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PARTISAN REVIEW
largely secular and universalist, with strong overlays of European
culture. Strategic maneuvers of the vanguard had first been mapped
out on gray immigrant streets.
With that immigrant culture our relations were more tor–
mented than we could possibly know. Denial and suppression,
embarrassment and shame: these words would not be too harsh.
Take so simple a matter as the pen name chosen by
Partisan's
chief
editor: I knew of course what
mhv
meant, yet years passed before it
dawned on me that Philip wanted to present himself as chief rabbi of
our disbelieving world, choosing, in a paradox typically Jewish, to
blur his Jewish identity by adopting an aggressively Jewish name .
For that matter, it would be a fascinating exercise to go through the
first twenty years of
Partisan Review
in order to see how frequently
Jewish references, motifs, and inside jokes break past the surface of
cosmopolitanism.
We wanted to shake off the fears and constraints of the world in
which we had been born, but when up against the impenetrable
walls of gentile politeness, we would aggressively proclaim our "dif–
ference," as if to raise Jewishness to a higher cosmopolitan power.
This was probably the first time in American cultural history that a
self-confident group of intellectuals did not acknowledge the author–
ity of Christian tradition. A whole range of non-Christian references
was now reaching at least some American literary people, terms like
Hasidism, place names like Chelm, proper names like Sholom
Aleichem.
Partisan Review
printed some, if not enough, criticism of
Yiddish writers-Isaac Rosenfeld on Peretz and me on Sholom
Aleichem; the magazine was just starting to confront its anomalous
position as the voice of emancipated Jews who nevertheless refused
to deny their Jewishness . Surprising assertions broke through. I
recall my shock-rather a pleasant shock-in the late forties when
reading Clement Greenberg's attack on Arthur Koestler for accept–
ing the "majority gentile view" of the East European Jews. "It is
possible," wrote Greenberg, "to adopt standards of evaluation other
than those ofWestern Europe.
It
is possible that by 'world-historical'
standards the European Jews represent a higher type of human
being than any yet achieved in history. I do not say that this is so ,
but I say it is possible and that there is much to argue for its possibil–
ity." Some
Partisan
writers may have felt a twinge of embarrassment
before these words , but I suspect that Greenberg was also expressing
some of their deeper feelings.
Little wonder that portions of the native intellectual elite, or
