BOO KS
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the scenes he had fled in quest of the freedom, the breaking-out that
was at one stage the whole of his life, in search of a limiting pastness, a
breaking back in, needed now to complete the definition of his exist–
ence. There
is
no question of surrendering what one has gained, mere–
ly of looking back from
it,
rather than forward to it. Indeed, after a
certain point, when one is incredibly living in what has always
been a desperately pointed-toward "future"-the only way to preserve
the pure wonder of that "future" is to redeem the past. Such a redemp–
tion means, of course, mythicizing a little what one has lived through.
We are surely all sufficiently aware by now that memory is no trans–
parent medium, but rather a cagy and poetic ally, remaking what
was merely given into the needed.
Such a redemption Kazin has attempted for his own years among
the working-class Jews of Brownsville, when the whole world "out–
side," even the
City
of New York just across the river, seemed in–
credibly remote, an untouchable though visible utopia. For him free–
dom was the City, and the City was America, toward which his par–
ents had sailed in the steerage of the Stieglitz photograph, but on the
verge of which they had somehow disastrously beached without love
or God. From the despair and insecurity (mitigated by the warmth
of family life and the color of the streets) of Brownsville, Kazin had
to complete the journey into the mythic America that no ship could
attain. And especially in the schools, those outposts of the Real America,
he felt himself continually tested under the gentile stare of his teachers,
to see whether indeed he were worthy of Success-an alternative name
for what his parents meant by America. I have never come across
anywhere else so apt a description of the Kafkaesque relationship be–
tween the Jewish schoolchild and his alien Guardians.
It
is one of the (dearly bought) splendors of Jewish existence in
America that
it
provides such apt and unforced metaphors for out–
sideness and quiet terror. And
it
provides, too, as Kazin realizes
(though this it is considered
in
some quarters more politic and "lib–
eral" to deny), the clue to an understanding of radical politics in this
country. Even among the first-generation immigrants (one is tempted
to say among the "parents," because they had consented to become
almost exclusively that) the image of Socialism had been set up beside
that of Success-America, as the first easy vision of stepping from ship–
board to belongingness had failed; without hypocrisy, the two visions
managed to exist side by side: the dream of "the children" becoming
rich and respectable, along with the vote for Debs and the discus–
sions in the Workman's Circle. And as the children grew into a post-
