I would argue that to fully understand the more junior, and more celebrated, Roth of American letters, to comprehend clearly the complex, rebellious, and often loving relationship between father and son that Philip Roth constructs repeatedly in his fictions, one has to understand Henry Roth and his generation of Jewish Americans. One has to understand Henry Roth’s characters in Mercy, especially Ira Stigman’s father, utterly cowed by the world of goyim, and Ira himself, whose unease and obsequiousness, whose sycophancy before American goyim, is what Philip Roth takes aim at in books like Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. And one has to understand the complex interplay between Chaim Stigman and his son. Ira’s engagement with the world of Gentiles, with Edith Welles and the bohemians of Greenwich Village, demonstrates extraordinary social progress from the vantage point of his father, who, when not slavishly serving Protestants of one stripe or another, pointedly avoids them. But Ira’s integration into a broader America is characterized by the outsider’s feelings of inferiority and subservience that Philip Roth’s autobiographical avatars would simply not abide. From Roth to Roth, then, we can assess the wildly changing dynamic of Jews in America, and American society more broadly, as it shifts from a nation that shuns immigrants, and Jews in particular, to one that embraces and celebrates them. The progression from Roth to Roth is the very same that allows us, with Mercy of a Rude Stream, to finally drop the designator “Jewish” from “Great American Novel.”
MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM
VOLUME I: A STAR SHINES OVER MT. MORRIS PARK
TO LARRY FOX
“SO HERE’S A HAND MY
TRUSTY FRIEND.”
I have ventur’d,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride
At length broke under me, and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me.
Not to dare quibble with peerless Will, I still question how ’tis that his little wanton boys on bladders are first descried swimming in a sea of glory, and lastly being swept away by a rude stream — which suggests a torrent, not a sea, unless of course an ocean stream, like the Gulf Stream, but that’s scarcely rude. Tide, the alternate word, might have been more exact, but not nearly so felicitous.
Also I would like to observe that while his use of the word mercy is ironic, mine is not. It is literal. The rude stream did show me Mercy.
PART ONE
I
Midsummer. The three incidents would always be associated in his mind, more durably, more prominently than anything else during that summer of 1914, his first summer in Harlem. How remarkable, too, that the coming of Mom’s kin, the move to Harlem, and the ominous summer of 1914 should all have coincided — as if all his being and ways were undermined by the force of history disguised in the simple fact of the accession of new relatives. A thousand times he would think vainly: If it had only happened a few years later. Everything else could be the same, the war, the new relatives; if only he could have had, could have lived a few more years on the Lower East Side, say, until his Bar Mitzvah. Well. .
It was in August [Ecclesias, or m’aiutate], the pair of newspaper hawkers charged into 115th Street bawling headlines in Yiddish, dissonant and confused. Each vendor toted a portentous accordion of Yiddish newspapers slung from a leather strap across his shoulders. “Wuxtra! Wuxtra!” each bellowed: “Malkhumah!” followed by a garble of Yiddish. The eight-year-old Ira had just come into the front room where his grandparents were seated next to the windows in the shade of the awnings, enjoying a breath of fresh air. Like them, his attention was drawn to the shouting below, and he looked down into the street for the cause. Beneath the window, the sun glared on the torrid sidewalk, shimmered on the black macadam. And the street, so lethargic and quiet until a minute ago, was now disturbed by two men flushed crimson roaring a hoarse gibberish of which only one word was intelligible — and repeated and repeated: “Malkhumah! Malkhumah!” War! Out of neighboring doorways of houses and stores came a scattering of buyers, some hurrying after the yammering pair of vendors, others waiting for them. The buyers frowned at the headlines, displayed them to one another, spoke, gesticulated, called up to people leaning out of windows.
“He cries war,” said Zaida.
And, “Woe is me,” said Baba.
“What is that coin I see them paying for the newspaper?” Zaida asked.
“I think it’s a nickel, Zaida,” Ira answered. “Five cents.”
“This kind?”
“Yeh.”
“Run, child. Fetch me one.” He handed the nickel to Ira, who with coin in hand sped down the two flights of stairs to the scorching street, pursued the vendors, still bawling their wares. He proffered the nickel; the newspaper was whipped out in exchange. And with the hectic cry still pursuing him, Ira raced back to the house, mounted the stairs with eager haste, and came panting into the front room.
“Indeed, war,” said Zaida after a glance at the lowering Yiddish headlines. “They’re slaughtering one another again.”
“Who?” Baba said.
“Austria and Serbia.”
“Oy, gevald!” Baba groaned. “My poor daughter. My poor Genya, and with child again in the midst of that peril. The Lord protect them. The Lord have mercy on them!”
“Madmen! Destroy! Destroy! Nothing else will suffice,” Zaida fumed. “Fortunate, we escaped in time from that charnel house. Praise His Holy Name.”
Thus the Great War came to Harlem: roaring news vendors hawking warm newsprint in the hot street; the diffident youngster offering a nickel to the sweating, red-faced herald of disaster. .
II
It was July of that year, still one month before the outbreak of war. Mom’s immediate kin were due to arrive in America in another few days. From the little hamlet of Veljish in Austria-Hungary, whence they had set forth, they would soon take up residence in Harlem. Their apartment, a large one with six rooms, only two flights up, and supplied with steam heat, electricity and hot running water — and even striped awnings above the two front-room windows — was located in the middle of the block — in the middle of 115th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues. It was called in Yinglish a shaineh b’tveen, meaning — literally — a lovely between. It was not only a thoroughly Jewish and congenial block, but one most conveniently located to shopping as well. Just east of it was the Jewish pushcart district that found shelter under the wide steel overpass of the New York Central Railway on Park Avenue. There the immigrants could haggle freely in Yiddish with the peddlers. The apartment also had the additional advantage of being across the street from the apartment of Tanta Mamie and her family (undoubtedly that was another reason why Ira’s two Americanized uncles, Moe and Saul, had chosen the place). Mamie could speak to Baba or Zaida, or one of her immigrant siblings — and they to her — from window to window, without anyone leaving the house.