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MARTIN GREENBERG
tion Jewish immigrant life that has just about disappeared. Earlier I
gave Mr. Fuchs as an example of the storyteller who creates an over–
flowing life rather than a powerful action. In
Summer in Williamsburg
he does this quite directly; it has no real plot but
is
a series of crowded
scenes through which the young observer threads his way. The
im–
pression is one of bursting vitality; these pages swann with an almost
biological life of housewives and storekeepers, gangsters and crones,
shabby sages and preposterous "intellectuals." (But with these last I
think that Mr. Fuchs falls down badly; he seems to have a personal
argument with intellectuals and with "culture" in general, and loses
his
detachment.) This of course is a familiar genre of writing and it labors
under severe limitations-pure panorama, without a shaping action,
forces the writer to find his significance in some large, vague gesture
of affinnation or rejection. But Mr. Fuchs handles the genre better
than most and also takes a more complicated attitude toward his scenes
than the simplistic ones usually found in this kind of novel.
Perhaps I can get at this attitude best through a comparison with
Isaak Babel. There is more than one Babelesque touch in
Summer in
Williamsburg,
the Babel of Benya Krik and the Odessa Tales. Here is
one of them: "From Williamsburg appeared one Anschele B. Nussbaum,
and concerning him as a lawyer the legend was great." But Babel re–
joiced in the life of Odessa Jewry and painted it in delighted colors;
Benya Krik is a great man, a hero, a
king-Babel's
calling him a king
is not ironical but a loving hyperbole. Papravel, the optimistic business–
man-racketeer whom Mr. Fuchs hits off perfectly, is an ironic com–
mentary on America and American Jewish self-satisfaction:
"Listen, boys," said Papravel from a full heart and with exuberant
satisfaction, "it's a party. Tonight we celebrate because all that comes,
knock wood, is good news. Morantz [who owns the bus line that com–
petes with the one under Papravel's protection for the traffic between
Williamsburg and the "mountains], he's quit not only in Williamsburg
but in the mountains altogether. We bought him out [he was strong–
armed!]. As for Gilhooley [who killed a state trooper], let no one say
Papravel don't take good care of his boys for Anschele Nussbaum here
has everything fixed right, only give us a little time and God's help.
And just this morning the railroad company sent out an announcement
they take no more passengers, only freight. And it is only a beginning,
because, remember, there is still a God over America."
Mr. Fuchs really doesn't like Papravel or Williamsburg one bit,
for all his apparently tolerant, amused wonder at their unself-conscious,
unself-questioning activity and beingness; he shows more than an
oc–
casional touch of callousness toward them in his writing. Innocent fools
