578
PARTISAN REVLEW
determined to raise families in this city rather than join the growing
white middle-class exodus to suburbia .
The union members arrived with a tradition of political activism. In
their forties and fifties in 1962, they have aged with a curiously intense
factionalism which, in these post-Cold War years, seems as exotic as a
taste for eighteenth-century porcelain. ''I'm a union man!" fiercely insists
the eighty-seven- year-old who reminds me each time he sees me of how
he stood shou lder to shou lder with my uncle (now dead) on Seventh
Avenue when the cops rode down on furriers massed in the street as far
as the eye could see in the fur strike of 1926, the horses black and
brown, the cops dressed in blue. Only both cops and workers were
white in 1926. An old furrier remembers how he stood with "the op–
pressed." Christian fundamentalists have Jesus as Lord, old Jewish radicals
"the oppressed" as salvation .
Is that why first he calmly denies the existence of and then bitterly
rages against black anti-Semitism?
In
one breath, an impassioned denial
that blacks can ever be anti-Semitic; in the next, a cry of anguish, an
equally impassioned
geshrei
to the sour heavens. The Cossacks, the
Germans, the Poles -
they
were the anti-Semites. That blonde blue-eyed
beast never roamed the streets of Harlem. Anti-Semitism is white. White.
Victims
all.
And yet, he has heard it as I have heard it, that older cry,
the Jew
again singled out. Union man or not, this old man has discovered that
he, too, is white. Indeed, for many blacks in this city, he has become
the
white man, definite article and all. An ironic fate, enough to make a
man struggling with the shopworn euphemism "progressive" grind
toothless gums together in the middle of the night. To be an
"oppressor" is not the destiny he and his kind envisioned back in 1926.
That God he has spent a lifetime denying not on ly wants the last word,
he turns out to be a Woody Allen wannabe - master not of the universe
but of the urban
shtick,
where life sidesteps logic for the perverse depths
of the comic imagination. Blacks and Jews, Jews and blacks. Who's op–
pressing whom?
Cellalt!
Life imitating politics is a subject beyond anyone's endurance. As if
they were living inside the pages of a Malamud story, these old Jews
keep coming back to the text, rereading lines, seeking connections. Do
Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans or Greek-Americans in this battered
city torture themselves with these endless racial permutations? Blacks and
Jews, Jews and blacks. Who did what for whom? To whom? On whom?
At whom?
Yet the subject demands attention. Can one conceive so distorted a
