Cards of identity
MICHAEL PVENS
Explorations: An Annual on Jewish Themes edited by Murray Mindlin and Chaim Bermant (Barrie and Rockliff 35s) How do you play it if you are dealt a Jewish card of identity? Sensitively and with a wry shrug? Aggressively, as a suffering victim or with a white negro identification? Do you light candles on a Friday night or, as a Zionist zealot, regard a Diaspora Jew as a man with only half a soul? There are other problems. Do you keep your Jewish card of identity to yourself? Or do you have an irresistible itch to demand that other Jews put their cards on the table? Then there are your parents: do you honour them, retreat from them or put them in a novel?
It depends, of course, where you happen to be. You will play your Jewish card differently according to whether you find your- self in Golders Green, Whitechapel, New York, Moscow, Belsen, an Israeli kibbutz or a Surrey point-to-point meeting. The problems of Jewish identity, its preservation and its loss, provide some of the most interesting material in Explorations, the first of a series of annuals on Jewish themes. Albert Goldman examines the influence of Jewish humour on American culture and notes the current fashion for Jewish fun books: Oy Oy Seven, How to be a Jewish President, Supermax: The Lone Arranger (The Masked Marriage Broker) and Tishman of the Apes. In 'Boy-Man, Schlemiel,' he argues that strong, demonstrative and manipulative mother love, the pressure for suc- cess and permissiveness have led to the alienation of the Jewish son. He projects his predicament in wry; sharp, schlemiel humour, and his. fear of losing his identity in instant Americanisation strikes a chord of sympathy with other groups.
Essays in Explorations vary a great deal in quality from absorbing material from the In- stitute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library to slender contributions whose main justification is that they are written by Jews or about Jews. The NIA lacks effective Orthodox writers as well as those who are at present forced to light Ior their identity in parts of Eastern Europe. Contributors, therefore, tend th ask how non-Orthodox identity can be maintained. Gabriel Pearson, in an excellent study, sees Bernard Malamud as concerned with maintaining Jewish sensitivity to suffering, of artistically preserving the Jew before he goes out of history. For Saul Bellow, in con-
trast, Jewish identity helps to push away suffering, to conceal vulnerability.
The most moving contribution is Marie Syrkin's study of the diaries of the Warsaw ghetto. Emmanuel Ringelblum noted sixty night spots and a passion for dancing. Mary Berg, a teenager, reported that the ghetto worked furiously to provide an enormous variety of education. How could you find a reason to stay alive if you were a Jew in German- occupied Europe? Two accounts by survivors show the basic will to live: jlselotte Themal hiding with her child in Germany; Kurt Lindenberg, ferociously willing his survival, going underground in Berlin and escaping through Denmark to Sweden. Getting to Palestine was another reason for staying alive; it was the Utopia without persecution. I shall never forget three young illegal immigrants who jumped into rough seas about three miles from Haifa when stopped by a British troop- ship. They were swimming for home like wounded salmon when we picked them up, con- centration-camp numbers stamped on their arms.
But how are my three illegal immigrants now that they are in Israel? Perhaps too busy to speculate on the finer aspects of identity. And yet, as Murray Roston shows in his study on the Israeli Nobel award-winning novelist, Agnon, and David Vital in his anxiety that Israel shall not become just another Levantine state, the question of Jewish identity in an increasingly secular society is one that will become more important in the future.
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