When Marx Mattered

An Intellectual Odyssey

Doris Fine, Harold J. Bershady

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412853699
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A beautifully written, trenchant, and moving memoir, When Marx Mattered follows Harold J. Bershady's odyssey from childhood through his coming of intellectual age. The wounds and pleasures of his childhood include fear of Nazis, poverty, the joys and constraints of Jewishness, his caring family and love of music, and the confusion surrounding World War II. In this book, Bershady describes his teenage encounter with Marxism and how it provided some understanding of the world and hope for peace.

Bershady gives us a serious portrayal of the evolution of scholarly judgment, but also a social history of the second half of the twentieth century, refracted through the author's own experiences in which Jewish Americans played an important but under-appreciated part. Along the way, the author corrects the misapprehension that Jewish or non-Jewish American political radicals only evolve into conservatives. Through his own mistakes and hard-won lessons, Bershady shows the power, importance, and morality that intellectual standards play in enabling an intellectual to achieve sound and fair judgments.

Bershady firmly believes that his achievements in the social sciences are grounded in the fact that he also studied philosophy, literature, and history—all of which immeasurably deepened his understanding of social life. The generational portrait in this book is both an homage to those who preceded him and a hope for educational broadening of social science in the generation to come.

1

Personal Background and Setting

Several entangled influences of personal and family history and local, national, and international events drew me to Marx. I was born in Toronto, Canada in 1929. All the adults and children I knew until I was about five years old and started kindergarten spoke Yiddish. I was called Hershl or varieties of that name (Hershele, Hersh, Heshie, and Hesh) rather than Harold. One or two family members and friends still call me Hershl or Heshie today. Many of the people I knew also spoke English, and I was bilingual until I was about eight or nine years old, when thinking and speaking in English had become spontaneous and primary. With one exception, my Yiddish today is approximately that of an eight-year-old. The exception is that my knowledge of adult Yiddish curses and profanity—the part of a language overheard that is taboo and therefore always remembered best—remains quite good.

In Toronto, my mother and father rented two rooms in a house on Palmerston Avenue, one of several streets in a neighborhood of Jewish immigrants. (I went back to visit this neighborhood a few years ago. It is now a Portuguese neighborhood, and the houses are painted much more colorfully.) My family and the owners of this house became good friends, and we celebrated Jewish holidays with them. I still remember the pleasure of sitting in a little straw hut put up next to the house and eating a meal. This was, I discovered some years later, to celebrate Sukkot, the harvest festival.

All of my relatives, including my parents, had immigrated from small villages, shtetls, near Kiev in Ukraine. My mother’s family, however, had come to the New World first. They had managed to get to Buffalo, New York, in 1922, before the laws establishing strict quotas for immigrants were passed. Their host family was my grandmother’s sister, my great aunt. She and her husband had settled in Buffalo twelve to fifteen years earlier where he had begun a construction business that in the post–World War I boom was thriving.

My father and his family took a different route. They had gone in 1921 from Kiev to Odessa to Bucharest. In Bucharest he met my mother, and they were betrothed. But he and his family did not have an American host. After my mother left for the United States, he, his parents, two younger sisters, and a younger brother managed to get to Paris. There he found work as a cutter in the garment trades. After four years he was able to immigrate to Toronto, where my mother joined him, and they were married.

In Toronto, my father worked as a pattern maker and cutter of ladies’ coats for Simpsons’ Department Store. He did well at Simpsons, but the depression that shook the world in 1929 also shook Canada. With the retail clothing business in sharp decline by 1935, and his job soon ending, my parents decided to move to Buffalo, where, with the help of the larger extended family, he might find some work. My parents had become Canadian citizens, and there was no quota restriction for them.

I didn’t want to leave Toronto. I had good friends in first grade and loved my first-grade teacher, whose name I still remember, Miss James. Besides, I was loyal to the king, not to somebody called a president. I had been to Buffalo several times to visit my grandparents and uncles and aunts. I loved them and enjoyed visiting them, but we always went back to Toronto. I had also gone with my parents a couple of times in a sleeping car to New York City to visit relatives, and still have wisps of memory of gently rocking in the berth and hearing the clacking of the train wheels on the tracks. The promise of more such rides did not change my mind, nor was the promise of getting a genuine hockey stick and puck when we got to Buffalo any better. I would stay in Toronto, I declared, and live where we’d always lived, with our friends on Palmerston Avenue. They—my parents—could go to Buffalo. I have seen photographs of myself taken during this time. And although I can remember something of the feelings I had then, I cannot connect myself today to that chubby, smiling little boy in the photographs who had those feelings. Time has constantly altered my appearance, but my stubborn essence has remained.

My sister, Marilyn, was born a month after we moved to Buffalo. Another calamity! The four of us plus my three uncles, an aunt, and my two grandparents all lived during our first year in Buffalo in my grandparents’ three-and-a-half-bedroom, one-bathroom flat. This occupied the entire first floor of a two-story house my grandfather had built in the 1920s.

My grandfather was a “plasterer.” I put his occupation in quotes because I discovered later that his plastering, which was genuine, was also a general term he used to describe repairs he performed or oversaw to the several houses he owned and rented out. He must have had some money with him when they arrived in Buffalo. My great aunt reminisced many years later that her brother-in-law, my grandfather, had owned several properties in his Ukrainian shtetl, and was considered to have been a prosperous man. None of this was apparent to me as a child. He wore work clothes much of the time and kept tools and a wheelbarrow, which I particularly remember, in a shed in back of the house. When he didn’t leave to do work, he sat at a little table in his bedroom and read or studied what I later understood to be portions of the Talmud.

Judging from the two-family houses and small lawns in the neighborhood in which my grandfather had built his house, the neighborhood had once been at the more modest end of the middle class. When we moved in it had become primarily working class. Many rooms were rented, and more than two families lived in several of the two-family houses. About a third of the people who lived there were immigrant Jews, another third German and Irish, and a third black. There were a few corner shops whose owners lived above their stores and also a few modest, genteel families down on their luck. The women of these families would show themselves occasionally en route to a store—thin and drawn looking but always primly dressed, always with hats and veils and gloves, and always holding a small purse and a woven shopping basket. They were clearly not Jewish. By 1935 there was much less work for everybody, and times were tight.

Because I am a male and the first born in the New World, my family treated me with special favor. Although not intended as such, this went a long way to compensate me for having been unwillingly dragged across the border from Canada to Buffalo. I would often bring my grandmother a cup of tea with a cube or two of hard sugar and sit with her and talk. Sometimes she asked me to comb her long, wavy, gray and gold hair, and while I was doing this she would tell me stories of her life in Ukraine. Those stories transported me to that little village near Kiev where she had lived, was married, and bore her children. Almost all the inhabitants of the village, called Sokolievke, were Jews. I learned the villagers’ names, habits, occupations, and the kinds of clothes they wore, and could refer to them almost as familiarly as she did. I never tired of hearing her stories of their doings and descriptions of what they looked like. “Jack the goat” (Yankel tsop) was one of my favorites. He had a small beard like a goat and scampered about his and his wife’s crowded millinery shop spilling buttons, misplacing needles, thimbles, thread, and creating general havoc. Village life, as my grandmother described it, was tranquil and orderly, sometimes comic, and, with the exception of an occasional miscreant, benign. I felt as comfortable imagining myself walking on its unpaved dirt roads as I did when actually walking on the concrete sidewalks of what had become my own neighborhood in Buffalo, New York.

When my grandmother and I were talking together on her front porch during the summer, a fellow villager or two who had also immigrated to Buffalo might walk by. Like all larger American cities by the 1920s and 1930s, Buffalo was made up of ethnic neighborhoods in which people from the same countries in Europe, Asia, and Central and South America had settled. My grandmother greeted her lands-men as they walked past and occasionally would turn to me and say something about them. I remember one of her comments in particular because it was not only startling and funny to my seven-year-old ears, but also because many years later I found its sense repeated in more general terms by Sigmund Freud. A bald-headed, red-faced man, thick in body and coarse in manner came lumbering by. He was known in the neighborhood as an ill-mannered, loud-mouthed boor, the sort of person my family called a “bol-agole,” a wagon driver. My grandmother said of him as he passed, “A ferd geyt ariber di velt un blaybt a ferd” (a horse goes around the world and remains a horse). Neither the perils of his escape from Ukraine nor any of the hardships he was facing in the New World had modified him. He was still the ill-mannered, loud-mouthed boor he had been in Sokolievke. Character is fate is the way Freud put it.

So the village might have remained had it not been for the ever more frequent pillaging of its households and ravaging of its families in the five or six years before my family left in 1921. These brutal acts were the work of those whom my grandmother called “the bandits.” Because I was very young, I was spared much description of these raids. Their occurrence, however, was voiced, said quickly, remembered almost unwillingly, and as quickly shuttered away into some memory vault into which I had at the time no access. It was clear to me, even as a child of seven or eight, that the bandit raids were critical to the ending of the story; they were the closing scenes to the tales of pastoral village life my family had known in the “old country.” To my questions of why the raids had occurred, my grandmother would sigh and say with a resigned nod, “They hated the Jews”—an answer that left me with the disturbing puzzle of why Jews were hated.

In tandem with my grandmother’s afternoon village tales were my father’s bedtime Bible stories. The stories he chose were often of the Jews’ captivity in Egypt and of their perilous rescue by Moses. I imagined and worried about Moses as a baby hidden in the bulrushes, was fearful of the test put to him by the pharaoh, surprised but also relieved by the angel who magically moved his hand from the gold to the burning coals; I shuddered at the pain he must have felt when he picked up the coals and put them to his mouth, understood why and was sorry that he could speak only in a slurred manner thereafter, was startled by the burning bush he encountered, heard God’s instructions and command to remove his sandals when in the presence of the Lord, tried to imagine—unsuccessfully—what the Being that spoke in the bush might actually look like, was grateful Jewish households were marked and spared the fearful plagues, thought of myself running with the Jews as they fled from Egypt, watched in wonder and delight as the waters were parted, was sickened but also thankful to see the pharaoh’s approaching soldiers drown, entered the desert with fear but also as an adventure, stared in apprehension as he brought the tablets down and chastised the idolaters, ate the unleavened bread, sorrowed at his death, and with the rest of the Jews, looked to the Promised Land.

Although they had occurred in ancient times, the Bible stories of enslavement, of testing, and of near death and escape were nonetheless thrilling. And since I was born about the same time that Passover occurs, the ritual reenactment of the Jewish flight through the desert became my favorite holiday. I identified with Moses. Moses may never have seen God, even on the mountain, but he had spoken with him. He was God’s special emissary, had saved the Jews, given them rules to live by, and led them to the borders of the land of milk and honey. This utopian dream of a land of abundance and peace won through great and dangerous effort was sown in me while still a child.

The structure and many of the rudiments of the Mosaic story were recapitulated in the unlikely adventures of the superheroes of the comic books. I had begun to read children’s books about age four but discovered the more exciting fare of comic books soon thereafter and must have read many hundreds until other books supplanted them. Superman in particular had many quasi-Mosaic qualities: he was very young when separated from his parents; lived as a secret alien in his host society; was endowed with great powers and became tireless in their use against evildoers; had an unshakeable moral sense; never wavered in coming to the aid of the oppressed; and however mighty his deeds, was—like Moses, who did not reach the Promised Land—always the giver rather than the recipient of aid. All the other superheroes had similar qualities; they frequently faced great danger to themselves in their fight against evil, but they too turned out to be invincible in the end. I am quite sure Moses and Superman fused in my boy’s mind. Moses was the Superman of the Jews; Superman was the Moses of everyone. It was not until much later, sometime in my forties, that I read about the creators of Superman and learned, not to my surprise, that they were Jews.

The Depression of the 1930s was harrowing to a great many families, my own included. Added to their hardships was a more distant yet rapidly approaching source of worry: the ominous rise of the Nazis and a hatred of Jews erupting all over Europe and beginning to course into America. My parents, uncles, and aunt gathered around the radio to listen to Father Coughlin’s diatribes against Jews (“A Kholyera zol im khapn”—“Cholera he should catch,” my mother used to say of him) and hear the latest news of the Nazi conquests in Belgium, Poland, and France. My father’s parents, my other grandparents, had managed to reach the United States in the mid-1930s and were now living in Pittsburgh. They were cared for by my father’s older brother, my Uncle Sam, who had somehow managed to get around the immigration quotas. But his two sisters, a brother, a brother- and sister-in-law, and four nephews were still in Paris, and there was growing apprehension about their safety. I saw my family’s faces tense with worry and anger when they listened to the news or read the newspapers. My grandmother, in particular, feared the war was unleashing the hatred of Jews from which they had fled in Europe, and which would now reach our family in its new haven—from which there was no where left to flee. Even as a child I sensed the lingering sorrow my family felt over leaving the old world and the disorientation and anxiety they faced in the new.

Yet, my family was not a psychologically depressed one. I remember joining my family in laughing at the wonderful comedians and stories on the radio—Fred Allen and Jack Benny, Abie’s Irish Rose, Fibber McGee and Molly, “Charlie McCarthy,” and others. Woody Allen captured some of this in his movie Radio Days. My family had a well-developed sense of humor and irony. The adults enjoyed one another, shouted hair-raising curses when a mishap occurred, sang punning songs of the sexual antics of a rabbi and his wife, which I only began to understand and to laugh at when I grew older, and during the week or on Sundays they would wind up the Victrola to listen in rapture to recordings of Caruso, Galli-Curci, and the famous cantors Pinchik and Yoselle Rosenblatt or the violinist Mischa Elman. My mother had a good alto voice. Soon after arriving in the United States she went to New York City to visit her aunt. There she met Pinchik, and during her two-year stay in New York City sang with him. When we listened to his recordings, and if she felt like it, she would sing along. She was rather proud of having had that experience.

Sometimes a record would be put on of Maurice Schwartz, the Ukrainian Jewish actor, telling a story. One that I remember, because I heard it several times and it affected my moral sensibility, was called “A khazn, a shikerr” (“A Drunken Cantor”). It is a tale of a cantor too poor to pay for medicines for his devoted, beautiful, talented, gentle, thoughtful, loving, delicate, graceful daughter, who is slowly wasting away. No one will help him. His daughter gradually grows frailer and paler. He beseeches one person after another for a kopek, just one kopek, to buy medicine for his adjectivally endowed daughter, but his pleas go unanswered. His daughter becomes feebler, her eyes grow wider, her skin becomes translucent, and with a last whispered word she calls for her beloved father and dies. In sorrow and despair the cantor takes to drink and tells the tale. It was certified 100 percent pure, genuine, unadulterated schmaltz, but heartrending, and our hearts were rent. Schwartz’s performance was a marvel of the actor’s art, as his voice lurched in places as though in a drunken stagger, or lapsed into snatches of cantorial melody, or into tenderness, and always punctuated with sighs and sobs. The story made me sad, but I was filled with unbelief and anger that no one would help the poor cantor. It was wrong! No matter how often the record was played, everyone cried a little when hearing it. I have no doubt this story helped shape my social conscience. It occurred to me years later to wonder how the poor cantor managed to get money for the drink in which he drowned his sorrows, but I never raised the question. The stories, music, and Yiddish wordplay and curses were legacies that have stayed with me my entire life.

Everyone in my family worked. My aunt was a salesperson in a department store. Her salary was based entirely on commissions, which made her become adept at assaying and persuading the few potential customers to buy. My oldest uncle, Dave, helped my grandfather and also sold life insurance—also a commission-based income. My father and another uncle, Max, started a small manufacturing business making ladies’ coats to sell wholesale to the local women’s haberdasheries. The business sputtered along until World War II began. My youngest uncle, Ed, eleven years older than I, worked as a clerk in a drug store during the day and went to business school at night to study accounting. My mother and grandmother cooked and sewed, repaired clothes, cleaned the house, and cared for my baby sister and me and everyone else. My family’s household economy was of necessity an austere one. But by pooling and husbanding their slender resources, they managed to stay marginally above other, smaller families we knew who had to rely on public aid.

From time to time I still wanted to go back to Canada. But other than that and one other unfulfilled yearning, I never experienced any lacks. I had books and toys and clothes and, judging from old photographs, plenty of food. But I also wanted to have piano lessons. My grandmother had a small upright piano in the living room. When my aunt Dorothy came home from work she would often kick off her shoes, sit down at the piano for a half-hour or so, and belt out and sing the latest songs, mainly those made popular by Bing Crosby. I found this great fun. She said she played by ear, but I saw both her hands going all over the keys. I liked the fuller sounds of the piano; its sonorities were much richer than the singing of Mischa Elman’s violin. My aunt showed me what she did with her hands—these instructions were, in effect, lessons—and I mimicked her as best I could. I listened to the radio and transcribed the melodies I remembered onto the piano. They were clumsy and childish efforts, and there was much thumping with my left hand as I beat out the rhythms, but I held back in asking my parents for the piano lessons that might improve my music making. I saw how hard they worked, how financially pinched we were, and assumed, without really knowing, that piano lessons would cost more than they could afford. I settled on noodling my way around the keyboard of my grandmother’s piano, and actually developed a fairly good sense of how to make a variety of sounds with this instrument.

I have one particularly vivid memory of my contribution to the family’s well-being, and that is of helping my grandmother to darn socks. She would put a small glass under the hole in the sock, pull the sock taut so that the hole would be centered over the open end of the glass, and begin to darn the sock. She would stitch back and forth many times in one direction then turn the sock ninety degrees to stitch back and forth in the other. I threaded the needles for her and so took a certain proprietary interest in the finished product. And the finished product was indeed a small miracle of stitching: even, delicate, and stronger than the original. I don’t know how many people today still darn their socks, probably not many, but I’m sure the sock industry would not be happy to see a sock-darning craze spring up.

The fact they were a bit better off than some other families did not give my family license to indulge in snobbery of any kind. If I were to tout some little accomplishment—which I sometimes did—such as a high grade on an exam, as though it were out of the ordinary, they would deflate me by congratulating me and then telling me to go stand on my head. This was equivalent to the mocking “Big deal!” But they could be much more severe. They detested and mocked snobbery and braggadocio all the more when so many people were in great need. The comparison to others that is intrinsic to snobbish acts achieves its self-elevating intention by diminishing those others yet further and adding to the pain they already feel.

An example of my family’s attitude toward snobbery that remains etched in my memory and doubtless contributed to my personal makeup as well as to my social views occurred when I was about seven or eight years old. One of my mother’s older cousins, Molly—whose original name in Ukraine was Malke—finally snared and married a dentist and forthwith changed her name to Mildred. With her new-found riches she bought a small convertible coupe with a rumble seat (into which I once surreptitiously crept)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Personal Background and Setting
• 2 Theory and Hope
• 3 Theory and Practice
• 4 Illusion and Reality
• 5 McCarthy, Philosophy, and the Jewish Question
• 6 Other Discoveries
• 7 Mannheim, Morality, and Neo-Marxism
• 8 The New Left
• 9 Penn Sociology in the Age of Aquarius: 1960–1965
• 10 Pot and Protest
• 11 Negation of the Negation
• 12 Emanations
• 13 Der Alter Goy
• 14 The More Things Change . . .
• 15 We Happy Few
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Index