UNCONSCIOUS JEWISH CULTURE
The point is that my Jewishness was not in any positive way dramatized to me, but by the cut of a discriminatory remark. I had always known, of course, that we were not Christians, that there was a kind of antipathy between our God and their God, but it was all in the family, so to speak. I never remember having chosen my friends on the basis of their race or religion, and I was brought up in Harlem where Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Italians and Jews crowded into the schools. Where then, was our Jewish culture? Now that I look back on it I can find its traces, but it must be remembered that all this is a rationalization after the fact. Until I had to fight competitively in the economic world, I had about the same idea of myself as any other American boy had.
The outcroppings of a Jewish culture that I can perceive from this distance were on the order of the sabbath ceremony on Friday night. This was really the closest I ever got to God, but my God was not, in my mind anyway, opposed or truly delimited from any other God. It was not a ceremony that was protecting me from anything outside. It was simply, in my youthful unawareness, the way any well-behaved family ate dinner on Friday night. It was an hour in my week when I felt the warmth of closeness with my family, and especially an hour when I sensed the full force of my grandfather’s dignity, inasmuch as he wrapped himself in the quiet aura of a certain sanctity. He, I felt, was speaking to God; he knew what he was doing; when he blessed the bread I felt instinctively that he had learned the manner of blessing and the words directly from Moses. Inasmuch as I was not afraid of being a Jew, the whole ceremony had no protective significance. It was similar to saluting the flag. In a long period of peace one salutes the flag mumbo-jumbo and that’s the end of it. In a war, when danger threatens, the ritual takes on combative proportions.
The same is true of Jewishness, in my opinion. I feel that had even the relative calm and prosperity of the twenties continued for two or three more decades, Jewishness as a state of mind and anti-Semitism would have very largely disappeared. The former may shock some Jews to whom Jewish history was taught in an intelligent way, to whom the ethic of Judaism was handed on for what it is, the very fountainhead of the highest Christian ethic. But for them the identity of Judaism and of Jewishness would have had to be maintained on a cultural level, on a non-combative level, on a level of philosophy and morality. Judaism would then appear for what it actually is, a religion, and in less devout hands, a moral philosophy. And it would have to stand or fall on its relevancy for the day.
Unhappily, anti-Semitism has confused my generation on the matter of the Hebrew religion as separate from Jewish culture. To my mind the Hebrew religion is a matter of option to the Jewish writer as to all Jews, but Jewish culture is his to defend whether he is religious or not. For if he does not defend it, he may die of its destruction. In the last analysis, the minimum of what we mean by Jewish culture today, and in this present world context, is the simple right to have been descended from Jews. Jewish culture is the sum and total of what history has made us. It is what the enemy wishes to burn. It is us, expressed in any form.
JEWS WITHOUT STIGMA
But let me go on with some personal history which I believe impinges upon the question of a new Jewish cultural revival. After working two years I finally had enough money for tuition, and I enrolled in a midwestern university. Now I was a little less, but not much less, innocent about the Jewish situation. For instance, my first friend there was the boy who sat next to me in the English class. He was tapped by a well-known fraternity. Naturally he wanted me with him. I hadn’t the money or inclination for fraternity life so I declined. He was a very rich boy and very affable. Our friendship continued throughout the year. In my sophomore year I wrote a play and it was all about Jewish people. It won the literary prize of the year and was produced on the campus. I ran into him again after the play was produced. He pretended not to notice me. I think that was when I knew I was a Jew.
The important thing, however, was the fact that I wrote my first play about Jews, and that I never regarded them, while writing, as Jews but as people. The creative act was completely innocent, it was absolutely clear of any pleading, or any sense of difference. I wrote as though the whole world were Jewish. At the same time, there were explicit references to the Jewish religion, there was a scene, the best scene, of a Friday night sabbath. There was a Jewish villain manipulating people to his own advantage, and a Jewish hero opposing him. There was good and evil in the most delightfully true proportions, with never a qualm about “revealing” anything about Jews. The play was a great success.
INNOCENCE IS SHATTERED
Why didn’t I go on writing about Jews?
I think a psychological shock did it. It was a shock that flew over two thousand miles of ocean, over the mountains of Eastern America, and right into my room in a little midwestern college town. It was Hitler. It was what he was saying about Jews and doing to Jews. And worse, it was the difference between my own indignation, my own anger, and the absolute calm, the indifference of the people around me. I felt for the first time in my life that I was in danger. And most important, my first play was optioned three times by three different Broadway producers. All of them wanted to do it, and all finally gave up for the stated reason that it was not a time to come forward with a play about Jews, especially a play in which a villain was Jewish. Really he wasn’t a very bad villain, in fact a rather likeable villain, probably because I loved everybody in those days. Nevertheless I think I gave up the Jews as literary material because I was afraid that even an innocent allusion to the individual wrong-doing of an individual Jew would be inflamed by the atmosphere, ignited by the hatred I suddenly was aware of, and my love would be twisted into a weapon of persecution against Jews. No good writer can approach material in that atmosphere. I cannot censor myself without thwarting my passion for writing itself. I turned away from the Jews as material for my work.
I take my story no further because I believe that what I have told you is sufficient to raise the discussion of a new Jewish literary movement onto a realistic plane. If, in the midst of writing my first play, in the midst of my innocence, when being Jewish seemed merely to be a person—if then someone had said, write more about Jews, bring out of the half darkness the whole truth about life among Jews as you know it, I would have had not the slightest conflict, I would have pitched into the task with joy. And my work, I think, would have been positive, full of humor and the optimism that comes from knowing the Jews well. But today I am no longer innocent. I have been insulted, I have been scorned, I have been threatened. I have heard of violence against Jews, and I have seen it. I have seen insanity in the streets and I have heard it dropping from the mouths of people I had thought were decent people. Instantly, therefore, and inevitably, when I confront the prospect of writing about Jewish life my mood is defensive, and combative. There is hardly a story or play I could write which would not have to contain justifications for behavior that in any other people need not be justified.
ART IN DEFENSE OF OUR PEOPLE
It is a similar dilemma to that of the writers in the thirties. In those days they could not conceive of being socially significant unless everything they wrote had a strike in it. So today, at first blush, many of us cannot see a Jewish theme excepting in direct relation to anti-Semitism. And unfortunately, the same is true of the audience, which seems to approach every work about Jews as though it must be inevitably a plea for relief from oppression, and therefore somehow spurious as art.
If my history parallels that of other Jewish authors, then I think the solution lies in a direction but dimly seen at present. Assuming, for one, that most of us want to be of help in protecting ourselves and our people by means of our art, it seems to me that we must do a very difficult thing with our minds. We must lift ourselves out of the present. That, in order to see the Jewish present. We must move into the area of Jewish life with a new vision, a vision that excludes defensiveness, a point of view whi
ch assumes at once that the Jew need not be “sold” to the American people. It is Sholom Aleichem’s attitude which excluded no part of Jewish life or psychology, which made excuses for nothing but never hesitated to arraign society where society was at fault. It is the attitude of the total truth. I think that with so many of them possessed of profound talents, we ought to be able to create a gallery of Jewish characters so powerful in their reality, so hearty in their depictions, so deeply felt in their emotional lives, that the audience or the reader, by the pure force of the characters themselves will be brought to that state of love and innocence in which I once so briefly lived, when all men are wondrous again and basically good, when all the Gods are friendly and in the family, and when Jews are Jews again in literature and art—in other words, when they are what they were to me—people trying to make some sense out of life, people out of the common pool of humanity, people lazy, people ambitious, people in love, people in jail, people running away, and people dying bravely on some military mountain.
• • •
For us the issue is not whether we are Jews who write, or Jewish writers. It is merely that we know something that no one else can know as well; something that the world needs desperately to know. It is the peculiar and happy quality of art that it carries understanding with it. To face away from Jewish life when one has a story to tell is not to be more universal and less parochial; it is to refuse to do best what no one else can do at all; and equally important, to draw upon Jews for our works is to bring into the family of people—our people, our beloved and creative people, who have been edged away from the table to wait in the shadows like ghosts or pariahs. I am not asking Jews who write to confine themselves to any material any more than I would lay the same rule upon myself. I say only that we wrong ourselves and our own art, as well as our people, by drawing a curtain upon them. In short, I speak not of duty but really of opportunity, and it seems to me that those who understand me ought ponder the relation of their art to the condition of Jewish man.
Miracles
1973
Sometime back in the Fifties, Life sent out a questionnaire asking opinions on the new revolution then taking place, allegedly. I sent mine back unanswered, with the note that there was no revolution. It seems to me now that I was right and wrong.
The only moment of near revolution I know about, at least in my lifetime, was in the winter of 1932 when the leading bankers went to Washington and seriously discussed with the Treasury Department the idea of the Government taking over all the banks. That, and a few days in Flint, Michigan, during the sit-down strikes. These events—along with the widespread talk in business circles and among the people, that the system was actually at an end and some form of socialist ownership had to be the next step lest total chaos overwhelm the United States—had the look of the real thing. In the ensuing one hundred days, the Roosevelt Administration devised a flood of legislation that saved capitalism by laying down what essentially were limits to how crooked you were allowed to be, or how rapacious, without going to jail. And direct money payments to desperate people was made public policy. It was a revolutionary moment, and it lasted for perhaps four or five years, primarily, I think, because the Establishment had lost its nerve, did not really have a clue to solving mass unemployment. Inevitably, to stand in the avant-garde meant espousing socialism; it meant being political.
The turmoil of the Fifties and Sixties came to a head in a booming economy, just after the Establishment had retrieved its poise to the point where it had cleaned out—through McCarthyism—the universities, the arts, of the last of the people who had a social, let alone a socialist, vision. If there were one concept that might stand for the Thirties avant-garde, it was the solidarity of humanity, and if the Fifties had an emblem, it was loneliness. The Thirties radical, of whatever stripe, saw a pattern of deliquescence in the American system; the Fifties youth was bereft of any such comfort. When the new struggle came, it was inevitably a personal and not a political one—because American politics had its strength back and was at least working again.
But if the Sixties was not a revolution in any classic sense—a transfer of power between classes—it did partake of the revolutionary process by overturning certain attitudes toward what a human being is and what he might be. More, the latter-day revolt has offered a new pattern, just as the one in the Thirties attempted to do, to account for the human condition, a hidden matrix which guided us all. So, in the psychological sense, there is a continuity between both generations, and there are others too.
It is commonplace to say that the Thirties revolt was one of the mind while the latest is one of the gut, a contrast between rationalism and mysticism. This distinction is too neat to be true. Of course a lot of people, probably the majority who became radical in the Thirties, were inspired by unfilled bellies and narrowed-down chances to make a buck. Which is natural and legitimate. As natural and legitimate as the number of Fifties and Sixties revolutionaries whose new vision was limited to the idea of getting laid without the etiquette of courting and bullshit.
I was about fourteen when the Depression hit, and like a lot of others who were more or less my age, the first sign of a new age was borne into the house by my father. It was a bad time for fathers who were suddenly no longer leaders, confident family heads, but instead men at a loss as to what to do with themselves tomorrow. The money had stopped, and these men were trained by American individualism to take the guilt on themselves for their failures, just as they had taken the credit for their successes. Under the streetlamp at the corner drugstore the talk was suddenly shifting from whether you were going to be a doctor, lawyer, businessman, or scientist, to what the hell you were going to do after the dreaded day you were graduated from high school. There were suicides in the neighborhood. We had all been sailing this proud and powerful ship, and right there in the middle of the ocean it was beached, stuck on some invisible reef.
It seems easy to tell how it was to live in those years, but I have made several attempts to tell it, and when I do try I know I cannot quite touch that mysterious underwater thing. A catastrophe of such magnitude cannot be delivered up by facts, for it was not merely facts whose impact one felt, not merely the changes in family and friends but a sense that we were in the grip of a mystery deeper and broader and more interior than an economic disaster. The image I have of the Depression is of a blazing sun that never sets, burning down on a dazed, parched people, dust hanging over the streets, the furniture, the kitchen table. It wasn’t only that so many high-class men, leaders, august personages, were turning out to be empty barrels—or common crooks, like the head of the stock exchange. It was that absolutely nothing one had believed was true, and the entire older generation was a horse’s ass.
So I went back to the synagogue—an Orthodox synagogue. And there I found three old men playing pinochle in the entrance corridor of that ugly building. I drew up a chair and sat with them. I had no idea what I wanted there. I could read Hebrew but understand little of what I had been saying. I walked inside and looked at the altar. I thought something would speak to me, but nothing did. I went home and came back a few more times. But the sun stood as still in the heavens as it ever had, and nothing spoke. I even joined the little choir, but still nothing happened to me, nothing moved within me.
The mute threat underlying unemployment is that you will never cease being a child. I was favored—I had gotten a job delivering rolls and bread from four to seven every morning, for four dollars a week. Freezing cats followed my bike from house to house, crying in pain. The summer dawns were lovely over the sleeping one-family houses, but they were spoiled by my fear of time bringing me closer to graduation. A man was not wanted anywhere, and the job ads in the New York Times specified “White,” or “Christian,” although there were never more than a dozen openings, anyway. A man, let alone a boy, wasn’t worth anything. There was no way at all to touch the world.
One afternoon on a windy street c
orner, while I was waiting my turn to play handball against the pharmacist’s brick wall, a guy who was already in college started talking about capitalism. I had never heard of capitalism. I didn’t know we lived under a system. I thought it had always been this way. He said that the history of the world (what history?) was the history of the class struggle (what is a class?). He was incomprehensible but a hell of a handball player, so I respected him. He was unique, the only one I knew who stayed on the same subject every time I met him. He kept pouring this stuff over my head, but none of it was sticking; what he was saying didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I was listening only for what I wanted to know—how to restore my family. How to be their benefactor. How to bring the good times back. How to fix it so my father would again stand there as the leader, instead of coming home at night exhausted, guilty.
This guy kicked the trip wire one afternoon. We were on the beach at Coney Island. In those days families were living under the boardwalk in scrap-metal or wood-slat shacks. We could smell feces and cooking there in the sun. And this guy said, “You are part of the declassed bourgeoisie.”
Life quickened, insane as it sounds, because . . .
Collected Essays Page 46