256
PAR T ISAN REVIEW
One would like to hear more than Mr. Handlin has told us about
immigrant success. Did the immigrant family whose father found a
satisfactory job think so little of him as Mr. Handlin's immigrants
thought of their so often jobless fathers? I remember a sentence from
a Polish immigrant's letter to the homeland: "We eat here every day
what we get only for Easter in our country." Did the paterfamilias
in this case appear to his family as a failure? And another letter,
this from Poland to the United States: "There [in America] they
speak about war lightly, and here among us they are so afraid of war
that they weep." Did the recipients of this letter regret leaving home?
And didn't those first American-born have a way of re-embracing their
parents after they had reached maturity and begun to raise children
of their own?
Mr. Handlin has written a good chapter on the means by which
immigrants gradually re-established in the ghettos new bonds of com–
munity to replace the lost bonds of the village; but by omitting many
other compensations that life offered or that the spirit of the im–
migrants persistently devised, he has unnecessarily restricted the tonal
range of his book. One occasionally gets, despite its remarkable .economy
and well-articulated form, a sense of repetition; what is repeated is
not the ideas but the emotional note. The author has yielded, I be–
lieve, to a tendency which, as Lionel Trilling recently noted
in
these
pages, has grown fashionable among us, to deal only in the strongest
shades in the spectrum of emotion, with the consequence that moderate
feelings, and shades of feeling, become devalued.
It
is as though the
case of the immigrant could not command our sympathy if it were
not set before us as a continuous agony. Mr. Handlin has, nonethe–
less, produced one of the most remarkable works of the historical
imagination in recent years.
Richard Hofstadter
TWO OUTSTANDING DEBATES
MONDAY, MARCH 17, 8:30 P.M.
TOPIC: DO SOVIET POLITICS LEAD TOWARD WORLD PEACE?
YEs:
CORLISS LAMONT,
Philosophy Dept., Columbia U.; Author "Humanism as a
Philosophy."
'
NO : PETER VIERECK,
Poet; Author, "Metapolitics," "Conservatism R evisited."
Chairman: NORMAN THOMAS
MONDAY, MARCH 24, 8:30 P.M.
TOPIC: DOES GOVERNMENT AID TO RELIGION VIOLATE THE FIRST AMEND-
MENT OF THE CONSTITUTION?
.~
YES: REV. DONAI;D HARRINGTON
Minister, Community Church,
N.
Y.
NO :
lA~ES
M. 0
NEILL~.PTof.
of Speech, Brooklyn College; Author; Lecturer.
Chamnan: SIDNEY HOOK
. .
Course Fee (both events) $2.00 Single Admission $1.50
(The oplDlOns expressed by the debaters do not necessarily reflect the policies of the Rand School)
RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE, 7 East 15th Street, New York 3, N. Y.
