Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Jewish Literature & Culture)

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding critical biography of Irving Howe
Review: Edward Alexander is not going to win the hagiography (lives of the saints) award of the year but he just might capture the critical biography prize because his tripartite study of the intellectual condominiums that co-mingled in the mind of Irving Howe is work of meticulous scholarship, felicitous writing style and a literate feistiness. The latter is perhaps the most endearing part of this absorbing book: Alexander has chosen to write a biography of a man whose political views, historical understanding and religious thinking (or lack thereof) he does not share. In fact, in a personal communication with his future biographer, Howe once referred to Alexander as my favorite reactionary. It is therefore a tribute to Alexander's skill th! at he has been able to reconstruct Howe's remarkable contributions to the American socio-political agenda and the Jewish component thereof while at the same time offering his, Alexander's, editorial strictures of Howe's political, literary and cultural myopias and tunnel vision. In his youth adolescence and early 20s - a period that coincided with the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of World War II - Irving Howe (né Horenstein) pledged his troth to the Trotskyite vision of the world, that is to say, an anti-Stalinist yet totalitarian form of communism which filtered the all political events through the doctrinaire lenses of the party line. The contrition which Howe expressed later in life about this part of his career could not be anticipated in the ferocious advocacy he advanced in his numerous articles in Labor Action about a version of history in which only the workers' causes and the class struggle had any validity. In this shameful and embarrassing period Howe was able! to analyze World War II as a unidimensional clash between! two capitalist systems. Alexander has gone through the painstaking and undoubtedly masochistic exercise of reading the articles that Howe wrote under his own name and under a pseudonym in order to document the vapidity of Howe's incredible ability to write about the most seismic events of the twentieth century - World War II and the Holocaust - without mentioning the uniqueness of Hitler's racial policies and, the targeting of Jews. There is no better example of ideological blindness filtering out unpleasant truths that might alter the rigidities of one's political beliefs. The ideological straitjacket which immobilized Howe's not inconsiderable intellectual potential was seen especially in the Partisan Review magazine crowd, among which Howe was a distinguished representative. The love affair which the largely Jewish coterie of Jewish intellectuals attached to that journal carried on with the American-English poet T.S. Eliot is a curious and archival example of the syndrome ! known as self-hate. Alexander notes with irony and some delectation the affection displayed by Howe and other Jewish intellectuals for a poet whose anti-Semitism was as unsubtle as his poetics was refined. Author Alexander also faults Howe for his inability in the late 1940s to register the importance of what Winston Churchill called an event of world history that would require two or three thousand years to conjure with - the creation of the State of Israel. For Howe and his ideological brethren Israel's re-birth was to be seen only under the rubric of fighting British imperialism. Even as late as 1982 when Howe was ready to celebrate Israel's creation, he made it a point to note that acceptance of the State did not imply any Zionist commitment. In his many digressions in this biography, Alexander rejects the use made by Howe and other (including this reviewer) of the term "Arab-Israeli conflict," as if it implied some kind of equalizing of responsibility. Says Ale! xander: "It's the Arab war against the Jews - period.&! quot; Alexander calls one of the chapters in his book The Request of Jewishness, by which he means Howe's slow and painful re-insertion into the Jewish orbit of history. In some ways it was predictable because Howe was a kind of Yiddish-speaking Marrano who despite heroic efforts to submerge his "parochial" heritage, found it bubbling to the surface in the soft cadences of the first language he spoke as a child in the Bronx and in the warmth he remembered in the image of his virtuous, hard working parents and the thousands of other simple Jewish immigrants who people the world of his youth. Later in life when he was reviewing a major book by a feminist critic, he conjured up the picture of his parents as an antidote to the rigidities of feminist theory. Howe's odyssey from Marxist ideologue to secular Jewish guru was neither smooth nor without its troughs and depressions. It began in the 1950s with his interest in editing Yiddish short stories and poetry, an exercise! in which he exhibited skill, sensitivity and sober judgment. It continued with Howe's entry into the university world, where, despite the absence of a Ph.D. in English literature and in a discipline notoriously prejudiced against Jewish scholars he achieved more than a modicum of success teaching at Brandeis, Stanford and Hunter College of the City of New York. The early 1960s was probably the turning point in terms of Howe's Jewish loyalties, as he himself hinted in his 1982 autobiography. Alexander details the controversy which swirled over Howe because of his unhappiness with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book which first appeared in serial form in The New Yorker. Howe organized a forum under the banner of his journal Dissent, during which the book was dissected asnd repudiated. Critics later argued that Howe had led a lynch mob against Arendt's book - a description which Howe and his supporters vigorously denied. By 1976, the bicentennial of the American revol! ution, Howe had come full circle with the publication of hi! s most famous book - World of Our Fathers. Alexander wryly observers that in 1940 none of the Partisan Review crowd could ever have conceived that their union-organizing, Trotskyite polemicist cum literary critic, would produce an affectionate, absorbing and best-selling volume about the hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants who had come to New York City beginning with the turn of the century. In publishing this extraordinary document Howe digested a library of Yiddish books, memoirs, letters, newspapers and other archival materials in order to tell his story and to let the participants of his drama speak out to history. Alexander recognizes the incisiveness of Howe's reconstruction of the Jewish immigrant community, its cultural riches and linguistic treasures. But he also advertises the book's weaknesses - its preoccupation with secular Jewishness at the expense of its religious dimensions. Howe's main argument was that Jews came to American for non ideological reaso! ns - to save themselves from persecution at worst and to make a better living for their families at best. Alexander does not contest this point but observes that there were thousand of other Jews who fled Czarist Russia and went to Palestine for ideological reasons. In the last decade of his life, before he was felled by illness Irving Howe injected himself in numerous political and literary skirmishes and Alexander is there giving us a lively play-by-play account of the victories, defeats and draws. Some of Howe's best critical works pivoted around the claims of the new university curricula where the books of "dead white males" are now denounced as holdovers from a despised canon. Howe would have none of this nonsense. Perhaps the best of Howe's writing was Holocaust memoirs and the difficulty of establishing esthetic criteria for a literature [e-mail] had no precedents and which "succeeded only when it failed." If there are any faults in A! lexander's stimulating biography they flow from a surfeit o! f its virtues. In an effort to be thorough Alexander has read virtually everything that Howe wrote and what others wrote about Howe. However, this reviewer found the parts about Howe's struggle with defining his Jewish of much greater interest than those parts dealing with Howe's interest in the esoterica of literary criticism, American ethnic politics, black writing and the American novel. Others will undoubtedly disagree. -30-

Rating:
Summary: A provocative account of the life and work of Irving Howe
Review: This is an excellent book, illuminating both the life and intellectual development of Howe, one of this country's foremost literary critics, and the world of New York's literati much throughout the twentieth century. It gives insight not only into the thoughts and work of this serious, idealistic, and highly intelligent man, not only into his complicated, social, religious, and intellectual background, and his encounter with the new world, at times clashing against the values of his ancestors, but also into the riveting history of Jewish socialist ideas, stemming directly from the Pale, shaping the American political, intellectual landscape throughout the century. In the process, it reveals the widening split within the Jewish community, the potential of the developing "kulturkampf," and the winding path of the bitter struggle, still characterizing the polarized groups of the more traditional and the more radical academics of our time. Reading Alexander's work, one learns not only to appreciate Howe's vision and moral development but also to place them in the context of the history of Jewish intellectual thought in search for the Messianic age. One may even note some of the crucial commonalities between this search and that of a number of European Jewish literati in our century. Of course, Howe's paradoxical attachment to the "world of our fathers" was not an option there. As true children of the Enlightenment, some of the European intellectuals remained simply detached and alienated from the tradition; others became communists or "Catholic socialists," following the instructions of the Popular Front and struggling against the transgressions of Franco rather than paying attention to the threat against Jewish life and being in Nazi Germany. Howe was more complicated and more "Jewish" than that (of course, he also had both more freedom to be Jewish and later more time to learn about, and recognize the consequences, of the Holocaust). Yet the process of living in, and the difficulties of assimilating to, a hostile world in need of redemption show deep-seated commonalities between these groups. They also reveal the ramifications and the price of such process and such need. While aware of the power of these forces, Alexander treats his subject truthfully and sympathetically. And despite his critique of Howe's initial opposition to both US involvement in World War II and the creation of the State of Israel, Alexander remains true to his task to trace Howe's steps and penetrate his ideas and imagination as truthfully as possible. The result is that he paints his subject as a great tragic character, vulnerable, torn by contradictions, intelligent, insightful, and despite everything, "better than ourselves." This is an excellent book, beautifully written, moving, exhilarating, and dramatic.