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California Dreaming
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14381 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
2,925 Words |
| Author
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Catherine Maclay
Catherline Maclay is a writer and editor who lives in
Berkeley, California. |
DREAMING
Herbert Gold
New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1988
271 pp., $19.95
In the 1950s and '60s, Herbert Gold was a promising young Jewish-American writer. Like other writers in that tradition, Malamud and Bellow among them, he was the son of immigrants, a product of the Diaspora who reclaimed his heritage by exploring the meaning of being a Jew in twentieth-century America. In Therefore Be Bold, Fathers, My Last Two Thousand Years, and other works, Gold has examined, through fiction and memoir, not only his own past but the pasts of his parents and grandparents and those like them--Eastern European Jews who, decades before Hitler, lived in a world of brutality and deprivation. In the autobiographical novel Fathers, the narrator's Russian Jewish grandfather was, as a boy, deliberately blinded in one eye by a professional "crippler" hired by his parents. It was common practice for little boys to line up outside the crippler's hut, awaiting any of a number of fates--fingers cut off, limbs broken, sight or hearing obliterated forever--to prevent their conscription into the czar's army, where they would surely die.
Gold has also chronicled the lives of those who escaped Europe for the New World and suffered in other, more subtle, ways, cut off from family and all that was familiar, struggling for survival in the tenements of Manhattan.
Gold's search for his heritage seems to have culminated in a 1958 visit to Israel, where he came to an intense, visceral realization, described in My Last Two Thousand Years, of how much his own Jewishness meant to him as a man and as a writer: "The writer fits into the Jew who fits into the writer, who fits into the Jew. The interpenetration is continuous. Words, hope of meaning, quest for community ... a continuous labor toward making sense and magic of life."
New Context
Then something happened. Gold moved to California and gradually stopped writing about being a Jew. Instead, he wrote about being a Californian and, more specifically, a San Franciscan. Two years ago California Magazine hailed him, along with Joan Didion and Joseph Wambaugh, as a leader in a new school of literature, California realism. That accolade coincided with the publication of A Girl of Forty, his sixteenth novel, a devastating, surgically precise dissection of the speech, attitudes,
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