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PARTISAN REVIEW
a Secular Jew
is not about marginality or alienation but about asthma.
"Heavy Breathing" is Goodheart's own contribution to the literature of
the experience of pain-a promise that life does not fail to keep. The
poet Emma Lazarus had depicted the immigrants of a century or so ago
as "yearning to breathe free"; and a son of those immigrants makes ter–
rifying what it is like to endure the agonizing intimations of near-death ,
the anxieties and panic-fear and sleeplessness, the desperate and urgent
need for relief as a substitute for a cure that remains elusive. Nor does
Goodheart spare the reader observations on the subject of old age-its
loneliness akin to desolation, as faith and hope vanish, to be succeeded
by a kind of suspended void. For the memory of the past has so often
dimmed or disappeared as well.
But resilience and gallantry can sometimes be detected as well. A
tenacious
elan vital
can even erupt to jump-start life itself and arrest its
inevitable decline. That is what happened to Goodheart's mother, who
became a widow in 1981 and lived independently in her own apartment
for fifteen more years, before moving into a nursing home near her son
and daughter-in-law in 1997. Had he himself not encountered so many
striking figures who are at least briefly portrayed in this memoir (from
novelists as different as Richard Wright and Saul Bellow to philosophers
as different as John Silber and Robert Nozick), Goodheart's mother
would win the
Reader's Digest
contest for "the most unforgettable char–
acter I've met." Hers is the only portrait tha t gets a full chapter in
Con–
fessions of a Secular Jew.
And speaking of philosophers, Ray Monk's
biography of Wittgenstein is what deepens the serious rea ding of Good–
heart's 88-year-old mother, who did not graduate from high school. The
syllabus has continued-burnished with Cather and Wharton. Nor does
Goodheart's mother permit his friends to patronize her, however fes–
tooned they are with academic pedigrees; she is not to be trifled with.
In
the twilight of her own life, she grasps in Wittgenstein the plenitude and
distinction of which some are capab le; and she fathoms how the
philosopher's "genius was connected with his suffering."
What neither of Goodheart's atheist parents had perpetuated in the
1930S and 1940S was the marrow of Jewish culture . The religion once
at its center was so extinguished that his father's funeral was an awk–
ward moment. "At the gra ve site, the ra bbi gu ided me th rough the
kad–
dish,
the Jewish prayer for the dead," which left the mourning son
feeling "deprived of the tradition that my fami ly had rejected." Bereft of
the thick immediacy of a con tinu ous and complex culture, Goodheart
represents a type familiar to modern Jewish historians. The youthfu l
leftism that he recalls assigned the working class as the agent of histor-
