The Heritage of the East Side
Nothing is a Wonderful Thing.
by Helen Wolfert.
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1946. 118 pp. $2.00.
There is a Jewish proverb which says that a story should not be too closely questioned. It may have been with this in mind that Helen Wolfert’s book was labeled a “story-poem.” But, if this was the case, it was done in vain; the questions have not been forestalled.
It is too bad. A book on the order of this one ought to be read two or three times if it is to be digested thoroughly. But, in truth, it’s hard to read it even once. An odd book, really. You begin it and see that it is teeming and gleaming with verbal novelties. You feel that, under these words, there must be treasures of equal value. Lift these stones and you will find glories that’ll leave you starry-eyed. But the words tire you so. You lack the power needed to lift them, the strength that is needed to understand them. You lack the strength to even want to understand them.
A drowsy apathy takes hold of you. You fall into a trance. But it is hubbub that has hypnotized you. Clamor—not silence. For, in Helen Wolfert’s book, you cannot find any silence. You cannot buy it at any price. The words are strident—so strident that they make you indifferent to the words that they are shrieking. Meaning? Let them mean anything they choose. You simply don’t care.
It takes time
To finish dying—she says and you Stan
You will be done with dying, too.
This may prove to be very profound after a second reading, but the author, alas, does not afford you a quiet moment in which to try to get on to her thought.
A narrative poem. But there isn’t much story. Only one incident—a murder. Two thieves throw Ezekiel Kahn, the neighborhood genius, over the stair-rail. Ezekiel falls a couple of flights. Then, as he lies there—dead—the poetess sings:
The water curls. The sand lies under
Where the water curls. The sun curls
With the curl in the water; light and light
Light and light, hill and valley
Hill and valley, hill and valley
Vein and root, vein and root
Vein and root, and scatter, scatter
And duller deeper, duller deeper
And down, down, dull and deep
The blur, the thud, the mud, the mud
Mud, mud, mud, mud.
A bit too Joycean, perhaps, for an East Side poem that had its genesis in these lines:
Hugging the brood of bugs and ticks
Born in the night’s deep hatchery. . . .
Jenny, ten years old, wakes on the fire-escape. In a flash, she sees that this day is the genuine East Side day. This is it—to a T—the day that has already been described in a few hundred other books. It stinks. It’s hot. Sultry. The whole block’s waiting for rain. The whore— she’s waiting. The thieves—they are waiting. The synagogue—the godless synagogue—is waiting. And Mrs. Tress’s illegitimate grandchildren—yes, all six of them—they’re waiting, too. The only one who isn’t waiting is Ezekiel Kahn, the East Side’s thinker. Ezekiel—he who used to brew his deep thoughts in the public library. Ezekiel is dead.
Hot. A sultry day. A suffocating night. Ten-year-old Jenny was finally able to doze off.
The forest walks in, oak green,
Elm green, ash green,
Almond and willow green like gray,
Green of palm and pine like gold,
Out of the long distance, from the green far,Downward, downward and never back,
Darker and darker—Jenny sleeps.
How could Jenny fail to see the Sandman? After such a soothing din, how could anybody fail to nod?
Helen Wolfert strains to get all the smells and sounds—the shouts, the noises, conversations, and voices that she remembers. She gets them. She has everything. Yet—there’s something lacking in this book. One thing—a soul.
She gets them. She has everything. The thieves, the bastards, the nudniks, the synagogue Jews with the pasted-on beards—all the walk-ons of a Jewish operetta. The rats, the bed bugs—all the stage-props. And the tone of a movie double-feature. She gets them—gets them all. All the paraphernalia of an East Side distilled in the laboratory of self-slander and self-hate.
This is “nothing.” Yes. How does he phrase it, the Philosopher—the nudnik— of the opus?
You get your eyes and your nose and fingers
into nothing
And nothing is a wonderful thing. It’s better
Even than being dead.
But, this “nothing”—this Nirvana better even than being dead—this is not the East Side. It is a nothingness that leads to nothing. If the same pen were to turn its attention to a palace —song-birds instead of bed bugs, perfumes rather than stench—it would still lead to “nothing.” For it is the pen itself that is tired and devitalized. All it gives us is a bog of words.
Piercing the air, inflaming the nostrils
Dropping to the mouth and falling to the belly
Making them delirious—the smell, the smoke
Of Living Rat, the persuasion, the musk.
Who is it, incidentally, whose senses are so keen? Is it ten-year-old Jenny who views the rats in all their delirious convulsions? Is it the nostalgic poet who, with highly developed sensitivity, reaches back, back, to the hot, foul-smelling East Side?
It’s hard to tell. See how book-wisdom and childishness are intertwined! Resonant names:
Freud and Kant, turn them out!
Marx and Darwin, turn them out!
commingle with
Bit by bit, frown by frown
The food goes in, the food goes down
Open teeth and teeth close
Tick, tock; tick, tock.
Who’s talking? Who is it who says the silly things? Who says the things that are so clever?
What else but only nothing can come
To those whom fear and want have filled
So full there seems for them no other way
But to think that nothing is a wonderful thins?
Our East Side is used to these attacks. She has had her share of back-biters. Enough scurrilities have been cast into her face. Helen Wolfert is not the first to vilify our Jewish life this way. Nor is she the first to have her brothel rubbing shoulders with her synagogue. It’s no longer the least bit daring to sing of Mr. Silderbrot as he sits in the shul and tries to forget Gloria, his daughter, and her customers—
Are. the hoards of his home worn by the feet
Of the men who come to consort with her?
It’s no longer a feat to sing of old Tress—in the shul— thinking about his “whored grandchildren.” Or the Preloff’s—parents of thieves—
All the holies, unblinded in the wide
White, Bible light of Jehova.
This is easy. So easy. The shelf is full of books that belong to this category. And to make it easier, Helen Wolfert was aided by a stroke of good fortune. There is no doubt that we Jews do have a sizable quota of underworld-characters. But lucky for the author that she was able to find the entire quota on a single block. Nay, as a matter of fact, she was able to cram the whole “sanctified community” into one single tenement. The children of Israel-long may they live—they take such a pleasure in self-flagellation!
Nothing is a Wonderful Thing may serve us, however—as the text for a sermon.
What are the gifts, the precious gifts, that we bear unto the world? With what are our caravans laden? Borrowed beads? Cheap costume-jewelry? With such alliteration as this?
To forget floss, forget the feel
Of fleece, the feel of fur. To forget
The grass. To live only to forget.
Or such inventive rhymes as “dough-nuts” and “go nuts,” “hook in” and “give a look in”? Is the world really waiting for us to re-chew and re-tailor yesterday’s stale poetic novelties?
Must we spit every time we pass a synagogue? Must we people the tents of Israel with nudniks, pick-pockets, rats and consumptives, one whore, three whores, six whoresons? Is this the gift—the precious gift—our young generation is bearing?
Is this really the spiritual map of the East Side? How do you reconcile it with the fact that the East Side also has a Jewish press, an organized labor movement, a fervent religious orthodoxy, a network of charitable institutions, a Jewish-American literature?
Were our children really spawned in such an atmosphere? How does that fit in with the fact that the East Side has served as a tender nurse to educators, teachers, scholars, writers, legislators, judges?
Helen Wolfert’s book is superficial. “Tick-tock, tick-tock. It is eight o’clock.” But our life has moved further than nursery rhyme. It’s 1947. We have been through two world wars. Six million Jews have been exterminated. We are beyond the stage of Nothing is a Wonderful Thing.
Is this the culmination of our heritage? Is this a link to our Jewish Past? If our parents were tired tailors and pressers, should we, the college-trained kids, haul off and smack them in the face? If our parents were remiss in anything, it was in failing to find the time to teach us some decent Jewish manners—decent Jewish traits of character.
We—we who write—what are we? What do we want? Why do we use words?
I do not mind it when our third-rate writing is a part of the stream of non-Jewish literature. But when we choose to parade our Jewishness, we have an immense responsibility.
Yes, there have been Jews who with fiery words have castigated our race. We have had our moralists. We have had our prophets. But —this “nothing” worse even than death—this is not the fire, this is not the rod of prophecy. It isn’t good poetry either. It is only:
The food goes in
The food goes down
Open teeth and teeth close
Tick, tock; tick, tock.
Our age has no time for this precise portrayal of the mastication process, for the philosophy that “nothing is a wonderful thing,” for a whore-and-thief East Side invented only to gratify the urge to self-flagellation. The world hasn’t the patience to listen to this thin, shallow and hollow Jewishness. “Tick-tock. Ticktock.”
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