“Hansen’s Law” in Fiction
by Suzanne Silberstein
An End to Dying. By Sam Astrachan. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. 246 pp. $3.50.
In spite of the warning on the jacket, An End to Dying, a first novel by a twenty-one-year-old recent graduate of Columbia, is “another autobiographical novel of groping youth.” This is its failing, but also its virtue. It fails because, like most first novels, or perhaps like all novels written in America since the war, it lacks a tone of its own. Its virtue, at the same time, is that it is so typical: it clearly expresses the dilemma of young American Jews who desperately seek their identity, their “name in the street,” and come to feel during the search that the streets in America have no names. Sam Star (the young hero and narrator of the book) repudiates the garbled Judaism of his rich uncles, the New York Cohens, who have migrated to America from East Europe. America, for them, he believes, has become the land of the lotus eaters, a paradise of escape whose opium is green dollar bills. As the Kagans of Czarist Russia, they lived Judaism in a purer form. And it is this purer Judaism of a latter day East Europe which Mr. Astrachan celebrates in his novel. He sees the Kagans not as a stoop-shouldered, meek, repressed community of Jews isolated against the backdrop of gigantic Russia, but as a people driven by a will to power and possessing the spiritual means to achieve it. If there is something of fantasy in Mr. Astrachan’s vision of his ancestors, there is also a conviction that gives to the first half of the novel real force and brilliance. This is especially true of the portrait of Jacob Kagan, Sam Star’s eldest uncle.
Jacob represents the Jewish wish for physical prowess come true, while his shrewdness recalls the stories told of the Baron Rothschild. Ultimately, his wrestling is not with the Gentile but with God, and his old age is a picture of a tragic hero who has somehow grown so powerful that he has gotten out of touch with his simple Jewish origin. When he is killed during the civil war by the aristocratic Russians who have always leaned on him with hate, we feel that something great has died out of the world. More than this, Mr. Astrachan manages to suggest that Jacob’s death is a direct consequence of his wish to assimilate and say, like a character out of Dostoevsky, “Hurrah for Kagan.”
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Mr. Astrachan, however, is much less effective in handling the present than the past. The present, unfortunately, is not merely an outgrowth of the past, but its shadow, and comes off second best, like a hand-me-down dress. Sam Star, revealingly enough, feels least comfortable in the United States; he is a foreigner in the here and now. Contemporary New York and Paris are merely “escapes from the reality of heritage” and never quite come off. We only know we are in the Bronx, or in a Paris night club, because the author tells us so.
This curious unevenness in the novel, between the first half which relives the past, and the second, which relegates the present to the shades, is attributable, I think, mainly to Mr. Astrachan’s inability to judge his own environment with the detachment that would allow him to understand it. Sam Star says that the Cohens are nothing more nor less than “the sons and daughters sucked into the watered-down version of their parents’ watered-down new world existence.” Every word he speaks is in this “I hate America” style, full of the rebellion of the 20’s and full, too, of its clever wisecracks. Consequently, the characters of the present lack substance: Sam Star himself turns out to be the prosaic picture of a poor boy from the Bronx, recalcitrant, dissatisfied; the Cohens are burlesques of the cloak-and-suiters in a Yiddish joke.
This latter portion of the novel is important, however, if only because it provides so extreme an expression of a point of view that is current in many periodicals and Jewish novels of our time. It voices the need of the third-generation Jew in America (and perhaps the third-generation anything) to remember what their fathers try to forget (otherwise known as “Hansen’s law”): the country from which they come, and their heritage. It further intimates that the image of America as the place where a wholly new life could be established is mythical: America can never smother the past, and no “New World” is new as long as there was an “Old World” before it. Those, like the Cohens, who try to forget are shapeless, ineffectual, like dangling participles.
The new artists are ineffectual, too. They are exiles in Paris, like Jess Kraut, who have forgotten that “a Jew must always work with the knowledge that he is a Jew,” who spend their days and nights haunting the old hangouts of an Ernest Hemingway, and sleeping with night-club prostitutes. They have never heard of classic Yiddish literature; they have no sense of a past, but only of the moment. It is not surprising that Shymolya Bernstein, the Yiddish writer, and Jess Kraut, the modern writer, have never heard of one another.
Finally, Mr. Astrachan would seem to maintain, with Santayana, that “if you are afraid to remember your past, you have to live it over again.” This is what Sam Star does as he retraces the steps of his ancestors in an effort to find his own place in the world. He writes in his diary:
“July 30, 1952. Sam Star is my name, and here and now I claim my heritage. My progenitors were the warriors and prophets of Israel, and my God is the God of Israel. When I speak or sing to God, my head is unbowed and uncovered. I look him in the eye and, with love and anger, I’ll say my piece. That’s the way I am.”
That’s the way our younger generation is too. With love and with anger they seem to be seeking a birthright which their parents have sought to conceal from them.
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