Three Lives

Life, I Salute You!
by Boris Kader.
Cambridge, Sci-Art Publishers, 1945. 368 pp. $3.00.

My Caravan of Years: An Autobiography.
by Goldie Stone.
New York, Bloch, 1945. 252 pp. $2.75.

The Son of The Lost Son.
by Soma Morgenstern.
New York, Rinehart and Company, 1946. 262 pp. $2.50.

The first of these books, Life, I Salute You! is not really a book at all but a loosely connected series of notes, observations, and autobiographical fragments having to do with the author’s experiences in Czarist and revolutionary Russia and in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Dr. Kader, in spite of the sufferings he has undergone, “affirms” the value of life and this, together with his exhortations against the temptation of suicide, constitutes the only sort of unity to which the book pretends.

Dr. Kader’s political and historical observations, where they are not pedestrian, are merely naive. The author would have been better advised to have written a straightforward autobiography. But he is apparently a Russian-Jewish intellectual of the old style and felt obliged to compose a tract to contribute to humanity’s redemption. Other Russian-Jewish intellectuals have been concerned with socialism or anarchism or education or religion. Dr. Kader is concerned with suicide.

A reluctance to be simple is very much in evidence here. Instead of an unpretentious account of the experiences of a Russian Jew, the author indulges in that grandiloquent rhetoric of humanity so dear to many Jews—a rhetoric ultimately deriving from the Era of Enlightenment, although in this case it has the fervid accent of the Russian intelligentsia—and that two world wars and the extermination of European Jewry have by now rendered anachronistic. The rights of man enunciated by the Enlightenment provided the Jews with a rational justification for equal participation in Western society. Ever since, a certain number of Jews have been constitutionally incapable of saying plain things about themselves without resorting to the high-flown periphrasis afforded them by such words as “humanity” and “mankind.” In Dr. Kader’s book this rhetoric does not modify in any way the fundamental simplicity of the character of the author. It is timidity, and modesty too, that prevents a Jew from directly speaking of himself, except in these grandiose synecdoches. The important thing for him is not the particular fate of a particular Jew but abstract humanity. This accounts for this book’s quality of woodenness, the absence from it of any sense of livingness; without which such a book has no justification.

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The first portion of Mrs. Stone’s autobiography, My Caravan of Years, is devoted to her childhood and early youth in the Jewish community of a Lithuanian village. Mrs. Stone’s emphasis is on the formal and ritual aspect of Orthodox life without, except in a few dutiful phrases, indicating its inner meaning. The picture she paints of the idyllic life of her well-to-do family has the ceremonial prettiness of a fairy tale, in which she figures as the princess. Mrs. Stone, in spite of the fact that she has remained an Orthodox Jew to this day, does not write from inside this life, but from the outside and so inevitably interprets it in picturesque and sentimental terms.

The early death of her father led to her immigration to America. After the first painful years of disorientation in New York’s East Side, she went on to Chicago to marriage and to an active life in the Jewish welfare organizations of that city, impelled by her sense of gratitude and obligation to American democracy.

As in the case of many other Jews, Judaism was no longer able to provide Mrs. Stone with a style of life and she therefore had to invent one. In retrospect, in Lithuania, she was the princess in a folk story. In America, apart from her genuine philanthropic motives, she plays the part of a kind of grand lady of charity in an active, American, feminist style—although one can still detect, with sympathy, the immigrant fear of lack of place and prestige. But what is at work here again, as in the case of Dr. Kader’s book, is a failure to be simple. Mrs. Stone has had to “contrive” her life. Her autobiography is therefore inevitably tainted with pretentiousness.

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The Son of the Lost Son by Soma Morgenstern is a novel directly concerned with what is a Jew. Judaism is Jewish Law. In the person of Wolf Mohilevski, a rich Polish landowner and at the same time a pious, caftaned Jew, the inner meaning of Jewish Law and ritual is exposed, not merely its picturesque and sentimental aspect, as in Mrs. Stone’s work. Every moment of Wolf Mohilevski’s existence is dominated by the Law, by the word of God. The elaborate, comprehensive, and exacting ritual of his days testifies to God’s ascendancy over him. The Law’s dry precepts contain the living presence of the Lord. His whole life is a ceremony in honor of God.

Although something of the beauty of a life lived in accordance with Jewish Law is evident in this novel, the story, unfortunately, turns on something else. Wolf Mohilevski goes to Vienna to attend a Jewish Congress. There he encounters for the first time his young nephew, Alfred, the son of a renegade brother now dead, who years ago had forsworn the Jewish faith to marry into a family of converted Viennese Jews. Alfred, although raised in almost total ignorance of his Jewish ancestry, already feels vague, sympathetic stirrings in the direction of his ancestral people. He witnesses a session of the Congress and is deeply moved by the piety of the Orthodox Jews and by a sense of the unity and intensity of their lives. The “Western” Jews present in modern dress, on the other hand, seem infinitely ludicrous to him in comparison with the figures in skullcap and caftan. Alfred is easily persuaded to renounce his present life and the novel ends with uncle and nephew arriving at the former’s Polish farm at sunset on a Friday evening, just in time to avoid the Sabbath prescription against travel.

The glaring fault of the novel is evident even in this bare account of the story. The return of “the son of the lost son” to the fold, the conversion of Alfred, is the dramatic question upon which the plot turns. It is this question that the author begs. Other than indicating an uncertain Sehnsucht in the nephew for his people, Alfred’s conversion is unmotivated. What takes place, in fact, is not a conversion, but the confirmation of a tendency already existing in the character of Alfred. What would otherwise be a grave spiritual struggle—between the urban, assimilated, “Western” Jew and the rural, Orthodox, “Eastern” Jew, an opposition the author takes pains to emphasize and on which depends the peripety of the plot—is lightly passed over.

The final effect of the book is therefore sentimental, in spite of the excellent depiction of the importance and supremacy of Law in the old Jewish life.