To Be Young, Gifted and Oppressed: The Plight of the Ethnic Artist

Abstract

Ethnic voices, when they speak of oppression, state their theme with authority. Eloquent immediacy distinguishes the literary treatment of oppression in Richard Wrighf s autobiography, Black Boy, and in Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev, a novel about a talented individualist in the Jewish society which Potok, as rabbi, painter, and writer, knows so intimately. 1 The ring of authenticity which informs the experiences lived by the personae in both books is the first of a number of properties these works share.As in many ethnic texts, the perils threatened by the hostile outside world provide a major theme here. The Wright of Black Boy early recognizes the omnipotence of what he calls "the white death"; while Asher Lev, from the time he understands who is is, knows that his heritage has been shaped by the Pharoah, Chmelnitzki and Hitler. In each work, the protagonist is conditioned by oppression which stalks him without quite striking him down. Wright observes, "The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly;... Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew." 2 Asher shudders as he observes of the crowded Brooklyn congregation, "With very few exceptions, every adult inside that synagogue had experienced the tyranny of Stalin" (Lev, p. 89).However, the most significant parallel is the variation these two works strike on the theme of oppression. Both books reach behind the prejudicial attitudes of the outside world to focus on the misunderstanding and the pain suffered by an ethnic at the heavy hands of his own people. The autobiography and the novel each tell an artist's story. In doing so, they demonstrate that an ethnic society is no more tolerant than any other of a member who marches to a different drummer. Indeed, the ethnic nonconformist is shown to provoke a special harshness from his already insecure people who view his differences as baffling and somehow threatening.The incident which opens Black Boy furnishes a mode of the incompatibility between the imaginative Richard Wright and the restraints of 73