BOOKS
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compassionate and a critic so catholic. One saw this quality at work in a
recent review Howe wrote of Leonard Michaels's
I Would Have Saved Them
IfI Could.
What is peculiar about this is that Michaels is·one of the very few
writers I know of who is trying to bridge the gap between Yiddishkeit and
modernism,
to
cement the parochial complexities of the remnants of Lower
East Side life to the freezing away of
menschlichkeit,
both Jewish and
American . He does not always succeed in this, but he is one of the few who
makes the attempt. And, as Howe himself points out, it is the question of
how we are
to
live that "is the single commanding power of the Yiddish
tradition ." In our own time, the question is still asked and the attempt
to
answer it must still be made- even by the grandchildren. Now, here , and
in an America which grows daily as distant from .us as it must have been
from our parents .
But that is a personal argument, the kind
World ofOur Fathers
inspires.
In a brilliant essay on Eastern EuropeanJewish history as it seemed after the
Holocaust, Abraham Heschel wrote, "Solidarity with the past must become
an integral part of our existence."
World of Our Fathers
is a remarkable
example of such solidarity. To read it is to be in Howe 's debt.
LEONARD KRIEGEL
THE MAD SENSE OF LANGUAGE
THE GRAVE OF THE RIGHT HAND.
By Charles Wright. Wesleyan University
Press. $2.00.
HARD FREIGHT.
By Charles Wright. Wesleyan University Press. $3 .45 .
BLOODLINES.
By Charles Wright. Wesleyan University Press. $6 .00.
When Charles Wright 's poems work, which is most of the time,
the poetic energies seem to break the membrane of syntax, exploding the
surface , reverberating in multiple directions simultaneously.
It
is not a linear
progression one finds but rather a ricocheting, as
if,
at the impact of a single
cue, all the words bounced into their pockets, rearranged , and displaced
themselves in different directions all over again. And it seems to happen
