Author’s Introduction

Biographical Statement for “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” (1944)

MURIEL RUKEYSER

I was born in New York, and I always loved the city. I remember an association test in school; the name “New York” was given, and the others responded “stone,” “big,” “crowds,” “high.” I thought “home.” But home did not mean ease and a cottage. It meant clash and growth. My father is a businessman—a salesman really, the member of a group that shifts in society according to the period—and during my childhood and adolescence he was in the building business, sharing responsibility in the fierce skyscrapers whose stone climbed up the frames of steel, where short fire was flung and caught by the riveters—sharing excitement in the implacable cranes that dug sand, in the roads leaping out from the city, even in the horrible real estate developments whose jerry-built walls would lean before a strong wind. I thought of my father as a builder. He was helping to make New York. Even the sidewalk I played on, in front of an apartment house like a huge trunk, was partly made by him.

It is true that we have to reckon the generations of the Jews according to their wanderings. Most of the younger Jewish writers in America are the children of immigrants, and I am not representative of that generation. It has the qualities which Margaret Mead points out as “second-generation”—split with the parent culture, leaning over backward to be “American” at its most acceptable.1 My father’s cousin recently stood up at a Town Hall meeting and said, needlessly, “I am an American.”

My parents did not migrate from Europe, but from America. My father came to New York from Wisconsin, where his grandfather had gone in 1848. He was brought up among the Western stories—Hill putting the railroads through, Juneau who went to Alaska.2 His mother had gone to a parochial school before there were any secular schools. His family was large, with many cousins as well as brothers and sisters, and he made most of his friends inside the family, but left as soon as he could. My mother came from Yonkers, which was then a rather English town on the Hudson, and had not yet become an industrial offshoot of New York. Her sisters and brothers, and she herself, were going through an anti-religious reaction against their studious and improvident father. The young man my father and the young woman my mother had no cultural resources to strengthen them. There was not a trace of Jewish culture that I could feel—no stories, no songs, no special food—but then there was not any cultural background that could make itself felt. My father had reacted even further from religion after an early tragedy, and art seemed not to mean anything to him. Julius Caesar was the only written work he ever mentioned. His friends were of several religions, and so were his business associates. His partner in business was an Italian, an enthusiastic pioneer for fascism here and in Italy.3

There was no mark of Judaism in my childhood home except for a silver ceremonial goblet, handed down from a great-grandfather who had been a cantor, and a legend that my mother’s family was directly descended from Akiba.4

I went to religious school automatically. Once there, I was excited, not by the digests and easy versions of Jewish history or by the smattering of prayer book Hebrew, but by the Bible itself in English. And all this time, I had no idea of what a Christian was. I knew that our maids were Christian, and all the governesses my sister and I ever had were Christian. I did not know what a Jew was, nor that the term could be used in contempt. Once it had been shouted, but to a bunch of us who were ringing doorbells and running, and we knew we could expect scolding if we were caught at that. I was told never to say the name “Jesus”; I knew that there was something about Christians that had color and tenderness and a child in it, and that suffering of some sort was bound up with all of that. But what I knew of my religion was confined to the trip on Sunday morning across the Park to where the Temple stood, its pale green copper dome rising over the little round lake where other children sailed boats, and where the trees flowered pink in Spring.5

Then, suddenly, out of a need or sadness of her own, my mother turned to religion. She cannot be said to have turned back, for she had never known anything like this impulse and response. There was a sudden new insistence, and its force was sharply felt in my family. I began to go to Temple with my mother, instead of to the Museum, and I went every Saturday for seven years. They were years in which I was learning through hostility. I was having a “sheltered” childhood, and the fact that I played with street-gangs and knew about the prostitutes on the Drive and the house across the street and the chauffeur’s private life were breaches which escaped my parents.6 There were a few sets of books at home, but after I had gone through these, I read whatever the maids recommended. This was the sheltered life, this was a life of comfort. All I knew was that it was not comfortable for me. I was beginning to care about a set of values which poetry was giving me. School could back up some of this; but there was nothing at home or in the Temple to answer me.

I think that many people brought up in reformed Judaism must go starving for two phases of religion: poetry and politics. The sermons I heard were pale and mechanically balanced talks. I grew up among a group of Jews who wished, more than anything else, I think, to be invisible. They were playing possum. They shrank away from the occasional anger of the rabbi, and said that such a man ought not be in that pulpit; they were the people who read Sokolsky’s column at breakfast, and agreed with him every time he said that Jews should be quiet and polite, and should never protest; they were the people who felt that Hitler would be all right if he would only leave the Jews alone; they were, later, the people who told van Paassen he was crazy to worry about the Jews in Germany and Poland.7 They supported big charities. They gave generously of their money. Some of the women even gave their time. But they wanted a religion of reassurance; they listened to the muted organ, and refused to be involved in suffering that demanded resistance, and refused to acknowledge evil. If they had a mission as a responsible and inspired people, they did not want it. It was enough to be Jewish. Charity was about the most they could give; not struggle; they would neither approach the source nor make the connections.

There was one place where this was done, for me; and that was in the Bible. I sat under the shadowy dome during the drone of the watered-down sermon and the watered-down liturgical music, and I read the Bible. Its clash and poetry and nakedness, its fiery vision of conflict resolved only in God, were true to me, no matter what I was coming to believe about the reality of the world or power or divinity or death or love. The Bible was closer to the city than anything that was going on or could possibly go on in the Temple.

Now it is much later, and I am being asked questions about my heritage and my writing. But it is not late enough; it is more than ten years since that time, and I have begun to come a little closer to the source and the connections. But just begun. I have moved around this country some, South a few times, west to California, north into Canada. I have lived in the Middle West and Mexico, and once I went to Europe. I have seen Scottsboro and Gauley Bridge, had good years at College, and looked for my first jobs in the middle of the depression. I crossed the frontier into Spain on the first day of the war, and stayed long enough to see Catalonia win its own war and make peace, a peace that could not be held. I have had a government job in wartime, with a division that was undermined from the beginning, making war posters for American distribution. And all the time I have been writing poems, and after each trip I have come back to New York.

I do not know how far I am representative of any group in Jewish life. I was brought up without any reason to be proud of being Jewish, and then was told to be proud; without any reason for shame, and then saw that people were ashamed. I was a fat child, and hated that condition until I grew up and grew into my skin. I saw people feeling toward their Jewishness as I felt toward my size. But I never had that. I saw my religion sharply divided into three divisions: there was the dogma, the ethic, with which I wrestled; there was the poetry and fire, a deepening source of power to me; and there was the organized church, which I saw as torpid and conservative, and which I repudiated. The chief pressures against me, and against what was coming to be my work and belief, came from torpor and conservatism—or from fear, from active reaction, as in the person, again, of my father’s cousin, who began to want me to change my name, so that it would not so much resemble his own.8 But these people were narrow, on the side of narrowness; whatever grew from the fact that I was Jewish, I would have to live, I knew, for the other side.

My themes and the use I have made of them have depended on my life as a poet, as a woman, as an American, and as a Jew. I do not know what part of that is Jewish; I know I have tried to integrate these four aspects, and to solve my work and my personality in terms of all four. I feel that I am at the beginning of that attempt, too. Jewish references have come into some of my poems—the strong cry of the Shema, the raw, primitive blast of the Shofar, the Friday candles, the tragic migrations, modern tortures and the Warsaw ghetto, Joel and Ezekiel (in terms of John Brown), images started in me by the poetry of the prophets in the English Bible. I have always accepted the fact that the treatment of minorities is a good test of democracy, or any other system; I do not believe that is a particularly Jewish idea. I have wanted Jews, and everyone else, to have social equality anywhere in the world. On the way out of adolescence, I searched, as others do, for ancestors. I felt, then and now, that if one is free, freedom can extend to a certain degree into the past, and one may choose one’s ancestors, to go on with their wishes and their fight. But I do not think that Jews are any more responsive to any of these ideas than are Christians. I am not afraid of allies in anything I may undertake, and I would work for my few beliefs with anyone who is willing to work for them.

To live as a poet, woman, American, and Jew—this chalks in my position. If the four come together in one person, each strengthens the others. Red-baiting, undercuts at the position of women, anti-intellectual and anti-imaginative drives such as Congress has recently been conducting—these are on the same level as the growing storm of anti-Semitism.

One questions oneself when all these attacks arrive; and one looks at the Jews. The Jews I knew as a child, the Jewish professionals who were able to get out of Europe and come here as refugees, the Jews who could put up with fascism as long as it left them alone, the Jews who objected to a poster against discrimination because it mentioned Jews and Negroes together. The Jews that so many Christians, fighting fascism and its implications, look sideward at. And then one thinks of the men and women in the Warsaw ghetto, standing as the Loyalists stood in Spain, weaponless against what must have seemed like the thunder and steel of the whole world; one thinks of the men and women, Jews moving freely in Russia; one thinks of the men and women, planting Palestine and taking a fierce oath never to put down their arms.

To me, the value of my Jewish heritage, in life and in writing, is its value as a guarantee. Once one’s responsibility as a Jew is really assumed, one is guaranteed, not only against fascism, but against many kinds of temptation to close the spirit. It is a strong force in oneself against many kinds of hardness which may arrive in the war—the idea that when you throw off insight, you travel light and are equipped for fighting; the idea that it is impractical to plan and create, and that concrete construction and invention are the only practical things, apart from killing. Organized religion has not been able to take a strong stand about these things, any more than it has been able to stand with the Jews in Warsaw, or against the disguised Fascists at home.

But the conflict enlarges and grows, with one’s own life and writing swept up in it. And the imagination moves, the spirit opens, one knows again what it is to be Jewish; and what it will always be at its best in one’s life and one’s writing: memory and fire and poetry and the wandering spirit that never changes in its love of man.

(Contemporary Jewish Record, 1944)