The Ordeal of Civility

Rooting Out Roundaboutness

Even today when Cynthia Ozick writes her story “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” with Edelshtein of Minsk enraged at the American-born sons of suburban Jewry, she depicts assimilation as a seduction to the values of courtly love: “Mutes, Mutations. What right had these boys to spit out the Yiddish that had bred them, and only for the sake of Western Civilization? Edelshtein knew the titles of their Ph.D. theses: literary boys, one was on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the other was on the novels of Carson McCullers.”¹ And Edelshtein’s great rival Ostrover, who has such a good press, whose Yiddish “translates well,’ and who draws crowds to his poetry readings at the”Y," gets the ultimate put-down: “Ostrover was courtly.”² Edelshtein in a letter writes: “Please remember that when a goy from Columbus, Ohio, says ‘Elijah the Prophet’ he is not talking about ‘Eliohu hanovi.’ Eliohu is one of us, a folksmensh, running around in secondhand clothes.³ Theirs is God knows what. The same biblical figure, with exactly the same history, once he puts on a name from King James, COMES OUT A DIFFERENT PERSON.”⁴

The late Susan Taubes noted that “the Old Testament has had the benefit of the most sublime spiritualization⁵ through centuries of Christian interpretation.”⁶ Bourgeois-Christian love is just such a “spiritualization” of coarse sexuality. This literal level is the unspiritual level; it is the coarse, “given” Old Testament. It is like the id, understood “carnally” (carnaliter); but, as a “preparation” for the New Testament, it is read “spiritually” (spiritualiter). To refine, in psychoanalytic tradition, is to repress, to “aim-inhibit.” “The repressed impulse, which was now unconscious, was able to find means of discharge and of substitutive gratification,” writes Freud, “by circuitous routes and thus to bring the whole repression to nothing.”⁷ These byways and divagations of lust and rage must be found out in their secret places and exposed to the full light of day and human reason.

This “Enlightenment” streak in (especially) the early Freudian movement is caught at the full tide of its animus against the embourgeoisement of the Jew by the heroine of Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing. Of Sophie Blind’s father, Rudolf Landsmann, M.D., a leader of the movement in Budapest, we read:

“It is wrong to teach a child to say thank you!” Papi always said, raising his index finger if anybody in the family or the maid or the shopkeeper asked her to say thank you. Omama was no exception. Sometimes Papi stopped in the middle of a sentence to correct himself, just as he stopped to correct anybody else. Papi belonged to a movement dedicated to rooting out hypocrisy and roundaboutness whose leader was a man called Freud. When you asked for something you mustn’t say, “Do you have …” or “Could you give me …” or “I would like to ask you …” No, there was no getting around Papi; Sophie wouldn’t get that piece of chocolate till she said, “Give me …” She cried. “Why is it so difficult?” Papi laughed. “I want some chocolate,” she said sullenly. “Is that so?” Papi said and walked on, pokerfaced…. Her father believed that the discovery of this new science was the most important event in human history; he was doing something that would change all mankind.^{8 9}

The first Freudian parental generation was at considerable pains to see to it that their children remained untempted by the “forbidden fruit” of the Diaspora. Sublimation, courtesy, romance—none of these had an inner rationale in Freudianism. Sublimation was stopgap, furtive, evasive, hypocritical, roundabout subterfuge. But gradually, as the children of the pioneers began breaking the taboo and discovered trayf—“the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and desire”¹⁰—enormous inner conflicts were set going and cultural tragedies occurred.

In Berlin, at the time, the circle of Georg Simmel’s interests included the handling of precisely such nonkosher stuff as was under Viennese ban. Simmel (1858-1918) explored the trayf: salon society, sociability, coquetry, Goethe, discretion, manners, the stranger, conversation, Christian love, tact, social games, (social) parties, hierarchy, the aristocratic motive, faithfulness and gratitude, fashion, adventure, “the esthetic significance of the face” (1901), social importunity,¹¹ the pathos of ruins. If Freud in Vienna was writing sentences that began, “But if the patient observes the rule [of free association] and so overcomes his reticences…,”¹² Simmel in Berlin, intermarried, “emancipated,” was interested precisely in the rules of reticence and how they could be observed.

Simmel leaves the mainstream of the Diaspora intelligentsia and becomes the “father” of “the phenomenological family,” of those Diaspora intellectuals who, sick unto death of unmasking the goyim, decide to abstain, for a time, from the ivresse des grandes profondeurs in order to take on faith the system of appearances goyim take at face and that are constitutive of their everyday lives. The “phenominological family” in- cludes Husserl, Scheler, Landsberg, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Kraus, Max Jacob, the Steins (Edith, Husserl’s secretary; and Gertrude, Leo’s sister), Berenson, Bergson, Susanne Langer, Wittgenstein, Schütz, Gurvitch, Gustav Ichheiser, and their present-day intellectual heirs: Maurice Natanson, Richard Gilman, Susan Sontag, and Harold Garfinkel. More will be said in another place about this “family” of Diaspora intellectuals.¹³