Kind of Kaddish for Paul
Luria, Yaacov
A kind of Kaddish for Paul YaacovLuria The Jewish tradition of yahrzeit makes good sense. At the very least, it compels a ritual remembrance of the dead one day each year; beyond that, in evoking...
...When he was blacklisted as a performer and harassed by Congressional committees, they approved...
...On my way home I think about the Paul Robeson I knew, neither a man of religious inspiration like King nor a black militant...
...About 150 people are waiting in the church, fewer than a dozen of them black...
...He never accepted the absurd myth that we have a single identity—black, American, senior citizen, or whatever...
...Although a faithful Communist Party liner, he never allowed his instinct for decency to be straitjacketed...
...He well deserved the small measure of remembrance in the Church of God in Deerfield Beach a year ago...
...This year Sylvia Poitier finished her year as mayor and decided not to run again...
...I rushed to hear him at rallies and concerts, even though he sang the same songs over and over...
...Robeson was of course on the program...
...Two black men, honor guards of the local American Legion post, march to the front of the church in white helmets, shouldering carbines...
...When I came of age in the 'thirties, there were probably no more than three blacks—"Negroes" was the in term then—whose names commanded instant respectful recognition: Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion...
...After a number of rousing "revolutionary" songs, he chose for his finale a Yiddish folk song, "The Kaddish of Rebbe Levi Yitzhak der Berditchever...
...Driving through the dimly lit Yaacov Luria's work, including fiction, essays, and poetry, has appeared in the New Yorker, Commentary, Harper's and Midstream...
...For the last decade of his life Robeson, not unlike Samson languishing blind among the Philistines, was a forgotten invalid...
...Only Robeson, however, had the chutzpah to oppose what later came to be known as "the Establishment...
...Robeson was pro-Communist at a time when many Americans equated his posture with treason...
...Then, signaling the accompanist, he proceeded to sing every Jewish song he had ever learned...
...I haven't forgotten...
...A belated gesture of atonement...
...The Legion had been one of Robeson's persecutors...
...In common with many college-bred young people of my time, I shared Robeson's politics...
...The meeting begins with a gospel singer belting out "His Eye is on the Sparrow" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic...
...Only 41 years old and a cousin by marriage of the famous Sidney, she could be headed for stardom of another kind, as retired people from the North eventually vote in Florida...
...With one-third of American wage-earners unemployed, we readily latched on to a political alternative that promised to bring an end to poverty, war, and the fascist dictatorships that threatened to engulf the world...
...streets towards the church, I recall the Robeson I knew so many years before January, 1976, when he died in obscurity...
...It was amazing, however, how it moved the secular leftist audience, how Robeson's sensitive intuition had leaped over and above the turmoil of the moment...
...And yet for him there was only one world and one human race...
...The rabbi draws a parallel—"Robeson removed walls, too"—but his eloquence is somehow too pat, as if he has used all these rotund phrases before...
...It was a gesture to uplift the hearts of all the Jews in the concert hall—and elsewhere in the Communist world...
...During my youthfully exuberant leftist days, Robeson was my idol...
...and tells a homily about a Catholic priest who removed a cemetery wall to accommodate a fallen Protestant soldier...
...Twenty years ago, Robeson, on tour in the satellite countries, was instructed to omit Jewish songs from his repertoire...
...Powerful hymns...
...And, depending on your point of view, he was either noted or notorious for his Communist sympathies...
...The veteran newspaperman Richard Yaffe, a correspondent in Eastern Europe after World War II, recalls a revealing incident...
...forerunner of the civil rights movement...
...It seems that everyone has been seeing Robeson not as he really was but rather in the adage of Martin Luther King, bigger in size but less famous...
...A rabbi delivers a belated eulogy— "His golden voice has been silenced, but the memory lingers in our hearts...
...Besides, as a middle-class, white retiree, in a recently built condominium enclave, I welcome the chance to meet my neighbors...
...I remember a stifling evening in early July, 1941, when I attended a mass meeting at Madison Square Garden in support of Russian resistance to the Nazi invasion of their country...
...for a while, blacks and whites stand and chat in the cool evening...
...One evening in Warsaw he complied—until the very end of his program...
...Once, home on leave during the War, I stood watching his magnificent performance as a military commander and broken-hearted lover in Othello...
...and Paul Robeson...
...He had turned the Berditchever's lament into a universal outcry against destroyers everywhere...
...His blackness was visible, of course, but irrelevant...
...I am happier with what happens after the church is emptied...
...Walter White, the national chairman of the NAACP...
...These thoughts are stimulated by an experience in southern Florida where I have taken refuge from the cold the last few winters...
...No wonder the young Jews, who dominated the ranks of radicals, took Paul to their hearts...
...Under pressure from McCarthyism, others might recant, finger old friends, but Robeson had too much integrity to follow their example...
...A white minister treads through the predictable cliches: "Robeson knew the meaning of democracy . .ahead of his time...
...There was no memorial meeting, no observance of yahrzeit for Paul Robeson...
...He insisted that his granddaughter, born to his son and a Jewish mother, be exposed to both her black and her Jewish heritage...
...He sang in dozens of languages, as it was the infinite variety that made the peoples of the earth interesting...
...Afterward, it's hard for the speakers to strike fire...
...The righteous of all nations are worthy of immortality," the Talmud tells us...
...Being a black man made it easier for Robeson to respond viscerally when others' rights to complete humanity diminished...
...Robeson summoned a vision of the workers marching into the better world to come, with the downtrodden minorities like Negroes and Jews at the head of the parade...
...beyond that, in evoking memories of the dead as they were when they walked this earth, a yahrzeit confers a token immortality on them...
...When Robeson's deep baritone unrolled in "01' Man River," I heard the walls of corruption come tumbling down...
...One evening, a year ago, I see a notice advertising a memorial meeting for Paul Robeson in a church in the black section of Deerfield Beach...
...The mayor of the burgeoning town of Deerfield Beach, Sylvia Poitier, billed as the "chairperson" of the meeting, is busily shaking hands...
...A lawyer by training, Robeson achieved fame as an actor and singer...
...He never hesitated to express special empathy for Jews...
...A local elementary-school principal, a young black man, has squirreled up the facts of Robeson's life and reads them dutifully from three-by-five cards...
...The "Kaddish," which asks God to account for the agelong suffering of the Jews, seemed out of place at first...
Vol. 2 • September 1977 • No. 9
