Return to the Fold?

An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy.
by Paul Cowan.
Doubleday. 246 pp $15.95.

A number of American Jews who once seemed thoroughly indifferent to their Jewishness have begun to move back into the Jewish sphere and to make their “return” a matter of public record. In a recent cover story in Esquire, the actress Barbra Streisand describes her latest film, Yentl, based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, as part of an attempt at posthumous reconciliation with her father, a Hebrew teacher who died when she was quite young. The article also reports that Miss Streisand is studying Talmud and that she supports Jewish education, and it ends with her quoting Maimonides.

The novelist Anne Roiphe, whose essay embracing the Christmas holiday drew a great protest when it appeared in the New York Times several years ago, has since written Generation Without Memory, in which she examines what she may have forfeited as a Jew in adopting Christian culture. By the end of her exposition she is able to draw up a pact with Judaism: if it can be made to satisfy six conditions (she is at least that much less demanding than God) she is prepared to consider it seriously.

Such individual acts of reappraisal, whatever their limitations, are a step or two beyond the cultic masquerade of the recent past when so many young American Jews adopted new identities in spectacular acts of conversion. That process may occasionally have seen the metamorphosis of a West Coast surfer into a yeshivah student, but on the whole, for those seeking an alternative to this deceitful world, the Moonies proved far more alluring than the Hasidim. The current religious revival, also among Jews, is part of a soberer America, and involves some thoughtful reviews of home, family life, community, and country.

This is certainly true of Paul Cowan’s autobiographical odyssey, An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy. As a long-time staff writer for the Village Voice and a contributor to other national periodicals, Cowan has conducted his transformation very much in the public eye. Five years ago, in the New York Times Magazine, he reported on the founding of a one-afternoon-a-week Jewish school that a group of parents had organized on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This then marked the high point of Cowan’s Jewish affiliation, and I remember thinking at the time that in American Jewish life less must surely be more: never had so little been so highly publicized before so many. But it is clear from Cowan’s new book that establishing the school was an earlier phase in an ongoing process, and that in his case the decision to live as a Jew has generated its own momentum. Since Cowan tells the story of his evolution in candid personal detail, he leaves a well-documented contemporary record—though one with more information than insight.

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Now in his early forties, Cowan was born into a wealthy, assimilated family. His father, a noted TV producer and executive, had changed his name from Cohen as part of an attempt to sever all connections with his family. His mother’s parents had embraced Christian Science when she was still a child. The holidays celebrated in the Cowan household were Christmas and Easter. The private school to which Paul was sent was Episcopalian. Of course the family still recognized itself as Jewish, and the prejudice the young Cowan experienced at school reinforced this identification negatively. But Cowan knew little about Judaism or the Jews. It was not surprising that in the early 1960’s, just out of Harvard College, he should marry a New England Protestant and become an active member of the New Left. He happened to be spending a year in Israel when he first read of the civil-rights movement in Mississippi and decided to return to America to become part of this “secular creed.” His Jewishness, filtered through what he describes as his mother’s amorphous guilt, was expressed in identification with the underdog and a resolve to come to his assistance.

The book gives a brief summary of Cowan’s career as a political activist and Peace Corpsman, of his post-60’s disenchantment with certain aspects of political life, and of his simultaneous desire for deeper roots. When in the course of an assignment Cowan discovered the Jewish poor of the Lower East Side, and an Orthodox community closer to the immigrant source, he became excited by his own connection with this tradition, and moved by nostalgia to explore it as a subject.

The sudden death of his parents in a fire added urgency to his search. He set out to learn all he could about his family, which resulted in an interesting introduction to immigrant ingenuity and adaptation since the 1840’s. As the research seemed to lead inexorably to Jewish origins, the pursuit of family data necessarily became combined with a self-education in Jewish history. In telling his story, Cowan shows how closely the two strands became intertwined.

The account of the two families from whom Paul Cowan derives is the best part of the book. The chapters on his father’s Lithuanian-based clan with its proud intellectual ambition, and his mother’s equally prestigious family which came from Abenheim in the Rhineland and founded the Spiegel mail-order company in Chicago, are decent historical reconstructions. Though Cowan lacks the background and the intellectual capacities that might have transformed these family sagas into documents of social history, the information he offers is sufficiently compelling, and the contrast between the families sufficiently dramatic, first to whet and then to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. Unfortunately, the author’s account of his own cultural development, which was to have formed the heart of this book, lacks any such sustaining power, and in fact evades opportunities for true analysis.

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This is not the first bildungs-autobiography that Cowan has written. In 1970 he published The Making of an Un-American, which, with the same kind of personal detail that characterizes the present book, told the story of his earlier radicalization. An angry document, it was prefaced by a “prayer” for his children taken from the “great Cuban revolutionary,” José Marti: “Los niños son la esperanza del futuro del mundo.” In those days Cowan wanted to fling open the doors to the sterile paradise of America in the following manner:

. . . when I read that the Vietcong had attacked the American embassy in Saigon during the Tet offensive, I was almost able to imagine that I was a member of the raiding party. How I would have loved to invade that segregated building and give all the information I could find there to my government’s enemy, the people.

To judge from the intensity of this rhetoric as compared with anything in the present book, Cowan was far more dedicated as an anti-American than he is today as a Jew.

Now the development of a rabid revolutionary sympathizer into a synagogue member in good standing—and in less than a decade’s time!—is potentially a fascinating story, one that could help to explain the nature of a whole generation. Yet far from wishing to clarify this development, Cowan appears to have undertaken this book, and perhaps even returned to Judaism, as a means of avoiding such a clarification. Many episodes and passages from his earlier autobiography are recycled in the present one without any sense of contradiction, even when they are put to startlingly different use.

Thus in The Making of an Un-American, Cowan’s education at Choate and later at Harvard opens his eyes to class privilege, and to the self-serving liberalism of his professors. Nearly suffocated in this atmosphere of prejudice and conformism, he is relieved only by his almost “religious” exposure to the folk singer Pete Seeger, who becomes for a year his “spiritual President.” In the current book, we are treated to the same recoil from his educational environment, but attributed now to a pervasive anti-Semitism at Choate, with no reference at all to Seeger, Che Guevara, or any of the leftist causes which, Cowan once wrote, he had been drawn to as a consequence of that environment. The second book seems to have been designed not to interpret an evolution from the first but rather to build an entirely new self-image out of the same raw material.

Whether this is the result of deliberate decision or, as appears more likely, of a kind of intellectual obliviousness, the product is a laundered tale that reduces all conflict and all issues of political choice to banalities, avoiding the kind of confrontation with the immediate past that alone could have made this book an important document.

Of his thoughts and actions in the radical 60’s, Cowan now has only this to say:

Whatever its flaws, the movement achieved some astonishing successes: it stopped segregation in the South and it stopped the war in Vietnam. Its own ending was terribly sour, because so many of us were so young, because our cultural diversity was so vast, because the forces we were facing were so great—and because of the paradoxical fact that we wanted to form a spiritual community out of something as evanescent and changeable as politics. But the movement’s early years—which are rarely described any more—represented some of the happiest days of our lives.

Thus in the full light of subsequent events does a person who was once prepared to hand over the American embassy to the Vietcong write the moment off a decade later without a hint of self-scrutiny, let alone of accountability. The irresponsibility of Cowan’s generational cohort is still taken by him as its principal charm; now an adult, he remains prepared to blame all the “flaws” of the movement on vague external “forces”—and on his own unrealized spirituality.

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But even if Cowan does not choose to recognize it, this book is obviously a sequel, and cannot be appreciated except as an outgrowth of its predecessor. The author describes himself as one who has never felt comfortable in aggressive, competitive situations, but has looked for ways of helping those who might need him—new immigrants in Israel, blacks in the South, the poor of Ecuador. He appears hard hit by the realization that those whom he has desired to assist are after no more than what he already has—wealth, freedom, privilege, the condition from which he recoils. His well-meaning efforts were rejected by Southern blacks in the early 1960’s; the Ecuadorans he met while serving in the Peace Corps suspected him of imperialist designs. Finally he found among the poor Jews of the Lower East Side the one club of the underprivileged (to invert Groucho Marx) that had to accept him as a member. In fact, the embracing warmth of these people, who received him as a fellow Jew, made him feel at home at just the moment in his personal life he needed it the most.

The series of articles about his rediscovered Jewish roots that Cowan published in the mid-70’s in the Village Voice showed how much this sense of attraction owed to the secular creed of the “Un-American” he had become. The very title of the series, “Jews Without Money, Revisited,” spoke to this connection, invoking an earlier book by the talented American Communist writer, Michael Gold, who in the 1930’s had defended the Jews because they were impoverished immigrants and on that account deserving of sympathy. Obvious in this line of defense is a rejection of non-poor Jews, which Cowan made explicit in moralistic attacks on Jewish philanthropists.

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Judaism thus seems to have become appealing to Cowan not through the grandeur of its spiritual vision, not through the exigencies of its Law, not by virtue of Jewish cultural accomplishment, but because Jews had been revealed as victims of society, and hence a suitable subject of approbation. Yet this too is not the whole story, because as it reaches its present conclusion Cowan’s autobiography takes an ironic twist. By discovering in Jews an object of his solicitude, he was able to come to terms with his desire, by now grown quite pronounced, for a happy, stable life with his wife and children, surrounded by friends from his own cultural and social milieu. According to his received ideological categories, this kind of American family life, in good circumstances among people of one’s own background and class, should have been considered bourgeois and contemptible. By defining himself as an orphan in history—a cultural victim of American society—he was able to justify his reclamation of Judaism and along with it the good life that his parents had prepared for him as an educated, affluent, decent American.

All this may signify a happy ending: the errant heir repossessing his birthright after a long and culturally arduous journey. And indeed it has been hailed as just such a happy ending by sympathetic reviewers and elated spokesmen of the organized American Jewish community, who have taken the author to their hearts and proclaimed his book a sign that a “lost generation” is now returning to the fold. But a word of caution to these celebrants: it is not yet clear whether Cowan’s adoption of Judaism has room in it for them. After all, these guardians of the institutional interests of the Jewish community do not qualify as “niños.” For Cowan to affirm a commonality with them would require not only entry into bourgeois society—a condition he has met—but an acknowledgment of that society’s objective and enduring worth. Cowan’s next autobiography may reveal whether this will have proved possible.

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