Fathers and Sons

Reflections on a Teapot.
by Ronald Sanders.
Harper & Row. 383 pp. $8.95.

My Last Two Thousand Years.
by Herbert Gold.
Random House. 246 pp. $6.95.

Although both these works pose as straightforward autobiographical memoirs, each is actually a document of coming-to-Jewishness, an attempt to define a uniquely personal Jewish identity by a narrative of the events through which that identity came ultimately to be formed. Conversion is hardly the apt term to describe the moment of time in which either Sanders or Gold discovered his Jewishness—both men are Jews and did not become anything they previously were not—but it is precisely the aura of conversion, its sense of apocalyptic finality, as well as its inwardness and impenetrability, with which both men have invested their acknowledgment of a fact, at heart, commonplace: that they were born Jews.

It is nevertheless in the particular trajectories of their authors' lives that the interest and uniqueness of both books lie. Sanders, a half-Jew whose father was not Jewish, found his Jewish identity through a scholarly commitment to Yiddish culture and the history of Jewish immigration to America from Eastern Europe. Gold first began to discover his Jewishness while visiting Haiti, although he did not undergo his “conversion” until a subsequent visit to Israel; he also attempts to locate the specific quality of his prose style—this touches upon his early decision to become a writer—in the experience of his own Yiddish-speaking parents and their struggles with a foreign lanquage that would eventually become the tool of their son's vocation. Yet the fact that both place the origins of their private returns to Zion neither in religion nor in Zionism but in Jewish cultures either extinct or on the verge of extinction begins to suggest the strangeness, eccentricity, and complexity which a simple acknowledgment of one's Jewishness might finally require.

_____________

Reflections on a Teapot takes its title from the famous children's song, “I'm a little teapot, short and stout,” which Sanders's father, George, an Englishman by birth and a struggling Tin Pan Alley musician, composed in 1939 when his son was seven years old. The boy grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn among Italians and Germans (not among the Jews who lived almost exclusively in the affluent sections of the neighborhood), and if he ever felt himself a pariah, it was not for the Jewish but for the English half of his parentage. His home was utterly lacking in any identifying Jewish qualities, but was suffused instead with a nostalgia for the turn-of-the-century England in which his father had grown up and out of which came the little teapot with all its precious evocations of, and yearnings for, the Victorian nursery; young Ronald, for example, still wore knickers and an Eton cap long after all his classmates had given them up.

Yet however complete his ignorance of a Jewish past, the boy did nevertheless know and feel himself to be a Jew. George Sanders for his part never encouraged his son to develop any interest in the church which he himself had left as a youth, while Sanders's mother told her children that they were Jewish because, according to traditional Jewish law, the child inherits his mother's religion. It seems no less ironic that the mother who had married out of and rejected her faith should implicitly fall back upon its most basic tenets in raising her children than that a Jewish identity so apparently tenuous should prove decisive and momentous for the son's future. It was this very tenuity, indeed, which characterized the young Sanders's own first contacts with a “Jewish” community: he was first called a “dirty little Jew” by a girl whose father, but not mother, was Jewish and who therefore was herself not Jewish. Even what would be thought of as the specifically “Jewish” qualities of those youths his own age whom Sanders did eventually meet—first in high school and later at Kenyon College—owed more to Brooklyn anti-snobbery, City College intellectualism, and the Marx brothers than to anything intrinsically Jewish.

When Sanders did come to commit himself unequivocally to his Jewish identity, it was neither in high school nor at Kenyon but, unpredictably, in an army boot-camp and through an entirely trivial incident. Required to declare his religion on his dogtag, Sanders first thought to write down “nondenominational”—which, in fact, best described his religious beliefs. When, however, it was bluntly explained to him that his choice would determine under what religious sign he would be buried if killed in combat, Sanders realized that what was required was less a mere bureaucratic decision than an existential commitment for all eternity. A Star of David suddenly appeared on an imaginary tombstone; he wrote down “J,” and discovered “at the innermost core of my particularity, I was a Jew or nothing.”

The eventual shape which this commitment would take emerged in graduate school where Sanders wrote a thesis on Abraham Cahan and learned Yiddish—a language which he remembered hearing spoken by his mother and her relatives in his childhood when they did not wish the children to understand what was being said. But the real irony of Ronald Sanders's odyssey lies not only in his choice of a culture dying more rapidly than even his enthusiasm for it could grow but that, despite his commitment to a Jewish past uniquely the possession of his mother, he should nevertheless remain so entirely his father's son. Reflections on a Teapot begins with an account of George Sanders's early life, ends with his death, and is dedicated to his memory. Although Sanders's mother alone determined the fact of her son's Jewishness, she is scarcely mentioned by him in the course of his memoir. It is exclusively with his father—with the ghost of the goy in the family—that Sanders is ever wrestling, and it is his father's character as well that determines the voice of the son's narrative: quiet, gentle, self-effacing. And finally, the same ambivalence which informs the son's struggle with his father also marks Ronald Sanders as a Jew.

Sanders exchanged his father's teapot for a chainik; but the son's achievement was a betrayal of the father as well. Early in his book, Sanders writes, “Culturally and temperamentally my father's son, I had no place else to go. Had my father been a truck driver instead of a musician and one-time budding Shakespearean actor, I might have turned out to be more of a goy after all.” He would, most probably, have turned out to be a different Jew, but in no case, unless he had actually chosen to convert, a goy. Precisely this tone of bemused surprise at having chosen to become a Jew—a tone characterizing Sanders's book as a whole and one which betrays an inability to recognize and accept the fact that he was born a Jew—leads Sanders to assume an attitude of ironic distance from, and even arrogance toward, his past and present situation. That in searching for an avenue to express his Jewishness he should have settled upon the one facet of the tradition forever closed to him—for Yiddish, as he himself remarks, was less a living language or culture than an order of “experience”—only begins to suggest how poignantly fatherless Sanders still remains.

_____________

Herbert Gold's My Last Two Thousand Years begins like a manifesto of the Prodigal Son returned home: “By a wide and narrow path I found my way back to an allegiance I didn't possess. Born a Jew in Lakewood, Ohio, I embraced the belief and accusation: America is enough.” The sub-stance of this autobiography is largely devoted to Gold's discovery that America was not enough-the gradual disillusionment of a young romantic in search of love, community, and art. The story is familiar, one told often enough, perhaps too often: a year at Columbia; a stint in the army at the close of World War II; bohemian life in Paris; an early marriage, the inevitable divorce; and a lonely bachelor's slumming among those hungry for success-and-fame in Manhattan. Though neither the loneliness nor the malaise ever sounds so convincingly bleak that one docs not privately envy it for oneself, what remains most peculiar of all is that out of this should emerge a confession of Jewishness.

Gold first began to come to terms with his Jewish sell while on a lecture tour in Haiti, a “land without Jews”¹ where he nevertheless undertook a search for the remains of a Jewish community. An enterprise which began as little more than a paradox—to find jews where there could be none—culminated in a discovery even more fantastic: Haiti was filled, over-flowing, with Jews. Besides recent European refugees, Gold found mulattoes named Cohen, Berlin, and Golden burg, ail presumably descended from Jewish merchants who had once traded on the island; and in one distant coastal village, a Jewish tailor from Russia, Monsieur Schneider, the husband of several native women, all sisters, and father of countless little Schneiders, “all gleaming mulatto boys,” The same Monsieur Schneider, upon his death, was elevated to the pantheon of native deities as the god Ibo-Juif. Finally there was the obligatory Israeli on an aid mission to teach the Haitians the art of breeding fish, and who, years later, led Gold to visit Israel.

However much the episode may smack of sheer literary invention, Gold's paradoxical discovery of Jews in the land without Jews comes finally to embody a grand metaphor for the discovery of his own Jewishness. The child of a home which, he claims, taught him nothing of what it was to be a Jew, and equally the product of the myth of the self-created artist who needs no past, Gold began to discover within himself those same qualities of “myth and imagination” which he had found in the Jews of Haiti. To be sure, the Jews whom Gold discovered there were not so much the fabled remnants of Israel as simple survivors, containing within themselves only the merest vestiges of Jewishness—Jewish oddities, as it were. Hut then, Gold himself is one representative of another class of Jewish oddities, perhaps the most paradoxical of them all: the American-Jewish novelist.

_____________

Gold's full conversion to Jewishness came on a visit to Israel at the time of its tenth anniversary as a state. Like most Jews on (heir first visit, Gold suddenly found himself at home; but for Gold the realization that he had finally arrived at the end of all his searching amounted to both the Day of Judgment and the Apocalypse, Wandering through the streets of Jerusalem in the early dawn, “I came to learn certain secrets about the deals I had made with myself. . . . I had put the doubt and gaming of love ahead of all other knowledge, ahead of knowledge itself.” Love—by which Gold largely means sex—cannot replace community; and it was community, and the consolations of history, for which he had all along been searching and which, in Israel, he found. For Gold the writer, community and history promised an immortality which even art could not provide. For Gold the Jew, community and history offered reconciliation with a fate long evaded.

Yet what does it mean, concretely, to be a Jew? Although there is no reason to doubt the genuiness of Gold's Jewish feeling, his answer to this question is artless and not a little self-serving: he learned that “to be a Jew required nothing at all.” Now it is certainly true that the fact of Jewishness, as birthright, requires nothing more than the passivity of emerging from the womb of a Jewish mother. But Judaism, whether as religion, as nationalist ideology, or as culture, does finally require and demand more than the simple acknowledgment of birthright, and does finally represent something more than “the otherworldly worldliness which offers a vision of the eternal in the here-and-now.” At the very least, Judaism demands respect for its taboos, if not an active commitment to its rites and traditions. My Last Two Thousand Years ends with Gold, now remarried to a non-Jew (his first wife was Jewish), present at the birth of a son. To both Gold's and his wife's surprise, the son turns out to be twin boys whom Gold decides to name Ari and Ethan: “that way we could have one Jewish and one New England Protestant twin.” Intermarriage may or may not be the most up-to-date form of apostasy, but one may doubt whether protestations of Jewishness of the kind with which My Last Two Thousand Years abounds will be enough in themselves to insure the Jews another two millennia on earth.

¹ This section appeared in! COMMINTARY, June 1971.