The young Lessing
For the last few months I’ve been reading a classic of philosemitism: the “Martha Quest” novels of Doris Lessing. Set in Southern Rhodesia in 1936-1949 and published in England in the 1950s, the first four of these books trace the youth of a fiercely independent child of British colonials born, as Lessing was, in 1919.
Lessing is famous as a “kaffir-lover,” to use the racist slang hurled against her; her hatred of the color bar resulted in her leaving Rhodesia for England in 1949 and culminated in her winning the Nobel Prize four years ago. But there are no major black characters in these novels, and really Martha Quest is a Jew lover. Determined to overcome her parents’ anti-Semitism, she gravitates to the Jews in the provincial capital of Salisbury (now Harare, Zimbabwe).
A fatherly Jewish lawyer gives Martha a job so that she can leave her parents’ farm and move to the city. There Martha loses her virginity to one Jew (Eastern European “scum,” he says), marries another (German Communist refugee), and has an intense affair with a third (Zionist Communist). A Jewish doctor prescribes contraception and tells her she’s too far along for an abortion. Martha’s Jewish friend Stella sets the bar on fashion and decoration, while Jasmine Cohen sets the bar on politics. Jasmine’s cousin Abraham dies fighting in Spain– and Jews are all over the small Communist party group Martha joins. (In her actual autobiography, Lessing has said that the Jewish mentors in these books were based on real people.)
But my business here is not to count the many Jews in these books. It is to express pride in my inheritance as it was perceived by a non-Jew. The sense pours through these books that were it not for the Jews of that generation and their “ancient culture,” Doris Lessing could never have become Doris Lessing. As brilliant a writer as she is, Lessing needed to break out of the thick racist porridge of the land-based cultures that surrounded her—the British colonials with their “Sports Club” snobbery and the Dutch Afrikaaner men with thighs like “pillars”—and to do so she threw herself on intellectually-sophisticated Jews.
At the beginning of the Martha Quest story, there are the Cohen boys, Joss and Solly, the “brilliant” sons of a shopowner in the small town of Banket, who recognize adolescent Martha’s intelligence and send packages of books to her every week or two. From the books of Communism and psychology, “Martha had gained a clear picture of herself, from the outside.” This becomes her greatest “weapon” in life, literary consciousness:
“She was not only miserable, she would focus a dispassionate eye on that misery. This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station….”
The Cohen boys in their Kosher household–Solly a Trotskyite Zionist, Joss a Marxist–are exact cousins of the Jewish intellectuals at City College in the 1930s.
At the other end of the Rhodesian books is Martha’s tormented lover Thomas Stern, a paranoid refugee from Poland who has lost his sisters in the Holocaust and veers self-destructively from Communism to business, from Jewish terrorism in Palestine to human rights work on behalf of blacks. By scoffing at Martha’s urging that he renounce violence, Stern gives the Martha Quest books their title: The Children of Violence series. But Stern is not only called to violence, he’s called to retail:
“So you see how hard it is to escape one’s fate, Martha? In Poland, middle-men, money-makers—the Stern Brothers. And here? My brother’s a rich man already, and we left Poland with what we had on our backs, eight years ago.”
A lot of my writing on this site is critical of the Jewish political presence in modern America. But I have a chauvinist streak of my own, and Lessing’s non-Jewish eye confirms it in me. The Jewish gift helped to form Doris Lessing as a young writer: the cerebral, text-bound life of persecuted Jews gave her awareness of the world and encouraged her to deliver the savage-sympathetic portrait of white colonial society that would make her name in England in the 1950s. That life is the Jewish culture that I was born into– outsiders, people of the book, harsh critics of the social structure.
[Joss Cohen] fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:
‘You repudiate the colour bar?’
‘But of course.’
‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’
‘Naturally’—this with a touch of impatience.
‘You are an atheist?’
‘You know quite well that I am.’
‘You believe in socialism?’
‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with people to whom every word of this conversation would have the force of a dangerous heresy.
Doris Lessing was an early adopter. Her philosemitism parallels the philosemitism of non-Jewish intellectuals in the States in the 40s and 50s, Edmund Wilson for instance, and anticipates by a generation or two full-blown American philosemitism of the meritocracy– when the White House was loaded with Jewish advisers, when Clinton put two Jews on the Supreme Court, when Jews became university presidents and started google and facebook and craigslist, and neocons guided our foreign policy.
American philosemitism reflects the Jewish contribution to this society. Recently I was told that the world still envies the U.S. because of four industries we have that no one else has (universities/research, film/media, software, and finance), and all these industries are as full of Jews as Doris Lessing’s early novels were. As Scott McConnell, who had something of Doris Lessing’s own Jewish-engendered intellectual awakening when he joined the Commentary neoconservative crowd in the 1980s, has told me, America is thankful to Jews because they are driving the economy. I think this recognition pervades Establishment culture. When I fault Chris Matthews for never talking about the Israel lobby, I must be aware that the network that gives him his salary was built and is now owned by Jewish entrepreneurs in the new global economy. When we try and explain the dismissal of Ron Paul, it is because he above all candidates is representative of an Establishment structure that has no truck with Jews– as opposed to Romney with his neoconservative advisers, Gingrich with his Sheldon Adelson money and Barack Obama with his Axelrods and AIPACs and Crowns. When I marvel that Robert Kagan works for Romney and his wife works for Obama without anyone raising an eyebrow, or that Stuart Levey the former Under Secretary of Treasury worked for Bush and Obama without a hitch—again, this is a measure of the large Jewish presence in the Establishment. Jewish gifts have propelled the new economy, such as it is. And when people accuse Occupy Wall Street of anti-semitism, it is in part because Occupy are critics of the new economy, and much of that economy was built by Jews.
Back when we were outsiders, Hannah Arendt warned Jews about reverence for wealth: liberal Zionists, she wrote, “failed to… attack the role of Jewish finance in the political structure of Jewish life.”
That same warning is sounded in the Martha Quest books, from the restless Communist Zionist Thomas Stern:
“Unlike you, when I work, I think in terms of money. I’m learning that it’s terrifyingly easy to make money.”
She laughed…
“I don’t want you to laugh about money. I’ve got to outwit it. I’ve got to find a way of not becoming Thomas Stern, rich merchant of this city.”
The beauty and tragedy of the Children of Violence series is that Thomas Stern does outwit that fate, at the cost of his own life. But modern American Jews are still stuck with Stern’s contradictions. We’re Zionists, and we’ve been incredibly successful. With the success has come something that none of the provincial Jews in Lessing’s philosemitic saga ever dreamed of having: power, which has eroded our outsiderness and endangered our detachment—that dispassionate eye on misery, that clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead.
It is not that Jews are incapable of that detachment. Many are. But the Cohen boys shared that gift a long time ago, and it is no longer just ours.
really interesting. you touch on so many ideas here. i’m not familiar with doris lessing’s writing but i am now intrigued.
an little factoid about myself. starting at the age of 17, inadvertently (unlike lessing) i too ended up being positively influenced by a number of jews i gravitated towards in my life. at the time tho i didn’t really understand or see them as jewish. but after a few years it didn’t escape my notice i had surrounded myself with a number of jews who ended up being very influential in the direction of my life. a few in particular really took me under their wings and they didn’t have to. i’ve often found myself in the right place at the right time with the right people.
Beautiful essay. Thanks.
“Lessing needed to break out of the thick racist porridge of the land-based cultures that surrounded her—the British colonials with their “Sports Club” snobbery and the Dutch Afrikaaner men with thighs like “pillars”—and to do so she threw herself on intellectually-sophisticated Jews.”
And now the “thick racist porridge” is Israeli, and Jews (and others) face the task of fighting racism (there as elsewhere) — or ignoring it — or joining it. Those who believe that Israel’s “thick racist porridge” should be privileged have, of course, “joined it”.
I tried to take the dispassionate position, that you so clearly value and I too on closer introspection, and look at the position of Jews in America and the Establishment over the course of 70 or so years.
I do not think it is an understatement to say that we changed America.
Harsh critics of the social order is not enough.
Overthrowers, even peaceful revolutionaries, of the social order is more apt.
I have noticed in myself that like you, one of the reasons why I focus so much on my own people is precisely because I share the chauvinist streak. I believe in Jewish power, I truly believe in it. If Jews as a group overwhelmingly decides to do something, or to prevent something, I deeply believe that we can be more successful in that area than virtually any other group, even one which is a hundred times larger than us.
But one of the issues that I keep thinking about today is, for a lack of a better word, purity. Purity of purpose, more specifically. Did we overthrow the old order primarily on moral rightouesness or for a greed of power? Both? And if so, how much of each?
I remember your story on the Winkelwossen twins, the true creators of Facebook, and then how Zuckerberg essentially swooped in at the last minute, stole their source code, hacked their site and was protected by the Jewish Harvard president, Summers.
Facebook’s not typical of the Jewish experience, but it holds a clue to the question I am grappling with. The racial taunts that Zuckerberg posted, and that were in some ways overmatched in the following Vanity Fair article mirrors what I think about the post-60s movement.
I’ll be frank: I think that one of the main factors that we today basically view racism as something mainly due to white people(meaning, European Christians) is the battles we had with them before. I think that in events leading up to the fifties and sixties, there was a lot of racial animosity towards the WASPs. A lot of that was hidden because the WASPs were morally bankrupt themselves, not least in their treatment of blacks.
But as I look onto the American scene today, it’s uniquely suited for racial minorities. If you are a minority, you can always claim persecution. Again, the flipside of my chauvinist streak is the attribution to Jews powers that we may not have, but it bears thinking about anyway. I felt, like the woman in the Beinart discussion at the GA recently, that I had been lied to. She had been lied to, she felt, about Zionism. I was growing up with very dark descriptions of my neighbours. We were not just smarter. We were more pure. Morally superior and culturally sophisticated. They wallowed in material wealth, but they were simpletons, brutes and worse.
As I’ve grown older, so much of what I was told has turned out to be a lie.
I now ask how much of what I was told was the result of my parents’ own bigotry?
This is why, I think, many Jews read anti-Semites. It’s a dirty pleasure, because it stokes our narcissism and gives us a way to think forbidden thoughts; to escape the condemnation of the self-hating Jew. And it’s reflected in jokes like the two Jews who are reading the newspapers during WWII and one Jew is reading the Nazi paper with misplaced, even bizarre, glee. Tired of all the bad news, he enjoys reading how the Jews are doing everything right and having supreme power.
There’s an element of this, I think, in the discussion I briefly mentioned and I want to seperate it, the childish narcissism, from genuine self-reflection. Why do I talk about the WASPs? Because their downfall had a lot to do with us, and if we see and look carefully what happened in those struggles we may, but for a brief moment, see if there are any commonalities today – how much was actually a critique of the society we lived in, in many ways horrible, and how much more was motivated by our own bigotry, was it motivated, and perhaps even, dangerous as it is to ask, our greed and lust for power?
If the answers to these questions are not as straightforward as I fear… then that may in some ways respond to the conflict vis-a-vi Israel/Palestine, where the solution ultimately rests within America’s borders and none so more than with us, the architects and enforcers of the Israel Lobby. The enablers, at it’s worst, of Jewish apartheid.
Yet, as you note, our history is filled with contrarians. We are told time and again, that to be Jewish is to be questioning. That there is an inherent value in argument and skepticism in it’s own sake. We are told, and we believe, that we are smarter. That we can self-regulate better than anyone else. And for much of our history in the diaspora, that was true. But here is the worst question of them all: what is that was because of our outsider status, not because of our internal values(or at least not sufficiently supported by them)? What if we had no choice to be the overthrowers of the social order, in part because that social order prevented us equal opportunity – and yes, power?
And now that we are part of the Establishment, and in many ways driving it, have we lost that ability? Is Israel the clearest manifestation of that? That we can be harsh towards others, even destructive, but are not simply up to our own mythologies of our supreme morality?
Have white conveservative Christians really changed that much in their basic world outlook, or is our alliance with them on Israel, even if superficial, a symptom of what I am talking about? That indeed it was us that changed. Or even worse, and nothing that Philip implied, that perhaps this was within us from the beginning but it was hidden from sight to others and even to ourselves as long as we were excluded? That is what I fear.
So Israel stands as the test to my questions. How much opposition to the old order was based on moral righteousness? If what we were told as we grew up was true, why then is Israel acting in precisely the way which we condemned the WASPs for, and now we cover it up amongst ourselves? Israel acts as the knife to the heart of Jewish exceptionalism.
It shows our thuggish side. The brave Cohen brothers have no power in Israel or even(!) in the Jewish diaspora. They are attacked as self-hating Jews.
In the Jewish state, the rulers are Avigdor Lieberman, Bibi Netanyahu and Danny Ayalon and the ultra-Orthodox religious establishment.
The questions I asked in the beginning are still with me, because they torment me:
How much of what we saw in the 30s, 40s and 50s, as Lessing documented, was righteous?
How much was hypocrisy, even, G-d forbid, naked self-interest ? What about the Communist Zionist in her book, is he a sign of this? Communism is opposed to nationalism, yet Ben-Gurion was a marxist and a nationalist. So were characters in Lessing’s book. We took exceptions to our own cause.
This is why I kept bringing up the WASPs, why I think Philip himself returns to the WASPs so often on this site, they are a key to understanding ourselves and how we deal with the world. The WASPs, together with Doris Lessing’s book raise the same question but from different angles, when contrasted with Israel and the total support for it’s apartheid: Can we only be truly moral when attacking the Other?
Boy, Phil, it sure seems to me you are skating on a very very thin edge of differentiation here. In short, the idea that one can be proud of something, but then say there’s no responsibility for the consequences of same.
Or, to put it another way, apropos of your talk of jewish involvement in communism—or even Zimbabwe as it has now too long turned out—I can just see someone rather archly asking “Because both have turned out so bloody well, right?”
Or, apropos your talk of jewish involvement in American “finance,” asking why then it would be so wrong to tag “jews” in particular for its, ahem, “problems,” such as the concentration of wealth we see, the flamboyant corruption its been involved in, and/or the economic wreckage we already see that has come about from the spectacular Wall Street follies we’ve seen over the last decade not to mention the possible terrifying meltdown some are predicting?
Don’t get me wrong: I think one can theoretically *somewhat* skate that edge successfully in at least some if not all circumstances, but I don’t think it comes out sounding all that great even in the best of them.
Just how much credit would we give, for instance, to any group that seemed to take pride in their idealistic passion for pulling Germany out of its post-WWI starvation … if that passion had led them for a goodly period of time to support the Nazi Party? Especially, say, if that support had lasted right up until the Nazis had turned on them in particular?
Being passionate and idealistic is all well and fine, but being right still matters, does it not?
Jewish people were uniquely well-placed to be critical of traditional Christian society and to press for positive change. Many of them played an essential role in creating modernity. For this, a debt of gratitude is due, but to the individuals concerned, not to the group, whose overall contribution was, like that of every other human group, mixed.
There is only one human race. There are no moral supermen, either by ancestry or by culture.