Some Jewish American rebels in the 1930s were also the children of Jewish Russian rebels—the ones who spent hours in the New York Public Library “leafing through the canonical and apocryphal writings of the prophets of the old revolutionary underground.” For them, socialism began at home—as “one long Friday evening around the samovar and the cut-glass bowl laden with nuts and fruits, all of us singing Tsuzamen, tsuzamen, ale tsuzamen! ”; or as heated arguments among uncles and aunts about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the treachery of the revisionists. When Daniel Bell converted from Judaism to the Young People’s Socialist League, his family’s main worry was whether he had joined the right sect. 85 But most Jewish American parents in the 1920s and 1930s were not rebels, so most Jewish American rebels renounced their parents as well as the cold world they had launched them into. As in Europe outside the Soviet Union, Jewish parents and capitalism seemed to take turns representing each other (“the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism ”). Much of early Jewish American literature was about Jewish boys questioning their legitimacy and about Jewish entrepreneurs selling their soul to the devil. Isaac Rosenfeld’s underground young man in Passage from Home hates his father and would rather have another one; Henry Roth’s “cellar” boy in Call It Sleep is hated by his father, who would rather have another son (of whose parentage he would be certain). Both Abraham Cahan’s David Levinsky and Budd Schulberg’s Sammy Glick lose their fathers, lose themselves, and produce no children as they climb up in search of wealth and status. Tevye’s American daughter (Beilke), his Soviet daughter (Hodl), and their children all agreed about what each destination stood for. For David and his mother in Call It Sleep , New York was a “wilderness.” For Boris Erlich in Babel’s “Jewess,” the Soviet Union was both his home and his masterpiece. Boris showed her Russia with so much pride and confidence, as if he, Boris Erlich, had himself created Russia, as if he owned it. And to some extent, he did. There was in everything a drop of his soul or of his blood, the blood of the corps commissar (of the Red Cossacks)—from the international train cars to the newly built sugar factories and refurbished train stations. 86 For Beilke and her children, language and “tonguelessness” were sources of agony and fascination; for Hodl and her children, “the clear and pure Russian sounds” came naturally (or so they seem to have felt). Beilke’s children despised