What's Wrong With Roots

...Italian culture is weighted heavily toward family obligations...

...Pan Am commercials came to feature photog r a p h s of P o l e s , A s i a n s , and Germans...

...But they are inspiring, in part, because they would build intimacy and community into our central institutions of work, rather than relying on the ethnic ornaments that adorn the fringes of life...

...Over the ensuing decade, the ethnic crusade did have a highly visible impact...

...Assimilation in America meant joining this superculture, and the result was both a loss of community and a numbing conformity...

...But in this they ignore a great deal of American experience...

...Chambers of commerce “have busily compiled lists of the ‘ethnic’ restaurants, including many that didn’t know they were ethnic...

...The inability to “accurately identify the boundaries of the ethnic population,” complained one New Ethnician, “reveals how indifferent much of the traditional social sciences have been towards the study of white ethnic Americans...

...Sometimes the implication is “well, that explains a lot,” and I can only wonder what deep and specious connections are being made in the mind of my observer...

...It had become a bad habit among the liberal elite-in the wake of the civil rights movement and the Kerner Commissionto look with contempt upon the white working class sons of Polish, Italian, Greek, and Slavic immigrants, labeling them as “racist” or “obstacles to social progress...

...Oh, you’re Jewish,” someone will exclaim, and 1 am immediately put on guard-because that phrase usually means one of two things...

...Despite, its popularity, the ethnic prescriIjtion has proved to be a good bit less effective than Novak advertised, and the “Decade of the Ethnics” probably ranks with the “Greening of America” in terms of living up to its advance notices...

...gI`or those who revel in their neighborhoods, who love its camaraderie, and warmth, who enjoy that life-well...

...The message of the ethnic ideologues is that any common identity must be that of the ‘‘WASP superculture,” that assimilation means homogenization...

...replaced by the sons of immigrants and then the sons of sons ol- immi rants...

...our “instincts, judgments, and sense of reality are heirs to cultural experiences that are now largely unconscious...

...Away from the peer pressure of those days, I have since come to See myself quite a bit differently...

...But those symbols aren’t always “ethnic” symbols...

...or develop his talents...

...Often, it is invented, using the leftover bits of old traditions, as jazz was invented, and baseball, and rock and roll...

...It is, like a lot of east coast cities, a town where ethnic consciousness runs high, and where one of the dominant values is a belief in the virtues of sticking by one's own kind, whether that means family, neighborhood, or, in a larger context, ethnic group...

...At times, the constituency of the New Ethnicity was clearly those white immigrants whom the melting pot hadn’t melted...

...The ethnic intellectuals, Novak, Rev...

...Isn’t it more likely that, if our identities are tied to our particular ancestral groups, we will be encouraged to look after only the particular interests of those groups, to preserve their accustomed privileges, rather than risk them in a general effort to satisfy an overriding national interest...

...It is very difficult,” Father Greeley wrote in 1971, “to speak precisely about what an ethnic group is...

...We have a lot in common,” the look seems to say, invoking a tradition of culture and philosophy that 1 am assumed to share like a bond...

...let those he the people vvho live there...

...What are the chances that ethnic clans could be the basis for such a united effort...

...Ethnicity, rather than being ineradicable, became, “in part, a matter of choice...

...But too many of the people I rew up with have stayed and worked in Providence purely out of a sense of dut towards their families...

...1 was, of course, well schooled in t h e h o r r o r of the Holocaust...

...My father is the son of an Italian' immigrant, and although I know less about where my grandfather came from and how he got to America than I would like, I have always found the notion of his getting here a romantic and attractive one...

...If ethnicity was to be the basis for a nationwide rebirth of community, as men like Novak envisioned, the movement would clearly have to do more than organize existing ethnic groups...

...The alternatives were rather starkly set forth: either we would follow the ethnic prescription and pursue what Greeley called “a mosaic society in which at least the most intimate ties are sought and maintained within our ethnic or religioethnic groups,” or we would end up with the monotony of isolating competition...

...Taking their cue from the civil rights struggle itself, theyand ethnic organizers like Stephen Adubado of Newark and Barbara Mikulski of Baltimore-sought to restore the pride that might allow working class whites and blacks to treat each other as respected equals...

...With each succeeding generation, there arc going to be many more...

...In short, I was a non-ethnic...

...We don’t even know if Cowan believes in God...

...For someone like me, whose surname ends in a vowel, Providence, R.I., was a nice place to be born and raised...

...In his book, The Rise of the Ummeltable Ethnics, Michael Novak described all the wonderful results that might flow from a rebirth of “ethnic consciousness...

...That is also why I have a hard time bemoaning the -death of "ethnic" neighborhoods, even Italian ones...

...1 am, however, making some distinctions: my past comes out of Rhode Island and America, not Italy, and It I take a certain pride in the accomplishment, of my grandfather, or in knowim._there is a town in Italy called Noeera (\v Inch, without any particular grounding in fact, I have always assumed had something to do with sonic long lost ancestors of mine), it is a pride in a personal past, not a enltnnral...

...More important, for any of Novak’s dreams to come true there would first have to be a tremendous effort to conceive and realize the interests of the entire nation...

...Though he wears a yarmulke on his trips to the Lower East Side (“I told myself I was doing so as a sign of respect...

...before *public eyes,” its champions were motivated by some reasonable and urgent concerns...

...In describing these “unmeltable ethnics,” Novak refers re peat ed 1 y to t h e “primordia 1, ” i n e r a d i c a b l e q u a l i t y of e t h n i c character...

...Is it inevitable that people be, as Novak predicts, “pleased to discover the limits inherent in being who they are...

...which was mostly Irish, but that wwa,, ul no great concern to me at the time: in Providence there was a great deal of pride associated with being Italian, and as a kid with an Italian surname...

...those family pasts are often gloriously mixed...

...Although the exact mechanism is never specified (is ethnicity inherited, or simply drummed into the brains of youth...

...The connoisseur of ethnicity ceases to be an ethnic himself...

...He soon takes up fasting on Yom Kippur...

...A more appealing ideal would leave even the ethnically pure free to pick those aspects of their inheritance that they ness by one history or the other...

...In Cowan’s hands, ethnicity is reduced to the level ol’interior decorating...

...What’s missing from Cowan’s description of his New Ethnic lifestyle, of course, is any appreciation for all but the most superficial or noncontroversial aspects of the Orthodox tradition...

...Jewish $nough, at any rate, for Hitler to have chased my parents into the New World...

...Whether the mechanism was WASP repression or free choice doesn’t seem to m a t t e r m u c h now-only a n impoverished and confining vision would condemn us to exhume our particular ethnic legacies rather than build on our new knowledge and experience...

...One further point: As the aceompanying article mentions, many of America's ethnic neighborhoods were created in the first place because the various immigrant groups needed the support and friendship of "their own kind" at a time when they were the sietims of discrimination in America...

...If I fancied myself a leftist, I could have steeped myself in the history of the Jewish Left, read all the McCarthy hearings, learned the old songs, wandered around mumbling about the Rosenbergs...

...He dreamed, he said, of a day when something would be “done to decentralize industry, to weave work more naturally into the rhythms of the home,” when “the formation of workers’ caucuses” would “devise ways of humanizing their work,” when “industrial establishments would be required to put a certain percentage of their income into enhancing the total environment of family and leisure...

...There are many people like me in America, people with "ethnic" surnames but with none of the stereotyped characteristic` that are supposed to go hand-in-hand v it It that particular ethnic group...

...But my larger gripe with ethnic neighborhoods is that for all their supposed cultural gusto, they line their repressive sides as well...

...On all these counts 1 plead “no contest,”-but so what...

...Good-sized paperback bookstores have shelves lined with books on ethnicity,” Father Greeley proudly points out, while “courses of ethnic studies have spread like contagious diseases through college catalogues...

...We can thank feminism, and the civil rights movement, for cutting through ethnic boosterism to subject the culture of whatever group to a scrutiny based on some universal ideas of justice...

...That's why I become disconcerted and even vaguely insulted when it is naturally assumed (as it occasionally is) that I should act or think a certain way simply because of that last name I have...

...The preservation of ethnic heritage degenerates easily into a cult of authenticity...

...it was not something I was a hoot to miss out on...

...Such questions do not admit of quick answers...

...But if becoming ethnic is a matter of choice, should we make that choice...

...Is Chuck Berry...

...In answering that question, the ethnic revivalists quickly ran up against a p a r a d o x . F o r , a l t h o u g h t h e main goal of ethnic pluralism is to encourage variety in society as a whole, in order to achieve that end it must discourage the cultivation of variety within individuals...

...But their movement, particularly as interpreted by Novak and Greeley, had a broader, cultural thrust, which was an attack on the old ideal of the “melting pot...

...But the ethnic movement was supposed to be more than this orgy of genealogy, scholarship, and cuisine...

...Andrew Greeley, Msgr...

...The Ethnic Prescription In the early 703, when the “New Ethnicity,” according to Novak, “blazed up...

...I delight in m\ name...

...partly as a result I think, the ethnic neighborhoods are also on the decline...

...High school status, I remember, was often conferred on the basis of what ethnic group one belonged to, and what neighborhood one lived in (the "tougher" the neighborhood, the higher the status...

...Does everyone belong to an ethnic group...

...What if you are the offspring of a Scottish-Sicilian liaison, and are neither effusive nor reserved-and what’s worse, you’ve developed a strong taste for knackwurst...

...Yet are we less dominated by those qualities after our ethnic revival, or more...

...Send More Chuck Berry At different points in our history, different approaches, and emphases, seem appropriate...

...There, in one of the world’s most pleasant climates, enjoying a life of almost unprecedented wealth, it was difficult to work up the sense of persecution and torment that, I am told, is central to the experience of my race...

...paternalism-were e i t h e r overwhelmed by the materialism of the community, or else seemed to have become part of the larger Southern California world that surrounded us, and appeared on our television screens...

...Wouldn't it he better for the son to do what he enjoys...

...But it can also be not-so-beneficial, particularly when it has the effect of limitine life's possibilities for the young...

...Ultimately, the process by which those af mixed background or taste cultivate a single ethnic character is hopelessly a r t i f i c i a l . “Given a grandparent or two,” Novak tells us, “one chooses to shape one’s consciousvarious ethnic fruits...

...The melting pot,” wrote Novak, “is a kind of homogenized soup...

...whether it meant staying in the neighborhood or moving to the other side of the country...

...Instead, Novak’s writings are littered with attempts to explain his near-mystical belief that, even in the most confused mongrel, one strain will out...

...And, symbols of continuity, as well as knowledge of our families’ :?]stories, are important to all of us...

...Above all, you can find it in the common heritage of all immigrants who came here in search of freedoms that could best be expressed in language that was universal, not parochial...

...Or else I’m discovered by somebody who is also Jewish, in which case the revelation is often followed by a knowing look, a sort of wink...

...What strikes me a, artificial is not the gradual translorrnation oC the generations, but the pressure, to preserve the old culture no matter what...

...Was Mark Twain bland...

...But these moments have come and, largely, gone...

...A good example is Paul Cowan’s account, i n his recent book, The Tribes of America, of his attempts to recover his own Jewish past, to “organize part of my life around that rich heritage...

...that is one of' its greatest strengths and sources of joy...

...Millions of Americans “rediscovered their roots...

...But sometimes it is carried too lar...

...and neither can substitute for our constant, individual efforts to make our own judgments...

...For good or evil, there are a whole lot of people like me floating around, thoroughly assimilated, or hopelessly polyglot, with “primordial” ties of “blood,” “family,” and “land” confounded by decades of intermarriage...

...Does it make sense, for example, for a son to stay in the neighborhood to run a laundromat or a bar simply because his father started it...

...Not only hadn’t the melting pot worked, said the New Ethnicists, but it shouldn’t...

...Similarly, men like Novak were right, at the beginning of this decade, to point out the condescending attitudes of many liberal professionals toward “white ethnics,” and to decry the active repression of immigrant cultures...

...I had a long conversation a few years ago with a priest who ran the Italian-American Foundation, who insisted on calling me "brother" simply because we both had Italian names...

...Either way, the attempts of my neighbors to preserve their Jewishness by t r a d i t i o n a l means-attending temple, staying away from school on Rosh Hashanah, or shipping off to faraway kibbutzes-often seemed artificial...

...In the heady days of the ethnic movement’s birth, however, quick answers weren’t required...

...As a result, the New Ethnicists find themselves, in the name of social contrast, endorsing what Jimmy Carter once so infelicitously called “ethnic purity...

...Is Boston's North End, for example...

...You can feel part of it watching old World War 11 movies, or reading Huckleberry Finn...

...communal bonds are fragmented arid diffused, and the dread assimilation looms just around the corner...

...I was trying to be a WASP...

...He is “de1ighted”to find a distant rabbi in his family tree...

...First of all, there was a basic ambiguity about whom the New Ethnicists were talking about...

...In the parts of Providence where I _rrcvV up, the predominant ethnic group ~~as the Italians, so it was natural that I cmbraced that part of my heritage...

...Reading the enthusiastic confessionals of born-again ethnics, I could tell I was being left behind, feel the subtle contempt that those who are at one with their heritage must have for the assimilated...

...What the New Ethnicity may demonstrate, in the end, is not the inability of a national culture to instill a sense of community and intimacy, but our failure of imagination i n n o t realizing the possibilities...

...a lot of the immigrant culture ineN itahltidies too...

...1 am going to be different...

...The sort of society-wide agreement that might move us toward Novak’s decentralized utopia would itself amount to a new national culture...

...It would have to expand them-not by new immigration, but by a rediscovery of ethnicity among already “melted” Americans...

...Like Kaus, I consider myself a nom-ethnic...

...It’s there in the idealization of the small-town life of the pre-Depression era...

...It was supposed to be, in Novak’s words, “a barrier against alienation and anomie,” a vehicle for preserving a sense of communality in a society dominated by “the bitch goddess success and the pursuit of loneliness...

...Even the most optimistic champions of white ethnicity claimed a constituency of less than 20 per cent of the American population...

...but to me that horror was not so much the attempted annihilation of a culture as the arbitrary murder of individuals on the basis of discovered ancestry...

...There are events, pieces of our history, which seem to go beyond mere tolerance, or bland assimilation, to evoke a distinct national, American, character...

...Are these things sterile, or featureless...

...The problem with the “unmeltable” view of ethnicity is people like me, members of what Novak and others like to call a “new class”-mobile, rootless, salaried, fond of universal moralizing and “social change...

...Emotional patterns that have been operative for a thousand years do not cease to function,” he argues...

...I don't wave my hands around y,yhen I talk and i've never been able to arouse any indignation over "The Godfather...

...teeming with ethnicity, or is it more a place where tourists can stop and cat "authentic" Italian cannoli at an "authentic" Italian cafe...

...It can mean taking care of an aging relative or taking seriously one's responsibilities to the community...

...If Italians have a history of idealizing and subordinating women-well, that’s Italian for you...

...If an individual adopts the values of a number of different ethnic groups, his identity is split between those cultures...

...Then, 1 decided I shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about who I am...

...For too mane of my friends_ that kind of choice wasn't encourageed...

...For many Americans, like myself, the substance of the immigrant values has been lost...

...Unmelting the Melted The weaknesses of the movement, like those of Reich’s “counterculture,” should have been apparent from the start...

...Everything is peace, tradition, heritage-conferred by the symbols of a past, rather than any commitment to the substance those symbols represent...

...The melting pot may not have softened up our grandparents or parents, but it has done its work on us...

...Beverly Hills, I suspect, was not the best place in the world to cultivate a fine Jewish consciousness...

...but a way of reclaiming part of my identity”), he wrestles with himself about whether to remove it as he nears his uptown apartment (he does...

...When the New Ethnicists billed their movement as the key to transforming American society, they violated these limits on the role of immigrant cultures in our lives...

...the fuzziness of the revival’s key concept, rather than calling the enterprise into question, only seemed to show how badly it was needed...

...An obsession with I those separate pasts can only cloud our judgment, and blunt our creativity...

...wearing it was...

...Obviously, I think there is a lot more of the latter in ethnic neighborhoods than the ethnicists will admit...

...But not, I’m sometimes told, obviously Jewish on the surface...

...I lie attitude of "sticking by one's own," so pmvalent here 1 grew up...

...To become an “unmeltable ethnic,” it seems, one must be made of only one metal...

...Perhaps because most people, at bottom, are reluctant to leave important decisions to the whim of inheritance, the efforts of “new class” professionals to rediscover their roots often mock the very communality that the ethnic movement was supposed to preserve...

...In their eyes, I was bland, suburban...

...What a tenuous bond on which to hang fraternity...

...It is amazing,” he argues, “how persons who claim themselves to have a ‘very mixed’ ethnic background exhibit patterns of taste and appreciation that are very ethnic indeed: a delight in the selfrestraint of Scotsmen, discomfort with the effusiveness of Sicilians-or, by c o n t r a s t , a sense of release in encountering Sicilian emotions, a constriction of nervousness faced with the puzzling cues of the culture of the Scots...

...he has just done up his life in Early Jewish...

...These are the most awkward moments of all, because where I should feel the throb of ethnic fervor, I inevitably feel nothing...

...I don't lament either trend...

...After all, even the ability of ethnic groups to respect each otherrather than hate each other-requires a healthy dose of “superculture,” because the ideal of tolerance must be taught to all...

...smog yields far more authentic nostalgia than a trip to the Holy Land...

...Our mission, Novak implies, is to search for this single ethnic clue that “unlocks secrets of the psyche as no $her does...

...You’re just not authentically anything, and you’d better rediscover your true ethnic identity before your selfconfidence is undermined entirely...

...So there is an exhortation running through the writings of the ethnic revivalists, directed at the assimilated: cultivate your ethnic character, search your past f o r , in Novak’s phrase, “ethnic materials,” “discover” your inheritance...

...Cowan starts by talking to Orthodox Jews...

...He ends by describing his, and his wife’s, attempts to “figure out how to observe the Sabbath, but in a way that blended the realities of our own highly mobile, multicultured life with our desire for peace and ceremony...

...Why aren’t I exactly who 1 am, the product of a variety of cultures, for whom a whiff of L.A...

...It is difficult to argue with their initial political impulse...

...In 197 1, Michael Novak announced the “Decade of the Ethnics,” and maybe sometime in the intervening years I should have made a major , effort to acquaint myself with my own cultural heritage, visited my ancestral town perhaps, tracked down distant relatives, or read some of the fine histories of the ’Sewish diaspora...

...These are inspiring goals...

...So, for all their talk of “richness,” “complexity,” and “untidy, messy, diversity,” you won’t catch Novak or Greeley talking about a variety of ethnic strands coexisting peacefully within the character of a single human being...

...If, as a child of the professional suburbs, you’ve tried to play basketball with black ghetto teenagers more intent on proving their manhood ‘than playing the game, your misgivings about the role of machismo in black culture should be repressed...

...As immigrant, die...

...Well, boy are you out of it...

...can be %vornderfully beneficial...

...Novak railed against the predominance of the “ W A S P super cu 1 t ure”-ra t io nal, restrained, competitive, above all “solitary,” and ultimately “sterile...

...Now most of that discrimination has gone, and...

...I guess you could say I’ve rediscovered my assimilation...

...After shopping at this ancestral smorgasbord, 1 pick the flavor 1 prefer, and then I dine on nothing else...

...After all, if you are going to avoid imposing your own ‘‘superculture,” you must try to appreciate other traditions “warts and all...

...I tried a few of these things, but they didn’t seem to work...

...We need the ability of each generation to say “My parents were like that...

...For the waves of immigrants who arrived in this country, the preservation of traditional communities was often a vital means of countering the contempt of predecessors, the pain of dislocation, and the burden of economic discrimination...

...If I’m not interested in Judaism, if 1 have no hidden ethnic yearnings to satisfy, so be it...

...The wonderful aspects of Jewish culture-the emphasis on learning and humor, the h u s t l e , t h e k i n d a n d inevi table Robert M. Kaus is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...communal one...

...If we have to choose an ethnic framework on which to build, why not choose this one...

...No Grounds for Dreaming Of course, not everyone who rediscovers their “roots”gets as carried away with the mechanics of the process as Cowan...

...make no mistake, but at the same time...

...Geno Baroni, among others, perceived a healthy dose of class snobbery and “nativist” prejudice in these attitudes, as well as an easy lack of empathy...

...1 am supposed to comb my family tree for its want to cherish, and to supplement them with habits from elsewhere...

...l o act as if I did would be false...

...V"eighhorhoods provided them all the things the rest of the county didn't, they helped make tife bearable and pleasant...

...Are they really the bastions of rich culture they are said to be, or are they artificial relics of the past...

...As a cure for WASPish homogenization, the New Ethnicity prescribed a particular type of pluralism-a pluralism based on the traditional cultures of America’s immigrant groups...

...Even for those of unblemished ethnic lineage, the demands of authenticity can seem arbitrary...

...In saying this, I have no sense that I am rejecting my heritage in order to hetler blend in with any homogenised mass of white-collar Americans...

...They also ignored the limitations that would be created by the ethnic revival itself...

...Indeed, for the entire society, the celebration of ethnic difference encourages a crippling sort of relativism...

...For t h i s r e a s o n , I’ve often had the experience of having my ethnic identity “discovered...

...In doing so, I undoubtedly slighted my mother's Ilcritaae...

...And what if you sometimes emulate the restraint of the Scots, sometimes the Sicilian effusion...

...And the noble goals of the New Ethnicity, the restoration of community, the fight against a culture that Novak describes as “sferile for the emotions, the instincts, the imagination,” require that we all struggle together to establish new communities, habits, and traditions, to choose the best elements f r o m o u r e t h n i c inheritances and forge them into a common identity...

...Jo.scph ;Voeera...