Identity Problems
The Passionate People: What It Means To Be A Jew In America.
by Roger Kahn.
William Morrow. 350 pp. $6.95.
Roger Kahn's The Passionate People (which, according to Herbert Kubly, “perhaps . . . does for the Jewish middle class what “Our Crowd” does for the monied upper-class Jew”), appears at a propitious moment. Not only are books dealing with Jewish subject matter still very much in vogue; it is also the case that the need to clarify Jewish identity has never been more pressing within the Jewish community itself. The same need, which is so overwhelming among Negroes at the present moment, presses almost as heavily upon Jews, although in different form and for different reasons. It has its origins in the fact that the new third- and fourth-generation Jew was not reared in an immigrant environment where identity problems could be resolved—however painfully—by spiritual and cultural influences emanating from the home, the primary group, and the neighborhood. Moreover, the decline of anti-Semitism has made group boundaries even more indeterminate than before. As a consequence the identity problems of members of a survivalist-oriented minority group such as the Jews tend to be magnified rather than reduced.
In sum, it was never easier, and never harder, to be a Jew. The more light, then, that can be shed on “what it means to be a Jew in America”—as Mr. Kahn's book is subtitled—the better.
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Kahn spent four years working on The Passionate People. He interviewed Jews both affiliated and unaffiliated, in forty-one communities, and observed Jewish institutions in many of these cities. Confronted with the problem of organizing this vast body of material, Kahn selected a handful of his respondents and proceeded to write fictionalized portraits of them. He terms these portraits, which constitute the core of his book, “new identities for actual people.”
A review of the portraits shows the variety of types he presents. The first is Max Farberman, a wealthy manufacturer of screen doors whom we meet as he is celebrating his son's Bar Mitzvah at a synagogue on Long Island. Then there is Jack Schrager, a Hollywood agent; Samson Wilson, a medical doctor who practices in a university town in the Carolinas; Harry Wolf, a disappointed musician from the Bronx who runs a dog kennel out West; Harriet Fromkin, a Manhattan psychoanalyst; Bernard Rogovin, a junior high school teacher in Brooklyn; Harry Goldenhammer, small-town businessman in Nebraska; Miriam Fleischacker, a housewife fighting the Birchites in California; Chaim Vrotchnik, an aged rabbi; Morton Applebaum, a businessman in a midwestern metropolis who is active in Jewish philanthropies; Myron Berman, the manager of a San Francisco nightclub which specializes in lewd entertainment, and his chief attraction, Marilyn Esther Wolf, a bottomless dancer; Jacob Linderman, a labor organizer, long since retired, who lives in the Bronx; Saul Lederman, an editor in his forties who works for a Manhattan publishing house; and David Nazaretsky, a concentration camp survivor who has become a millionaire home builder in California. In addition to these fictionalized studies Kahn offers three portraits of people who, because they are so prominent, are identified by their real names. These three are Al Rosen, the former baseball star, now a stockbroker; Shecky Greene, a night club comedian; and Harry D. Goldman of Rochester, an associate justice of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.
Brief discussions of such topics as American Jewish history, the organization of the Jewish community, and the nature of Jewish religious life are interspersed throughout the book. Also included are observations made in the course of the author's travels: Rosh Hashanah at the Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles and Purim in Williamsburg. Finally there are a series of short interviews with prominent Jews—Max Fisher, a businessman from Detroit who is nationally known for his philanthropic activity on behalf of Jewish causes, and Sol Linowitz of Rochester, the obscure Jewish lawyer who became a public figure with the success of the Xerox Corporation and is now Ambassador to the OAS.
Given the intrinsic interest of his material and the jazzy skill with which he handles it, Kahn's book is hard to resist. But resist it we must. For the truth is that The Passionate People is more significant as a publishing phenomenon than as a contribution to understanding what it means to be a Jew in America.
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The defects of The Passionate People are endemic to what may be called “the new Jewish book.” The new Jewish book is produced by a writer of non-fiction who is both responsive to, and a part of, the present interest in Jews. Such a writer is to be distinguished from the producer of the old Jewish book—the type which was standard until very recently. The author of the old Jewish book wrote out of a compelling personal need. He could not write anything else: Jewish problems seemed to him so much more significant than other problems. Thus he did not write for a market in the sense that publishers use the term—frequently he wrote for a small circle of cognoscenti.
If the old Jewish book is more “authentic” than the new, that is not to say that all old Jewish books are good books. Far from it. They are frequently parochial, irrelevant, and opaque. And even if the old Jewish writer did know how to write (many did not) and devoted himself to popular rather than abstruse themes, his books betrayed at times another repelling feature: the feeling of self-pity. The work of Ludwig Lewisohn, who, like Roger Kahn, devoted himself to the study of what it means to be a Jew in America, is a case in point. Yet despite the fact that the new Jewish book is free of all such symptomology, it suffers from equally lethal defects of its own.
To start with the least serious of these, the new Jewish book, written by an author who is not a specialist in Jewish culture, is generally replete with technical errors. Thus, to cite a few examples among many, Roger Kahn writes “chasid and misnagdim” on page 252, inadvertently combining a singular and a plural in a single phrase. On page 255 he confuses the role of rabbi and baal tefillah (leader of worship). On page 276 he shows his ignorance of the political movements that developed in Jewish life in the late 19th century by expressing surprise at the fact that the picture of the bearded man on the wall of Jacob Linder-man's home (he the Socialist labor organizer!) is someone other than Theodor Herzl.
The second defect of the new Jewish book results from the compulsion under which it labors to engage, even to entice, the reader's attention—a compulsion that frequently issues in vulgarity and distortion. Kahn's portrait of Harriet Fromkin, the psychoanalyst who lives on Park Avenue, is a perfect illustration. Two relevant problems are touched on here—why so many analysts are Jewish, and the intriguing question of the Jewish identity of Jews whose professional preoccupation is the discovery and resolution of problems of identity. But instead of exploring these significant issues, Kahn chooses to emphasize something more titillating: despite her professional success, Dr. Fromkin is an unhappy woman, a divorcee who needs a man. Whatever else that may mean, the total effect of emphasizing it is to make the portrait irrelevant to the problem of “what it means to be a Jew in America.”
But even when Kahn avoids such devices and keeps his story in balance, we cannot be sure that his conclusions about what it means to be a Jew in America are to be trusted. The portrait of the other doctor in the book, Sam Wilson, who practices in a university town in the Carolinas, is a case in point. Wilson apparently represents the Jewish doctor, and as such he is an outsider in his own profession. Because he is a Jew he is smarter than his Gentile colleagues—none of them is capable of practicing the kind of medicine he does. So great is the gulf between his competence and theirs that Gentile colleagues who would not deign to associate with him socially beg him to treat their families when serious illness threatens. But not only is Sam Wilson superior as a doctor, he is also superior as a man. Kahn has Wilson tell us the following:
I see two kinds of people dominating American medicine. . . . There are the incompetents and the fascists. Take [Dr.] Mc-Granery, a Catholic, right? A decent guy, sure. But a slow-moving, slow-thinking man. He has killed kids. He's damaged women. Not out of malice. McGranery just doesn't know. . . . Then there are fascists. By fascists I mean someone who does not give a stinking damn for the fate of other human beings. You find fascists running the medical schools and the hospitals. They care about systems and figures and birth rates and death rates . . . but what do they care about that little colored kid dying in a shack, crying in pain?
Nonetheless Sam Wilson is an unrealized human being. His tragedy, as Kahn sees it, is that he is spoiled by success and thus prevented from upsetting the medical applecart:
He has too much now. . . . He has his practice and his hospital affiliation and his handsome, conservative wife. But if he could speak out, [he] would tell them a thing or two worth mentioning.
This portrait, flattering to the Jewish ego as it is, makes one very uneasy. The thoughtful reader is aware that most Jewish doctors practice in large urban centers. Many of them are affiliated with Jewish-sponsored hospitals or with hospitals where the representation of Jewish staff is very strong. If they are brilliant diagnosticians like Sam Wilson, they typically devote more time to correcting the mistakes of their less talented Jewish peers than those of anti-Semitic Gentile colleagues. They are not really outsiders.
Even the fact of Dr. Wilson's brilliance is troubling. We may be prepared to concede that as a result of parental pressure and as a consequence of what was once a flourishing pattern of discrimination against Jewish applicants to medical school, Jewish graduates have sometimes been intellectually superior to their Gentile peers. But this phenomenon belongs to the past. Thus, Kahn is left holding on to the idea of Jewish moral superiority—an idea by no means easy to demonstrate, and which, even if it could be demonstrated, might be as much connected with the sociological condition of marginality as the religious condition of following a moral code. And if the putative moral superiority of the Jew flows from a sociological abnormality, is it not fated to go the way of Jewish intellectual superiority?
These significant and very controversial issues—whether applied to the situation of the Jewish doctor or broadened to include the condition of Jews generally in our society—are certainly relevant to the problem of Jewish identity in America. But they are not seriously discussed in The Passionate People, Kahn preferring to leave the Jewish reader with the flattering notion that Jews are more sensitive than Gentiles—a passionate people. Even Gentiles who read the new Jewish book may find such Jewish ethnocentrism appealing. After all, Stephen Birmingham, himself a Gentile, found a large Gentile public willing to read a book devoted to documenting the assertion that the Jewish upper class was superior to the Gentile Four Hundred.
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The portraits of Sam Wilson, Harriet Fromkin, and others offer a clue to the final problem of Kahn's book. While he has collected a great body of data (and gives full license to his imagination in reconstructing the lives of his respondents) there emerge no firm intellectual criteria by which respondents were selected. As a result we are presented with a series of miscellaneous vignettes rather than a collection of portraits which illustrate contrasting resolutions of the problem of what it means to be a Jew in America. Such a collection of portraits could do what Kahn's book does not: help the reader locate his own identity problem. Entering empathically into the lives of different kinds of Jews, such a reader would be afforded the opportunity to consider what meaning their resolutions have for him.
If the limitations of The Passionate People are such that the book does not really convey what it means to be a Jew in America, it does touch on one theme which has so far been insufficiently explored in the burgeoning list of new Jewish books: the theme of the Holocaust. Surprisingly, except for theologians, no one has yet stopped to investigate, or even to ponder, the problems which the Holocaust presents to American Jews. There is, for example, the question of how human beings live with the realization that their lives were spared only by historical accident, that while they were prospering a Jewry even larger than their own was consumed in the gas chamber, and that this Jewry too had Gentile friends, neighbors, and business contacts who, as it turned out, were in many cases untrustworthy. What, then, is done with the feelings of guilt, shame and anomie which the Holocaust must produce? Are they repressed only to appear in disguised and destructive forms? Or are they being acted out in socially constructive ways?
It is to Kahn's credit that he is sensitive to this problem, which crops up in several portraits—most centrally in that of Saul Lederman, an editor in a New York publishing house. Lederman is assigned a new author: Herta Lieber Cohen, a Gentile born in Germany and now married—in a casual sort of way—to a Jewish artist. Assimilated and “liberated” though he is, Lederman cannot overlook her German identity, and in the midst of a sexual episode (one of many such in the book), he takes his revenge upon her. She may be an attractive woman, but to Lederman she stinks of the masters of Auschwitz.
One more portrait concludes The Passionate People. It is devoted to David Nazaretsky, the millionaire builder of Southern California who is a concentration-camp survivor. Others may forget Auschwitz, or at least try, but for Nazaretsky even the effort would be an act of futility; the good life can never erase his memories.
Kahn's sensitivity to this issue, whatever the limitations of his treatment of it, gives us some notion of the potentiality of the new Jewish book. The antennae of the new Jewish writer are capable of receiving signals which might be lost on the more inner-oriented writer of the old type. If these signals can be properly decoded and built upon, a definite analysis of what it means to be a Jew in America may yet be produced.
