New York in the Thirties

...Growing up in New York during the thirties meant, for me, the Jewish slums of the East Bronx, endless talk about Hitler, money worries of my parents migrating to my own psyche, public schools that really were schools and devoted teachers whose faces lived in memory longer than their names, fantasies of heroism drawn from Austria and Spain to excite my imagination, the certainty bordering on comfort that I would never find a regular job, and above all, the Movement...

...For some the Movement was a mere stepping-stone to careers, a training school for political advisors to trade-union leaders, academic sociologists, freewheeling literary critics...

...With time I hope that it will yet settle into coherence for me—more coherence than these notes reveal—and that I will learn to look back with peace and good feeling...

...and my own self-consciousness, which in relation to my parents led me into a maze of superfluous lies and trivial deceptions, made it difficult for me to believe in the possibility of a life grounded in simple good-faith...

...He had used the phrase "sodden brilliance" to describe it and I had reacted with irritation, making the point that his phrase was a contradiction in terms...

...Years later, one hot night in Indiana, I had a bitter quarrel with Alfred Kazin about the intellectual quality of this life...

...New York was the embodiment of that alien world which every boy raised in a Jewish immigrant home had been taught, whether he realized it or not, to look upon with suspicion...

...10 It is all gone, and I do not want it back...

...When we fought against the Stalinist theory of "social reformism" we were partly responding to ideological disputes in Russia but also trying to cope with a form of political adventurism that threatened to destroy the trade unions of New York...

...Such historic arrogance had its intellectual equivalents: a barely disguised contempt for the thought and learning of the past, an intolerance of divergent thought, a condescension toward "bourgeois scholars" who, it is true, occasionally accumulated valuable material but who lacked the depth interpretation that "only Marxism" could provide...

...Later it would all be repeated, a bit more crudely, in the local branches and then in the youth organization...

...There is nothing I desire more than a revival of American radicalism, but the past is done with, and I have no wish to recreate it nor any belief in the possibility of doing so...

...The moment would come, our leaders kept assuring us and no doubt themselves, if only we did not flinch, if only we were ready to remain a tiny despised minority, if only we held firm to our sense of destiny...

...but now I cannot help seeing that "sodden brilliance" was a good description...

...to experience poverty is to gain an idea as to what is happening...

...Another part, involved beyond retreat with the style of the problematic, cannot help remembering in terms of uneasiness and dismay...

...The ways in which we were, are now obvious and if there is one middle-aged literary man or journalist who has failed to point them out I do not know his name...

...And when we thought in terms of catastrophe and apocalypse...

...and then it all seems pure in the light of time, I feel with pleasure the old stirrings of faith and conviction, that love for the unborn future which may redeem the past...

...Once my father's grocery store went bankrupt in 1930 and he became a "customer peddler" trudging from door to door with sheets and linens, we were often very poor, living together with uncles, aunts and grandmother to save rent...

...But I think the factions fights had another purpose that we could not then acknowledge: they were charades of struggle, substitute rituals for the battles we could not join, ceremonies of "acting out...

...The phrase burnt itself into my consciousness, and hearing it can still make me blush...

...Later, having become a teacher myself, I found it a consoling memory when dealing with narrow-minded students...

...It was not merely the power of ideology which bound one to the Movement...

...Nor was it merely the magnetic pull of group life, with its enormous yet curiously satisfying demands upon our time and loyalty, that drew us so closely to the Movement...

...here you could listen to the leaders and intellectuals, and here it was possible, usually, to fill a fair-sized hall so as to soften our awareness of how small and futile we were...

...Against opponents who shared our essential beliefs we could argue well—too often confusing arguing well with thinking well—but against those who dared question our essential beliefs we were not nearly so effective...

...Yet I had no very acute sense of being deprived, or any notions that I was the victim of social injustice...

...One revelled in the innocence and arrogance of knowledge, for even in our inexpert hands Marxism could be a powerful analytic tool and we could nurture the feeling that, whether other people realized it or not, we enjoyed a privileged relationship to history...

...well, how many years did it take before catastrophe and apocalypse came to blacken the globe...

...Through them we created our own drama in our own world...

...Both sides gained a kind of pleasure from watching these disputes move forward step by step, from jocular argument to fierce attack, from amiable preparation to split or near-split:—a drama in which the main fighters held to their fixed roles and seemed bound by the fatalities of an action quite as much as the protagonists of a classical play...

...But while the East Bronx was a place of poverty, it kept an inner discipline: Jews felt obligated to look after each other, they fought desperately to avoid going on relief, they would treat with the outer world only under extreme duress...

...But this is not at all to say, as so many people now do, that the radical outlook of the thirties was a mere fantasy or rested upon a failure to apprehend the realities of American society...

...it meant the capacity for responding quickly and with a comforting assurance to events...

...We had a strong sense of intellectual honor, but only a feeble appetite for intellectual risk...

...I had enough imagination to suppose that each could see through the shams and limitations of the other, but not enough courage to defend one against the other...

...Only after I had begun to go to high school did the idea of poverty start creeping into my consciousness, and I learned to regard it with the familiar blend of outrage, shame and ambition...

...It was "their" city in ways that one's parents could hardly have explained, and hardly needed to...

...One's capacity for endurance played an extraordinary role in these political war-games, and there were oldtimers who prided themselves on battle scars from the legendary faction fights—the days of the titans—in the old days, just as there were party leaders whose prestige rested not on their achievements as organizers or gifts as writers but on their reputed shrewdness in faction maneuvers...

...and then it became for us a crux of our political system...

...Yet there were places I knew intimately...

...You might be shouting at the top of your lungs against reformism or Stalin's betrayals, but for the middle-aged garment worker strolling along Southern Boulevard you were just a bright and cocky Jewish boy, a talkative little pisher...

...Attitudes of tolerance and permissiveness, feelings that one had to put up with and indulge one's cranks, eccentrics, idealists and extremists, affected the Jewish community to an extent that those profiting from them did not always stop to appreciate...

...The principle of classic drama, peripetia or the sudden reversal of fortune, we stood upon its head quite as Marx was supposed to have done to Hegel...

...it was also brutal, ugly, frightening, the foul-smelling jungle that Celine would later evoke in Journey to the End of the Night...

...If someone had asked me in 1939 what I thought of New York, I would have been puzzled, for that was not the kind of question one worried in those days...

...It made us sensitive to the decay and brutality of the modern world...

...I remember my friend M., who had a gift for picking up odd jobs and a passion for consuming ice cream sodas...

...And the Jewish labor movement, ranging from the garment workers unions to the large fraternal societies and small political groups, had established a tradition of protest, controversy and freedom, so that even when such organizations violated this tradition, it still exerted an enormous moral power in the Jewish community and provided cover for the left-wing parties...

...It felt good "to know...

...It was neither typical of the city nor of American radicalism, it was simply mine...

...others were serious and gifted men, at least as serious and gifted as the writers and professors I later came to know...

...I could not imagine bringing together the life that was given, with its sweet poignancy and embittered conflicts, and the life one had chosen, with its secret fellowship and sectarian vocabulary...

...For while the debates were frequently brilliant, there was also a heavy-handed sarcasm, a nasty and unexamined personal violence, and a lumbering scholasticism that would warrant the qualifying "sodden...

...It imbued us with an intense fascination for the idea of history, and if that brought intellectual dangers, they were probably worth facing...

...Well, that was the New York I grew up in...

...the sullen immigrant kindliness of my parents would have struck my friends as all too similar to that of their own fathers and mothers...

...2 There never seemed any place to go...

...people who cared nothing about ideology also shared the desire for profound social and moral change...

...At least as crippling as its refusal to examine first principles was the attitude of the Movement toward what we called "bourgeois thought...

...1 New York did not really exist for us as a city, a defined place we felt to be our own...

...the sense of my own handicap became vivid to me only after I had learned about the troubles of people I did not know...

...For the city in its own right, as it actually was, we had little concern or sensitivity...

...And surely this experience was typical...

...The worldly manner, the savoir faire of Monroe High School and then of the city colleges, that was affected by some of my friends would have stirred flames of suspicion in the eyes of my father...

...It taught us to look upon social problems in terms extending beyond local or even national interests...

...And if we were often mistaken, we were surely no more so than most other people...

...In economics I was a complete bust, and to this day feel somewhat queasy when trying to remember the formulas of Capital, perhaps because they were taught in the Movement with the same talmudic rote which, years earlier, had characterized my disastrous Hebrew lessons...

...I must have been wounded by the accuracy of Kazin's thrust and by what I took to be his piety of manner...

...But more...

...With its stress upon inevitable conflicts, apocalyptic climaxes, ultimate moments, hours of doom and shining tomorrows, it appealed deeply to our imaginations...

...The storekeeper turned wearily to his fountain, shrugging his Jewish shoulders as if his fragment of profit, the reward of his vigil, had just been dissolved in the bubbling glass...

...But the Jewish neighborhood was prepared to listen to almost anyone, with its characteristic mixture of skepticism, interest and amusement...

...And this perspective was something rather different from, a good deal more practical and immediate than, Marxist ideology...

...The Movement gave us a language of response and gesture, the security of a set orientation—perhaps impossible to a political tendency that lacked an ideology but not quite to be identified with ideology as such...

...The realization of what it meant to be poor I had first to discover through writings about poverty...

...In the garment center things were of course different, and there, in the bitter struggles between left and right unions, knives were wielded with a supreme indifference to race, creed, color or size...

...There were the free concerts at the Metropolitan Musum where—it was a matter of pride to know—the music was poor but one found a sort of comfort in sitting on the marble floors, snuggling together in a chosen arc of relaxation, and allowing our romanticism to find a sanctioned outlet in Beethoven and Schubert...

...In the summer, after meetings, we would parade across the middle bulge of the Bronx from the tenements on Wilkins Avenue in the East to the forbidding apartment houses of the Grand Concourse on the West...

...Provinciality breeds a determinism of its own, and the provinciality of New York in the thirties, which tended to regard a temporary meeting of ethnic cultures and social crises as if it were an unalterable fact of history, led us to suppose that only here, in New York, could one bear to live at all, yet that unless one were in total revolt the life of the city was mean, constricted, intolerable...

...It was all part of our mania for willing a new life, our tacit wish to transform deracination from a plight into a program...

...It was simply that, for reasons beyond my comprehension or probing, things had changed unpleasantly...

...They would then batter away at each other to the point of exhaustion and hoarseness, and continue to enact the whole combatpageant even after everyone had firmly taken his stand...

...My friend started bawling that her mother would beat her for breaking the glasses, and the Jewish lady, suddenly sympathetic, took the girl to a store and bought her a new pair...

...When we endlessly debated "the class nature of Soviet Russia" in Webster Hall and Irving Plaza we were partly succumbing to a Marxist scholasticism but also trying to cope with the problem of a new kind of society, a problem that still bedevils serious students of politics...

...If you found a job, it was likely to be in a "Jewish industry" and if you went to college it was still within an essentially Jewish milieu...

...Almost all of us rebelled, at one point or another, against the exhausting routine of political activism—so much of it meaningless and calculated to force upon us an understanding of our distance from American politics...

...And so we lived in hopes of a reenactment that would be faithful to the severities of the Marxist myth and would embody once more in action the idea of October...

...We went in, M. treated me to a soda and then returned to the storekeeper for a little more seltzer in his glass...

...So we walked the streets, never needing to tell one another why we chose this neutral setting for our escape at evening...

...5 Why did the Movement prove so attractive to young people...

...The streets would be empty, the summer nights cool, a kind of expansiveness would come over us...

...Only now do I see the extent to which our life, for all that we had decided to cut ourselves off from official society, was shaped first by the fact that many of us came from immigrant Jewish families and second by the fact that in New York the Jews still formed a genuine community reaching half-unseen into a dozen neighborhoods and a multitude of institutions, within the shadows of which we found protection of a kind...

...The thought of bringing my friends home was inconceivable, for I would have been as ashamed to show them to my parents as to show my parents to them...

...6 Were we so entirely wrong...

...One of my least happy recollections is that of meetings where eighteen- and nineteenyearolds would hector each other with pat formulas as to whether Russia was "state capitalist" or "bureaucratic collectivist," hardly aware of the semantic and analytic difficulties in which they had become entangled, so puffed up were they with the vanity of rhetoric...

...It was a heady brew for young people, and some suffered a hangover for years...

...and later, once I had absorbed the values of the Movement, it became "their" city in a new and, as it seemed to me, deeper sense...

...3 Someone always had a little money...

...Only in the mythology of the Movement did New York figure significantly for us, and there it took on a glamorous cast: for New York was always "the party center," no matter which party it was...

...It was a somewhat specialized skill...

...Even among the Stalinists the fact of Jewishness counted in surprising ways...

...Often enough these disputes concerned issues of genuine importance, in which the Movement found itself groping toward problems that most political analysts had not even begun to consider...

...Perhaps the most insidious doctrine afflicting the radical world was the Leninist theory of the "vanguard party," the notion that we possessed the political truth, held the key to the future, and had, so to say, signed a pact with history for a 99-year lease on the privilege...

...Our enemies slept, the world was ours...

...9 Still, life had a way of asserting itself, and the reality was always far more complex and diverse than any possible description...

...There were the movies on 42nd Street where amid clouds of steam and stench our political virtue was compromised by sophisticated European art films...

...Yes, the Movement taught us to think, but "only along too welldefined and predictable lines...

...8 The Movement was a school in both politics and life, and much of what we know, both good and bad, we learned there...

...Ix RETROSPECT what strikes me as remarkable is that while we thought of ourselves as exposed to the coldest winds of the coldest capitalist city—and in many, many ways we were—we still lived in a somewhat sheltered world...

...Late one night, in the drab center of the Bronx, we passed by a little candy store whose owner had been sitting up in wait for a "sale...

...Life would break through the crevices of our ideology and prompt us to unpolitical happiness and spontaneous feelings, it would tempt us with the delights of avant garde writing—I read Axel's Castle at 15, understood little of it, and profited greatly—and lure us to the discoveries of romantic love...

...But there is a more fundamental reason for the appeal of the Movement...

...I remember those night walks as carefree and relaxed, away from the pressures of family and politics, though always with some secret anxiety that I would get home too late—for my parents, in their sweet blind innocence, were more distressed by my irregular hours than my irregular opinions...

...Annoyed by those who have made a virtue out of scoffing at the generosities of their youth, one part of me would cry out that despite all the fanaticism and absurdity, it was good, vibrant with hope, an opening to vision...

...I remember one evening when a street meeting was being harassed by a gang of Jewish Stalinists, and a screeching lady heckler jostled a friend of mine, causing her glasses to fall and break...

...the Jewish community did the same thing, though less from political principle than from what I would hesitantly call ethnic shrewdness...

...Once these dialectical tournaments began, the opposing factions would line up their squads of speakers, like knights arrayed at both ends of the field...

...Too many barriers intervened, too many kinds of anxiety...

...The Jewish community enclosed one, not through choice as much as through experience and instinct, and often not very gently or with the most refined manners...

...In the thirties the ordinary New York Jew realized that Jewishness was not something one had much choice about, and in this respect his instincts were sounder, both morally and practically, than that of the radicals who chose for their "party names" almost anything that did not sound Jewish...

...It was quite as if I had been asked what I thought about my family: there seemed no choice but to accept the one I had, lamentable as it may sometimes have been, and I no more imagined that I would ever live—or be able to live—anywhere but in New York than that I could find myself a more fashionable set of parents...

...Trotskyist street meetings were sometimes broken up, but only upon the decision of the Communist party, which until the Popular Front prided itself on standing outside the spectrum of Jewish ideological life...

...but the forces that shaped one, the subtle enveloping conditions that slowly did their work on character and disposition, were not really matters of choice...

...And to my dismay I hardly know, there does not seem to be a total and assured perspective upon the past...

...Or perhaps more to the point, why have those who left it found themselves romanticizing their youthful time as radicals...

...For a young Marxist in the thirties, the greatest ploy was a claim to be learned in economics, the science we faithfully praised as basic and secretly regarded as dismal...

...for most it was an experience both liberating and crippling, beautiful and ugly...

...7 A Movement that raises in the imagination of its followers the vision of historical drama, must find ways of realizing the dramatic in the course of history...

...In my own case, a fleeting encounter with Robert Michels' book on political parties left me with a permanent feeling of uneasiness, which time and exposure sharpened into doubt...

...We would listen with pleasure to our professional jokester, full of panting malice as he raked every friend who happened not to be along, or to the brilliant leader who warmed us with his confidence...

...For the Communist lady my friend had a few minutes earlier been a "fascist" but when trouble came and the glasses were broken, she also must have seemed like a nice Jewish girl...

...In our very distance from the city—caused, I suspect, less by a considered "alienation" than by a difficulty of access, a puritanical refusal of possibilities, and an unacknowledged shyness beneath our pose of bravado—we made for ourselves a kind of underground city consisting of a series of stopping-places where we could ease the strain of restlessness and feel indifferent to our lack of money...

...Occasionally these disputes produced some vivid writing and speaking, in which the talents of the leaders, unable to find a public outlet, were expressed inwardly through polemic, wit and invective...

...No, what I think held young people to the Movement was the sense that they had gained, not merely a "purpose" in life, but far more important, a coherent perspective upon everything that was happening to us...

...Our hopes and expectations were not realized, and concerning those that were crudely tainted by power-hunger it is perhaps just as well that they were not...

...In the winter, when the Bronx is grey and icy, there were cafeterias in which the older comrades, those who had jobs or were on WPA, bought coffee while the rest of us filled the chairs...

...the society was sick and inhumane...

...Pride in belonging to the "vanguard" was an expression of, as also an incitement toward, a naive authoritarianism: I recall one youth leader riding on a Fifth Avenue bus and pointing to the skyscrapers with the remark: "Some day that will all belong to us...

...What you believed, or said you believed, did not matter nearly as much as what you were, and what you were was not nearly so much a matter of choice as you might care to suppose...

...It was not only the Jewish labor movement that provided a protective aura...

...Not only because the Movement had a way of turning in upon itself, becoming detached and self-contained, and finding a security in that isolation which all its speeches bemoaned...

...There were millions of people desperate, hungry, hopeless...

...If at a discussion meeting there happened to be a maverick who wished to speak apart from the lists of the two factions, the decorum of democracy required that he be given the floor...

...When I try to summon an image of human goodness in its more public aspect, I still find myself remembering an ill-favored curmudgeon in the Bronx as selfless as he was grumpy, a girl in Brooklyn who poured the purity of her soul into the hope for socialism, a peculiarly mixed group of people whom I knew well or barely at all, yet who survive dimly as faces, those who enjoyed talking to `outsiders" about politics and those who were shy and would mail newspapers or fold leaflets in the office...

...At the age of 14 I wandered into the ranks of the socialist youth, as much from loneliness as conviction, and from then on, all through my teens and twenties, the Movement was my home and passion, the Movement as it ranged through the various left-wing, anti-Communist groups...

...And that is why we seldom became disturbed when a member questioned a tactical or strategic "line" of the Movement, but felt uneasy, as if sensing the threat of heresy, when he began to wonder about the more abstract and fundamental Marxist tenets...

...The man stared at him in dismay, and M., no longer a budding Marxist theoretician but a nice roly-poly Jewish boy, said in great earnestness, "But I always get more seltzer with my sodas...

...It was this pattern of drama which made each moment of our participation seem so rich with historical meaning...

...Thinking about it now, I am struck by how little I saw as a boy in the thirties of hunger and suffering, though surely there was no lack of either in New York and I was quite prepared to notice both...

...There are moments now and again when I recall the life of New York in the thirties, and see it through the lens of affection...

...Since we had, meanwhile, to suffer the awareness of our limitations, we found excitement—that poor substitute for drama—in the ceaseless round of faction fights...

...Ideology mattered, of course, but only the more ambitious among us really tried to master the intricacies of Marxist economics or Trotsky's critique of Soviet industrial policy...

...As I rummage through the past, all I can find are bits and pieces of that chaos which forms the true substance of life...

...I have said that the movement was my home and passion...

...Marxism involves a profoundly dramatic view of human experience...

...In the thirties New York was not merely the vital metropolis, brimming with politics and contention, that has since become a senti mental legend...

...Besides, where would people sit in those cramped apartments...

...And not entirely by intention, it led us to a strong feeling for democracy, if only because the harassments and persecutions to which we were subjected by the Communists per suaded us to value freedom of thought more than we quite knew we did...

...We felt that we were always on the rim of heroism, that the mockery we might suffer at the moment would turn to vindication in the future, that our loyalty to principle would be rewarded by the grateful masses of tomorrow...

...In the winter there were the numberless "socials" given by branches of the Movement to raise funds for their headquarters, evenings I remember, perhaps inaccurately, as drab and awkward...

...It trained us to think on our feet, and opened to us the pleasures of thrust and parry...

...What passed for thought among us was often no more than facility: we were clever and fast in responding to familiar cues, especially in arguments with Communists, but had little capacity for turning back with a critical eye upon our own assumptions...

...The sophisticated adherents of both sides shared, however, an impatience to get him out of the way, so that unless he were an important member whom it was advisable to court, the orderly buffeting of dispute could be resumed quite as if he had never spoken at all...

...When I was thirteen or fourteen I began to buy a magazine that was printing Sherwood Anderson's reports about hunger in the North Carolina textile towns, and I would read these articles with tears of indignation, barely aware of the extent to which I was really feeling sorry for myself...

...Some of the leaders were intellectuals manqué, full of pomp and pretension...

...I knew, of course, the shacks of Hooverville on Riverside Drive, the lines of people waiting before store-fronts rented by the welfare agencies, the piles of furniture on top of which sat the children of evicted tenants, the panhandlers slouching on Fourteenth Street, the idle men standing day after day near the rowboats of Crotona Park...

...The totalism of the Marxist system seemed attractive not merely because we wanted a key to all the doors of knowledge (most of which we never tried to open), but also because there was a keen pleasure in picking up a copy of the New York Times and reading it with that critical superiority, that presumptive talent for giving a "basic" interpretation to events, which our commitment enabled us to command...

...We would glide away in our Melvillian freedom, away from the frustrations of the Movement and the dreary thought of the next morning when, with mama's quarter in my pocket for carfare and lunch, I would be taking the subway to City College, prepared once again to cut the classes that had, I was entirely confident, nothing to teach me...

...The world I never made, made me...

...From the chilling distance of time I now ask myself: what did it mean, what do I really feel about those years in New York...

...I repeat this phrase from a comment a City College teacher once wrote on a Marxistic composition of mine...

...We did not realize then how sheltering it was to grow up in this world, just as we did not realize how the "bourgeois democracy" at which we railed was the medium making it possible for us to speak and survive...

...We were trained in agility rather than reflection, dialectic rather than investigation...

...4 To be poor is something that happens...