American Diaspora

NEW YORK'S IMMIGRATION officials gave my maternal great grandfather his name. "What kind of work will you do?" I can imagine an Ellis Island inspector asking him. "I can sew," my great grandfather probably answered in Yiddish. "A tailor. Alright, Morris. Stitch is your new American name." Henceforth the man would be known by his product. The confusions and contradictions of the arrival, the harrowing journey from the homeland, and the family still trapped on the Russian shtetl, anxiously waiting for word to come join him, were glibly ignored by this new alien world.

In his impressive new book, Irving Howe has chosen to remember. Howe, the editor of Dissent, and a third generation East European himself, has written the story of how the "bedraggled and inspired" Jewish immigrants lost a heritage and found a home on New York's lower East Side. World of Our Fathers revitalizes what are by now the familiar details of the unspeakable slums of East Broadway, the feverish Jewish labor movement, the lively culture of Yiddishkeit, and the rapid Jewish dispersion into the mainstream of American culture, by recasting them in the words of the immigrants themselves. In the wake of the assassination of czar Alexander II and the pogroms which followed, thousands of Jews left their homeland in the 1880s to fulfill their dream of a Jewish nation while hoping individually to gain some of the amenities of survival. The discovery that the two were mutually exclusive in America was the immigrants' tragic vision, according to Howe, and their subsequent individual decisions to assimilate were their tragic fall.

THE FIRST GENERATION of East Europeans to come to America were innocents. Some arrived de-classed and displaced; others were energetic, vigorous, ambitious. Almost all of them were young and believed that they could maintain their personal vision of religious tradition and the cohesion of the Jewish community in the midst of American society. But the sheer facts of life on the East Side overwhelmed them. The interminable hours in the sweatshops, families crowded six to a room in the tenements, the growth of crime and near epidemics of dysentery, typhoid and tuberculosis, the "tailor's disease," seemed to reflect the chaos of their lives. Howe quotes the Yiddish writer Leon Kobrin.

The streets are enveloped in an undefinable atmosphere, which reflects the unique light, or shadow, of its Jewish inhabitants. The air itself seems to have absorbed the unique Jewish sorrow and pain, an emanation of its thousands of years of exile. The sun, gray and depressed; the men and women clustered around the pushcarts; the gray walls of the tenements--all looks sad.

The immigrant reaction was swift and sudden. The Jews' strong communal sense, Howe suggests, opened them to the socialist organization brought by radicals arriving from Warsaw and Vilna after 1905. Socialism became for the Jews a belief, as idealistic fervor, which, the immigrants hoped, would bring the actuality of their American world closer to their original vision of it. The new Bund leaders snatched their chances in the shirtwaist makers strike of 1909 which made of a brave but undisciplined group of female shopworkers the members of a recognized ILGW union and a year later, in the cloak-makers strike which transformed the unionists of the men's clothing industry into the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' union, which was as liberal in its programs as it was distinct from the AFL.

In spite of Howe's anti-revisionist contention that these strikes transformed the consciousness of thousands of immigrant workers, what remains crucial is that the Jewish socialist goals were never realized. Consequently workers turned to the more traditionally American channels where they gained at the polls what they lost in ideological consistency. Howe traces the gradual compromise of radical values in the ever-narrowing circles of influence between the reformers and the Tammany machine. Belle Moscowitz, charming New York's governor Al Smith onto a course of social betterment, replaced the self-educated worker as the Jewish version of political success. But this adaptation was not confined to the political realm. Everywhere the Jews favored postponing fulfillment. After all, wasn't it right for a truly loving parent to deny his own pleasures for the sake of his children's?

STILL, IT REMAINED the unspoken hope of the immigrants through the Second World War, Howe writes, that "their visions and ambitions, the collective dream of Jewish fulfillment and the personal wish to improve the lot of their sons and daughters could be satisfied at the same time." In the ambitious second half of the book, Howe analyzes Yiddishkeit as the culture of the postponed decision. The "modernized" fiction of Yiddish culture grappled with universal themes of class struggle, personal relations and urban anomie as well as with the Jewish experience in eastern Europe. Uneasy Yiddish theater, trapped between the artistic aspirations of its playwrights and the communal experiences clamoured for by its audiences, emerged as brilliant, outrageous theatricality, a cross between a synogogue and a bawdy house, as the poet Moshe Lieb Halpern called it. At the center of this precarious world was The Forward, a socialist paper published daily in Yiddish by the remarkable Abraham Cahan. Howe notes that the problem with The Forward was precisely the problem with the Jewish community: ambivalence toward the American vision of success. Cahan himself wrote the outstanding novel of the Jewish immigrant experience, The Rise of David Levinsky, which is about the price of success in this country. Cahan apparently realized as Howe does not that to put off the decision to assimilate was already to get swallowed by avaricious American culture.

Since Jews have been reluctant to forget the values of their immigrant past, Howe's final section, in which he treats the third and fourth generations as the products of such a rejection, does not work. Explaining the phenomena of the "New York intellectuals"--men like Philip Rahv, Paul Goodman, and Harold Rosenberg--as a group that "sought to declare themselves through a stringency of will, breaking clean from the immediate past and becoming autonomous men of the mind," as Howe does, is simply not convincing. And the description of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as part of the long-standing Jewish tradition of "violent dissociation, postures of self-hatred and contempt for one's fathers" is surprising coming from Howe. The immigrants' tilt away from the collective vision and toward American materialism may not have been correct, but the dominance of theory over a pragmatic treatment of the facts in this concluding section is certainly not right either. Describing today's disapora is too much for Howe to handle. In its reliance on generalizations rather than anecdotes, this section lacks the immediacy which grips the rest of the book. Like the initial chapter describing life on the shtetl, the last seems short on life because it stands aloof, like experience twice removed.

But there is a more crucial reason, hinted at in an earlier chapter titled "The American Response," why these contemporary survivors hardly survive as real people in Howe's book. Although Howe obviously did not have the space to cite more than a few examples, the overall impression left by this chapter is that the theories of contemporary writers like Henry Adams and Henry James had more to do with shaping American attitudes toward the Jews than did the achievements of the immigrants themselves. Even more importantly, Howe hints that the dominant opinion in America worked against the immigrants' struggle to retain their identity in the midst of a strange culture from the beginning. The children of the American dispersion are not the products of the new Jewish vision of individuality as Howe suggests, but of the old American vision of homogeneity. America is the true protagonist in this, and indeed any immigrant account, working to break barriers and make everyone seem the same. The implicit point, which Howe fails to make, is not that the Jews chose wrongly when they accepted the American vision of success, it is that there was never any choice at all.

Howe has written a rich and beautiful story of the process of acculturation in America. He has immortalized "obscure men" like Louis Borgenicht who became wealthy by working his way up in the clothing industry but who ended his life "not quite comfortable in any world, visibly a success but uncertain where to register its impact, a stranger, perhaps, even to himself," But even though the characters and emotions are all there, Howe may have written the wrong script.