Jewish Lit - Passing Thoughts ...
By Eric Shapiro for EN-365 - Special Studies in Jewish Literature with Steve Stern Spring 2010 ...
Shallow Polemic and Intimate Description in Jews Without Money
The Lower East Side Jewish ghetto was known for its atrocious living conditions. Overcrowding, bad sanitation and a lack of hope left its residents in a state of desperation. As parents slaved away to feed their families, children were left to fend for themselves in the streets, a cesspool of moral depravity that destroyed their innocence.
In his novel Jews Without Money, Michael Gold portrays the Lower East Side ghetto where he grew up. In contrast to Henry Roth, who made use of post-modern, Freudian methods in his examination of life in the ghetto through the eyes of a particularly introspective young boy, Gold has a clear political agenda and he wears it on his sleeve. His overriding message is that poverty is, in essence, the root of all societal problems. To make this point, he relies on both intimate description and polemical rants. The former is quite effective, while the latter is shallow and misinformed.
Gold shows a willingness to distort reality in service of his leftist agenda. The ghetto was by all accounts an unpleasant place to live, but Gold, in an attempt to provoke feelings of horror from the reader, makes the environment in which he grew up seem even worse than it was, constantly exaggerating realities of the ghetto and thereby magnifying the horrors of the setting. By emphasizing the worst aspects of the Lower East Side and making them seem more common than they are, he crafts a modern day Gomorra that resembles, but does not accurately represent, its setting. All of this is within the framework of a simplistic narrative that pits the noble, innocent and poor working family against the wealthy aristocrats responsible for their suffering.
The results of Gold’s approach are decidedly mixed. On the one hand, he adds a palpable sense of drama to the affair with the over-the-top situations and broadly-drawn characters. On the other hand, he often overstates his case, adhering to a ham-fisted, single-minded message that risks numbing readers to the very real problem of urban poverty. In the same vein, he betrays a simplistic, black and white view of the world common in political radicals of the time. He asserts: “There never were any Jewish gangsters in Europe. The Jews there were a timid bookish lot. The Jews have done no killing since Jerusalem fell. That’s why the murder-loving Christians have called us the “peculiar people.” But it is America that has taught the sons of tubercular Jewish tailors how to kill.” This statement is problematic on many levels and exemplifies Gold’s limitations as a thinker. He perceives the world according to a narrow, simplistic ideology that revolves around class conflict and oppression. When reality does not coincide with his vision, he exaggerates, and, in the aforementioned quote, he lies in order to compensate.
There were, in fact, Jewish mobsters in Eastern European shtetls. Also, the Old Testament describes a number of instances in which the Jewish people, supposedly at the behest of God, conquered cities and massacred their inhabitants. Case in point, Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, in which he and his followers did not rest until ‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword’ (Joshua 6:21). The story of Joshua, along with similarly ghastly morality tales such as that of Noah’s ark, are implicit in Jewish culture, even if they do not often manifest themselves.
To be fair, poverty and a sense of hopelessness in the Lower East Side ghetto did spur some Jews to turn to crime. Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and others like them, on which Gold’s character of Louis One Eye is likely based, gained reputations for their exploits in organized crime. However, Gold forfeits his credibility by whitewashing history and ignoring instances of Jewish violence. When reality does not fit the author’s narrative about urban poverty causing all of society’s ills, he is all too willing to distort it. Although this practice and the simplistic worldview it serves detract from the overall quality of Jews Without Money, Gold’s keen eye for detail and his ability to create strong images in a concise manner are considerable assets to the novel. In one example of the former, Gold describes the ghetto during winter: “Winter. Children, old men and women fight like hungry dogs around a half-finished building… Winter. Bums sleep in rows like dead fish… Winter. In an Irish home a dead baby lies wrapped in a towel” (Gold 259). There is a certain poetry to Gold’s spare style that shines when his prose is unburdened by heavy-handed political rhetoric. Despite his limited vocabulary and a reliance on simple, clichéd metaphors, his descriptions are quite evocative and the images he conjures stick in the reader’s head, far more than his simplistic polemical rants. Intimate details like the ones above suggest that Gold writes best when he draws on his personal experience rather than abstract ideologies.
Gold also conveys a clear understanding of the forces that drive his Jewish characters. The protagonist and his parents may not be the most complex characters, but in the process of telling their story, Gold offers compelling insights into their way of life.On page 143, he tells of how “The East Side worshiped doctors, but in nervous cases, or in mishaps of the personal life, it sometimes reverted to medievalism” (Gold 143). In one brief sentence, Gold describes the clash between Old World values and New World aspirations that played out in the lives of Jewish immigrants.
Gold is at his best when he avoids polemical screed and sticks to observations. His keen descriptions speak much louder than his rhetoric and he risks undermining his credibility in readers’ eyes by indulging in his often misinformed rants and utopian visions. As a snapshot of urban poverty in the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East side, Jews Without Money is a success. As a work of literature with a sophisticated political message, it falls short.
An American Tragedy
Saul Bellow’s novel Seize the Day is a peculiar kind of tragedy. Its protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, is not particularly likeable or sympathetic, at least initially. A child of privilege who has quit his job out of sheer egoism, he is resigned to coasting along until he runs out of money and his father, a successful retired businessman, runs out of patience. Unlike tragic characters like Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, he is not a man of great quality doomed to a horrific fate due to some inherent defect. Rather, he is profoundly, passionately unremarkable, a man of average intellect deluded by the society in which he lives into thinking he is entitled to a life of luxury and personal satisfaction. The tragedy of Seize the Day lies in the false promise of the American Dream, an outdated, misguided idea that promises success to everyone and delivers it to only a few.
Tommy is a victim of his own mediocrity, a deep enough thinker to be dissatisfied with his lot, but not talented or enterprising enough to improve it. He craves self-realization, to break away from the expectations of his family and assert his own individuality, but he can do no more than make token gestures. In a painful moment of self-awareness, he remarks on changing his name: “It was, he knew it was, his bid for liberty, Adler being in his mind the title of the species, Tommy the freedom of the person. But Wilky was his inescapable self” (Bellow 21). Tommy is unable to accept himself for who he is and therefore invents an ideal persona that he can never live up to.
Depressed, anxious and desperate, Tommy is vulnerable to the machinations of Dr. Tamkin, a cynical con artist with a false get-rich-quick scheme. It is easy to judge Tommy for his gullibility, but in truth, his actions are understandable given the bundle of false promises sold to him by his society. He is literally swindled by Dr. Tamkin and metaphorically swindled by an America that still clings to a myth of self-realization that is increasingly impossible in an economy where the key players are corporations, not individuals. It is conceivable that had he been born earlier in the nation’s history, when the Western frontier still held vast promise for those with the ambition to explore it, he would have found the satisfaction he was looking for.
Ultimately, the tragedy of Seize the Day is that it predisposes people like Tommy Wilhelm to be manipulated by people like Dr. Tamkin, who instinctively realize that the American Dream is an anachronistic sham whose sole purpose in the modern world is to keep the little man in line by convincing him to operate under the false assumption that his hard work will get him somewhere. His idea of the two souls conveys this idea, albeit in an overly-complicated fashion: “You are not free. Your own betrayer is inside of you and sells you out. You have to obey him like a slave. He makes you work like a horse. And for what? For whom?” (Bellow 67) In other words, people are driven by an inner force that tells them they need to work for some purpose, be it self-realization or the accumulation of wealth. In reality, they are working for the benefit of powerful men who control industry. In reading Call it Sleep, one may or may not pity Tommy Wilhelm, but they will surely pity the society that has created him and experience catharsis at hearing its ills so eloquently and creatively expressed by Bellow.
Why Complain? The Lot of the Diaspora Jewish Male
In Philip Roth’s novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, the title character nurses grievances against the world and against himself. Alexander Portnoy is locked in a state of perpetual agitation over his inability to commit to a healthy romantic relationship. His “complaint” is that his Jewish upbringing has left him with an uncontrollable desire to have sex with non-Jewish women. He expresses this complaint to his doctor in an attempt to validate the promiscuous lifestyle that he is locked into, which he portrays as a product of his individual upbringing and his larger role as a Diaspora Jewish male.
Portnoy blames his problem on several factors, the chief being that his mother was overprotective and made him neurotic with her countless restrictions. He is plagued by a sense of impotence, telling the doctor: “I can’t stand being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy” (Roth 40). In order to assert his masculinity and power, Portnoy engages in forbidden activities. As an adolescent, he masturbates compulsively, and as an adult, he has sex with non-Jewish women.
Portnoy also diagnoses himself as suffering from the condition of the “Diaspora Jewish male.” After years of being victimized at the hands of the world, Jews are left in a state of powerlessness. Portnoy explains: “Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself--frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world” (Roth 299). They are so used to suffering that they manufacture maladies and reasons to do so. Portnoy claims to want emancipation from the suffering of the Diaspora Jewish male, hence his statement: “stick your suffering Jewish heritage up your suffering ass-I happen also to be a human being” (Roth 84). Although Portnoy claims to want to live a healthy adult relationship with a Jewish woman, in reality he is addicted the thrill of having sex with goyim because it makes him feel powerful and the guilt he feels allows him to indulge his masochistic urge to suffer. His complaint is merely a way to pacify the sense of guilt he suffers as a result of his compulsive actions.
Naomi, an Israeli woman Portnoy encounters on his trip to that country, has him pegged: “you seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. I don’t believe you actually want to change your life” (Roth 298). Portnoy complains as an excuse to avoid behaving differently, to pretend that he is dealing with his problems when really he is only purging his guilt through self-deprecation. In telling the story of Portnoy, Philip Roth calls attention to the peculiar plight of the Diaspora Jewish male, whose own worst enemy is himself. Roth provides a clue regarding the purpose of his novel and Portnoy’s long complaint: “So [said the doctor]. Now ve may perhaps to begin. Yes?” (Roth 309). In order to cure the affliction of the Diaspora Jewish male, it must be laid out on the table in all its neurotic glory. That being said, its revelation is only one step in a difficult healing process complicated by the fact that those who suffer from it are not certain they want to be cured. It brings up the question of how to help someone who thrives on their own misery.
“Eli the Fanatic:” You Are What You Wear
Eli, the protagonist of Phillip Roth’s short story, “Eli the Fanatic,” is a man suffering from an identity crisis. At the onset of the story, he is ostensibly a fully assimilated American Jew. He lives in a comfortable American suburb with a wife who is pregnant with their first child. Although not rich, he is living what many would consider the American dream. However, Eli is plagued with an implacable sense of uneasiness that manifests itself in his dealings with a family of Hasidic German Jews that have taken up residence in his neighborhood in the wake of the Holocaust. They feel particularly threatened by one man who parades around town in his old-world Hasidic garb. The town calls upon Eli, a lawyer, to force them out. Despite Eli’s distinct personality, Roth also intends for him to represent the townspeople in general, hence his statement: “I am them, they are me” (265). Thus, in a sense, the character of Eli reflects the attitude of assimilated American Jews in general.
Although he lives a life that many would envy, Eli feels empty. He is emblematic of a conflict that plagues many assimilated Jews. He tellingly remarks: “the trouble was that sometimes the law didn’t seem to be the answer, law didn’t seem to have anything to do with what was aggravating everybody” (Roth 254). In the absence of a religious component to his secular existence, Eli feels as if he is missing something. The system of law on which he has based his career seems arbitrary and does not answer his spiritual needs. To Eli, the sterile rules of the American legal system seem divorced from the world of feelings and passions that he perceives around him. The law is a metaphor for the secularism that has come to characterize the life of Eli and those like him.
Tsurif, a member of the family, tells Eli: “What you call law, I call shame. The heart, Mr. Peck, the heart is law! God!” (Roth 266) The strict religious observance of the Hasidic Jews appeals to Eli’s spiritual hunger. It also offers moral guidance that is absent in secular law, which can be made to serve any purpose. Eli tellingly observes: “Everybody in the world had evil reasons for his actions. Everybody! With reasons so cheap, who buys bulbs?” (Roth 266). Eli is uncomfortable with the fact that secular American law can be made to serve the “evil” purposes inherent in human nature and is plagued by feelings of guilt since his career consists of defending it. Similarly, therapy, which has in large part supplanted religion as a source of consolation for troubled individuals living secular lives, has not provided Eli with peace of mind. Despite professing a dislike of the Hasidic Jews religious practices, they are quite tempting to a man who cannot find comfort in secular remedies.
Compounding Eli’s dissatisfaction with life is the Holocaust which, although not often mentioned, lurks in the background of Roth’s story. In light of the murder of millions of European Jews, Eli and his fellow assimilated Jews are wary of anything that makes them appear different from other Americans. The Hasidic family is an uncomfortable reminder of their past and, for Eli, a source of great guilt and fear. He suggests to Tzuref that had the European Jews “[given] up some of their more extreme practices,” the Holocaust might have been averted (Roth 262).
When Eli gives up his suit to Tzuref, he is essentially giving up himself and the values of the life he is living. His wife pleads with him: “Eli, it’s your loveliest suit. It’s my favorite suit. Whenever I think of you, Eli, it’s in that suit” (Roth 272). Eli’s green suit is clearly an integral part of his identity. His wife, who presumably knows him very well, associates him with it. The suit represents the man he has been up until this point in his life: an assimilated, rootless spiritually vacant, secular American Jew.
By the same token, the suit of the Hasidic Jew represents the experience of the Jewish people in Europe, especially the Holocaust. Eli’s donning of the Hasidic garb is the culmination of his dissatisfaction with the state of his life. It is a way for him to, quite literally, connect to the collective experience of his people. The townspeople, oblivious to everything but their conformist, materialistic existences, call it a nervous breakdown. In a sense, they are correct. A sane man would likely not dress up in Hasidic garb with so little consideration of the immediate consequences, especially on the morning of his son’s birth. However, it can also be viewed as the manifestation of a subconscious unwilling to accept a hollow state, existence devoid of spiritual sustenance and moral guidance. In “dressing up” for his newborn son, Eli may well be announcing his intent to instill in his heir an appreciation of Jewish faith and culture.
Translation as Power
Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy, or Yiddish in America” directly confronts the dilemma facing Yiddish authors. As purveyors of a dying language and culture, writers, previously bound together by a focus on mutual themes and values, began to diverge in their approach to their craft. Some, like Yankel Ostrover, developed a new approach that focused on appealing to Americans and the West in general. In doing so, he earned a devout following, consisting of many young English students. However, he also provoked the scorn of Yiddish writers like Edelshtein, who accuse Ostrover of “selling out.”
The conflict between these writers is multi-faceted, but revolves around the issue of translation, which Ozick equates with power. Edelshtein, besides being driven by a personal vendetta and consuming jealousy, has a valid point. He asks the question: “Ostrover was to be the only evidence that there was once a Yiddish tongue, a Yiddish literature?” (Ozick 51). In seizing upon what he sees as the “watered down” Yiddish literature of Ostrover, Edelshtein fears the general public will miss out on the essence of the culture and language, which is lost in translation. He writes in his letter to Ostrover’s translator: “I humbly submit you give serious wrong Impressions. That we have produced nothing else” (Ozick 53) Edelshtein fears that the academic world will reductively judge Yiddish literature solely on the works of crossover writers like Ostrover.
Edelshtein is enraged that the power of translation is being used to promote a writer who does not meet his own subjective criteria of quality. Translators themselves, judging by the words of Ostrover’s spinster translator, have a special authority. She carries her position like a rank: “I’m ‘Ostrover’s translator.’ You think that’s nothing? It’s an entrance into them… who makes the language Ostrover is famous for” (Ozick 55) Ozick suggests that translation is an act that rivals writing itself when it comes to the public perception of literature.
On a more personal level, he sees translation as a means to keep himself alive, despite the death of the language in which he wrote: “anyone who uses Yiddish to keep himself alive is already dead” (Ozick 67) The implication is that in wiping out the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Europe, the Nazis also destroyed a vibrant culture. The language and the few who still speak it will fall through the cracks of history and it will be like they never existed. Edelshtein sees translation as a means to achieve immortality.
Edelshtein attempts to use Hannah as a tool to achieve immortality through the power of translation. In training her to speak Yiddish, he hopes to live on through his writing. However, she is ultimately uninterested in his writing and, in an argument that culminates in Edelshtein slapping her in the face, Hannah yells: “Boring! You bore me to death. You hate magic, you hate imagination, you talk God and you hate God, you despise, you bore, you envy, you eat people up with your disgusting old age-cannibals, all you care about is your own youth, you’re finished, give somebody else a turn” (Ozick 98). After Ozick spends the majority of “Envy; or Yiddish in America” inhabiting the minds and taking on the voices of old people, she allows a member of the new generation to give their take. To them, Yiddish and the world from which it came is antiquated and no longer relevant. She is on to something when she ascribes selfish motives to Edelshtein’s obsession with having her work translated. She implies that instead of striving to preserve the old forms and old egos, indicative of a lack of imagination, they should pass on the torch to a new generation of writers. In the end, Ozick casts Edelshtein as the last of a dying breed, whose lack of vision makes him undeserving of preservation through the power of translation.
Assimilation as an Inevitability in “The Loudest Voice”
Like many other stories about the Jewish experience, Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” deals with the topic of assimilation. The protagonist, a young girl named Shirley Abramowitz, is for the most part a passive character. Although clearly intelligent, she is vulnerable to the machinations of the adults around her. She is neutral when it comes to assimilation because America is all she knows.
The debate over assimilation, of preserving tradition versus going along with the customs of the New World, is between her parents. Specifically, they clash over whether Shirley should participate in a Christmas production at her school. Her mother represents the voice of tradition, of holding onto Jewish values. When her husband points out how the pressure to conform in America pales in comparison to Palestine and Eastern Europe, she responds by referring to a “creeping pogrom” in America. This is an accurate description of what is occurring.
Mr. Hilton appeals to Shirley’s ego by praising her for her strong narration and offers her the opportunity to participate in a production with older students. He praises her constantly, going so far as to ask: “How could I get along without you Shirley?” (Paley 58). This kind of praise is immensely appealing to a young girl, especially one who is already a natural outsider due to her religion. Hilton also makes Shirley his enforcer, giving her power over the other children in the production.
The fact that she is participating in a Christmas play does not matter to Shirley. She is simply acting as any child would, thriving on the praise of her elders. “America” is not forcing Shirley to renounce Judaism at the point of a gun, but in the end its method is just as effective. Shirley is completely at Mr. Hilton’s mercy. As the director, he has total power over her, hence his comment that an actor’s life is “like a soldier’s, never tardy or disobedient to his general, the director” (Paley 57).
In his acceptance of the play, Misha is not afraid to admit his own ambitions for his daughter’s future: “Maybe someday she won’t live between the kitchen and the shop. She’s not a fool” (Paley 59). He unashamedly sees assimilation as a necessary means to advance in society. His wife’s telling accusation, “your idealism is going away,” is indicative of the harsh reality of assimilation (Paley 58). By referring to the phenomenon as idealistic, she tacitly acknowledges how vigorously defending one’s culture in a vacuum is impossible in a place like America, where members of different religions mix on a regular basis.
In the end, Paley portrays the Christmas play as inevitable, much like assimilation itself. Shirley’s mother is content to voice her disapproval, making no real effort to remove her daughter from the production. Her humorous tone at the end of the story, after she has seen the play, shows the depth of her resistance. Paley, however, does not cast assimilation in a purely negative light, suggesting that it is possible to preserve one’s cultural traditions in some form. In the end, Shirley still speaks Yiddish and invokes Israel in her prayer. However, she also prays for “the lonesome Christians,” implying that participating in the play has instilled in her a compassion for individuals who practice a different religion
Judging Rosie Lieber in “Goodbye and Good Luck” By both modern feminist standards and the standards of her time, Rosie Lieber, the protagonist of Grace Paley’s short story “Goodbye and Good Luck,” is no role model. Ostensibly, she devotes her entire life to pleasing Vlashkin, a married man. Contemporary standards, particularly in the Jewish culture, would demand that she raise a family and live a life of domesticity. Rosie’s mother represents this point of view, accusing her daughter of not taking the proper path in life. The implication is that she should marry and have children. Modern feminist standards are condemnatory of women who forsake their own careers and ambitions to please men, which is ostensibly what Rosie does. However, it is clear when Rosie tells her story that she is a fiercely intelligent woman who asserts her individuality by devoting herself to Vlashkin.
She is admirably free-thinking in her distaste for domestic life, which she expresses by calling her sister’s “whole married life a kindergarten” and posing the question of “who needs an apartment to live like a maid with a dustrag in the hand, sneezing?” (Paley 9). She is not some thoughtless young brat engaging in token rebellion by falling for an attractive actor, but a mature young woman who makes a personal choice to live a different life than those who raised her. Unlike Sara Smolinsky, the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s Breadgivers, she frees herself from the shackles of a simultaneously widespread and distinctively Jewish insistence that a woman must devote her life to raising a family.
At the same time, Rosie defies feminism by finding fulfillment through a man rather than a career. However, it is difficult to judge her harshly for this given how she was raised. She hails from a poor Jewish family where she has been taught that she can have no greater ambition than motherhood. She frequently demeans her own significance, posing the question “who am I?” and referring to herself as “nothing” (Paley 12, 16). Rosie was not raised in a modern progressive family, and despite her independent streak, the scope of her ambitions are limited. She sees nurturing Vlashkin as a means to make a difference in the world, to mean something. She even takes something akin to professional pride in essentially helping Vlashkin to develop his acting craft, specifically his ability to convey emotion, through their affair. She tellingly describes a particular performance: “when I saw him… an older man in love with a darling young girl… I cried… What he said to this girl, how he whispered such sweetness, how all this experience he had with me. The very words were the same. You can imagine how proud I was” (Paley 18). Rosie has made a career of enriching the life of a man she immensely admires. She defines the terms of her own success, which is more commendable than living the life that her mother and her culture have laid out for her.
One might see her initial willingness to have an affair with a married man as problematic and this is a fair criticism. However, in the end, she cannot stomach it, telling Vlashkin: “No more, this isn’t for me. I am sick from it all. I am not a home breaker” (Paley 14). She acts somewhat selfishly in entering into a relationship with Vlashkin (although as an old man in a position of power, he deserves more blame for manipulating her), but she redeems herself by making the difficult but ultimately moral decision to sever ties. In light of the fact that she has given up so much of herself to this man, the strength of character she displays in this choice cannot be overstated.
Shallow Polemic and Intimate Description in Jews Without Money
The Lower East Side Jewish ghetto was known for its atrocious living conditions. Overcrowding, bad sanitation and a lack of hope left its residents in a state of desperation. As parents slaved away to feed their families, children were left to fend for themselves in the streets, a cesspool of moral depravity that destroyed their innocence.
In his novel Jews Without Money, Michael Gold portrays the Lower East Side ghetto where he grew up. In contrast to Henry Roth, who made use of post-modern, Freudian methods in his examination of life in the ghetto through the eyes of a particularly introspective young boy, Gold has a clear political agenda and he wears it on his sleeve. His overriding message is that poverty is, in essence, the root of all societal problems. To make this point, he relies on both intimate description and polemical rants. The former is quite effective, while the latter is shallow and misinformed.
Gold shows a willingness to distort reality in service of his leftist agenda. The ghetto was by all accounts an unpleasant place to live, but Gold, in an attempt to provoke feelings of horror from the reader, makes the environment in which he grew up seem even worse than it was, constantly exaggerating realities of the ghetto and thereby magnifying the horrors of the setting. By emphasizing the worst aspects of the Lower East Side and making them seem more common than they are, he crafts a modern day Gomorra that resembles, but does not accurately represent, its setting. All of this is within the framework of a simplistic narrative that pits the noble, innocent and poor working family against the wealthy aristocrats responsible for their suffering.
The results of Gold’s approach are decidedly mixed. On the one hand, he adds a palpable sense of drama to the affair with the over-the-top situations and broadly-drawn characters. On the other hand, he often overstates his case, adhering to a ham-fisted, single-minded message that risks numbing readers to the very real problem of urban poverty. In the same vein, he betrays a simplistic, black and white view of the world common in political radicals of the time. He asserts: “There never were any Jewish gangsters in Europe. The Jews there were a timid bookish lot. The Jews have done no killing since Jerusalem fell. That’s why the murder-loving Christians have called us the “peculiar people.” But it is America that has taught the sons of tubercular Jewish tailors how to kill.” This statement is problematic on many levels and exemplifies Gold’s limitations as a thinker. He perceives the world according to a narrow, simplistic ideology that revolves around class conflict and oppression. When reality does not coincide with his vision, he exaggerates, and, in the aforementioned quote, he lies in order to compensate.
There were, in fact, Jewish mobsters in Eastern European shtetls. Also, the Old Testament describes a number of instances in which the Jewish people, supposedly at the behest of God, conquered cities and massacred their inhabitants. Case in point, Joshua’s destruction of Jericho, in which he and his followers did not rest until ‘they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword’ (Joshua 6:21). The story of Joshua, along with similarly ghastly morality tales such as that of Noah’s ark, are implicit in Jewish culture, even if they do not often manifest themselves.
To be fair, poverty and a sense of hopelessness in the Lower East Side ghetto did spur some Jews to turn to crime. Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and others like them, on which Gold’s character of Louis One Eye is likely based, gained reputations for their exploits in organized crime. However, Gold forfeits his credibility by whitewashing history and ignoring instances of Jewish violence. When reality does not fit the author’s narrative about urban poverty causing all of society’s ills, he is all too willing to distort it. Although this practice and the simplistic worldview it serves detract from the overall quality of Jews Without Money, Gold’s keen eye for detail and his ability to create strong images in a concise manner are considerable assets to the novel. In one example of the former, Gold describes the ghetto during winter: “Winter. Children, old men and women fight like hungry dogs around a half-finished building… Winter. Bums sleep in rows like dead fish… Winter. In an Irish home a dead baby lies wrapped in a towel” (Gold 259). There is a certain poetry to Gold’s spare style that shines when his prose is unburdened by heavy-handed political rhetoric. Despite his limited vocabulary and a reliance on simple, clichéd metaphors, his descriptions are quite evocative and the images he conjures stick in the reader’s head, far more than his simplistic polemical rants. Intimate details like the ones above suggest that Gold writes best when he draws on his personal experience rather than abstract ideologies.
Gold also conveys a clear understanding of the forces that drive his Jewish characters. The protagonist and his parents may not be the most complex characters, but in the process of telling their story, Gold offers compelling insights into their way of life.On page 143, he tells of how “The East Side worshiped doctors, but in nervous cases, or in mishaps of the personal life, it sometimes reverted to medievalism” (Gold 143). In one brief sentence, Gold describes the clash between Old World values and New World aspirations that played out in the lives of Jewish immigrants.
Gold is at his best when he avoids polemical screed and sticks to observations. His keen descriptions speak much louder than his rhetoric and he risks undermining his credibility in readers’ eyes by indulging in his often misinformed rants and utopian visions. As a snapshot of urban poverty in the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East side, Jews Without Money is a success. As a work of literature with a sophisticated political message, it falls short.
An American Tragedy
Saul Bellow’s novel Seize the Day is a peculiar kind of tragedy. Its protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, is not particularly likeable or sympathetic, at least initially. A child of privilege who has quit his job out of sheer egoism, he is resigned to coasting along until he runs out of money and his father, a successful retired businessman, runs out of patience. Unlike tragic characters like Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, he is not a man of great quality doomed to a horrific fate due to some inherent defect. Rather, he is profoundly, passionately unremarkable, a man of average intellect deluded by the society in which he lives into thinking he is entitled to a life of luxury and personal satisfaction. The tragedy of Seize the Day lies in the false promise of the American Dream, an outdated, misguided idea that promises success to everyone and delivers it to only a few.
Tommy is a victim of his own mediocrity, a deep enough thinker to be dissatisfied with his lot, but not talented or enterprising enough to improve it. He craves self-realization, to break away from the expectations of his family and assert his own individuality, but he can do no more than make token gestures. In a painful moment of self-awareness, he remarks on changing his name: “It was, he knew it was, his bid for liberty, Adler being in his mind the title of the species, Tommy the freedom of the person. But Wilky was his inescapable self” (Bellow 21). Tommy is unable to accept himself for who he is and therefore invents an ideal persona that he can never live up to.
Depressed, anxious and desperate, Tommy is vulnerable to the machinations of Dr. Tamkin, a cynical con artist with a false get-rich-quick scheme. It is easy to judge Tommy for his gullibility, but in truth, his actions are understandable given the bundle of false promises sold to him by his society. He is literally swindled by Dr. Tamkin and metaphorically swindled by an America that still clings to a myth of self-realization that is increasingly impossible in an economy where the key players are corporations, not individuals. It is conceivable that had he been born earlier in the nation’s history, when the Western frontier still held vast promise for those with the ambition to explore it, he would have found the satisfaction he was looking for.
Ultimately, the tragedy of Seize the Day is that it predisposes people like Tommy Wilhelm to be manipulated by people like Dr. Tamkin, who instinctively realize that the American Dream is an anachronistic sham whose sole purpose in the modern world is to keep the little man in line by convincing him to operate under the false assumption that his hard work will get him somewhere. His idea of the two souls conveys this idea, albeit in an overly-complicated fashion: “You are not free. Your own betrayer is inside of you and sells you out. You have to obey him like a slave. He makes you work like a horse. And for what? For whom?” (Bellow 67) In other words, people are driven by an inner force that tells them they need to work for some purpose, be it self-realization or the accumulation of wealth. In reality, they are working for the benefit of powerful men who control industry. In reading Call it Sleep, one may or may not pity Tommy Wilhelm, but they will surely pity the society that has created him and experience catharsis at hearing its ills so eloquently and creatively expressed by Bellow.
Why Complain? The Lot of the Diaspora Jewish Male
In Philip Roth’s novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, the title character nurses grievances against the world and against himself. Alexander Portnoy is locked in a state of perpetual agitation over his inability to commit to a healthy romantic relationship. His “complaint” is that his Jewish upbringing has left him with an uncontrollable desire to have sex with non-Jewish women. He expresses this complaint to his doctor in an attempt to validate the promiscuous lifestyle that he is locked into, which he portrays as a product of his individual upbringing and his larger role as a Diaspora Jewish male.
Portnoy blames his problem on several factors, the chief being that his mother was overprotective and made him neurotic with her countless restrictions. He is plagued by a sense of impotence, telling the doctor: “I can’t stand being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy” (Roth 40). In order to assert his masculinity and power, Portnoy engages in forbidden activities. As an adolescent, he masturbates compulsively, and as an adult, he has sex with non-Jewish women.
Portnoy also diagnoses himself as suffering from the condition of the “Diaspora Jewish male.” After years of being victimized at the hands of the world, Jews are left in a state of powerlessness. Portnoy explains: “Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself--frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world” (Roth 299). They are so used to suffering that they manufacture maladies and reasons to do so. Portnoy claims to want emancipation from the suffering of the Diaspora Jewish male, hence his statement: “stick your suffering Jewish heritage up your suffering ass-I happen also to be a human being” (Roth 84). Although Portnoy claims to want to live a healthy adult relationship with a Jewish woman, in reality he is addicted the thrill of having sex with goyim because it makes him feel powerful and the guilt he feels allows him to indulge his masochistic urge to suffer. His complaint is merely a way to pacify the sense of guilt he suffers as a result of his compulsive actions.
Naomi, an Israeli woman Portnoy encounters on his trip to that country, has him pegged: “you seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. I don’t believe you actually want to change your life” (Roth 298). Portnoy complains as an excuse to avoid behaving differently, to pretend that he is dealing with his problems when really he is only purging his guilt through self-deprecation. In telling the story of Portnoy, Philip Roth calls attention to the peculiar plight of the Diaspora Jewish male, whose own worst enemy is himself. Roth provides a clue regarding the purpose of his novel and Portnoy’s long complaint: “So [said the doctor]. Now ve may perhaps to begin. Yes?” (Roth 309). In order to cure the affliction of the Diaspora Jewish male, it must be laid out on the table in all its neurotic glory. That being said, its revelation is only one step in a difficult healing process complicated by the fact that those who suffer from it are not certain they want to be cured. It brings up the question of how to help someone who thrives on their own misery.
“Eli the Fanatic:” You Are What You Wear
Eli, the protagonist of Phillip Roth’s short story, “Eli the Fanatic,” is a man suffering from an identity crisis. At the onset of the story, he is ostensibly a fully assimilated American Jew. He lives in a comfortable American suburb with a wife who is pregnant with their first child. Although not rich, he is living what many would consider the American dream. However, Eli is plagued with an implacable sense of uneasiness that manifests itself in his dealings with a family of Hasidic German Jews that have taken up residence in his neighborhood in the wake of the Holocaust. They feel particularly threatened by one man who parades around town in his old-world Hasidic garb. The town calls upon Eli, a lawyer, to force them out. Despite Eli’s distinct personality, Roth also intends for him to represent the townspeople in general, hence his statement: “I am them, they are me” (265). Thus, in a sense, the character of Eli reflects the attitude of assimilated American Jews in general.
Although he lives a life that many would envy, Eli feels empty. He is emblematic of a conflict that plagues many assimilated Jews. He tellingly remarks: “the trouble was that sometimes the law didn’t seem to be the answer, law didn’t seem to have anything to do with what was aggravating everybody” (Roth 254). In the absence of a religious component to his secular existence, Eli feels as if he is missing something. The system of law on which he has based his career seems arbitrary and does not answer his spiritual needs. To Eli, the sterile rules of the American legal system seem divorced from the world of feelings and passions that he perceives around him. The law is a metaphor for the secularism that has come to characterize the life of Eli and those like him.
Tsurif, a member of the family, tells Eli: “What you call law, I call shame. The heart, Mr. Peck, the heart is law! God!” (Roth 266) The strict religious observance of the Hasidic Jews appeals to Eli’s spiritual hunger. It also offers moral guidance that is absent in secular law, which can be made to serve any purpose. Eli tellingly observes: “Everybody in the world had evil reasons for his actions. Everybody! With reasons so cheap, who buys bulbs?” (Roth 266). Eli is uncomfortable with the fact that secular American law can be made to serve the “evil” purposes inherent in human nature and is plagued by feelings of guilt since his career consists of defending it. Similarly, therapy, which has in large part supplanted religion as a source of consolation for troubled individuals living secular lives, has not provided Eli with peace of mind. Despite professing a dislike of the Hasidic Jews religious practices, they are quite tempting to a man who cannot find comfort in secular remedies.
Compounding Eli’s dissatisfaction with life is the Holocaust which, although not often mentioned, lurks in the background of Roth’s story. In light of the murder of millions of European Jews, Eli and his fellow assimilated Jews are wary of anything that makes them appear different from other Americans. The Hasidic family is an uncomfortable reminder of their past and, for Eli, a source of great guilt and fear. He suggests to Tzuref that had the European Jews “[given] up some of their more extreme practices,” the Holocaust might have been averted (Roth 262).
When Eli gives up his suit to Tzuref, he is essentially giving up himself and the values of the life he is living. His wife pleads with him: “Eli, it’s your loveliest suit. It’s my favorite suit. Whenever I think of you, Eli, it’s in that suit” (Roth 272). Eli’s green suit is clearly an integral part of his identity. His wife, who presumably knows him very well, associates him with it. The suit represents the man he has been up until this point in his life: an assimilated, rootless spiritually vacant, secular American Jew.
By the same token, the suit of the Hasidic Jew represents the experience of the Jewish people in Europe, especially the Holocaust. Eli’s donning of the Hasidic garb is the culmination of his dissatisfaction with the state of his life. It is a way for him to, quite literally, connect to the collective experience of his people. The townspeople, oblivious to everything but their conformist, materialistic existences, call it a nervous breakdown. In a sense, they are correct. A sane man would likely not dress up in Hasidic garb with so little consideration of the immediate consequences, especially on the morning of his son’s birth. However, it can also be viewed as the manifestation of a subconscious unwilling to accept a hollow state, existence devoid of spiritual sustenance and moral guidance. In “dressing up” for his newborn son, Eli may well be announcing his intent to instill in his heir an appreciation of Jewish faith and culture.
Translation as Power
Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy, or Yiddish in America” directly confronts the dilemma facing Yiddish authors. As purveyors of a dying language and culture, writers, previously bound together by a focus on mutual themes and values, began to diverge in their approach to their craft. Some, like Yankel Ostrover, developed a new approach that focused on appealing to Americans and the West in general. In doing so, he earned a devout following, consisting of many young English students. However, he also provoked the scorn of Yiddish writers like Edelshtein, who accuse Ostrover of “selling out.”
The conflict between these writers is multi-faceted, but revolves around the issue of translation, which Ozick equates with power. Edelshtein, besides being driven by a personal vendetta and consuming jealousy, has a valid point. He asks the question: “Ostrover was to be the only evidence that there was once a Yiddish tongue, a Yiddish literature?” (Ozick 51). In seizing upon what he sees as the “watered down” Yiddish literature of Ostrover, Edelshtein fears the general public will miss out on the essence of the culture and language, which is lost in translation. He writes in his letter to Ostrover’s translator: “I humbly submit you give serious wrong Impressions. That we have produced nothing else” (Ozick 53) Edelshtein fears that the academic world will reductively judge Yiddish literature solely on the works of crossover writers like Ostrover.
Edelshtein is enraged that the power of translation is being used to promote a writer who does not meet his own subjective criteria of quality. Translators themselves, judging by the words of Ostrover’s spinster translator, have a special authority. She carries her position like a rank: “I’m ‘Ostrover’s translator.’ You think that’s nothing? It’s an entrance into them… who makes the language Ostrover is famous for” (Ozick 55) Ozick suggests that translation is an act that rivals writing itself when it comes to the public perception of literature.
On a more personal level, he sees translation as a means to keep himself alive, despite the death of the language in which he wrote: “anyone who uses Yiddish to keep himself alive is already dead” (Ozick 67) The implication is that in wiping out the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Europe, the Nazis also destroyed a vibrant culture. The language and the few who still speak it will fall through the cracks of history and it will be like they never existed. Edelshtein sees translation as a means to achieve immortality.
Edelshtein attempts to use Hannah as a tool to achieve immortality through the power of translation. In training her to speak Yiddish, he hopes to live on through his writing. However, she is ultimately uninterested in his writing and, in an argument that culminates in Edelshtein slapping her in the face, Hannah yells: “Boring! You bore me to death. You hate magic, you hate imagination, you talk God and you hate God, you despise, you bore, you envy, you eat people up with your disgusting old age-cannibals, all you care about is your own youth, you’re finished, give somebody else a turn” (Ozick 98). After Ozick spends the majority of “Envy; or Yiddish in America” inhabiting the minds and taking on the voices of old people, she allows a member of the new generation to give their take. To them, Yiddish and the world from which it came is antiquated and no longer relevant. She is on to something when she ascribes selfish motives to Edelshtein’s obsession with having her work translated. She implies that instead of striving to preserve the old forms and old egos, indicative of a lack of imagination, they should pass on the torch to a new generation of writers. In the end, Ozick casts Edelshtein as the last of a dying breed, whose lack of vision makes him undeserving of preservation through the power of translation.
Like many other stories about the Jewish experience, Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” deals with the topic of assimilation. The protagonist, a young girl named Shirley Abramowitz, is for the most part a passive character. Although clearly intelligent, she is vulnerable to the machinations of the adults around her. She is neutral when it comes to assimilation because America is all she knows.
The debate over assimilation, of preserving tradition versus going along with the customs of the New World, is between her parents. Specifically, they clash over whether Shirley should participate in a Christmas production at her school. Her mother represents the voice of tradition, of holding onto Jewish values. When her husband points out how the pressure to conform in America pales in comparison to Palestine and Eastern Europe, she responds by referring to a “creeping pogrom” in America. This is an accurate description of what is occurring.
The fact that she is participating in a Christmas play does not matter to Shirley. She is simply acting as any child would, thriving on the praise of her elders. “America” is not forcing Shirley to renounce Judaism at the point of a gun, but in the end its method is just as effective. Shirley is completely at Mr. Hilton’s mercy. As the director, he has total power over her, hence his comment that an actor’s life is “like a soldier’s, never tardy or disobedient to his general, the director” (Paley 57).
In his acceptance of the play, Misha is not afraid to admit his own ambitions for his daughter’s future: “Maybe someday she won’t live between the kitchen and the shop. She’s not a fool” (Paley 59). He unashamedly sees assimilation as a necessary means to advance in society. His wife’s telling accusation, “your idealism is going away,” is indicative of the harsh reality of assimilation (Paley 58). By referring to the phenomenon as idealistic, she tacitly acknowledges how vigorously defending one’s culture in a vacuum is impossible in a place like America, where members of different religions mix on a regular basis.
In the end, Paley portrays the Christmas play as inevitable, much like assimilation itself. Shirley’s mother is content to voice her disapproval, making no real effort to remove her daughter from the production. Her humorous tone at the end of the story, after she has seen the play, shows the depth of her resistance. Paley, however, does not cast assimilation in a purely negative light, suggesting that it is possible to preserve one’s cultural traditions in some form. In the end, Shirley still speaks Yiddish and invokes Israel in her prayer. However, she also prays for “the lonesome Christians,” implying that participating in the play has instilled in her a compassion for individuals who practice a different religion
Judging Rosie Lieber in “Goodbye and Good Luck” By both modern feminist standards and the standards of her time, Rosie Lieber, the protagonist of Grace Paley’s short story “Goodbye and Good Luck,” is no role model. Ostensibly, she devotes her entire life to pleasing Vlashkin, a married man. Contemporary standards, particularly in the Jewish culture, would demand that she raise a family and live a life of domesticity. Rosie’s mother represents this point of view, accusing her daughter of not taking the proper path in life. The implication is that she should marry and have children. Modern feminist standards are condemnatory of women who forsake their own careers and ambitions to please men, which is ostensibly what Rosie does. However, it is clear when Rosie tells her story that she is a fiercely intelligent woman who asserts her individuality by devoting herself to Vlashkin.
She is admirably free-thinking in her distaste for domestic life, which she expresses by calling her sister’s “whole married life a kindergarten” and posing the question of “who needs an apartment to live like a maid with a dustrag in the hand, sneezing?” (Paley 9). She is not some thoughtless young brat engaging in token rebellion by falling for an attractive actor, but a mature young woman who makes a personal choice to live a different life than those who raised her. Unlike Sara Smolinsky, the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s Breadgivers, she frees herself from the shackles of a simultaneously widespread and distinctively Jewish insistence that a woman must devote her life to raising a family.
At the same time, Rosie defies feminism by finding fulfillment through a man rather than a career. However, it is difficult to judge her harshly for this given how she was raised. She hails from a poor Jewish family where she has been taught that she can have no greater ambition than motherhood. She frequently demeans her own significance, posing the question “who am I?” and referring to herself as “nothing” (Paley 12, 16). Rosie was not raised in a modern progressive family, and despite her independent streak, the scope of her ambitions are limited. She sees nurturing Vlashkin as a means to make a difference in the world, to mean something. She even takes something akin to professional pride in essentially helping Vlashkin to develop his acting craft, specifically his ability to convey emotion, through their affair. She tellingly describes a particular performance: “when I saw him… an older man in love with a darling young girl… I cried… What he said to this girl, how he whispered such sweetness, how all this experience he had with me. The very words were the same. You can imagine how proud I was” (Paley 18). Rosie has made a career of enriching the life of a man she immensely admires. She defines the terms of her own success, which is more commendable than living the life that her mother and her culture have laid out for her.
One might see her initial willingness to have an affair with a married man as problematic and this is a fair criticism. However, in the end, she cannot stomach it, telling Vlashkin: “No more, this isn’t for me. I am sick from it all. I am not a home breaker” (Paley 14). She acts somewhat selfishly in entering into a relationship with Vlashkin (although as an old man in a position of power, he deserves more blame for manipulating her), but she redeems herself by making the difficult but ultimately moral decision to sever ties. In light of the fact that she has given up so much of herself to this man, the strength of character she displays in this choice cannot be overstated.