IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM?
371
tellectuals saw in the Jews emblems of corruption, insidious and demonic
manifestations of big capital and allies of Yankee industrialism. "The rats
are underneath the piles, the Jew is underneath the lot," T. S. Eliot
wrote. Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were suspected of
upsetting the political and social equilibrium of the country. Italians who
gladdened the hearts of American tourists in Florence and Naples pro–
voked disgust in Boston and Philadelphia. Immigrant labor enriched the
country and raised the value of its real estate, but the Jews were identi–
fied only with cupidity and squalor. Those who had come in the 1840s
from Germany were polite and assimilable, although a Robert Moses,
while at Yale, rich, gifted, and good-looking as he was, still did not
make Skull and Bones or any lesser club. But the Russian and Polish
Jews, whose cackling and shrieking set Henry James's teeth on edge
when he resided in the East Side, were bizarre to a dangerous degree.
Seventy years after James had published
The American Scene,
John
Updike, reviewing one of my books in
The New Yorker,
declared that he
saw a parallel between James's East Side horror and my recoil from the
Negro underclass and the conditions of life in the housing projects of
Chicago. A suggestion rich in possibilities. My view was that if well-born
WASPs wished to put me down as a Jewish poacher on their hereditary
cultural prosperity, let them show that they were indeed proper heirs,
qualified by talent.
I was very probably being deliberately dense and brash, for I couldn't
have been so simple-minded as to believe that I really had met certain
persistent objections. These were repeatedly thrust upon me not only by
WASPy snobs and irritable rivals but also by certain Jewish writers and
thinkers whom I held in esteem. Of these the most memorable was
Agnon. Back in the fifties I visited Shmuel Agnon in Jerusalem, and as
we sat drinking tea, chatting in Yiddish, he asked whether my books had
been translated into Hebrew. When I said they hadn't been, he drew
back in his chair and said he was alarmed to hear it. "The languages of
the Diaspora will not last," he warned me, with concern, with charm,
with slyness. He gave me to understand that eternity was looming over
me and that I would be wiped out unless I moved quickly. To feed
Agnon's wit and keep up the pitch of the conversation, I said, "Poor
Heinrich Heine. What's to become of him?" "Oh, there's no worry
about Heine. He's been translated beautifully," Agnon said. "He's per–
fectly safe."
Was Hebrew the
only
language for a Jew? Out of respect for my el–
ders I was silent. Or rather I kept my own counsel silently - that, too,
went back to childhood. Was the old guy suggesting that I dismantle my
life and start again from scratch? I was not about to run away from my
