Position Paper 2

The theme of inter-generational conflict in American Pastoral demonstrates the collective desire to “one-up” or be different from one’s parents; in other words, to become more American. Of the youngsters of his neighborhood, Zuckerman says, “…we were steered relentlessly in the direction of success: a better existence was going to be ours” (41). The ability to step forward and do something better comes from the immense American energy after the Great Depression, according to Zuckerman (40). Not only are Zuckerman and his childhood peers eager to move forward and make a name for themselves, but it is “mostly the friction between generations [that is] sufficient to give us purchase to move forward” (42). The children are highly aware of signs of immigrant status, like whether or not a neighbor’s mother has an accent (43). Keen to their surroundings, the children of Zuckerman’s area are observant of the indicators of “the minutest gradations of social position” (43) among their families.

Zuckerman reports a “generalized mistrust of the Gentile world” (41) at the time of his childhood and “exclusions the goyim still [wish] to preserve” (44) at his high school reunion, 45 years later. The words “gentile” and “goyim” both mean non-Jew, but “goyim” is slightly offensive. With the use of almost derogatory language when referring to non-Jews, Zuckerman demonstrates the lingering attitude of distrust.

Part of the conflict between people of Zuckerman’s age in the 1940s and their parents is that the “adults… [are] striving and improving themselves through [the children]” (42). Zuckerman says of his generation’s astuteness that there is an “unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things” (43). It is important for the young ones to interpret those around them to help carve a sense of self-identity. It is easy for them to “[grasp] how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive different human problem” (43). It is the very human problem that each family suffers that pushes the younger generation to move toward success.

The reader notes the presence of Jewish elements in Zuckerman’s life in the past and the present. Zuckerman mentions the yahrzeit candles some of his neighbors have when he is a child (43). Another element of Judaism is the goodie bag of rugelach that everyone receives at the end of the Weequahic High School reunion (46). Rugelach is an old, traditional variety of Jewish cookie. The phenomenon of the high school reunion brings together people who have not spoken in years. After growing into adults and being independent, everyone inevitably returns to the personality and energy of high school. Zuckerman says to an old friend, Mendy Gurlik, that “after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent” (51). This quote suggests that the Jewish men and women who grew up with Nathan Zuckerman spend years trying to be different, to be American, but the reunion returns them to the time when their shared raw Jewishness was impossible to hide. In their adult years, these people succeed in disguising their Jewish heritage in the hopes of acceptance and success in a “typical” or “mainstream” American life. This sense of “passing” is one of the central themes of American Pastoral and indicative of the necessity to relinquish one’s Jewish heritage in order to succeed. Just by participating in the reunion, Zuckerman can say he has an “uncanny sense that what goes on behind what we see is what I was seeing” (52). He is comfortably aware that everyone at the reunion is putting on a face, trying to be someone else. This “someone else” is someone they strive to be; someone like the Swede who manages to be the darling of the community for his near-gentile looks and abilities. That is to say, everyone at the reunion, though the majority are Jewish, are trying to downplay their Jewishness, which has been a natural behavior since before high school.

The reader sees the social barrier between Jews and non-Jews with the appearance of an old classmate with a shiksa, or Gentile woman, for a wife. The wife questions her husband, Schrimmer, about the nicknames she hears everyone calling each other at the reunion. She asks, “Why are they all Mutty and Utty and Dutty and Tutty? If his name is Charles, why is he called Tutty?” (57). To this, Schrimmer responds, “I shouldn’t have brought you… I can’t explain it… nobody can. It’s beyond explanation. It just is” (57). Not only does this exchange show the rifling animosity Schrimmer can still show for his Gentile woman who is his wife, but it broadcasts the kind of unique Jewish nickname-giving of the Newark Jewish community that divides it from its non-Jewish counterpart.

Zuckerman’s encounter with Jerry Levov, the Swede’s younger brother and a classmate of Zuckerman’s, fills in a lot of blanks of information about the Swede. Most importantly, Zuckerman learns that the Swede has just died within the last week. Zuckerman concludes that the Swede must have known he was dying at their dinner meeting and wanting to express some unfulfilled emotions by speaking to a long-lost acquaintance (82). Unfortunately, the Swede never speaks about writing a book about his dad, as he mentions in his letter to Zuckerman imploring him to meet for dinner. How far had the Swede’s seemingly perfect life crumbled? Jerry says, tragically, that the Swede is “a perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt forever” (68). What exactly did the Swede not escape? Is death the only thing that interrupted perfection?

Slowly, Zuckerman begins to realize the façade of the Swede. He, too, was trying to pass, but really lived a double life. Zuckerman learns from Jerry about the Swede’s revolutionary daughter, Merry, who detonated a bomb in a post office during the Vietnam War, killing one person. This is the first real chip in the perfect picture of the Swede’s life. Jerry recalls finding the Swede crying in a fancy restaurant’s bathroom stall following an otherwise pleasant family dinner about the alleged death of Merry (71). The failure in Merry is a sudden tragedy to the Swede. Of the Swede’s naivete, Jerry says, “Never in his life had occasion to ask himself, ‘Why are things the way they are?’ Why should he bother, when the way they were was always perfect?… The question to which there is no answer, and up till then he was so blessed he didn’t even know the question existed” (70). The Swede’s tragedy is important because it is the equivalent to the loss of his ability to pass, to be a real American. Jerry brings it one step further when he says, “That was [the Swede’s] fate – built for bearing burdens and taking shit” (70). Jerry is essentially breaking the image Zuckerman always held of the Swede. The Swede never really was perfect. He always had problems dealing with the expectations of others, and he never knew that life could be a different way until his only daughter became a murderer and an outlaw.

There is a difference between the two Levov brothers in their ability to take what life gives them and continue moving, or passing. According to Jerry, it is the Swede’s lack of rage, or reaction, that keeps him from letting go of the loss of his daughter, ultimately leading to his death. On the other hand, according to Zuckerman, Jerry has “a talent for rage and another… for not looking back” (72). This talent for not looking back demonstrates the need to hold only the loosest bonds to where one originated in order to be able to move forward. This means, among other things, to not grasp onto Judaism so much because it would impede on the possible successes ahead.

A perfect self-observation Zuckerman makes is that he must have been sitting “in Vincent’s restaurant, childishly expecting to be wowed by [the Swede’s] godliness, only to be confronted by an utterly ordinary humanness” (72). Zuckerman processes it himself that the Swede is no different from him. He was not god-like, he did not have all the answers and he certainly did not pretend to be the same childhood hometown sports legend that he used to be.

Another way we see the tragedy of the Swede is that he was “fatally attracted to his duty… fatally attracted to responsibility” (72). The use of the word “fatally” suggests that in being so loyal to his responsibilities, or the norm or familiar, the Swede caused his own death by not properly responding to the crimes and death of his daughter with flexibility. Apparently, for the rest of his life it was all he could do to “bury this thing,” that “one day life started laughing at him and it never let up” (74).

The one thing that no one trying to be successful or to pass can escape is the body. While speaking with an old romantic interest, Joy Helpern, at the high school reunion, Zuckerman marvels at the changes in her “body, from which one cannot strip oneself however one tries, from which one is not to be freed this side of death” (79). That is to say, no one can escape the confines of his or her own body no matter how much he or she wants it. It will always be there, this relic of one’s heritage, one’s journey. This is important because it shows the desperation of Zuckerman’s peers who want to assimilate to such a degree that even their own bodies are a problem – they betray who they really are.

Zuckerman comes to his own conclusion about the post-Merry’s bombing life of the Swede: “Stoically he suppresses his honor. He learns to live behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin. Swede Levov lives a double life” (81). Furthermore, Zuckerman deduces that “[the Swede] had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that it makes no sense” (81). The loss of Merry is really what brings the Swede back down to earth and makes him god-like no longer in Zuckerman’s eyes. It is probably this very family tragedy to which the Swede was referring in his letter to Zuckerman, even though he never brought it up in person at their dinner. The haunting nature of the double life of the Swede plays itself in the notion that “the responsibility of the school hero follows him through life” (79). This school hero, this legend, was all a tangible dream for which the neighborhood was partly responsible.

The Swede’s problem with “making himself unnaturally responsible” is that he “keeps under control not just himself but whatever else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his all to keep his world together” (88). The Swede must be so ingrained to the norm that he limits himself and causes hardship by not being more open. The Swede’s boyhood successes have influenced his constant desire to please by taking responsibility. These efforts bring him further and further from his Jewish religion. He is “an American not by sheer striving, not by being a Jew who invents a famous vaccine or a Jew on the Supreme Court, not be being the most brilliant or the most eminent or the best. Instead – by virtue of his isomorphism to the Wasp world – he does it the ordinary way, the natural way, the regular American guy way” (89). This presents the indelible problem: the shed one’s Judaism in order to become American and be accepted by all.

The reader finally gets a clue about what might have led to the Swede’s downfall when it is revealed that the Swede kissed his 11-year-old daughter on the mouth at her request. Zuckerman’s interpretation of this event and its impact is that “never in his entire life… had [the Swede] given way to anything so alien to the emotional rules by which he was governed, and later he wondered if this strange parental misstep was not the lapse from responsibility for which he paid for the rest of his life” (91). Why is there an emphasis on responsibility or the lack thereof? Why does the Swede follow an instinct to be responsible for everything around him, controllable or uncontrollable? Is this mistake really the only time that the Swede did not meet his self-imposed standards, the real reason for his downfall, his inability to pretend anymore?

Zuckerman shows us that the Swede so long crated fell apart after the realization that the Swede’s whole life changed after that illicit 10-second kiss (92). Putting himself in the Swede’s shoes, Zuckerman tells us, “All the triumphs, when [the Swede] probed them, seemed superficial; even more astonishing, his very virtues came to seem vices. There was no longer any innocence in what he remembered of his past” (93). The self-judgement leads the Swede to believe that his whole life has been a sham, that he has never truly passed for a stable, got-everything-together all-American man. The intention of the kiss is supposedly to relieve Merry of her tensions and make her feel comfortable, but it may have resulted in Merry’s unfortunate, obstinate stutter. Thus, the Swede concludes, “What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended” (93).

The Swede’s crestfallen attitude about the consequences of his actions influences him for the rest of his life. Relating his life to the handicap of his only daughter’s stutter, he “no longer had any conception of order. There was no order. None. He envisioned his life as a stutterer’s thought, wildly out of control” (93). This loss of control is synonymous with his loss of responsibility, his waning life force soon leading to his death.

There is more lack of practice of Judaism in reference to the Swede’s family. His teenage daughter takes Saturday trips to New York City to meet with other political radicals during the Vietnam War. Saturday is supposed to be Sabbath observed by all Jews, which includes not doing any work. Traveling to New York City constitutes as work, and we see that the Swede makes no mention about a possible disappointment in Merry’s failure to observe the Sabbath. Also, when Merry is younger, she sees speech therapists for her stutter on Saturdays. One surprising element of Judaism, though, is when the Swede is angered by Merry’s Catholic trinkets given to her by her Gentile grandparents. After it becomes clear that the trinkets are not going away, the Swede has a talk with Merry, explaining that Jews do not have crosses or pictures of Jesus Christ hanging in their rooms, and that these objects should be hidden when the Swede’s own parents come to visit (94).

Merry’s weekend trips to New York City are even more disrespectful of the laws of Judaism in that she neglects the laws of kashrut, or the eating restrictions. One of these restrictions is that meat and cheese should not be eaten in the same meal, and it seems Merry often enjoys cheeseburgers while in New York City (105). Merry has many arguments with her dad, the Swede, about her activities and whereabouts on these trips, and she astutely says to him during one such argument, “You think everything that is f-foreign to you is b-bad. Did you ever think that there are some things that are f-foreign to you that are good?” (110). Herein lies the problem with the Swede: he likes everything to be at a comfortable, controllable norm, and when things get too “extreme” he does not feel safe and secure.