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PARTISAN REVIEW
In "The Culture of Yiddish," Howe depicts a culture in the strikingly
singular position of moving from parochialism toward complexity as it
moved toward its own destruction .
Is there anything comparable in the whole modern period? An up–
rooted people, a broken culture, a literature releasing the crude
imme–
diacies of plebian life, at once provincial in accent and universalist in
its claims.
The question is not merely rhetorical. The deepest attraction that the Yid–
dish world can claim today is that it was a true culture of
folkmassn .
If its
relationship
to
modernity remained peripheral, its strength lay in its unusual
melding of worker and intellectual. When Shelley labelled poets "the
unacknowledged legislators of the universe ," he was indulging in rhetoric.
But when Peretz wrote, "Art is the soul of the people , the personality of a
nation ," his audience understood that if it was
his
art it was
their
soul and
personality he was talking about. To a degree perhaps never since matched,
worker and artist were united in the Yiddish world . Often, they were in–
distinguishable .
Imagine in any other literature the turn to impressionism or symbolism
being undertaken by a shoemaker and a house painter, the dismissal
of the social muse by men laboring in factories!
Yiddish was a language which was , inevitably, used to keep the nonYiddish
world at a distance. " As against the crumbling of history , the Yiddish world
remained an unsleeping witness ."
World of Our Fathers
is an act of piety, but a remarkably objective
piety. Howe writes with a certainty of purpose, a sense of finality , that is
one of the sadder gifts his history imposes. Only in the final section ,
"Dispersion," where he traces the breakup of the fathers' world and deals
directly with the contributions of their offspring, does the reader suspect
that Howe is not altogether at home with his material. For Howe's argument
with the descendents has become part of his argument with our times .
It
is
difficult to see where one can draw the line .
World of Our Fathers
is itself
part of the argument-at least I suspect it is. In insisting on our recognition
of the achievement ofYiddishkeit, Howe indicts all cultural disaffiliation .
And yet, something of the culture lingers . It will not wholly die , nor
is it absorbed in quite the way Howe indicates here . There remains , on his
part, a kind of impatience with the young, as if they, in some mysterious
manner, were responsible for the inability of the culture of Yiddishkeit to
get beyond its tragic history .
It
is a disturbing quality in an historian so
