Books to read,films to watch: February 2009

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Islamic Enlightenment

* BOOKS
* FEBRUARY 14, 2009

The Islamic Enlightenment
Recalling an era when science and scholarship were prized

The House of Wisdom
By Jonathan Lyons
Bloomsbury, 248 pages, $26
Aladdin's Lamp
By John Freely
Knopf, 303 pages, $27.95
The first step in the construction of Baghdad 13 centuries ago involved casting a horoscope. The caliph al-Mansur, whose name means "the Victorious" -- and who was one of the founders of the mighty Abbasid dynasty -- called on the services of a Persian astrologer, who determined that the most propitious date for breaking ground for the city would be July 30, 762.

Istanbul University Library/The Bridgeman Art Library

A 16th-century depiction of astronomers at the Galata observatory in Istanbul.

The mile-wide site, with its four districts and numerous gates and towers, was marked out using geometrical principles gleaned from Euclid. Another four years would pass before the last mud-brick of the high triple walls was set in place. Still, this was city planning at its most efficient, based on time-tested methods. For the inner wall, which may have risen to more than 100 feet, the exact number of bricks required was calculated by mathematical computation, again derived from ancient sources.
The palace where al-Mansur and his successors nestled behind their bodyguards lay within the innermost wall. They would reign for half a millennium, but not even the stoutest walls could protect them. In 1258, the Mongols razed Baghdad and murdered the last ruler of the Abbasids. The caliph himself, "the shadow of God on Earth," was sewn into a sack and trampled by the conquerors' horses.
In two books about the vibrant intellectual tradition of early Islamic culture -- John Freely's "Aladdin's Lamp" and Jonathan Lyons's "The House of Wisdom" -- both authors make the founding of Baghdad central to their accounts. In particular, they focus on the establishment there of the famed House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma in Arabic), where respect for learning and scholarly achievement far outstripped anything known to the "West" of the time -- and even now stands in stark contrast to the theologically constricted learning of later Islam, up to the present day. Though the books overlap at many points, they could not be more different. Mr. Freely's "Aladdin's Lamp" is brisk and ambitious, indeed overly so. Mr. Lyons's "The House of Wisdom" is sophisticated and thoughtful, if at times given to special pleading.

Ericka Burchett

Mr. Freely begins with the ancient Greek philosopher Thales and concludes in the 17th century with Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution. But Mr. Freely's focus is consistently directed to Islamic contributions to the development of modern science -- contributions that he believes to be neglected in most accounts. Certainly the Abbasids -- along with such rival dynasties as the Umayyads of Spain and the Fatimids of Egypt -- were great promoters of learning. The arts and sciences flourished under their patronage. And medieval Muslim scholars not only assimilated the learning of the ancients but also transformed and extended it.
The House of Wisdom -- a royal library, not a "research institute," as Mr. Freely calls it -- was modeled, in its eighth- century form, on an earlier institution founded by the Sasanians, the Persian dynasty that Arab armies had overthrown a century before. Though holding thousands of Greek and Persian manuscripts, the House of Wisdom was no inert repository. Beginning under al-Mansur and continuing for two centuries, its collections -- containing virtually the entire corpus of Greek scientific and philosophical literature -- would be studied, commented upon and translated, with ever increasing refinement, into Arabic. These translations, later rendered into Latin and Hebrew, would have a decisive effect on Western thinkers, beginning with the Scholastic theologians of medieval Paris and Bologna and culminating in the revival of Greek learning in the Renaissance.
The impetus behind the Abbasid "translation movement" was pragmatic as well as pious. Astronomy was important because its observations made precise time-keeping possible -- essential for determining the times of the five daily prayers and the sacred seasons of the ever-shifting Islamic lunar calendar. Scrutiny of the planets, abetted by Arabic versions of Ptolemy, helped astrologers cast reassuring horoscopes for uneasy caliphs. Translations of works on medicine, logic, mathematics and natural science had immediate practical value.

“Seven years before the earthquake that shook the moral foundations of Crusader Antioch, Adelard surveyed the world around him and pronounced it rotten.
-- Read an excerpt from "The House of Wisdom"”

Mr. Freely, a professor of physics and the history of science at Bogazici University in Istanbul, is good on individual scientists, such as the ninth-century mathematician al-Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra. (Our word derives from the Arabic al-jabr.) Or Ibn al-Haytham, the 11th-century physicist from Cairo who made pioneering advances in optics. Mr. Freely includes lucid diagrams, together with magnificent color plates taken from illuminated manuscripts. But his account is cursory; it has a potted feel, as though drawn from lecture notes.
Worse, it is marred by many errors; names are oddly lopped: He speaks of the literary critic Ibn "Qutayb" or the historian Ibn Abi "Usaybi," but the correct names are Ibn Qutayba and Ibn Abi Usaybi'a. He also misrepresents key works. The 11th-century Persian theologian al-Ghazali did not attack "rationalism" in his critique of philosophers; rather, in his scathing "Incoherence of the Philosophers," he set out to prove that the philosophers weren't rational enough. There are many such errors; thus, "The 1001 Nights," far from being "written" in Baghdad, as Mr. Freely claims, was in fact compiled centuries later in Cairo from anonymous, and largely oral, sources (though some of the stories are, of course, set in a highly fanciful "Baghdad").

Ericka Burchett

Jonathan Lyons tells the same story in a far more reliable way. In "The House of Wisdom," he shapes his narrative around the travels of the little-known but extraordinary Adelard of Bath, an English monk who traveled to the East in the early 12th century and learned Arabic well enough to translate mathematical treatises into English. The astronomical tables that he later devised were based on the earlier work of al-Khwarizmi.
Mr. Lyons's narrative is vivid and elegant, though marred at times by tendentiousness. Medieval Muslims, as he says, did find Europeans uncouth as well as brutal. (Though Mr. Lyons doesn't mention it, medieval Muslims were shocked to realize that "the Franks" were ignorant even of such refinements as underarm deodorants.) Mr. Lyons is right to remind us of the spectacular savagery of the Crusaders who waded knee-deep in blood through the Holy Sepulchre and of the embarrassing inability of Europeans to tell time once the sun had set.
But he hammers the point too insistently, as if to elevate Islam by diminishing European civilization to crude farce, and at the very time when it, too, was beginning to launch its own projects of philosophical speculation and scientific inquiry. Indeed, his own example of Adelard of Bath makes this plain. Mr. Lyons denies that "Islam is inherently hostile to innovation" but fails to note that the very word for "heresy" in Arabic is bid'a, literally "innovation." Nor does he mention the fierce resistance to certain kinds of science within Islamic culture, even during its more enlightened era. "Greek medicine" was long viewed with suspicion, and it took three centuries for Aristotelian logic to be accepted, over the strenuous objections of pious clerics.

“When I first visited Miletus, in April 1961, it was completely deserted except for a goatherd and his flock, whose resonant bells broke the silence enveloping the ruins through which I wandered…
-- Read an excerpt from "Aladdin's Lamp"”

In the best account of the Abbasid translation movement, the classic "Greek Thought, Arabic Culture" (1998), the Yale scholar Dimitri Gutas calls the movement "epoch-making" and deems it as historically significant as Periclean Athens or the Scientific Revolution. As both of these books show, he is justified in doing so. The long-ago destruction of Baghdad didn't spell the death of scientific endeavor in Islam: Within a year the Mongol ruler Hulagu himself had an observatory built under the supervision of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, a Persian philosopher-scientist of genius. But a long decline did set in. Despite grand beginnings and momentous accomplishments, the Islamic house of science, if not its House of Wisdom, has stood almost empty for centuries since, and nobody can explain quite why.
Mr. Ormsby is the author, most recently, of "Ghazali: The Revival of Islam."

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Lincoln Monuments

Illustration by Christoph Niemann

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The Many Faces of Lincoln

February 8, 2009
Reviews of New Lincoln Books
Lincoln Monuments
Reviews by WILLIAM SAFIRE

Begin by resisting a wave of adulation in the deluge of books occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, a bicentennial celebration that follows by only a few weeks the inauguration of America’s first black president. We can appreciate the symbolism of Barack Obama’s decision to be sworn in on the Great Emancipator’s Bible, but we need not canonize Lincoln as our “secular saint,” not just murdered but “martyred.”

His is a life more worthy of detailed study than dutiful reverence. Fortunately, in the dozens of biographies and histories published in the 200th year since his birth, we have excellent new ways to tunnel through the mountain of myth that, even generations ago, had been built around his contradictory personality. His gentle humor and love of anecdotes were overcast with bouts of what was then called “the hypo” or melancholia.

Though a member of no church, Lincoln meditated profoundly on the inscrutable justice of God. Though a family man and a forgiving soul, he refused to attend his own father’s funeral. And despite his modest protestation that he was controlled by events, the best of the Lincoln literature of our time reveals that his strong-willed decisions were driven by the unwavering political purpose of his life.

That declared purpose was not to abolish slavery, though he privately abhorred it and campaigned before the Civil War to oppose its expansion westward. For two long years into our national fratricide, he repeatedly disavowed emancipation as his goal because that divisive issue might defeat his overriding purpose: to establish the principle of majority rule in the world’s most daring experiment in self-government by insisting that the whole country abide by the results of its national election.

For someone who wants to brush up on Lincoln, or who feels an urge to introduce a young family member to the practical world of democratic idealism, where best to start? How do potential Civil War buffs get a handle on what can become an enriching, lifelong enterprise?

Before we dive in, a perceptive overview is helpful. James M. McPherson, whose “Battle Cry of Freedom” (1988) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and is the most readable short history of the Civil War, has just written an introductory biography, Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University, $12.95) — only 79 pages, a speedy narrative but no superficial treatment. McPherson cites an example of Lincoln’s skill in molding what he called public sentiment.

In the month after Lincoln took office, Confederate leaders demanded withdrawal of the federal garrison from Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. William Seward, the former political rival Lincoln had chosen to be secretary of state, and several other cabinet members urged the president to give in to that demand in hopes that it would preserve the peace and dissuade other slave states — especially Virginia and Maryland, which surrounded the District of Columbia — from following South Carolina’s lead in seceding. Lincoln’s dilemma: Withdrawal from the fort would show a weakness likely to encourage foreign countries to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. On the other hand, by sending a shipload of United States troops to shoot their way in to reinforce the garrison at Sumter, Lincoln would be blamed by many in the North — especially those who did not believe the cause of abolition was worth civil war — for choosing to start a bloody conflict.

“But Lincoln hit upon an ingenious solution,” McPherson writes. “Instead of sending troops, he would send only provisions — ‘food for hungry men.’ ” The new president sent a message of assurance to the governor of South Carolina “that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition, will be made.” Of course, Lincoln was aware that Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, could not accept that seemingly peaceful gesture of sending only food, because that would appear to cede sovereignty of the port to the Union. Davis ordered Southern guns to fire, thereby suffering the blame for starting a war. As Lincoln had figured, his move not only helped keep European nations from recognizing the Confederacy but also united the divided North.

Manipulative? Of course. That was Lincoln, in his first major presidential decision, pursuing his strategy of preserving the Union at all costs to ensure the relatively untested experiment in majority rule. As George Washington had been indispensable to independence, Abraham Lincoln was indispensable in seeing that independent Union through its existential test. That is why historians keep digging into both their lives, especially that of the more recent and complex Lincoln, for fresh revelations.

Today’s buff-to-be needs the story of a life in a single, well-regarded, hefty but manageable book. What’s the best one-volume “life” in this generation? McPherson recommends A. Lincoln: A Biography, by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, $35), as “the best biography of Lincoln since David Donald’s ‘Lincoln’ (1995).” White’s major new work does cover all the bases, adds newly discovered papers, explores the religious angle and may well be the best “since” the best. But no one-volume life published so far beats David Herbert Donald’s perceptive and lucid work (still selling in trade paperback). When supplemented with a pictorial dimension now provided in Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon (Knopf, $50), by three members of the Lincoln-steeped Kunhardt family (with a foreword by Donald and an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin), such a combination of Donald text and Kunhardt illustration is enough to ignite a lifelong interest in the era that reveals the most about our history.

Most who are beginning that worthwhile journey are probably not ready to undertake Michael Burlingame’s two-volume, 2,000-page, million-word Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University, $125), a magisterial enterprise by a historian whose mentor was David Donald. (A surprise to me: Burlingame is convinced that the famous letter of condolence to the widow Bixby for the loss of what was thought to be five — in fact, two — of her sons was written by John Hay, one of the president’s aides.) It is not likely to be soon overtaken in scope or timeliness, however, because it is scheduled to go online in the spring at www.knox.edu/lincolnstudies. This version, the author promises, “will be updated as mistakes are discovered and new information comes to light.” (Think of that: a “life” that never ends.)

To get a glimpse of Lincoln’s mind actually at work, peruse the official publication of the Library of Congress’s Bicentennial Exhibition, In Lincoln’s Hand: His Original Manuscripts With Commentary by Distinguished Americans, edited by Harold Holzer and Joshua Wolf Shenk (Bantam, $35). It contains photos of the original manuscripts of many of his most famous letters and speeches — often with his handwritten editing, bringing to life his second thoughts — with brief commentaries by 43 modern contributors. My own assignment in that collection was to examine his editing of his first Inaugural Address, delivered after some states had seceded but before the war had begun. The new president promised “my dissatisfied fellow countrymen” of the South: “The government will not assail you unless you first assail it.” (Italics his.) But just before delivery, he took Seward’s toning-down advice, and drew a line though the bellicose caveat “unless you first assail it.”

Removing that provocative phrase was wise. He also agreed with Seward about what had been the final, challenging words: “Shall it be peace, or a sword?” He scrapped that hard line, too, and we can see in Lincoln’s legible handwriting the way he reworked his key adviser’s suggestion of a much more fraternal final paragraph.

Seward’s draft of a peroration began with a stark “I close.” Lincoln changed that to a poignant “I am loth to close,” as if he hated to tear himself away from his audience. (That was an early spelling of “loath.”) His longtime rival from New York came up with lines about “mystic chords” that could harmonize their ancient music “when breathed upon by the better angel” — Seward crossed out the word “better” in his own submission and concluded with “the guardian angel of the nation.” That would have been a most acceptable prose peroration.

The incoming president then took up that musical metaphor and, in a stunning revision, transformed it to poetry with an image of the chords produced by strings of a celestial harp: “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave . . . will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” That was some memorable editing.

A publishing industry chestnut is that the three fields readers are most interested in are (1) Lincolniana (2) medical books and (3) books about the care of pets; therefore, one surefire best seller would be “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” Joking aside, we have a mountain of bicentennial works, many slicing and dicing influences on all the phases of his life and death: relationships with his wife, his admirals, his great and terrible generals, his law partners and secretaries, and supporters and contemporaries, from Frederick Douglass to Stephen A. Douglas — and an account of his escape from assassination in Baltimore on the way to inauguration.

In the blazon of this bicentennial biographical bonanza, several new books are of special interest to readers with a literary bent: one is The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now, edited by Harold Holzer (Library of America, $40). (Besides coediting the aforementioned “In Lincoln’s Hand,” Holzer is also the author of last year’s “Lincoln President-Elect” and the writer or editor of more than a score of other works on his favorite subject.) Contemporaries in “The Lincoln Anthology” who observed the Civil War president include Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an insalubrious atmosphere around the White House”), the humorist Artemus Ward and the class-struggling correspondent Karl Marx. (“Hesitant, resistant, unwilling, he sings the bravura aria of his role as though he begged pardon for the circumstances that force him ‘to be a lion.’ . . . Nevertheless, in the history of the United States and of humanity, Lincoln will take his place directly next to Washington!”) Modern perspectives are supplied by the poets Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz (“Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!”) and novelists from Irving Stone to E. L. Doctorow.

But what of books not being written about our 16th president? I’d like to see an anthology of “Lincoln’s Greatest Mistakes — or Were They?” One chapter: Why did he arrogate to himself the power given to Congress, not the president, to suspend habeas corpus in case of rebellion — banishing the war opponent Clement Vallandigham, preventing Maryland’s legislators from voting for secession, censoring The Brooklyn Eagle and other peaceful dissenters in areas where the courts were functioning? (Defenders’ comeback: the challenge to national security was unprecedented, requiring a commander-in-chief “to think anew and act anew.”) Why did he publicly disavow any intention of abolishing slavery when he had a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his desk drawer? (An answer: Putting abolition first might have divided the North, led to a negotiated peace and neither preserved the Union nor freed the slaves.) Why did this humane leader, undoubtedly sensitive to suffering, replace the casualty-avoiding Gen. George McClellan with a Union general willing to accept and inflict huge casualties to destroy the rebel army? (Reply: He had sworn an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution, and nobody realized at the outset it would cost more than a half-million lives in a population one-tenth of America’s today.) Why did he draft a letter on Aug. 24, 1864, to Henry Raymond, editor of The New York Times, instructing him to “obtain a conference for peace with Hon. Jefferson Davis” — and then decide not to send it? (Reply: It might have split the North, helped the Democrat McClellan defeat the Republican Lincoln’s bid for re-election, probably leading to peace negotiations and a 19th-century two-state solution.)

In that regard, how about another controversial publishing project: “What Would Lincoln Do?” Look ahead a generation or two. For argument’s sake, say that the illegal immigration issue has not been resolved, and a majority of voters of states in the Southwest, feeling inundated and isolated, are moved by a demagogue with a rousing message of secession. If cool reason doesn’t work against such unabashed sedition, do you go to war to preserve the Union?

Or project a different crisis: if today’s moral issues of abortion or same-sex marriage become as nothing compared with the fury of people in the heartland over an explosion of the cloning of human beings in the Northeast and West Coast — as well as the rage of post-Internet bloggers, echoing the Civil War media giant Horace Greeley, who is supposed to have said “erring sisters, depart in peace”— do you dare enforce majority rule at the point of a gun? Or what if a tax-shackled “Generation No” rebels against paying entitlements guaranteed to its grandparents? Or if some new human-rights holocaust is raging while the rest of the world turns away, and a defiant majority of one section of the United States point-blank refuses to participate in unilateral American intervention — do you, as president, defer to that national minority?

Never happen, we assure ourselves; such dire scenarios are as alarmist as a notion of global economic collapse leading to Great Depression II. But daring to think such unthinkable thoughts helps put us inside the mind of a president who chose to lead the nation through what he called, in his 1862 letter to Eliza P. Gurney, the “fiery trial” of civil war (his reference to martyrdom in 1 Peter 4:12). Times change; faced with the choice of “peace, or a sword,” we might not do what Lincoln decided to do; a Lincoln reincarnate might choose otherwise. But by exploring his thought process — sifting the evidence in books and whatever future electronic platforms give us access to his motives and actions — our descendants will be better able to deal with wrenching decisions to come.

Through the nation’s most agonizing crisis, he kept the Union indivisible. He held fast to the majority rule that affirmed the ideal of popular government, which he believed must also lead to the end of human bondage. From examining his shrewd move in molding public sentiment at the approach of hostilities to appreciating his close attention to the weight of each word in his inaugural addresses, we teach ourselves and his successors the hard lessons of political power and moral leadership.

Let us, then (he liked that construction), not wallow in worship of a statue looking gravely down on multitudes from a marble monument engraved with famous lines. The way to honor the hero who did most to force us to stay united is to absorb the ever-better histories that illuminate Lincoln’s character, his humanity, his genius in expression and, above all, his sure grasp of high political purpose.

William Safire, a former Op-Ed columnist for The Times, writes the On Language column in The Times Magazine. He is the author of “Freedom,” a novel of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Mean Streets

Home buyers signed a statement saying they would 'not permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.'

By FERGUS M. BORDEWICH

With the inauguration of the nation's first African-American president still fresh in our memories, it is easy to forget that not that long ago hard-wired racism underpinned communities all over America -- not just in the states of the old Confederacy -- and that acquiring a home was, for black families, a process often fraught with humiliation and danger.

In "Levittown," a vigorous and often surprising narrative, David Kushner journeys into the racially charged heart of what newspapers once trumpeted as "the most perfectly planned community in America." Today Levittown serves as condescending shorthand for suburban conformity. But just after World War II, Levittown, N.Y., and its sister community of Levittown, Pa., symbolized liberation from crowded urban neighborhoods for families whose idea of the American dream was a private home and a patch of grass.

The Levitt brothers -- Bill and Albert -- were both visionaries and brilliant businessmen, a winning combination. "In contemporary terms," Mr. Kushner writes, "they had the kinetic chemistry and renegade brash of a Silicon Valley start-up." They also had a winning idea: By adapting the techniques of mass production to homebuilding, the Levitts brought cheap, well-made homes within reach of returning GIs and the aspiring postwar middle class. They mass-produced concrete septic tanks, made pre-formed plumbing trees and chimneys, and framed entire walls on the ground, then raised each house quickly in place. They installed then-novel amenities such as brand-name appliances, closets with automatic lights and built-in television sets and added carefully landscaped lawns and even a birdhouse painted to match each home's shutters.

Levittown
By David Kushner
(Walker, 237 pages, $26)

Both Levittowns were conceived from the start as complete communities, themselves prefabricated, so to speak, with shopping centers, churches, pools, parks, curved streets for a rural feel and cul-de-sacs where children could play safely. The Levittown customer, declared Bill Levitt, was "not just buying a house, he's buying a way of life." By 1952, the Levitts were building one out of every eight homes in the country. Time magazine dubbed their company the "General Motors of the housing industry."

But there was a snake in paradise: racial segregation. Buyers of Levittown homes were required to sign a statement that declared, in bold capital letters, that they would "not permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race." Like many developers, the Levitts believed that racial integration was commercial suicide.

Mr. Kushner suggests that the demand for housing in the years after the war was so great that the Levitts could have integrated their towns from the start and thus set a national pattern. Instead they capitulated to what they perceived to be Americans' darkest fears. "The plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities," Bill Levitt repeatedly declared.

The core of Mr. Kushner's story focuses on the campaign to desegregate Levittown, Pa., in 1957. He deftly splices together the experiences of two families at the center of what became a terrifying ordeal. Bill and Daisy Myers and their children were educated, friendly, quiet people -- just the sort of folks anyone would want to have next-door -- except that they were black. Their staunchest local allies were Bea and Lew Wechsler, labor organizers and longtime members of the Communist Party. The Wechslers were among the few whites who remained uncowed by the venomous racism that gripped Levittown that summer.

With the support of local Quakers and the NAACP, the Myerses moved into their Cape Cod-style "dream house" on Deepgreen Lane. They got more than they bargained for. Crosses were burned. Mobs waving Confederate flags staked out their home night and day. Rocks were thrown through their windows. Malicious callers rang their phone around the clock: "I will not let my children drink chocolate milk again as long as I live!" one irate woman yelled at Daisy Myers. Threats were made to burn them out. The local authorities refused to intervene. The police, for the most part, claimed that they were helpless to control the mobs. Many residents in fact blamed the Myerses for provoking all the "agitation."

Similar desegregation battles were taking places in many other communities at the same time (including the one in which I grew up, in Yonkers, N.Y.). But Levittown was a national symbol of the good life for all Americans. "The very people of Levittown considered the standoff as nothing less than the fight for the soul of new suburbia," Mr. Kushner writes.

The Myerses' battle to stay in Levittown made national news. When the press began to condemn Levittown as "a disgrace to America," Americans everywhere began to question what kind of postwar communities they had themselves created. In the end, with the state attorney general behind them, the Myerses won their battle to stay. Several of their tormenters were convicted of harassment, and the demonstrations petered out. The mass flight that racist whites feared never took place.

The Myerses suffered no further abuse, but they never felt at ease in Levittown after the summer of 1957. Five years later they moved to Harrisburg, Pa. Their story is a reminder that facing down segregation required from ordinary black men and woman a degree of heroism that few white Americans have ever been asked to exhibit except in war.

Other black families followed the Myerses to Levittown, Pa. -- but not many. Its lingering reputation tended to keep African-Americans away. According to a recent census, only 2.45% of the town's residents were black.

Mr. Bordewich's most recent book is "Washington: The Making of the American Capital."
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11

Yiddish Novel With Tolstoyan Sweep

"The Brothers Ashkenazi" is a pitch-perfect 1936 work from I.J. Singer, an older sibling of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN

Robert Lowell called Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" the best French novel in the English language. So, similarly, might one call I.J. Singer's "The Brothers Ashkenazi" the best Russian novel ever written in Yiddish. The book has the grand sweep of Tolstoy, with a vast and wide-ranging cast of characters, a strong feeling for the movement of history, and, playing throughout, the drama of men and women trapped in the machinery of forces much greater than themselves.

I(srael). J(oshua). Singer, born in Bilgorai, Poland, in 1893, was the older brother by nine years of I(saac). B(ashevis). Singer. The Singers' father was a Hasidic rabbi, their mother the daughter of a long line of famous misnagid (or non-Hasidic) rabbis. I.J. Singer spent his early years in the shtetl of Leoncin and his adolescent years in Warsaw, where he became caught up in the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, movement. As a young man he worked as a journalist in Kiev, where his early attraction to socialism was punctured by the brute realities of the Russian Revolution. In 1934 he to moved to the U.S., where he worked for the Jewish Daily Forward. He published seven books in all, of which "The Brothers Ashkenazi" (1936) is the best known.

The tension between religious and secular life among Jews born into orthodoxy gave both Singer brothers an inexhaustible literary subject. In much of Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction his characters stray from religion and then, after leading lives of dissipation, degradation and disappointment, return to it, where they find a measure of contentment.

Ryan Inzana - The Brothers Ashkenazi

For I.J. Singer things are more complicated. He did not think much of either traditional religion or the secular life of his time, which didn't leave him, as a novelist, a great deal of room to negotiate. Politics taught I.J. the bitter lesson that, however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground upon which they met comfortably was anti-Semitism. The Jew as scapegoat in the dark world of Eastern Europe is more than a leitmotif in "The Brothers Ashkenazi"; it is the underlying moral of the novel. "Don't you know," the wives of the striking Jewish workers cry out to their husbands during a bitter strike in Lodz, "it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding."

"The Brothers Ashkenazi" begins not long after the Napoleonic wars, with the arrival of German and Moravian weavers in the Polish town of Lodz. At first excluded, the Jews gradually insinuate themselves into the town. They began as small-time entrepreneurs, setting up minor factories or sometimes working in their homes with handlooms, putting in long hours and grinding out a living. A handful of Jews worked for large-scale German factory owners, as agents, buyers, managers.

One such is Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, who, soon after the novel begins, is presented by his wife with twin sons, Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem. Abraham Hersh hears the prophecy from his rabbi that his sons will both know great wealth. This prophecy, which will come true, is a disappointment to their father, who would have preferred they be pious and learned.

The brothers turn out very differently, in talent and in temperament. Simha Meir, the first born by a few minutes, is from an early age clever, conniving, a boy and then man concentrated on the main chance. His brother is physically more gifted -- strong, handsome, charming -- a cynosure. Simha Meir is aflame with ambition; Jacob Bunem, less concentrated, is dedicated to easy living.

At the center of "The Brothers Ashkenazi" is the climb of Simha Meir -- who later abandons his religion and becomes Max Ashkenazi -- to dominance over the weaving industry of Lodz. The machinations behind his climb are set out in impressive detail. In the background plays the subsidiary story of the rivalry and estrangement between the two brothers: Simha Meir, in an arranged marriage, is betrothed and marries the love of his brother's life. Later Jacob Bunem marries into a family of vast wealth, a cause of consternation to Simha Meir.

Conflict is the order of the day in Lodz: between brothers, between owners and workers, between rabbis and miscreants, between Russians and Poles, between Gentiles and Jews, between Polish and Lithuanian Jews. Under capitalism man exploits man, an old saying had it, while under communism just the reverse obtains. So it is in Lodz; no matter who is in command, the city is breeding ground for exploitation, with every kind of hatred polluting the air.

"Simha Meir had the guts of a pickpocket," Singer writes. "In Lodz this was the highest compliment." We learn that "justice isn't a commodity in Lodz," and that "Lodz admired nothing more than wealth." With hundred of dab touches Singer personifies the city as the sinkhole of men set loose without any guiding principles or goals apart from that of gain: "Lodz knew that with money you could buy anything." When credit dries up and inflation hits Lodz, Singer notes that "even the whores in brothels and the doctors who later treated their venereal diseases were paid off with IOUs."

Such idealism as Singer allows in the novel is given to the few revolutionaries who appear in its pages, but theirs turns out to be a naïve revolutionism. Nissan, the son of a poor rabbi, exchanges his father's devotion to Torah for his own to Marxism, into which he invests the same unshakeable faith. He lives to see the revolution he fought for turn into a pogrom, with the corpses of Jews hanging from trees. At one point, Nissan thinks: "Maybe man was essentially evil. Maybe it wasn't the fault of economic circumstances, as he had been taught, but the deficiencies of human character."

Strikes, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the invasion of Lodz first by the Germans, then by the Russians -- all are described by Singer, with pitch perfect artistry and pace. Lenin makes a cameo appearance in the novel, as Napoleon does in "War and Peace," and so do the hapless Czar Nicholas and his Czarina Alexandra. The world turns topsy-turvy, with only Max Ashkenazi's dream of industrial and financial dominance remaining constant, until it, too, is blasted, when, having earlier moved his factory to Russia, he is imprisoned in the new Soviet Union, from which he is saved by his long-despised brother. On the brothers' return to Poland, reconciled at last, Jacob Bunem is killed, in an act of anti-Semitic bullying, by an ignorant Polish officer.

"The Brothers Ashkenazi" ends on a pogrom, which sends all the city's Jews fleeing: to America, to the new Zion recently created in Palestine, to less cruel countries than Poland. "Lodz," Singer writes, "was like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices." Max Ashkenazi, intent on personal reform, which he is unable to attain, dies soon afterward.

Masterly, pitiless, this great novel forgoes a happy ending to render instead a just one: The city of Lodz and the characters it spawned get all they deserve.

Mr. Epstein is the author of "Fred Astaire" (Yale University Press).

* MASTERPIECE
* FEBRUARY 7, 2009

Friday, February 6, 2009

Abe as He Really Was

New angles, fresh insights and perennial truths

By JOHN A. BARNES

Feel that you've heard a bit too much about Lincoln in the past few weeks? Barack Obama's remarkable political journey from Illinois to Washington has certainly inspired a lot of Lincoln comparisons. Journalists and Obama supporters alike -- if one may be forgiven the redundancy -- see Mr. Obama as "the next Lincoln" or, more grandly, as the man who will complete Lincoln's quest to redeem America's race-torn soul.

As it happens, Abraham Lincoln is worthy of our interest quite apart from dramatic parallels, real or imagined, with our current political moment. And with the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth (Feb. 12) now upon us, it is a good time to dip into the latest writings about him for fresh facts, surprising angles and familiar truths.

Getty Images

Mathew Brady's photograph of Lincoln in February 1860.

"A. Lincoln" (Random House, 796 pages, $35), by Ronald C. White Jr., is the first comprehensive, single-volume biography of Lincoln since David Herbert Donald's in 1996. Taking advantage of newly available resources, such as the recent publication of the voluminous Lincoln Legal Papers, Mr. White delivers a strong narrative that moves neatly from Lincoln's boyhood in Kentucky and legal career in Illinois to his rise within the Whig Party, his defeat in the 1858 Senate race to Stephen A. Douglas and his election, in 1860, as the first presidential standard-bearer for the new Republican Party and, as it turned out, the country's leader in a time of war.

Mr. White aims at the general reader, not the specialist, and pauses helpfully to define terms ("doughfaces," for instance, are Northerners with Southern sympathies). As Mr. White notes, Lincoln could not have been more unlike most of today's lawyer-politicians, few of whom have spent much time trying cases. He was a grizzled trial veteran who handled contested wills, railroad tax tangles and even murder cases. The experience taught him, Mr. White argues, an appreciation for the other fellow's point of view. Until the Civil War, Lincoln subscribed to Southern newspapers, and he kept reading them in the White House whenever they became available. He refused to lay the blame for slavery exclusively at the feet of Southerners, saying that Northerners would feel the same about the practice if the two populations changed places.

For Lincoln, facts and argument were the keys to winning people over to his point of view. Wary of extemporaneous speaking, he "mastered his brief" instead, assembling his speeches ahead of time and taking care with his choice of words. His first great speech was his address at Peoria, Ill., in 1854 attacking Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed slavery to take hold again in the territories. He wrote the speech himself after doing the considerable investigation into the provisions the act. Unlike most public men today, he had no "researchers" to do his work form him.

Facts might win men's minds; their hearts were another matter. Here Mr. White argues against the common policy of pigeonholing Lincoln as merely an Enlightenment deist. Lincoln's "Meditation on the Divine Will," a memorandum written after the carnage of the summer of 1862 and discovered only after Lincoln's death, shows a man grappling to find divine purpose in the war's violence. Somewhere between the lawyer's brief of the First Inaugural Address and the soaring biblical cadences of the Second, Lincoln discovered that a blend of reason and faith was more likely to persuade his listeners than reason alone.

Lincoln's relation to the written word is the subject of Fred Kaplan's "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer" (Harper, 406 pages, $27.95). Not unlike Allen C. Guelzo, who argued in "Redeemer President" (1999) that Lincoln deserves to be considered a first-rate political thinker, Mr. Kaplan argues that Lincoln deserves to be considered a first-rate American writer. "The novelist William Dean Howells's claim about his friend Mark Twain, that he was the 'Lincoln of our literature,' can effectively be rephrased," Mr. Kaplan writes. "Lincoln was the Twain of our politics."

The statement sounds over-generous at first, but Mr. Kaplan makes a good case. How many American writers, after all, have had their words chiseled in marble and, so to speak, graven in the hearts of their countrymen? Memorizing the Gettysburg Address was once as much a rite of passage in American childhood as memorizing "Old Ironsides" and "Hiawatha."

Any great writer starts as a great reader, and it is here that the young Lincoln began to stand out. The son of an illiterate father and a semi-literate mother, Abraham had little formal education. Reading and writing were simply not seen as important to life in the agricultural world of the early 19th century. Thus began Lincoln's heroic act of self-education. "Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing," his half-sister later wrote; "he was active & persistent in learning -- read Everything he Could."

Which, at the beginning, wasn't much. The King James Bible was his starting point, since it was one of the few books on the Kentucky-Indiana frontier. Its parables and prophecies had little effect on Lincoln theologically, but its rhythms and meter would show themselves later in the "House Divided" speech (delivered on June 16, 1858, in Springfield, Ill.) and in the Second Inaugural. Shakespeare would become a lifelong favorite, with quotations from the plays coming, Mr. Kaplan says, as "naturally to him as breathing."

While Lincoln never lost his love of great literature, the press of the war forced him to widen the scope of his learning to include practical matters. In May 1861, he confessed to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles that he "knew little about ships." Necessity compelled him to learn quickly.

Lincoln actually knew more than he let on, as Craig L. Symonds, a retired Annapolis professor, notes in his splendid "Lincoln and His Admirals" (Oxford, 430 pages, $27.95). The only president to hold a patent (on a device designed to lift riverboats over shoals), Lincoln was fascinated by maritime technology and frequently visited the Washington Navy Yard to see the latest weapons and engines.

His problems with the naval high command often mirrored those he faced on land: officers raised in another age and unable to come to grips with the new -- in this case, with steam, ironclads and combined operations with the army. Lincoln often had to step in and force action, such as the time he personally organized the taking of Norfolk, Va., in 1862, having taken a tug out of Washington to the battle site. By the end of the Civil War, Mr. Symonds shows us, the Navy, both on the oceans and on the Western rivers, had played a major role in bringing about Union victory, thanks in no small part to Lincoln's persistent naval leadership.

Working at close quarters with Lincoln in the White House was an education in itself, as Daniel Mark Epstein observes in "Lincoln's Men" (Collins, 262 pages, $26.99), his study of Lincoln's secretaries: John Hay, John Nicolay and William Stoddard. The first two actually lived in the White House, probably spending more time with Lincoln than anyone outside his immediate family. All three were Illinoisans. Nicolay early put his finger on one of his boss's great strengths: his ability to size people up upon first meeting them. "He knew men on the instant," Nicolay recalled.

The White House budget allowed Lincoln to employ exactly one secretary (Nicolay). To handle the work, Hay and Stoddard were added, though they were officially paid by the Interior Department. In addition to answering correspondence from senators, congressmen and governors, they responded to begging letters from office seekers and the mothers of soldiers. They also read through a huge amount of hate mail. Nicolay became an overnight expert on protocol to supervise White House functions. The task of "handling" the prickly Mrs. Lincoln went to Stoddard, who, alone among the three, calmed her tantrums.

But it wasn't all work and no play. Hay, the poet and artiste of the three, carried on an affair with a married actress. Nicolay often danced the night away while his fiancée waited patiently back in Illinois. Stoddard speculated on the stock and gold markets, with mixed success.

For Lincoln, of course, life in Washington during war was almost all work and no play. To read more about him is to realize how few of our current political leaders even begin to approach his level of intelligence, rhetorical skill, natural wit and capacity for empathy. It also reminds us how ridiculous it is make comparisons between Lincoln and anyone today.

Mr. Barnes is the author of "Ulysses S. Grant on Leadership" and "John F. Kennedy on Leadership."