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PARTISAN REVIEW
longer understanding the language. The true subject of
World of Our
Fathers
is the dissolution of the world of Yiddishkeit, a dissolution which
today seems irremediable, inevitable , even self-willed.
The culture of Yiddishkeit was a folk culture given powerful literary
expression at exactly that moment in history when its death throes had been
set in motion. The Enlightenment had already doomed Yiddish as a lan–
guage-although Hitler and his minions hurried the process of destruction
by a century-and there cannot be a culture without a language. It is diffi–
cult to believe that Yiddish could have withstood the impact of modernism.
Its strength was residual, strongly tied to tradition and parochialism as well
as to its need to insulate itself from a world it at once envied and regarded
with long-conditioned hostility. Perhaps its chief glory in America must be
seen as its willingness to sacrifice itself. Was there, among other immigrant
peoples, a verbal construction similar to
tsu oysgrinen zzkh-"
to cease being
a greenhorn"? Ignorant of the ways of America, the
gn'ne
was, by definition,
a barrier to children determined to live what "acculturation" meant even
before they had heard the word . Yiddish journalists might sigh in print for
"the old country," but they rarely failed to exhort their fellow immigrants
to learn English, to Americanize themselves as quickly as possible, to let the
shted
dissolve in its own bones while their children came to terms with the
menace and promise of urban America. Yiddish socialists and trade union–
ists employed their rich language to satisfy the Jewish craving for universal
brotherhood, which, like Christianity, possessed its greatest appeal to those
who were homeless and uprooted and poor, dreadfully poor, poorer than
it is possible for their Scarsdale-reared grandchildren and great-grand–
children to believe .
One reads the familiar details of that poverty in
World ofOur Fathers.
And one wonders whether it is of any use to remember that the population
density of the Yiddish Lower East Side at the turn of the century was prob–
ably greater than that found in any other place at any other time. The fact
is that the Yiddish Lower East Side is finished . And the poverty has itself
been banked as a platitude. Success creates its own illusions. For the well-fed
young, poverty may even be attractive. But for those reared in the culture of
poverty, it is simply the inevitable accent of the collective voice. In the
Yiddish world, the poor were a mirror of the collective strivings as well as
the collective fate. The poor constituted both audience and material. It is
not by accident that the writer and his audience were cemented together
here as they have never really been in the American world. The Scarsdale
grandchildren may feel a twinge of what is today called .. ethnic pride"
when they read that Sholom Aleichem' s funeral in the Bronx was attended
by 100,000 people; the grandparents would simply have accepted this,
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