Jacob's Voices: Reflections of a Wandering American Jew. - book reviews

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Rafael Medoff

Reviewed by RAFAEL MEDOFF

In a reversal of the classic story of Jewish immigrants assimilating in the American melting pot, Jerold Auerbach's engaging autobiographical memoir charts the journey of an American Jewish intellectual who returns to a life of Jewish commitment. Jacob's Voices is moving and often humorous, while at the same time offering an insightful assessment of the American Jewish condition.

The 'Jacob" in the book's title is Auerbach's grandfather, a Romanian immigrant in turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh, struggling to make ends meet as a cigar roller and dreaming of a better life for his children. Old-world Jewish traditions were not easily transmitted to a younger generation that saw assimilation as the ticket out of the ghetto. "Not Jacob's Orthodoxy, nor even any vestiges of yiddishkeit (beyond a superstitious phrase or two), survived the chill of assimilation that settled across the second generation" (p. 72), Auerbach avers. Typical of his generation, Auerbach's father (Jacob's son) was content with a sort of residential Jewishness, an ethnic identity defined primarily by his choice of neighbors - what Gerald Sorin has called "the nurturing neighborhood."(1) "What my father learned, and practiced with true artistry," Auerbach recalls, "was how to remain enclosed within exclusively Jewish surroundings without ever identifying with anything Jewish" (p. 74). For Auerbach, his parents' "transition from Judaism to Americanism" was nothing less than "a revision of the classic formula of Jewish emancipation: they were marginal Jews at home and wary Americans on the street" (p. x).

Not only did Auerbach's parents eschew religious traditions, but in their determination to become fully integrated Americans, they also remained aloof from domestic Jewish communal concerns, the genocide of European Jewry, and the struggle for Jewish statehood. "My parents purchased their ticket of admission to American society with silence on any public issue involving Jews," he writes (p. 7).

Hebrew school, for young Jerold, was a period of "temporary confinement" culminating in a bar mitzvah in which "my flawless singing was matched only by my ignorance of what it all meant, or why I was doing it." Jerold's father recited the traditional blessing releasing the father from any further religious responsibility for the deeds of his son - the traditional rite marking a youngster's spiritual transition to manhood - but, in reality, the Auerbach bar mitzvah "released the son from any further obligation" to live a Jewish lifestyle (p. 11).

For his high school education, the Auerbachs sent Jerold to Horace Mann, a private school in Riverdale (the Bronx), prestigious but predominantly Jewish, "midway between the Flatbush Yeshiva and Groton" (p. 24) in more ways than one. Horace Mann appealed to Jewish parents who "wanted to propel their sons beyond their own cultural constraints, but not too far or too fast" (p. 24). It was left to the sons to move farther, and faster, in the years to follow. Auerbach shed the last remains of his Jewish identity as he moved on from Horace Mann to Oberlin College in northern Ohio, "a time warp of prairie wholesomeness" (p. 27) followed by graduate studies in American history at Columbia and his first teaching position, at Brandeis University.

Looking back at his Brandeis years, Auerbach recalls the university as "a Jewish bedlam" (p. 36). It reminded him of Horace Mann: Jews ensconcing themselves in a predominantly - Jewish environment, all the while laboring to distance themselves from their Jewishness. The university's "schizophrenic mission - to become a Jewish Harvard - converted it into a repository of Jewish intellectual and cultural angst" (p. 36). Still, at that stage of his life, it suited Auerbach perfectly. With his first children born, his first book published, his first home purchased (a landmark event in his immediate family), Auerbach settled comfortably into what he describes as his "life as a non-Jewish Jew" (p. 39).

Then along came an invitation to join a tour group to Israel, organized by the American Jewish Committee "to rouse slumbering scholars from their Jewish self-denial" (p. 40). And rouse him it did. For two intriguing weeks in the spring of 1972, Auerbach visited sites ancient and modern, met with Israelis from all walks of life, and felt "bombarded by acutely conflicted feelings of attraction and resistance" (p. 42). Two years later, a fellowship gave him and his family the opportunity to return to Israel for his sabbatical year. No longer the wide-eyed tourist, Auerbach took in day-to-day Israeli life, riding the buses, shopping in the marketplaces, allowing himself to be "enveloped in Jerusalem's history and mystery" (p. 52).

Again and again in the years to follow, Auerbach returned to Israel, the only place he could feel the connection between his past, present, and future. Yigal, a tour guide who accompanied the Auerbachs during one 1983 outing, casually mentioned his grandfather's Romanian origins. It turned out that Yigal's grandfather and Auerbach's grandmother Minnie had grown up in the same small Romanian town. "It was imaginable that nearly a century earlier our grandparents had played together, as children, in the same Romanian shtetl," Auerbach writes. "Israel, I knew, was like that: a place where Jewish lives intersected, where autobiography and history were fused" (p. 84). It was Israel that enabled Auerbach "to hear Jacob's voice at last" (p. 157), that is, to affirm the value of his Jewish roots and their place in the life of a modern American Jew.