YES
potok, Chaim
YES CHAIM POTOK Chaim Potok is the author of The Promise, The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev. This piece is an excerpt from his new book, Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews which...
...He became a journalist for a Yiddish newspaper...
...I said we were making up for that now...
...The American Jew mirrors in microcosm the ongoing tension in western civilization between old loyalties and new ideas, the ambivalence reflected in the eagerness to be part of the secular adventure of modern man and at the same time not vanish as a minority group...
...Most of the gentle Jews are dead, he once told me...
...He knew that Jews had been mayors of many frontier towns because often they had been the only literate people around...
...that in 1915 the Lower East Side of New York City had contained 350,000 Jews in less than two square miles—almost the same number as the entire Jewish populations of Warsaw and Vilna...
...Men slew children...
...The immigrant generation, as well as the American Jews who had come from Germany, organized to fight anti-Semitism openly in the press and in courts of law and at times through the more concealed methods of economic pressure...
...Yes, most of the gentle Jews are gone...
...is publishing this fall...
...Who says it will be easy...
...No, I knew nothing about any of those things...
...He was sixteen years old...
...I was eighteen years old in November 1947 when the great powers in the United Nations granted nationhood to the six hundred thousand Jews then living in the land of Israel—fifty years after its existence as a state had been predicted by the Viennese journalist who had thought to write a novel after a confrontation with an anti-Semitic mob and instead had created the beginnings of what may one day be the third civilization of the Jews...
...In 1854, in California, there were ten synagogues...
...I marvel at its desperate courage...
...They fear for her, tremble when her people are hurt, support her, are not yet certain what sort of nation state they wish her to be, are concerned about the drain upon creative energies and the coarsening of moral fiber caused by endless military vigilance, and are dazed with disbelief and joy over an achievement like Entebbe...
...Reform congregations conducted their services mostly in English and professed their total loyalty to America and lack of allegiance to Zion and Jewish law...
...I had placed very high in a contest in which thousands had participated...
...I feel myself part of that venture...
...I think of Sumer and its rushing rivers, Egypt and its rising Nile, Canaan and its terraced hills and fertility cults, Greece and Rome, Islam and Christianity, Jerusalem, Babylon, Cordova, Toledo, the Rhine valley, the Ukraine, Vilna, Odessa, Kishinev...
...A boat from Hamburg brought him to New York—four months after he had left Russia...
...He also knew Talmud and Hebrew literature and was an observant Jew...
...They have sparked a small Orthodox Jewish renaissance in some of the large urban centers of the land...
...Then he took a job as a carpenter in a construction crew...
...He helped found the Labor Zionist movement in America...
...Often they were helped by the uptowners, the wealthy German Jews who wished to see their downtown coreligionists acculturate as quickly as possible, both out of a feeling of compassion and a desire to be spared the embarrassment of having non-Jews identify them as somehow related to these eastern Europeans...
...They are reminders of the people's beginnings and a counterpoint to the activity of the secularists...
...that there were 6,000 Jews in the country in 1826...
...Rivers ran with blood...
...I remember my father's rage, my mother's soft endless weeping...
...Early in this century my wife's father came to America from Russia...
...He did not know what would be the central idea, the driving force, of this new Jewry...
...Twenty-three Jews on a boat fleeing from Brazil where the conquering Portuguese had begun to burn Conversos...
...The American Jewry of today was born in that one generation when the last of the great tribal migrations of our species moved across the cities, hills, and valleys of the new world...
...He told me of the German Jews who had traveled west on the wagon trains, settling everywhere, opening shops—some of which became the huge department stores we see today—pioneering the land as Jews had once pioneered Gaul and the Ukraine...
...others were Socialists, Anarchists, actively antireligious...
...The central idea of Biblical civilization was the covenant, he said...
...Yes, the Jew is now solidly inside the affairs of the world...
...What will Jewry make of itself for the next thousand years...
...Some climbed aboard boats that took them to South Africa, discovered an unspoiled, verdant land, settled in, and brought over their families and friends—entire small towns in many instances...
...They built Reform synagogues and communities in Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Albany, Rochester, Syracuse, Boston, Hartford, New Haven, Baltimore, New Orleans, Mobile, Galveston, Indianapolis, Columbia, Chicago, and elsewhere...
...No, I had not known that...
...He reacted to the Irgun raids with grim and silent satisfaction...
...Yes, I knew about that...
...The chill of a winter of death is still in the air...
...He would have gone over himself, but he came down with influenza the night before the last boat sailed...
...If you will, it is not a dream," he would add, echoing another dreamer from a different time as if to strengthen his own uncertainties...
...and on societies of agriculture, trade, and industry that would fulfill Mosaic, or socialist, principles...
...He never saw his parents again...
...All nations would then undergo a renaissance, including the Jewish nation...
...Why couldn't you have been first...
...The gas chambers and ovens have brought a new kind of Jew into the world...
...He had never believed the Communists and their tales of the willing disappearance of Russian Jewry...
...Their heavily felt presence evoked an anti-Semitic reaction from some Americans, the "No dogs and Jews allowed here" signs, job discrimination, exclusion from certain clubs and hotels, the anti-Semitism at times coarse and open but most often covertly concealed behind formal courtesies...
...America does not have the foul smell of Europe...
...Perhaps I knew that Herzl had read Rome and Jerusalem in the spring of 1901 and had written in his diary, "Everything that we have tried is already in his book...
...And all the wanderings of European Jewry came to an end...
...He was very active in Zionist affairs...
...YES CHAIM POTOK Chaim Potok is the author of The Promise, The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev...
...on a legal framework that would enable labor to proceed fruitfully...
...Even the Hasidim are no longer gentle...
...He had noticed a link between the liberation efforts of oppressed nationalities—in particular the war of the Italians against Austria in 1859 and the writings of Mazzini, the Italian revolutionist—and the researches in anthropology in which he was engaged...
...hundreds killed by terrorist raids...
...We offer ourselves grim consolation: all the wars have cost us less than three days at Auschwitz...
...They feel no reservations and hesitancy on the part of other Americans concerning their presence...
...The Jews should make every effort to preserve their identity in the dispersion and achieve the political restoration of the land of Israel...
...From 1881 to 1914 about two million Jews fled Russia...
...The future Jewish state would have to be based on land acquired by the entire people...
...we can read of their anguish in the Yiddish press of the time...
...The Semitic race too had a dream: it yearned to moralize and sanctify life...
...He thought we could make something of Jewry in America...
...That civilization was dead...
...There were two major historical races, the Aryan and the Semitic...
...He was a fine writer—in Hebrew and Yiddish...
...Yes, we will renew our people...
...We have to be careful, he would say soberly whenever I would mention it...
...He labored in the sweatshops of the garment industry during his early years in the United States...
...But it could never be the same Jewry we had once had in Europe...
...One day his name was spotted on the local police arrest list by a kindly peasant...
...After the Second World War about 150,000 eastern European Jews entered the United States, almost all of them death-camp survivors...
...Blood and fire and pillars of smoke concealed the sun and fused together in an immense apocalypse, an auto-da-fe that burned the soul of the world...
...He could write in Russian and English too, but did not publish in these languages...
...15,000 in 1840...
...People fled from towns for the security of forests...
...I thought I knew American history but there were things my father-in-law knew, especially about the Jews in America, that surprised me...
...I had known nothing about any of that...
...During the First World War he helped organize American volunteers to the Jewish Brigade, which fought in the British army...
...He had been astonished to discover that sudden growth in the Jewish population, he said softly...
...150,000 in 1860...
...He loved America...
...Israel and American Jewry will do it together...
...He was a short, thin, fragile-looking man and he burned with the strength born of dreams...
...He had come from a world where the fusion of the sacred and the secular seemed an effortless act...
...From their ranks came the religiously moderate masses that made Conservative Judaism the largest of the three American Jewish congregational groupings...
...A Talmudic head should come in first...
...We will do it, he would say repeatedly...
...Perhaps history will see that as our new beginning...
...Where is it written that the world will love us...
...He had come before his time...
...We should take nothing for granted...
...I rode home on the bus staring at myself in the New York Journal-American...
...His family was one of millions that broke apart in the cataclysm of hunger and hatred that convulsed Europe around the turn of the century...
...In time they entered and began to dominate most of the communal Jewish organizations established by German Jews...
...Yes, we will continue to be the other, to hold to our own view of things...
...Often he would tell me of the men he had known, the early dreamers, of Nachman Syrkin, the first ideologist of socialist Zionism, of Shemaryahu Levin, a Zionist writer, and Chaim Green-berg, a later socialist Zionist theoretician...
...Anthropology had taught him that of races there is neither inferiority nor superiority, only variety...
...This is an early, troubled springtime for the Jewish people in the United States and Israel, in England, Canada, Australia, South America, in almost all the non-European lands to which Jews have wandered in the past two centuries...
...Still others went to Canada when the United States began to close its doors and created great urban centers of traditional Judaism...
...my father had asked...
...My parents had both come from old Hasidic families...
...From Auschwitz to Entebbe in a single generation...
...Centuries of Christian and Roman hate were king in the guise of a Teutonic pagan...
...He knew Russian Jewry had not died, he said...
...The Jews who poured out of the steerage holds of the steamships that crisscrossed the Atlantic found themselves in a land that had already hosted two previous waves of Jewish immigration, one a tiny Sephardic ripple during the colonial period— Sephardim saw themselves as the aristocrats of American Jewry—and another, much larger immigration from Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century...
...Sitting on the living-room sofa or in the kitchen over glasses of tea, we would trade bits of knowledge about American history...
...The land had then gone its own way, tumultous, frenetic, often course, sometimes ruthless, pushing against its frontiers...
...I dream that we can do it, together with Israel—from which the sparks will one day come...
...He spoke of Ahad Ha-Am, Ber Borochov, A. D. Gordon, along with other Zionists—the minds who had fashioned the movement that had turned the land green, guided its people through riots and a bloody war of independence, and was now trying to create a viable state out of the grim realities of normalcy...
...I remember the newspaper photographs, the memorial assemblies, the disbelief in the faces of friends, the shock as news came of death and more death...
...The religion would preserve the people...
...Everywhere I go I meet Jews passionate with pride in Israel...
...They will say of us either that we used our new freedom—the freedom we sought but were never granted by Europe—to vanish as a people, or that we took advantage of the secret opportunity concealed within the persistent but hidden trauma we are now experiencing—a Jewry and Judaism decisively changed by its confrontation with modern paganism—to reeducate ourselves, rebuild our core from the treasures of our past, fuse it with the best in secularism, and create a new philosophy, a new literature, a new world of Jewish art, a new community, and take seriously the meaning of the word emancipation—a release from the authority of the father in order to become adults in our own right...
...Look how our secularists are creating, he once said...
...Still others sensed quickly that an education was often a passage to the American landscape...
...He asked me if I knew that in 1700 there were about three hundred Jews in America and that they or their families had almost all assimilated by the time of the Revolution...
...The Jew was the last national problem...
...Since Spinoza, Jewry has brought forth no greater spirit than this forgotten Moses Hess...
...He had belonged to a Zionist group...
...Perhaps I knew that Hess had been influenced by Zevi Hirsch Kalischer, a rabbi in Prussia who had written works urging Jews to abandon the traditional view of the Messiah and attempt to obtain the consent of the nations for the Jewish resettlement of the land...
...I sat for a long time that evening lost in awe over the secret life of ideas...
...We spoke at length one evening of Moses Hess, an assimilated German Jew of the nineteenth century who had published philosophical works and many articles and essays, all on political subjects...
...That generation of Jews struggled valiantly with its new world...
...Who was not king...
...The children and grandchildren of those eastern European Jews now participate in and help mold the Jewish and secular cultures of the land...
...He was convinced, he wrote, that it was the destiny of man to put an end to racial domination...
...seven thousand killed in the War of Independence...
...That was not news to me...
...Many brought with them the religious orthodoxy of their eastern European background...
...More than a million and a half Jews settled in the United States...
...You couldn't come in first...
...The Jewish population of Russia was quickly replenished by a high birth rate...
...Henry Ford's newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, ranted about the international Jew who was the enemy of Anglo-Saxon civilization, the Jewish Bolsheviks who were set on conquering the Christian world...
...Colonial Jews had been an exotic minority regarded with some suspicion but never cruelly persecuted...
...three thousand killed in the October 1973 war...
...Beasts roamed the land...
...That was the messianism of this assimilated Jew, my father-in-law said...
...In the past few years I have wandered back and forth across oceans...
...With that, there began a chain of events portentous for the history of all Jewry and, perhaps, the world...
...Whether it knows it or not, my people is now engaged in an attempt to create for itself a third civilization...
...Then in 1862 he published a book called Rome and Jerusalem...
...it does not have its history, its centuries of hate...
...All had perished—uncles, aunts, cousins, sisters, brothers, parents...
...The Jew sees all his contemporary history refracted through the ocean of blood that is the Holocaust...
...Everything seems to be in fragments: Judaism, Christendom, socialism, the secular dream of Hume that man can manage on his own—it is all in pieces around us...
...German Jews had not come in sufficient numbers to create a troubling anti-Semitic reaction...
...This second wave of Jewish immigrants began to establish the self-help organizations, foster homes, hospitals, social clubs, literary societies, and fraternal orders that would in later decades give unique configuration to American Jewry...
...280,000 in 1880...
...He would meet with his friends in a forest and they would talk of their dreams of a new society in a Jewish state in the land of Israel and of their plans to emigrate from Russia...
...These were the socialist Zionists from whose ranks in America and the land of Israel would come David ben-Gurion, Golda Meti...
...and 4,500,000 in 1925, out of a total population of 115,000,000...
...But it would come, he said...
...He had killed Russians during the First World War as a Polish soldier in the Austrian army...
...It is not difficult for Jews to remember the historical traumas of their past, the Crusades, the persecutions at the time of the Black Death, the Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain, the degrading ghetto centuries, the Chmielnicki rebellion, the Russian pogroms, the massacres during the First World War, and finally the Holocaust, in which the European branch of Jewry perished—the core, the very heart, of both the sacred and the secular in Jewish life, the branch that produced the great Talmudists with whom I once studied as well as Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Albert Einstein...
...He was entirely at ease in two cultures and well read in a third, Russian...
...Israel and America will create something new for themselves and the world...
...Its echoes would continue but its creativity was gone...
...Some priests and ministers preached anti-Semitism, echoing the early Jewish experience in Spain, Gaul, and Poland...
...There was never the experience in America of a protracted, anguished battle for emancipation, of rights granted and then withdrawn, of twenty-one different sets of laws governing the behavior and status of the land's various Jewish communities, of Judaism as an impossible burden, a monstrous barrier preventing equality and therefore causing deep insecurity and bitter self-loathing, or relentlessly anti-Semitic political parties—as there had been in Germany before and after the rule of Bismarck...
...Zionist activity was illegal in Russia after the unsuccessful revolution of 1905...
...During my last year in high school I had been one of a handful of winners in the nationwide Hearst American History Contest...
...He was a socialist and a follower of Hegel...
...Despite the shallowness of American Jewry, its materialism, its ignorance, despite the splintered hopes of secular civilization, the dreariness and loneliness of modern life—perhaps because of all this—it would come...
...No one listened...
...Almost all were very poor...
...He attended night school and confronted eagerly this new culture...
...They and their children now live in Johannesburg and Cape Town and in other cities of that land, have built a wealthy and highly organized Jewish community, find themselves between the hammer and anvil of that country's growing anguish, and do not quite know where to turn...
...Others went to Australia and now live in Melbourne, Sidney, Perth, Adelaide, and elsewhere on that vast continent, feel themselves part of its urban and outback landscape, and worry, together with other Australians, about the distance that separates them from the centers of western civilization...
...When Russian Jewry returned to life after the death of Stalin, we talked of it often and his eyes would glow behind his steel-rimmed glasses...
...Yes, we touch millennia of precious history when we walk the streets of Jerusalem, and climb the hills, and journey through the sand wastes of the land...
...They would take careful notes of their ideas and plans...
...and others...
...Does that mean we should be without dreams...
...American Jewry is in the mainstream of American civilization...
...The world was as silent as the Nile had once been...
...That night the young Zionist began a long underground wandering in unheated trains through the snows of Russia and Poland, past guards whose hatred of Jews had been dulled by fat bribes...
...During that time there took place a major westward migration to England and America of European peoples, among whom were to be found eastern European Jews, the parents and grandparents of most of today's American Jewry...
...There, amid the nightmarish fears of other lonely, dislocated Europeans who were also bereft of their families and without status, sharing the course intimacies of communal toilets, narrow hallways, thin walls, garbage-clogged air shafts with windows that faced one another from ground floor to roof—amid this noise-filled, dehumanized tenement world, the immigrants slowly settled into their new land and tried to make something of their lives...
...Perhaps I knew that another early eighteenth-century rabbinic Zionist, a Sephardic rabbi, Judah Alkali, had influenced Herzl's grandfather...
...that when the Jews—sixty thousand workers—had poured out of the factories at the appointed start of the famous 1910 cloakmakers' strike in New York City, the chairman of the strike said it reminded him of the Jews leaving Egypt...
...Did I know that there were no Jewish lawyers during the colonial period because lawyers were of low repute then, considered to be corrupt enforcers of bad laws...
...Yes, we are a single people, capable of loving our separate lands as well as Israel—as one is able to love a mother and a father...
...This is a kind land, despite its terrible mistakes and broken dreams...
...We would have to create something new...
...He knew of the anti-Semitism latent in America like a polluting white noise, barely heard, barely sensed, but always present...
...In the decade of the thirties a new wave of German Jewish immigrants fled Hitler, brought literacy, artistic, and scientific brilliance to these shores—and intensified the secular Jewish participation in American culture...
...When I first met him he was in his sixties and was teaching the Bible in a Hebrew-language parochial school in New York...
...It was this third wave of immigrant Jewry that built the American Yiddish theater, the Yiddish press, established Jewish labor unions, and founded the Orthodox synagogues that blunted the force of Reform Judaism...
...For the Jews there is the sense of constant struggle with frightening echoes of the past, a wariness that is the reflex of a battered people, a defensiveness after millennia of anti-Semitism, and a fear that once more we might lose hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of our people as we compete in the open marketplace of ideas during this confrontation with secularism...
...My father was a follower of the militant capitalist Zionism— the Revisionist party—of Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose disciples organized the underground army of the Irgun under the leadership of Menachem Begin and declared war against British forces in Palestine...
...I remember being lost in a deep tunnel of disillusion after a terrorist ambush and a bloody reprisal...
...We are in an interregnum between worlds, groping about, peering into the future and seeing only our own image vaguely reflected in the dark glass...
...Yes, there will be peace one day...
...He was an educated, rational man, but there were moments when he seemed strangely possessed by the radiant imagination of the kabbalist...
...They entered schools...
...So were a lot of Americans, I said...
...Who was king...
...In the early years of the twentieth century eastern European Jews streamed in a tribal inundation onto the land and settled densely in its great urban centers, most of them in the malodorous tenements—stifling in the summers and freezing in the winters—of New York's Lower East Side, a section teeming with people and pushcarts...
...Those who say America is evil know nothing of Europe...
...The Aryan race had a dream: it sought to explain and beautify life...
...The central idea of rabbinic civilization was the Messiah...
...Dreaming is cleaner than living," he told me gently...
...This piece is an excerpt from his new book, Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews which A tfred Knopf Inc...
...Yes, we are aware of the resonance of hate that lingers like a stench upon Western civilization...
...I am one member of one people confronting these closing decades of the twentieth century...
...With little sense of Jewish self-consciousness, many of these Jews actually created much of what is today American culture...
...A secular Amos...
...Perhaps I knew that...
...Others entered the marketplace and fought their way to success...
...Many Jews failed...
...He loved its great writers and hated its despotism...
...What a price we have paid for that land...
...It was effortless for me to love him immediately...
...Many have seen divine guidance in this new wandering of the Jews...
...I would sit with him for hours in the Brooklyn apartment, with the furniture of the twenties and the bookcases crowding the rooms and the pictures of Bialik and Weizmann and Herzl on the walls, sometimes the two of us alone, at other times together with my wife, who was his younger daughter, and my mother-in-law, and we would talk of the early years of Zionism...
...He knew the names of the mayors of big cities and of many senators and their voting records...
...I am a Jew, an American...
...His father was quickly told...
...Only two hundred copies of the book were sold...
...Surely I knew about the first Sephardic Jews who had arrived in New Amsterdam in September 1654 and were labeled a "deceitful race" by Peter Stuyvesant...
...About three hundred thousand settled in England and built for themselves a small, vital island of Jewry with open bridges to the host culture...
...I said I had read that somewhere...
...During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the mercantile nations of Europe had carved up the new land for exploitation...
...Often I would see him clutching his Yiddish newspaper as he read of the day's events, and I could imagine his veined iron hands holding and firing the machine gun he had used in the war...
...But there is also a sense of renewal, a forced sharpening of our self-identity, a feeling that we are approaching some distant fertile plain, though we cannot clearly make out the paths leading to it...
...In some future time, eyes will gaze upon us as we have gazed in this book upon worlds of the past...
...The sixteen-year-old boy who fled from Russian police and would one day be my father-in-law somehow managed to live creatively as both secular man and traditional Jew...
...History aims at the harmony of nations, the cooperation of all peoples...
...They had proved industrious, had introduced into the land the hard-working peddler who brought clothes and books and medicaments to isolated farmers and villagers, and had become storekeepers, international traders, land speculators, clothing manufacturers, financiers...
...In the eighteenth century a revolution had severed the links between settlers and mother country...
...Yes, there are flowers to plant, seedlings to nurture, young trees to tend, old earth to nourish, and new earth to put in—a garden of new dreams to bring forth, to add to old covenants and messianic hopes, and to offer to ourselves and to our broken and beloved world...
...But Israel is a warmth for Jews everywhere, despite the failures and disappointments felt when dreams are soiled by the muck of reality and the weaknesses of human beings...
...another thousand killed in the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six-Day War...
Vol. 3 • September 1978 • No. 9
