Revolution Speaks Many Languages

Back about a generation ago, there was an ad that ran on New York television for the (at that time) men’s clothing store Barney’s. It showed a brownstone stoop, circa 1920, populated by an “Our Gang” of typical Brooklyn kids in short pants. “Hey, Fiorello!” one of the punks shouts, “whaddya gonna be when you grow up?” “I’m gonna be mayor of New York,” the Little Flower answers, “how about you, Joe?” “I’m gonna be a big-time baseball player. What about you, Barney?” “Well,” answers the nebbish on the lowest step, “someday you’re all gonna need trousers.”

Peter Glassgold’s first novel, “The Angel Max,” opens with a similar brownstone premise. Only in his scene, Brooklyn is the middle-class Jewish neighborhood of Kovno, Lithuania, and the date is 1876. Fiorello La Guardia and Joe DiMaggio are replaced by the youthful Chava Goldman, later to change her name to Emma, and Sasha Berkman, who rose to fame in the United States as the would-be assassin of industrialist Henry Clay Frick.

Barney, in Glassgold’s scenario, becomes the young Max Kraft, a handsome young nobody. After his mother’s death, Max is raised by a kindly stepfather, a wealthy landlord, in a house of privilege, complete with two free-spirited step-sisters and a rotating garden of governesses, “Mesdames,” to teach the children French language, French manners and (in one particular case) French kissing.

The stepsisters, Sophia and Nina, introduce Max to power and politics. They recruit him as a courier between the revolutionaries at the boys’ school and the girls’ school. It is only after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 that the game turns deadly serious. Sophia and Nina are arrested and sent to Siberia. The Kovno Circle, which includes not only Sophia, Nina and Max, but their young half-brother Mischka, his friend Sasha Berkman and little Emma Goldman, disbands. Years later, the circle regroups inside the parlor of Max’s brownstone on the Upper East Side. Max, now the wealthy landlord, has become the secret “angel” of the cause. As Barney might have said, “Someday all you anarchists are going to need money.”

It’s a wonderful premise, and a pleasure to see an Old World portrait of the Pale that is not just mist and shtetl. Yiddish is called “jargon” or “Jewish,” and is the province of the servants, Lithuanian the language of the non-Jewish gardener and housemaid. Max and his family speak Russian, French in good company, and read the philosophers and poets in German. As Max approaches his bar mitzvah, Hebrew is introduced. “Each language was an enormous room of a different shape,” Max says, “with windows cut in different sizes and patterns and set higher or lower.” But in his dreams, Max looks through another window into a “faraway land where only one language was spoken and I would be with my mother once more. In my imagination I called that land America.”

Glassgold is excellent when he writes about language, and he sets the debate within the anarchist, and later Bolshevist, circles as much over language as philosophy. Max supports the cause as long as the revolution in America happens not in Russian or Yiddish, but in the language of the country, English.

It is therefore a tremendous disappointment that Glassgold fails to support his ideas with either passion or language. The multitude of dramas dropped into the novel--the bombings, the births, the betrayals--fall short of being dramatic at every turn: At times, they skate over the surface of character and detonate before a true climax has been achieved. Perhaps because Max is such a stickler for English and the novel is set in his voice, Glassgold retreats from giving us the rich flavor of each language that members of the cast bring to the scene. Perhaps it is just that Max is such a stick.

Yet Pierre of “War and Peace” fame was also a stick, and look what Tolstoy made of him. DiMaggio knew that the difference was only a few feet between a home run and a long out. Perhaps, with a little more batting practice and courage, Glassgold will grow up to be another Bronx Bomber.