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No Goyz in the Hood
Lev Raphael
 PLACE OF SACRED MEMORY: Diner reminds us of a collective, iconic memory of 'tenements, pushcarts, sweatshops and synagogues...along with pungent smells, loud noises, crowded spaces, and good rich food' |
A Jewish writer friend once asked me what it was like to do a book tour, something she had never done. I told her that while it was exhilarating to be taken seriously by my publisher and to meet fans around the country, at the end of each day I couldn�t help feeling I was manning a pushcart on the Lower East Side, hawking my wares.
She laughed because even though she was from the Midwest and had never even been to New York, she knew exactly what I meant. I, myself, who grew up there, hadn�t ventured down to the Lower East Side except once or twice with my parents to eat at Ratner�s, the famous dairy restaurant. In any event, the Lower East Side my friend and I pictured was long gone, but for both of us the images were as clear as they are for so many American Jews.
Hasia Diner reminds us of that imagined diorama: �Tenements, pushcarts, sweatshops, and synagogues ... along with pungent smells, loud noises, crowded spaces, and good rich food. Pious elders, rebellious children, passionate socialists ....� Our comfort and familiarity with these iconic images illustrates one of the central points in Diner�s engaging, informative book, which explores the role of this neighborhood in American Jewish culture.
Diner makes it quite clear that for American Jews, the Lower East Side has come to be both a conversational commonplace as well as a place of sacred (that is, �set apart�) memory, symbolizing the American Jewish experience as well as being emblematic of Jewish history in general. Its iconic significance is so pervasive that histories of other Jewish communities in the U.S. have long referenced the area with Delancey Street at its heart as if it were the touchstone of Jewish American authenticity.
Diner lovingly examines the poignant and powerful narrative that has grown up about the neighborhood, a place where Jews supposedly �could be Jews as they wanted� without caring what the goyish world thought. The outlines of this popular story point both to the American past and the Jewish past. Like the Pilgrims, Jews coming to America fled religious persecution, and as during so many periods in Jewish history, they could not return to their former homes, making them unlike other immigrants who actually did go home.
Even as told by such renowned writers as Irving Howe in the enormously influential �The World of our Fathers� (1976), the story is dramatically oversimplified, uniformly envisioning these immigrants as shtetl Jews, unversed in the ways of cities and civilization. Seeking opportunity and a new life, they found hardship and poverty in a primarily Jewish enclave. If Russia was loosely seen as the Egypt of Exodus, then in some ways the Lower East Side was the wandering in the desert, with America outside that ghetto standing in for the Promised Land. To emerge from the ghetto entailed both freedom and loss; one had to abandon elements of the past like religious observance to embrace freedom and success. While these Biblical metaphors, which gave resonance to the myth, may not be exact, that in no way dulls their evocative power.
With the help of turn-of-the-century photographs by Jacob Riis and others, this �Lower East Side memory culture,� as Diner labels it, began to take root after World War II, when the area was already no longer heavily Jewish. With assimilation into the wider culture possible, Jews were moving to suburbs, and in the wake of the Holocaust�s catastrophic losses and the disappearance of �back there,� American Jews seemed to be seeking comfort and reassurance in connection with at least some aspect of their past. The rise of Jewish-American literature in the 1960s and of ethnic awareness also fueled this trend.
In an entertaining and quietly witty style, Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, analyzes a variety of �texts� that helped the memory culture coalesce, including triumphantly rediscovered pre-war works by Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth; surprisingly influential children�s literature like Sydney Taylor�s �All-of-a-Kind Family�; Howe�s best-seller; remakes of �The Jazz Singer� and even Steven Spielberg�s cartoon �An American Tail.� Synagogues and restored tenements themselves became overwhelmingly popular tourist attractions for Jewish visitors. Has their hunger for connection been pathetic or commendable? Diner opts for the latter interpretation. In her view, American Jews needed �a place of origin through which they could represent themselves, and a venue from which to describe the loss of Jewish authenticity in the face of collective and individual achievement.�
She makes one fascinating point after another. Jewish life in New York actually spread far beyond the boundaries of the Lower East Side, which was also never as homogeneously Jewish as the nostalgic story holds. And Jews were resident there anyway long before the massive immigrations of 1880-1920. In her analysis of popular romantic fiction dealing with neighborhood heroines, Diner wryly notes that unlike other such genre writing, Jewish women authors focused heavily on food and on the ambivalent nature of their heroines� successes, as in Belva Plain�s bestseller �Evergreen.� Diner�s illuminating analysis of the depth of political, literary and cultural activity of the Lower East Side also makes clear how the ferment of that time has become mere fizz in our romanticization of the period and the place.
Though published by a university press, there is nothing dryly academic about this lively and colorful study. In fact, Diner�s book is so thoroughly entertaining that when I finished, I could almost hear Barbra Streisand singing, �Memories, like the kugel in my mind, kosher-colored memories, of the way we were ....�
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Lev Raphael is the author, most recently, of �Little Miss Evil� (Walker & Co.).
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