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PARTISAN REVIEW
And harsher terms might have to be used, I suspect, if we were to
consider why the New York writers, or at least a good many of
them, were so sluggish in responding to the news of the
Holocaust. Nevertheless, it would be a fascinating exercise to go
through the first twenty years of
Partisan R eview
to see how
frequently Jewish references, motifs, inside jokes, and even
explicit themes break past the surface of cultural cosmopolitan–
ism and Marxist internationalism. Perhaps the New York
writers might see some multiple ironies in the story about Franz
Kafka's one-sentence speech to a sophisticated Prague audience
that had come to view a Yiddish theatrical group: "Ladies and
gentlemen, you all know more Yiddish than you think you do."
These things are hard to measure objectively. Still, do we
not all feel in our bones that for good and/ or bad something of
the moral fervor, the polemical fury , the passion for idea and
ideology that prevailed among the New York writers had its
roots in secular and no doubt pre-secular Jewish life? Writing
about such popular entertainers as Al Jolson and Fannie Brice
in the 1920s, Gilbert Seldes remarked on their "daemonic"
abandon. They were "possessed," he said. They had "a fine
carelessness about our superstitions of politeness and gentil–
ity... " Anyone old enough to remember the disdain and, still
more, the anxious fear that
Partisan R eview
inspired in the
American academy during the 1930s and 1940s, will recognize
that what Seldes said about Jolson and Brice would hold as well
for Rahv and Goodman, Rosenberg and Abel, Hook, and Mac–
donald.
Style and personal tremors apart, the rise of the New York
writers had another important consequence for American cul–
ture. For the first time there was now a self-confident group of
intellectuals in this country that did not derive from native
Christian sources and, what is more, did not seem to feel this as
an insuperable disadvantage. For the first time a whole range of
non-Christian sources, references, terms reached at least some
American intellectuals-terms like Hasidism, place names like
Chelm, proper names like Sholom Aleichem. Little wonder that
remaining portions of the native intellectual eli te, or rag-tail
poseurs trying to shimmy their way into elite status, found the
