A Ghetto to Look Back To: World of Our Fathers, Ethnic Revival, and the Arc of Multiculturalism

In the 2 January 1977 issue of The New York Times Book Review, the editors ran their annual picks of the best books published in the previous year. Among them were Alex Haley's Roots, "a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one"; Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, "an investigation of soul, not landscape" portraying "the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it"; and Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, a study of "bedraggled and inspired" immigrants on the Lower East Side, "a complex story of fulfillment and incompleteness." ¹ The coincidence of these three landmark publications and their enthusiastic reception mark the maturation of a long-term development in American intellectual and emotional life and the beginning of a new phase in the cultural politics of American diversity: the coalescence of the ethnic revival, which a decade later would commonly be known--and frequently disparaged--as multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is now almost wholly regarded as an intellectual engagement, for better or worse, among various educators, critics, and cultural producers representing peoples of color. Its prehistory is in Black Power and related movements of the late 1960s; its ascendance is marked by the emergence of Black Studies programs, the American Indian Movement, Ebonics, Afrocentrism, and the push for bilingual education among Latinos; its pantheon of heroes (or antiheroes, depending on one's view) includes figures like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Vine Deloria, Frank Chin, Maya Angelou, Sandra Cisneros, Spike Lee, Janice Mirikitani, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ronald Takaki, and Rudolfo Anaya. Its sacred texts include Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Obasan, Dogeaters, and Beloved. Certainly no Irving Howes in this tradition; no Richard Gambinos or Michael Novaks; no Blood of My Blood, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, or World of Our Fathers.

But the appearance and celebration of that spellbinding triptych in 1976--Roots, Woman Warrior, and World of Our Fathers--denote a pervasive national thrall, a shared impulse across the color line. In its formative moments what would become multiculturalism was not at all the exclusive province of peoples of color. Howe's work may have spoken to insular, specifically Jewish concerns of peoplehood, collective destiny, and memory, to be sure: in their contemporary reviews, for instance, specialist Frederic Cople Jahar could quibble with Howe's treatment of the Holocaust; and Paul Novick, in the sectarian tones of a bitter insider, could decry Howe's "Cahanism" and his rough injustice to the intellectual tradition of the Morning Freiheit ("History in the Guise of Libels and Trash," is how Novick summed up these matters). ²

But in reckoning with the status of World of Our Fathers as a bestseller, the meanings and appellations affixed to the book in the non-Jewish press may be more useful than contemporary scholarly debates among Jewish intellectuals and historians. Time magazine set its review of World of Our Fathers beneath the telling headline, "Assimilation Blues," situating Howe's work within the proximate cultural context of Fiddler on the Roof and Portnoy's Complaint, texts which spoke only imperfectly to the forgotten or distorted--but hungered--past of those "many Americans whose non-English-speaking [forebears] were part of the huddled masses that funneled through Ellis Island at the turn of the centruy." ³ Business Week mused upon ethnicity's new status as "a literary and political buzzword," noting that "135 colleges have established ethnic studies programs, and recently President Ford appointed a special assistant for ethnic affairs," and then pronouncing World of Our Fathers "the most impressive of the recent ethnic books." ⁴ The Christian Science Monitor ventured that Howe had captured in his distinctly Jewish masses "the archetypes of the immigrant (one wants to say American) experience...