The Blessing and the Curse by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

“DESCENDANTS OF THIS IMMIGRANT, YOU DO NOT grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America; no such place exists.” If Cynthia Ozick had been in the Broadway audience on the opening night of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, in 1993, it’s easy to imagine her nodding in agreement at this sentence from the play’s first speech. For most American Jewish writers, America is the great reality, and it is Jewishness that exists only in a doubtful fashion—as a memory, an obligation, a sentiment. Ozick, with her long historical perspective, sees America as merely an episode in a much longer Jewish story.

To the audience just embarking on the epic journey of Angels in America—which is composed of two plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, and takes eight hours to perform—it might seem that Kushner is going to agree. This pessimistic verdict on the American Jewish experience is delivered by a rabbi at the funeral of a very old Jewish woman, Sarah Ironson—one of the last remaining members of the immigrant generation, “the last of the Mohicans” as he calls her. The passing of such a woman, and of her whole cohort—“pretty soon . . . all the old will be dead,” the rabbi reflects—invites stock-taking. As the twentieth century nears its end, it is natural for a Jewish writer to ask whether the transplantation of Jewish life to America has been a success, and what price has been paid for it.

One way of tracing the evolution of American Jewish life is through names. In his eulogy, the rabbi lists the names of Sarah’s grandchildren—Lesley, Angela, Luke, Eric—and recoils at their foreignness: “Eric? This is a Jewish name?” For the rabbi, the adoption of such an Anglo-Saxon name is a sign of the way assimilation has erased Jewishness. But the irony is that the rabbi’s own name—Isidor Chemelwitz—is equally foreign to Jewish tradition. If Isidor sounds like a Jewish name today, it is only because, like Irving, so many American Jewish men adopted it as a substitute for “Israel.” From the beginning, as Abraham Cahan knew, Jewish life in America has consisted of adaptation. There is no such thing as purity or permanence, in names or anything else.

This impossibility of fixity is one of Kushner’s central themes. The rabbi’s opening speech proposes two contradictory ways of thinking about Jewish immigration to America. He lauds it as a heroic endeavor of a kind that the comfortable descendants of Sarah Ironson can never share: “Such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist.” At the same time, however, the rabbi derides this voyage as delusive, a change of place that failed to produce a change of character or destiny. Ashkenazi Jews, he claims, remain Eastern European on the inside: “Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl.” America claims to be a melting pot, where immigrants are remade into something distinctively new, but for the rabbi it is a “melting pot where nothing melted.

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