Benjamin Hollander, In the House Un-American, (Clockroot
Books, 2013), pp.150, $15.
Carlos ben
Carlos Rossman, Benjamin Hollander’s alter ego in his account of discovering
what it is to be, or not to be, an American, describes his father, “a Jew
hiding in plain sight,” as living “between false options: as a worker among
workers speaking outside his class, or as the quiet American hiding the
languages he knew they distrusted, since they insinuated, in phrase or condition,
heard or unheard, ‘the un-American,’ the un-welcomed.”
I
spoke Greek before I spoke English. It
was the language of our home, the one I absorbed from the cradle, spoke with my
parents and my grandmother, who never learned English. But when I went to school, one day in second
grade (this was during the early years of WWII), our teacher Miss Parks asked each
one of us to tell where our parents were born.
When I offered that my father came from Sparta, Greece, a girl piped
up—Marie Byrnes: how can I ever forget her name? “Sounds like a can of grease,” she said. From then on my brother and I were called
“Grease Balls” or “Greasy Greeks.”
I
went home crying. As soon as my father returned from work at the corner store he owned, I explained to him what had
happened.
“You
tell those kids you’re proud to be Greek,” he said. “Tell them that the Greeks
invented the democracy they live in!”
Of
course, my father was right to comfort me, giving me an argument for my
defense. But my brother and I knew that such
a response would only lead to more derision, if not physical retaliation. For in those xenophobic war years in Gloucester,
Massachusetts it was the Greeks and Jews against the Italians, Portuguese and
Irish, who had arrived in America before our grandparents and staked out their
claims earlier as Americans. As a
consequence, my brother and I never spoke Greek again. We literally expunged our mother tongue from
our consciousness for the rest of our lives.
No
wonder I can relate to Hollander’s harrowing account of his own, his family’s,
his friends’ and immigrants like them as they attempted not just to live in
this country but to become Americans.
Cut
to a 1947 hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington,
before which Bertolt Brecht is questioned about his possible ties to the
Communist Party, by definition believed to be un-American:
“Now
Mr. Brecht, what is your occupation?”
“I
am a poet and a playwright.”
“A
poet and a playwright?”
“Yes.”
“Where
are you presently employed?”
“I
am not employed.”
About
poetry Hollander writes:
“[It] comes like
this kind of underwater English to one who speaks like this, because poetry is
already the sounding of a second language within an American culture that does
not count it among its facts, its culture of evidence.”
Equating
poetry and alienation, exclusion—poetry and anti-intellectualism, Hollander
continues:
“This
is what the un-American feels, his condition, if you care, is that he appears
to others like a poem, quizzical, without much use, just standing around.”
But
Hollander, to his credit, does not stop with “the role of the Un-American
Committee in determining political alliances or questioning who among the
native-born or naturalized among us was or was not a patriot.” He brings us immediately to the present: “Just
as today FBI counter-terrorism media consultant Brad Garrett can warn us about
the thoughts of a Muslim citizen of America, who, himself, may not be capable
of being a threat to the country, but. . .may be drawn to the ‘bad guys’ who
are not citizens but bomb-capable, which is why we have to be in a state of
vigilance towards the un-American American’s ‘bad thoughts.’”
So
not only in America do we police what we fear may be potential actions of the
putatively “un-American,” we also strive to monitor their thoughts or what we
think may be their thoughts from their ethnic and cultural origins, or from
those of the individuals or groups they may be associating with.
It’s
an old story for anyone who grew up during the McCarthy anti-communist hysteria
of the 1950s, or who knew people whose phone calls were monitored, mail read,
and movements recorded; yes, and whose family members lost their teaching jobs,
as Vincent Ferrini’s Radcliffe honors graduate wife Peg did (a brilliant
teacher, incidentally, who had a school building named for her after she was
“allowed” to return to teaching). And it
hasn’t ended but only continues with our phone calls and emails collected and
stored today, potentially to be used against us, for communicating with each
other.
Hollander’s
narrative—part memoir, part fiction, part history and part documentary—is so utterly
relevant as to have been written tomorrow. For In
the House Un-American is not only an account of an immigrant’s voyage of
self-discovery as he uncovers the very nature of belonging “in an exceptional
country that makes no exceptions,” Hollander writes. There is also sharp social criticism here,
much of it as biting as it is humorous, as Hollander skewers the sentimentality
that papers over every national excess: “When in America did this start, this
ritually honored public sentimentalism as a form of redemption for your
violence?”
I
want to conclude with language because language is at the heart of Hollander’s
inquiry (or should I say inquest?)—
the languages our families arrived speaking, the languages they adopted or
abandoned.
The
Dartmouth-educated son of a Jewish immigrant of my father’s generation once
accused my father of “murdering the English language” as he claimed his own
father did.
“I’d
like to know what you would do,” my father retorted, “alone in a strange
country, with no one to understand you and not a soul to turn to.”
That
pretty much encapsulates the condition Hollander opens his account by describing. I know it well from growing up caught between
two languages. I saw how my father
struggled to make himself understood in his second language, and how my mother
and her siblings, all well-educated, tried to transcend their own embarrassment
at their parents’ imperfect and accented English. My brother and I joked about how our father
called the World Series “the World Serious,” but beneath our laughter was our
own fear that we too, even though we could speak the native tongue, did not
belong. To this day I do not feel that I
belong. And yet I wonder, as Hollander calls
into question, do any of us belong in a culture that is more fable than
reality?
(This review appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of House Organ, edited by Kenneth Warren)
