A Forgotten Voice

Hayim Greenberg Anthology.
by Marie Syrkin.
Wayne State University Press. 343 pp. $3.95.

Hayim Greenberg appeared too late on the Russian Jewish scene—just before its virtual end in the October Revolution—and too early on the American Jewish scene—in the late 1920's and early 1930's—to affect the thinking of his contemporaries to the extent that he should have. As a very young man he fought unsuccessfully against the process by which the continuity of Russian Jewish life was being disrupted by the Bolsheviks. When he came to the United States in the 20's, the young were busy making their way into the American middle class. As a result, his fate was to speak almost exclusively to people older than himself, and for them to find him merely unconventional.

Greenberg's early years followed the pattern of his older contemporaries like Ahad Ha-am, Chaim Weizmann, and A. D. Gordon. Beginning with a rootedness in classical Jewish learning, each of these members of the first generation of worldly Jews worked out his own relationship to the Jewish heritage. In contrast to intellectuals like Isaac Deutscher, they did not leave the Jewish community. Instead, they viewed their task as one of making some sense out of the counterpulls of the new values and their Jewish commitments. All of them agreed on the right and necessity of the Jews to exist as a people, but none of them imagined that it would be enough to forge a Jewish identity that would be as “healthy” and “normal” as that of the Albanians or the Uzbeks. Their passion—and their burden—was the messianic sense that Jews could not be themselves unless their community made a profound difference in the world. (There is no statement of this theme by any contemporary Jewish theologian as clear and as resonant as Greenberg's essay, “The Universalism of the Chosen People.”)

Greenberg and his contemporaries were influenced, to a far greater degree than anyone has ever seriously discussed, by Hasidism. Each of them was, in his own way, a rebbe. With the exception of Weizmann and, at the very end of his life, Greenberg, none of them ever occupied a high official position in the Zionist movement. What made all of these men into leaders was their personal attractiveness. Most of them wrote considerably, and Greenberg, who spent the bulk of his life editing the Yiddish and English periodicals of the Labor Zionist movement in America, wrote thousands of words a week for many years. Nevertheless, those who revered and loved him—I proudly confess that I was among them—learned what he had to teach by being in his company, by listening to his table talk, and, above all, simply by being in his presence. His very existence showed that it was possible to be at once a Jew, a socialist, and a Zionist.

The issue of the conflict between the “man” and the “Jew” is not new—it was not new to Moses Mendelssohn two centuries ago. It reappeared at the beginning of the 20th century among some younger Hebrew writers who felt within themselves a “rent in the heart” between their Jewish emotions and their desire to break out into a wider and freer world. Greenberg was a younger contemporary of these figures, but he was much better educated than any of them in the whole range of Western culture (right after the Bolshevik Revolution he was professor of both medieval Hebrew and classical Greek at the University of Kharkov). As a result, in his heart too there was much pain, but there was no rent.

This is why it is so regrettable that Greenberg's voice never became the influence it deserved to be. While his middle-aged audiences wanted him to tell them that all was for the best in their world of internal Zionist organizational politics, Greenberg wanted to talk to the then younger generation which was not there to hear him. Some of the children of that generation—which was so busy in Greenberg's time with passing competitive examinations to get jobs in the New Deal bureaucracy—are now disdainful of success. Searching for their own rebbes, they have turned to instructors like Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse, or, counterposing Buddhism to both their Western and Jewish identities, to such as Allen Ginsberg. An essay in the collection under review shows that Greenberg was far ahead of today's youth in assimilating Buddhist learning. However, Greenberg was also a humanist and a social-democrat, and “up against the wall” would have been as repugnant to him as Bolshevism itself. The experiences of the Russian Revolution implanted in him the unshakable conviction that no ideological vision justified the expenditure of an individual's life or human rights. In the 30's, in the days of the Popular Front, he turned away from blood and anger, even though it was presented as holy anger, and continued to insist that ideologies of the Left were no less capable of leading to murder than those of the Right.

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During his lifetime Greenberg served as rebbe to a coterie, several members and disciples of which have seen to it from time to time that some of his essays be republished. The Hayim Greenberg Anthology is the third such volume to have appeared so far in English; it is graced by a very moving introduction by Marie Syrian.

This latest effort to bring Greenberg's writings to a wider audience continues to have about it the atmosphere of an act of piety. I do not blame the translators and editors of the several collections of Greenberg's writings for not being able to break outside the bounds of their immediate circle. I am, however, deeply saddened by the thought that his work continues to be seemingly unknown. But perhaps it is right that this should be so. Greenberg is the kind of writer whose work needs to be encountered by personal choice. The best place to begin, in English, is this collection.