Quest for Self

...Whether the book is an illumination of the author or of the decades in question is never made clear—an unresolved ambiguity central to the book and one to which I will return later...

...if not quite prepared to wash his hands of the whole business, he was ready to go about the more important business of finding his own soul—or as we now call it, his identity...

...the organization and conduct of street-meetings...

...This aspect of the book—the public Paul Jacobs, as it were—is engaging social history: often as sad as the period itself in its failures and evasions, frequently hilarious, always useful...

...These journeys are paralleled by an inner quest—and so we come to the intriguing question asked in the title...

...He is still opting for that role to be independent in his intellectual commitments, to be able to say nay to power when need be...

...for example, he urges resistance to American policy in Vietnam and Santo Domingo...

...Having had first-hand experience with unscrupulous Communists and having—with their comrades ¦—suffered at the hands of the Stalinists, these former radicals frequently found their anti-Communist "expertise" being exploited by, and indeed feeding, the flagrant abuses of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the witch-hunting committees, and blacklisted whom they deplored...

...One plausible explanation of the attraction of revolutionary Marxism is that in one leap an embattled minority-group member could lose his minority status and all the ambivalence and ambiguity of his condition of powerlessness, insecurity, and otherness...

...I think I was obsessed with Bridges, as if a cpn-stant war were going on inside me, one side still reacting to the way I thought he'd followed all the twists and turns in the Communist line, and the other side filled with guilt for the way in which I had helped push him out of the CIO...

...By 1956, with the Communist "menace" at home clearly not a central problem, it seems to me Jacobs was ready to shift his ground...

...but here, and in his subsequent role in helping to get Harry Bridges's longshoreman's union (ILWU) thrown out of the CIO in 1950, a certain uneasiness about his position begins to make itself felt...

...Who is Curly...

...He expresses his uneasiness honestly when he describes an article he wrote for The Reporter in 1956, "condemning the government for prosecuting Harry Bridges...

...Indeed, he points out—as others have— that this was not untypical of Jewish radicals in the Thirties...

...All this is seen without sentiment and false nostalgia, and yet without undercutting the participants' ennobling conviction "that the world was wrong and we could set it right...

...Jacobs pursued that path—and is refreshingly frank about his recurrent fantasies of assurance, acceptance, and power...

...In the last sentence of the book, Jacobs concludes that he is, and having accepted that identity, Jacobs can go on to "learn some other things about him, too...

...He seems to relish as well becoming, after World War II, an international representative for a West Coast oil workers' union, valued for his skill as an anti-Communist infight-er...

...That may be—if we understand by Jewishness the sum total of his peculiar experience...

...At any rate, the man and the times are seen from "a special radical view...

...Jacobs did not, nor does he in this book, wholly resolve the dilemma, although he seems to be moving in the direction of a solution...

...that the author Paul Jacobs insists "is not really an autobiography" attempts—as the book's subtitle promises—to illuminate "three turbulent decades of social revolt, 1935-1965...

...As I have said earlier, Jacobs has a cool and candid eye for these absurdities, but even he does not make the connection that perhaps it was something vestigially Jewish (although, of course, not a special preserve of the Jews) that made him cling to his role of nay-sayer, to cling to his difference and otherness...

...I think he will, too, but that knowledge is not really in this book, except by inference...

...In 1955, made uncomfortable again by the Communist issue when members of the Congress of Cultural Freedom accused Robert Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic (with which Jacobs was then associated) of having no real "understanding of the Communist problem," Jacobs found that "I, too, was getting much more disturbed by the C.C.F.'s primary focus on the Communist issue to the virtual exclusion of all else...

...Knowing that Bridges's charge at the time—that his union was being railroaded—was made "with some justice," Jacobs, because of his anti-Communist logic, did what he was asked to do...

...the cafeteria strategies...

...the dreary meetings...

...Much to his surprise, Jacobs discovered at the age of forty that the conception he had of himself was that of a tall, handsome, seventeen-year-old named Curly—and with that discovery Jacobs dates his quest to understand what he could about this inner man, "and especially about whether he was Jewish...

...In 1951, upon being fired by the oil workers' union, Jacobs discovered, apparently, that "he wasn't going to escape being Jewish," and must thereafter accept the label as an aspect of himself...

...Jacobs' brief career as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and later as a staff worker ("a professional Jew") for the American Jewish Committee, is also presented in a tough-minded and realistic fashion, with relish and conviction...

...He then goes on to ascribe the distinctive quality of that self to his being Jewish...

...Jacobs conveys beautifully the tone and feeling of the manic-depressive, far-left politics of the Thirties: the absurd splinter groups of half a dozen members, splitting hairs and chopping logic in a fine Talmudic fashion...

...The view is that of a New Yorker, born into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family in 1918, educated first at a high school for the precociously intellectual, then briefly at City College of New York in the early Thirties, who launches into a career that in successive stages included stints as a professional Trotskyist, union organizer, staff worker for the American Jewish Committee, international representative for a union, consultant at the Fund for the Republic, and writer...

...Perhaps he should content himself with that position rather than worrying too much and too fuzzily about the theological and logical niceties of Curly's Jewishness...

...And he began a series of foreign travels—to Germany, Russia, and, chiefly, Israel—one of the classic means employed by those engaged in the quest for self...

...As I read the title—with the accent on the verb—what it means for Curly Jacobs to be Jewish is never more than suggested along the way...

...The important thing, I would argue, is that there is this private self, no matter what he is called, and that having discovered his reality and his surprising ability to endure, the writer has found something to build on...

...He began to write seriously for a living...

...Jacobs' problem, in part, was that of many former radicals of the non-Stalinist left...

...Opting for a far-out politics, Jacobs opted for a kind of chosenness, with a vengeance...

...Driven in upon himself at a certain point, Jacobs discovered there was a being there distinct from the public man...

...That must have been a turning point, because during much of the earlier part of his career it seems that he was trying to minimize and render meaningless that aspect of himself...

...Yet there is this curious paradox: how to reconcile the mentally exhilarating flight and merging of the self into the broad stream of history with the grubby reality of dreary meeting halls, social ostracism, laughably small groups and influence...