A Sentimental Education for the Whole Family

Abstract

Criticsof Irving Howe’sWorldof Our Fathers (1976) found an easy mark in the book’s title. In the months following the publication of this sweeping history of eastern European Jews, their life in the shtetls, their journey to America, their struggle and their uneasy pursuit of middle-class respectability, a series of reviewers asked the same question. All of them wanted to know ‘Where are the mothers?’ Each assumed a sense of profundity as if they alone noticed the absence. One can imagine those Howe allegedly overlooked asking this same question – in fact they are probably best equipped to voice it. ‘You never call … you never write … and when you come to tell the story of our people, you leave us out?’ The answer that Howe gave was true to the book’s content, as it was to its spirit. But keeping faith with the material counted for little in the face of what many perceived as an indifference to the context that provoked the question in the first place. In 1976, at the crest of feminism’s second wave, Howe’s arch ‘World of Our Fathers is a title, World of Our Fathers and Our Mothers is a speech’ was never going to go down well. Few would take this remark as evidence of his characteristic poise – the careful balance between doggedness and grace that he struck as a critic and in prose. Nor, for that matter, did his quip ‘without mothers there wouldn’t have been fathers’ do anything to convey his sensitivity to the plight of the Jewish mother. On this latter point, Howe’s biographer Gerald Sorin has mobilised several examples where World of Our Fathers in fact foregrounds the place and role of women.1 Still, in the logical bases for the axiom – that for fathers to exist there have to be mothers – we glimpse the view of Jewish society underlying Howe’s work. Women are not named in the title for the same reason that they are absent from the registers of genealogical knowledge (the yikhes briefe) that traditionally structure Jewish kinship. When marriages were brokered it mattered who one’s father was. In this way, the ties binding the community provide a textbook example of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s proposition that ‘marriage alliances are not established between men and women, but between men by means of women, who are merely the occasion for this relationship.’2 Women are of prime importance in a secondary way. They are the means to ensure the continuity of the generational line, but as this line is drawn they are effaced from the history it traces.