On April 15, 1962, Hannah Arendt sent a brief personal note to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, thanking him for some flowers he had sent. It had been a rough winter for the political philosopher: Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, was suffering from a brain aneurysm, and Arendt had developed a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics she was given to treat a cold. Then, in March, a truck had plowed into a taxi she was taking through Central Park, resulting in a concussion, hemorrhages in both eyes, broken teeth, and fractured ribs. Nevertheless, in her note three weeks later to Shawn—who had assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem a year before, and was still awaiting her copy—Arendt sounded almost chirpy. “I am much better,” she wrote, in her blue-ballpoint cursive, spidery and cramped on cream-colored stationery, “and on the point of going back to work.”

Five months later, she was done. On Sept. 19, a sheaf of onion-skin pages arrived at The New Yorker’s office at 25 West 43rd Street, with the title, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report.” The manuscript was sent over to the typing pool, where it was copied onto heavy yellow bond, double-spaced, and then returned to Shawn for editing.

Meanwhile, a carbon copy was delivered to Arendt’s publisher, Viking Press. A lightly edited version of her manuscript was published as a book in May 1963 under the same title she’d picked for the New Yorker articles that were published in February and March but with the dramatically enhanced subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” The book, with revisions, has remained in print since. But it never reflected Shawn’s changes to Arendt’s draft, which was serialized in five issues of the magazine. So while The New Yorker remains almost reflexively associated with “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the text that most people have in mind when they talk about Arendt’s report is not, in fact, the one that appeared in the magazine.

The Shawn typescript, cluttered with pencil marks, is now held with the rest of The New Yorker archive at the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. His major cuts and alterations to Arendt’s original are striking in their consistency: Almost all of them involve Arendt’s asides about the contemporary Jewish community and its handling of the trial. Many of the most controversial passages made it into the magazine intact, including her assertion that “if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between five and six million people.” But the final magazine text is in some ways less provocative, more streamlined, and—unsurprisingly, given the precision of The New Yorker’s legendary copy editor Eleanor Gould—more polished than what’s in the book.

In one sense, Shawn was simply exercising his preference for straightforward structure and well-modulated language: The sections cut from the magazine, especially near the beginning, are generally asides that distract the reader from the central focus of the Eichmann narrative. In some places, he reined Arendt in, softening her claim that Hitler was, in 1935, “admired everywhere as a great national statesman” with a judiciously placed “almost” before “everywhere.” But the cuts also reflect Shawn’s aversion to what Irving Howe, in his criticism of Arendt in Commentary, self-deprecatingly described as the “grubby” polemic of the little intellectual journals. (Ben Yagoda, in his New Yorker chronicle, About Town, noted that Arendt went to Shawn for the assignment on the advice of her friend Mary McCarthy only after Norman Podhoretz told her Commentary couldn’t afford to send her to Jerusalem; given that Podhoretz responded to Arendt’s finished piece with a scathing review subtitled “A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance,” one can only imagine that the final product would have been quite different had Arendt been writing for him.)

Arendt doesn’t appear to have fussed over the cuts. “She did not like to look at things, or go back to things,” explained Jerome Kohn, Arendt’s former research assistant and now her literary executor. “What she gave to Shawn she left in his hands, and what she sent to the publisher, she left in theirs.” She did, however, send in corrections, and requested multiple sets of galleys during editing. “It would make things easier for me,” she wrote to Shawn on Sept. 30, 1962. After the first installment of the series was published, the following February, she wrote to chastise Shawn for an error she had found in the text concerning the date of Yad Vashem’s establishment. “This is an error,” Arendt wrote, noting she had spoken to the fact-checker, William Honan, who went on to be a culture editor at the New York Times. “This is not very important but it confirms my conviction that no dates or facts provided by your checking department should be inserted unless they are checked and approved by me.”

The date of Yad Vashem’s founding turned out to be the least of it, of course. According to Arendt’s biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Shawn cabled Arendt on March 8 to advise her of the response to her piece: “People in town seem to be discussing little else.” A few days later, on March 13, she replied that she had begun receiving angry letters. “Now the Jews know that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the German’ and the Germans agree that enemy No. 1 is not ‘the Jew,’ it is me,” Arendt wrote, in a letter held at the Library of Congress. “This, to be sure, is an exaggeration and your checking department would not let me get away with it.”

• The six best Jewish cookbooks. [Saveur]

• Ruth Franklin weighs what it means to consider Anne Frank’s story a universal one, as opposed to a particularly Jewish one. [TNR]

• At a memorial for former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—the first Likud PM—Benjamin Netanyahu chastised West Bank settlers that harass Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• The latest This American Life, whose theme is gifts, has much of interest to Tablet Magazine readers, from the reading of an Etgar Keret short story to a tale of an Israeli marijuana sting. [TAL]

• Thirty Jewish Studies faculty members in the University of California system urged the Orange County prosecutor to drop charges against 11 Muslim students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Irvine last year. [JTA]

It occurred to me that two of the three Jewish intellectuals contributing editor Ruth R. Wisse wrote about this week are also two of the three Jewish intellectuals in Zelig’s opening.

I eventually found him—though he did not, at first, meet my expectations.

***

From my early teens, discussions around our family table took off from articles in Commentary, the only publication read in common by my father, my brother Ben, and me, five years Ben’s junior. These discussions continued once Ben and I formed our own families and became independent subscribers.

In all that time, few essays ever got us more riled up than “My Negro Problem and Ours,” written in 1963, at the height of the American civil rights movement, and almost certainly intended to provoke the hundreds of letters it generated. In it, Commentary’s legendary editor-in-chief, Norman Podhoretz, pitted his experiences as a poor kid in Brooklyn who was stalked and bullied by bigger black boys against the prevalent notion that Jews were rich and Negroes persecuted. He unearthed in himself emotions like envy and hate and examined them in light of what increasingly militant blacks were saying about their treatment in America. Far from minimizing their grievances, Norman concluded that the tortured relations between blacks and whites should be dissolved. “I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.” Intermarriage was the desired resolution. Were he asked whether he would like one of his daughters to “marry one,” he wrote, he would have to answer, no, he would not like it at all, but he would accept it as the man he had “a duty to be.” There was real import to this statement by a man with three daughters.

“Politically incorrect” hardly suffices to describe the tenor and substance of this article, which retains every iota of its disturbing power to this day. Norman’s mercilessly rational analysis falls like a searchlight on thoughts and feelings that might have benefited from softer illumination. But what troubled us in Montreal was less the treatment of race, which hardly resonated north of the border, than the author’s indifference to whether his daughter’s hypothetical black suitor was Jewish. So the boy was black—big deal. But how could the editor of a Jewish magazine so casually treat his daughter’s marriage to a gentile?

And then, almost as an aside, came this reflection: “In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant,” Podhoretz wrote. “Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction.”

Was the question terrible or simply off-key? Striving for ultimate honesty, it betrayed moral innocence without registering what Judaism had come to accomplish. Jews had forsworn human sacrifice. The Germans murdered because they were not Jews and did not follow God’s law. The genocide of the Jews was the consequence not of Jewish survival but of Nazism’s perverted search for the “fittest.” Surely the unspeakable crimes by enemies of the Jews ought to have prompted questions about the value of their existence.

***

It wasn’t until several months later that Norman received redemption in our family, which came as a result of his response to Hannah Arendt’s coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been captured and brought by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, from his hiding in Argentina to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people. This was the first such reckoning, as earlier trials of Nazi war criminals had charged them with crimes against humanity or against other nationals. Israeli leaders felt duty bound to try one of the chief organizers of the Final Solution for the genocide that had inspired the jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin that term. Arendt, by contrast, was bothered by what she considered legal gerrymandering in trying the SS officer in the court of a country that had not existed at the time of the massacres, by the prosecution’s emphasis on the national catastrophe rather than the narrow specifics of the case, and by its inadequate understanding of the Nazi mind. Author of a major study of totalitarianism, Arendt was convinced that the modern technocrat—Nazi or Soviet—was so regimented and brainwashed that he was not intellectually agile enough to try to save himself in a court of law. Eichmann was dull-witted, a pencil pusher: It was ridiculous to cast an efficient bureaucrat as arch-villain in so large a drama.

Of all the prominent European Jews who found refuge in America during the war, Arendt had, before this, been singled out for homage by the New York intellectuals, who were just coming to terms with the Jewish national experience they had until then mostly ignored. They had not realized that she was moving in the opposite direction, distancing herself from her earlier Zionist and Jewish sympathies. Although no one at the time suspected her liaison with her teacher Martin Heidegger, or the resumption of her correspondence with him despite his wartime association with the Nazi regime, the Americans felt betrayed by her account of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Saul Bellow ascribed his dislike to one of his characters, the Holocaust survivor Arthur Sammler, who protests that the Germans’ idea of making the century’s great crime look dull was not banal but an idea of genius: “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abandon conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself.” The historian Jacob Robinson exposed Arendt’s many factual errors in a study called, after Isaiah, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, and Arendt’s German-Jewish landsman Gershom Scholem called her tone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.” Citing Scholem, Irving Howe recalled that what struck them both—“struck like a blow—was the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.”

The debate over Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial affected the American Jewish intelligentsia almost as powerfully as the trial shook Israelis.

Norman’s contribution telegraphed its verdict in the subtitle: “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance.” As if taking up her challenge to look at the universal aspects of what might otherwise seem merely a Jewish quarrel, he examined the symptomatic qualities of her reportage: Eichmann may or may not be a new type of modern man, but Arendt represented a new style of modern thinker. What she did, he noted incisively, was to “translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to a sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim. It has all the appearance of ‘ruthless honesty,’ and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?”

Norman identified the technique of postmodern inversion that destabilizes the moral order: preferring flawed originality to mere accuracy. Resentful of being a “young fogey,” he was by this point publishing articles as subversive as the work he was dissecting here. But the venerable Arendt was turning frivolous, and so he took on the task of undoing her mischief—a task that required a more patient pen and disciplined mind than the mischief-maker’s own. Distortion is to accuracy as snorting is to sobriety, but unlike the private vices that harm only their practitioner, the intellectual follies—to use Lionel Abel’s term—infect the body politic.

Let me quote Norman again: “The brilliance of Miss Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann could hardly be disputed by any disinterested reader. But at the same time, there could hardly be a more telling example … of the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” He was speaking here for almost all the New York Intellectuals, who had painfully outgrown their own misguided enthusiasms. One can hardly exaggerate how genuinely thinkers like Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe had come to value lucidity and intelligibility over other literary virtues. But attaining that clarity required filtering out pollutants, not once but repeatedly, in a society that embraced Arendt’s “perversity” as eagerly as France sanctified the criminal Jean Genet.

What no one foresaw, of course, was how quickly postmodern frivolity would engulf the elites and flood the humanities. Bellow would soon be savaged by the counterculture, and Howe by the New Left, the latter winning his way back into its good graces only once it had passed its faux-revolutionary phase. As for Norman, he cleaned the stables, earning the Homeric adjective that accompanied these labors.

Continue reading: Zionism, “our love for the State of Israel,” and being a soldier. Or view as a single page.

Irving came to me out of need, which put us on an even footing. This was unexpected, since I owed him a considerable professional debt: In 1969, when I was completing my doctorate at McGill University and teaching sections of the English literature survey course, I petitioned the English Department for permission to introduce courses on Yiddish literature under its aegis. When my colleagues asked how they could justify the inclusion of a subject with no obvious connection to theirs, I pointed out that not a single course in the university dealt with any aspect of Jewish history or culture. Jewish studies would have to start somehow and somewhere: Did they think I’d do better in the German Department? Invited to supply a syllabus, I proposed a course on the Yiddish short story that was based largely on Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories; almost entirely on its own, it won over my department.

Howe describes in his memoirs the emotional-political pressures of the early 1950s that prompted him to seek refuge in this project of Yiddish translation. Because he read his native language only haltingly, he partnered with a Yiddish poet called “Leyzer” Greenberg, who selected the authors and read his choice of stories aloud until Irving hit on the ones that he liked. In this way, he later quipped, he got to know the lesser Yiddish writers much better than the great ones. As the “outside man” on the project, he conscripted translators from among fellow writers who still knew some Yiddish from home. When Saul Bellow agreed to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” Leyzer likewise read the story aloud to him, and Saul sat at the typewriter, translating it sentence by sentence as if taking dictation. The result was so good (if slightly bowdlerized) that Bashevis Singer never allowed Bellow to translate another story, lest Saul be credited for any share of his achievement.

But I digress: I was making the point that Howe and Greenberg’s anthology allowed me to introduce Yiddish literature at McGill. The two men published several more anthologies of Yiddish poetry, essays and stories, until Leyzer’s death in 1977 left Irving without a partner on a project he had come to depend on as the link to his Jewishness.

The most ideologically rigid of the New York Intellectuals, Irving did not change his affiliation over a lifetime. As his fellow leftists turned neo-conservative and their publications edged rightward, he alone remained a socialist, conflating his socialism with what he called Yiddishkayt (Jewishness), so that he could not abandon one without appearing to betray the other. When Jewishness began to matter more to him, he looked for ways to become part of it without compromising his socialist faith, and he’d found a highly creative avenue for this linkage in the transposition of Yiddish literary treasures into English. Leyzer’s death forced him to find a new collaborator on the Yiddish projects that constituted the Jewish portion of his life, and that was how he came to me.

Our first joint venture, The Best of Sholem Aleichem, was conceived when Marty Peretz approached Irving with the idea for this collection to be published by New Republic Books, and Irving—the one with experience—got us to sign away all the rights for $2,000. Irving had composed the introductions to the books he co-edited with Leyzer, but he and I decided to do ours in the form of letters, which we sent back and forth in the days when mail took several days for delivery. Leon Wieseltier, who saw the proofs of the book, asked me whether I noticed that whereas my letters responded to Irving’s by incorporating his comments, his never referred to anything I said. I had noticed it, but it was beneath my pride to show Irving that I cared. And I felt beholden to him. It was his reputation, not mine and not Sholem Aleichem’s, that got our book frontpage coverage in the New York Times Book Review.

We began work on the Sholem Aleichem anthology just as Irving’s most ambitious book, World of Our Fathers, was about to appear. Irving worried that the Times would assign the review of it to Harry Golden, whose work he had panned. Instead, he won the National Book Award, made the best-seller list, and got to tour the country for respectable fees. But fate seemed to conspire against his triumph. His marriage to Ariel Mack, to whom he dedicated this book, was then coming apart. When we started working on the book, he lived with her in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive; by the time we began our second project, he was in a smaller apartment on the Upper East Side.

Domestic matters apart, I was under the impression that Irving felt more comfortable in smaller spaces. He seemed attracted to socialism because he considered it a losing cause in America, and to Yiddish for the same reason, interpreting it as the culture of what he called the “little man.” When he toured to promote his book, he complained that the well-heeled audiences at synagogues and Jewish community centers were nothing like the garment workers and union organizers whom he had so lovingly portrayed in his book. I pointed out that he had memorialized only those parts of the Lower East Side that had not endured in America. His audiences were made up of the synagogue-goers, Zionists, and immigrants who had made good. The ironies of this ought to have been cause for celebration, but, for Irving, they were instigators of regret.

***

I don’t think Irving would have dignified me as a “political adversary” in the first years that we worked together. Feminists may snigger, but I sensed that he felt protective toward me, trying to shield me from the battles he had been fighting since his teens and to which he now seemed condemned. He obviously enjoyed writing and teaching about literature more than duking it out politically, and he may have wanted to grant me the respite he could not allow himself. “Try to understand that I genuinely did not wish to get into a fight with you,” he wrote after he had treated me to a public putdown at a nasty conference on Jewish literature we had both attended in Berkeley, Calif.:

[This] was not because I dismissed you. It was … in part because I know that polemics exact a heavy price from you in pain and suffering, and I keep saying to myself that it would be best to avoid them. But also, to be honest, I don’t think you’re very good at political polemics, certainly not as good as you are in literary discussions; I feel it’s not your métier, that you force yourself to do it out of a sense of obligation (with attendant anxiety). But I don’t want [to] make it seem that it has been only my goodness of heart—though it’s there—which prompted me to refrain from public argument with you. I think you have no idea how aggressive and combative and provoking you can be, indeed were in San Francisco, and that this elicits strong responses in turn.

Admitting to “contradictory feelings in the matter,” he expressed satisfaction in our ability to remain collaborators and friends, “perhaps the best that can be done under the circumstances.” This was seductive. But though I shared some of his contradictory feelings, he did not have my number. His description of the anxious polemicist, including of her abrasiveness, seemed (then and now) truer of him than of me. In wanting to attain for the Jews the political unexceptionalism to which they were entitled, I was anxious about the outcome, not the process. As between the two of us, he was the one more often accused of harshness, while people were always saying (to my irritation) how nice I was despite my out-of-favor views.

Indeed, Irving and I drew very different conclusions from the Yiddish culture with which we were engaged together. Yiddish wit once observed that Jews had turned links (left) because they were denied their recht (rights). Irving saw some such connection between political weakness and moral strength. I, who was spared the fate of European Jewry by parents who brought me to Canada in 1940, could not romanticize the politics that had allowed my cohort to be turned into fertilizer. While I would not have chosen to be anything but a Jew, it was precisely the study of Yiddish that had taught me not only the dangers but also the corrupting potential of powerlessness. Whereas Sholem Aleichem fully recognized the deformities that poverty bred, and loved Jews despite the humiliation to which they were subject, some of his contemporaries considered weakness a sign of distinction and decried achievement and prosperity as such. I was also aware, from studying Yiddish, that prolonged repression had produced a rash of informers and converts to other faiths, who often outdid gentiles in malignity. Although Irving and I both admired Jewish resiliency, I had come to recognize Jewish political dependency—a corollary of exile—as a deeply flawed political ideal.

***

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, defining Zionism as a form of racism. I was convinced that this charge, lifted straight from the Communist playbook of the 1930s, would greatly advance the Arab war against Israel. By transposing their rhetoric from “We will crush the Jewish State” to “The imperialist Jews are despoiling us,” Arab rulers had forged an anti-liberal alliance among despotisms, autocracies, and dictatorial regimes across the political spectrum. European anti-Semitism in the 1870s had cast the Jews, the beneficiaries of liberal democracy, as its conspiratorial exploiters, so that destroying them became a necessary defense against their alleged domination. By adding the trendy indictment of “racism” to the toxicology of anti-Jewishness, Arabs and Muslims would henceforth rally to their cause Marxists who picked up Stalin’s charge of Zionist-imperialism, internationalists who insisted that Jews should transcend their particularism, and rightists who could now turn the Holocaust indictment of racism against its victims. Talk about a big tent.

Continue reading: an editorial spat, anti-Jewish ammunition, and Robert Frost. Or view as a single page.

Singer’s novel is considerably more literary than Mitchell’s, but it is surprising how well the adjectives that apply to Gone with the Wind also suit The Brothers Ashkenazi. Singer’s book, too, is a sweeping historical novel, covering several generations in the life of a family and leading them through world-changing events. And Singer, too, is more interested in big, impressive set-pieces than in characterization—the major figures in The Brothers Ashkenazi tend to be forcefully one-dimensional, with little interior life or capacity to change.

The reason for the different fates of these bestsellers, of course, has to do with the particular histories they bring to mythic life. In writing about the Civil War and Reconstruction, Mitchell tackled the central American experience, and despite her racist sentimentalizing of the antebellum South—or, perhaps, because of it—she has never stopped appealing to American readers. Singer, on the other hand, wrote in Yiddish about the central modern experience of Eastern European Jewry: the violent transformation of Jewish civilization, from 1880 to 1920, under the pressures of secularism, industrialism, nationalism, and Communism. It is no coincidence that the family at the center of the book is called Ashkenazi; Singer set out to write the archetypal story of Ashkenazi Jews, on the same scale as epic novels like War and Peace and Les Misérables.

The novel’s vantage point on this crisis is the city of Lodz, sometimes called the Manchester of Poland. In the late 19th century, Lodz was transformed from a small village to an international capital of the textile industry—an industry dominated by Jewish manufacturers, merchants, and laborers. Singer captures this reckless, explosive growth in a cinematic sequence in the novel’s first pages: “Seemingly overnight the houses already standing sprouted additional stories, annexes, wings, extensions, ells, attics, and garrets to accommodate the flow of newcomers … like a torrent overflowing its banks, the Jews smashed down all barriers set up to exclude them.” Singer’s method in The Brothers Ashkenazi is to drop his protagonists into this bubbling cauldron and document the changes that result.

The patriarch of the Ashkenazi dynasty, Abraham Hersh, gets rich as the chief salesman for the Gentile-owned manufacturing firm of Huntze. Just as he is an employee of capitalists rather than a capitalist himself, he seems to be in the new Lodz without being of it: He remains a traditional Hasid, spending as much time as possible at the court of his rebbe. He uses his wealth to do mitzvot like buying Passover supplies for the poor and ransoming Jewish prisoners.

Yet Singer is by no means an admirer of this traditional Hasidic culture, and he blasts it with all the standard criticisms that enlightened Jewish writers had been making since the days of Haskalah. Abraham Hersh’s piety, though sincere, is shown to be harsh and superstitious, and it entails a total contempt for women, especially his own wife. “If he loved her in his own fashion, he showed it only in their bed, as the Law prescribed. Otherwise, he was quite rigid about a woman’s role in life. She was to bear children, rear them, observe the laws of Jewishness, run a household, and obey her husband for life.”

Abraham Hersh’s priorities are made quite clear when he leaves his wife alone, even though she is about to give birth, while he makes his usual Passover pilgrimage to his rebbe. She ends up having twin boys—Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem, the brothers of the title. Singer does not waste time setting up the temperamental and physical contrast that will define these characters for the rest of the book, and end up determining their fates. Simha Meir, the older by five minutes, is small and frail, bites the nipple while nursing, and turns into a solitary, clever, manipulative boy. Jacob Bunem, a vigorous baby, is also his brother’s opposite in every other way: athletic, charismatic, and not too bright.

It is hard to decide whether such blunt dualism is simple, like a myth—Singer clearly wants us to think of Jacob and Esau—or simplistic, a melodramatic convention. In any case, the reader never has to wonder what Simha and Jacob will do in any given situation, and one reason The Brothers Ashkenazi is so easy to read is that its complications are all sociological, seldom psychological. For instance, it is fated that Simha, the prodigy, will end up claiming the desirable Dineleh as his wife, even though she loves Jacob; and it is equally fated that the marriage will be full of mutual contempt and sexual coldness, since Simha’s defining trait is that he is impossible to love.

Likewise, we see enough of Simha as a greedy boy, cheating at cards and loansharking to his friends, to predict that he will grow up to be a ruthless and successful businessman. The rise and rise of Simha Meir—who in time drops his Yiddish name and becomes simply Max—dominates the first half of the novel. Singer, knowing he has a great villain on his hands, clearly relishes the scenes in which the young Simha coldly bankrupts his father-in-law, in order to take control of his business, and then gets his own father fired, so that he can take over his job. Eventually Max Ashkenazi gains control of the Huntze factory and achieves his dream of becoming “King of Lodz.”

But the cost of his ambition is not merely personal. All along, Singer shows that the rise of Lodz’s Jewish bourgeoisie takes place at the expense of the Jewish workers, who spend endless shifts at their factory looms and still don’t earn enough to support their families. The Brothers Ashkenazi never quite manages to become a great realist novel, in the tradition of Balzac or Zola, because Singer doesn’t write concretely enough about the realities of labor and commerce—he tends to offer emotive formulas in place of precise observation. But these are enough to keep the reader on the side of the proletariat against the bosses:

The more agile among the workers managed to filch some bread from the pantry, but those less bold starved. A piece of meat was never seen; the chicory substituting for coffee was served with a mere lick of sugar. The work went on all through the night by the dim light of oil lamps and smoking wicks. The smoke from the stoves irritated the eyes; the boss’s children cried; the women cursed and bickered. When the red eyelids could no longer be held open, the men stretched out on the dirty floor with a piece of goods as a pillow and dozed off, freezing in the winter, steaming in the summer, eaten alive by fleas, flies, and bedbugs.

Yet even as he mounts this Marxist critique of Lodz-style capitalism, Singer is convinced that Communism, too, is a dead end for Eastern European Jews. If Abraham Hersh shows the bankruptcy of tradition and Simha Meir the bankruptcy of capitalism, the bankruptcy of socialism appears in the character of Nissan, a rabbi’s son who becomes a strike-leader and revolutionary conspirator. Nissan earns the nickname “the depraved” for his open rejection of everything his puritanical, pious father believes in. Yet as Singer shows, with blunt irony, Nissan’s own longing for revolution is the mirror image of his father’s messianism, and he annotates the margins of Das Kapital just as his father annotated volumes of the Talmud.

Jewishness, Singer insists, is inescapable, and it makes any real comradeship with Polish workers impossible. When Nissan launches a strike against Lodz’s factory owners, it quickly degenerates into a pogrom. “Didn’t you know it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding?” the townspeople reproach him, and while Nissan can’t accept this truth, Singer clearly does. The Brothers Ashkenazi takes its characters through all kinds of social upheaval, culminating in World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. But anti-Semitism never changes, and it makes a mockery of every attempt to break the impasse of Eastern European Jewish society. In the novel’s very last chapter, the funeral liturgy—“Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return”—is echoed in the hopeless refrain of Lodz’s Jews: “Everything we built here we built on sand.”

This somber, trapped, helpless conclusion now seems horribly prescient. A few years after The Brothers Ashkenazi was published, the thousand-year-old Ashkenazi civilization would be annihilated in the Holocaust. Lodz itself became the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, with some 250,000 residents, most of whom were murdered at Chelmno and Auschwitz. In some ways, the world of the Lodz ghetto can be seen as a nightmare sequel to the world of The Brothers Ashkenazi, with sweatshops transformed into labor camps and Simha Meir, the “king of Lodz,” giving up his throne to Chaim Rumkowski, the infamous head of the Lodz Judenrat, who was derisively known as “King Chaim.”

I.J. Singer himself left Poland for America in 1934, taking a job at the Forward, New York’s socialist Yiddish daily. The following year he brought over his brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, then a fledgling writer. Emigration saved their lives—their mother and younger brother were killed in the Holocaust. Yet as Rebecca Goldstein points out in her introduction, it was not until Israel Joshua died of a heart attack, in 1944, that Isaac Bashevis began to flourish as a writer: “it was only the death of the one brother that brought the genius of the other to life.” And the prodigious success of the younger Singer, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature, has cast a retrospective shadow over the older brother whom he idolized: “To me, he was not only the older brother, but a spiritual father and master as well.” The Brothers Ashkenazi does not, I think, have the same literary power as the best of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work, but it remains a powerful and indispensable document of Yiddish civilization.

The Jew-as-character-of-fiction had fared not much better. American Jewish writing was a fiction of mawkish quaintness, what Irving Howe called Second Avenue tearjerkers, stuffed with sentimentalized stereotypes: the suffering schlemiel; the Lower East Side immigrant who peddles his way from rags to riches; the wise, pious patriarch struggling to accept the Americanized son; the son desperate to escape the old world who felt “too foreign in school and too American at home,” as Will Herberg put it. Even worse were Jewish characters written by non-Jews. The Jew appeared as the annoying stranger (Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises); as rebellious young radical (Ben Compton in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.); or as unscrupulous businessman (Harry Bogen in Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale). Abe Jones, in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Irving Howe complained in Commentary, is “dreary, tortured, melancholy, dully intellectual, and joylessly poetic, his spirit gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish murk.”

This state of affairs carried over into the 1940s. Writers in the extended Commentary circle—the ‘Family’ as future paterfamilias Norman Podhoretz would retrospectively call it—found nourishment in Herman Melville or Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English poets or Russian novelists—but not in Jewish texts. The motives of Jewish writers, managing editor Robert Warshow complained in 1946, “are almost never pure: they must dignify the Jews, or plead for them, or take revenge upon them, and the picture they create is correspondingly distorted by romanticism or sentimentality or vulgarity.” One Commentary writer, seeking in 1948 to find promising Jewish contributions to contemporary American literature, could point to only three minor talents: Harriet Lane Levy, William Manners, and Charles Angoff. American Jewish writing, Commentary reported the next year, lay fallow, “steeped in apologetics and in false provincial pride.”

Commentary founder Elliot Cohen grasped that the Family’s discoveries of America could have literary reverberations, could release among the Family a great literary efflorescence that had only yesterday seemed an impossibility. By taking Jewish writing seriously, by refusing to disdain it as a parochialism, Cohen’s magazine planted the seeds of a generous literary fertility. Cohen had always demanded that Jewish writing of any kind conform to the highest standards. The future American Jewish culture “cannot be purely imitative,” he insisted. “As to Jewish culture,” he said, “the first question we should ask is not whether it is Jewish, but whether it is good. And ‘good’ means on a par with the best in the culture of society in general.” In literature as in all else, Cohen recoiled from apologetics, defensiveness, sectarianism, sentimentality, and self-congratulation. What lay fallow would grow in the 1950s into a jungled abundance that surprised even the presiding genius.

Several seasons passed before the new literary fruit showed itself. The first Commentary fiction was perfectly parochial. But very soon new Jewish writers, to borrow a phrase Philip Roth used in Commentary, launched “an imaginative assault upon the American experience.” Writing became for them a priestly calling, an instrument of upward mobility, a gateway for fighting their way into the great American beyond. It seemed to Cohen as though he were watching before his very eyes the passing of dominance from the southern school of William Faulkner to the urban Jewish school of Saul Bellow. A new kind of fiction, not intended to flatter the Jewish ego, was coaxed forth from the novelist branch of the Family, language obsessed writers seeking, in Irving Howe’s phrase, to shower the country with words. And what words! These scribes brought with them to the great culture rush the tones of Jewish speech and verbal performance: a street brashness and detached irony, an ability to careen between different registers and inflections, from high to low, from wide-ranging erudition to urban idiom.

Among the first fruits Commentary reaped was Bernard Malamud’s “The Prison,” a 1950 story that beautifully dilated upon the theme of Jewishness as confinement. The magazine would run eight more of Malamud’s stories (at $30 a page), including “Idiot’s First,” and five of the thirteen stories in The Magic Barrel, the collection that would earn Malamud a National Book Award. “Commentary gave him the perfect audience,” his friend Philip Roth said. In fact, young critic Norman Podhoretz made his Commentary debut in 1953 with a review of Malamud’s first novel, The Natural. “Well, you seem to know something about novels,” Cohen had told Podhoretz; “you know something about symbolism, you know something about Jews, and you know something about baseball. Here’s a symbolic novel by a Jewish writer about a baseball player. I guess you’re qualified to review it.”

What begins in the flat cadences of Malamud becomes visionary in Saul Bellow’s exuberance. In a review of Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, Commentary recognized with more than a little prescience what Bellow had done. That novel, Martin Greenberg (then an editor at Schocken Books) announced in the January 1948 issue, was “the first attempt in American literature to consider Jewishness not in its singularity, not as constitutive of a special world of experience, but as a quality that informs all of modern life.” Bellow animated the book’s hero, Asa Leventhal, with a feeling of somehow not belonging, a loneliness Greenberg called “the malaise of the megalopolis.” In a similar vein, Alfred Kazin hailed The Adventures of Augie March as Bellow’s “attempt to break down all possible fences between the Jew and this larger country.” The book’s famous first line announced a turn from alienation to affirmation: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Forging a passage from marginality to American literature writ large, Bellow’s own pieces for Commentary reprised the theme. In the February 1951 issue (a month before Cohen ran Bellow’s story “Looking for Mr. Green”), Bellow condemned the self-doubt that cramped other Jewish writers, a timidity about writing in a language their immigrant parents did not speak. “As long as American Jewish writers continue to write in this way,” Bellow said, “we will have to go elsewhere for superior being and beauty, and will thus continue to be foreigners.”

Philip Roth, to complete the triumvirate, made his Commentary debut in 1957, at age twenty-four, with a charming piece that Norman Podhoretz, then assistant editor and only three years older than the writer from Newark, had rescued from the slush pile. “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” included two years later in Goodbye, Columbus, was Roth’s first published story. The magazine also ran “Eli, the Fanatic,” Roth’s brilliant story about the confrontation between assimilated Jews and ultra-Orthodox Holocaust refugees intent on setting up a yeshiva in their suburb. Roth had first come across Cohen’s magazine as an undergrad in the periodical room in the Bucknell University library in the early 1950s. “I was stunned,” he said. “So this is what it’s like to be Jewish.” By offering a sophisticated Jewishness, free of parochialism and apologetics, Commentary did for Roth what the Menorah Journal had done for Lionel Trilling three decades before. “Commentary furnished a whole education, a way of being Jewish and intelligent and American—all at once.”

By now Commentary fiction was consistently first rate. Cohen ran two parables by Henry Roth, his first publications since Call It Sleep in 1935, as well as stories by Delmore Schwartz, Nelson Algren, and Alison Lurie, who published her earliest story in Commentary when she was all of twenty. Cohen fertilized all of this with translations of Yiddish literature: stories by I. J. Singer, Zalman Shneour, Y.L. Peretz, and David Bergelson, and Chaim Grade’s first published story, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” a powerful meditation on faith after the Holocaust. Most spectacularly, Commentary published Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” (translated by Marion Magid and Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Pollet), first appeared there in English in September 1962, as did some of the vignettes that would make up In My Father’s Court (1966). “Commentary is one of the rare magazines in America which takes seriously both the writer and the reader,” the future Nobel laureate said. “I also have a personal feeling about Commentary: it was the first magazine which published me in English.”

Jewish writers, ex-alienated men, were in vogue. Norman Podhoretz used to joke about the Jewish writer who took the name Nathanael West that had he arrived in the 1950s rather than the 1930s, he would have changed his name back to Nathan Weinstein. After the American Jewish literary profusion had peaked, Edward Hoagland, the essayist married to Marion Magid, was grumbling (in Commentary itself ) that the Family’s writers had all but forged a new establishment, making it difficult for a WASP like him, who “could field no ancestor who had hawked tin pots in a Polish shtetl.”

In later years, some of these plaints would turn uglier. Gore Vidal complained that Jewish writers like Bellow, Roth, and Malamud “comprise a new, not quite American class, more closely connected with ideological, argumentative Europe (and talmudic studies) than with those of us whose ancestors killed Indians.” Truman Capote bitched in a 1968 Playboy interview about a Jewish literary cabal: “a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines. All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention. . . . Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer are all fine writers, but they’re not the only writers in the country, as the Jewish mafia would have us believe.” (Perhaps Capote’s line would have been softer had the Commentary review of his bestselling In Cold Blood not dissented so vigorously from the notion that the “competently though too mechanically told” book represented some kind of literary breakthrough.) But as boosters and detractors could agree, America’s new Jewish writers had come into their own.

Even as Cohen’s magazine helped forge a new literary temper, Commentary acted as a greenhouse for a new style of literary criticism, too, incubating the first generation of critics to grow from America’s working class. Before World War II, the upper reaches of American life had excluded Jews as much from the study of literature as from the creation of it. No matter how assiduously the Family’s critics may have schooled themselves in Walt Whitman’s 1871 Democratic Vistas or Van Wyck Brooks’s 1915 America’s Coming of Age, they were disqualified by heredity from the Republic of Letters. “Jews, it was often suggested, could not register the finer shadings of the Anglo-Saxon spirit as it shone through the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton,” Irving Howe recalled. “I wouldn’t recommend that you study English,” the head of Northwestern’s English Department had told Saul Bellow. “You weren’t born to it.” The Family could not help but notice that currents of anti-Semitism ran deep within the Anglo-American literary tradition itself—from William Shakespeare’s Shylock, to Charles Dickens’s Fagin, to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim. “We reexamine our literary heritage as Jewish writers and readers of English—and we wince!” Leslie Fiedler wrote in Commentary. “We enter into our supposed inheritance, only to find we are specifically excluded.”

The attraction to fascism exhibited by poets W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot didn’t help matters. The Library of Congress’s decision in 1948 to award the Bollingen Prize to Pound’s The Pisan Cantos vaulted Cohen into high indignation, and he dedicated Commentary’s first symposium to the question of literary anti-Semitism. The responses he received bespoke a newfound literary self-confidence. Some advocated a separation of wheat from chaff. Alfred Kazin replied, “If we were to read only those who love us, even among ourselves, our intellectual diet would be thin indeed.” Lionel Trilling commented, “Anti-Semitism is, as Nietzsche said, a vulgarity; it is indeed remarkable how often notable minds of our day can support their quanta of vulgarity; but it would be foolish not to take from them what they have to give.” Saul Bellow suggested that the direction of judgment had reversed: “Modern reality, with the gases of Auschwitz still circulating in the air of Europe, gives us an excellent opportunity to judge whether they [modern Jew-despising writers] are right or wrong.” So long to inferiority.

In the beginning, Commentary critics aimed at Jewish writers. Irving Howe, born and bred in the Bronx, would write for the magazine on, say, Daniel Fuchs, who had authored several novels about Jews in Williamsburg. Tellingly, the magazine’s first critical essay on a goyish writer was called “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism.” When the magazine examined Pearl Buck—as in a 1948 review of Peony—it was for her description of Judaism. But the more Family critics assimilated—and assimilated into—American literature, the more confidently did they put Jewish writers in the highest fraternity of Gentile company. Both outside the magazine and inside its pages, Jews began to write about American fiction under the assumption that it was their inheritance, too.34 And they wrote not just about fiction. The magazine’s poetry criticism included John Berryman on W. H. Auden and a consideration of Sylvia Plath, who had studied with Alfred Kazin at Smith.

Commentary critics, never afraid to contradict the prevailing estimate of a reputation, shared a contempt for middlebrow mushiness. James Gould Cozzens, Arthur Miller, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk—these were almost too gauche to bother with. The result was an urgent style that combined scholarly rigor with journalistic flair. The urgency came from the way the Family’s strenuous strivers took literature as a matter of high gravity, as a secular scripture, as if it should yield to moral, and not just aesthetic, judgments. Writing, as vocation and avocation both, became in their hands a kind of emancipation, a gesture of self-fashioning; it was everything. The Family’s rhapsodists of American literature met America through its writers, the highest manifestations of national feeling.

Alfred Kazin, who would write some twenty pieces for Commentary, was a case in point. Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a son of immigrants, Kazin came to City College at age sixteen. In 1942, at twenty-seven, he published On Native Grounds, a tellingly titled history of American prose from the 1890s through the 1930s. Like Philip Roth, Kazin acknowledged that his view of the possibilities of Jewish writing was indebted to Commentary:

I remember that as the first issues began to appear at the end of that pivotal year of 1945, I was vaguely surprised that it dealt with so many general issues in so subtly critical and detached a fashion, regularly gave a forum to non-Jewish writers as well as to Jewish ones. Like many Jewish intellectuals of my time and place, brought up to revere the universalism of the socialist ideal and of modern culture, I had equated “Jewish” magazines with a certain insularity of tone, subject matter, writers’ names—with mediocrity. To be a “Jewish” writer . . . was somehow to regress, to strike attitudes, to thwart the natural complexities of truth. . . . “Jewish” magazines were not where literature could be found, and certainly not the great world. “Jewish” magazines worried over the writer’s “negative” attitude toward his “Jewishness,” nagged you like an old immigrant uncle who did not know how much resentment lay behind his “Jewishness.” But Commentary, to the grief of many intellectual guardians of the “Jewish” world, marked an end to that.

For Kazin, literary criticism was “the great American lay philosophy.” He and the other Family generalists who came to command the literary heights—Trilling, Rosenfeld, Howe—wrote not to advance an academic point, not to advise the author, guide the book buyer, or impress the professional specialist, but to assess the larger meaning of a work. (The adjective “academic” was for them always a pejorative, a synonym of “pedantic” and antonym of intellectual audacity.) They considered criticism a branch of literature itself, a rival form of imagination. Unlike the New Critics who treated literature as something hermetically self-contained, the Family critics believed that writing was a political act; they read a work with an eye for what it said about its cultural environment. They practiced literary criticism as social criticism. These inebriates of literature wrote in a way, Kazin said, “that pure logic would never approve and pure scholarship would never understand.”

Before too long, by pursuing things unattempted yet in the precincts of American Jewish writing, Elliot Cohen was beginning to feel that his magazine was changing the world. Before Commentary (to paraphrase Leon Trotsky on Russian writer Nikolay Gogol), American Jewish literature in English, stuck in imitation, merely tried to exist. After Commentary, it existed.

Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem and fellow at the Hudson Institute. The preceding is excerpted from Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right.

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

As we embark on this decline, with newspapers folding, and the book industry itself threatening collapse, it is revealing to read the writers of this generation—Henry Roth, Daniel Fuchs, Michael Gold, Albert Halper, Tess Slesinger, and others—in order to understand how they survived, not only financially, but also spiritually. Because they came of age in Depression, much of their work was published poorly, then quickly forgotten by an accelerated wartime economy just a decade down the breadline. But if Jewish American literature has any true founding fathers (and mothers), these are they—writers who first established its concerns with justice and ethnic censure in public language.

The Great Depression coincided with the settling of the final great wave of Jewish immigration in the 20th century. Boats all but stopped steaming into Ellis Island with the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed a quota on foreign arrivals. When the stock market crashed five years later, the island was being used as a prison and mustering station for the deportation of immigrant thieves, murderers, and Anarchists. By the time the law had taken effect, however, most Jews in America were already citizens, paying taxes, building cities. As the Depression encroached, these European and Russian speakers of Yiddish were raising the first generation of American Jews to speak English natively, and the first generation of American Jewish writers to write naturally in English, too. The Depression marked the profoundest attempt by Americans of any origin to address the claims of the Old World, as Jewish writers of criticism and fiction shaped accounts of their pre-histories, defining the margins of inheritance, while codifying the essential success of immigrant acculturation.

Depression’s newest Americans also discovered democracy, though the zeal of enfranchisement, abetted by financial distress, often led them to extremes—to the foremost forms of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism; Stalinism; Trotskyism; the politics of Norman M. Thomas; and the Labor politics of unions, representing the social welfare interests of workers in various trades. To get a clearer snapshot of the milieu, imagine these movements surrounded by loose, citybound circles of young intellectuals, who espoused a cafeteria Marxism more concerned with the artisanal quality of talk than with any quantity of action. However, the very fact that there was never any real prospect for Marxist revolution in America might have given Depression’s thinkers and writers the freedom to apply the Left’s radicalism directly to themselves—their personalities.

In his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, Irving Howe, born in the East Bronx in 1920, evoked the intense, immersive political atmosphere of the 1930s, particularly in New York—which had the most jobs in a country of no jobs, yet which also suffered the worst housing shortages, and hunger—and particularly centered around Manhattan’s City College, where ferocious arguments were waged between students who were exhaustively reading, and exhaustedly (if they were lucky) working their way through school: “We took positions on almost everything, for positions testified to the fruitfulness of theory. Theory marked our superiority in ‘vulgar empiricist’ politics, compensated for our helplessness, told us that some day this helplessness would be dialectically transformed into power. We took positions on the New Deal, the class nature of Stalinist society, strategies for Indian liberation, the ‘four-class’ bloc proposed by the Chinese Communists, tactics for the French Left, the need for a labor party for the United States.”

Alfred Kazin, born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1915, and Howe’s fellow City College alum, was another critic who made his name writing for “the little magazines” that proliferated in the aftermath of Depression, including Commentary, Dissent, and Partisan Review, which themselves grew out of miniscule, shoestrung Jewish journals of the 1930s like Jewish Frontier, and Menorah Journal. Starting Out in the Thirties, Kazin’s least-read memoir (others are New York Jew, and his classicA Walker in the City), intimates that Depression aspirations to political change began personally, as a poetics of the soul. Injustice, to be recognized as such, required empathy, or compassion, while utopian dreams required both imagination, and the youthful—or the youthful culture’s—ability to self-re-invent: “What young writers of the 1930s wanted was to prove the literary value of our experience, to recognize the possibility of art in our own lives, to feel that we had moved the streets, the stockyards, the hiring halls into literature—to show that our radical strength could carry on the experimental impulse of modern literature.”

As the Spanish Civil War smoldered (1936-1939), and the Stalinist purges and show trials of often-Jewish Trotskyites continued unabated, Kazin remembered: “Not even the hack jobs I did for a living now seemed unworthy, for the issue raised in a book review, a street scene studied for an article, always fitted into my sense of the destiny and inclusiveness of history. So my parent’s poverty had a mystique for me, and our loneliness a definite heroism—we were usually unhappy and always on each other’s necks, but I saw us all moving forward on the sweep of great events. I believed that everyone was engulfed in politics, absorbed in issues that were the noble part of themselves.”

This sort of hyperbolic mimesis is typical of the period: Just as things get externally worse, we celebrate the internal best, “the noble part.” Such romantic reinventions of poverty into heroism, of individual misfortune transformed to philosophical iniquity and so, for political cause, are marks of a new people—or of a saved race thinking through a new language of the self. It was this language, that of Howe, Kazin, and Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Paul Goodman, and others whose Jewishness was strictly associative (such as Dwight MacDonald, and Mary McCarthy), that became the lingua franca of America’s first truly democratic decade—a decade that matched ambition with possibility, and responded to privation with an amalgam of innocent gusto, and wiseass “sensibility.”

Post office, Lower East Side, June 1936

To be sure, Saul Bellow, writing in 1953, could not have had his Augie March stand at Liberty’s golden door, declaring himself “an American, Chicago-born”—“first to knock, first admitted”—without Depression’s actual Augies having thanklessly laid the groundwork. American Jewish writers of the 1930s engineered a literature that, while unread today, defined concerns for the next generation, setting out the radical agenda decades before Bellow and Philip Roth would reap the spoils of a postwar economy of readers with more money, and more leisure-time: Michael Gold (1893-1967), editor of The New Masses and a columnist for The Daily Worker, turned the Lower East Side into a political hothouse, a raucous forum for Downtown grievances against an Uptown ruling class (his novel Jews Without Moneyis an overwritten, overheated, slummy masterpiece); Albert Halper (1904-1984) was less ideological than his frequent antagonist Gold, and more concerned with the characters of workers than with their aspirations toward political power (his novels include Union Square, and it is telling that his Depression memoir is wistfully entitled Goodbye Union Square); Tess Slesinger (1905-1945) was an incisive stylist, though perhaps too cynical for affiliation of any kind (her novel, The Unpossessed, is a scathing treatment of the nativity of the non-group Irving Howe later called “The New York Intellectuals”).

It was an immigrant, though, who wrote the consummate work of growing up on the East Side—Henry Roth, born to Yiddish in Galicia. Called Call it Sleep, Roth’s book virtually disappeared upon publication in 1934, though its 1964 rerelease as a “mass-market paperback”—a Depression innovation, ever since an institution in American publishing—revitalized interest among readers for whom the ghetto was only an ancestral rumor. The 1964 review that brought attention to the book came from Howe—not in the pages of a leftist journal or undercirculated literary quarterly, but on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

The writers of little magazines become the writers of big magazines; while the political radicals, if they live to compromise with prosperity, become the political conservatives; the failed books of yesterday are sure to be the classics of tomorrow: these are stories tinged with sadness, with an autochthonous American sadness; stories that, in their prescribed conventionalities, function as jokes, and, as jokes, might be the closest this country comes to a native, Jewish-like dark humor. Here, in large liberal America, intellectuals, to say nothing of writers, have improved on Protestantism’s libertarian streak, and are now more grossly atomized than ever, which condition they think beneficial, if not to themselves then to their governance—capitalism requiring competition, and competition requiring separation, their heads left apart and alone to find out “the fittest.”

opening credits for The Hard Way, screenplay by Daniel Fuchs

But to survive in any way during Depression, American writers had to join something—whether the WPA, the Communist Party, or even the parties of eastern scribblers who went west in the 1930s to work for a Hollywood that had recently discovered sound, and needed writers to write dialogue for it (just a handful of years later, everyone, literary or not, joined the war effort, joining up for a just war being the ultimate belonging). Among those ambivalent fortunates who went to California to write for film was Daniel Fuchs. Author of three brilliant neglected books of Jewish Brooklyn, Fuchs left the east for Lala Land, and its guaranteed salary, in 1937. His subsequent writing serves as a window into how necessity inspires life. From Fuchs’ diary: “For ten days I have been sitting around in my two-room office waiting for some producer on the lot to call me up and put me to work on a script. Every morning I walk the distance from my apartment on Orchid Avenue and appear at the studio promptly at nine. The other writers pass my window an hour or so later, see me ready for work in my shirtsleeves and suspenders, and yell jovially ‘Scab!’ But I don’t want to miss that phone call.”

That is the Depression mentality in a sentence, qualified with Judaic neuroses. Let it be that generation’s epitaph, and a millenarian motto: “But I don’t want to miss that phone call.”

Pledging modest cash awards to the authors of the six best essays on the theme “Why I left Europe and what I have accomplished in America,” YIVO asked entrants to fill at least 25 “notebook pages” and to be “detailed,” “precise,” and “sincere.” Excellent advice for most writers, this was particularly apt counsel for novices, which nearly all the entrants were expected to be (and turned out to be).

For YIVO, the contest was an expression of a mission undertaken in 1925 in Vilnius (Vilna, to Jews) in what was then Polish-occupied Lithuania. That mission was to study, esteem, and strengthen the common (in both senses) Jews of Eastern Europe and their secular culture, often referred to as Yiddishkeit for the common (both senses again) language that ruled the arguments, lovemaking, postcards, soccer matches, business deals, ribaldry, newspapers, and restive dreams of some 11 million Jews over a territorial swath that extended from western Russia north to the Baltic, south to the Balkans, and then east across empire and satrapy to the Oder River.

By 1925, that great sea was at ebb, reduced by war, revolution, poverty, anti-Semitism, secularism, socialism, Zionism, and America—to name some principal drains on population and spirit. Among other recovery efforts, YIVO dispatched zammlers (collectors) to record story, song, argot, and custom in the shtetls and urban ghettos, and sponsored three autobiography competitions for young Jews in an attempt to secure them as citizens of Yiddishkeit. Those contests were popular successes, the last of them concluding just months before Germany devoured Poland in September 1939.

In 1940, having nimbly reestablished world headquarters in Manhattan and out of what would become murderous German reach, YIVO picked up where it had left off, administering an autobiography contest for young American Jews. But this call from a Yiddishist preservationist organization failed to prick ears that were hearkening to such matters as work, college, the Dodgers’ chances against the Reds, and Frank Sinatra keening “I’ll Never Smile Again.” (In 1946, YIVO would issue an equally tone-deaf and unsuccessful call for what-I-saw-in-the-war memoirs from Jewish veterans.) And so in the spring of 1942, YIVO in America turned to its tried-and-true constituency, Jews native to Eastern Europe.

In all, YIVO received 223 essays (some 25,000 “notebook pages”) before the “Why I left Europe” contest closed in March 1943. About 200 were in Yiddish and the rest in Hebrew or English. Only 47 were by women. The awards were presented at a public ceremony in September 1943, and the contest “secretary,” a distinguished YIVO scholar named Moses Kligsberg, wrote soon afterward, “Now YIVO is confronted with the great task of studying the submitted materials.”

That “great task,” if ever undertaken, is nowhere manifest. After he got done responding to the entrants who believed they’d been jobbed by the judges, Kligsberg himself wrote a few uninspired essays on the contest material. Much later, Irving Howe tapped some of the English-language entries for World of Our Fathers, his 1976 best-seller that still reigns as the heavyweight champion of Third Migration cultural history. But it was not until the late 1990s that the Fordham historian Daniel Soyer and the YIVO researcher Jocelyn Cohen, supported by a grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, cracked “American-Jewish Biographies, Record Group 102” wide open and began the dusty, demanding work (all those handwritings; all those variant spellings and localisms; all those amateurs) that led to publication—in cloth in 2005 and in paperback this past year—of English translations of nine of the autobiographies under the title My Future is In America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Immigrants.

A fine piece of scholarly and humane business, the book is supported by an informative introduction and comprehensive, lucid notes. The translations themselves move along nicely in Yiddish-flavored English that never goes vaudeville on us and that respects writer as well as reader. When Shmuel Krone—of Denver and Verkhovichi, Belarus—a man rather given to what the law calls excited utterances, says of his oldest son, “He is now a public accountant!,” Soyer and Cohen know that this is an exclamation point to preserve on behalf of the sweet and luckless Krone. And when the pedantic Chaim Kusnetz—from Brooklyn and Duboy, Belarus—repeatedly interpolates “Vayehi hayoym”—“and it came the day”—into his narrative, they know to leave the Hebrew phrase stand in the text for what it conveys about Mr. Kusnetz’s literary and personal vanity. (Kusnetz ends his autobiography with this gem: “And the thorn of loneliness in the desert of my life burns eternal.”) And if, some literary heavy breathing aside, the memoirs generally present as facts mustered in chronological order, the brisk artlessness of the narratives is itself often affecting.

So with Rose Silverman—New York City and Berdichev, Ukraine—who sums up her years of compelled labor as a child-seamstress with the sentence, “The hardship never let up and accompanied me always”; and with Ben Reisman—Pittsburgh and Kalush, Galicia—who writes of the consequences of a slum fire in America, “My oldest boy caught cold and was sick for several months, until he died. Our grief cannot be described.” And so, too, with the ambitious, vivacious, and pretty Rose Schoenfeld—New York City and Drohobycz, Galicia—who recalls her arranged (by her desperately poor parents) marriage in the old country to a visiting American businessman this way: “With an embittered heart, I went to the wedding canopy.” Isaac Babel, a near-contemporary of Ms. Schoenfeld’s and master of the hammer-blow sentence, might well have put it just that way (though he probably would have told us whether the imported bridegroom smelled of onions or a sweet American cologne or a broth of both on the wedding night.)**pagebreak next=”The autobiographies also bring us the details called for by the contest sponsor.”**

The autobiographies also bring us the details called for by the contest sponsor. We learn, for example, that the salary structure for melameds—village religious teachers who instructed children, usually in the local synagogue—was tied not to length of tenure or ability but rose with the ages of the students taught; and that starving Jews filled themselves with cakes made of ground sunflower shells during the Ukrainian civil war; and that the Jewish trade in metal-smithing made its practitioners bearded, skull-capped repairers of church cupolas across the Russian and Ukrainian summer sky.

We also pick up piquant colloquialisms (“Even a broom can shoot if God helps”), rabbinical nicknames (“the Kaidoner prodigy” and “Reb Leybele the Sharp”), and telling exchanges of conversation, as in this one between the then-melamed Shmuel Krone and a fellow greenhorn slightly more versed in America:

Greenhorn: “You are too talented for teaching.”
Krone: “What should I do?”
Greenhorn: “Open a dry goods store like mine.”

It’s a fine harvest altogether, though I, for one, would have liked to have heard more from the editors about their decision to thumb the scales hard for gender (five of the nine contributors are women), for landfall (1892 through 1929), and for place of origin (Ukraine, Galicia, Poland, and Belarus are all represented), rather than simply publish the strongest essays they could find. And they could also have done a better job of placing YIVO within its initial American context, exploring the misapprehensions suffered by the organization’s leaders in the face of a Yiddishkeit on these shores unlike any previously known or imagined, and how their failure to attend to America with some humility undermined YIVO’s early work in this country.

But the most important question this book raises is not for the editors or for the contributors (all of the latter as safely entombed in history now as King Tut), but for the volume itself. And it takes this form:

Following the recovery, beginning in the 1960s, of Henry Roth, Anzia Yezierska, and Abraham Cahan (to name a very few); and following the publication of A Walker in the City (1951), The Downtown Jews (1969) and World of Our Fathers (to name a very few); and following the inflorescence of Jewish historiography under the post-war ministrations of Moses Rischin, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Oscar Handlin, and more recently David Roskies, Hasia Diner, and Jonathan Sarna (to name a very very few)—after all that has been delved, recorded, filmed, monographed, and presented at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies ever since the YIVO autobiographies were locked down in 1943—after all this, was the retrieval of these words of nine of our fathers and mothers necessary or even helpful?

From the perspective of what the founders of YIVO thought of as “science” (YIVO has since removed Wissenschaft—or science—from its name and is the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research), the answer must be no. The sophisticated scholarly and imaginative work that has emerged over the past 65 years roars like Niagara beside these trickly odysseys. And unmediated personal declarations, while held in scholarly esteem in 1942, are no longer considered important in ordering history. Scholars, to paraphrase the late Moses Kligsberg, are no longer confronted with the great task of studying the submitted materials.

* * *

But if scholars aren’t confronted, maybe others are—or should be. Here I mean we common (in any sense you like) American Jews who have come to view the territories these nine men and women inhabited—the shtetl and the Lower East Side—as cohorts of Mamre’s plains, the brickyards of Egypt, Jerusalem, Sepharad, and (very lately) Masada: stars in that runic cosmos that Jews have been studying for millennia, looking for a “usable past,” by which historians mean the tales that make a tribe’s progress through time explicable.

In the case of the shtetl, how else could we have accommodated the ground that swallowed millions of our brothers and sisters except to declare it holy, and ourselves therefore enjoined from treading upon it in shod feet? And so Abraham Joshua Heschel, speaking on “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” at YIVO in New York City on January 7, 1945, 20 days before Soviet soldiers reached Auschwitz, pronounced an elegy that, in accordance with ancient panegyric tradition, cast what had happened as a theological calamity, as a blow against klal Yisroel, the one covenantal Israel. “Even those who have abandoned tradition . . . have not separated themselves,” Heschel said, reading mundane and also sacral truth in the crematoria ash. And then, after comparing the European destruction with the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem, Heschel concluded by placing the Shoah out of human reach: “If other eras [in Jewish history] were holy, this one was the holy of holies.” The audience, it’s reported, as though one covenantal Israel, stood and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.

And a powerful and incontrovertible umen has sounded ever since, in the stories and memoirs of Singer, Agnon, Wiesel, and lesser lights; in Chagall’s pie-eyed fiddlers, loopy lovers, and crucified rabbis; in the Hasidic and Haredi communities’ faithful replication of the habits, dress, and quarrels of lost study halls and rabbinic courts; in the popularity of Buber’s romanticized Tales of the Hasidim, and of the slushy Life Is With People; in the hundreds of Yizkor books that memorialize the saintly butchers, the uncomplaining widows, the kindly melameds, and the generous mill- and tavern-owners in one shtetl after another and never recollect a card cheat, a child beater, a philanderer murdered by the Germans; and of course in unabashed confections such as “Mein Shtetele Belz” and Fidder on the Roof.

In the case of the Lower East Side, there’s no better explanation for what we have made of the place—in novel, in “The Rise of the Goldbergs,” in movie, in lox, in bagel, in the Tenement Museum, and on Big Onion tours of Delancey Street—than that offered by Irving Howe for why World of Our Fathers became an astonishing (and to him somewhat embarrassing) success. The book, Howe wrote, “enabled [readers] to cast an affectionate backward glance at the world of their fathers before turning their backs upon it forever and moving on, as they had to, to a world their fathers would neither have accepted nor understood. My book was not a beginning, it was still another step to the end.”

For Jews, some failures—an inability to samba, for example—feel stunningly inconsequential, while others, such as the failure to keep faith with fathers and mothers, with that pesky klal Yisroel, feel stunningly unforgivable. And so sitting beneath our vines in Beverly Hills, on West 72nd, or in Cambridge 02138, we trouble our hearts with yearnings for our lost Eden of Jewish authenticity: that land of virile pickle-makers; the communion of three-times-a-day prayer; peddlers and pressers who not only spent a predawn hour over the Torah but remained faithful to the Internationale and saved money for their children’s education; and tenement windows that glowed with Sabbath candles beneath which children studied hard.**pagebreak next=”Unlike us, though, the contributors to this book did not know that “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” was over.”**

Unlike us, though, the contributors to this book did not know that “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History” was over. (The ghettos, the shootings, and the sometime gassing by engine exhaust in the closed compartments of trucks were known by 1943, but the six million was an abyss undreamed.) Nor had they any reason to feel guilt about taking off for Brownsville, the Bronx, or Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill and leaving the Lower East Side to wither away, because they wanted the Lower East Side and all it represented to wither away.

And so, a truth escapes like a reflexive sigh from these nine witnesses, which is that the shtetl and the Lower East Side were for common Jews not places of authenticity, pride, and vitality, but vulnerability, contingency, and impotence; and a main product of such a life, for Jews as for other people, is anger, which seeps inward as self-scorn and depression, or spews outward as cruelty directed at the nearest targets, which are usually one’s children, parents, spouse, brothers, sisters, neighbors.

Here is Minnie Goldstein—Providence, Rhode Island and Warsaw—come to tell us that her mother was one of 12 children of whom 11 died young; that her mother was left a widow with two children at 19; that relatives cheated the woman out of her meager inheritance; that her second husband—Minnie’s father—was himself ruined financially when in-laws—his business partners in a shoe store—took to stealing stock during the night; that Minnie herself was loathed by her mother, who called her “treyf,”—unkosher. She writes, “I cannot remember a single day during my childhood when I was taken care of as a child should be, or when I had enough to eat.” Later, a grown woman in Providence, and married to a hapless, cheerless husband, she bears a son who develops polio, and she considers murder and suicide: “Would it not be better to take the child into bed with me, turn on the gas, and go to sleep forever with the child?” She notes, in a sentiment that is repeated in a number of these memoirs, and inferred in more of them, “Those who have been here in America for a long time will never be able to grasp that we who have experienced so much could still be full human beings.”

And here is Aaron Domnitz—Baltimore and Romanovo, Belarus—a sweet man of lively intelligence whose early love of Talmud and then of secular literature led him nowhere but to America and the fate he most wanted to avoid—a six-day-a-week shift at a sewing machine in a rundown factory on the Lower East Side. Domnitz tells us of an impromptu party celebrated by his coworkers in the apartment of a colleague whose daughter had just become engaged. They drank. They sang “Russian revolutionary songs.” And one worker, who was a cantor, sang a High Holy Day prayer. And then the bride arrived. “Instead of greeting us, she twisted her nose and hurled a reproach at her father in English, why did he bring drunks into the house?” Her father “smiled stupidly and helplessly . . . completely foreign among his grown children.”

Leaving the daughter and father behind, the men fled to a nearby park where they “leaned against the fence and looked at the East River. The water, like the sky was dreary, autumnal. . . . Through the mist we saw the silhouette of the Statue of Liberty. Behind her, the ocean spread out far and wide, and across the ocean somewhere were the shores of the Old Country. We were silent.”

Of course, our notions of Belz or “The Historic Lower East Side Bargain District” are no more likely to be altered by the testimony of Minnie Goldstein and Aaron Domnitz, than a bonfire of dreidels is likely to be inspired by evidence that Hashmonean priests and Taliban mullahs had many bloody habits in common—which by my reading of purity zealots through the ages seems highly likely. In the development of prophetic or apologetic history, whether by Jew, Frenchman, Serb, or Abkhazian (who knew?), the truth is whatever shores up the bottom line of need.

Today, the “shtetl” and “the Lower East Side” appear at the very least to be remarkable self-healings of grave wounds, and at the very best creations as brilliant as Hashmonean Jerusalem. Given, however, the amount of evil that has entered the world as a consequence of supra-history, we probably want to try and keep track of what really happened. In aid of this anchoring, we have those books and conferences and peer-reviewed articles, which tell us such things as the percentage of Eastern Europe’s Jews who depended on relief at the turn of the twentieth century (35) and the childhood mortality rate on the Jewish Lower East Side (40 percent). And now we have these words of our fathers and mothers; reedy in places, affecting in places, but surely usable if we ever find ourselves in need.

Ben Birnbaum is the editor of Boston College Magazine and an award-winning essayist. He is the editor of Take Heart: Catholic Writers on Hope in Our Time (Crossroad, 2007).