In History's Grip by Kimmage Michael;

Author:Kimmage, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Initially, the Newark trilogy’s three protagonists do not see history as “no reason,” if they see history at all in their youthful reckonings with life, if they see history as more than an archaic garment to be dropped, the vestiges of Jewish life that make less and less sense in America, on the one hand, or the cloak of blackness that never suited Coleman Silk, on the other. Nor was their Newark, with all its ethnic and racial balkanization, a city that bore the traces of historical disaster. It was never a beautiful city, it was no place for aesthetes or political utopians, but it was a city that could be tied to the tradition of American boosterism, a city made vibrant by economic growth, by the labor of its citizens, by the enterprising spirit that had attracted inventors and entrepreneurs in the nineteenth century. Thomas Edison brought his American genius for science and business, which promised greater comfort and prosperity, to Newark. In this Newark, history was reasonable, whether or not it was a fantasy, a Chamber of Commerce promise or an immigrant’s dream. Newark was a productive city rooted in the American republic. When Franklin Roosevelt called for an “arsenal of democracy,” outlining America’s purpose in World War II, he could have pointed to Newark, which would enthusiastically lend its factories to the war effort and its residents to the war. Yet “no reason” had found its way to this very place and, once entrenched, “no reason” made itself at home in Newark. For Newark’s blacks, “no reason” was more clearly visible, or visible earlier, than for its Jews. Yet for all three protagonists, there is little in their Newark childhoods to anticipate a hurricane of “no reason” coming from nowhere.

When history reaches for the Swede and Ira, it works through the family. The Swede’s immersion in “no reason” starts with his daughter. By choosing to act on the historical stage, Merry will turn the history of her family inside out. Instead of traveling ever further from poverty, Merry takes her family from civilization to barbarism and from decency to crime. She embarks on her journey from Old Rimrock, the moneyed home of the Levov family, and travels back to Newark, where the Newark-born Swede is forced to see that history is pain or that history causes pain, that the house of history is one where suffering and loss are welcome, frequent guests. Parroting Weathermen clichés, Merry is more accurate than she knows when she promises to bring the Vietnam War to America, to her community, to her home and family. In Ira’s case, the roughness of McCarthyite denunciations, his history, enters his home and finishes off his home life. His wife, Eve, uses Ira’s past against him, not the murder Ira had committed as a teenager in Newark, his real crime, but Ira’s involvement with the Communist Party—nothing very serious, if enough to land Ira in McCarthy’s net. Eve’s memoir, I Married a Communist, is a false

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