BOOKS
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too, as an aspect of the culture of poverty. If the poor were both audience
and material, then the writer's voice was their voice simply because neither
they nor the writer had any recognizable existence outside of the other.
Yiddish literature had to be parochial, since its concerns, even in America,
were rooted in the history and condition of its audience. Its parochialism was
of its audience's world. In his introduction to
A Treasury o/Yiddish Ston'es,
published more than twenty years ago and still the best essay available in
English on Yiddish literature, Howe wrote,
Because of its own limitations, the world of the East European Jews
made impossible the power-hunger, the pretensions to aristocracy, the
whole mirage of false values that have blighted Western intellectual life .
The virtue ofpowerlessness, the power ofhelplessness, the company of
the dispossessed, the sanctity ofthe insultedand injured-these,
finally,
are the great themes ofYiddish literature.
Such themes are rooted not in the writer but in the culture itself. We
have, of course, confronted this kind of thing in others: in the Otwell who
stalks the streets of Paris and London trying to expiate in himself the sins
of capitalism and the crimes of colonialism; in Silone's understanding that
socialism must derive as much from the
ca/oni
of the Abruzzi as from the
relentless theorizing of its intellectuals; even, perhaps, in the harsh ambiva–
lence of Lawrence's attitudes toward the English working classes or Faulkner's
mellowing willingness to let the Snopses, the "white trash" of his world,
speak for themselves and possess their triumph. But none of these writers
embodies the attitude of an entire culture toward poverty.
In
World
0/
Our Fathers,
Howe has managed that most difficult of
historical voices, a mixture of objectivity and compassion. And he never
permits himself to fall into the temptation to sentimentalize, to make of
the Yiddish Lower East Side world something greater than what it was . He
knows that much of the power it exerted and the loyalty it commanded was
directly due to its parochialism. He knows that, like other languages, Yiddish
was subject to short spasms of growth interrupted by long periods of quies–
cence. But he also knows that Yiddishkeit as a cultural force was impossible
to replace. With its demise, whatever cohesiveness there had been to Ameri–
can Jewish life began to disintegrate. At one and the same time, Yiddish
had turned inward and outward, embracing American life yet retreating
from American values, acculturating American parochialism (articles in the
Forward
explaining baseball to bewildered
gn'ne
fathers) yet insisting on its
singularity. A culture of contradictions, Yiddishkeit brought its tensions to
American shores . It was, in fact, confused by American life. What was
bewildering about America was that it could not really be explained in terms
