer can count on life...
...On the one occasion when Abel does confront a genuine intellectual folly, the wartime neutralism of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' party, he somehow feels entitled to draw lessons from his disillusionment with the organized left that are pure neoconeries, if there is such a word (there should be...
...He also has a fondness for epigram, which he often uses to advantage: "There are no faults as interesting to us as those of the persons we love best and most admire...
...The British New Left did not seek to supersede the industrial working class but, rather, to reinterpret its task and rally new forces to its banner...
...The English state had changed, undermining the truth of the Chartist discourse of authoritarianism and parasitism...
...Accordingly, Monday through Saturday, together with my friends, I crossed the bridge to attend classes...
...Lionel Abel is a witty and cultivated man who has participated in or observed at close hand many of the past four decades' important art movements and intellectual currents...
...She never outgrew a fixed 345 picture of her family's history formed of early fantasies that dominated a good deal of her fiction and influenced her political loyalties...
...In accounting you also judged, and had to judge what you were becoming...
...Nor was he alone in this belief...
...Despite the at times deplorable laxness of the writing—it often sounds as if it had been dictated ("like, for instance" appears twice in one sentence...
...And how close it is to the typical Commentary article's view of the world as wholly dominated by ideas, theirs and ours, and to the admiration of power for its own sake that is now so much in evidence on the right...
...Its protagonist, a wealthy Jewish community leader, is negotiating with an anti-Semitic government to let half a million Jews leave the country...
...The suggestions presented here should not be read as a triumphant manifesto," he grants in his introduction, "but rather as a response to the breakdown or impasse reached by previous interpretive frameworks...
...Langer presents Herbst as having passions, opinions, and loyalties but never a consistent set of ideas...
...paper $11.50...
...By the mid-1840s, English Jacobinism had lost both its ancien regime and its Jacobins...
...Neither her fiction nor her journalism reveal this as well as the copious correspondence through which she seemed to live, keeping in contact with countless friends and acquaintances...
...To be sure, these are only moments in a long life, but important moments as Langer perceives them, reflective of Herbst's basic spirit...
...Yet Langer shows that Herbst was not only "distressed" at the time, but quickly agreed that she had been "outwitted"—hardly the admission of a committed Stalinist...
...A month later, Dorian (who had served as an officer in World War I) went to his infantry regiment to secure the necessary document for exemption...
...Forty years later Farrell, once a close friend, was still berating Herbst, impugning her political reputation...
...There is something to be said on both sides of the argument...
...The political discourse of Chartism was broad enough—popular enough—to span divisions within the working class and between the classes (a great achievement of this essay is the place it assigns to the radical middle classes in the history of Chartism...
...IN AN ESSAY on Chaim Weizmann, Isaiah Berlin wrote: Early in his life he accepted the proposition that the ills of the Jews were caused principally by the abnormality of their social situation...
...When we came home from 355 class, he might inquire about the last story we read in English—"The Happy Prince" sticks in my mind—but never about the bridge...
...Nor can we any longer assume that O'Connor's followers were mainly male artisans in failing trades: women (workers and wives), factory operatives, shopkeepers, publicans, and journalists, all are worked into a genuinely popular movement...
...Does Langer accurately identify Herbst's political beliefs...
...When all the walls crumbled, the ghetto's and my own, I asked myself whether, instead of going to classes, we should not have learned to make bombs and handle guns...
...But how the new social history and the new political history are to be connected is unclear...
...Children, women, men, each wearing a Star of David, crouched down for a few minutes, then resumed the climb of stairs—three flights up, three down...
...It hung over a wide street, bustling with life...
...He briefly explains his reason for doing this in the 50th-anniversary issue of the Partisan Review...
...The history of labor movements is a history of failure, because the movements' discourse fails to change rapidly enough to keep pace with the wheel of history...
...Her chief target of criticism is a work first published in 1918, along with others dating from the late 19th century...
...For those who "were there" or who knew Herbst and her friends, a disinterested judgment may be impossible...
...It is invaluable for the completion of my anthology...
...To take one example, Thompson relies too heavily for her depiction of upper-class attitudes on the diary of one minister, John Cam Hobhouse, whom she calls "James" on p. 74 and prematurely ennobles on p. 81...
...But the neuroses of slaves may grow and flourish in the most perfect military state, too, as the Germans inadvertently demonstrated...
...Herbst was undoubtedly a "fellow-traveler," although, when describing Herbst's politics in the mid-1930s, Langer concedes that "If the term `fellow-traveler' implies a distance from the center of things, she was more than a 'fellowtraveler.' " This admission is not enough for her critics...
...Across his dossier was inscribed, in bold letters: "Suspect—Jew...
...New York: W. W Norton...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
