Like
most people in the First World, I live at many removes from the world
in which my grandparents were born. They were born in the 1870s in
Lithuania. I was born in 1944 in the United States. We were both
members of a minority. They and their parents were Yiddish-speaking
Jews in an autocratic, hostile empire. My parents and I were
English-speaking Jews in a prosperous, democratic, tolerant society.
I imagine that the provincial towns in which they were born were like
Third World cities today: full of mud and garbage, dark,
insalubrious, and dangerous.
My
grandparents, until they emigrated to the United States, were
entirely Jewish in culture, language, and ethnic identity, deeply and
conspicuously different from the people around them. I was (and
partially remain, though I have lived in Israel for more than forty
years) deeply American in culture and language, not outwardly
different from other Americans in an immediately recognizable way,
but Jewish in ethnic identity. My parents and then I assimilated
without repudiating Judaism, whereas my grandparents could only have
assimilated into the dominant Russian culture by converting to
Christianity. Our assimilation was quite easy, and I never thought
very much about what we lost by it until I was a young adult, which
was when I decided to live in Israel.
My
grandparents weren't explicitly offered a Faustian bargain when they
moved to the United States as very young adults. No one said to them,
“Give up your Jewishness, and you can have all the benefits of
American openness and progress.” In fact, they never did give up
their Jewishness. They spoke with Yiddish accents until the end of
their lives, though they came to know English well. But, without
intending it, they enabled their children to set aside their
Jewishness. My parents and their siblings children grew up as
Americans in a society that by and large accepted them.
My
parents and their siblings gained enormously by accepting the tacit
bargain: give up your parochial Jewishness and reap the fruit of
American prosperity and freedom. So why did I have a sense of loss,
even though, paradoxically, I had never known what I felt I had lost?
Somehow, I felt that my American identity was an ill-fitting garment.
Although
we Jews like to think of ourselves as unique, our displacement is
part of an enormous historical process affecting hundreds of millions
of people. The leap into modernity from traditional societies has
been a universal cause of anguish and confusion in the past two
centuries or so. Rural populations became urban factory workers in
their own countries, and many others left Italy, the Russian and
Austro-Hungarian Empires, Ireland, China, and other poor lands and
migrated to the United States and other places where they could make
a better living and escape oppression – frequently at urban factory
workers. At the same time, in Asia and Africa European colonial
regimes created and trained local elites, removing them from their
traditional societies, teaching them new languages, and expecting
them to behave like Europeans (while looking down on them for not
being European). All of us, the descendants of these displaced
people, lost a major part of our connection to our ancestors' past.
* * *
Like
countless viewers all over the world, I watched The Sopranos
with pleasure and curiosity, heightened by familiarity with the
setting. I grew up in Greenwich Village, on Manhattan, which bordered
on Little Italy. When I was a
boy, my parents took me to small,
family owned Italian restaurants. My
mother bought almond biscotti
from Italian bakeries, and, as I walked down Macdougal Street to my
school on Bleecker Street, I passed Italian grocery stores and other
small businesses with Italian names in gold letters on the plate
glass storefronts. There was an Italian funeral parlor across the
street from my school. Every year there was a street fair for Saint
Anthony of Padua. When I saw Cinema Paradiso,
the people's faces looked just like the people I used to see around
me as a child. Not only that, lots of my relatives lived in suburban
New Jersey, Tony Soprano's stomping ground.
I
was fascinated by the characters in The Sopranos,
because they are Italian in almost exactly the way that American
Jewish people of the parallel generation – my generation – are
Jewish. They have the food, the religion (which they don't
necessarily take very seriously), and the family connections, but
they have lost the language and
the culture in which their
grandparents were rooted.
Like other assimilated ethnic groups, in return for their family's
traditional culture, Italian Americans have gained the chance to
excel in America, not – despite the stereotype – as criminals,
but as doctors, lawyers, business people, entertainment professionals
(like David Chase, the main writer of the series, and the excellent
actors), and academics. Nevertheless, as The Sopranos
makes clear, by sending Tony to Italy, by having him fantasize about
an Italian girl, and by bringing an Italian mafioso to New Jersey,
these people are not entirely comfortable in America. (Perhaps, as
the 2016 presidential election results show, nobody is truly
comfortable there – but to consider that possibility would be too
much of a digression.)
My
decision to move to Israel was an effort to alleviate this discomfort
and restore my connection with the Jewish past. As I should have
known, this effort was doomed to frustration and failure from the
start, because Israel itself was founded on rejection of the Jewish
past and the aspiration to produce a new kind of Jew, and, of course,
the Holocaust obliterated what was left of traditional Jewish society
in Europe. I couldn't go back to Vilna to learn Yiddish, but I
learned something very important about the immigrant experience
undergone by my grandparents by reiterating it, although far more
comfortably, in Israel. An immigrant generation is a confused
generation. Understanding a new and foreign society is daunting. My
grandparents arrived in the United States with no financial resources
to speak of, without knowing English, without a modern education, and
in a highly individualistic environment, where people were expected
to fend for themselves. Like the millions of other immigrants who
arrived in America at that time, they had no knowledge of American
culture and society, few tools to understand their new environment,
and no letup in the constant pressure to make a living, so they could
never step back and figure things out.
Not
only were they disoriented, with no useful conventional wisdom to
guide them in their new country, they also were unable to explain how
things worked to their children, the second generation. So the
children often had to lead the way. For example, my wife's aunt, who
was born and raised in Chelsea, Massachusetts, once spoke to me about
the flood of 1909, when she was a schoolgirl. She and her sisters had
to be the family spokespeople when they went looking for shelter in
homes on high ground, because their parents didn't know English. When
our own children were in elementary school in Israel, my wife and I
often had to ask them to translate notes from their teachers for us.
Being
a well-educated, affluent, English-speaking immigrant in Israel is
much easier than being an indigent Yiddish speaker with no relevant
formal education, but I can't exactly say that I've assimilated into
Israeli society, even after more than forty years of residence here,
military service, and acquisition of the Hebrew language – which I
still speak with an accent. Moreover, I'm not sure that my
non-assimilated Israeli-American-Jewish identity suits me any better
than the assimilated American identity that I discarded.
