66
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
of our father's God but for him, the dead father himself, to tell us once
again that we were good sons, American sons? His need for the comfort of
belief was what we wanted to satisfY even if we remained beyond belief's
comfort. For his belief threatened to condemn us
to
that dark Europe of
his superstitious longing. The legacy of American sons was to extol the
immigrant father, and then refuse to follow him.
Yet if I did not follow him, I also never adequately praised that Illan
who was not able to seize the America his
SOIlS
hungered for. Twenty years
after his death, how can I speak of the courage of a fear-filled immigrallt
without sentimentality? How do I exp lain that he blessed America as sav–
ior even as he cursed his inability to understand it? Did either Abe or I
have any choice but to reject our father-with love, yes, but reject him
nonetheless? He never understood the country that filled our liberated
imaginations, and we felt nothing but contempt tor his Europe. Not for us
Emma Lazarus' passionate plea. If we wanted Europe's tired and poor or
those huddled masses yearning to breathe fI·ee, all we had to do was take a
good look in the mirror.
l\/liryor, lIIirror, all the
1/
1
11/1
f;Vho
~\
th(' great('st s//((('ss
or
thelll a/l?
Not our illlmigrant father. Sons want more than a sigh of resignation in
the bleak night, or a shrug of the shoulders to indicate that the f:1ther accepts
his fate. What our father could not understand was that the laconic accep–
tance his sons found in Jimmy Stewart's Saturday afternoon movie voice
echoed immensities of space that could never be filled, a
m;~estic
American
emptiness so far beyond the Yiddish inflections of our EIther's
sh((,tl
past
that it made us wince at the thought of what he must sound like to the Irish
on our block who had assumed the title (if not the prerogatives) of the
neighborhood's "real" Americans. We did not want the puffiness and raw
nerves of Galicia. We did not need the sweaty smell of bodies laboring or
the cloaked consciousness by which pogroms were dated. We had no use for
the endless recitations of death and destruction, the anniversaries in which
catastrophe was hysterically pledged to memory. What we wanted wen:
fireworks on the Fourth of July, eating hot dogs at Coney Isbnd, belly
whopping on the sled we shared on Mosholu Parkway's hills in winter's
snow. The places we hungered for were incalculably beyond his unques–
tioning loyalty to a God who cOll1manded that the heart of the ghetto beat
to the rhythm of old fears. America asked of its sons only the courage to
change. Of its immigrant f:1thers, it asked nothing.
He possessed a difTerellt kind of courage fI·om what America wanted–
quiet, weathered, dull. There was little in Fred Kriegel that one could
