228 - World of Our Fathers

World of Our Fathers
By Irving Howe
New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. 714 pp. $14.95.

Embraced in the Jewish history of the last one hundred years are the massive movement of Eastern European Jews to the United States, starting in the 1880's; the German Nazi Holocaust (1933 1945); and the coming of the Third Jewish Commonwealth in 1948. Professor Howe tells the tale of the first of these revolutionary epochs-a migration comparable in modern Jewish history only to the escape from the Spanish Inquisition. It is hard to envision a finer book on the subject, and it certainly deserves the National Book Award for "History," recently announced by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Marred only by excessive citation and an impossible "system" of references, World of Our Fathers is 400,000 words of history, biography, literary and social analysis, and philosophic reflection built into a marvelous edifice and completed with numerous photographs and drawings. Everything is here: the shtetl origins; the ordeals and demoralizations; the crime, politics, and laughter; the self-education of the workers; the beauty, persistence, and decline of a civilization. No one studying this work can ever again label Jewishness as "only" a reli-

229 - World of Our Fathers

gion; and no one can ever gainsay the element of faith that nourishes even the most secular of Jewish thinking and behavior.

Irving Howe's accounting of the lives and fortunes of two million people and their descendants is a mix of sadness, irony, and yearning. I doubt that many readers will be able to stop their tears, especially at the very places where the immigrants seem to be "making it." For the entire journey and its settlement were to eventuate in a single, ironic end: the very promise of America took its ineluctable toll of that Yiddishkeit that immigrants fought so hard to sustain.

Despite the hardship, most Jews stayed in America. Their low rate of re-emigration is striking, in contrast to the almost one-third of other comparable ethnic groups that returned to their places of origin. One interpretation of the difference (not Howe's) is that the United States somehow came to mean more to Jews than to others. A consequence is the disproportionate Jewish contribution to this country's culture and values.

The current American quest for "roots" adds a special timeliness to this volume. Yet, distinctively, Jewry has always been able to avoid the individualist tendency within that kind of search. The Jewish family tree is the whole people of Israel. The lifeblood of Abraham and Sarah, drained away by the machines of the devilish sweatshop, would flow again in the children Moshe and Karia, and in the grandchildren Raphael and Lillian.

Professor Howe, himself a son of the world he chronicles, ventures a kind of hopefulness-not that the tangibles of Yiddishkeit will escape dissolution but that Jewry's gift of menshlichkeit, a way of vital humaneness, of realism-idealism, will remain with us. The author seems to have eluded the state of crisis he attributes to many American Jewish writers. I suggest that his literary and spiritual health is empowered by the stoicism he discerns at the root of "both Jewish faith and Jewish rebellion." Although Howe is also markedly constrained by that condition, his intellectuality-so patient and so menshlich, the dual force behind his brilliant contribution-could never have realized itself apart from the Yiddishkeit he himself honors.

The Jewish sense for history rolls on strange wheels: the tomorrows are always getting sent back to the past, and the yesterdays are always getting sent ahead to the future. Any who will, with Irving Howe, climb the rickety stairways of the tenements and, over a glass of tea and a piece of bread, give ear to the fathers and mothers of the Lower East Side, those obscure souls here praised, may have their spirits readied for tomorrow's messiah.

A. Roy Eckardt
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania