The Inevitable Pit
Stephen Greenblatt writes about his family and the New World
I am an American who thinks of himself (interchangeably, with increasing degrees of specificity) as an Eastern European Jew, an Ashkenazi and a Litvak, but this self-identification, I have to acknowledge, is strange. It is true that my grandparents were born in Lithuania: my father’s parents in Kovna, my mother’s in Vilna. But they left for America sometime in the early 1890s, and, with a single exception, it was more than a century before anyone in my family returned for a visit. No one seems to remember the precise year of their departure or even the precise occasion, though there was somewhat vague talk, when I was growing up, about the need to escape a tsarist Russification scheme that centred on drafting eligible young Jewish men into the Army for 25-year terms of military service. I know that the Russian Government lurched between wanting to isolate Jews in a carefully demarcated Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb them by destroying their separate identity. Twenty-five sounds suspiciously like a mythic number, but Russian reality has often had a mythic quality, so it is possible that some such scheme at one time existed, and even a much shorter term of military service would have seemed almost unendurable, particularly to anyone who was committed, as were both my grandfathers, to observing Kashrut and keeping at least a reasonable number of the other commandments.
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[*] The following is a list of English equivalents of some of the Yiddish words and expressions not already glossed in the article or commonly known. Shul: synagogue; cheder: religious school; unglick: misfortune; shiksa: non-Jewish woman; goyishe kop: gentile mind; tref: non-kosher food; mamzer: bastard; minyan: a prayer quorum of ten Jewish men. The original meaning of schmaltz is ‘cooking fat’.
[†] Still the New World was reviewed in the LRB of 18 May by David Bromwich.
Letters
Vol. 22 No. 20 · 19 October 2000
From Sarah Roth
I wonder if Stephen Greenblatt's memory of the football song his father's cousin wrote (LRB, 21 September) is based on seeing the written lyric. He has it 'I'm a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech, and a hell of an engineer.' My Jewish father sings 'heck of an engineer', which rhymes better.
Sarah Roth
London N19
Vol. 22 No. 22 · 16 November 2000
From Charles Homsy
My grandparents were born in Damascus and brought their children to the US in the 1890s at about the same time that Stephen Greenblatt's grandparents arrived (LRB, 21 September). My family name identifies the origin of the family in Homs, northern Syria. The 'y' denotes 'of the place'. My parents were raised in Boston, Massachusetts as were Greenblatt's. They spoke English and Arabic at home but although I understand Arabic they made no effort at all to give their children any skill in the language. The Syrian Orthodox Church we attended performed the divine liturgy in Aramaic but the Sunday School classes were in English. In a single generation, the immigrant cohort of which my parents were a part dispersed widely into the suburbs of Boston and merged with the indigenous culture of New England. The region provided good schooling, of which I took advantage, with the result that I had the choice of automatic entrance to either Harvard or MIT. Ethnicity did not factor into entrance to either place. I married a Wasp in her Church (Congregational), which I admired for its Enlightenment roots and constructive efforts to enhance the quality of American life. My parents welcomed the marriage. I received a Fulbright to study in England (as did Greenblatt) and moved south to make a life for my family. My children in turn were raised and educated to be Americans without a hyphen.
From my earliest days at the Latin School in Boston, with its high percentage of Jewish students, I recognised their impulse to participate in the American experience yet remain apart from it. This is understandable, but the minority to which my parents belonged did not make a fetish of its ethnicity. The future of the United States is positive only to the extent that it resists becoming a country of hyphenated groups on the way to Balkanisation.
Charles Homsy
Houston, Texas
Vol. 23 No. 3 · 8 February 2001
From I.D. Mangoletsis
The term 'Balkanisation' has come to mean a process which leads to a horrific state of affairs. Now, as well as its existing connotations, implications and extensions, Balkanisation is presented as a potential result of hyphenation. Charles Homsy tells us (Letters, 16 November 2000) that his family comes originally from Homs, northern Syria, and made an emotionally long journey to Boston, Massachusetts; that, despite his ethnic origin, he had a choice between Harvard and MIT; that, despite being a Syrian Orthodox, he married a Wasp (in a Congregational church); and that he now lives in Houston, Texas. All that would be well were it not for the closing sentence of Homsy's letter, which ends with this warning: 'The future of the United States is positive only to the extent it resists becoming a country of hyphenated groups on the way to Balkanisation.'
The use of the term 'Balkanisation' usually displays only a partial understanding of the history of the Balkan peninsula and of the struggle of the people who have lived there to assert their ethnic, religious and cultural identities. Homsy, for example, ignores the fact that there has never been such a thing as a hyphenated Balkan as there is, say, a Syrian-American – or as there might be a Syrian-Arab for that matter. Had there been one it is probable that 'Balkanisation' would not exist, and Homsy's creative rhetoric would be diverted elsewhere.
I spent some time in Houston myself. It is a town of peace and prosperity, which many Balkan, or Arab, towns are not. And it is a long way from the Balkans. So Homsy has good reason to be grateful for his luck, and should try to avoid quick analogies, and make his point by other means. But he was obviously carried away by the force of his narrative and became forgetful of the metron – the word, it is said, was written on the temple of Apollo, in Delphi, Phokis, southern Balkans.
I.D. Mangoletsis
Thessaloniki
