A Diving Rock on the Hudson (review)

Book'Reviews 165 work on interwar New York Onhodox Jews, suggests the need for qualification. Future historians can and will surely refine these chronological contours of the parameters of American Jewish culture. Despite this, what remains the wonder of !be Wonders ofAmerica is its path-breaking vision and sweep. Joselit's understanding of American Jews and the panicular expressions of their culture is keen. She observes them buying bar mitzvah suits as well as prayer shawls, making pilgrimages to Jewish museums, and crafting a "new geography of kashruth" (p. 174) that made Chinese restaurants a mainstay of the Jewish diet. And she perceives the dissonance between that which the elite custodians of communal culture, the rabbis, want and what the folk do. In ignoring sermons to come to the synagogue on the Sabbath while buying electric menorahs and pastrami,Jews, awash in the freedom ofAmerica, eloquently proclaimed their cultural priorities. An imaginative and gifted historian, Joselit fathomed this. The result lies here in her eloquent and imaginative ponrait of the invention-although she calls it a reinvention-ofAmerican Jewish culture. Pamela S. Nadell American University A Diving Rock on the Hudson, by Henry Roth. New York: St. Manin's Press, 1995. 416.pp. $23.95. Many readers ofnovels have thought ofwriting them; some have tried. A few have tried for years. But very few have tried for 60 years, and none after having written a great first novel, except Henry Roth, who died in October of last year. Roth passed away shonly after publication of the second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, of the six-volume series, "Mercy of a Rude Stream." The book followed sixty-one years after publication of the universally acclaimed Call It Sleep. Understanding what Roth did to break his silence, to bridge the gap of an unreponed lifetime, makes clear why these latter novels are at once so intimate yet so troubling. The "hero," if one can call him that, is Ira Stigman-Watchful Stigma-man, by the dictionary meaning of Ira and a brief expansion of the last name. While not a bad appellation for an outsider immigrantJewish boy in the first quaner ofthe twentieth century, Stigman's character is a polar opposite of the naive, sympathetic boy hero of Sleep. 166 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 From the blend of history and imagination that form the substance of Diving Rock, Roth's narrator-an elderly Stigman typing the story of his early life on a computer-transcribes a more treacly version of young Ira's life, allegedly written and discarded by old Ira a few years earlier. The extract contains unhelpful passages like these: "And Pop-memory harbors a few, tender recollections ofPop too, rare but precious.... [As we sat on a pier,] [i]nfrequently, but worth waiting for, as if it were a pyrotechnic display for our diversion, a lurid shaft offlame springs from the top of the smokestack into the twilight's dusty lapis lazuli, and flares, flares upward -'Look, Pop. Look!'" But Roth's narrator decides to present not this overly precious reminiscence-a kind of caricature of the likeable hero ofSleep, who lived at the mercy of forces and people beyond his control-but instead, a character who is the cause of his own misfortunes. And so we get the barely tolerable Ira Stigman, whose embarrassing behavior is the cause of some very wonderful writing. In a few pages of stage setting at Diving Rock's opening, the old narrator chastises his younger self for a variety of alleged faults: Ira is flunking every subject but English, is too shy to proposition a sexually loose young woman, as some tough Irish kids urge-"'G'wan, ask her for a lay. We all laid her. She'll give ye a lay.' 'No.' Ira shrank back," and is intimidated by ". . . the blacks who had taught him just how awkward he was." Added to this list of, we learn that this schlemiel also keeps losing his possessions "invariably because of inattention, carelessness, failure to keep strict guard over his property." Ira is thus about as far from John Wayne-style male competence as is possible to create in...