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, clothes, eating habits, and automobile preferences of a small but significant segment of the population of the San Francisco Bay area. The issue of Jewish identity, however important it may remain for Gold in his private life, appears to have dropped out of his fiction, leaving barely a trace.
Gold has lived in San Francisco for a quarter of a century now. He will be sixty-four this year and likes to call himself the "oldest young writer." He dislikes labels and is fond of pointing out that in addition to being a novelist, he is a poet (deliberately unpublished), journalist, teacher, citizen, political activist, and father (he has five children); "I try to live as many lives as a cat," he said two years ago in a Publisher's Weekly interview. But the fact remains that what Gold does better than anything else these days--and, at times better than anyone else--is to examine the worrisome
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