OF LANGUAGE, IDEAS, EUROPE, AND AMERICA

Author: By Paul Kafka

Date: SUNDAY, May 10, 1998

Page: F3

Section: Books

It has at least three important dimensions: as an account of the socialist and anarchist movements in the United States in the years before the Russian revolution of 1905; as a documentary of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to America at the end of the last century; and as an ethical critique of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary political forces.

The geographic scope of the book is as vast as its intellectual landscape. Peter Glassgold first re-creates the feudal provincial Russia of Max's childhood, then New York's Lower East Side, where ideas and languages do battle in the cafes and meeting halls of the socialists, anarchists, nihilists, and new American democrats. The second half of the book is centered on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Max and his family enter mainstream American culture, and upstate, where Max buys land to build a guest house in what will eventually become the Borscht Belt. At times dizzying, always impressive in its historical specificity, ``The Angel Max'' manages to be at once a novel of ideas, a work of social history, and a compelling drama.

As a child in Kovno, the orphan Max learns that people are divided by language as well as by class, sex, nation, and family. His sisters ``spoke a private language of girls. Frieda the housekeeper, Ruth the cook, and Basya the kitchenmaid all spoke Jewish among themselves but German or Russian to everyone else. Kazys the gardener and Marya the housemaid joked with each other in Lithuanian. . . . Polish, my stepfather said, was forbidden in the province. . . . His new wife . . . spoke a refined Russian with sprinklings of French. . . . Each language was an enormous room of a different shape, with windows cut in different sizes and patterns. . . . I dreamed of a faraway land where only one language was spoken. . . . In my imagination, I called that land America.''

As soon as Max is old enough to leave, in the period of turmoil following the assassination of Czar Alexander II, he emigrates. From the moment he arrives in New York, he refuses to speak in any tongue except English. Does assimilation assure freedom in the new land, or is it evidence of what has been lost? Is Yiddish divisive and primitive, or authentic and healing? Glassgold offers no easy answers to these questions, just as he does not come down on the side of either the socialists or the bourgeois liberals. There are scoundrels and angels on both sides of the linguistic and political fences that structure Max's world.

The term ``angel,'' we learn, is derived from those patrons of theater who back stage productions with their purses. Max is one of the lesser angels of the coming revolution. Almost all the revolutionaries in the novel come to Max for money and, as in a novel of Dostoevski, each represents and articulates a philosophical position. At one end is Mishka, Max's half-brother, an extortionist and murderer, who may or may not also be a terrorist in the cause of social justice. Mishka, who espouses Enrico Malatesta's ``propaganda by action,'' serves as an evil double for Max himself, a warning against the abuses of revolutionary authority. On the other end of the spectrum is Max's wife, Fanny, who wishes to leave behind not only Russia, but the necessity for political life itself.

Between terrorism and escapism are Max's stepsisters, Sophie and Nina, both dedicated soldiers of the coming revolution and both, for much of their lives, devotees of Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, foremost theorist of the anarchist movement. Exiled to Siberia, the two young women found and lead a commune inhabited by convicted criminals, whom they educate in socialist values. Later, they travel the world, lecturing and writing, until the schism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks divides them. Max himself is for the working folk and against the police state, whether czarist or capitalist. He dreams of a new world, where all people will speak English and no one will live in fear. He is against religion and superstition of all stripes, including the rationalist Judaism of his father and the socialist utopianism of his sisters. But he does want change to come to Russia, and he is willing to support violence in response to political repression in America. We see this when he does not condemn Alexander Berkman's assassination attempt on Henry Clay Frick, the industrialist who violently broke up the strike by steelworkers in Homestead, Pa., in 1892. Max is principled, and his idea of himself compels his support of those whose beliefs translate into action.

``The Angel Max'' is Peter Glassgold's first novel, but not his first book. An accomplished translator from the Dutch, Latin, and early English, Glassgold brings a linguist's understanding of the immigrant experience to this fiction. The first chapters, set in polyglot Russia, are imagined with such clarity that we carry the child Max with us through the rest of the book.

At times, in the latter pages, we miss the younger Max's sensibility, his capacity for pleasure and surprise. Glassgold's own passion for socialist iconography leads him to intertwine fictional characters with historical figures, notably ``Red'' Emma Goldman, Berkman, and Kropotkin. The problem is that, while the historical figures emerge with the clarity of characters in a novel, the fictional characters sometimes fade to the two-dimensionality of historical personages.

There is a sacrifice of one kind of literary richness, that of the individual sensibility, for an allusive or historical texture. The tradeoff seems the deliberate choice of an author for whom love and politics, romance and linguistics, historical socialism and family dynamics, hold equal fascination. Glassgold makes his novelistic debut as a writer of diverse and unusual talents, whose first book, successful in so many ways, gives promise of more to come.