People of the Book 101: Meyer Levin

by Marek Breiger

“We must believe in humanity, in our ability to find these solutions malformed and crippled as we are. I believe the survival force in us, and the curative force in us, to be stronger than the force of destruction. Of this, all I have seen of my people has served as proof.”

—Meyer Levin, In Search

On this date, December 14th, in 1952, a radio adaptation of Anne Frank’s war-time diary, which had been published earlier that year, was broadcast for the first time on The Eternal Light series, produced by the Jewish Theological Seminary on the NBC network. The writer of the adaptation was Meyer Levin — a journalist and novelist who died thirty years ago and is today altogether too unread and unsung.

Levin was published in the Menorah Journal before he was 20, and continued to write until his death at the age of 75. He was praised by some of the greatest author’s and thinkers of his time, including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Albert Einstein. Among his many novels were four books so powerful as to be considered major statements about his times: The Old Bunch (1937), Citizens (1940), In Search (1949), an autobiography, and his novel about the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case, Compulsion (1956).

Levin was a controversial figure who ran afoul of both the Jewish establishment and the New York intellectuals. Like his fellow Chicagoan James T.Farrell, he wrote realistically, and at time unflatteringly, of his people. The Old Bunch, a massive novel that traced the progression of young Jewish Chicagoans from 1921 to 1934 — the year of Chicago’s “Century of Progress World’s Fair” — did not please the Jewish community leaders of Levin’s time. It was, as he described it in In Search, “preached against in the temples and described in some of the Jewish press as a degradation of our people . . .”

The Jewish intellectuals did not accept Levin because he had become a committed Labor Zionist after living for long periods on a kibbutz in Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s, a time when the Jewish intellectuals of New York were enamored by Marxism and perceived Zionism as mere nationalism.

Levin was an honest writer and honest man, however, who deserved better from both the Jewish community and its public intellectuals. The Old Bunch, in particular, is a novel that should be read as by contemporary readers, for how it confronts rather than sentimentalizes the Jewish present and past.

In 964 pages, Levin writes about some dozen young Jewish Americans who seem to have jettisoned the Jewish immigrant experience and entered adulthood not knowing enough about Judaism or America. Levin’s young characters have been shaped by American popular culture (the novel opens with their departure from high school in 1921, at the height of the Jazz Age) — by songs, styles, activities, and attitudes that are inimical to Jewish life as it was once lived.

It may be difficult today to appreciate how precarious Jewish life in America was before World War II: how embarrassed and even ashamed so many first-generation Jews were of their immigrant parents, how tenuous was their connection to Yiddish culture, though they had heard Yiddish in their homes, and how desirous they were to embrace American popular culture.

Levin takes us to the West Side of Chicago, a step removed from the Maxwell Street Ghetto of these characters’ parents and grandparents, who are, with few exceptions, laborers and marginal business people. They have prospered enough to move toward or into the middle class, and their children, on the verge of adulthood, are in rebellion. The girls bob their hair, pet in the backseat of cars; they all listen to jazz and do not listen to immigrant parents. Too many of them have also adopted the racism endemic to Chicago.

Yet, unlike James T. Farrell’s earlier Studs Lonigan, with which The Old Bunch is correctly compared, Levin’s book shows the possibilities of growth and change. The bunch are not static characters. Like real human beings, they have the possibility of learning from their lives and becoming wiser and more compassionate, as well as the negative capacity to stay the same and decay. In showing this range of human possibility, Levin makes a permanent contribution to Jewish-American literature.

Other classic Jewish youth characters are frozen in time. We can see young David Schearl in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as forever the victim of his cruel father and protected by his loving mother in Lower East Side childhood tableaux. We see Daniel Fuchs’ young man in Summer in Williamsburg forever living a Depression-era Brooklyn summer defined by his sensitive and sympathetic perception of immigrant and first-generation Jewish Americans — which is where that fine book starts and stops. Likewise for the Bronx apartment of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing: One cannot imagine his characters having a real life once the play ends. But Levin’s characters, who are in their early 30s as the novel ends — at a time when 30 was equivalent to being 40 or older old today — have gone through real change. Levin demonstrates that the painful passages of marriage, divorce, and parenthood are not endings but beginnings.

The idealistic attorney, Sam Eisner, is caught in a nightmare marriage with his beautiful but striving wife, Lil. Eisner will divorce and leave her after what is, for him, “the last straw”: when she and her friends mock the Passover seder. The maid brings in a ham, and when Sam looks at his son, “glancing across at the book in Lil’s hand” he “suddenly remembered the Hebrew words: ‘Mah nishtanoh halaylah hazeh?’ as he had used to say them, awed, and the grave answering intonation of his grand father.”

Sam is pulled back into the present to hear his son, in English, ask the question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” to his friend at the table. “Because this is April 4,” Phil answers, “and every other night is another night.”

“Their guffaws rattled the glassware.”

As Sam stands to leave his table, his wife states: “Are you crazy? Disgracing me before my best friends?” Sam leaves with “words . . . flashing, as though he were reading them on an electric sign, on and off, on and off: ‘This is where I get off. This is where I get off.”

Sam has made a choice that unveils his character but does not finally define him. He is heroic to leave his wife and turn his back on her money – yet not visiting his son is not the action of a hero. Sam Eisen, as created by Levin, is a full character, who still has a life to lead.

Similarly, the medical student Mitch Wilner, who will become a doctor, realizes, when traveling outside of Chicago to the Mayo Clinic, how little he really knows about the United States and how limited his neighborhood experience has been. Mitch realizes also that medical science itself has just scratched the surface of knowledge, and that becoming a doctor is only a first step in his adult life.

Then there is the sculptor Joe Freedman — Levin’s self-portrait — who is in Palestine, without the girl he loves, amid the heroism of Jewish settlers risking their lives to build a Jewish state, when his father dies. At first Joe wonders: “And if he should die now, what would his young life have been but a failure? He had failed with Sylvia, he had failed with his work, only here perhaps the thing he had made, rugged and as yet roughly finished, could stand.” Then Joe comes to a realization of young he is: “[L]aughingly, like a sudden breeze against his cheeks, he realized he had no need to rid himself of anything. He could possess, embrace, big! . . . He wanted to end, when he was just beginning.”

Joe Freedman’s homecoming to Chicago reveals to him what his deceased father, who owned a flophouse on South State Street, was all about: morality and honor. “He was the best guy on the street,” one Irishman says. “Your father was the best friend I ever had, boy.” “It became clear to Joe,” Levin writes, “how his father had been, in the dregs of South State Street, among tubercular whores, pimps, beggars, bums . . . simply a good Jew.”

A Black friend who worked for Old Man Freedman wants to sing “ Eli Eli” at the memorial. Joe agrees, but his sister is horrified. “Mrs. Freedman heard them arguing. ‘Let him, let him,” she declared. ‘He was a good friend of Pa’s. So long he worked for him.”

“ . . . John stepped to the casket and began the heart-throbbing Yiddish song. His voice was full of sorrow. Sniffles were heard throughout the room.” Death, then, is not an ending but the beginning of Joe Freedman’s understanding of his father and of what real manhood entails.

Levin should have rank as a modern American-Jewish writer who began what was so eloquently expanded upon by Saul Bellow in books like Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift, and Philip Roth in Patrimony and American Pastoral: the creation of Jewish characters who are not entrapped in their parents’ ghetto, who have freedom and choice, yet are brave enough to repossess at least a portion of their parents’ Jewish ideals.

Levin knows that their choices are not easy ones: whether or not to identify with the suffering of the Jewish people, and with the building of a Jewish state in Palestine; whether to seek love and real fulfillment in marriage as opposed to status and security; whether to see African Americans as fellow sufferers or to embrace American racism. Many of his characters do not respond heroically, in fact, because Levin’s intent was to confront human nature as it is.

Still, he is an advocate. He tells us that we can find our Jewish identity not only in Orthodox religion. He tells us that to be Jewish is to be cognizant of our history and to lead a moral life connected with the Jewish people. He tells us that we have the obligation, at any age, to become something authentic rather than retreating into conformity — whether it be the conformity of the Jewish establishment or of the bohemian Jewish counterculture.

Levin argued for the growth that comes when we learn to speak for ourselves. The Old Bunch is a document still pulsing with life, still vital, nearly 75 years after its publication.

Marek Breiger has published over 60 essays, short stories and poems dealing with Jewish-American life and literature. His work has appeared in Jewish Currents, Midstream, and J, and his essay on multicultural America is included in the anthology, Where Coyotes Howl and the Wind Blows Free, University of Nevada Press.