294
PARTISAN REVIEW
Schwartz well-widens out into Aristotle's perception that motion "is
being's deepest wish." It is the same case with Hershey's other discov·
eries. The street games of "Buttons" and "Picture Cards", in which
he
so delights, are seen as "drunk with contingency and private property;
the deepest motives that surrounded the playing boys." The Katzenjam·
mer Kids who bore and perplex Hershey "with their endless destruction"
are discerned as "presenting the adult vision of childhood," the vision
of the anarchy which adults "yearned for and could not have."
The
narrative sections on Hershey's first big league ball game and on his
going to see Chaplin in
The Kid
become, through similar broad handling,
memorable passages of moral history.
The first book of
Genesis
takes Hershey up through grade 4A in
school, and thereby gives occasion for a passage on Lincoln, one of the
most effectively unified of the choruses, which is underscored with the
belief that
In fact, the North and South were losers both:
-Capitalismus won the Civil War.
The narrative comes to a violent climax when Eva Green and Hershey,
out riding on a Sunday afternoon with friends, encounter Jack Green
and his woman at a roadhouse:
Childhood was ended here! or innocence
-Henceforth suspicious of experience!
Hershey has already known for the first time what it is to be scorned
as a Jew; and talking to a Catholic boy, he begins to have a sense of
other mysteries. In continuing his story beyond this point, Schwartz will
have to
be
on his guard to avoid becoming involved in Hershey's adoles·
cent self-pity. A related problem for the form wil,l be to devise some
variation of the alternating narrative and chorus, which has already be·
come monotonously expected by the end of this first book. But the
deepening themes of Schwartz's thought give great promise for what lies
ahead in Hershey Green's unfolding experience. For Schwartz's firm
command of Marxist history has not prevented him from becoming aware
of the renewed urgency of religious issues. And his profound belief
that Europe is "the greatest thing in North America" should prove one
of the important forces for the renewal of our culture in these days when
we are continually threatened by a recrudescence of narrow nationalism.
F. 0.
MATTHIESSEN
THE HUMOR OF EXILE
THE WORLD OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM.
By
Maurice Samuel. Knopf. $3.
Throughout Mr. Samuel's book there is a tone of patient, literal,
laborious and repetitive explication which, though <,:ertainly poorer than
Sholom Aleichem deserves, is nevertheless justified. Mr. Samuel, true to
the title of his work, is writing primarily about a world; and though
"worlds" are large and public entities, universally knowable or known,
here, however, is one which in the space of hardly fifty years has all but
vanished. It is the world of
Golos
(Diaspora) further dispersed, existing
at present only in reminiscence, and only in vestiges of religious or com·
munal tradition. At one time it was the center of Jewish learning and
