Читать книгу If I Am Not For Myself - Mike Marqusee - Страница 10

An’ here I sit so patiently Waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of Going through all these things twice.

Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside

of Mobile with the

Memphis Blues Again”

“One should never judge a book by its cover, but in the case of former President Jimmy Carter’s latest work, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, we should make an exception,” declared Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman in 2006. “All one really needs to know about this biased account is found in the title.”¹

As Carter discovered, coupling the word “apartheid” with Israel is a quick route to getting branded an anti-semite. The campaign of vilification mounted against Carter—familiar to supporters of Palestinian rights but extraordinary in that its target was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President—confirmed how determined the Israel lobby is to rule this analogy out of bounds. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the largest organization of rabbis in the US, declared that “use of the term ‘apartheid’ to describe conditions in the West Bank serves only to demonize and de-legitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.” (For good measure it also accused Carter of “attempted rehabilitation of such terrorist groups as Hezbollah and Hamas.”)² Eager to distance the Democrats from Carter’s critique of Israel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced: “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression.” Pelosi seems to believe not only that all Jews support Israel but that Jews by nature are always politically correct, uniquely shielded from the fractures and vagaries of history. If the generalization she had made had been a negative one, the racist nature of her logic would have been obvious and would have been condemned. But since she flattered the Jews, and backed Israel, the Anti-Defamation League wasn’t interested.

The more I travel and read, the more analogies I discover, and at the same time the warier I become of all analogies. For an analogy to do its job, there have to be clear distinctions between those features that are and those that are not analogous. One has to examine context and proportion. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it is full of echoes, some revealing, some misleading.

Attacks on what has been dubbed “the new anti-semitism” (an anti-semitism associated with the European left in particular) have focused on the use of what are deemed to be inappropriate analogies, which are interpreted as inherently anti-semitic. Curiously, this argument is usually linked to the further charge that critics of Israel reveal their true, anti-semitic bias when they “single out” Israel.

The European Union Monitoring Committee on Racism and Xenophobia has published a “working definition” of anti-semitism which declares that “anti-semitism manifests itself” in “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as well as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”³ Former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky defined “the new anti-semitism” by applying what he calls the “3D test”: “demonization” (comparing Israelis to Nazis), “double standards” (measuring Israel by different yardsticks than are applied to other countries), and “delegitimization” (denying the Jewish right to a state). Berlin Technical University’s Center for Research on Anti-semitism characterized the new anti-semitism as a critique of Israel in which the Jewish state is “negatively distinct” from all others. Irwin Cotler, the Canadian Justice Minister, claimed that acceptable criticism of Israel ends and anti-semitism begins when critics deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, when they “Nazify” Israel, or when they “single out Israel for discriminatory treatment in the international arena.”

To single something out unfairly is to deny its analogous status: for example, Israel’s crimes in relation to crimes committed by other regimes. This “double standard” is said to be a telltale sign of anti-semitism or, in the case of Jews, self-hatred.

Now I strongly agree that there must be a single standard when it comes to human rights and dignity, crimes of war, violence, occupation, and discrimination. Here I’m with the Prophet Amos, to whom the Lord showed “the plumb line” against which all, including Israel, were to be measured. However, in working out where the plumb line falls, determining that single standard of human justice, it is necessary to engage in the process of analogy. And on this the Zionists place a priori restrictions.

Israel demands exemptions: on refugees’ right to return or compensation, on seizure and settlement of land acquired by military conquest, on torture and assassinations, on the indiscriminate use of violence in densely populated areas, on nuclear proliferation. These exemptions are embodied in hundreds of US vetoes on Israel’s behalf at the Security Council. So who is really doing the “singling out”?

Of course, Israel is not the only offender in today’s world. The US and Britain are both guilty of unspeakable crimes in Iraq; Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and far too many other states are committing crimes that need “singling out.” But if no protest against a particular crime is to be admitted unless all crimes are equally and presumably simultaneously protested against, then there will be no protest at all, against any crimes. This is an acute form of moral relativism masquerading as its opposite. The upshot is to minimize or relativize Israel’s crimes and to attempt to delegitimize those who would judge Israel by universal standards of human decency.

Anti-Zionists, of course, do reject the idea that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. In doing so it’s said that we are “singling out” Jews by denying their right to the statehood that others enjoy. Here the Zionists move from objecting to inappropriate analogies to insisting on analogous status with other national groups. A rejection of that particular analogy, and the preference for other analogies—other readings of history—is ruled anti-semitic, either in motive or effect.

“Why should Jews be the only people denied the right to national self-determination?” The historical selectivity lies with the accusers. There can be no doubt that very large numbers of Tibetans, Western Saharans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Chechens, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Mizos, Nagas and Assamese in India, Aceh in Indonesia, Pushtoon, Baloch, and Sindhis in Pakistan, Ibo people in Nigeria, not to mention Palestinians, believe their right to self-determination is being actively denied, not merely in theory but in practice.

By all the usually accepted definitions—language, culture, territorial contiguity and widespread national consciousness—the Kurds have long qualified as a nation, but none of the great powers has ever recognized Kurdish national aspirations. As a key backer of Turkey, the US helped suppress Kurdish revolt, and only discovered the cruelties inflicted by Saddam on the Kurds of Iraq when it became useful to do so. The subsequent suborning of the Kurdish leaders in Iraq by the occupation has, in turn, made it clear that even in such a relatively clear case, national self-determination throws up awkward questions, not least in regard to cities with mixed populations, like Kirkuk. Even just claims for national self-determination can be turned into pretexts for ethnic cleansing. At the moment, Kurdish politics is marked by cavernous divides, and a free and independent Kurdistan seems to be on no one’s agenda. Are those Kurds who support the pursuit of autonomy, not nationhood, within a larger national framework, those who consider themselves Iraqi nationalists and support resistance to occupation, “self-hating Kurds”?

In Sri Lanka, there has been a long and violent struggle for an independent Tamil homeland, but that demand is not supported by all Tamils, and many democratically minded people do not see it as a wise, just or feasible solution to the island’s ethnic conflict. Does that make them anti-Tamil racists? The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam think so, and seek to eliminate, physically, those “self-hating” Tamils who advocate another path. Like Zionism, the Tamil Tigers’ brand of Tamil nationalism secures vital support from a diaspora imbued with a memory of racism, in this case the institutional and sometimes violent racism of the Sri Lankan state.

Were those who opposed national self-determination for Afrikaaners and Zulus in post-apartheid South Africa “singling out” these ethnic groups by denying them this universal right? Both groups could boast their own language and culture, and the Afrikaaners could boast a distinctive religion. Yet their claims were universally rejected by liberal and left opinion. They were recognized as undemocratic, exclusivist nationalisms, either preserving or seeking to establish ethnic privileges. In the end, the bulk of the South African population decided that only majority rule across the country, not separatism, could guarantee minority rights. World opinion was in complete accord, yet to advocate that self-same solution for Palestine is deemed—officially—anti-semitic.

None of these examples, it will be argued, compare precisely with the Jews. After all, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus all have their own countries, why not the Jews? But what about the Sikhs? There are 23 million Sikhs globally, of whom 15 million live in the Indian state of Punjab. In the 1980s, Sikh militants seeking to convert Punjab into a separate Sikh homeland, Khalistan, fought a war with the Indian state (one of whose casualties was Indira Gandhi and the thousands of Sikhs murdered in Delhi in revenge for her death in 1984). Although the Khalistan movement received support from the Sikh diaspora, the demand divided Sikhs in the Punjab itself, and no longer enjoys widespread support. No one seriously claims that to oppose Khalistan—and wish to remain within a secular India—is tantamount to being anti-Sikh.

There are currently no Protestant or Catholic or Hindu or even Muslim states that legally privilege members of those religions in the way that the state of Israel privileges Jews. There are Muslim states that give privileges to Islam and to Muslim citizens, but there is no Muslim state that offers all Muslims worldwide a homeland, or that endows foreigners with full (indeed privileged) citizenship, simply because they are Muslims. While religion may affect citizenship rights, it is not the determinant—which is birth or long residence within the borders of the state. Paradoxically, although the Jewish state is said to belong to Jews everywhere, it does not define Jewishness by religious observance. It claims to be a secular state, unlike those Muslim states that require public observance of specific forms of Islam.

The founder of Pakistan, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, envisaged his Muslim homeland as a secular state; he was not personally devout and his contempt for mullahs was very much in keeping with the Labor Zionists’ contempt for rabbis. His Two Nations Theory defined Muslims in the subcontinent as a separate nation with the right to a separate state in a defined territory where they would comprise the majority. Was it Islamophobic to oppose the Two Nations Theory? That would make Islamophobes of the Congress, Gandhi, Nehru, the entire Indian left, not to mention the majority of Indian Muslims, who chose not to emigrate. Jinnah’s secular promise was not borne out by history. The birth of the state was accompanied by murderous ethnic cleansing (on both sides of the border). Over the following decades, minorities were persecuted and mullah-ism of the sort Jinnah disdained ran rampant; like a number of Israel’s founders, he would be appalled at the role clerical obscurantism plays in his country today. The marriage of the secular and confessional under the banner of “nationhood” is invariably uneasy, and in this sense Israeli experience is not unique.

Nations, nationalism, and national self-determination are the building blocks of the modern world, powerful social realities, but they remain analytically elusive. Nationalisms run the gamut from exclusive to inclusive, from territorial, transparent and democratic to transcendental, opaque and authoritarian. There are racial, linguistic, cultural, and religious nationalisms, often in combination. There’s Nazi blood-and-soil nationalism; there’s French Revolutionary nationalism; there’s an internationalist nationalism—preached by Garibaldi or Castro or Hugo Chávez or an earlier generation of Palestinian and Arab leaders. Where does Zionism sit in this constellation? The measurement must be—as for all other nationalisms—the democratic content of the national demand and the national identity in question. (When the Nazis annexed Sudetenland, Hitler cited in his defense the German-speaking Czechs’ right to national self-determination.) In many situations it is unclear where the balance lies. But in the case of Zionism the verdict is dramatically stark: Zionism involves, unavoidably, a denial to others of democratic and equal rights. It is an obscurantist claim dressed in the garb of secular modernity, underpinned from the beginning by naked power.

If there were as many states as there are ethnic identities, or even putative nationalities, the UN would have to be enlarged several times over. Crucially, even in the most clear-cut claims for national self-determination, there is no right to build a state on land already inhabited by others, or to sustain an ethnic majority in a state through the dispossession of others. It is here that Zionists make for Israel an exceptional claim among the nations. Their case cannot be sustained by analogy, so they delegitimize the process of analogy.

However, there is, even here, one analogy they do claim: that between Americanism and Zionism. Like Palestine, North America was a land without people for people without land. Both Americanism and Zionism are settler-colonial ideologies infused with utopianism—and racism. Both the Israeli and the US state are presented as embodying extra-territorial ideas. The “city on the hill” is an outpost, and in latter days an embodiment, of white European civilization. American exceptionalism and Israeli exceptionalism are mirrors and partners. Like the Zionists who founded Israel, the Protestant settlers who founded the USA were fleeing from and supported by an empire. They dispossessed the indigenous people while declaring them the beneficiaries of their good intentions. Among the charges the Declaration of Independence makes against King George III is that he has blocked “new appropriation of lands,” failed to encourage migration from Europe, and sided with the “merciless Indian savages” against the “inhabitants of our frontiers,” namely, the white settlers seeking to expand the colonial domain. The American Revolution, like the Zionist struggle against the British mandate in 1945–47, was partly a response by settler-colonialists to imperial restrictions on their right to dispossess natives.

I’ve heard this analogy used to justify the Nakba, the Palestinian “catastrophe” of 1948: terrible things happened to the Native Americans but these are the casualties of progress, and cannot be undone. Every people acquires its land, at one point or another, by conquest, so why should the Jews be any different?

But that raises the less comfortable case of another settler-colonialism, white South Africa. When it comes to the apartheid analogy, what’s decisive is not Carter’s legitimizing of it but the fact that it arises, spontaneously and irresistibly, to the lips of black South Africans visiting the Occupied Territories. What they see there—the Jews-only roads, the confinement of Palestinians in camps and villages, the checkpoints, the harassment, the second-class citizenship based on ethnicity—reminds them graphically of the system they suffered under and struggled against. The Afrikaaners were immigrants from Europe with a religious-nationalist consciousness whose racist assumptions about their right to the land were underpinned by superior European technology and weaponry. White settlers acquired control of the state thanks ultimately to British imperial power, with which, like the Zionists, they were often nonetheless in conflict.

There is at least one major difference between Israel and white South Africa, though it’s not one that favors the former. Under apartheid, the dominant whites used the black population as a source of cheap labor. In contrast, Zionism has aimed to remove the Palestinian population, to replace Palestinians with Jews. And this has been evident from what Zionists called “the conquest of labor” in the 1920s (when Jewish settlers campaigned for the non-employment of Palestinians), to the Nakba of 1948 and its aftermath, to the current calls within Israel for “transfer,” the final expulsion of the bulk of the Palestinian population.

As for the Nazi analogy, it is indeed indiscriminately used, as is the word “fascist,” applied too readily to anyone who is authoritarian and racist. This is name-calling and it’s no substitute for analysis. The prime culprit here, however, is not the left. In my lifetime, every US military action, from Vietnam to Iraq (and now the threat against Iran), has been justified with analogies drawn from World War II. Every enemy is a new Hitler (Qadaffi, Noriega, Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe, Ahmadinejad), every call for peace is Munich-style appeasement, and every challenge to Israel is an existential threat akin to that posed by the Nazis—from the days of Nasser down to Hamas and Hezbollah.

Of course, the Nazis and the holocaust represent an acme of inhumanity, an evil so enormous that any comparison seems dubious. Yet if we remove them from history and treat them as sui generis, we debar ourselves from learning and applying the broader lessons. When the world discovered the extent of Nazi barbarism in the wake of World War II, the cry was “Never again!” We cannot turn that cry into a reality, we cannot ensure that nothing even remotely like this happens again, unless we are permitted to draw appropriate analogies from the experience. Where there is Nazi-like behavior, a Nazi-like idea or a Nazi-like threat, then it is right that the comparison is noted. Is it permitted, however, to compare anything to the holocaust? Its industrial and ideological nature and scale seem to make it unlike anything in the annals of genocide. But even these salient features occur only within the broader phenomenon of Nazi imperialism, and Nazi imperialism has to be placed within the still broader phenomena of imperialism, racism and colonialism. That’s where the story of the extermination of European Jewry belongs and it does not in the least belittle or relativize the magnitude of its horror to say so.

League tables of atrocities serve no purpose, or, rather, the only purpose they serve is to allow scope for the apologists for atrocities. The holocaust, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Native Americans and Australians, the centuries of “untouchability” in South Asia, the Belgian Congo (where, according to Adam Hochschild’s revelatory book King Leopold’s Ghost, some 10 million Africans may have perished in little more than a decade), Stalin’s Gulag. All these are distinct historical phenomena, but share in common an institutionalized inhumanity on a mass scale. All are unspeakably, irredeemably horrific; they exemplify that which every human being has an absolute obligation to resist and not to aid, in any way, even by omission.

For many anti-Zionist Jews, one of the key analogies is between Jewish and Palestinian experience—exile, persecution, racism. “We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing,” writes the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. How can anyone study Jewish history and not draw the larger analogies with all those oppressed or displaced by empires, great and small? Palestinians themselves are alert to these analogies. They speak of the Palestinian “diaspora.” The separation wall is daubed with the words “ghetto” and “concentration camp.”

In the late forties, EVM started but never finished a memoir he titled “So You Want to Be a Politician?,” the fruit of his years pursuing the ambition articulated at the end of his letter to Dr Paul. He recalled:

I broke in in ’21. The local Democratic Tammany machine had sold a bill of goods to Nathan Straus Jr to run for state senator. The district was so solidly Democratic that Hiawatha could have won. Straus was the antithesis of what a politician should be—aloof, too rich and too sensitive a stomach. He served one term and obligingly folded his tent.

Straus was the Princeton-educated scion of the German Jewish family that owned Macy’s department store and the jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss. One uncle had been a congressman and another an ambassador. Unusually for wealthy American Jews of the period, they were Democrats and Zionists. To EVM, Straus was a “boob,” one of that breed of charitable reformer who dabbled in politics but failed to engage with the nuts and bolts of political organizing.

Why did the professed idealist choose to join up with Tammany Hall, the New York Democratic Party machine notorious for patronage and municipal plunder? Partly it was a strong attraction to hands-on politics, and a belief that he could succeed at them, and make something of himself through them. Ed’s brother-in-law was a Republican, as were many Jewish businessmen and professionals at the time, whereas most working-class Jews in New York—strongly influenced by the Bund—voted Socialist (the Lower East Side had sent a Socialist to Congress in 1914), and the Jewish-dominated unions were Socialist-orientated. A solidly Democratic Jewish vote in New York was in those days unimaginable. The Democratic Party was the creature of Tammany, and Tammany was still, certainly in the eyes of many Jews, Irish-dominated. It was, in EVM’s phrase, “the ahrganization.” But here he believed his name and his “hybridity” could be turned to advantage. He could stake out a position for himself as a liaison between Tammany and the Jews. It never worked out that way. At one point he resorted to forming—and having himself elected chairman of—a kind of front group called the John E. McCarthy Association, for which John E., an elderly Tammany time-server, provided merely a name. Later, EVM recalled his years as a Tammany foot soldier:

A saga of doorbell ringing, writing envelopes—speaking on street corners—making the club so the leader would see you. Watching the Law Journal to see if the Judge you broke your fool neck for in November remembers your name in July for a bit of patronage. . . law committees, publicity work, ghosting speeches.

The Tammany EVM joined was a well-oiled machine, but it was also a machine nourished by countless concrete links to the city’s working-class communities, and under the leadership of Alfred E. Smith it was turning to the left. Smith was the son of Irish immigrants, a boy from a poor family who started off in politics running errands for the Tammany District leader. EVM campaigned for him for Governor in 1922. In a precursor of the New Deal, Smith introduced labor laws, safety regulations, workers’ compensation, and rent control. He also stood up against the renascent Ku Klux Klan and spoke out against the 1924 Quotas Act, which blocked immigration from eastern and southern Europe (admitting only 124 people a year from Lithuania, but 28,000 from Ireland). The Democratic Convention of 1924 was held on Tammany’s home turf, at Madison Square Garden, and Smith was the organization’s candidate for the presidential nomination. While the urban ethnics backed Smith, the Protestants from around the country despised him (some turned up in white hoods and sheets). The convention was deadlocked for 99 ballots before Smith and his opponent, three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, withdrew and the nomination was handed to a nonentity named Davis. For Tammany this was a bitter blow, especially for young Smith men like EVM. That November, Davis duly lost the state to Coolidge while Smith was easily re-elected Governor.

The EVM who plunged into Tammany politics in the early twenties is hardly visible at all in the diaries and private letters of the period. Here he appears a romantic introvert, quoting Omar Khayyam and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe: dreaming, posturing, hungering, spewing out overwrought prose about dawn and death and love and the stars, self-pitying but at times delirious with the excitement of an unknown future. In 1922, he puts what he calls an “epilogue” on the first page of a new diary: “The Dreamer wants to put at the end of his story the beginning. The Dreamer still hopes. The epilogue of shattered romance is really the prologue of a new desire.” In a long entry bemoaning his special fate—“burdened with a dual ancestry” in “a world of hate”—he muses:

There doesn’t seem much contentment in having a strict individuality. I have always gloried in being different, each and every mood of mine that partook of eccentricity was sponsored to become a habit by the thought that in it lay inanimate some future potentiality that made for success. I still sense the wall, feel the sting of the word “different” and loathe those people who hate their memories of a ghetto and yet place others in a prison of mental abhoration . . . One cannot be both Jew and Christian. One can’t forget the Inquisition by remembering that Christ was born a Jew. It is possible at times to feel relieved and read scientific treatises on the similarity between the races, but it is but flattering for the moment.

In a primeval wilderness, he suspects, a man and a woman could meet and love each other without regard to heritage, “But God, they tag you here from birth!” To Jews, he belongs “out there”—in the non-Jewish world—but to gentiles he belongs “back in the ghetto.” “Not only am I a member of an outcast race, but an outcast in the race.” Those he resents most “have put a sign on their door: ‘thou mayest eat and drink with us, but marry into our lives, never.’” And here he seems to be referring to Jews, not gentiles: “I can’t blame them though. Perhaps if I saw a troop of Black Hundred kill my relations, that barrier of blood would antagonize me even if it reached but an infinitesimal quantity.” Yet, typically, he finishes this entry on a note of defiance: “Israel has lived and been revitalized because of being pressed almost to extermination. I glory in your hatred. I mock your fooling childish fancies. I am nearer God than you. I am of more strains of life.”

There’s something of the same oscillation in his jottings on sex, love and marriage. “I have not been a victim of sex,” he boasts. “That one big bogey has no terrors for me. The so-called wild woman hasn’t a chance.” Yet he fears “the mistake of falling in love before being loved.” He pursues the object of his desire but meets only frustration: “Month after month to look forward to the ultimate consummation of one’s desires—and then to lose the prize!” But when he does succeed in the chase, his reactions prove ambivalent: “It was wonderful the sensation of having someone say, I love you. It was wonderful to hold someone in your arms—and defy the world to take you from her side. But it’s not always the bolting of doors that keeps the thief away.” Reflecting on the lesson of this failed relationship, he vows never to lose respect for his future wife, whoever she may be: “intimacy should not breed contempt.”

He seems to have met Olga and begun courting her in 1923. They married in 1925. Between these two dates EVM wrote a series of letters to other women friends (Lilla, Mutchie, Mamie, and Mollie); the letters are flirtatious, hinting at past intimacies, or his own desire for intimacy. Sometimes the tone is pontificating: “Too often among the Jewish race the old talmudic and rabbinical idea exists that a woman is man’s inferior and just a breeder of children.” Sometimes it is whimsical: “I am in love, kid, and really so and methinks that my chase is over. I am wondering if I shall enjoy a domestic existence and shall forget the wanderlust. It is amusing how quickly I change, and yet don’t you think me adaptable?” He feels the hand of destiny—“an unknown publisher of works is giving me material to live that perhaps may be good copy some day to write”—but rues his foibles and continuing frustrations:

I have tried to analyze myself and discover why I should detest to do things that ordinarily I should do, work for instance. I think were I never to have been pampered from the beginning I might now have succeeded in making my brain accomplish something. But ceaseless nagging and having people tell me that my views were all wrong changed my decision. My Jewish ancestry betokens work, success, brains . . . which parent can I attribute my idealism to, which my impracticality? Both equally and neither.

Writing to a fraternity brother he protests bitterly at having been mocked after showing friends something he had written in his diary. “Don’t you see that there are two races in me? Two widely diversified strains. Were I a boob I wouldn’t think about these things and all would be well.”

Finally, there are two letters from Ed to Olga, in both of which he analyzes in some detail the reasons why they were not meant for each other. The first appears to be written immediately after a break in their courtship:

I am sorry that we could not have found a more congenial way in which to end our friendship. I almost said love but love typifies immortality, and as this ends it cannot be love. I appreciate your frankness. It repays me for my own to you . . . I feared this ending and I shall tell you why. I recall first kissing you. You said you had never kissed in return before. That was enough to thrill even so experienced and so youthful a man as myself. Then I remember your face, it appeared as though you were conscience-stricken. I never had seen anything so ghastly.

The decision to end the relationship seems to have been Olga’s, and she seems to have told him that she could see “no future” in him. “Perhaps you are right,” he muses, then springs to his own defense:

I never have felt the need of practicality. Is a man a man who would refuse a loan without interest to a friend? That is your practicality . . . I am not of the multitude . . . more’s the pity. Yet were I of the multitude I could forget the taste of your lips, your arms about me . . . This then is the end. Please do not feel hurt, and as I told you, have no tears, for tears have air waves, and my heart is a radio. I may be of a most diversified inheritance, but I have always believed in God, who, what or why, unlike you mortals that are sure, I am not sure.

But this was not goodbye. They renewed their relationship, and after some months of indeterminate courtship, EVM wrote again: “The distinct and different point of view that you hold towards life in general makes it utterly impossible to even have a starting point, where at least there might exist a common ground to reason upon.” That might sound conclusive, but it’s only the beginning of the letter. He reflects on his past:

I never seemed to be right. Maybe I never shall be right, but here is where our paths separate. My family never thought well of me, I was different. My mother alone has faith, and when you coldly tell me you think I am doomed to failure you belong to that pack that has ever snarled at me and whom I hate since I can first remember.

Olga complains that in over a year of promises he has shown her “nothing material”—presumably in the way of making a living and supporting a family. “Can’t you fathom my soul that maybe never will see anything material on this earth?” he replies, then rues the absence of “a counterpart of femininity that could mate with my own temperament and see the sky when I see the sky.” The ostensible purpose of the letter is to assuage Olga, to repair a breach between them, but its main thrust is self-justification. EVM mingles promises and threats, emollience and defiance.

I was and still am willing to drop my cloak of poetic aspirations towards that which may be aesthetic and non-productive and turn down your path. Don’t you see that sacrifice I was willing to make for you? And yet you call me selfish . . . Olga don’t you realize that you and I have not lost each other because there is no money but because we can’t agree? A saint couldn’t stand the constant bickering I have had to and the Lord knows I am no saint! I undertook law as a profession and I think I will do well in it, supplemented by such writing as I shall begin when I am better equipped. I cannot work for another. Nothing can make me . . . Other people! Other people be damned. Life is but a spark that blows out when least we expect it to. Life must be enjoyed. Not that I crave social activity, merely freedom of thought. This is my ultimatum.

The two of them ignored their better instincts and in January 1925, at the West End Synagogue in Manhattan, they solemnized “in conformity with the laws of the State of New York and the rites of the Jewish faith” what my mother described as “a marriage made in hell.” Is it really that hard to reconcile the streetwise Tammany hotshot with the moody aspirant poet? They were both graspings at something EVM wanted to be, needed to be, could not be, at least not completely. Likewise his marriage to Olga. What drove him to ignore all the obvious objections, the predetermined failure of the enterprise, was his need for what she represented: normalcy, convention, a firmer place in New York’s ethnic mosaic. Olga was a respectable young woman from a respectable and unmistakably Jewish family. In marriage to her, EVM sought release from that sense of never fitting in that had haunted his youth.

Soon after their marriage EVM, now twenty-five years old, began his long and singularly unsuccessful career in private legal practice. The young couple moved to the Bronx, where EVM joined the local Democratic Party, which was run then—as it was for another twenty-five years—by Ed Flynn, the Boss of the Bronx, who became the national chairman of the Democratic Party and a confidant of Roosevelt. For EVM, Flynn became a byword for the hypocrisy of organized politics, but also an alter ego, one of those larger-than-life public figures against whom EVM compulsively measured himself. In the Bronx, he later recalled, “Everybody and his cousin gets a letter. They usually read like . . . ‘Dear Vince: Bearer is an extremely intelligent, etc. see what you can do for him.’ Signed ‘Ed Flynn’ . . . But there is a code in the initials which means ‘be nice—but no job’ or ‘this guy has something on us—put him to work.’”

The only note pertaining to his life in the second half of the twenties is a typewritten jotting made years later, referring to a particular night in August 1927:

I remember walking up the Grand Concourse. I was on my way to a well-known social-political clubhouse. When I arrived the place was crowded, especially the bar . . . Well, you know the spirit of camaraderie that makes for good bar fellows. There he was leaning against the bar, slightly tipsy.

“C’mon fellers,” he bellows. “Have a drink on me—in five minutes they’ll blast those lousy wop bastards’ souls to hell!”

Factually he was partly right. At precisely eleven that night, Sacco and Vanzetti were due to go to the chair.*

That’s why I had been walking around. That’s how I came to be at the club—couldn’t sleep . . . I refused to drink with him. He became abusive. I told him off—and plenty. Everybody was in on it. I sobered that barfly up that night. I guess I was pretty well labelled, socially and politically, thereafter.

But it took him another ten years to make his formal break with the Democratic Party.

* Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born American anarchists convicted and sentenced to death for murder in 1920. The trial was conducted amid anti-radical and anti-immigrant hysteria, and was widely considered a miscarriage of justice. An international campaign in their defense, including the high-profile advocacy of future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, failed to halt their execution.