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1945
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November, 1945An Act of AffirmationIt is traditional to begin a new magazine with brave declarations. If we do not, we trust we shall be forgiven. The Spiritual Reconstruction of European JewryAlthough the blackout is slowly lifting from the areas where once flourished the largest centers of Jewish life in Europe, only fragmentary reports concerning the survivors have filtered through to the outside world. American Fuehrer in Dress RehearsalHitler has been off the scene less than a year, yet already it is difficult to believe that this flagrant little paranoid could have dominated the drama of Western civilization during its most critical modern period. Next Steps After the CharterThe current drive for human rights began to gather strength in the early days of World War II. It was allied with the drive for an international organization that would be powerful enough to stop war. In the flood of designs for world-government that began pouring out in 1940, codes and agencies for enhancing and safe-guarding the liberty and the dignity of man as man have taken prominent place. The Month in HistoryThe Balance Sheet
A Civilization Within a Civilization?Can Jewish life in this country attain that vitality of function, that variety of content, that integrity and distinctiveness of pattern, and that degree of organization which would endow it with the character of a civilization? In the light of the opportunities and requirements of a democratic design for living, is it desirable that Jews mobilize and direct their energies to the end of creating a Jewish civilization? The Decline of the TheaterAnother season is beginning on Broadway; shows are racing one another to town; playwrights' names, actors' names, producers' names are being flung about as synonyms for beauty and excitement. The present moment is a delightful one for the press agent, for whom the sky is still the limit; the reviewer, however, if he would remain on solid ground, must look back to last season and bury it with what sighs and oratory it seems worthy of. But funerals, after all, offer excellent opportunities to generalize, to edify the living under pretense of extolling the dead. Or, it may be, of not extolling the dead: the evil that men do is repeated after them. A Prayer for DewAND the offering of Judah and Jerusalem shall be a delight unto the Lord, as in days of old, as in ancient years. With this ending of the great Standing-prayer, the congregation sat down. The Statue of Liberty Finds Its Poet"I am not able to write to order,” Miss Lazarus wrote to the ex-Secretary of State. He had requested a poetic contribution to the Statue of Liberty Pedestal Fund; the date was 1883, and the famous statue stood in a Parisian suburb, a baseless, soulless, forsaken-looking colossus finished by France and waiting for America to set up its promised foundation in New York harbor. But the response here was weak, to say the least. The British General ElectionThe Labor Party's victory was overwhelming. It has a clear majority of more than 150 seats over all other parties combined, while the Conservatives and their satellites have lost nearly 200 seats and the minor parties have been simply obliterated. So far as I know, not a soul in England foresaw any such outcome. Before the election began, my own forecast had been a small Tory majority, and after polling day—this as a result of observing the strong leftward swing in the London area—a small Labor majority. Most of the people I know were of the same way of thinking, while the newspapers alternated between giving the Tories a majority of about 50, and predicting a stalemate. Cedars of Lebanon: XVI. On Being a Jewish PersonThe state of the world today may force us to postpone many desirable things, not for a better day but for a better century. It could hardly be asserted that the great urgency at the present moment is to organize Jewish learning or to urge both Jews and non-Jews to the endless writing of books on Jewish subjects. Books are not now the prime need of the day. But what we need more than ever, or at least as much as ever, are human beings—Jewish human beings, to use a catchword that should be cleansed of the partisan associations still clinging to it. From the American Scene: Portrait of a ChaplainOn August 11, 1944, on a road somewhere near Vire, France, a fragmentation bomb dropped from a German plane exploded beside Chaplain Rabbi Irving Tepper of the 60th Infantry Regiment. Twenty-two pieces of shrapnel went into him. For nearly two days Irving Tepper fought to live; the doctors who tended him declare they never saw a man so badly wounded fight so hard. But he died in a field hospital and was buried in an Army cemetery near Chasney. The Study of ManSocial scientists can no longer be reproached for busying themselves with theoretical issues while ignoring the major problems confronting mankind. The ivory towers now stand abandoned; almost every scholar of note in the fields of sociology, psychology and anthropology concerns himself with how the studies devoted to the extension of man's knowledge of man may advance solutions to the problems of a free society. The theoretical equipment developed in the study of the social life of Melanesians or the learning habits of rats is now turned on Western man. At the same time new theoretical approaches are being developed and applied, designed specifically for the special problems of our own society. Poems, by A. M. KleinMr. Klein's poems are academic, semi-religious. Vohin Gehen Mir, by Jacob LestchinskyMr. Lestchinsky is a sociologist and economist, especially interested in the factual-statistical aspect of Jewish life, in which field his contributions have been of considerable value. He is also an excellent journalist, investing his data with dramatic quality and contemporary pertinence. But Mr. Lestchinsky is a writer with a “purpose,” he is a sociologist with a point of view, and it is not always easy to determine whether his point of view serves to illuminate and coordinate his discrete facts and objective data, or compels him to lend undue emphasis to some of the facts and to interpret them in such a way as to distort them. The Bible and the Common Reader, by Mary Ellen ChaseThe object of this book is to present the Bible, considered as literature, to the “common reader.” The Tables of the Law, by Thomas MannJoseph was the last of the Fathers, and after his time the children of Israel were no longer a family of epic individuals but a nation, a mass.
Felix Mendelssohn: Letters, edited by G. Selden-GothFelix Mendelssohn's music in recent years has assumed an importance far beyond its inherent value. This is due in no small measure to anti-Mendelssohn propaganda on the part of the Nazis. Because his music seems so deeply rooted in German romanticism, both ideologically and musically, and because his work represented a substantial part of the concert repertory of pre-Hitler Germany, he is considered as the chief example of the alien intruder by anti-Semites, and the prototype of the emancipated Jew by others. The Moral Conquest of Germany, by Emil LudwigThe first ninety-six pages of this book ought to be studied carefully. They constitute an alarming specimen of what Leon Blum once termed “racialism in reverse.” Ludwig claims that there exists such a phenomenon as “German character,” not as a heuristic construction, but as a “genuine reality.” That character is not only unchangeable, but also 100 per cent black—as the Nazis claimed the “Jewish character” to be. Some of These Days, by Sophie TuckerFor the title of her autobiography, Sophie Tucker takes the name of her theme song, a phrase of promise and improbable hope, both melancholy and buoyant. It is (or was) the theme song of the immigrant, of the man who starts at the bottom of the ladder, the boy who may grow up to be president; it is (or was) the national motto of the land of opportunity. “Some of these days you're going to be so lonely . . .” i.e., in the indefinite future everything will be turned upside down, the unloved will be loved, the rejector rejected, the poor, rich, and the ugly, beautiful. In other words, all the laws of probability will be violated; and the aptness of the title to the book is flagrant, for the whole career of this hefty chanteuse was an insult to the laws of probability. December, 1945The Crisis of the Individual: Will Civilization Survive Technics?THE editors of COMMENTARY recently invited a number of the leading men of thought in America and Europe to address themselves to a subject which many consider the basic issue of our times. Must the Jews Quit Europe?Out of the question “What next?” posed by the last years of the Third Reich and the events following its collapse, has been born the slogan: “Exodus from Europe!” With many leaders and writers the call for a latter-day migration has become not only an emergency directive in the present crisis, but a watchword for all Jewish social and political thought and action in the postwar period. As such, it has won ardent adherents and evoked intense disagreement. Nobel's Prizes and the Atom BombPeace by the threat of scientific destruction is a fairly new idea, but older than H. G. Wells who got the credit for it in the recent editorials. It was conceived before the British novelist was born, by a Swedish multi-millionaire who once told a young lady, “I wish I could produce a substance or a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that it would make wars altogether impossible.” George Gershwin's MusicMuch has been written about George Gershwin; but almost nothing about his music. Version after version of his life appears, and in each he is seen merely as a prototype of the American success story. In the recently released Warner Brothers' motion picture, “Rhapsody in Blue,” Gershwin's glittering rise to fame and fortune found its destined apotheosis in a million-and-a-half-dollar Hollywood production. Yet such was the character of the composer's life that, with the addition of two fictitious love affairs, it emerges on the screen relatively true to its actual course. The only surprise is that it took Hollywood eight years to bring to the screen a biography which had existed as a living script for almost two decades. The Month in HistoryWithin a few months after the end of the most destructive war in history, realists talked casually about the possibility of the end of civilized life within the forseeable future. Atomic fission—which presumably could transform the earth into a sun once more—posed the old problem of the technological era in a final form: men would either live with each other peacefully or they would cease to exist. Encounter in EdinburghAll this began one Saturday afternoon in Edinburgh, some weeks after the war ended in Europe, when I walked out to Holyrood Park.
The Truth About ReconstructionismBoth the philosophy and program of reconstructionism have evidently proved challenging. Pillar of SaltMy Aunt Pia, my father's sister, died at the age of seventy-eight, surviving her husband by twenty years. Three weeks before her death she ordered a shroud, and when it arrived quarreled vehemently with the shroud-maker over the price and the quality of the linen. The Moyne Case: A Tragic HistoryEliahu Hakim and Eliahu Bet-Zouri are figures in a tragic history. The two Jewish youths—the one 18, the other 22—who assassinated Lord Moyne, British Minister Resident in Cairo last autumn, are dead. But the deed for which they died and the motives which led them to such a suicidal act must be understood in correct perspective if we are to understand at all that vast complex of human hopes and human desperations which is Jewish Palestine today. Cedars of Lebanon: XVII. The Kingdom of GodTHIS ESSAY by Hermann Cohen is the seventeenth in the series of "Cedars of Lebanon," which was initiated by COMMENTARY'S predecessor, the Contemporary Jewish Record. From the American Scene: Portrait of a Labor LeaderThe strenuous life does not seem to have left its mark on David Gordin. A Webster panatella, half of which he chews rather than smokes, punctuates his hard, yet not unpleasant features. Gordin's clothes always fit well—tailored by Billy Taub, they are the penultimate in Seventh Avenue styles; the four pointed ends of a white hand-rolled handkerchief effectively break the thin vertical pinstripes and his ties show elaborate floral designs. In fact, Gordin, who pronounces his name in the Russian way, Gordin, is virtually indistinguishable from the manufacturers he now includes among his many friends. The Study of ManSociologists are finally heeding the injunction, “Physician, heal thyself.” After having subjected social strata ranging from hoboes to the Four Hundred to sociological analysis, they have now begun to study the social scientist himself. Their chief tool turns out to be an imported one, the “sociology of knowledge,” which analyses beliefs and ideas in terms of the social origins and position of those who hold them. The Wisdom of Israel, edited by Lewis BrowneAuthors and the public love anthologies, and the market is flooded with them year in and year out. To put a lively variety of things together is easy and diverting, and it tempts one's spirit of adventure. It's pleasant and one can be rather irresponsible: you skim about in a wealth of material, and you lift out whatever tickles your fancy. You saunter around as if in an antique shop, picking up this and that and putting it back, and often you even acquire something to take home. Jews in the Post-War World, by Max Gottschalk and Abraham G. DukerOf all peoples who have passed through the tragic destiny of Nazi rule none has suffered more than the Jewish people; of all the multitude of problems confronting a baffled and bewildered post-war world none is more complex than the Jewish problem. Yet there is no problem about which there is generally less knowledge, less understanding and less intelligence than about that which concerns the postwar fate of the Jewish people. The Jewish as well as the non-Jewish world, communal leaders and lay people alike, display a lamenable and pathetic ignorance of the most elementary and basic facts of Jewish life. In the light of such a situation, the appearance of a guide to the Jewish problem by two competent scholars, Max Gottschalk and Abraham Duker, is more than of academic interest. Marc Chagall, edited with an introduction by Lionello VenturiMarc Chagall has been associated so intimately with the culture of Eastern Jewry that his work can be regarded by the West as one of the chief testaments and memorials of that culture. For this reason, aside from its real plastic achievement, it has taken on something of the sentimental aura of the family album, a melancholy charm which has nothing to do with art and can only distort our appreciation. Before he is entirely engulfed and obscured by sentiment, a new evaluation of this artist is necessary. The Neurologist's Point of View, by I. S. WechslerThis collection of papers of the last twenty years, by the clinical professor of neurology at Columbia University, breathes a humor, tolerance, and irony that come from respect for the eons of natural evolution and millennia of history and wariness of the cultural conceits of a few decades. The main themes that recur through the book are the potentialities of neurosis in the historical nature and situation of the Jew; scorn for the pretension and mediocrity of the attempts to flatten out mankind into a dull “normalcy”; and evaluation, mainly laudatory, of the work of Sigmund Freud. Crossroads of Two Continents, by Feliks GrossWhen this book was published, some six months ago, its basic thesis—for all its logic and sanity—was a dead issue. Mr. Gross conclusively proves that federation for Eastern Europe is an economic necessity; and he insists on the political desirability of a federated Europe because a “world-wide organization,” without which “there can be no lasting peace,” can be achieved only through “regional organizations.” Confident of the “natural trend of history toward world economy” and well-acquainted with the desperate situation of the “pulverized states inhabited by Poles, Czechoslovaks, Rumanians, Serbs, Croats . . . and others,” he surveys the history of the idea of federation, gives very valuable material on economic conditions in Eastern Europe and adds a much needed selection from contemporary accounts to show that all the peoples who joined the resistance did not do so just to fight the German invader but had gotten it into their heads that they were fighting for something. What they were fighting for was a federated Europe. The Facts of Life, by Paul GoodmanA gifted, spoiled child has certain magnificent charms which are denied to all good children, just as he has certain horrors peculiarly his own. He is gay, mischievous, daring, outgoing, assured, and has a healthy hardness that enables him to take pleasure in a sorry world. At his wilful, arbitrary, tiresome worst, he drags us into endless games without telling their rules. Democracy in America, by Alexis de TocquevilleWhat Europeans have said about America and what Americans have said about Europe is at times mere verbiage, and at other times highly prophetic. Four NovelsThe Journey Home.
by Zelda Popkin.
New York, J. B. Lippincott Co., 1945. 224 pp. $2.50.
A Sea Between, by Lavinia R. DavisThis Item belongs to those sub-literary “girls' books” which year in and year out roll quietly off the assembly lines. Written for the late ‘teens, Mrs. Davis' novel makes the usual gestures in the direction of plot, characterization and setting, with perhaps a little more restraint and less sentimentality than some of her fellow craftsmen. Judging the book by its real aim, which is didactic, one might rate it well, for it is replete with “wholesome” precept and instance, and its adolescent heroine exemplifies in her character and actions many of the values generally held suitable for inculcation in the youthful feminine mind. |
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