SOURCE: A review of World of Our Fathers, in The New York Times Book Review, February 1, 1976, pp. 1-2, 28-30.

[Solotaroff is an American editor, educator, essayist, and critic. In the review below, he discusses some of the major themes of East European Jewish immigrant culture presented in World of Our Fathers, particularly socialism and Yiddishkeit.]

The first generation tries to retain as much as possible, the second to forget, the third to remember. Little wonder that the outcropping of American-Jewish writing in the past 30 years is so often a literature of memory, an attempt to recover the world of childhood and adolescence as the last place the trail of Jewish identity was seen before it faded into the lawns of suburbia and the bright corridors of the professions. Why this interest, though? "Why not stick to the present," as my father would say. "The farther back you go, the more miserable it gets."

The main reason, I think, is that the third-generation Jew like myself intermittently experiences himself as walking around in America with a case of cultural amnesia, full of ancestral promptings and demurrers pulsing away. That's why Portnoy's Complaint rang bells like mad. But Roth's novel was a two-generational psychological farce—Freud played by the Marx Brothers—which can only explore its point by simplifying and tickling it. The secret communications between the generations are more long-term and broad and vague, and run through other switchboards besides the Oedipal one. So one also reads Bellow and Leonard Michaels, Grace Paley and Malamud, Cynthia Ozick and I. B. Singer, among many others, looking for kinship and instruction. Or one can study Judaism, even learn Hebrew, hoping to find the way back to its shaping significance on one's spirit that must have preceded the tense, perfunctory bar mitzvah lessons and seders of one's childhood. However, contemporary fiction tends to be too immediate and too stylized to carry one back far enough, while the covenants, principles and movements of Judaism, like its warming but remote observances, are difficult to carry forward (except perhaps for Hasidism). Probably the most useful contact is the fiction of Chaim Potok, which is solidly plugged into the Jewish tradition, though the messages it delivers are a little too bland to persuade, censored by their author's high sentiments, his edelkeit.

So the context of these intuitions of Jewish being, or these moral slants and emotional tilts in the way you do your work, relate to your children, vote, justify your life, chase your desires remains elusive, full of blank spaces and darkness. A temporal link seems to be missing.

Jewishness, then, is like a language in which one knows only a few words and yet is thoroughly responsive to its intonations and rhythms, its lights and darks of feeling. Like Russian, as I found out on a recent visit. And, more to the point, like Yiddish. Yes! The dark language in which our parents mainly kept their secrets from us. What remains is a few expressions, a coarseness to the ear which once had a stigma attached, like slurping soup; also a certain long breathing frenzy underneath that makes it seem a little dizzying; also a vibrant tone, a mingling of laughter, heartfulness, irony. So one puts these bits and drops into one's English, now and then, like salt and pepper and a touch of horseradish. But one also does so because they feel right, confirm something basic.

Of course, one says, hitting his head at finding what was before the eyes, or rather, on the tongue. The missing link is Yiddish, and the evasive context, as one recognizes and recognizes in reading World of Our Fathers, is Yiddishkeit, the culture of our grandfathers.

Irving Howe has written a great book. Those who are not Jewish can still read a marvelous narrative about two generations of "bedraggled and inspired" Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond in virtually all of their social and cultural bearings and in most of their political and economic ones. A work of history and of art, World of Our Fathers is brilliantly organized and paced by brisk, pithy chapters that make up large perspectives—the detonations of new hopes and renewed fear that drove the immigrants out of the Russian Pale after the assassination of Alexander II and the pogroms that followed; the wretchedness and culture shock of the first two decades in New York; the daily family and work life in the filthy, noisy, flaring streets off East Broadway; the dynamics of the Jewish labor movement and of the culture of Yiddishkeit and the rapid, fated dispersion into America. All of which is exhaustively researched and documented, often in the words of the people themselves. World of Our Fathers is also a complex story of fulfillment and incompleteness, a work of meditation and vision—the eye of knowledge and of imagination seeing together. Finally, it is lucidly and sensitively written. A richness almost everywhere.

But if you are Jewish you will also realize that Howe has written a necessary book, particularly for those of you who need its blow on the head to deliver you from your amnesia or, better, to help you begin to rescue yourself. Not that Howe's pages are ever particularly startling. Their effect is cumulative—the slow, dawning realization that this world is as familiar to you as it is fresh. Howe's just, remarkably just, descriptions and explanations, along with the voices of his sources, will minister to your residues of Jewish intuition and memory and cause them to unfold and blossom like those Japanese pellets which when put into water turn into flowers. As you read along, it is often difficult to distinguish between what you are discovering and what you are recollecting of this all-but-vanished life. For this life, as you will see, still lives—right behind your sense of your own distinctive mind and heart and face. And slowly you will begin to understand.

A few examples—some almonds and raisins and a bite of honeycake for remembrance sake. Savor for a moment Howe's detail that the Yiddish word for excommunication, herem, is also the word for a boycott. Or Howe's image of Jacob Adler, the matinee idol of the Yiddish theater, lying in state, as he instructed, in English morning coat, Windsor cravat, and talit. Or a sketch by Z. Libin—a writer from the terrible first years, the era of the "farloyrene menschen," "the lost souls"—about a worker who fears that because a wall blocking his window has been torn down he will have to pay more rent. Or let the following words work on you from an unpublished memoir by David Goldenbloom, one of the self-educated workers who become the composite hero of Howe's narrative:

[When I was about 17] I began to take an interest in books. Since I had also gone a little to the Russian school, I began to swallow—I mean, really swallow—Russian books…. Turgenev was my favorite, perhaps because there is such a sweetness to his voice. And then Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I read, of course, Sholom Aleichem, who made the ugliest things in life seem beautiful, and Peretz who, in his own way, taught me not to lose respect for myself.

In order to perceive the force of the attitudes and values that Yiddishkeit pumped through the generational conduits, one often has to recover the conditions that charged and shaped them. It is a platitude, for example, that Jews are mercenary because our forefathers were desperately poor, that Jewish mothers dote on and stuff, worry about their children because of the immigrants' experience of hunger, illness, self-sacrifice and hope. How banal, one says, until he reads Howe's harrowing account of the poverty of the Lower East Side during the 1880's and 90's. "Have you ever seen a hungry child cry?" asks the social worker Lillian Wald, explaining the dedication of her life. By 1885, the crying was everywhere. Wages in the garment industry—the main source of jobs—were cut in half. The population density of the Lower East Side was soon greater than in the worst sections of Bombay, the mortality rate was double that of the rest of the city. Project these figures into conditions and you get men working 70 hours a week in the unspeakable sweatshops and taking piece-work home to scrape by, of people sleeping five or six to a room with their boarders, of near epidemics of dysentery, typhoid fever, and of course tuberculosis, the "tailors' disease." For 20 years or so, it was as though the fabled wretchedness of the steerage passage never ended, that those dark packed ships simply came upon land and turned into factory lofts and tenements.

What was most traumatic was the inner darkness. Totally uprooted and alien, driven by a tempo they had never known before, their austere, decorous spirits assaulted and derided by the brutal dog-eat-dog conditions of their existence, their religious institutions in disarray, the immigrants seemed to lose their main possession, the culture that had preserved so many generations of the Pale despite poverty and other oppressions. The collapse of its center, rabbinical authority, is brought home by the anecdote Howe tells of the attempt to establish a chief rabbi to restore order: soon there were three—a Lithuanian and a Galician (traditional antagonists) and a newcomer from Moscow. When asked who had made him the chief rabbi, he replied "the sign painter."

"They were Jews without Jewish memories or traditions," reports one Yiddish writer. "With every day that passed," recalls another, "I became more and more overwhelmed by the degeneration of my fellow-countrymen." And in the words of the poet, Moshe Lieb Halpern: "If a wolf stumbled in here / He'd lose his wits / He'd tear his own flesh apart." In a radical newspaper of the day, Howe tells us, "the word finsternish, darkness, recurs again and again…. their lives are overcome by finsternish and it is to escape from finsternish that men must learn to act." So they listened meekly to their flamboyant agitators, went on bitter and usually doomed strikes, saved their pennies for the Yiddish theater, but mainly lived on their last hope that "here they might yet see their sons and daughters move on to something better."

Finsternish didn't begin in the New York ghetto. It came in the immigrants' luggage and dreams, the darkness of being cooped up for centuries in their decaying villages and prayer-houses and in their sustaining but hapless messianism. But in the Russian Pale it was already lifting, thanks in good part to the Bund, the nascent Jewish socialists from the cities. Here is David Goldenbloom again:

… just a few years before I came [from Russia] people of my generation became very restless. We heard of the Bund, which had recently been started, and to us it meant not only socialism but the whole idea of stepping into the outside world. When a speaker from the Bund came to our town, we saw him … as a new kind of Jew, someone with combativeness in his blood and a taste for culture on his tongue…. He was our lifeline to the outside world, and that was enough.

In America, it was the distinctively Jewish socialism developed by the Bund that largely rebuilt the community and morale the immigrants had lost. Indeed socialism, mostly through the organizing of the garment trades, provided a collective enterprise, not only as a consequence of despair but also as a movement toward the vision of a "normal life" at last, not merely as a response to privation but also as a recycled moral yearning. Jewish socialism derived, as Howe shows, from Jewish messianism, in which the worldly and other-worldly were aspects of the same destiny, a tradition that was quick to produce political and social movements that had a strong utopian, universalist cast and fervor.

The radicals of the early Lower East Side had been mostly Russian-style anarchists to whom the benighted workers were the shock troops of revolution, good for strikes but hardly worth organizing. The socialists from Warsaw and Vilna who came in droves after 1905 brought organization. They also brought the idea that the Jewish trade unions should reorganize the Jewish community and bring it into the 20th century by replacing the religious framework with more adaptive and effective social and cultural institutions. The Bund leaders saw their opening in the great strikes of the shirtwaist-makers in 1909, many of them, like their leader, teen-age girls and of the cloak-makers in 1910, in which, as the writer Abraham Liessen declared, "the 70,000 zeroes became 70,000 fighters." From these strikes rose the intense feeling that the Jews had once again fought their way out of captivity and darkness; this elan, along with the moral and psychic restlessness of believers who were rapidly discarding the religious world view, was rapidly channeled into the I.L.G.W.U. and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The socialists produced the major Yiddish newspaper and set up organizations such as the Workmen's Circle, which provided health and life insurance, hospitals and sanitariums, schools that offered a "secular Jewish education," as well as all manner of lectures, courses and other cultural activities, mostly in Yiddish. From this example, all of Jewish unionism would take its cue: thus the communists would challenge the socialists with their own children's camps and schools, cooperative housing projects, theater, dance, and choral groups, mandolin ensembles and literary panels, as well as an excellent newspaper. In short, in trying to revolutionize the world that ground them down, the immigrant Jews revolutionized themselves both to resist—and to help their children rise in it.

Reading Howe's pages on Jewish socialism and the labor movements—meticulously fair and even-tempered, though patently written by the editor of Dissent, one of the remaining few to whom socialism was a belief "to which they would pledge their lives"—one can see the powerful strains of Jewish idealism and skepticism working away like yeast in bread. Also in Howe's descriptions of the intricate, shifting, but always bitter struggle between the left and right, of the slow giving way of radical aspirations to practical ambitions in the rank-and-file, one can find an evolving paradigm of the political behavior of Jews in America as well, perhaps, of the ideological tensions that mark one's own politics. This comes home in Howe's argument with the revisionist view that the Jewish socialist movement was mainly a mode of acculturation instead of a force dedicated to a new society, which was the way it mostly saw itself and the way it actually transformed the consciousness of masses of Jews.

The other powerful force that brought the immigrant community together and enabled it even to flourish was Yiddishkeit, also originally an East European movement of the late 19th century. Its marrow was the vernacular of the Jews, "a language crackling with cleverness and turmoil, ironic to its bones." Its substance was the Jewish way of life, through thick and thin, the "shared experience, which goes beyond opinion and ideology." Its function was to hold a people together who were undergoing one challenge after another, including, after 1881, dispersion and acculturation in a totally strange secular society. Its spirit was an ironic acceptance of its role of straddling two world views—the religious and secular—which were slowly moving apart and one of which was withering.

Even so, it performed wonders while it lasted. It carried the fragmented, rivalrous East European Jews into the modern world. It provided an essential network of communications between the Pale and New York that reached into their respective theaters, union halls, newspaper offices, poetry movements, political cells, lifestyles, schools of fiction. It also negotiated the uneven and fateful transactions between tradition and modernity, between communal and individual expression, between its own survival and its people's acculturation. In its very premises that the Jews could remain Jews and yet regain their worldly bearings and lead a "normal life" in Russia and America, lay the sources of its enormous energies and contradictions, its startling full life and its inexorable destruction.

A few examples, necessarily brief, that do little justice to Howe's superb account of Yiddishkeit. In his chapters on the Daily Forward, he describes how this leading newspaper functioned as a teacher of the tribe—a kindergarten that taught new manners and a university that explained the intellectuals to the masses (and vice versa); a counselor in all manner of family, work and personal problems; an organ for high socialist essays and lurid crime stories, for Yiddish soap opera on one page and the fiction of I.B. Singer on the next. In sum, as Howe puts it, "a large enclosing mirror that reflected the whole of the world of Yiddish—its best, its worst, its most ingrown, its most outgoing, its soaring idealism, its crass materialism, everything." It was all held together by the remarkable Abraham Cahan, who wrote the one distinguished novel in English about the immigrant experience, The Rise of David Levinsky, whose theme is the melancholy wages of success; Cahan knew from the start that the more the Forward built a bridge to America, the more of its readers would cross it. At the same time, his newspaper held up the idea of the underlying unity of a culture that would strongly mark the work of American Jews, from the movies of Hollywood to the pages of Commentary.

Yiddish theater began as the one refuge in the years of darkness, serving up lofty sententiousness, flooded emotionality and low pageantry: Moshe Lieb Halpern called it a cross between a synagogue and a bawdy house. In the 50 years that followed it tried to inch its way toward modern realism and theatrical art, especially the Russian model. But its audience continued to clamor for the war-horses of historical spectacle or family schmaltz, preferably a touch of both, such as Mirele Efros, first called "The Jewish Queen Lear," in which ungrateful, worldly sons eventually return to confirm their mother's wisdom. Such plays provided the audience with what they wanted: the brilliant genre acting of Adler, Thomashefsky, Maurice Schwartz, in the higher and lower registers (the best acting in New York, according to Stark Young), and a plot that confirmed the old wisdom that a persecuted minority requires strict family discipline—i.e., Mamma knows best. Yet it was just this function that enabled Yiddish theater to flourish, creating something akin to Italian opera, in Howe's view, by the expressiveness and vigor of its uncomplicated theatricality. Perhaps in time, with the development of more sophisticated Yiddish audiences, the theater would have caught up with the aspirations and abilities of its Joseph Ben Amis and H. Leivicks. But there was no time: "a wink of history and it was over."

I have not touched on Howe's chapter on Yiddish poetry—the soul of Yiddishkeit and the most highly developed of its literary arts, leading the charmed and bitter life, as poetry usually does, of public neglect. Nor have I indicated Howe's treatment of the dispersion of the immigrant ethos, through the comedians from Eddie Cantor to Lenny Bruce, the painters such as Jacob Epstein and the Soyer brothers, or the American novelists from Henry to Philip Roth. Here Howe bears down on the point I began with—the legacy of Yiddish culture in the deeper levels of consciousness and moral will: for example, the abiding commitment to the esthetic of Judaism itself—"beauty is a quality, not a form; a content, not an arrangement"—the moral and esthetic belong to the same realm. Or in recent fiction, one sees the creation of a new American prose with a Yiddish flavor, and a carrying out of the strategy of the great Yiddish actors—"realism with a little extra," as Harold Clurman puts it. At the same time, Howe observes the waning of the Yiddish influence under the same paradox that governed its own rapid development and attenuation.

The sense of this rich and terrible brevity provides the tone of World of Our Fathers—the note of up-and-doing, striving, even frenzy mingling with the note of frustration, sacrifice, incompleteness. This tone, now brisk, now elegiac, also arises from Howe's feeling for the tragic dialectic of his story—that the "normal life" that these self-educated workers and their tribunes strove to create proved to be but a staging area for their children's escape from the family, community and culture. Perhaps the last word fittingly belongs to David Goldenbloom, whom Howe, like the world he lived in, has rescued from near-oblivion:

What else can I tell you. My children went their own way. I am proud of them, but there are things we can't talk about. Still, I have no complaints. My circumstances were what they were. My family has been a whole world to me. I still take pleasure in Sholom Aleichem, and to me Bazarov and Raskolnikov are like friends of my youth. But to think of them is to be reminded that there was a door which, for me, never opened.