Fairy tales from my father

On Thanksgiving morning, my 82-year-old father and I sat together to watch NFL football. Men love sports because we can lose ourselves in them as in nothing else. That’s why we become fanatic apostles of one specific team—we submerge ourselves in it, preferring its fortunes and misfortunes and even its style of dress to our own. No surprise, then, that I had fled the demands of my wife and children on Thanksgiving morning to concentrate my entire being, in an easy chair in my father’s living room, on my beloved Houston Texans.

But my father had demands of his own. A coal miner’s son, he grew up in rural Greene County, Indiana, and became the first in his family to go off to college, taking his 17-year-old bride forty miles away to Terre Haute and Indiana State Teachers College, as it was known then. After graduation, he accepted a teaching post in a rural high school outside Crawfordsville (where I was born), and then tried a larger school in the Gary metropolitan area (where my brother was born). Still dissatisfied, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to earn an advanced degree in microbiology. There he was recruited by the chairman of the biology department at Riverside City College. Southern California was booming: the city of Riverside nearly doubled in population between 1950 and 1960. My family arrived in 1957, one year before the Dodgers.

Dad was a teacher—that was all he ever wanted to be. I remember him at the dining room table, a stack of blue books at his right hand, grading straight through until the stack had disappeared. He was quick to explain scientific concepts to his children, and he excelled at illustrating what he was saying with common objects—fruit, string, masking tape—from the kitchen and garage. Although he earned enough credits for a PhD in microbiology at the University of California at Riverside, he did not have the research interests of a scholar. He never finished his dissertation. He may not even have begun it. Instead, my father taught at full load of large classes at RCC for more than four decades. For years, whenever I returned to Riverside for a visit, he and I would run into his grateful and admiring ex-students when we went shopping or out to eat. (One of the strippers at my brother-in-law’s bachelor party had even been one of his students. I never mentioned her to Dad, figuring he would not be nearly as proud of the connection as I was.)

My father did not lack ambition, but he did not have what is conventionally thought of as ambition. He did not itch for career advancement. He avoided academic politics, stayed as silent as Clarence Thomas during faculty meetings, never sought an administrative appointment, and did not waste his time cozying up with the comers and climbers who could have taken him with them up the ladder. He remained loyal to the chairman who had first recruited him. They became friends and bowling teammates, but the chairman was no more hungry for career advancement than Dad. They stayed where they were, in the classroom, on the RCC campus, earning small annual raises, for their entire professional lives. My father demonstrated his loyalty to the man who had hired him, and to the institution that had given him a place, by teaching as well as he could—as imaginatively, as faithfully—for as long as he could.

Talking to him about his teaching career as the Texans ground out an overtime win against the Detroit Lions, I realized that my father had passed along his values to me without really trying. Somewhere along the line I acquired the idee fixe that if only I wrote well—if only I was honest and thorough, having original things to say on important subjects, in prose that was not entirely undistinguished—success would come. When I was about to enter graduate school at Northwestern (I took off a decade to work as a reporter), a leftist friend who had preceded me to a doctorate warned that I would be marginalized in English. I ignored him, because I was convinced that if only I wrote well, etc. After two decades at Texas A&M University, I was the lowest paid associate professor by almost $10,000 a year, although I had written some things I was proud of. The year Paul Hedeen and I published Unrelenting Readers, our large anthology of post-Vietnam poet-critics—the first of its kind, with a historical introduction by me—I was told by the review and evaluation committee that I was “not meeting departmental expectations.”

My experience at Commentary was different only in institutional setting and political orientation. In my fifteen short months as the magazine’s fiction critic and literary blogger, I wrote 139,000 words—a book the size of Lord Jim—and reviewed or wrote reconsiderations of thirty-eight different books. Some of what I wrote wasn’t bad either. I was convinced that if only I wrote well, etc., but in the end, even at a magazine with a long intellectual tradition, different criteria were in force.

Only now, late in life, do I realize that my father’s career was a fairy tale. Dad reached his intellectual maturity at exactly the right time—an expanding postwar economy, a massive population shift to the West, a sky-high confidence in education and a rising demand for scientific training. He could afford to neglect his professional image, to avoid the avoidance of risk, to fulfill his responsibilities and expect to be rewarded for nothing else. Although my father never served in the military—he is blind in one eye—his values are what used to be honored as martial virtues: “Selflessness, devotion to duty, and the courage to challenge difficult and controversial problems,” as an Air Force officer described them. But that description dates from the early ’eighties, the officer was retired, and even then “the military [was] moving away from an institutional orientation where the job is viewed as a ‘calling’ toward a civilian job outlook which emphasizes self-interest.” The martial virtues, in other words, were just as hollow and naïve as my father’s values—propaganda on behalf of institutions that fostered loyalty in an era of labor shortages.

What I believe in is untrue. The alternative of self-interest and seeking career advancement before all else, including personal integrity, is nothing I can believe in. What then do I teach my children?

Open letter to Philip Roth

On what he has meant to his readers, especially his Jewish readers: the daily feature this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily.

A literary prize for Erdrich—at last

Louise Erdrich has won the National Book Award in fiction for The Round House, her thirteenth novel. (My Commentary review of it is here.)

Based on the contentious case of William Janklow, two-time Republican governor of South Dakota who was accused of raping his children’s babysitter at gunpoint in 1967, The Round House starts off promisingly as a thriller. The narrator is the twelve-year-old son of an Ojibwe woman who is raped at the tribe’s round house. Joe (called Oops in the novel’s opening pages and then rarely again) sets himself to finding the rapist. But the reader figures out his identity before Joe does, and the legal issue bogs down in a question of jurisdiction.

Erdrich is outraged that jurisdictional issues prevent the rapists of Indian women from being prosecuted. “This is a book about a huge case of injustice ongoing on reservations,” she told the audience at the awards ceremony, held at the swank Cipriani restaurant in New York last night. Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is that no sense of outrage sneaks into the novel. The narrative voice prefers the dulcet to the angry, the familiar routines of literary modernism to the harder work of keeping outrage in check while blasting injustice.

The characters in The Round House first appeared in Erdrich’s Plague of Doves, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that went instead to Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge. One of the two narrators of the 2008 novel, Judge Antone Bazil Coutts (appearing in the sequel without his first name), is Joe’s father and the husband of Geraldine, the tribal enrollment specialist who is raped by a man with a racist grudge against Indians. This habit of recycling characters and returning to story lines is characteristic of Erdrich. And in fact, Joe reveals in the closing pages of The Round House that, now an adult, he has married the daughter of the family in Love Medicine, Erdrich’s famous first novel from 1984.

After a career of nearly thirty years, Louise Erdrich deserved to win a major literary prize at last. Just not this year. Not for this unremarkable book.

On the strict separation of literature and politics

The dream of “pure poetry” has beguiled those who would remove literature from the blaring disorderly world, and those who would emasculate it, for nearly a century. The term was first introduced by Paul Valéry, who meant simply that poetry should not try to do what history and philosophy can do better, but it fell to the critic Henri Bremond to popularize the concept. In a controversial address to the Académie Française in October 1925, Bremond called for a poésie pure, which would dutifully renounce any baser motive and reduce itself exclusively to poésie. There is, you see, something ineffable about poetry that distinguishes it from prose, and this ineffable quality is what Bremond venerated as its pureté. The pure poem sends its reader into a state not unlike that of religious ecstasy.

In Soviet Russia, meanwhile, the critics who described themselves as Formalists were looking for something similiar—“the specific peculiarities of literary material,” “the autonomy of the aesthetic function” in literature. They called what they were looking for literariness. They would not settle for saying that the distinctive quality of literature, what separates it from all other kinds of human discourse, was ineffable. They wanted to effing name it.

They failed. Every effort to define the unique property of literature has failed, and is doomed to fail. Literature is mimesis! No, it is the sublime! No, it is “that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching”! No, it is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”! No, it is the deconstruction of the hierarchies and binary oppositions of Western ideology! No, it is whatever.

The mind of man hankers after a purity and a perfection that are not numbered within its powers. The truth is that literature is an unholy mess, its borders characterized by dispute rather than international agreement. What some writers and critics plant as a garden, other writers and critics yank up as an overgrowth of weeds. E. D. Hirsch Jr. said it best. Replying to a critic who laughed at him for calling Darwin’s Origin of Species a literary masterpiece, Hirsch pointed to Stanley Edgar Hyman, who had classified Darwin as literature in The Tangled Bank, and to the many editors who had included Darwin in anthologies of Victorian literature. He concluded:

Either literature is defined by traits that someone stipulates, in which case literature can be defined as one pleases; or literature is what the authorities call “literature,” in which case The Origin of Species is literature.It may be insubordination not to yield to the authorities’ view of literature, but the unpleasant reality is that any effort to demarcate a small yard for literature, especially by erecting a wall of separation between it and politics, is arbitrary and hostile to literature. As T. S. Eliot quipped, the demand that poetry be pure is the demand that poetry must be something other than itself to gain respect.

My own definition of literature tries to capture its paradoxical condition: Literature is simply good writing—where “good” has, by definition, no fixed definition. From this angle, though, there is nothing whatever to prevent literary works and reflections from running into politics, precisely like colors, and especially since politics admits nearly as much variety as literature. Some literary genres—satire, epigram, the realistic novel—are impure by choice and wantonly susceptible to politics, but even literary “purists” make a political commitment in retreating to the study from the street. There are also those who, in the name of preserving literature (or themselves) from contamination, would not blink at its forced purification.

Politics is merely advocacy for an arrangement of life, and if the advocacy is well-written—or if the advocate is selected and admired for his good writing—then it is literary too. In calling himself a liberal and entitling his most famous book The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling said much the same thing. He acknowledged the word liberal was “primarily of political import, but its political meaning,” he went on, “defines itself by the quality of life it envisages.” Like any other human being, the writer or critic envisages a life of a certain quality. The writer, who can’t set out to write literature without fishtailing into pretense instead, is concerned with getting the vision down in the right words, or as close to right as humanly possible. The critic is more concerned with the quality of the vision. But writer and critic can no more divorce themselves from questions about the arrangement of life—from political questions, that is—than Jewish men and woman can remain apart forever, even if they are strictly separated for a few hours every week at prayer.

Best fiction of 2012

Amazon has released its choices for best books of the year (h/t: Jenny Che at Page Views). Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, which I reviewed lukewarmly for Commentary in October, grabbed the top spot. Kevin Powers’s Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds, quoted here to verify its god-awfulness, was second.

The conspicuous conclusion is that literary pretension is regularly confused with literary merit, especially among those for whom “literary fiction” is a status symbol. For my money, indisputably the best English-language novel of the year, nominated for not a single literary prize so far, is Christopher R. Beha’s unforgettable What Happened to Sophie Wilder (Tin House). I don’t know anyone who has read Beha’s novel and has not wanted to talk about it immediately.

After a slow start, 2012 turned out to be a rather good year for fiction. Here is my list of the year’s best (in alphabetical order by author, since a ranking of books is almost as pointless as a ranking of college football teams):

• Christopher Buckley, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? (Twelve). A hilarious political satire about America’s anxious relationship with China.

• Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue (Harper). A “used vinyl” store in Oakland, straddling “the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted,” is about to go under, and the question is whether it will take its two owners with it. This is the Chabon—not the Chabon of the splashier and shallower Jewish fiction—the Chabon who is fulfilling his early promise.

• Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead). The favorite for the National Book Award. A collection of nine stories.

• Hillel Halkin, Melisande! What Are Dreams? (Granta). A unique and moving study of marriage, a love letter to conjugal love, by a writer who, writing his first novel at 72, has discovered the secret to great fiction—the creation of characters who are so interesting and complex, so full of life, they do not remain subservient to the plot

• Joshua Henkin, The World Without You (Pantheon). Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. A family divided between left-wing politics and Orthodox Judaism gathers to memoralize a son killed in Iraq. No one now writing is better than Henkin at drawing character.

• Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Henry Holt). Booker Prize-winning historical novel which (in Mantel’s words) “mak[es] the reader a proposal, an offer,” about Anne Boleyn. The second of her absorbing novels about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister.

• Alice Munro, Dear Life (Knopf). The fifteenth book of fiction by the Canadian who is perhaps the greatest story writer now at work. Ten stories, including two that are as good as anything she has ever written, and four autobiographical narratives she calls a “finale.”

• Francesca Segal, The Innocents (Hyperion Voice). Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is transplanted to North West London, where the New York rich become British Jews. If you know Wharton’s novel, Sigal’s rewriting will delight you—her use of the source to illuminate the lives of secularized 21st-century Jews is pitch perfect. If you don’t know Wharton’s novel—as my wife didn’t when she read Sigal’s novel—you’ll still love this story of divided and honorable love.

• Pauls Toutonghi, Evel Knievel Days (Crown). A half-Egyptian obsessive compulsive travels to Cairo to find his father; adventures ensue.

• Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins (Harper). Hollywood descends upon a desolate Italian port town in 1962. I haven’t read it yet, but I trust Mark Athitakis, who praises “the comedy in the marrow of its sentences.”

• Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood (Little, Brown). A guided tour of the ethnic rivalries in Miami. Wolfe’s best novel yet.

• Hilma Wolitzer, An Available Man (Ballantine). In Commentary I described it as a “refreshing comedy of regeneration after grief.” A widower tries to reenter the dating scene. You’ll never guess whom he ends up with.

• Marly Youmans, A Death at the White Camellia Orphange (Mercer University Press). In the middle of the Depression, an eleven-year-old orphan—Pip Tattnal, who seems to be mildly autistic—hops a freight train after his brother is murdered. A Southern picaresque in the garden of good and evil.

Historical novels

W. D. Howells, too, disliked them. “[I]t is asking a good deal of people in these busy, practical times,” he said, “to go back with you for half a dozen or more generations, and to lose themselves among strange customs and among strange people in a strange land.” As not unusual for Howells, he may have got it exactly backward. Maybe people prefer historical novels precisely because they are a break with business and practicality.

Historical novels are treated like a “tramp in the parlor of letters,” said A. B. Guthrie Jr., himself a historical novelist who won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Way West. Indeed, the popular appeal of historical novels has long been a scandal for serious writers. And so the attempt has been made and made and made again to endow them with what Lion Feuchtwanger (another historical novelist) called a “higher purpose” than seeking merely to “relate historical facts just as brightly and excitingly as possible.” (Though that might seem purpose enough to you and me.) So what, according to Feuchtwanger, is the higher purpose of historical novels? To “express [a writer’s] own concept of the world.”

You might wonder how such a purpose differentiates the historical novel from any other kind of literature, but the expression of higher banality seems habitual to those who would mount a serious defense of historical fiction. The champions of the lesbian novelist Sarah Waters—a writer who deserves better champions—suggest that her neo-Victorian novels express a queer historiography, “which destabilize[s] the idea that studies of differences and similarities across time must exist in tension and opposition to each other.” Thus Waters’s work “demonstrates that historical fiction may use the past to comment on issues of contemporary concern. . . .”[1] So many words to say so little that is surprising!

Historical novels are “the most consistently political” genre of fiction, Perry Anderson said in the London Review of Books last year. The basis of his claim, of course, is the 1937 study of The Historical Novel by the Marxist critic György Lukács, who argued that the sole aim of the historical novel is to show how class divisions operate in a period of the past—what Anderson calls the “tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life.” From this angle, the model of the historical novel was fashioned by Sir Walter Scott, because no one is better at dramatizing the forces of class.

But this reductive Marxism is as specious and unlikely as the claim by another Lukacs—the historian John Lukacs—who told an absorbing 1992 symposium conducted by American Heritage magazine that “Every novel is a historical novel.” Yes, and every brush is made with bristles; except for those that aren’t.

If the historical novel is about class tensions, though, and if every novel is a historical novel, then it follows that every new novel must be written about class tensions. Monism leads to imperative. If the solution to writing historical fiction has been found, it would be irresponsible not to chase after it. Michael Oakeshott dispatches the fallacy when he discusses historical novelists’ older sibling, the historian:

[D]on’t you believe it. Nobody has solved the problem of how history should be written, and for the same reason that nobody has solved the problem of how poetry should be written, or how chess should be played or how houses should be built—because there is no such problem. We have been told, so often as to be nearly persuaded, that history must be scientific, or it must be imaginative, or it must be impartial, or it must be impersonal. But why all this “must”? Why should there be only one kind of history? And we are particularly puzzled because, as far as we know, there are a great many different kinds of history, and we find it very difficult to say one kind is really so much better than any other that it is the only kind we can allow the name to.[2]The mistake lies in talking about the historical novel as if there were just one way to go, as if there were classical unities every historical novel must obey. (Lukács and Lukacs channel Aristotle!) The truth is that there are only historical novels—novels, plural—with as many different approaches to historiography, and to making up stories about the past, as there are historical novelists. Alessandro Manzoni saw further than twentieth-century theorists when he said the historical novel’s aim is to “give a faithful representation of history.” The historical novel, he concluded, is “the most refined and ingenuous effort” yet devised to “mix history and invention, whatever their form.”

The question is whether a historical novel owes its best effects, its keenest pleasures, to being set in a historical past—whether its historical trappings are necessary or mere bubkes. Confining myself to novels in English, and to one novel per author (in alphabetical order), here are twenty-five historical novels which, if not the best of their genre, make good use of their historical settings, for instruction and delight. The list is not exhaustive, because my reading is not exhaustive:

• John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960). Barth is in eclipse, but deserves to be remembered for this novel: the story of a seventeenth-century poet who is commissioned to write an epic poem, The Marylandiad. Like many of the very best historical novels, it not only asks its readers to “lose themselves among strange customs,” but also in a strange language—a curious and authentic seventeenth-century English.

• Frederick Buechner, Godric (1980). The life of a twelfth-century saint, from Britain to Jerusalem and back, whose talk is spicy and impious at times, wholly realistic at all times.

• Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). The first-person confession of the bushranger and outlaw who became a folk hero to Australians and was hanged by the British in 1880.

• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Perhaps the best example of a subvariety that I’ve called the historical novel of faith—the story of Jean Baptiste Lamy of Santa Fe and his vicar Joseph Machebeuf.

• J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973). Indian Muslims besiege a British imperial outpost during the “Great Rebellion” of 1857.

• Esther Forbes, A Mirror for Witches (1928). The chronicle, written in contemporary idiom, of a seventeenth-century girl accused of being a witch.

• George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman (1969). The multivolume autobiography of a Victorian “bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady,” begins in the first Anglo-Afghan War.

• Thomas Gavin, King Kill (1977). The incredible hoax of the automated nineteenth-century chess player, which was exposed by Edgar Allan Poe.

• Linda Grant, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000). A British hairdresser transplants herself to Mandate Palestine, becomes involved with the Irgun.

• Robert Graves, Sergeant Lamb’s America (1940). Better known for his Claudius novels, Graves is at his best in this story of a Dublin man in the service of His Majesty’s Army in the American Revolution.

• MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist (1976). In 1897, a Swedish scientist tries to reach the North Pole via hot-air balloon.

• Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990). A powerful philosophical novel about the U.S. slave trade in the early nineteenth century.

• Thomas Keneally, Confederates (1979). In the American Heritage symposium, Garry Wills called it the best novel about the Civil War. I can’t disagree. Stonewall Jackson’s invasion of the North as experienced by Virginia soldiers in the ranks.

• Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941). In a sixteenth-century village in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France, a woman discovers that the man she passionately loves is an imposter.

• Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1967). Blood libel in Czarist Russia—a retelling of the Beilis case.

• Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012). Even better than her first Booker Prize-winning historical novel, Wolf Hall (2009)—the story of Anne Boleyn told from the slant of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister.

• Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1985). There are other contenders (Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident, A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, Oakley Hall’s Warlock, Eugene Manlove Rhodes’s The Proud Sheriff, Wallace Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain), but McMurtry’s may be the best novel ever written about the American West. One of my fondest memories is trying to read it, all 843 pages of it, in a single sitting.

• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004). Three generations of Iowa preachers, from the Civil War to the 1950’s. An American classic.

• Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974). The battle of Gettysburg is reconstructed from multiple perspectives—nearly all of them officers’.

• Jane Smiley, The Greenlanders (1988). The final years of Gardar, the Norwegian bishopric in Greenland, and the people who live there in the fourteenth century.

• Allen Tate, The Fathers (1938). The rise and fall of old Virginia from the last antebellum days to the first months of the War between the States.

• Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter (1997). A first-hand account of the birth of modern art narrated by an American painter who studied under Robert Henri and palled around with Rockwell Kent.

• Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002). An orphan girl serves a Victorian collector of erotica in a variety of capacities.

• John Williams, Augustus (1972). An epistolary historical novel about the nineteen-year-old who finds himself, upon the death of his great-uncle Julius, the new Caesar of the Roman Empire.

• Marly Youmans, Catherwood (1996). In seventeenth-century New York (near “Albanie”), a young mother and her baby girl become lost in the woods for seven months—and survive.

The source for everything you need to know about historical novels is Margaret Donsbach’s astounding one-woman site, which categorizes over five thousand titles. To the making and reading of historical novels, as Donsbach convincingly shows, there is no possible end.

Update: Readers have suggested Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (about Novalis, the German Romantic poet who lived from 1772 to 1801), Stephen Harrigan’s The Gates of the Alamo (about, well, the Alamo), Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire (the battle of Thermopylae as told by the only Greek survivor, and also Joseph Epstein’s favorite historical novel), Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French (about an Irish insurgency, aided by the French, in 1798), Gore Vidal’s Creation (about Persia in the fifth century before the Common Era), Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of novels about the British Navy (although it is a private theory of mine that you either like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, as I do, or O’Brian’s naval novels), George Garrett’s The Death of the Fox (about Sir Walter Ralegh), and Ernest Haycox’s The Border Trumpet or Trouble Shooter (two Western novels).
____________________

[1] Mandy Koolen, “Historical Fiction and the Revaluing of Historical Continuity in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet,” Contemporary Literature 51 (2010): 371–72.

[2] Michael Oakeshott, “What Do We Look for in an Historian?” (1928), in What Is History? and Other Essays, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Charlottesville, Va.: Imprint Academic, 2004), p. 135.

Statement on my firing

On Thursday afternoon I was fired from my position as literary blogger and book critic for Commentary magazine. The facts are these. At about 4:20 p.m. I posted the piece directly below, entitled “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” The original post contained two sentences at the end of the first paragraph that I deleted, for obvious reasons, when publishing it here instead:

My post yesterday [“The GOP Can’t Be the Party of Old White Men”] was only the opinion of this author, who also happens to write for COMMENTARY and speaks for no one else; my post did not reflect an editorial shift on the part of the magazine. It is, in fact, a testament to his editorship that John Podhoretz encourages a diversity and even a clash of opinions here at COMMENTARY.A little more than an hour later I received an email from John Podhoretz, telling me that I had been terminated. I removed the offending post almost immediately.

Whether I was fired for the substance of what I wrote or for violating the magazine’s procedures is unclear even to me, especially since my followup emails have gone unanswered. Since I do not have the right to quote the message in which Mr Podhoretz terminated me—he never called—I can only summarize his objections. If I understand him correctly, he considered my defense of gay marriage to be political, and thus inappropriate for a literary blog, and he could not understand why I did not seek prior approval for it.

Now, I did not conceive of my post as political; it was, to my mind, a literary and philosophical defense of gay marriage, derived from my reading, utterly silent on questions of public policy. Moreover, I had written explicitly political posts in the past, most notably my attack on OccupyWriters.com, without objection—except from the likes of Salman Rushdie, who tweeted his disgust. And in the sixteen months I wrote Commentary’s literary blog, I was never once required or reminded to get prior approval before posting. I was given, and I assumed that I had, complete editorial independence.

All of this was naïve of me—gobsmackingly, blindingly naïve. My wife says that I have “never learned how to play the game.” The argument is the only thing that matters to me—and too often I have pursued it in heedless disregard of any other consideration. What’s more, as an academic for more than twenty years, I have become too comfortable with intellectual autonomy; I clearly and admittedly did not show the proper deference to Mr Podhoretz’s authority. On the other hand, he had approved a post by me the day before—Wednesday, the day after the election—calling upon Republicans to “drop their opposition to gay marriage.” It never dawned on me that a followup to that earlier post, developing one of its premises, would be wrong.

Was I fired for writing in defense of gay marriage? Well, I think it’s equally naïve to think that I would have been sacked if I had used any other political topic as an occasion for literary and philosophical reflections—the topic of illegal immigration, for example. I’m the last one who could say for sure.

Addendum: I remain grateful to John Podhoretz for giving me the opportunity to write Commentary’s literary blog and fiction chronicle, and I wish him and the magazine nothing but the best.

Update: John Podhoretz gives his side of the story here. Over at the New York Daily News blog Page Views, Alexander Nazaryan offers a balanced account of the mess. I consider the matter closed and shall have nothing further to say about it publicly.

The conservative case for gay marriage

My post at Commentary’s Contentions blog on Wednesday, calling upon Republicans to “drop their opposition to same-sex marriage,” occasioned a lot of commentary, much of it quite angry. For the record, I have publicly supported gay marriage for three years now, and privately for longer than that.

The post was not written out of political expedience or disingenuousness. Over at the Daily Beast, Megan McArdle explains what the GOP would look like if it simply threw in the towel:

Gay marriage is going away as an issue, because the advocates have won. (And in the legislature, not in the courts, as they should). Not all the dominos have fallen yet, but they're lined up the right way; it's just a matter of time. Young evangelicals either don't get energized about the issue, or are actively pro. The GOP knows they're eventually going to moderate, which is why you see these fumbling, ham-fisted attempts to reach out to GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans.What I hold is that a strong case for gay marriage can be made according to conservative principles. The heart of my argument is this line from my post yesterday: “If marriage is everything we conservatives say it is, why should we want to deny its moral benefits to gays?” What I did not do yesterday, however, was to spell out what we conservatives say marriage is. I want to do so now. My conviction is that nothing in a moral account of marriage necessarily excludes gays.

In proposing this line of argument, I realize that I am setting myself against the late James Q. Wilson, who offered perhaps the most powerful case “Against Homosexual Marriage”:It would make more sense to ask why an alternative to marriage should be invented and praised when we are having enough trouble maintaining the institution at all. Suppose that gay or lesbian marriage were authorized; rather than producing [what Andrew Sullivan calls] a “natural foil” that would “not eclipse the theme,” I suspect such a move would call even more seriously into question the role of marriage at a time when the threats to it, ranging from single-parent families to common divorces, have hit record highs.I suspect the opposite—that gay marriage would strengthen the institution. The enormous social pressures on marriage, ranging from the sexualization of popular culture to the casualness of no-fault divorce, have not caused the institution to buckle, but to be reconstituted as a well-fortified refuge. As Pascal Bruckner observes in his newly translated Paradox of Love (Princeton, 2012):The fact that we can choose between traditional marriage, cohabitation, and a free relationship, that in the course of our lives we can encounter several forms of interpersonal connection, is ultimately a major step forward. We have not destroyed the institution of matrimony, we have, like hermit crabs, adapted it to our needs, bent it to our will to the point of making it unrecognizable. The old fortress has not collapsed and remains desirable for many people.Traditional marriage is counter-cultural. It may be only one of the choices available on the sexual buffet, but it is a choice—a choice to stand at cross purposes to the very culture that, in Wilson’s words, threatens the institution. In my view, traditional marriage needs all the allies it can get. One of the most prominent voices raised against same-sex marriage is the gay activist Michael Warner, who argues in The Trouble with Normal that marriage will have the insidious and unwelcome effect of making gays normal. He’s right. That’s the whole point of marriage.

The best account of traditional marriage is Denis de Rougemont’s classic L'Amour et l'Occident, first published in French in 1940 and translated into English in 1956 as Love in the Western World. A history of the literary idea of romantic passion, the book is especially good for my purposes because it ends, as George Woodcock noticed in reviewing it for the Sewanee Review, by coming down “in favor of Catholic orthodoxy.” No more conservative a case for marriage, in short, has ever been made. (Full disclosure: I am an Orthodox Jew.)

De Rougemont argues that much of the confusion in our emotional lives comes about as a result of having inherited two different moral systems—one that values sexual passion, the Stendhalian experience of being swept away against one’s interests, and the other that demands a plighting of a troth, in the wonderful old-fashioned phrase—a promise to stay. “Passion and marriage,” de Rougemont writes, “are essentially irreconcilable.” The one wants “irresistible love,” the heady sensation of losing all control and surrendering to ecstasy; the other prefers being in a state of happiness, which requires self-mastery and the ability to give to someone else what everyone expects in his day-to-day life, what even the passionate man hopes to return to after a bout of rapture—a “sense of constancy.” Too often, though, the desire for romance becomes the basis of marriage. The mistake is tragic. De Rougemont explains:Romance feeds on obstacles, short excitations, and partings; marriage, on the contrary, is made up of wont, daily propinquity, growing accustomed to one another. Romance calls for “the far-away love” of the troubadors; marriage, for love of “one’s neighbor.” Where, then, a couple have married in obedience to a romance, it is natural that the first time a conflict of temperament or of taste becomes manifest the parties should each ask themselves: “Why did I marry?” And it is no less natural that, obsessed by the universal propaganda in favor of romance, each should seize the first occasion to fall in love with somebody else.Traditional marriage is not the denial of passion, but its mastery. A “man does not control himself owing to lack of ‘passion’ (meaning ‘power of the libido’),” de Rougemont says, “but precisely because he loves and, in virtue of his love, will not inflict himself.” He will not force himself upon his lover, because to love means “to accept another being for his or her own sake, in his or her own limitations and reality, choosing this being not as an excuse for excited elevation or as an ‘object of contemplation,’ but as having a matchless and independent life.” Thus de Rougemont’s definition of traditional marriage, in which he underlines every word: it is the institution in which passion is “contained,” not by morals, but by love.

Tell me, because I do not understand, why gays are excluded from this beautiful and moving account—unless you think that gays are disqualified, simply by virtue of loving someone of the same and not the other sex, from the experience of self-mastery and keeping faith. The moral acceptance of another human being is not dependent upon his or her gender. If you agree with James Q. Wilson that “we are having enough trouble maintaining the institution,” I would think you’d want the help of anyone who also seeks to maintain it. Conservatives who believe in traditional marriage have no reason not to bring gay marriage under their belief.

Barzun on intellect

Jacques Barzun has a died at the age of 104. Over at Literary Commentary, I have written a short obituary of a man I greatly admired.

After writing the obit, I sat down to thumb through my old copy of The House of Intellect (1959), one of my favorite Barzuns. I found that I had underlined it heavily. In my appreciation of him, I’d questioned whether Barzun can rightly be described as a “public intellectual.” The House of Intellect is a critique and an apologia for the role. Here are some of the best sentences in the book:

• “[T]hough Intellect neither implies nor precludes intelligence, two of its uses are—to make up for the lack of intelligence and to amplify the force of it by giving it quick recognition and apt embodiment.”

• “A man cannot help being intelligent, but he can easily help become intellectual. Intellect is an institution; it stands up as it were by itself, apart from the possession of intelligence. . . .”

• “The truth is that Intellect can be diminished in its own eyes only with its own consent. . . .”

• The “vice of specialization” entails the denial of intellect. “It is a denial because it rests on the superstition that understanding is identical with professional skill. The universal formula is: ‘You cannot understand or appreciate my art (science) (trade) unless you practice it.’ ”

• “The professional’s fallacy, in short, is to make no distinction between knowing the subject and knowing the craft.”

• The contemporary writer or artist “makes clear that regard for the works of the dead does no good to him, who is living, or rather starving, and that if our age wants a good name hereafter, it must give him the means to create.”

• “Being intellectually feeble, these complaints cannot lead to action; they merely poison the air and the lives of those that breathe it.”

• “[T]here is a difference between the artist and the refugees from life who hide their nakedness in artistic toggery; there is a parallel difference between criticism which is the gateway of understanding and that which is a substitute for artistic work.”

• “A truly modern dictionary would add an entry under ‘human’: ‘the opposite of admirable’. . . .”

• “To admire is an expression of freedom that is denied by envious equality, and admiration depends on fame.”

• “[W]henever an effect cannot be related to a clear cause superstition thrives.”

• “Criticism is supposed to demonstrate an opponent’s error or the merits of a better idea—intellectual work par excellence.”

• “[M]anners are minor morals which facilitate the relations of men, chiefly through words.”

• “Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it and commend it, and are busy about it, at the same time as they are willing to degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.”

• Our colleges and universities graduate “young men and women of unquestionable gifts, energy, and zest, whose fine intelligence is not matched by strength of intellect.”

• “Without the power to articulate there can be no sustained thought.”

• Barzun disliked school “activities,” especially “group projects,” which are devised to relieve students of the “menace of drudgery, that is, of work.” “The intention, one may suppose, is to inure the young to the ways of collective journalism.”

• “[T]he simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately, following an argument, detecting an ambiguity or a false inference, testing guesses by summoning up contrary instances, organizing one’s time and one’s thoughts for study—all these arts . . . cannot be taught in the air but only through the difficulties of a defined subject [and] cannot be taught in one course or one year, but must be acquired gradually, in dozens of connections. . . .”

• “The truth is that dealing with the contemporary prepares the mind poorly for a thoughtful life, shortening judgment and distorting perspective.”

• More often than not, the teacher’s relation to the student “is no longer one of legitimate authority met by willing submission, but one of popularity-seeking met by patronizing tolerance.”

• “Of all the deprivations that modern life imposes on intellectual man, the abandonment of work is the cruelest, for all other occupations kill time and drain the spirit, whereas work fills both, and in the doing satisfies at once love and aggression.”

• “In turning individual militant liberalism into socially protective liberalism, they idealized all downtrodden minorities, including children, and instead of ‘liquidating ignorance’ hunted down Intellect as an ogre to destroy.”

• “A believer in a system, or as we say today, an ideology, supports it with all his gregarious instincts—he is no longer alone in his struggle against the world. . . .”

• To think is not the same as “merely prospecting among ideas.”

• On contemporary fiction: “Meaning has evaporated because clear thought is no longer considered an important constituent of art.”

• “[T]he ethics of the intellectual must be those, not of worldly habit, but of deliberate scruple. His only models are the Just Man and the Magnanimous Man. These are distinct technical terms which must not be taken as roughly synonymous with saint. They mean nothing more than what they say: the just man is he who puts his whole strength in seeing the object or idea as it would appear if he had omniscience; and the magnanimous man is he who puts his pride in declining mean advantage or easy victory.”

• On literary scholarship. “It seems odd that a profession whose exercise requires the making of fine distinctions should fail to make one between significant knowledge and insignificant scribbling.”

• When a critic “applies” a method—or what would now be called a theory—he is hoping “to find out what intuition and reflection fail to disclose. Once again, judgment is abandoned or disguised in favor of an objective gimmick.”

• The only question to ask of any intellectual work. “What do we know afterward that we did not know before?”

• “The language which modern pedantry devises is an imitation of jargon, a pseudo-jargon, in which the terms are not fixed and not necessary.”

The Island Within

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded.

Ludwig Lewisohn is nearly forgotten today, but in his day he was a literary celebrity. He was so well-known, in fact, that his marital scandals—multiple divorces, accusation of bigamy, flight to Europe with a 20-years-younger woman, second wedding interrupted by an hysterical jilted lover—made national headlines. Through it all he kept writing, publishing 35 books by the time of his death in 1955. A passionate champion of Zionism and sexual freedom, Lewisohn was equally zealous to promote “Jewish self-realization.” His novel The Island Within (1928), based on Lewisohn’s own Jewish reawakening, was a polemical summons for American Jews to return to their “native tradition.”

Born in Germany in 1882 to “Jews of unmixed blood” (in his own words), Lewisohn was raised as a Methodist in Charleston, South Carolina. After being told by his graduate advisor at Columbia “how terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a good position,” he abandoned his dream of becoming an English professor and became a writer instead—novelist, critic, autobiographer. A journey to Palestine in 1925, taken on the advice of Chaim Weitzmann, caused him to embark upon “the great study” of Jewish civilization, and among the first fruits was The Island Within.

*

The novel leads one Jewish family through four generations to an overwhelming question: “Why not, since one was a Jew and had to live Jewishly, get—in vulgar but sensible parlance—the maximum good out of one’s Jewishness, one’s racial poetry, one’s ancestral history?” The Levy family story begins in Vilna in 1840 with a melamed or Hebrew-school teacher who has a “dark secret.” Despite belonging “to the order of the learned and the holy,” he is “dry of heart,” with neither glow nor fervor to his prayers. Mendel longs for the forbidden knowledge of nature and geometry.

When he is offered a job as a traveling agent for a rich and secularized brandy distiller, Mendel accepts in order to have the means to give his wife a velvet dress and “maybe in time a silver menorah for the Sabbath!” The job leaves him no time for reading and study, however, and he grows nostalgic for “his little school, for the icy evenings in the library of the synagogue, for the warmer contacts and argumentative exercises of the beth hamidrash.” Worse yet, his son Ephraim leaves yeshivah, “the Talmudic university,” shaves off his earlocks, discards the “long coat of the orthodox,” adopts the latest German fashions, and goes to work for the distiller, marrying his daughter and rising to become his “right-hand man.” Ephraim sees no reason to regret his actions. “Were not new Jewish voices coming out of the west?” he asks. “Could not one be a European and a Jew?”

The pattern is set by which the Levys slough off the Jewish religion. The first half of The Island Within chronicles the first 75 years of the process. Ephraim’s son Jacob immigrates to the U.S. and establishes a thriving furniture business, becoming more German than American, because German culture signified the romance of modernity: “But this, too, was, though he did not know it, a kind of Americanization.” It is his son Arthur—Ephraim’s grandson, Mendel’s great-grandson—who is the first thoroughly American, the first thoroughly modern, man in the family. His very name represents how far the Levys have progressed in abandoning their “ancestral consciousness.”

The second half of the novel is devoted to Arthur’s story. A cool and aloof rationalist, Arthur trains to become a Freudian psychiatrist, imbued with the highest principles of science and morality. He quits the staff of a Hospital for the Insane over the abuse of patients (“God — damn — interfering — KIKES,” a colleague seethes upon learning of his complaints); he opens a private practice in New York. Around 1918 or 1919, Arthur Levy meets Elizabeth Knight at his cousin’s apartment. A beautiful young journalist who is active in the suffrage movement, she is the daughter of a Campbellite preacher. Elizabeth describes herself as a “lost soul.” Arthur should run like the wind, but instead he marries her. They have a child together before he finally admits to himself that theirs is a mésalliance.

The problem, as Arthur explains to Elizabeth, is that they belong to different kinds:You’re saved, Elizabeth, because you live in a stream of tradition that is native to you. The stream changes. You don’t believe what your father believes. The intellectual processes and assents are different. But the stream is the same. You are an American Protestant. Your divergences from your ancestors are normal divergences within the native tradition of your race and blood and historic experience. But I and many like me have tried to live as though we were American Protestants or, at least, the next best thing to that. And we’re not. And the real American Protestants know we’re not. And so we live in a void, in a spiritual vacuum.Arthur goes on to say that there is no human being “who isn’t outwardly and inwardly some kind of a human being.” There is no being human without classification; or, as the multiculturalists might say, without identity. Lewisohn’s language is, at least in part, the clumsy idiom of his day: “race and blood.” (Not that our day is any more coherent on the subject.) But the remaining part of Lewisohn’s language is provocative and promising. The kind of person that a person is is determined by her “native tradition”—the stream of ideas in which she is baptized—and the “historic experience” of others of her kind. Whether she is Christian or Jewish, for example, is more important than whether she is shy, outgoing, fun, mean, immature, dramatic, or nice.

While Elizabeth lives in a “stream of tradition that is native to [her],” Arthur has nothing of the sort. His family has succeeded in uprooting him from Jewish tradition—and not only him, but an entire population, which had sought the “protective mimicry” of blending in with their Christian neighbors rather than leading Jewish lives. “Jews like himself who denied any tradition or character of their own,” he reflects, “were really trying to do a thing that was unhuman, that no one else was trying to do.”

And so Arthur “goes back to the Jews,” although neither he nor Lewisohn are clear on just what the going back involves. He separates from Elizabeth, and decides to accompany a fact-finding commission to Rumania “to investigate the condition of the Jewish communities there,” but after that? Will he undertake to master a Jewish language? Study the Talmud? Emigrate to Palestine? His plans are unclear. Stephen S. Wise called Lewisohn’s novel an answer to the assimilationist ideology of the melting pot (an early anticipation of multiculturalism’s “salad bowl” of ethnic identities), but other than the simple act of identification, his return to the Jews is entirely negative, a mere rejection of his long effort to assimilate into the Christian majority and deny the fact of his Jewishness. “I didn’t have to resurrect the Jew,” Arthur tells his wife. “I just put away a pretense—a stubborn, hard, protective pretense.”

His brother-in-law makes a far more promising choice. After briefly leaving his wife and daughter, Eli returns and asks to be taken back. But only if Hazel agrees to “move to a Jewish neighborhood” and “have some more children” and “be a Jewish wife same as her mother or mine.” If she promises to do that, she will never have again anything to complain about him. “And I want my children to be brought up as observant Jews, same as I was,” he adds, “no matter what they believe.” Hazel even suggests that they “join a nice congregation.”

*

When it was published in 1928, The Island Within seemed like a revolutionary document. The New York Times book reviewer John Chamberlain wondered if it were the best novel of the decade. That would be the decade of The Age of Innocence, An American Tragedy, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Sound and the Fury. No matter how interesting it is in the history of Jewish ideas, though, the honest truth is that The Island Within is not much of a novel.

Lewisohn starts each new section of the book with a sermonic essay written in the tones of a pundit (“Big business and the theory of cultural solidarity, Henry Ford and Nordic supremacy, have always been united on the ground of practical politics”). And though it contains many interesting sociological details of Jewish life in America before the Great Depression, for much of its length The Island Within is a narrative only in the sense that one stage of the family history follows an earlier in chronological order.

Finally there is the style. Lewisohn’s deepest literary influences were the German romantics, and they show. His central terms are vague evocations of deep, nearly inarticulate feeling. His celebrations of sexual fulfillment and the nobility of “creative expression” are embarrassingly ornate, as if Lewisohn consigned them to the decorative arts. As Alfred Kazin astutely said in On Native Grounds, Lewisohn’s rhetoric was “self-indulgent” and carried “to the point of self-ridicule.” It is difficult to wade through the oracular dicta to reach the good sense at the heart of his thinking.

And even as a significant moment in the history of Jewish “return,” The Island Within is ultimately disappointing. Lewisohn could not imagine moving to a Jewish neighborhood, joining a nice congregation, and asking his wife—one of them, at least—to be a Jewish mother. Half a century after Lewisohn’s novel was published, thousands of young American Jews would arrive at crossroads similar to that of Arthur Levy’s, rediscovering and celebrating their ethnic origins as part of a nationwide search for “roots.” Most had never heard of Lewisohn, although he might have taught them (if nothing else) that their happiness depended upon reenrolling in the Jewish people. For what to do next, however, they would have to consult another source.

Bread Givers

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded.

Books for women have been a distinct and popular variety of Jewish literature at least since the early seventeenth century, when Ts’ena Ur’ena, a Yiddish “woman’s Bible” embellished with amazing tales and pointed lessons, started its ascent to become the most widely read Jewish book for the next 300 years. In America, the first writer to tap into this deep well was the Polish-born Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882–1970). Her 1925 novel Bread Givers, frequently misinterpreted as a feminist attack upon Jewish patriarchy, is in fact the most successful attempt ever undertaken to reproduce in another language the half-serious, half-sensationalist brand of popular Yiddish fiction.

It is easy enough to understand why Bread Givers should have earned a reputation as a Jewish Room of One’s Own. Yezierska tells the story of the four Smolinsky sisters, each of whom “let go her chance of fixing up her happiness because of Father’s unforgiving pride.” Except for Sara, that is. The youngest of the four and the book’s narrator, she slips the paternal yoke and eventually realizes her modest ambition “to make myself for a person and come among people.”

The father, Reb Moisheh Smolinsky, is a batlen, the Hebrew-Yiddish term for an unworldly man who devotes all his time to the study of holy books. His villainy consists in expecting his daughters not only to support him but to endure his preaching when they drag themselves home after a day’s work. “More and more,” Sara laments, “I began to see Father, in his innocent craziness to hold up the Light of the Law to his children, was a tyrant more terrible than the Tsar from Russia.”

The father exercises his tyranny by chasing off the daughters’ suitors. Bessie, the eldest, known as “the burden bearer” for supporting the household on her wages from a clothing shop, brings home the head cutter who earns “six, sometimes seven dollars a week” and dreams of becoming a manufacturer, like David Levinsky. Generously he declares to her father that he wants Bessie “like she is, without a dowry.”

“Why don’t you ask me first what I want?” cried Father. “Don’t forget when she gets married, who’ll carry me the burden from this house? She earns me the biggest wages. With Bessie I can be independent. I don’t have to grab the first man that wants her. I can wait yet a few years.”Rejecting the cutter, he weds Bessie instead to an elderly widower, a fish monger with six children. Soon she finds herself working in his store, her thin arms covered with “gummy scales,” fighting for her life with “the bargaining yentehs.”

The pattern (and the heartbreak) is repeated twice more. Mashah, called “Empty-head” because she “lived in the pleasure she got from her beauty as Father lived in his Holy Torah,” is adored by a young pianist from a wealthy family, while Fania is wooed by an impoverished Yiddish poet who inscribes lyrics in her honor. All their father sees in them are “a meshumid [apostate] who plays on the Sabbath” and a “schnorrer [beggar] who writes . . . love letters on wrapping paper.” Arranging matches instead with two men he imagines to be rich and suitable husbands, he is proven wrong in both cases.

That leaves Sara, called Blood-and-Iron for the stubbornness of her will. She does not wait around for Father to marry her off. “You made the lives of the other children!” she shouts in his face. “I’m going to make my own life!” And so she does—finding work as a presser, saving money for college, and returning home with the prestigious credential of a schoolteacher.

*

It is small wonder that Yezierska’s novel, turning on the contrast between the self-redeeming Sara and her “life-weary” older sisters, might appeal so strongly to a feminist like the one who praised it for recording “the destructiveness of a culture in which women are ‘Bread Givers,’ serving men so that they may serve God.” And despite the hyperbole, there is reason to be grateful to them, because it was feminist critics who sponsored the novel’s rediscovery and reprinting in 1975, fifty years after its original publication. Yet the saga of a father’s tyranny and a daughter’s liberation is not a political statement, not a critique of women’s place in traditional Judaism, but a plot, a means of parceling out dramatic scenes to move readers to fear and pity.

Although arranged marriages were a fact of life in medieval Jewry (“Parents were never censured—indeed, they were praised,” writes the late historian Jacob Katz—“for arranging a match for daughters of thirteen and fourteen and sons of fifteen or sixteen, and even for marrying off their children at such young ages”), by the first quarter of the twentieth century they had become more a literary than a social convention. So, too, with the figure of the tyrannical father. Toward the end of Bread Givers, Reb Moisheh dissolves in self-pity: “With all I have done for my daughters—the morals I soaked into them, the religion I preached into them from the day they were born—yet they leave me in my old age, as they left King Lear. . . .” The comparison is apt. Reb Moisheh Smolinsky is a tragic and memorable figure, oversized and raging like Shakespeare’s great king. But when it comes to actuality, Sholem Aleichem’s no-less-stylized portrait of hapless Tevye and his daughters’ quest for fulfillment offers a truer insight into modernity’s impact upon a Jewish father’s authority.

According to a recent critic, Bread Givers “comes out of a tradition of ethnic immigrant literature, documenting the experiences of European Jews in New York City in the beginning decades of the twentieth century.” Reader, rejoice: Bread Givers provides documentary evidence of nothing. The novel has its feet planted solidly in the Yiddish tradition of farvaylung-literatur (entertainment literature), which from the very beginning, as in the novels of I. M. Dik (1808–1893), never strictly separated the sheer delight of storytelling from moral didacticism.

Abraham Cahan’s Rise of David Levinsky has been called the first Yiddish novel in America, although it was written and published in English. The title more deservedly goes to Yezierska’s 1925 masterpiece. Far more effectively than any other American novelist—and that includes Henry Roth and Bernard Malamud—Yezierska, who was born in Russian Poland and emigrated to the United States around the age of twelve or thirteen, captures the rhythms of Yiddish syntax. Her English is a first-generation English: the sentence structure bends under the weight of her native Yiddish. The recovery of Yiddish in later English-language writers is strikingly different: while the vocabulary may reach for Yiddish, the syntax remains natively English.

But Yezierska’s mame-loshn (mother tongue) is Yiddish. Not only do her characters speak with a Yiddish inflection. The narrative voice also slips into a Yiddish lilt. The principal difference is in the use of prepositions, which will be immediately recognizable to anyone with ultra-Orthodox friends who grew up in Brooklyn with Yiddish as a first language. We stayed by them rather than with them, a Yiddish speaker will say. But the word-order also betrays the non-native speaker of English. “How could I come into their homes,” Sara asks when she is away at college (Yezierska herself attended the University of Wisconsin), “exchange with them my thoughts, break with them bread at their tables?” An American, who grew up monolingual in English, would defer the phrases with them till after the nouns.

In its language and literary background, Bread Givers may just be the most Jewish novel in American literature. And it helps to know that a little preaching, about women’s place in Judaism if not about Jewish law, is a conventional and expected feature of a ripping good Jewish yarn. But you need not mistake Reb Moisheh Smolinsky for an actual Jewish patriarch to be vastly entertained by Anzia Yezierska’s lively and inspiriting novel.

The Fugitive

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded.

Popular Jewish fiction in America began to absorb other Jewish literary models at a surprisingly early date. Ezra Brudno’s novel The Fugitive, published in 1904 by Doubleday, Page, is a pioneering American example of what Alan Mintz calls the “novel of apostasy.” A sprawling first-person chronicle written in the style of 19th-century Hebrew fiction and autobiography, it recounts an Eastern European childhood of poverty and persecution, a narrow and harsh early Jewish education, the arrival of sin (represented by sex and Spinoza), and the scrape with modernity that ends in an irreversible loss of faith. Brudno also tosses in a blood libel, the influence of the Jewish Enlightenment [Haskalah] and Zionism, and the first account in English-language fiction of a pogrom.

Ezra Selig Brudno was born in Volozhin, Lithuania—home of the famous yeshivah—in 1877. Descended from a distinguished rabbinical family (his great-grandfather had studied with the Vilna Gaon), he emigrated to the U.S. as a child, attended Yale and Western Reserve Universities, and practiced law in Cleveland where he became an assistant district attorney and was known as a Progressive Republican.

The theme of The Fugitive can be summarized as “Once a Jew, always a Jew.” The protagonist, Israel Abramovitch, becomes an orphan when his father is lynched for the ritual murder of a Christian child and his mother soon dies of grief and exhaustion. After a fire destroys his native shtetl, Israel becomes a wanderer. Beaten unconscious by Lithuanian swineherds, he is taken in and nursed back to health by a Christian magistrate, only to be sent packing upon discovery with the magistrate’s blonde daughter. A brief spell in the yeshivah at Javolin (a phonetic anagram of Volozhin), cut short when “forbidden books,” including Spinoza’s Ethics, are found in his room, leads to his forming the ambition of becoming a doctor. Embarking on his studies in Kiev, he runs into the magistrate’s daughter and undertakes to convert for her sake.

But Israel’s plans are disrupted by the May 1881 pogrom, which destroys the city’s entire Jewish district. Concluding that Russia holds no future for him, he heads West, eventually finding his way to America. Once there he labors in a sweatshop, gets himself arrested as an anarchist, and finally goes to work for a Christian missionary who puts him through medical school in return for literary services. In New York he is again reunited with the magistrate’s daughter and marries her—without benefit of conversion.

Unlike Emma Wolf’s Other Things Being Equal, The Fugitive is not a romance of intermarriage. Rather, Israel and his girl have passed beyond Christian-Jewish enmity into what, in a dream-vision, he has glimpsed as a joint “symbolism of the innocent blood.” Just as the martyred Jesus is “the symbol of His people,” so too are the victims of blood libels and pogroms the symbols of the Jews. For Israel to marry an innocent Christian girl is thus not only to find happiness but to accept his own symbolic status as a Jew.

If a modern reader is unlikely to warm to Brudno’s vision (“Side by side[,] the life of the Crucified and the life of my race among the nations”), the reason may be that the Kiev pogrom is the most powerful scene in the novel. “The street,” writes Brudno, “was filled with gesticulating, brawling peasants, who gave vent to volleys of oaths as only descendants of Tartars know how, and rapaciously attacked Jewish shops and dwellings.” A piano is pushed from a second-story window. On the floor above, a peasant leans out, swinging an infant by its feet and shouting, “Catch it! Catch it!”:

    “Ho! ho! ho! ho!” cheered hundreds from the crowd below. “Throw down the Jewish brat!”
    With the exultation of conquest the screeching babe was flung high in the air, like a ball, and it came down upon the pavement with a splash of blood that bespattered the bystanders.Two rioters drag an old man by his feet down the road, “the Jew’s white hair sweeping the stones of the pavement and painting their sharp edges red with flowing blood.”

Israel himself is a victim of this pogrom, nearly killed in trying to prevent the rape of a Jewish maiden. Two months later, convalescing in the home of a friend, he hears about Zionism for the first time. His friend explains why he has decided to leave Europe for Palestine:The nations that teach love in the name of the crucified Jew do not practice it. They never practice it. The Crusaders, the auto-da-fé, the Russian knout, the German press—they are all pursuing the same end in the name of Christian brotherhood.And yet, though his “conscience and self-esteem as a Jew” have been “aroused by the recent massacre,” Israel cannot join his friend, turning his face instead to the New World.

In short, Brudno seems to have conceived his book as a piece of propaganda for cultural assimilation. But in undermining its thesis with starkly contrary evidence, as well as in its ease with Jewish religion, Jewish sources, and Jewish idiom, the novel’s effect outruns its conception and establishes its lasting importance as a precursor to such better known (and more accomplished) works as The Rise of David Levinsky and Call It Sleep. Not incidentally, The Fugitive also serves as a useful reminder of a perennially relevant fact: Jews in the United States have never been terrorized by blood libel or pogrom.

Other Things Being Equal

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded.

When was American Jewish fiction born? The credit usually goes to Nathan Mayer’s Civil War novel Differences, published by Bloch in 1867. But a more likely date is 1892, when the Christian-owned house of A. C. McClurg released the first American novel written by a Jew, on a Jewish subject, but aimed at a general audience. Other Things Being Equal is a romance of intermarriage. Its author, Emma Wolf, 27 at the time of publication, was a wheelchair-bound San Franciscan and the spinster daughter of a well-to-do tobacco merchant from Alsace.

While Differences made small impact and is nearly impossible to find today, Other Things Being Equal was so popular that it remained in print for more than two decades. The first edition went through six printings between 1892 and 1901; in 1916, Wolf revised the text and McClurg republished it. Hundreds of readers wrote to thank her for having “untangled a knotty problem.” She would later say she had no idea how many marriages her novel was responsible for.

Wolf’s theme is announced in the novel’s opening pages. A family cousin asks the main character why her parents “mix so much with Christians.” The reply: “Fellow-feeling, I suppose. We all dance and talk alike; and as we do not hold [religious] services at receptions, wherein lies the difference?” The Jews and Christians of her class—San Francisco’s fashionable, gilded class—“have had the same schooling, speak the same language, read the same books, are surrounded by the same elements of home refinement.” And since class is stronger than religion in America, wherein indeed lies the difference?

Other Things Being Equal contests the notion that there is any. Ruth Levice, a tall girl with a “pure Madonna face” and something “almost Oriental” about her, is the 22-year-old daughter of a rich San Francisco merchant. As the novel opens, her mother has exhausted herself through arduous social obligations, and the worried family has summoned Dr. Herbert Kemp, a 35-year-old specialist in nervous diseases with the “highest reputation for skill.”

On his visits to oversee her mother’s “food and rest cure,” Kemp chats with Ruth about this and that. One time the talk turns to the Jews. Kemp expresses admiration for the “race.” Ruth thanks him: “I am proud of many Jewish traits,” she says. But Kemp is confused. He has noticed that, while Jews “hold the balance of power in the musical and histrionic worlds,” they “do not seem to have made much headway in the other branches of art.” She replies with a parable about a Rose of Sharon, which faded when removed from the Holy Land. When the pious watered it with tears of ecstasy, however, the “petals sprang up, flushed into life.” Ruth repeats the moral she has learned from her rabbi: “In the light of toleration and love, we too have revived, we too are looking up.”

Kemp is touched. And so the “peculiar, inexplicable feeling of mutual understanding” grows between him and Ruth, which gradually deepens into love. (Wolf’s chief narrative problem is filling the time while it does so.) Finally, at a summer resort in the mountains, he asks her to marry him. “If you really want me,” she says without hesitation.

But her father is not so eager. “Child, you are a Jewess,” he says, and “Dr. Kemp is a Christian.” (A Unitarian, to be exact.) “What difference can that make,” she asks, “since we love each other?” She has never considered the religious gulf as anything more than a “mere passing shadow.” Asking her to think about that gulf now, her father urges to ponder “every sacrifice, social and religious, it enforces.” But, she counters, has not he himself taught her “to look upon my Christian friends as upon my Jewish”? And does he not admit Dr. Kemp to be “irreproachable from every standpoint?”

Mr. Levice is not an Orthodox Jew. He is a Reform Jew, but not merely an adherent; he is a propagandist for Reform. It is far too late in the day to summon the force of religious law. And as for mere outward “forms,” Ruth observes, “you, Father, have bred in me contempt for all but a few.” Still, she assures him that she is not going to renounce her native religion, even as her husband-to-be has no intention of renouncing his. Mutual respect will be the rule. As the “irreproachable” Dr. Kemp himself tells her father, “[I]f my wife would permit me to go with her upon her holidays to your beautiful Temple, no one would listen more reverently than I.”

The compromise they propose would become familiar in later decades as the Jewish rate of intermarriage soared: a little bit of Judaism, a little bit of Christianity, and everybody is happy—or, at least, nobody is offended or expected to do very much. In 1892, however, the idea was unthinkable to organized Judaism. Even the Reform movement continued to oppose intermarriage, although upon what grounds was unclear.

On his deathbed, Mr. Levice comes around and blesses the union, reciting birkat habanim on the head of his future son-in-law. It is the one and only time in the novel that Wolf drops into a Jewish idiom.

*

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel is that it is addressed simultaneously to two audiences: those Christians for whom a certain lack of cultural refinement is “the inevitable mark of the [Jewish] race” and those Jews for whom objections to intermarriage are one of the “minor forms” of Jewish life that “are slowly dying out and will soon be remembered only historically.” On the latter point, Wolf makes no pretense of neutrality.

For Jewish readers, the vilification of traditional Jewish attitudes toward intermarriage will be most striking. The contemporary reviewer for American Jewess, a magazine which described itself as the only one in the world “devoted to the interests of Jewish women,” clearly understood this as the novel’s claim to originality:It is perhaps for the first time that an American writer ventures in a romance to attack the racial and religious prejudice of the Jews, trying to establish a closer social relationship between Jews and Gentiles. This is done by pure and simple motives, without violating existing faiths. Matrimony is freed from religious environments and placed plainly on social grounds. . . . Orthodoxy finally yields to the power of humanity. Without sensationalism or sentimentality the climax of the story is reached. Jewish religious scruples crumble into dust when attacked by the strong impulses of the human heart.What is less obvious is what Wolf actually values about Jewish life. She finds Jewish housekeeping too strict for her tastes (“as if at any moment a search-warrant for dirt might be served”); faults “Jewish etiquette, or rather Jewish espionage,” for not permitting an unmarried woman to appear in public unescorted by a man; is impatient with the habit of “Jewish people with diseased imaginations” to construe “every remark on the race as a personal calumny.” Although her characters describe themselves as “intensely Jewish” and swear they will die as Jews, their Jewishness consists of little beyond heated but vacuous declarations of identity, and much criticism.

Ever since feminist scholars rediscovered Other Things Being Equal, it has been treated as a proto-feminist novel about a woman who risks social ostracism to seek her freedom from the bondage of custom. It is hardly that. As a work of fiction, it owes more to literary convention than to political courage. As a novel of ideas, its value is as a testament to just how deeply the ideology of romance, of love as sufficient reason for tossing aside other responsibilities, had penetrated the consciousness of some significant number of American Jews well over a century ago.

The Rise of David Levinsky

Originally published by Jewish Ideas Daily in May 2010. Revised and expanded.

In American literature, Leslie Fiedler once quipped, nothing succeeds like failure. But among American Jewish writers, something like the reverse is closer to the truth: nothing fails so miserably as success. And nowhere is this seen more clearly than in The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), the first classic of Jewish fiction in America.

Written by Abraham Cahan, editor of the Yiddish daily Forward from 1903 to 1946, The Rise of David Levinsky adopts the rags-to-riches formula of Horatio Alger’s wildly popular books for boys, but with a twist. David Levinsky comes to America a penniless immigrant and rises to success as a cloak-and-suit manufacturer “worth more than two million dollars”—only to find his life empty and insignificant. He fails to complete his education, fails to marry, fails to create a home for himself in his new land. He advances in the garment trade only through his “personation” of more successful men; deep inside, in the privacy of his soul, he experiences himself as a fraud.

How did this happen? The novel opens in the Russian “Pale of Settlement,” and its early pages conjure the atmosphere of poverty, violence, and zeal for learning that characterized the lives of Jews there. Much of this ground had been covered by Ezra Brudno’s earlier novel The Fugitive, but Cahan’s treatment is livelier and more exacting. Indeed, early reviewers praised the Russia section as perhaps the best part of the novel.

When his mother dies at the hands of antisemites, David is thrown upon charity. He distinguishes himself as a student of Talmud—Cahan may have been the first to propose that talmudic study explains why “our people represent a high percentage of mental vigor”—and a rich benefactor rewards him with free room and board. He promptly falls in love with the daughter of the house, who wants something better for him than Talmud. She raises the money to send him to America, where he hopes to become an educated man.

Once in the Promised Land, David takes work in a sewing shop to earn money for college, but his life is changed forever—he is “led astray,” he later says—when he accidentally spills a bottle of milk on a pile of silk coats. Abused by his boss, David plots revenge by stealing the company’s designer, whose “Americanized copies of French models had found special favor with the buyer of a certain large department store,” and starting up a garment business.

To get a drop on the competition, David lets his skilled tailors take Saturdays off instead of Sundays. In gratitude, the Sabbath-observant Jews are willing to work for lower pay. Such “cheap labor,” which he candidly admits is his “chief excuse for being” as a clothing manufacturer, gives him “an advantage over the princes of the trade.” When the Cloakmakers’ Union goes on strike, David makes a pretense of joining the industry-wide lockout but clandestinely permits his tailors to keep working, picking up the orders that other manufacturers have left unfilled. “What was a great calamity to the trade in general,” he reflects, “seemed to be a source of overwhelming prosperity to me.”

Thus David Levinsky’s rise, accomplished by cheating the competition and exploiting labor. Small wonder he will conclude his life story by declaring that, for all the “thrilling sense of my present power” when compared with his “days of need and despair,” nevertheless his “sense of triumph is coupled with a brooding sense of emptiness and insignificance,” and the “lack of anything like a great, deep interest.”

Although the book purports to be Levinsky’s autobiography, Cahan is at his best when he instructs his narrator to step back from his own story and become a street-level observer of Jewish immigrants, reporting the strange customs they adopt in turn-of-the-century New York. He transcribes, for example, the “uncouth language” of the Jewish pushcart man firing a “volley of obscenities at a departing housewife who had priced something on his cart without buying it.” He narrates the comic struggles of native Yiddish speakers in night school, butchering English in a hopeless effort to master “real Yankee utterance.” Newly wealthy Jews who parade their munificence in synagogue before their former Russian neighbors; unhappy Jewish housewives who dream of romance and squirm with guilt; affluent Jewish vacationers in the Catskills who rise to their feet at the American national anthem, “offering thanksgiving to the flag under which they were eating this good dinner, wearing these expensive clothes”; Yiddish writers “of two opposing schools” who quarrel at the top of their voices in a Bohemian café: through portraits like these Cahan’s book delivers a continually fascinating first-hand report of a lost place and time. The Rise of David Levinsky has been called the first Yiddish novel in America, even though it was written and published in English. It would be more accurate to call it the first Russian novel in America. Cahan adapts the tradition of Turgenev’s and Tolstoy’s realism to the American Jewish scene.

In the end, however, Cahan’s novel is driven less by sharp-eyed realism or a keen novelistic imagination than by a fixed idea, and is the poorer for it. Although he himself was an entrepreneur, building up the Forward to a circulation of 275,000 at its peak, Cahan neither understood nor appreciated business success. That starting a business and getting it to succeed requires not just hard work and luck but courage and real talent—“aptitudes,” in the words of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, “present in only a small fraction of the population”—is entirely alien to Cahan’s philosophy. He could not believe that, for a businessman like David Levinsky, the garment trade might itself be a “great, deep interest.” A lifelong socialist, Cahan was committed to the view that by definition any capitalist venture was exploitative, a means of legalized theft. His novel is a socialist roman à these, relentlessly pursuing its set-in-concrete ideological theme that private ownership destroys the soul.

On thematic grounds, The Rise of David Levinsky is barely distinguishable from Elias Tobenkin’s Witte Arrives, which preceded it by a year. But as Ruth R. Wisse has written, Cahan’s novel served as the model for many later works of American Jewish literature “in which the hero’s emotional sterility is the predictable price for his financial satiety.” Levinsky is a familiar type of Jewish success story, embarrassed if not made ashamed by his “satiety.” What the novel shows is that, if antisemitism is the socialism of fools, the long Jewish love affair with radical politics has been the socialism of shlimils.

David Levinsky’s inner failure earns neither the novelist’s nor the reader’s imaginative sympathy. Instead, what arouses that sympathy, and redeems the novel, are the loud streets teeming with the Jews whom Levinsky has left behind—many of them, no doubt, consoling themselves with fantasies of socialist revolution. Perhaps better than any other book, The Rise of David Levinsky depicts a Jewish world in which the losers are more successful and emotionally alive than the winners, on the page if not in life.

On being irradiated

Yesterday I started my second round of cancer radiation—a “palliative” treatment, in this case, to relieve the pain in my right hip. Zell Miller, the former governor and senator from Georgia, describes himself as an “80-year-old man with 100-year-old legs.” That pretty much captures the feeling in my right leg. Can I have Miller’s extra twenty years?

The worst part of radiation is not the side effects, including a fatigue that leaves you too listless to go for a cup of coffee. The worst part is the daily interruption, the small daily indignity of traveling to a windowless chamber in which you are asked to pull your pants below your knees and lie perfectly still, around which you must organize your schedule and thinking and expectations. I clamber onto a hard metal table (a nurse must lift my right leg onto it, since I no longer have the strength to do so). My feet are slotted into plastic stirrups; I am given a blue rubber ring to grip, asked what music I’d like to hear (“Do we have time for all six Brandenburg concertos?”), and then I try to float my mind elsewhere while the nurses mark up my skin with Sharpies and line me up in the linear accelerator’s crosshairs.

The radiation itself is painless. It’s the dread that hurts. In last night’s episode of The Closer (my wife’s favorite TV show and mine too), a drug-company representative who scammed oncologists by selling them saline instead of medicine for chemotherapy defended himself by saying that he was merely helping cancer patients to enjoy their last few months as human beings, rather than “dried-up husks.” The cancer patient never feels like a husk, though. He feels like a ghost within the husk.

Nothing makes you feel more ghostly than the knowledge that the same thing that killed Madame Curie, Harry K. Daghlian, and Louis Slotin is being beamed through your body—that part of you is being killed so the rest of you might live. The ghost is more precious than the husk, although it is sometimes a struggle to get the ghost to appear.