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25 Chapter 1 William Novak,“The Lost Worlds of Our Fathers and of Yiddish Literature,”Moment, March 1976, 24-27. Introduction World of Our Fathers (1976) marked the culmination of a long evolution in Howe’s career, from a Trotskyist who fervently supported an international Socialism that eclipsed his own Jewish background to a literary intellectual and pioneering scholar of Yiddishkeit, the culture of Yiddish-speaking East European Jews, whose upbringing and history were integral to Howe’s identity. Although Howe’s early stance as a Marxist revolutionary had been extreme enough for him to describe World War II as a capitalist, imperialist struggle, he was to look back years later aghast at the ideological rigidity of his youthful writings. Yet even as early as 1946, with his first published book review in the Partisan Review, Howe’s treatment of Yiddish author Sholom Aleichem furnished a glimpse of another Irving Howe, the young man whose childhood in New York’s distinctly Jewish Lower East Side was animated by a verbal pathos and brave fatalism characteristic of the East European shtetl. The young Howe privileged his political life over his Jewish roots and his personal life, a bifurcation then apparent in much of Jewish intellectual life. As Howe matured, he would become a champion of Yiddish literature, most notably in co-editing (with Eliezer Greenberg ) A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954), a landmark collection that introduced a hitherto unexplored literary world to an American audience. As Howe points out in this interview, Jewish intellectual life in the 1950s had been moving toward “a confrontation with the fact of being Jewish which for various reasons—chiefly our aspirations to worldliness—we had suppressed.” World of Our Fathers moved 26 Chapter 1 from this literary genre to a more direct grappling with Howe’s heritage. In doing so it struck a nerve in a Jewish community struggling to keep some kind of connection to its past, becoming Howe’s first and only best seller and transforming him—for his allotted (in late 1976 and early 1977) fifteen minutes—into a minor celebrity. Yet as some critics, particularly neoconservative ones, have pointed out, World of Our Fathers paints a picture of the Jewish immigrant community slanted toward Howe’s humanism and Socialism. Alvin Rosenfeld takes this critique one step further, arguing that Howe neglects both Judaism as a religion and identification with Israel, “the two most encompassing cultural forces in American Jewish life in the post-Holocaust years.”1 Rather, Howe is a proponent of a fading secular Jewish culture. In this interview, Howe acknowledges his biases, admitting that he left much out, that “histories tend to be written by people like myself who are secularists.” Of course, any work must have its emphasis, and World of Our Fathers reflects Howe’s own first-generation experience in New York, his family’s debt to the union movement, and his impassioned involvement with Socialist politics. If Howe explains here that his interest in Jewish Socialism was one antecedent for the book, he also discusses how his earlier anti-Zionist radicalism had given way by the 1970s to a deep concern for Israel’s welfare and survival. This trend may be traced backward to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, published in English in 1948, which provoked a controversy regarding anti-Semitism as a shaping influence in Jewish identity. According to Edward Alexander, “‘Jewishness’ was now at least recognized as a subject of serious inquiry. Howe was forced to admit to himself that his earlier failure to face Jewish problems candidly had made him one of Sartre’s ‘inauthentic’ Jews.”2 In Howe’s case, as with many secular Jews, such negative prods may have been just as important as cultural and religious feelings in leading to rethinking Jewish identity. For Howe, another catalyst was the controversy over Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which its critics charged with partly blaming the Jews for their fate in the Holocaust. Howe explains that the debate “forc[ed] us into a confrontation with the fact of being Jewish which for various reasons—chiefly our aspirations to worldliness—we had suppressed.” Important as the Arendt controversy was in American (and indeed international ) cultural politics, we should not attribute excessive social significance to it; the founding and precarious existence of the state of Israel demanded by the 1960s such a rethinking. Still, Howe would never become a Zionist, and he continued to criticize Israeli policies with which...

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