BOOKS
619
FATHER FIGURES
WORLD OF OUR FATHERS: THE JOURNEY OF THE EASTERN EURO–
PEAN JEWS TO AMERICA AND THE LIFE THEY FOUND AND MADE.
By Irving Howe. With the Assistance of Kenneth Libo. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich . $14.95 .
When it arrives at rhe point at which its achievements are summed
up and a reckoning presented, a culture has gotten as far beyond the trage–
dies of its own history as is humanly possible . To understand this is to under–
stand the tough integrity of Irving Howe's
World of Our Fathers,
a great
work of the historical imagination and a painful elegy in which the author's
own sense of loss is matched by his insistence on seeing a dying culture as
it was, its limitations as well as its attractions carefully placed before the
reader. Working from within the crucible of his own past, Howe evokes the
world of the Eastern European Jews in America almost as if he were writing
memoirs rather than history.
It
is a remarkably personal book. And it de–
mands a personal response . If we are still close enough to a world so that the
writer can force us
to
trace our own lives from its not yet hidden swirls, then
history, like fiction, is inevitably
personal
and
intimate.
And if, like Jacob
wrestling with the angel, you have struggled with your own duality,
your
American matched against
your
Jew, then
World of Our Fathers
is your
history because the hand lies heavy on your back .
But if the legacy is ours, the story Howe tells belongs to the fathers.
"We need not overvalue the immigrant Jewish experience in order to feel
a lasting gratitude for having been part of it. " The peculiar nature of rhe
immigrant response to America, this
goldneh medinah
which was both
blessed and cursed (often in the same breath), formed the basis for the ways
in which their children and grandchildren would deal with America. To
claim for the Jewish experience of America an uncontested singularity would
be false. But it would be equally false to subsume that experience within
the general context of immigrant history. The Jews were similar to and yet
unlike other peoples who come to these shores. They possessed the culture
of Yiddishkeit and because of that they brought to the immigrant's tribula–
tions something new. Carrying within itself the seeds of its own dissolution,
Yiddishkeit succeeded in creating a particular tone for urban America, a
tone which , as the culture which gave it life recedes into memory and myth,
continues
to
exert its hold on rhose who have inherited the voice while no
