The Past Recaptured

...And while they dreamed of taking their place alongside the European masters, they also toiled like all the other impoverished immigrants: Mani Leib a shoemaker (or rather, as he wrote, "a poet, who makes shoes"), Zisha Landau a house painter, the visionary H. Leivick a paper hanger...

...Accursed are the conditions that have brought you forth...

...It was an enormous and transforming migration, Howe points out, "comparable in modern Jewish history only to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition...

...Men who had been craftsmen, small tradesmen, Hebrew teachers, became dray-horse proletarians, working 70 hours a week over sewing machines in filthy sweatshops, or drudging up and down the tenements—and later the country roads—as peddlers...

...The life-blood of Yiddishkeit was, of course, the language, written in the sacred alphabet of Hebrew but obstinately secular and ironic in spirit...

...How many lives have you broken...

...Workers were inspired to collective defiance by such fiery union spellbinders as Joseph Barondess, and by unzere vunderbare farbrente meydlakh, our wonderful fervent girls, like Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman...

...Shakespeare was an Englishman, he was not available for bows...

...Concerned for their lives, one-third of the East European Jews?obsolete artisans, socialist firebrands, bewildered wives, religious fanatics, virtuosos of the violin, illiterate butchers, scribblers of poetry, cobblers, students, luftmenshn [without visible means of support], above all the numberless ordinary Jews, the folksmasn"—emigrated over the next 33 years...

...Spit on her, Yankl, and come with me...

...And memory is the thread on which Yiddish life hangs...

...In its pages he abandoned Biblical lamentation for the more pragmatic goals of organizing unions and building Jewish institutions in America...

...With energy and ambition to burn while they waited out their expectations, the greenhorns slowly began to feel more at ease, if never really at home, in their alien pockets of the golden land...

...When Adler took the risk of mounting a faithful (more or less) translation of Hamlet, his audience was so moved and delighted they called for the author...

...Yet even in those crushing early years, the immigrants, bred to an iron stoicism passed on through centuries of persecution, were able to bear their lot, even glimpse the hope of better days, by the communal solace of Yiddishkeit, the culture and mores rooted in the shared secular language that was their link with the European past and, in America, with each other...

...As Howe observes, "Whatever these writers gained from native American culture and the culture of international modernism,' the Jewish side of their experience was crippled by the will to flee...

...What Howe profoundly understands is that although every immigrant Jew considered himself to be, in Abraham Cahan's words, "involved in something more than a personal expedition...

...Ironically, some of these were now owned by Jewish immigrants moving rapidly upward, the group Cahan dealt with in his novel The Rise of David Levinsky...

...As the greenhorns hurried their children toward bicultural adaptation, just as eagerly did they hasten the disintegration of their own self-sufficient world...

...May she choke, that rotten daughter of yours...

...Now that the immigrant world is practically gone, the actors and poets, the peddlers and cutters, the housewives and editors, and the wonderful fervent girls —an entire culture and its language the self-willed sacrificial offering of the East European past to the fragmenting, impatient American future—Irving Howe has reclaimed its importunate, chaotic abundance...

...For the child of East European Jews, whose first language was Yiddish, that I was and will be to the end of my time, this book, more than a book, is an act of redemption...

...Indeed, Howe argues that one can best place these novelists as regional writers, nourished by "the encounter between an alien group, racing toward assimilation yet half persuaded it is unassimilable, and the host culture of the country...

...What makes Cahan so central a figure in World of Our Fathers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 714 pp., $14.95), Irving Howe's wise and beautiful history of Yiddish life in America, is his consistent grasp of the paradox that is the book's fundamental theme: When the East European immigrants would realize their visions in America, the language and culture of Yiddishkeit would vanish...

...The unions, Howe reminds us, were not only bargaining agencies but also indispensable centers of cultural solidarity...

...In the "journeys outward" of the immigrants' cultivated offspring, as intoxicated with Auden and Hemingway as they were indifferent to the literature of their parents' language, tradition was converted into discontinuity...

...Yiddishkeit glowed with some of the visionary power of the Messianic idea, which Howe identifies as the most urgent force in Jewish tradition, the sustaining promise behind the ragged miracle of Jewish survival...

...Often the plays were little more than an improvised carnival of outrageous claptrap, or gaudy melodramas that ground together Shakespeare with the sobs of a Jewish mother, Socialist politics with vulgar clowning, Biblical legends with the coarse and gritty local color of the surrounding slums...

...Though these early labor struggles were crucial for the future of the Jewish clothing unions, they also provided the Jewish proletariat of New York with a proud unity, a new-found trust in their assertiveness, a sense of possibility...

...The world is a theater...

...Desperately poor, ill-prepared either by their otherworldly religion or by the stagnant narrowness of shtetl experience to seek a new life so far from home, the immigrants spent the first two decades of their American existence packed into the unspeakable slums of the Lower East Side...

...But "in behalf of its sons," Howe writes, "the East Side was prepared to commit suicide...

...part of an historical event in the life of the Jewish people," many of them were fatalistically certain that the collective dream of Jewish fulfillment would be realized not in their own lives but in those of their children...

...But first the morale of the farluhrene menshn had to be restored...

...Yet for about 40 years?a mere blink of history" —they managed to sustain that culture in the new land...

...Uprooted and cast adrift, choking with homesickness, some of the East Side Jews became what later, less exhausted immigrants called farluhrene menshn, lost souls who had even lost the will to cry out "I want more light in my darkened life...

...It was more than their nagging, ambitious parents had consciously bargained for...

...This brief flowering—through Socialist labor unions and the Yiddish press, short lyric poetry and long family novels, the Second Avenue theaters and the artless memoirs of obscure men—is the vital burden of World of Our Fathers...

...In 1890 it was the most congested section of the city...

...Yet for all this naive literalism, the untutored audience, as Howe points out, also had "an innocent respect for the idea of culture...

...She has a stone, not a heart...

...From this perspective, seen as a subculture that "finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment that it approaches disintegration," the American Jewish writers can, Howe believes, be compared with the Southern regionalists, who also made of their dissociated inheritance "a wonderful rich mess of language...

...Imagine in any other literature," Howe observes, "the turn to impressionism or symbolism being undertaken by a shoemaker and a house painter...

...In 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated by a terrorist's bomb, the fragile security the Jews in the Russian Pale had warily enjoyed for a few decades vanished in a wave of pogroms...

...The word finsternish, darkness, Howe remarks, recurs again and again in Yiddish writing, "the one note Yiddish readers could be expected immediately to recognize...

...Even during the terrible early decades there were intellectuals and writers among the immigrant ranks who believed that "this mere zhargon, this street tongue, this disheveled creature wearing the apron of the Jewish week, this harum-scarum of a language recklessly mixing up bits of German, Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Provencal, English, and God alone knows what, could become the vehicle of a literature through which Jewish life would regain its bearing...

...Yet the audience found such spectacles deeply satisfying, a "full" evening...

...If we can no longer be certain who in the immigrant community responded to this poetry with the literary sophistication it demanded, we do know that everyone went to the Yiddish theater, where the histrionic style of a Jacob Adler or Maurice Schwartz always spilled over with an unembarrassed excess of gesture and emotion...

...immigrant families slept six to one airless tenement room, with a boarder or two snoring in the kitchen...

...So ardent and uninhibited was the response of the immigrant audience to the heart-clawing drama unfolding before their eyes that at one performance of The Jewish King Lear a man...

...As Molly Picon used to sing in her mocking vibrato, "Di velt, di velt, iz a teyater...

...But sweatshop poets like Morris Rosenfeld, and the more sophisticated poets of later decades—the embattled proletarian esthetes who called themselves Di Yunge and, still later, In Zikh (Introspectivists)—produced some extraordinary work in their belief that Yiddish verse could be more than "the rhyme department of the Jewish labor movement...

...In its brief years, this world, this culture, was astonishingly coherent, energetic and robust...

...overcome by Adler's portrayal, left his seat and ran towards the stage shouting...

...By 1902, however, as tens of thousands of Jews continued to pour into Ellis Island from Eastern Europe, Cahan had made his irascible peace with the curse of emigration, and began a long tenure as editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, which soon became the most powerful Yiddish newspaper in America...

...To hell with your stingy daughter, Yankl...

...Writers & Writing THE PAST RECAPTURED BY PEARL K. BELL In 1882, the year he arrived in America with 40 rubles in his pocket, Abraham Cahan unburdened his heart in a letter to a Russian newspaper: "Curse you, emigration...

...As the modernist poet and critic Jacob Glatstein remarked not long before he died, a few years ago: To be a poet of an abandoned culture "means that I have to be aware of Auden but Auden need never have heard of me...

...In the work of Saul Bellow, Henry Roth and Bernard Malamud, "the internal bilingualism of Hebrew and Yiddish is replaced by a half internal and half external bilingualism of Englished Yiddish and Yiddished English, from which there sometimes arises a new and astonishing American prose style...

...Composing in a doomed language, even the gifted poets—whom the literary children of immigrants could not be bothered to translate in Partisan Review—went under with all the rest...

...When the Socialist intellectuals began arriving in America from Warsaw and Vilna after 1905, they started to organize massive strikes in the factories...

...World of Our Fathers is history and celebration, memory and judgment...

...The fiction printed in the Yiddish papers, eagerly devoured by readers hungry for a little pleasure and a lot of guidance in the bewildering ways of their strange environment, was often little more than didactic shund-romanen, cheap romances...

...the underpaid and overworked prisoners of the sweatshops had to recoup some of the human dignity crushed in the trap of poverty...

...Neither the alarmed resentment of native Americans nor the haughty condescension of the German Jews could diminish this hope in the future—the Messianic promise cocooned in the second generation...

...Adler, never at a loss, explained that since Mr...

...And since these 2 million immigrants were passionately committed, by religion and necessity, to the family as the self-renewing bastion of survival and continuity, Howe's affectionate but scrupulously unsentimental chronicle is also the story of their children, whose triumph exacted the price of irreversible deraci-nation...