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Overview
Raised in the notorious Bloody Nineteenth Ward in Chicago, Meyer Levin landed a job at the Chicago Daily News at eighteen. He pursued reporting as a means to support his fiction writing, yet it was as a war correspondent that Levin found his voice. One of the first Americans to enter the concentration camps during World War II and record the horrors there, Levin also helped smuggle Jews from Poland to Palestine, capturing the events in his now classic film The Illegals.
In this vivid chronicle, Levin traverses America, France, Spain, Eastern Europe and Palestine, incisively documenting some of the most important events of the twentieth century. Yet In Search is equally the story of Levin’s quest to define his Jewishness to himself and to the world. Both personal and universal, it affords a glimpse into a singular life and career and is, as Levin puts it, “more than a book about the Jews; it seeks to touch the human spirit.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781625670885 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 507 |
| File size: | 807 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Part One AMERICA: The Self-Accused
THIS IS A BOOK about being a Jew. I suppose people are somewhat weary of the Jewish problem. The other day while breakfasting at a drugstore counter, I caught a snatch of conversation from the neighboring stools. "... there was a bunch of them there, carrying signs." "What were they kicking about now?" "I don't know. Didn't we give them Israel ..."
But the coming into being of Israel has brought into focus many of our own inner problems, some of them appearing now as not so different from the problems of other people, and some of them unique — for every people has its unique aspects. And it has seemed to me a good time now to examine these problems in myself, for I partake of the general mood for self-examination that has come over the world in this seething lull when we feel as though we are locked up while immense preparations are going on outside, and suddenly the door will be opened and we will be confronted with the final act of civilization. We want to be sure of our own selves, in readiness for this last confrontation.
Artists, particularly writers, sometimes serve society as testing agents; their lives become token lives in the working out of certain problems, for they are apt to free themselves from some of the material conventions in order to follow their moral imperative. And I believe that in following out the sometimes conflicting elements of the Jewish question within myself, I may have served as such a testing agent for my own generation and particularly for the American born. I have been freer to go in search of the ends of the problem than, let us say, a businessman living in a firmly formed community. So I am telling my own story, not so much, I hope, out a sense of self-importance as out of a feeling that the evidence I have picked up in seeking a solution of this problem can be of general use in bringing Jews to understand this part of themselves a little better, and bringing other people to understand us — and perhaps even themselves — a little better.
Undoubtedly signs of a sense of self-importance and of self-pity and other disproportioned and irritating traits will come into these pages. Nor do I wish to "blame everything on · being a Jew" in the way that the Jew often makes his Jewishness his scapegoat. First of all, this is not, I hope, a book of blame or of excuses, but rather a book of investigation and evaluation. Secondly, I recognize that in all of us consistent difficulties arise out of character deformations traceable to many sources, the deepest being particular and personal : but these seeds of deformation as often take root in the general soils of poverty, of racial shame, of sexual frustration, as in the soil of "Jewishness." And even though I risk over-evaluation of the Jewish aspect, I intend in this book to try to trace it out in my own life, as a common problem.
It will soon appear that my development as a Jew is inextricably woven with my development as a writer, though there were periods when I tried to separate these two factors. Certainly there are not many people faced with this particular combination as a problem, but perhaps the button manufacturer and the Jewish automobile mechanic will recognize parallels to their own lives, just as I recognized elements parallel to mine in the autobiography of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who is a chemist.
It is one of the first rules of the novelist that what is most particular is most general. Many years ago I wrote a novel called The Old Bunch, minutely studying a group of young people growing up on the west side of Chicago; recently a Frenchman remarked to me that in reading the book he was surprised to find not only that the pattern in the Jewish group reflected what he knew of other American unities, but that he was identifying it with his own circle in France.
I do not, in presenting examples from my works, and in studying my developmental problems, intend to suggest that these are important works or that I am a writer whose processes must be studied, but simply to use myself as the example of human being I know best.
The impulse to write this book came one day in Paris when I stopped at the Café Dome, now outmoded, and was greeted by a photographer I had known during the war.
"Where have you been?" he asked.
"In Palestine," for I had just returned from filming The Illegals.
"What are you doing these days?"
Just then I was earning a little money translating stories by Sholem Asch, and I was making a puppet film. And suddenly it struck me that I might have given the same curious answer, in precisely the same spot, some twenty years before. Then too I was stopping in Paris after having seen trouble in Palestine, and I was — the only other time in my life — translating Sholem Asch to earn money to make a puppet film to earn money so that I could go on with my own writing.
So I had come full circle. But the circle was not empty.
In the years between, Palestine had become Israel. As for me, I had published a number of novels, made films, seen something of war, and sought to know myself, particularly as a Jew.
I had since early manhood been passionately involved in the development of a Jewish civilization in Palestine. Twenty years ago this had seemed a strange absorption for an American Jew, but now it appeared that I had not been on the wrong track. But now some of the old questions took a new turn. What was my relationship to Israel? to America? to the world? More insistently than ever I had to ask myself, What am I? and, What am I doing here?
I know that Jews everywhere are asking themselves this question. In America, there are five times as many Jews as in Israel. Despite the immediate, fervent response to the creation of Israel, many Jews outside the homeland argue that its creation will eventually lead outside Jews to assimilation. As when any great new fact appears, there is confusion, before the new lines of orientation are clear. The Jew outside Palestine must define again not only his own relationship to his people — he must decide how to orient his children, whether to give them more Jewish education or as Arthur Koestler suggests, to try to relieve them of the burden of Jewishness.
There is a tendency to examine these problems only in the light of the new element in the situation — Israel. But actually they are of course old, old problems rooted in all our past.
Though writers are usually automatically considered as intellectuals, I do not feel that I can qualify as one, and I shall not attempt a book of logic or close reasoning. I have sought my own answers as most people do — through re-examining my life. In that search I started to write this book. There will be a good deal of fumbling through incomplete experiences, there will be material that seems not quite relevant. And in writing this book, I could scarcely expect to find all the answers. Indeed I wasn't sure of finding any. But I felt I could define my remaining areas of doubt.
I knew as I began my self-study that I was still not sure how to live as a Jew, and that I still had not learned how to live as a writer. In the literary world, I sometimes believed that my lack of status was due to my perhaps not being a very good writer. Often I tell myself that I don't really care about the big reputation, but that I only want the audience and the money that comes with it in order that I may fully develop whatever talent I possess, instead of frittering away so much of my energy at odd jobs. At other times I believe that I am really a good writer and that my only trouble is bad publishing luck, much of it related to being a Jew. Then I recognize that other Jewish writers, at whatever their literary level, found wide audiences even though they wrote about Jews. Yet I cannot think of any American Jewish writer who worked consistently and successfully in this field; even Ludwig Lewisohn felt a lack of response, and there are matters in my own history which indicate that such Jewish identification has indeed been something of a difficulty, and that it is related to the whole question of the American Jew's attitude toward himself.
Occasionally I stare into the real abyss, discern subjects which I feel incapable of handling, relationships which I cannot convey. Sometimes for a blinding instant I perceive living reality — what there is between people, not what we describe, not what we write down. And then I feel my only trouble is inadequacy.
Yet I hope in this book to exorcise the frustrations I have felt not only through unreached goals in my work, but in its low achievement toward its desired social effect. I want to examine my way of life as a Jew born in America, seeking the full realization of his potentialities. Certainly there are in me character deformations which can be identified around the common "Jewish complex." But if I have had to deal with a sometimes exaggerated form of this complex in my life, the experience may prove usefully illuminating.
And on the positive side, I want to make an account of how much I have been able to achieve toward self-knowledge, in what I may consider as half of my active life, already past.
* * *
My dominant childhood memory is of fear and shame at being a Jew. We lived on Racine Avenue in the notorious Bloody Nineteenth ward of Chicago. It was so known because it was the scene of a political vendetta between Italian ward chiefs. And it was at that time the incubating ground for the gunmen of Chicago's later gangster era.
Before I was born, the ward had been an Irish neighborhood, and in the classic pattern of deterioration in American cities, the Irish had moved on and been supplanted by Jews, the Jews were being supplanted by Italians, who were in turn to vacate the slums to Negroes before the area was at last cleared for a housing project.
My father was a tailor, with a hole-in-the-wall shop near the old Dearborn Station, downtown; he did pressing and mending, and a little buying and selling of used clothing, work-tools, and odds and ends possessed by South State Street derelicts. He worked twelve hours a day, and invested his savings in real estate. At that time, he had overextended himself in buying a three-story brick house containing twelve small flats, on Racine Avenue. Thus, we were landlords.
But as the Jews moved away and rents dropped there was an endless debate as to whether to allow the flats to stand vacant in the hope of keeping up the quality of the building, or whether to rent to Italians and deteriorate the property. Worried discussions of mortgages, first, second, and even third mortgages, reverberated into the dark little children's bedroom while our parents sat discussing finances in the kitchen. Though we were landlords, though my father "had his own business," we somehow felt that we were worse off than the poorest of the tenants, we were janitors as well as landlords, and our living was always on the edge of peril and collapse.
And in the same way that, as landlords, we felt superior and inferior to our tenants, so we feared and yet somehow felt superior to the dagos and wops who were engulfing us, who had swarms of babies, and whom we considered dirty.
We children believed ourselves to be smarter than the wops. Yet they seemed more American. For though the Italians were immigrants just like our own parents, their children already seemed to have a native right over us, a right to call us sheenie and kike which had overtones of degradation far beyond anything associated with wop or dago. Perhaps we knew that there was something particularly inferior about being a Jew through all the tales we absorbed in childhood, of how the lives of our parents had been in the old country. From our earliest consciousness, we absorbed these tales of our people being kicked around and browbeaten by drunken goyim, and we therefore knew that with our people, in no matter what country they lived, it had always been as it was with us — we were a despised people. While we could yell back at the dagos and wops, we knew from the beginning that our epithets only applied to their old people, who were immigrants and who had green peppers and funny smelly sausage strings hanging in their grocery stores, but the children, we knew, would have nothing to be ashamed of when they grew up, they wouldn't be wops and dagos. We would still be Jews.
This unthought-out realization must have been in us from the start, to make us feel somehow inferior to them. And then, we were plain afraid of them. Going to school each day was like running the gauntlet. By each house, the Italian kids might be laying for us with stones or knives. — I'll cut your nuts off you lousy little sheenie.
On Racine Avenue, our side was still Jewish, but the Italians faced us from across the street. From our house to the corner we felt nearly safe, but once we turned into Taylor Street on the way to the Andrew Jackson school, we were in entirely Italian territory. The first place of refuge was a friendly Italian's grocery store where a hunchbacked boy would serve us with penny pickles out of a barrel. Then, after peering out to make sure the coast was clear, we would scuttle the rest of the way to school.
Actually, though we lived under constant derisive taunts and promises of beating, and though occasionally stones were thrown and knives flashed, I don't remember being assaulted, and recall instead that in my only fight I was the physical aggressor.
One morning as I was on the way to school some kid started shouting sheenie at me; I rushed at him in sudden rage, and to my own astonishment, knocked him down. I ran away, and for days afterward I was terrified that he would be laying for me with his gang.
I was a bookish child of the sort considered typically Jewish, and I shrank from physical encounter. It was certainly a monumental rage that overrode my fear. I suppose it may be said that I have been repeating this pattern all my life, raging at being called or fancying I was being called a sheenie. In all my life I never again struck anyone, until last year when I hit a man under a provocation curiously associated to the sheenie cry, for that man was a Jew. I shall come to the incident in its place.
There were only a handful of Jewish children left in our class, for by the time we reached the upper grades the Bloody Nineteenth was virtually all-Italian. After school, we few boys went to a Hebrew class in the old and deserted Jewish People's Institute that still functioned in the neighborhood.
One day, after coming home from Hebrew class and gym, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a story, passionately, in a little notebook resting on the oilcloth. After supper there was an unusual atmosphere of well-being in the flat. My father was home rather early from his store. My mother had polished the stove that afternoon: it shone, and a kettle steamed. Suddenly, standing with my back to the stove, I felt called upon to communicate to the family that I would be a writer. I opened the notebook and recited, rather than read, the story to them:
There was an innocent man who had been jailed, and he broke out of prison and hid in the tonneau of a passing car in order to get to the city to prove his innocence. There was a beautiful blonde American girl driving the car.
Many years later it appeared to me that there were obvious unconscious meanings in this little story. Wasn't the jail the restricted precinct of Jewish life to which we were innocently confined? I would break out, and in my childish fantasy I would be carried in the womb of a car driven by an American girl, to be delivered to the great city where I would establish my guiltlessness.
Thus, in my later interpretation, I was seeking an escape from my Jewishness in order to prove to the world that it was no crime. In the symbols of the fantasy, I wished for rebirth.
At the time, my simple adventure story evoked a family debate. My mother and father were aware that the fundamental goal of Jewish family life was for the son to become either a lawyer or a doctor. However, they said, the would not try to influence me or hold me back from any path I chose. They would try to help me. But, my mother worried, could one make a living as a writer?
I appealed to my father, as being in contact with the outside American world. Writers made fortunes, I pointed out. Especially since the invention of movies. Writers made fortunes because everybody bought their books, and then the movies paid them again for using their stories. (How I had already come to this knowledge is a mystery.)
Although I sensed that my parents still hoped I would study medicine or law as a safety career, my nine-year-old self understood that they were too timid to advise me because they felt that even an American child knew better than a pair of immigrants about the way of the world. All through childhood I sensed, and resented, this terrible shame and inferiority in my elders; they considered themselves as nothing, greenhorns, Jews.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "In Search"
by .
Copyright © 1950 Meyer Levin.
Excerpted by permission of Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
Part 1 America: The Self Accused,
Part 2 Europe: The Witnesses,
Part 3 Israel: The Released,
Also by Meyer Levin,