BOO K S
599
terms,
is
a turning of the soul toward faith.) In all the sections of her
book that deal directly with the problems that the fall of France set for
her philosophy of reconstruction, she has the great advantage of writing
from a highly complicated perspective: herself a Jew and an intellectual,
she knew something quite naturally of uprootedness; at the same time,
deeply French in her culture, she experienced the defeat of France as a
tearing out of her being from the traditions and values in which she
had grown; she had conscientiously gone after a taste of factory work
and labor in the fields, so that she came to know the proletariat better
than she might otherwise have done, and learned to check somewhat
her masochistic tendency to romanticize toil, which restraint deepened
rather than lessening her appreciation of its nature and meaning; and
she brings together in most of her observations, and often with a sur–
prising twist, a profound learning in both sacred and secular matters,
writing at her best with an almost medieval facility and concreteness in
her symbolism for linking the material and spiritual worlds. All these
advantages make her, when she uses them, not only the great woman
she was in her own right, but an intruder of genius into the world of
sociology.
Unfortunately, she makes a rather sparing use of these advantages,
and much of her book is tedious reading. It is not a meditation on God,
written in the tenderness and excitement of holy expectation, like her
previous work,
Waiting for God,
but largely a sermon which gets wound
up on irrelevant topics, the Roman Empire, the Greeks, the ancient
Hebrews (whom she continues to misrepresent, disconnecting them from
all influence on Christianity) and similar subjects; and even when the
discussion has a bearing on the problems of reconstruction, as in her
consideration of patriotism, she brings on such a wealth of illustrative
matter that the point not only gets snowed under, but begins to look,
some time before it disappears from sight, like a thing of little interest to
her. The startling simplicity and vividness of her words about the up–
rootedness of modern populations are nowhere recaptured.
It seems to me that these are more than faults of composition. She
gets lost in
The Need for Roots
because the trouble
is
one of concep–
tion, having to do with the very idea and image of her book, the notion
of roots
per se.
It
may well be that the terms, rootedness-uprootedness
are a false dyad, in no way so closely connected as they would seem to
be through simple opposition.
Uprooted
is an indispensable word; there is little danger of going
astray with it, for even its utmost meaning, the most drastic image it
brings to mind, of plant life torn out of the soil and threatened with
