I saw my mom last night and she talked about D.D. Guttenplan’s superb new book about I.F. Stone, American Radical. A New York friend of hers knew Stone, and she’s reading it and getting into all the delicious old ideological battles around Communism in New York.
I was provocative with my mother. I have read a lot of the book, and the interest for me is seeing how much of Stone’s commitment came out of Jewishness: his outsider journalism came out of his Jewishness, his Communism came out of Jewishness. By Jewishness I mean the Jewish experience in western society. This is my lens, and it seems to me that neoconservativism and Zionism and communism (at least the Jewish New York variant) were Jewish responses to feelings of powerlessness in America.
I said to my mother, "How much of your friend’s communism came out of Jewishness, a sense of a Jewish interest, and not of a working class interest? Because a lot of those Jewish communists weren’t working class."
My mother pointed out that her mother’s second husband was a Communist, and a merchant marine. He was working class.
I conceded that, but said that many of the Jewish intellectuals who supported Communism did so out of purported concern for the working class. When maybe they were supporting their own interest, as Jewish outsiders.
I gave up the point soon after. I realized that I was taking away my mother’s pleasure in her friend’s leftwing beliefs. I was being a jerk. We agreed that I would go talk to her friend some day.
I had a nightmare that followed from the conversation. I was at a party at a non-Jewish neighbor’s with my wife and a young woman who looked like my mother as a young woman. The young woman was talking about someone who was coming to the party, who she was excited about seeing, the Schwartzes. I said, Well you know the difference between the Schwartzes and our host? The young woman shook her head. I said very deliberately, "The Schwartzes support an apartheid state in Palestine."
The young woman’s face fell. My wife glared at me, angry at me for souring another social situation. I got up and left the room. As I walked out, the floor shifted, and my glass of water spilled.
It turned out I was on a train, careening through the hills. Suddenly there was a call to prayer. A Muslim next to me fell to the floor and for a second I thought I must join him, but I stood on my feet, davening next to another Jew. I watched the other Jew, to see what I must do, because I don’t know the religious forms.
The religious service went on and on, as they do. I went on to the next carriage, and sat on a religious Jew’s lap as he prayed. It seemed the correct religious order. I sat on that orthodox man’s lap for nearly an hour, till I looked around and the service was over, and I got up.
Outside it was snowing, and the train tore angrily along the rails and up through the mountains. It switched this way and that, shrieking against the rails as it gained elevation. Behind us a pickup truck came flying along, with a man with a cigar in his mouth at the wheel. He was angry and glared at us, and the train careened forward, in fright, trying to avoid him. We were much stronger than him.
I thought about the nightmare all day. The man in the pickup truck reminds me of anti-Semites, and the train feels to me like Jewish history, like all the eastern European trains that my own ancestors took to escape pogroms and that Herzl took to try to wrench the Jewish state from the Turks and the Russians.
The train was rising, and Jews have risen. I’m in Jewish history, too, figuring out my place in Jewish history. Right now the history is out of control, careening along with apartheid. But I’m not in much control either. I spilled my glass, and upset my mother. I am confused by the religiosity. I have to figure out a better way to think and talk about these things.
