MOSAIC

Several months ago, when I last reviewed Mosaic, there was really no magazine to review. A near-random collection of unrelated articles, poems, tomes, and stories, the issue was nothing more than the arithmetic sum of its disparate parts, some interesting, many not.

Things have changed. Summer apparently reinvigorated the editorial board, for the fall issue once again allows one to call Mosaic the "little Harvard Commentary," an epithet used frequently around the University not too many years ago.

There are three short meditations on "Jewish Identity." There is refreshing poetry by Chana Faerstein, John Morgan, and Andras Hamori. There are three thoughtful and informative studies of "new student action groups" by three new student activists. Finally, three contributions which the table of contents calls simply "articles."

Lets dispose of these three "articles" first and get on to the more significant fare. The magazine would be better without them, though I think I see why they were included. Saul Ginsberg's "New Christians" and David Flusser's "The Schema on the Jews and the Church" says little that is worth saying in the Harvard community, even in the Harvard Jewish community. But Harvard students did the translating, and the Hillel Society understandably wishes to encourage such efforts. Publishing should be sufficient encouragement; reading is unnecessary. "The New Christians" will interest few except avid scholars of Russian history; "The Schema..."provides no information on the Ecumenical Council that conscientious readers of Newsweek don't already know.

The third article is authored by the publisher of Mosaic, Richard Zigmond. That must be the reason it was included. Zigmond tackles a fascinating subject, "Problems of the White Civil Rights Worker," but his handling of it approaches the simple-minded. After a summer with the Student Woodlawn Area Project of Chicago, he might have written a detailed reminiscence, providing through suggestion and implication a profound understanding of the subject. Instead, beyond a few anecdotes, he draws less on his personal experience than on the rhetoric of various chiefs and braves in the Movement.

A reminiscence would have followed an internal logic of its own. Zigmond, relying on the experiences and words of others, must develop his argument in a more formal way. He fails for two reasons. First, the abstractness and detachment of the essay simply do not fit a subject so intensely personal and emotionally complex. It is easy to list, in a neatly ordered manner, the "problems" faced by a white volunteer: guilt, fear, prejudice (both ways), self-doubt, etc. Such a list, however, provides about as much feel for the problems as would a similar list for the "horrors of war."

Second, the essay fails because it does not probe deeply enough, even on its own terms. Zigmond postulates that most of the white volunteer's problems stem from the preconceived notions he entertains of the Negro and the Movement. Fine, but why treat only two of these notions, and at that the two have been most throughly discussed already, Granted, some whites join the struggle because they see the Negro as the Oppressed One (the "guilt-ridden white" in Zigmond's terms) or as an agent of massive social change (the "utopian white"). This however hardly exhausts the possibilities. Some seek an escape from the boredom of affluence, or the puritanism of the middle middle class, or the rootlessness of suburbia, etc. For Zigmond's detached approach to yield significant observations, it must proceed further than he takes it; it must attempt a complete analysis of the psychology of the white volunteer, at various levels of commitment.

Ralph Ellison began this task, if sketchily, in his conversations with Robert Penn Warren, reported in the latter's Who Speaks for the Negro? People with Zigmond's knowledge could carry on such an analysis; it is disappointing when they waste their efforts.

In calling the poetry in this edition refreshing, I have in mind particularly the verses by Chana Faerstein. Her imagery is far from flawless ("Pearly and luminous as butterflies") and its density at times approaches contrivance ("Mousing up these lion paws of mountains"), but again and again the produces quickly paced lines that are genuinely exhiliarating "The weather here is salt; I want to scrub my soul in it. Typically, her best poem, Life Goes to a Party in Chelm, is her most audecious. It skips outrageously in and out of metaphores but they are never mixed, and she finally succeeds through sheer vitality.

Andras Hamori is less fun to read, but his imagery is invariably exact, and the moods he maintains are more demanding than Miss Faerstein's. John Morgan's sinuous and complicated poem, "Mississippi," fails unless the reader retraces its rather flat lines several times. It contains a lot of detail unnecessary to its message or tone.

In it's "symposium on Jewish identity," Mosaic borrows a technique of magazine organization that has contributed greatly to Commentary's brilliance. It is simple: Propose a controversial topic and allow several bright and informed minds to bat it about. Jewish identity is about as original a topic as negritude, but David Levey and Yoran Ben-Porath manage to say original things about it. The other contributor, Andrew Grey-stoke, wanders aimlessly about the subject, finally admitting that he really has no firm position. Levey and Ben-Porath, conversely, attack the problem with the rigor and hard-nosedness of their chosen discipline, economics. Their articles display an impressive tightness, derived from a controlled tension between deep conviction and and an even deeper respect for logic and evidence.

Over one-third of the magazine is turned over to three student politicians, if that is the word: John Case and Steven Johnson of SDS and John Maher of the May 2nd Movement. Johnson offers a well written account of the intriguing history of SDS. Never does he allow rhetoric to overrun his genuine curiosity. For anyone who considers joining SDS, this article is a must.

Case tries to spell out, in clear and simple language, the equally simple but far less clear ideology which underpins concrete SDS projects. The ideology, which he calls "democracy," seems to differ little in temper or substance from the "direct democracy" of the socialist left-wing in Europe at the beginning of this century. These men wanted "democracy from below" in the factories; SDS wants it in the slums. They wanted a sense of community in the factories; SDS wants that in the slums. And, like the pre-World War I radicals, SDS feels little need to develop a logically impenetrable justification in theory for what it does in practice.

The radicals of old succumbed to cold-hearted and hard-headed logicians on both their right and left. SDS, God knows, has its share of enemies on the right. Judging from John Maher's article, it may soon find them on the left also. The May 2nd Movement has little interest in "direct democracy" and a "sense of community." Swallowing whole Lenin's economic theory of imperialism, M2M has chosen foreign policy as its battle grounds. SDS too abhors the Viet Nam war, but eschews Leninist formulations in favor of sentimental, if telling, analogies between the Asian peasant and the Mississippi sharecropper. M2M reverses the analogy, viewing the Negro as an incidental victim of the same capitalist power which crushes the Viet Cong. The difference is crucial in theory and could become so in practice.

Incidentally, Maher now seems disillusioned with pamphleteering, fearing that it doesn't satisfy the Maoist dictum to "swim in the sea of people." He should learn from the editors of Mosaic, who realize that the best way to swim in a sea of Harvard people is to fill paper with clear and interesting argument.