Freedom’s Deadly Fruit
In The Morning Light.
by Charles Angoff.
Beechhurst. 736 pp. $4.50.
In The Morning Light is the second of Charles Angoff’s books about the Polansky family, immigrants from a small village in Russia who settled in Boston. It contains the reminiscences of David Polansky, the answer to his five-year-old daughter’s question, “Is it hard to grow up?” The book covers only four years of David’s life, from his Bar Mitzvah to his high school graduation, but it contains glimpses of his numerous relations, descriptions of Jewish life in Boston during the First World War, and it purports to be a serious study of the adjustment of East European immigrants.
It is a pity that the sentimentality and awkwardness of the writing often obscure the natures of the main characters. One feels that the author knows more than he tells. There is a great deal of compassion and insight hidden behind the descriptions of people who are “good in every sense of the word.” Too often, however, the meaning of worthwhile passages is lost because of the trite expressions that make it difficult to take what is written seriously.
The older women get the best and most sensitive treatment. The men are more real when angry than when they are kind. The children and young people are as flat and real as paper dolls. The Polanskys are very ordinary people living commonplace lives. They are not challenged with any passions that would force them to transcend their pettiness. Instead of forcing them to become alive under pressure, Angoff tends to glorify their small virtues, making the book an apology for the manners and customs of poor Jews.
There are only good and gentle people in the Polansky family. There may occasionally be foolish ones, but never wicked ones. How else could they be, when the “alte Bobbe,” who bore them, was a paragon of virtue? When they are not worthy of her, the blame is never theirs, but America’s. The characters and author constantly extol America, but at the same time, almost in the same breath, they blame their undoing upon this same America. A great deal of the story is devoted to this ambivalence. The moral of the Jewish expulsion from the Eden of poverty and piety, however, prevails as the stronger feeling. America is the snake and money is the apple. Although such feelings are expressed by immigrants, the author attempts not only to express them, but to prove they are valid. Money separated husband from wife and brother from brother, though poverty and strangeness in a new land had kept them together. To prove this, the characters in the beginning of the story are unbelievably sweet and forgiving. If they are pricked, they do not bleed. Nothing jars them from their acceptance of the will of God. Within a few short years, however, their lives are full of hatred, resentment, and humiliation, all attributed to America, which has wounded them with its false values.
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There are two villains in the book, business and the enticement of the “goyishke” way of life. There are only a few Christians in the book, but they carry the full weight of Christian failings, just as the Polanskys and their friends are encumbered by Jewish goodness. They are, however, never guilty of anti-Semitism, because they are all “good goyim” who love Jews. David’s relations with four non-Jewish boys are symbolic of his attempts at emancipation. The first is Frank, who frightens David at first, but eventually wins his pity when it becomes plain that Frank’s father has no use for “educated fools” and will not let his son go to college. The second, Willie, is a tough who for some mysterious reason babies and protects David from the gang. Willie joins the Marines at the age of fifteen, somehow gets to Mexico, and is killed in a skirmish with Villa. Jerry, his third friend, goes up in an airplane, which David wants to do, but doesn’t dare to because his mother would not approve. The plane, of course, crashes. From his fourth friend, Stan, he learns about sex, enough to decide that Jewish sex is spiritual and Christian sex vulgar. David’s need for vicarious experience finally leads him to seek out a Jewish family that has assimilated faster than his own. The father does calisthenics with his sons and takes them to baseball games. The mother smokes. Solly drinks water instead of seltzer; Joe goes to prize fights; Sam chews gum. In a few years they come to their natural ends. The father goes to the state penitentiary for selling narcotics, the sons are expelled from school for cheating. David’s un-happy experience with these people serves to bring him home to the arms and values of his parents.
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The Polansky family includes a large number of Jewish types. There is the rich crass uncle Mottel and his wife Bassel who is bored by affluence and longs for the old days when she worked night and day in a candy store. Aryeh is a Hebrew teacher who goes to night school for many years to study chemistry and finds at the end that he dislikes chemistry and prefers to teach Hebrew. Yetta is the lady socialist who marries someone who is her intellectual inferior, bears children, and becomes wealthy, never mentioning socialism again. Intellectual activity in women is seen as a kind of disease. They either lose their brains along with their pincenez after marriage, or turn over their only loves to rivals and lose them. Aaron is known as the silent one. He has a predilection for older women, and does not marry until he finds a young one fat and aggressive enough to mother him. All we know of her is that she loves trees and flowers, drinks copious quantities of orange juice, and takes cold baths. Probably the most obnoxious character is Harrele-mit-the-pants, the atheist, who misquotes Schopenhauer and wears only pants and shirts which are too large for him. He dies young, exhorting David to love science. Since Aryeh has already explored the world of science at Tufts Night School, and found it empty of inspiration, an important Jewish lesson is taught.
If these were just background characters seen through a young boy’s eyes, their incompleteness might be forgiven, but they are the result of the narrator’s experience, used to justify his ideas of Jewish values; as such they are often unbearable.
Though too many characters come forth like vaudeville actors to make their speeches or put on acts, without revealing themselves except by accident, the large number of characters, taken together, do suggest the family patterns and the immigrant pattern of development. There are long speeches delivered by the doctor, the pharmacist, the Yankee, that could not have been spoken, but are informative, nevertheless. The businesses, unions, and stores, though sometimes superficially described, are all there to examine. The total provides a study of Jewish conceptions, misconceptions, and prejudices, even though its goal is to substantiate rather than expose the prejudices.
The use of Yiddish in the book is often unfortunate. Though it could add flavor when the words cannot be easily translated into English, or even if it is to appeal to those who “know,” the use of as many rather than as few Yiddish words as possible is awkward and disturbing. The translations in parentheses break up the continuity of the passages and frequently do not explain at all. The use of Yiddish, therefore, comes as a language lesson added to the other formal lessons in the book. Of all the Yiddish words, the use of mensh and goy as antonyms is the most confusing. The word goy is used as a term of derogation, though the actual goyim are always referred to as “good goyim,” making it appear that the only kind of a bad goy is a Jew. Mensh is used in the sense of “be a mensh,” as well as “he’s only a mensh,” and “he’s a real mensh,” a bewildering assortment for the uninitiated, since they are all translated alike.
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Despite the sentimentality and the prejudices, the book can be said to have value as a family photograph, even if it suffers the fate of family photographs. Everyone is in the picture, as well as the house behind, and even the stores down the street. But we can see few faces clearly. The tinting of the whole in pale pink blurs them even more, without adding to their reality. Still, family photographs are seldom discarded. If they cannot withstand the bright living room light, there is always a place for them in the hallway. The fact that the fourth man from the left, two down, the one with the glasses, mustache, and crooked tie, is someone’s father, may give it the same meaning for some readers that it has for the author.
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