Traveling Salesmen
Travels in Jewry.
by Israel Cohen.
Dutton. 372 pp. $5.00.
Under Strange Skies.
By Harry Simonhoff.
Philosophical Library. 349 pp. $3.50.
It is easy for the modern, freethinking Jew to lose whatever sense of Jewish continuity he may have. Often there is no reason, other than a kind of anthropological curiosity, itself not to be disparaged, to keep alive in him an awareness of his past in Europe or of his contemporaries everywhere. Whether the loss of this sense is good or bad or simply inevitable, it is not likely that either Mr. Cohen’s or Mr. Simonhoff’s work will make such a Jew regret the loss.
The chapter titles of Mr. Cohen’s book promise a tour through some of the cities and towns the 20th-century immigrants to America left behind them. Cracow, Lvov, Czernovitz, Vilna, Kovno, Bialystok, Czenstochova. These are fabled places: they gave names in the new world to branches of fraternal organizations; they formed the magical references in discussions, arguments, and reminiscences of family circles; and Bialystok provided the designation for a uniquely rubbery roll, the “bialystoker,” which rivals the bagel as a New York delicacy. Certainly it is interesting to go through these localities of one’s parents with Mr. Cohen; it is a journey through the family album, even if we only get time-table statistics most of the time. One or two of Mr. Cohen’s more detailed accounts, of a Sabbath service in Paris, of a Karaite community in Poland, are sharply vivid and charming in their dry detachment-which is maintained almost, but not quite, to the end: he concludes the first with an annoyed comment about the similarity of the French rabbi’s and the French priest’s garb, and the second with an irrelevant touch of Zionist propaganda.
But on the whole, Mr. Cohen uses his tour simply as the occasion for a series of lectures, pretty much on one note, on modern anti-Semitism and the fabulously widespread appeal of Zionism (“everybody is doing it, so why not you”), which finally leave us unmoved and uncomfortable. His reporting is controlled by a need to sell us something, and his role as salesman finally limits his observation. Indeed we would get little sense of the story-book characters and most of the storybook places without some of the wonderful photographs Mr. Cohen collected; the illustrations of the smiling street workers in Lvov, of the Kovno dandy in tight suit and homburg leaning insouciantly on a cane while consulting a bearded marriage broker, point up the failure of the text to handle life.
_____________
Mr. Simonhoff carries Mr. Cohen’s technique of making everything abstract to the point where we often get no notion at all of the places he visited. Many of his straightforward descriptions are good; he can be an alert, expressive, and uncommitted observer. But when he disembarks at a Spanish city, we get a history-book spiel on the Inquisition; he goes to England, and we are overwhelmed by an astonishingly intemperate attack on Ernest Bevin, in which the whole British Palestine policy is ascribed to the personal anti-Semitism of the Labor foreign secretary. For any country he passes through, we are edified with smug comments about how many prominent Jews there have been there, including half-Jews and former Jews. It is rather like those college alumni publications in which every activity of every alumnus is reported with equal enthusiasm. Mr. Cohen, though he expresses himself more subtly, is similarly chauvinistic.
Occasionally both writers adopt techniques made familiar by anti-Semites themselves. Of a former governor of Florida, David Sholtz, identified as a converted Jew, whose first name is always given as “Dave,” Mr. Simonhoff writes: “. . . a minority held that a meshumed is not to be trusted. It became clear that Dave Sholtz was running true to type. Evidently the minority were right in their estimate of a renegade.” He brings up the ugly idea that in all mixed marriages the Jewish partners sooner or later will “receive a rude jolt on hearing themselves reviled by anti-Jewish spouses or offspring.” He tells us with unpleasant relish of Rabbi David Marx, whom he describes as “among the first to perceive that the tepid Reform Judaism of his time was concerned chiefly with the cultivation of good will among Christians,” and who was the object of an attack by General George Van Horn Mosely. “Irony of Ironies! The climax of a lifetime! Patriotism is perhaps the rabbi’s sincerest quality. His Americanism is probably deeper rooted and more profound than his Judaism. It is patriotic fervor that made Rabbi Marx a bitter enemy of Zionism and a member of the American Council for Judaism.”
Mr. Cohen is far less guilty than Mr. Simonhoff of lapses into sheer bad taste. But even he refers to a monk who “sought to move the multitudes of London Jewry with his passionate appeals for the rebuilding of Zion, though his fervor would have been more fittingly, and perhaps more fruitfully spent, in launching a philippic against Christendom to Christianize itself.”
_____________
Perhaps more important than the instances of pure bias is the undercurrent that runs through both books, in Mr. Simonhoff’s close to the surface, of completely taken-for-granted feeling that the inferior goyim have as their one function in existence the harassing of Jews. Every case of Jewish persecution or discrimination, obvious or dubious, is reported, often the gruesome details are smackingly lingered over, but never is there an attempt to understand on any but the most hackneyed and insubstantial grounds. Typical is Mr. Cohen’s interpretation of an action of Lithuanian authorities: “They enacted a compulsory Sunday rest law in the alleged interest of the Christian Sabbath, but in the real interest of Christian commerce, for the Jewish tradespeople, who were thus compelled to rest two days a week. . . and consequently subjected to a tremendous handicap in the economic struggle.” What has Mr. Cohen to say about American or British Sunday rest laws?
The profundity of Mr. Simonhoff’s concept of anti-Semitism may be demonstrated by his glib “medical” description: “For ages, doctors have treated typhus or malaria without knowing the bacterial origin of these diseases. Some day science may also isolate the germ that causes anti-Semitism. The symptoms of Judeophobia are well known. A person of any race, nation, group, or sex is seized by undefinable hate. In milder cases, the patient is satisfied with name calling. The more advanced stage causes him to break out in violence. But the most dangerous manifestation takes the form of neurosis. Then like all monomaniacs, the psychotic loses his sense of reality.”
_____________
