New Dreams for Old

By Melvin Maddocks

THE RISE OF THE UNMELTABLE ETHNICS

by MICHAEL NOVAK 321 pages. Macmillan. $7.95.

Michael Novak's Slovak grandparents, oppressed by the Austro-Hungarian empire, emigrated to the United States for the classic reasons. One grandfather became a Pennsylvania farmer. One grandmother, widowed, hired out as housekeeper and laundress. Novak's parents mobiled upward, from Johnstown's Slovak ghetto to "the WASP suburb on the hill." Then Michael went the rest of the way. He is a sober-profiled Catholic professor of philosophy and religion, currently at the State University of New York. But with a book in one hand (perhaps even his own A Theology for Radical Politics) and a pipe in the other, Novak could pass as a WASP to the Eastern Establishment born.

Novak has made it. And--would the WASPS believe?--he isn't happy about it. With pride and a certain bitterness, he is now reclaiming his ethnic identity. Nor does he regard this step as a private pilgrimage. Noting such things as the appearance of "Kiss Me, I'm Italian" buttons and the proliferation of Irish-American autobiography, Novak presumes to speak for the 70 million American descendants of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Armenia and the Slavic nations. "In the 1960s," he writes, "the blacks and the young had their day." The '70s will be the "decade of the ethnics."

Passionately and erratically combining scholarship with manifesto writing, Novak begins his argument with a rather familiar counterattack. The WASP model for behavior has got to go. WASP America, "more like a religion than like a nation," has demanded of its joiners a "conversion of the soul." Novak blames the WASP for everything from birth control to Women's Lib ("infected with WASP individualism"). Say "WASP" to Novak and he sees cold "modernity," antiseptic blandness. Say "ethnic" and he sees colorful people, starring at family feasts, full of a fierce loyalty to their neighborhood and to the old pieties--spiritually if not physically in folk costumes. Authentic, by God.

Novak's notions of revolution blend a variety of the new populism (TIME, April 17), with a dream of "cultural pluralism." Novak talks bravely of "a policy that will guide the nation for thirty years--that is what we need." But his own suggestions tend to be vague: "Life will slow down," "new cities" will be built "on a human scale." Or nostalgic: There should be a William Morris-like return to handicrafts and cottage industries. Or whimsical: Let one million New Yorkers move to Iowa, where "there are green fields and hills, jobs and dignity."

Other planks in the Novak platform for a better America:

"Doctors should be paid no more than plumbers."

"Children of intellectuals shall be admitted only to colleges of agriculture in prairie states."

"Expense accounts are outlawed."

"Taxi drivers shall teach sixth and seventh grade."

When Novak gets down to serious, vote-winning politics, he stipulates a coalition of "blacks and ethnic whites" as "inevitable." While admitting that, to the blacks, all whites look alike for the moment, he asks wistfully: "Couldn't they distinguish a fellow sufferer under Nordic prejudice from a WASP?"

As new American politics, Novak's plea for ethnic power can sound like the oldest American politics; one hears the rhetoric of a new Tammany promising the Slovak grandmother prune dumplings in the sky. In his general plea for decentralization -- down with the bu reaucrats, up with neighborhood government -- Novak seems on sounder ground, though he fails to prove that ethnic self-consciousness is the key. What validates the book is Novak's very recklessness -- his willingness to sweep beyond defendable limits. This is the price he knowingly pays for a modest act of hope at a time when most intellectuals are playing it safe with predictions of Apocalypse. "There is a great deal yet to be discovered about America," Novak concludes. He has, in fact, attacked the American Dream in order to open up a possible second chapterfor it. Melvin Maddocks

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