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corpse and there is no God; on the subject of death, this was as far
as his commitment extended. I do not mean that it is necessarily
possible to go further, but given the completeness of the statement,
it was the tone that mattered: conceivably, he might actually have
instructed us to throw his ashes into an ash can, and that, without
altering the sense of his statement, would yet obviously have made
an enormous difference. But he was not trying to be original, nor
even, in fact, to make a "statement" at all; he had too much humor
and was too sociable a man to place an exaggerated value on his
"philosophy." The instructions contained in his will simply expressed
his sense of what was fitting; after all, he was trying to fulfill cer–
tain conventions.
In its proper historical context, the complex of ideas on which
these conventions rested had indeed constituted all that one could
wish of a "philosophy," sufficient to engage fully those who embraced
it and requiring of them some degree of honesty and even, at times, of
courage. My father was born in 1876 in Russia, into that enlighten–
ment which came so late but with such blinding clarity to the Jews
of Eastern Europe; from the very little I ever heard
him
say about
his early years, I suppose he was a materialist and a rationalist before
he was sixteen, and apparently without the intense struggle which
the adoption of this position involved for so many of
his
contem–
poraries. In America he was as a matter of course a Socialist, and
took some active part in the vicissitudes of that movement for about
fifty years; shortly before his death he was involved in an abortive
effort to reunite its remaining fragments. He belonged
to
the
Socialist movement as one belongs to a certain city or a certain
neighborhood: it gave
him
his friends and it embodied his culture-–
so fully, indeed, that he had little need for the more formal objects
of culture, such as books, but was able to expend his considerable
excess of intellectual energy in the public atmosphere of meetings
and discussions, in the masculine (and indefinably "Jewish")
rituals of card-playing, and in a peculiarly serious concern with the
daily newspaper, which seemed always to yield more to his reading
than it has ever done to mine. Even when he was young he could hard–
ly have been anything like what we should call an "intellectual"
(though in some sense he surely belonged to the "intelligentsia"),
