Word: howe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...World of Our Fathers, Howe...
STILL, IT REMAINED the unspoken hope of the immigrants through the Second World War, Howe writes, that "their visions and ambitions, the collective dream of Jewish fulfillment and the personal wish to improve the lot of their sons and daughters could be satisfied at the same time." In the ambitious second half of the book, Howe analyzes Yiddishkeit as the culture of the postponed decision. The "modernized" fiction of Yiddish culture grappled with universal themes of class struggle, personal relations and urban anomie as well as with the Jewish experience in eastern Europe. Uneasy Yiddish theater, trapped between the artistic...
Since Jews have been reluctant to forget the values of their immigrant past, Howe's final section, in which he treats the third and fourth generations as the products of such a rejection, does not work. Explaining the phenomena of the "New York intellectuals"--men like Philip Rahv, Paul Goodman, and Harold Rosenberg--as a group that "sought to declare themselves through a stringency of will, breaking clean from the immediate past and becoming autonomous men of the mind," as Howe does, is simply not convincing. And the description of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as part of the long...
...there is a more crucial reason, hinted at in an earlier chapter titled "The American Response," why these contemporary survivors hardly survive as real people in Howe's book. Although Howe obviously did not have the space to cite more than a few examples, the overall impression left by this chapter is that the theories of contemporary writers like Henry Adams and Henry James had more to do with shaping American attitudes toward the Jews than did the achievements of the immigrants themselves. Even more importantly, Howe hints that the dominant opinion in America worked against the immigrants' struggle...
...Howe has written a rich and beautiful story of the process of acculturation in America. He has immortalized "obscure men" like Louis Borgenicht who became wealthy by working his way up in the clothing industry but who ended his life "not quite comfortable in any world, visibly a success but uncertain where to register its impact, a stranger, perhaps, even to himself," But even though the characters and emotions are all there, Howe may have written the wrong script...