Assimilation Blues

By R.Z. Sheppard

WORLD OF OUR FATHERS by IRVING HOWE 714 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $14.95.

Irving Howe is one of those writers for whom the designation "a gentleman and a scholar" was minted. Professor of English at New York's Hunter College, literary critic and editor of the democratic-socialist magazine Dissent, Howe belongs to an intellectual tradition in which literature and politics, aesthetics and morals are not mutually exclusive.

He is one of the few writers who can still use phrases like "the life of the mind" and "the sanctity of thought" without causing the eyes of his readers to glaze. His prose reflects the even heat of his intelligence, yet he can turn a seating phrase when the situation calls for it. During the '60s, when some of his academic colleagues were carried away by militant fantasies, Howe labeled them "guerrillas with tenure."

In World of Our Fathers, he confronts another symptom of success in America: the assimilation blues. For many Americans whose non-English-speaking parents and grandparents were part of the huddled mass that funneled through Ellis Island at the turn of the century, the immigrant experience is conveniently forgotten or bizarrely recreated.

Blazing Saddler. The modern American Jew has supported a minor industry built on the ABs. He warms to his past either as romantic folklore or the wellsprings of neurosis. Fiddler on the Roof and Portnoy's Complaint can be immensely entertaining, but they hardly represent the range and depth of Jewish traditions.

World of Our Fathers does. A scholarly, fluent social history and a generous eulogy, the book spans nearly 100 years--from the exodus of Eastern Europe's Jews to the national acceptance of Woody Allen's gentle kvetching. The distance covered can be measured by a simple fact: even adjusted for inflation, the $33.50 it cost in 1903 for a steerage ticket from Bremen to New York would today scarcely cover a night on the town.

The Lower East Side of Manhatttan was the staging ground for the Jewish dispersion into America. It was also the center of a unique and conflicting culture. The embers of an ancient piety awaiting deliverance by the Messiah flickered alongside the political activists who led the fights for higher wages and better working conditions. Frictions between the old and the new were aired daily in the Yiddish newspapers. Most notable was the Forward, whose editor, Abraham Cahan, became the Solomon of assimilation. Allowing your son to play baseball, he assured one parent, would not necessarily turn him into "a wild American runner."

As the book progresses, stereotypes of pale children, bearded old men and worried mothers in babushkas step aside for anarchists who gather on Yom Kippur to dance, eat and sing La Marseillaise "and other hymns against Satan." Gangster Arnold Rothstein makes it all the way from Hester Street to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as the underworld character Meyer Wolfsheim. Outside New York, Jewish peddlers roam the South, and Jewish farmers plow as far away as Oregon. There are even Jewish cowboys of a sort. Writing home from Kansas, one incipient blazing saddler complains that his gun is too heavy.

As Howe demonstrates with anecdote and analysis, the mainstream of early Jewish-American life converged in its institutions. The Educational Alliance, for example, fed the newcomers' legendary hunger for learning with classes and standing-room-only lectures.

Zero Mostel, who grew up in a small, overcrowded tenement apartment, recalls that "the alliance gave me a new life--I had never seen such big rooms before!"

There was no shortage of popular culture either. The Yiddish theater, which Howe shrewdly compares to Italian opera (where the emphasis is on virtuoso performance rather than content), was not shy about amending Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was set in a Polish village, and Friar Laurence was recast as a Reform rabbi. The famous performers originating in the ghetto included Al Jolson, the Marx Brothers, George Jessel, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice.

Spilled Contempt. Howe has less affection for such latter-day Jewish comedians as Buddy Hackett, Jack E.

Leonard, Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks, who spatter their routines with Yiddish vulgarisms. Their stage bilingualism, Howe argues, spilled contempt on themselves for being inauthentic and disdained Gentiles for rewarding them.

Philip Roth is given a similar dressing-down for Alexander Portnoy, the Jew who sees his Jewishness as a trap preventing his development into a Franchot Tone American. "Who, born a Jew in the 20th century, has been so lofty in spirit as never to have shared this fantasy?" replies Howe. "But who, born a Jew in the 20th century, has been so deluded as to stay with this fantasy for more than a few moments?" Such sobering interrogations have always kept the American Jew leaping from the melting pot into the fire. R.Z. Sheppard

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.