Book Review : A Special Perspective on U.S. History

Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience by Howard Simons (Houghton Mifflin/A Marc Jaffe Book: $22.95, 418 pages)

“I set out to trap memory, however imperfect, in electronic amber,” Howard Simons announces at the opening of “Jewish Times.”

During a period of several years, Simons interviewed about 227 men and women, almost all of them “Jews who still identify themselves as Jews.” (Two exceptions: Republican Sens. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and William Cohen of Maine.) He presents these interviews in a single, almost seamless volume that amounts to a vast oral history of the Jewish people in America in the 20th Century.

Simons, a former managing editor of the Washington Post and now curator of the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard, tends to favor articulate Jewish men and women in law, government, politics, academia and, especially, the media. (He also seems to favor the Eastern Seaboard, and--curiously--Burlington, Vt.)

From the Famous

So we hear at length from famous people: television journalist Lawrence Spivak (“My mother, who was very sensitive about her age, kept dropping three or four years with each census, so in the end she was almost my age”); Harvard professor Daniel Bell (“Humiliation, I’ve always felt, is one of the strongest mainsprings to Jewish radicalism”); former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg (“The big defect I found in the Jewish stories is they concentrated on intellectuals, and most Jews were not”); and radio talk-show host Larry King (“The name was changed to King in 1959, when I started in radio. But the birth name was Larry Zeiger. My mother . . . sent me a birthday card: ‘Dear Larry King.’ She signed it ‘Love, your mother.’ ”)

We also hear from less-famous (but, in a curious sense, no less familiar) men and women, each one telling a story that captures an almost mythic moment in the saga of the Jewish community in America.

“At dawn, we entered New York Harbor and there was the Statue of Liberty and everybody just fell on their knees,” a retired Yiddish teacher from St. Louis recalls. “Then all I remember of Ellis Island was a very, very sad place. People just huddled together . . . and they were all afraid lest they be sent back.”

But the stories collected in “Jewish Times” are not merely emblematic--this is the firsthand testimony of witnesses to history. And sometimes--if only rarely--the testimony turns out to be an unexpected revelation of the most intimate emotions and experiences of the teller’s life.

A Latecomer

For example, Simons allows a woman from Burlington, Vt.,--a fortysomething baby boomer who came late to observant Judaism --to explain her own lively and growing commitment to her Jewishness: “We open . . . our doors to anybody who wants to come to our house on Shabbes. Then, after the meal is over . . . we sing z’mirot like in a yeshiva, banging on the table.” She boasts of her youngest child, who is “a very religious Jew” (even though she sends him to a Catholic day school): “He’s 9. He wears tsitsit. He can daven like an adult.” But, as she talks, we begin to perceive the war that rages in her heart: “The rest of the people see us as zealots,” she says. “What we do makes people feel guilty.” Later she confesses: “My older son’s already told me I’m going to hell. But I understand that. I’ve committed so many sins and broken so many Halachot that I’m doomed.” (I wondered: Did she say all this with a straight face? Does she realize that “sins” and “going to hell” are hardly a central theme in Jewish theology?) At last, she confesses a kind of terror of her own observant 9-year-old: “I hope he won’t reject us. I don’t know. Who knows? You never know what kids will do.”

(By the way, Simons provides a brief but convenient glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish terms: Z’mirot are Sabbath songs. Tsitsit are fringed undergarments worn by observant Jewish men. Davening is praying. Halachot are Jewish laws.)

Of Varying Lengths

Some of these interviews are only a few sentences; some are whole chapters. But each one has been edited and polished by Simons to promote “continuity, comprehensibility, and readability.” He has succeeded in making the book readable, but--I fear--he has sacrificed much of the spice and savor of the spoken word: “Jewish Times” is prose with a high polish. As a result, the aging zeyde (grandfather) from the Old Country and the young Harvard lawyer, the furrier and the United States senator, all tend to sound alike.

One more small complaint: For a book of such polish and high purpose, “Jewish Times” has some oddly inelegant chapter titles--”Go West, Young Jew, Go West,” for example, or “An Officer and a Jewishman.” Someone must have thought these misbegotten puns were funny. I cringed.