Books: Jews in Chicago

THE OLD BUNCH — Meyer Levin — Viking ($3).

U. S. readers have lately had their work cut out for them. Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind have all been of approximately 1,000-page length. Last week Meyer Levin’s The Old Bunch (964 pages) gave wrist-weary readers another hefty handful. Aside from actual weight, however, The Old Bunch has less in common with its swollen sisters than with such half-starved gutter rats as James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan. Realism of the cheapest dye, Author Levin’s tale of Jews in Chicago is not so much a chronicle as chronic narrative. Gentile readers (goyische Lezer to Author Levin) may find themselves oppressed at times by the heavy, strident Jewishness of the book’s atmosphere, but once under way most of them will be carried along by the momentum of the year’s most naturalistic novel. After a hasty checkup, statisticians last week agreed that Author Levin had succeeded in printing twice as many four-letter unprintables as his nearest competitor to date.

Like John Dos Passes’ trilogy, The Old Bunch is punctuated and underlined by scraps of current popular songs, but the background (Chicago from 1921 to 1934) is integrated with the story. Some of the 20-odd main characters wander to Manhattan, Paris, Palestine, Greece, Poland, but the principal focus is on Chicago and “the bunch” as they grew up there. “The bunch,” high-school age in 1921, were second-generation Russian Jews. Few of their immigrant fathers were well off; most of them were buttonhole makers, shoemakers, pawnbrokers, barbers, cigar-makers. Most of the mothers still spoke Yiddish.

Some of the bunch were consciously ambitious, felt themselves capable of big things; all of them were determined to do better for themselves than their parents had. Their tastes soon began to differentiate them. Runt Plotkin, toughest of the crowd, embarrassed them by his actions with girls, which spoke louder than their lewd chatter. He drifted off to become a precocious hack-driver. First of the bunch to go further than the universally-allowed petting were Estelle and Sol, the chesty athlete. That went on till they got a scare, then they broke up.

Some of them got to college, but most went to work, with night school on the side for the more ambitious. Rudy and Mitch studied medicine; Sam, Lou and Runt went to law school; Sol became a six-day bicycle racer; Mort and Alvin went into business with their fathers; Harry wanted to be an inventor; Joe, a sculptor. They married each others’ sisters. All the girls found husbands except Estelle, who got too fond of casual lovemaking, and Rose, whose skinny height kept her a spinster schoolteacher. Rudy and Mitch both became good doctors; but Mitch would have done better in the research from which he was sidetracked. Sam’s conflicts with authority forced him to become an increasingly radical lawyer. Lou, who had married a politician’s daughter, learned how to play ball with the boys. Runt’s underworld connections got him the name of shyster. Mort proceeded blithely from amorous to business success, became a big man in the Chicago hat trade. Alvin, the world-weary intellectual, found himself thrown back into business again by the crash of ’29. Harry, without the capital or knowledge to market his inventions, was at last thankful just to get a job. Joe found sculpture a hard row to hoe. On the whole, the girls did better than the boys: most of them turned out to be comfortable middle-class matrons.

Author Levin’s characters think, speak and act with complete naturalness—so long as they are in Chicago. Their prospects may improve but their grammar remains true to life. As a Jewish commentary on the 13-year period that took in Big Bill Thompson, Samuel Insull and Al Capone; as a citizen’s-eye-view of Chicago justice, education, business and racketeering methods during that time, The Old Bunch is an impressive job. As a novel, it is too self-consciously Jewish, too uneven, too exhausting to be rated in the first rank.