Jews in Cardiff
Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve.
by Dannie Abse.
Criterion. 200 pp. $3.00.
For all its toughening know-how, and the deracinating power that New York’s brash and sophisticated force is supposed to exert on the children of the city’s immigrants, sucking them out and away from the language-barriered narrowness of kinship they feel about the heights of the Bronx or the depths of Brooklyn, it has always seemed a little preposterous to us to think that Jews very much like us, speaking roughly the same kind of Yiddish, punctuating their remarks with much the same kind of gestures and intonation, could be living in parts of the world whose Population and Chief Products made up the grinding routine of geography lessons in P.S. 125. Maybe Chicago and Boston can be let in with the rest of us, and Los Angeles, and even [laughter] Rosenberg, Texas, even the East End of London (because Tante Nachamke had lived there for a while before she finally embarked for America, and that hard-headed dowager was no spinner of fairy tales). We’d allow these places the possibility of having Jews “like us,” allow it with a certain incredulous smirk, knowingly suspicious as we were of their authenticity, tending to say, as someone I know once remarked about a friend of ours who grew up in (of all places) Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “Well, he’s really sort of a goyishe Jew.”
But Brazil, Italy, Honolulu? Ridiculous. Or Cardiff, whose Jewish life is undeniably there in Mr. Abse’s novel? Impossible. Then we began pushing out of the subway circuit, moved by curiosity and ambition, by education and snobbery, granted our own kind of wandering freedom by jobs and Fulbrights and Guggenheims, and we began to back up along the routes our parents had traveled, though never getting quite to the point from which they had started or making the move in quite their way. But we began to know that certain latkes and certain chochmes were, astoundingly, made from the same recipe, by the same kind of people, anywhere a Guggenheim can take you. Yet for me it never quite registered that in the British Isles, those very British Isles that were the college-English-course territory of Shakespeare and Dickens and kings and queens, of Morgan le Fay and King Arthur and Cyril Connolly, that on those holy swards of their culture—there could be places and people, as redolent of the real thing as the front-page format of the Forward, which were forever Yiddish: or as forever Yiddish as our parts of New York itself will remain.
Reading Mr. Abse’s slight, at times touching, but annoyingly disjointed and slapdash autobiographical novel about his boyhood in Cardiff, it occurred to me that although place names like Ogmore, Porthcawl, Penarth, and Swansea are no more “Jewish,” God knows, than the street names in my part of Brooklyn (resounding bits of British biscuit like Hopkinson, Chester, Bristol, and Amboy), such are the willful deceptions of familiarity that they seem much more so, to me, than Porthcawl and Penarth. (Some British writers, of course, like David Daiches, wise to the parochial funny-bones of New York Jews, have dug rich comic gold from the solecisms of Scots Yiddish, though it seems doubtful that an Edinburgh Jew would get quite the same kick out of a piece about the similar misalliance of languages in New York.)
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Somewhat reluctantly, disbelievingly, then, we came to acknowledge the strange truth that Brownsville and Delancey Street and Mosholu Parkway were not the only safe-deposit vaults of authentic East European Yiddish life; that even though this is a Welshman writing, who tells us “My mother was born at Ystalyfera one rainy Tuesday, my father on Guy Fawkes night in Bridgend,” he is not for a minute writing about those alien, “assimilated,” goyishe Jews. Though in Mr. Abse’s world there are the beating of the Channel tides, and the appearance of old men with names like Dafydd Morgan and girl friends with names like Megan Davies, and the young Dan’s dreams of glory about cricket matches, still “It was Friday night and we were Jewish. The two candles burning symbolized for me holiness and family unity. My mother could speak Welsh and Yiddish and English, and Dad knew swear words as well. One of my big brothers would say the prayer and we would eat. . . . The meat was kosher.”
And we are given, almost as though Mr. Abse were trying to prove to us that this is much the same world as our own, the familiar, snuffling good-for-nothing, Uncle Isidore, not exactly an uncle, living on family handouts, “an oldish, untidy man, a sort of amateur beggar, who wouldn’t work but read in the Reference Library and forever played his violin.” (And played it badly, too, as that kind of uncle always does.) Nor are the other landmarks missing: the boy’s fiercely dedicated Communist brother, Leo; the mother with an endless reserve of tears to shed no matter what the mood of the occasion; the father whose greatest ambition is to make his sons doctors and lawyers, educating them to the point where they can no longer talk to him, so that he can really say life is tragic; and old Rabbi Aaronowich, who said kaddish for his son when he married a shikse, who “spoke in English, with a Russian and Welsh accent, throwing in a bit of Yiddish when his vocabulary failed him.”
But for all the warm familiarity, there is something missing here. The setting is strange and fascinating to us, but though Mr. Abse’s novel is interesting, in its savory authenticity, as incontrovertible proof against our own provincial incredulity (and against the tendency to make all this a big joke, which Daiches has capitalized on), he has not come to terms with his own history enough to show the full commitment and conviction necessary to a novelist. Choosing too flimsy and easy a form for his book, which renders its experience as tenuous and impermanent as a house of limp cards, he does not make the life he is evoking sink as deep into the imagination as one wishes he might have done. Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (and why the pompous title from Eliot when the matter is what it is?) is too literally sketchy, shifting with eye-straining abruptness from a quick vignette of family life here, to a hastily constructed sliver of history there, to rapid-fire boys’ talk about sex, to snatches of popular songs from the year he is writing about at the moment. It all seems a curiously old-fashioned, and by now not very effective, derivation from Dos Passos and similar writers of the 30’s, who tried to suggest the jerky, capricious shifts of history through a kaleidoscopic shuffling of episodes in their novels.
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Something of the same narrow timidity seems to be at work in Mr. Abse’s sensibility that stifles so many American immigrant-begotten novelists, who find it so hard to blend and merge and use, in their own visions and with their own voices, the world of their fathers and the alien, yet demanding, world to which their fathers came. So we get very little valid sense of change or development in Mr. Abse’s characters, only a battery of hastily chosen details, indiscriminately conceived images, left to drift without a guiding point of view: and this can lead to some very bad writing. Though Mr. Abse tries, rather over-insistently, to show how much, how terribly and crucially much, is going on in the world as Dan is growing up in Cardiff in the 30’s, the mark he is saying it left on the boy is never felt creatively enough to leave a lasting mark on us. How is the subtle, shaping interaction of history and character to be seen if he contents himself with using “current events” like a hypodermic injection, plunged rather desperately into the arm of his prose whenever the life of the story seems to be beating too feebly? It just won’t do to attempt to underline the boy’s awareness of Nazism by suddenly devoting five pages to a television-like account of Grynszpan and the assassination of von Rath. And he is all too inclined to add the right “ponderous” and timely dimension by awkward interpolations: “The voice said Newport, Swindon, Reading. . . . It seemed the voice of Fate. More appropriately it should have called out Abyssinia, Czechoslovakia, Spain.”
When he leaves history lessons alone, the book makes far better reading. In accounts of the countryside around Cardiff, and the boy’s adventurous, poking, awkward curiosity about girls, in lyric passages about the sea, and winter swirling through the city, and summer insects rasping away in the grass, Mr. Abse often writes with charm and a lively boldness of imagery. But at times, and here the lack of his own true voice is most seriously felt, the highly charged metaphoric excitement is entirely too reminiscent of the soaring, blazing imagery Dylan Thomas volcanoed through his own prose about his childhood. This kind of hurtling daredevilishness often only reminds us that Thomas’s wild and roaring brilliance is a treacherous kind of fire for other writers to try and catch on their own.
True as it is that ornateness is peculiarly characteristic of the Welsh when they write in English, even when they speak in English, it is hard to avoid feeling that Thomas has been taken too literally as the Icarus model for some of Mr. Abse’s more exuberant and unsuccessful flights. Perhaps this is the very temptation into which the younger Welsh writers have unavoidably been led, at first by the fantastic explosiveness of Thomas’s fame, and now in overpious homage to the dead. In either case, originality loses out, and Mr. Abse should stick more closely to the particular originality of his Welsh, and Jewish, experience, and the particular understanding and language that can grow out of it.
Yet the evidences of a potentially rewarding individuality are there, in many parts of this first novel, despite its abundance of shortcomings, its imitative timidity. Where Mr. Abse is at his best is where he comes most intensely in touch with his own world, the Jewish life of Cardiff that is distinctly his, and felt, and now, through his efforts, neither outlandish nor merely comic for us.
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