Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

Beyond the Golden Door

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study, but utilized as important underpinning or as a historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series, works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought. The editor of the series is Don B. Wilmeth (Emeritus, Brown University), Ph.D., University of Illinois, who brings to the series over a dozen years as editor of a book series on American theatre and drama, in addition to his own extensive experience as an editor of books and journals. He is the author of several award-winning books and has received numerous career achievement awards, including one for sustained excellence in editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Also in the series: Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-garde by Günter Berghaus Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato Moscow Theatres for Young People by Manon van de Water Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre by Odai Johnson Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers by Arthur Frank Wertheim Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing by Wendy Arons Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific by Daphne P. Lei Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns by Leigh Woods Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance edited by William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 by Susan Harris Smith Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject by Alan Sikes Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience by Julius Novick

Beyond the Golden Door Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience

Julius Novick

BEYOND THE GOLDEN DOOR

Copyright © Julius Novick, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7009–1 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7009–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Novick, Julius, 1939– Beyond the golden door : Jewish American drama and Jewish American experience / by Julius Novick. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1–4039–7009–2 1. American drama—Jewish authors—History and criticism. 2. American drama—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Jews— United States—Intellectual life. 4. Judaism and literature—United States. 5. Jews in literature. I. Title. PS173.J4N68 2008 8129.5098924—dc22

2007036453

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2008 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

For Phyllis and Ilana “In you this journey is”

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When I was eight or ten years old, I asked my mother if we could have a Christmas tree Long pause. “Well,” she said. “A small one. In your room. But don’t tell your grandmother.” That, essentially, is what this book is about.

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Contents

Introduction

1

1. The Golden Land Israel Zangwill: The Melting-Pot (1908) Aaron Hoffman: Welcome Stranger (1920) Samson Raphaelson: The Jazz Singer (1925)

9 9 14 18

2. Elmer Rice’s Multiethnic New York Street Scene (1929) Counsellor-at-Law (1931)

25 25 28

3. The Bronx Clifford Odets: Awake and Sing! (1935) Gertrude Berg: Me and Molly (1948)

35 35 42

4. Arthur Miller and the Jews Death of a Salesman (1949) After the Fall (1964) The Price (1968) Broken Glass (1994)

47 47 55 56 57

5. Prosperity and Its Discontents Paddy Chayefsky: The Tenth Man (1959) Jules Feiffer: Grown Ups (1981) Jon Robin Baitz: Three Hotels (1993)

61 61 66 69

6. Neil Simon: Brighton Beach to Broadway Come Blow Your Horn (1961) The Brighton Beach Trilogy Brighten Beach Memoirs (1982, 1983) Biloxi Blues (1984, 1985) Broadway Bound (1986) Lost in Yonkers (1991) Three Show-Business Plays

71 71 78 78 79 80 82 83

x Contents The Sunshine Boys (1972) Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993) Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway (2001) 7. The Musicals Joseph Stein (book), Jerry Bock (music), and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics): Fiddler on the Roof (1964) Joseph Stein (book), Charles Strouse (music), and Stephen Schwartz (lyrics): Rags (1986) William Finn (book, lyrics, music) and James Lapine (book): Falsettos (1992)

83 84 86 87 87 90 94

8. German Jews, Southern Jews Alfred Uhry: Driving Miss Daisy (1987) Alfred Uhry: The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997)

97 97 100

9. More Fathers and Sons Donald Margulies: The Loman Family Picnic (1989) Donald Margulies: Sight Unseen (1991, 1992) Herb Gardner: Conversations with My Father (1991, 1992)

109 109 116 122

10. Jewish Daughters Barbara Lebow: A Shayna Maidel (1985, 1987) Wendy Wasserstein: Isn’t It Romantic? (1981, 1983) Wendy Wasserstein: The Sisters Rosensweig (1992)

129 129 131 135

Epilogue Tony Kushner: Angels in America (1991, 1992)

141 141

Acknowledgments

145

Notes

147

Bibliography

173

Index of Playwrights

183

Index of Plays

185

General Index

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Introduction “If one writes about his people honestly and unflinchingly, he is writing about all people.” —Donald Margulies*

A

great deal has been said and written about “the Jewish novel.” It is generally accepted that Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and many others are not just novelists who happen to be Jewish: they are Jewish novelists writing about Jewish characters and Jewish themes, writers best understood in their context of Jewishness, who achieve universality—if they do achieve it—through Jewish particulars. But except for a small, devoted band of scholars, who speaks or writes or even thinks about “the Jewish drama”? The American theater has not lacked for dramatists who are Jewish, but they are seldom thought of as “Jewish dramatists.” One important reason for this is that until well after World War II, Jewish American playwrights seldom concerned themselves exclusively, or primarily, or even occasionally, with Jewish protagonists and Jewish themes. Instead, like the Jewish studio heads who ruled Hollywood, like the Jewish creators of Archie and Superman comics, they conjured up worlds where everybody is ethnically neutral, with an Anglo-Saxon name, except perhaps for some secondary comic types capering in the background. Jewish playwrights as eminent and prolific as George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, and Lillian Hellman seldom or never created a central character who was explicitly or even recognizably Jewish. Unlike the movie moguls, however, Kaufman and Hellman came from German Jewish families, Hart from an English Jewish family. Scions of such families had a head start in moving away from the shtetl and into Western culture and were not always eager to identify themselves with the toiling masses of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Thus the anti-Semitic tinge to a stage direction from Merton of the Movies (1922), by Kaufman and Marc Connelly, in which one character is described as “a Semitic-appearing young man, rather crude.” * Sources for quotations and other references will be found in the Notes section, identified by a few words from the passage being documented.

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There is a recognizably Jewish secondary character in June Moon (1929) by Kaufman and Ring Lardner, a man named Maxie Schwartz. “It’s a Greek name,” he says, deadpan. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out who or what is being made fun of by that little joke. Is Maxie mocking the person he is talking to, a small-town girl so naive she might not even know that a Maxie Schwartz has to be Jewish? Or is he mocking the kind of person who would try to hide his Jewishness? Both, I think. At any rate, this little moment does seem at least to raise the possibility of being uneasy about being Jewish. But June Moon is not about Maxie Schwartz. In Merrily We Roll Along (1934) by Kaufman and Hart, a play that moves backward through time, we meet a minor character named Cyrus Winthrop, a millionaire industrialist and art collector, among the glittering, fashionable, shallow guests at a Long Island estate that seems to be just down the road from Jay Gatsby’s; a few scenes later, we meet the same man at an earlier stage of his life, as a nervous little fellow trying to find nickeland-dime investors, and his name is Simon Weintraub. So, in the great gallery of pretentious phonies that goes back to the Greeks and includes the braggart soldier and the bourgeois gentleman, we have the self-Gentilized Jew. But Winthrop/Weintraub is only a minor character. In Once in a Lifetime (1930), the famous send-up of Hollywood by Kaufman and Hart, the movie executives are obviously Jewish—just like the real-life Hollywood studio executives, who compensated for their uncouth Jewishness by creating endless images of an Anglo-Saxon America. The ironies here get pretty convoluted. At any rate, in Once in a Lifetime we meet Herman Glogauer, head of the Glogauer Studios, and his underlings Weisskopf and Meterstein, and we hear about his rivals, the twelve Schlepkin Brothers. Glogauer is a bit paranoid about the Schlepkins: All my life they been trying to get me! Way back in the fur business already, when I had nickelodeons and they only had pennylodeons. Always wanting to merge, merge! And because there’s twelve of them they want odds yet!

“The fur business”—where that real-life Jewish mogul, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, got his start. And that final “yet”—the unmistakable sound of Jewish exasperation. But Hollywood, in the play as in real life, is a crazy, preposterous alternate world, and the Jews are just a few among the play’s delirious denizens. The protagonists of Once in a Lifetime, the people we are supposed to care about, are named George Lewis, May Daniels, and Jerry Hyland. In The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946), Lillian Hellman carefully de-Judaized characters who were based on her own

Introduction

3

relatives—so closely based that some of the relatives threatened to sue for libel. She also managed to write a play about refugees from Nazi Europe, Watch on the Rhine (1941), in which there are no Jewish characters, and in which the word “Jew” is mentioned only once, as two secondary characters discuss the stalwart anti-Nazi hero: TECK: A Jew? MARTHE : No. I don’t think so. Only in her very last play, My Mother, My Father, and Me (1963), adapted from a novel by Burt Blechman, did she write about Jewish characters. And this bilious, heavy-handed, now-forgotten satire on upper-middle-class New York Jews would undoubtedly have been regarded as anti-Semitic if a Gentile had written it. Could it be that these playwrights, in spite of themselves, express in their work some sort of “Jewish sensibility?” Perhaps. The snarky wit of Kaufman and Hart and the moral earnestness of Hellman could be regarded as Jewish characteristics. But the fact remains that, especially before the middle of the twentieth century, these and other eminent Jewish American playwrights wrote with little or no reference to their Jewish heritage. Were they trying to reach a larger audience? To shed the burden of ethnic identification? Did they unconsciously assume that their de-ethnicized worlds were the “real” America? Or were they just interested in other things? In Hellman’s case, there were sometimes very specific reasons. If the scheming, coldhearted, rapacious Hubbards of The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest had been identified as Jews, they would have been very close to the classic Jewish stereotype beloved of paranoid anti-Semites; anyhow, Hellman was interested in the Hubbards as capitalists, not as Jews. And the absence of Jews from Watch on the Rhine probably had something to do with fears, not without foundation before Pearl Harbor, that Americans might see the struggle against Hitler as a merely Jewish concern. In any case, these playwrights were claiming a freedom to which they were eminently entitled as artists. I reject the idea, tenaciously held in some quarters, that a writer who is a member of a minority group has some kind of moral duty to be always the representative of that minority group. As one of Chekhov’s characters says, “Everyone must write as he wants to and as he can.” Even so, over the course of the century—and especially in its last few decades—there emerged a considerable body of significant plays by Jewish American dramatists, written in English and produced for general audiences, that do more than show signs of some vague “Jewish

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sensibility”: plays on Jewish themes, expressing Jewish concerns, populated by Jewish characters, dramatizing Jewish experience—plays in which Jews take center stage. These plays are the subject of this book. As to the vexed question of who or what is a Jew: for the purposes of this book, dramatic characters are Jews if they consider themselves Jewish, or if others consider them Jewish—whether those “others” are characters in the play or spectators watching it. Like most of the significant plays written by Gentile American dramatists, these plays are rooted in the realistic tradition, without being the dull exercises in conventional realism so often decried by learned critics. They feature a flavorful, detailed verisimilitude as to time and place, as to the way real people talk and live and relate to one another, but many of them stretch the bounds of strict realism in the direction of comedy, and some of them burst through those bounds to sing and dance, to address the audience directly, even to put memories and hallucinations onstage, the better to tell stories about individuals that are not merely about individuals. Most of these plays are about New York Jews of Eastern European extraction; these, of course, are not the only American Jews, but they are the paradigmatic ones, the kind of people both Jews and Gentiles usually think of when they think of “Jews.” Certain themes keep recurring: the memory of persecution; the fear of the big Gentile world and the yearning to join it; generational conflict; upward social mobility; pride; shame; ambivalence; the counterpoint of outward success and inward disappointment; new American ways of being Jewish; the survival of Jewish identity among those indifferent to Jewish religious belief and religious observance; the diminution of Jewish identity over the generations. All these, like the spokes of a wheel, lead to and from the great subject of this Jewish American drama: the question of how (or whether) to be Jewish and American at the same time. This is the great question of Americanization, acculturation, or (God forbid) assimilation. (“Americanization” and “acculturation” refer to the adoption of American ways of being; I use “assimilation” to mean the loss of Jewish identity entirely.) It is a question, or a tangle of questions, that Jewish American playwrights, like other Jewish Americans, must answer or evade in their own lives. How (or whether) to keep faith with their Jewish heritage, while at the same time embracing (or not embracing) American opportunities, moral as well as material? How Jewish? How American? And what does it mean to be Jewish, to be American, anyway? All this is the American version of what has been a burning question ever since Jews began joining—and remaking—the modern world, but it is by no means a parochially Jewish matter. In many specific ways, Jewish

Introduction

5

American experience is peculiar to Jews: nobody else has a “Viennese table with sparklers, make your own non-dairy sundaes” at their bar mitzvahs. (I quote from The Loman Family Picnic by Donald Margulies.) But in a larger sense, Jewish American experience is the Jewish version of American experience. That is why I have preferred the term “Jewish American” rather than “American Jewish”: to imply a comparison with other Americans, rather than other Jews. The Jewish American divided self and its results are paralleled by the experience of most of us in this famously multiethnic nation of immigrants and their descendants. W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” We Americans are a long way, metaphorically and literally, from where our traditions were formed. Somewhere in our ancestral past, unless we are American Indians, our ethnic heritage, whatever it is, has been weakened by a great transoceanic uprooting, followed, nearly always, by an endless series of other big and little uprootings. Even a Mayflower descendant today is a long way from Plymouth Rock. Even for American Indians, that great uprooting, though not transoceanic, was hardly less traumatic. What that our ancestors brought have we managed to keep with us, and how valuable, how viable is it? What have we discovered here, and how valuable how viable is that? Where in this New World, whatever New World it may be, do we find beliefs and models to tell us what is important and good, to show us how to be, to replace the beliefs and customs that failed to make it through customs? Even beyond America, beyond ethnicity: As long ago as 1949, the critic Leslie Fiedler wrote, “Indeed, in this apocalyptic period of atomization and uprooting, of a catholic terror and a universal alienation, the image of the Jew tends to become the image of everyone.” The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld maintains that “If you’re Jewish, you’re also Everyman. Look at the Bible. It’s the story about one particular, obscure Semitic tribe, but it has universal human appeal.” In our time, more than ever, the Jew is Everyman, since most people today are living in a different world from that of their immediate ancestors and are faced with the crucial task of figuring out how much (if any) of their heritage they can and wish to keep, and of compensating for what has been lost. The sociologist Werner Sollors speaks of “the tension in human [not just Jewish] desire between the wish to escape ancestors and the yearning to fulfill them.” Jewish American drama chronicles and analyzes the Jewish American version of an all-but-universal experience. We all live in the tension between what we came from and what we have come to; we are all faced with the challenge of making some accommodation between them.

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Beyond the Golden Door

Personally, I have always thought of this challenge as an opportunity: so many possibilities, so much raw material out of which to shape a self. America, after all, is the Land of Opportunity, and “Opportunity” includes, very prominently, the opportunity for self-creation. But for many people, dealing with what Du Bois calls “two-ness,” always a less than fully conscious process, is attended by ambivalence, inconsistency, and confusion. Often it is terribly painful. How do we deal with the immigration trauma, that great wound of uprooting that continues to throb down the generations? Oscar Handlin, our leading historian of immigration, has written— apropos of American immigrants in general, not just Jews alone, [T]he history of immigration is a history of alienation and its consequences. . . . Emigration took these people out of traditional, accustomed environments and replanted them in strange ground, among strangers, where strange manners prevailed. The customary modes of behavior were no longer adequate, for the problems of life were new and different. With old ties snapped, men faced the enormous compulsion of working out new relationships, new meanings to their lives, often under harsh and hostile circumstances. . . . The shock, and the effects of the shock, persisted for many years; and their influence reached down to generations which themselves never paid the cost of crossing.

Sometime during the 1930s, the majority of Jewish Americans became American born. Most of the plays discussed in this book date from the years since World War II, when Jewish Americans became more and more at ease in declaring their Jewishness, and when it became more and more widely realized that general as well as Jewish audiences were willing to buy tickets to plays about Jews. Thus Jewish American drama is not primarily about the immigrants themselves, but about their descendants. But it dramatizes the continuing effect of the “alienation,” the “shock,” that Handlin speaks of. Often what happens in these cases is that one of the “two souls,” in Du Bois’s terms, usually the older, pre-American identity, is suppressed. It is striking how many characters in Jewish American plays have two names: an old, inherited Jewish name, and a new, chosen American name. Two names for two souls. The very act of taking a new name involves some kind of rejection, however limited, of the old and what it represents. This suppression, again, is not a peculiarly Jewish tendency. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison writes, “Most Italians [in America] wanted to disguise their past; they wanted to be ‘Americans.’ ” Sometimes, however, the rejected old soul will not go away, causing ambivalence and confusion; sometimes, when successfully suppressed, it leaves behind it a terrible emptiness. The recent

Introduction

7

rise in America of ethnic sensitivity and identity politics has not made the matter any less complicated. It is a question, finally, of who we are, of who each of us is—a question not easily solved, perhaps not entirely solvable. Wrestling with these matters in the American theatre is not, of course, the exclusive preserve of Jewish playwrights. Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Touch of the Poet, Eugene O’Neill’s plays, are largely about being Irish American. In the works of Tennessee Williams, Amanda Wingfield and Blanche Du Bois are immigrants, strangers in a new and hostile country, even though their journey, geographically speaking, has only been a few miles. But this book is about the great attempt by Jewish American playwrights to dramatize American experience by dramatizing Jewish American experience, by exploring the Jewish American version of “two-ness”: the conflict between the “two souls,” the attempt to reconcile them, the choices made between them, and what happens when one of the two (in real life, usually the Jewish soul; in drama, almost always the Jewish soul) is suppressed. The plays fulfill one of the great functions of drama in any age: to show how history feels to people as they live it; to present social fact in terms of fictive but felt experience that brings it home to audiences. I have included biographical facts about the playwrights, where available and appropriate, to show that they are dramatizing their own real experience, and I have included testimony from historians, sociologists, journalists, and even a rabbi or two, as evidence that the playwrights are dramatizing widespread reality and not just private concerns. These plays provide a running commentary on the Jewish encounter with America—and, by extension, on America becoming and being itself. *

*

*

This book makes no claim to be encyclopedic. It does not deal with Yiddish drama, which is another matter entirely, but with plays written in English, for a general American public, by Jewish writers. (Except perhaps for The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window by Lorraine Hansberry, I know of no play by a non-Jewish writer that has much to say about Jewish American experience as such.) However, I have not compiled a catalogue or directory or survey of Jewish American plays or playwrights. There are chapters on Arthur Miller and Neil Simon, the two most prominent Jewish American playwrights, that attempt to trace how their attitudes toward dramatizing Jewishness evolved over the years. Otherwise, no playwright is represented in the book by more than two plays. Some eminent Jewish American playwrights who have written about Jews are excluded entirely (David Mamet,

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Beyond the Golden Door

most notably)—not because I am unaware of them, not because I do not admire them, but because, in my opinion, other plays by other writers cast a more vivid light on the specific question of what it can mean to be Jewish in America. Similarly, these chapters are not offered as all-inclusive, allpurpose readings: they are studies of how the plays they discuss deal with this one crucial question. The plays virtually span the twentieth century, from 1908 to 2001. The arrangement of the book is chronological up through Death of a Salesman (1949); thereafter, I have broken chronology in order to group together plays by the same author, plays of the same genre (musicals), and plays with similar themes, in order to point up connections and contrasts.

1. The Golden Land ISRAEL ZANGWILL: THE MELTING-POT (1908) The Melting-Pot had its world premiere in Washington, DC, with President Theodore Roosevelt in attendance. At the end, as the author took his curtain call, the president stood up in his box and shouted, “It is a great play, Zangwill!” It created a sensation in Washington, Chicago, and London. Though it had a disappointing reception in New York, it may well be the most influential play ever written about the Jews and America. But it is not, strictly speaking, a Jewish American play, because it was written by an English Jew. All the other plays discussed in this book will be certified American plays, but I begin with The Melting-Pot because its title gave us a pervasive metaphor for what many people thought this country was, or at least should be. Perhaps many people think so still. Others had used the melting-pot metaphor before, but Zangwill’s play gave it currency. As the New York Herald-Tribune said in 1926, “Seldom has an author so molded thought by the instrumentality of a single phrase.” Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was a figure of some significance in his time. One critic called him “the Dickens of the ghetto.” Many people—the American writer Hamlin Garland, for instance—considered him to be one of the foremost living English writers of fiction, in the same league as Hardy and Kipling. But who nowadays reads Children of the Ghetto or The King of Schnorrers? The Melting-Pot, said its proud author, was “[p]layed throughout the length and breadth of the States. . . .cited by preachers and journalists, politicians and Presidential candidates,” but as a play it has vanished from public consciousness, leaving only its title behind. Zangwill had gained his first-hand knowledge of America through a single lecture tour, but he had no compunctions about telling Americans just what their country was all about. He wrote The Melting-Pot, he said, “to bring home to America both its comparative rawness and emptiness and its true significance and potentiality for history and civilisation,” and added modestly that it “has been universally acclaimed by

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Americans as a revelation of Americanism.” But to discuss Americanism not in terms of Washington and Lincoln, or cowboys and covered wagons, but, as Zangwill did, to conceive of America as first of all a nation of immigrants—this was, in 1908, to make a big and controversial statement. Perhaps, in certain quarters, it is still, or again, a controversial statement. The play was produced in the midst of the great wave of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe that ended with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Bill of 1924; as I write, we are in the midst of another great wave of immigration, from a different direction, and Congress is discussing how to end it. The protagonist of The Melting-Pot is a brilliant young musician named David Quixano. “Quixano” is a rather odd name for a Yiddish-speaking Russian-Jewish immigrant, but Zangwill wanted him to have a noble pedigree. “In Spain his ancestors were hidalgos, favourites at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.” (Zangwill was not the only one to feel that invoking noble Spanish Jewish ancestors gave a touch of class to drab Eastern European Jewish reality. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, told his biographer “that he was the descendant of noble Spanish Marranos rather than, as was the case, of Bulgarian Jews.”) David suffers from what we would call posttraumatic stress syndrome, having barely survived the Kishinev pogrom, in which his parents, brother, and sister were killed. (The pogrom at Kishinev was a real event; it took place in 1903 and caused an international wave of shock and anger.) Safe in America, he is a somewhat hysterical believer in his new country. Like nearly all the characters in Jewish American drama, and most Jewish Americans in real life, David does not share the traditional rabbinical—and, more recently, traditional Zionist—belief that to live in the Diaspora is to live in exile, that there is something temporary, provisional, about the life that precedes “Next year in Jerusalem.” Even when deeply alienated from America, Jewish Americans, in drama and in life, usually assume that they are Americans, that this is their homeland—whether they like it or not. But David is not alienated, quite the contrary. He stands with the nineteenthcentury Reform rabbis who declared, “America is our Zion.” As his gloomy Uncle Mendel says, “He is crazy about America.” Not everyone in the play is so enthusiastic. To many of the Jews from Eastern Europe, America was the goldene medina, the golden land, but to others it was the treyfene medina, the un-kosher land, a place inimical to the practice of the Jewish religion, as their rabbis had warned them. If they felt exiled in the Old World, they felt doubly exiled in the New. In Eastern Europe, most Jews lived in tightly knit, exclusively Jewish communities,

The Golden Land

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where traditional Jewish observances were an integral part of everyone’s life. In America, these communal ties were cut, and all sorts of social and economic necessities and temptations wore away at Orthodoxy. An endless number of books, fiction and nonfiction, and nearly all the plays discussed in this book testify directly or indirectly to the inexorable weakening of Jewish traditions among American Jews. And so Mendel’s aged mother curses Columbus. She cries every Friday night because, as Mendel says, “She knows that in this great grinding America, David and I must go out to earn our bread on Sabbath as on weekdays. She never says a word to us but her heart is full of tears.” “For many,” writes Irving Howe, “the pressure to work on the Sabbath became a problem threatening the security of their souls.” As often happens, the playwright has anticipated the historian. For other immigrant Jews, however, the weakening of Jewish ties in America was one of America’s greatest attractions. The author’s spokesman in The Melting-Pot is unmistakably David, who proclaims, America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot [a crucible is literally a melting-pot—more appropriate to this play than to Arthur Miller’s] where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the crucible with you all! God is making the American . . . he will be the fusion of all races, the coming superman.

But how is this wonderful melting to be brought about? In an afterword to the play, Zangwill speaks of “spiritual miscegenation”: “The Jew may be Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic [i.e., sexual] interaction.” But in the play itself, David does his bit by falling in love with Vera Revendal, a Gentile Russian immigrant. The complex question of intermarriage—still an issue for many Jewish Americans—raises its head. (Zangwill himself married a non-Jewish woman, which did not stop him from being active in Jewish causes all his life—he was a pioneer Zionist.) Intermarriage crops up in other Jewish American plays, though not so often as perhaps you might expect. Far and away the most popular play ever written on the subject is the supremely trashy Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), by the Gentile playwright Anne Nichols, in which a priest and a rabbi are equally happy to bless the marriage of Abraham Levy and Rose Mary Murphy, and even the battling fathers of the couple are unable to resist the ensuing twins. Jewish playwrights take the matter a little more seriously. As we know, the Quixanos are not uniformly observant Jews. Kathleen, their excruciatingly comic Irish maid, has one shrewd comment on the

12 Beyond the Golden Door varieties of religious experience in Jewish households. She says to Mendel, To-night being yer Sabbath, you’ ll be blowing out yer bedroom candle, though ye won’t light it; Mr. David’ll light his and blow it out too; and the misthress won’t even touch the candleshtick. There’s three religions in this house, not wan.

Even in colonial times, says the historian (and rabbi) Arthur Hertzberg, “American Judaism was becoming in practice almost as many ‘Judaisms’ as there were individuals.” Nevertheless, Uncle Mendel is appalled by David’s romantic plans and throws him out of the house. “Go!” says the uncle, “You have cast off the God of our fathers!” Like most playwrights of his time, Zangwill had a weakness for the melodramatic gesture. But if Mendel is appalled, Vera’s father, Baron Revendal, is fit to be tied: (Grinding his teeth and shaking his fist.) Those Jew-vermin—all my life I have suffered from them! . . . But this supreme insult Vera shall not put on the blood of the Revendals—not if I have to shoot her down with my own hand—and myself after!

In a thunderously unlikely coincidence, David recognizes his prospective father-in-law as the officer in charge of the massacre at Kishinev. David has a spectacular fit and tells Vera, “You cannot come to me. There is a river of blood between us.” But he ultimately realizes that “God’s Crucible”—America—can melt even this “heritage from the Old World, hate and vengeance and blood” and he and Vera are reconciled. He celebrates with a great burst of Zangwill’s purplest rhetoric: There she lies, the great Melting-Pot—listen! . . . Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,— black and yellow— VERA : [Softly, nestling to him.] Jew and Gentile— DAVID : Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. . . .

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[An instant’s solemn pause. . . . Far back, like a lonely, guiding star, twinkles over the darkening water the torch of the Statue of Liberty. From below comes up the softened sound of voices and instruments joining in “My Country, ‘tis of Thee.” The curtain falls slowly.] This, of course, is Zangwill’s wish-fulfillment fantasy, his sentimental dream, and it is easy to make fun of it—though there is sadness in the thought that intelligent, serious people once had such high hopes for our country. But how is this dream to be achieved? America the Crucible will melt the “heritage from the old world, hate and vengeance and blood,” but that is not all that is to be melted: “the roaring fires of God are fusing our race with all the others,” says David. Zangwill writes in his afterword that “the process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an all-round give-and-take” He seems to be suggesting what Warren Beatty says, less elegantly, as a white senator with a black girlfriend in the movie Bulworth (1998): “Everybody gotta keep fuckin’everybody till they’re all the same color.” Still, it is clear that in this projected future America there will be no more anti-Semitism because there will be no more Jews. In 1963, the sociologist Nathan Glazer declared crisply, “The experience of Zangwill’s hero and heroine was not general. The point about the melting pot is that it did not happen”—meaning that the various ethnic groups have sturdily maintained their identity. As the plays in this book testify, American Jews have refused to be melted; they have remained Jews. But since 1963 the intermarriage rate has been climbing, and at the turn of the millennium, many Jewish community leaders are afraid that the melting pot might happen yet (except for the Orthodox faithful), without the paradisiacal results that Zangwill hoped for. Even Zangwill had to admit that “the Jewish pulpits of America have resounded with denunciation” of his play (which would seem to contradict his assertion that it was “universally acclaimed by Americans”). But The Melting-Pot represents, very strongly, one extreme response to the challenge of being Jewish in America: total assimilation, even though Zangwill rejects that word. It is a response that has its temptations even to those who refuse it. That burden of difference, of separation, of outsider-hood—of “two-ness”— what a relief to lay it down! And, of course, it is not just an American issue: when Isaiah Berlin visited the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak in 1945, he reported that Pasternak, who was Jewish, “gave the impression . . . of wishing that he had been born the flaxen-haired blue-eyed son of a peasant.” *

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14 Beyond the Golden Door

AARON HOFFMAN: WELCOME STRANGER (1920) Of course, there are more immediate ways to lay down the burden of Jewishness, or try to. One can always become a Christian. But this does not always work very well. There is the story of a Christianized Jew and a hunchback passing a synagogue. “I used to be a Jew,” says the Christianized Jew. “I used to be a hunchback,” says the hunchback. Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Benjamin Disraeli, were all baptized but were known as Jews to the end of their days. But one can go further: change his name, cut himself off from his family and all those who knew him, take on a new identity, and try to “pass”—like Isaac Leavitt, ne Levi, in The Auctioneer (1901) by Lee Arthur and Charles Klein; or Ichabod Whitson, né Isaac Wolfson, in Welcome Stranger. Significantly, in both plays the Jew who denies his roots is the villain of the piece, and a Jew at ease with his Jewish identity is the hero. In Welcome Stranger, Whitson/Wolfson has not only reinvented himself as a Christian among Christians: he has also become a virulent anti-Semite. As mayor of Valley Falls, New Hampshire, he is determined to keep his little town free of Jews. Presumably their presence makes him uncomfortable, for obvious reasons: presumably they intensify his fears of being suspected; presumably he is trying to ward off the guilt he feels; perhaps he directs toward them the hatred he feels for himself. It would be interesting to see into the mind of a man like that, both before and after he is exposed. But Aaron Hoffman (1880–1924) was a prolific writer of vaudeville sketches, not a specialist in deep psychologizing. Whitson/Wolfson is mostly just a cardboard villain. Hoffman was clearly more interested in Isidor Solomon, his eupeptic hero. Whitson/Wolfson and Solomon are polar opposites. Though Solomon shows no particular interest in Judaism as an organized religion and even flirts with Christian Science, he is in no doubt concerning his Jewish identity, and he is comfortable and open about it. He cheerfully invites a Gentile friend to taste his daughter’s gefilte fish, but his Jewish consciousness goes deeper than that: he proudly identifies himself with the Jewish history of suffering and survival and invokes God as the protector of the Jews. When an anti-Semitic enemy says, “I’m going to wipe you out,” he replies, [F]or thousands of years better men than you have been trying to wipe us out and crush us and annihilate us—you can go all the way back to Pharaoh—but they can’t do it—and why? Because for some particular reason God wants us to live and prosper and—what the Hell are you going to do about it?

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Solomon appears in the town of Valley Falls one snowy New Year’s Eve, determined to stay. Historically, American Jews have tended to cluster in or near large cities and to disdain the countryside, except for vacations, but to Solomon, this small town is an American paradise: I used to peddle through the mountain towns around here and many a time I used to look down on you in the valley, and everything here looked so nice and peaceful and friendly, the grass looked so green, the waterfalls lying there like pure silver. Many a time I wished I could come here and settle down.

Like Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman, Solomon believes that he can fulfill himself by leaving the city behind. We do not know whether he was born in this country, but it is as if he means Valley Falls to be the end of a journey from the Old World to the heart of America. He has left Boston, where “they don’t like Jews,” but expects better treatment in Valley Falls, because “in a small town it’s different. It’s more like a big family. People ain’t so narrow-minded.” But the “big family,” with Mayor Whitson at its head, does not want him as a member. He is told in no uncertain terms that he is not welcome. Like so many Jewish protagonists, on and off the stage, he must fight the Gentile world if he is to make himself a place in it. Full of benevolence and expecting it from everyone he meets, he manages not to notice when he is being insulted, which serves initially as a shield against the town’s anti-Semitism. But he is not only benevolent, modest, and charming: when the occasion warrants, he is tough and shrewd. He has the stereotypical Jewish affinity for the dollar, but his financial ability is presented as a virtue, since he uses it for constructive purposes. And—unlike some of the anti-Semitic townsfolk—he is scrupulously honest. He goes into partnership with a local inventor; foils the dastardly plots of Mayor Whitson and exposes him as a Jew; and within a year is hailed as the town’s benefactor for bringing electricity to Valley Falls. (Note that the commodity he brings is light.) He even manages to unite two pairs of nice young (Gentile) lovers The sociologist Robert K. Merton has pointed out that Gentiles, in “fear of the alleged superiority” of the Jews, often condemn them for being too successful. [U]nderstandably enough, many Jews will come to feel that [their] accomplishments must be minimized in simple self-defense. . . .

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Beyond the Golden Door In a society which looks upon wealth as a warrant of ability, an out-group is compelled by the inverted attitudes of the dominant in-group to deny that many men of wealth are among its members. “Among the 200 largest nonbanking corporations. . . . only ten have a Jew as president or chairman of the board.” Is this an observation of an anti-Semite, intent on proving the incapacity and inferiority of Jews who have done so little “to build the corporations which have built America?” No; it is a retort of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to anti-Semitic propaganda.

Thus when one of the anti-Semites in Welcome Stranger says, “your people are tricky, you’re too smart and I don’t mind admitting to you that we’re afraid of you in a small community like this,” Solomon answers, I want to ask you something, if you think we’re so smart—who is the head of Standard Oil? Mr. Rockefeller. Is he a Jew? Oh, no. Who are the heads of the railroads? The Vanderbilts, the Goulds. Are they Jews? Oh, no. Who are the heads of the Steel Industry, Mr. Schwab, Mr. Gary. Who are the heads of the coal industry? Mr. Burns, Mr. Farrell. Who controls the telegraphs and the cables? Mr. Mackay. Are they Jews? Oh, no. Who is the big financial gun in America? Mr. Morgan. Is he a Jew? Oh, no. Believe me, we ain’t half as smart as a lot of people think we are.

The playwright has anticipated the sociologist by many years, dramatizing the Gentile fear of Jewish ability, and the Jewish tendency to minimize Jewish success because it attracts hostility. However, Solomon cannot help adding, mischievously, “Of course—we ain’t altogether damn fools either.” Near the end of the play, the now ex-mayor returns, humble and contrite—“My name is Wolfson—Isaac Wolfson,” he acknowledges— and Solomon forgives him. “I did it because I had to in order to succeed,” says Wolfson. “I thought it was the easiest way to avoid the handicap of prejudice that exists against us.” But Solomon will have none of this excuse: No matter what a man is—no matter where he goes—he can make himself liked if he behaves himself and thinks of other people besides himself. If he is honest and kind and straightforward, he don’t have to push himself in anywheres—they’ll ask him in and be glad to have him. You can say all you want about prejudice. Yes—there is prejudice, but whether it’s going to be against you or in your favor is entirely up to yourself.

This idea that anti-Semitism can be disarmed by being “honest and kind and straightforward” is contradicted by Solomon’s own experience in the

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play. He triumphs over anti-Semitism, through superior ability and a great deal of luck, only after a painful struggle. In the America of 1920, with so many obstacles to Jewish success in business and the professions, poor Wolfson has a point. However, as anti-Semitism has faded in America over the course of the twentieth century, there has been less and less motivation for Jews to dig up their roots by the roots and try to pass as Christians, except under very special circumstances of self-hatred. (An anti-Semitic skinhead who is actually Jewish is the protagonist of The Believer [2001], a movie inspired by the actual case of a neo-Nazi leader in New York who committed suicide when The New York Times exposed him as a Jew.) For blacks, and certainly for homosexuals, the motivation to pass has lasted longer. Welcome Stranger, like The Melting-Pot, is clearly a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Like so many real American Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Isidor Solomon is an ex-peddler who prospers as an entrepreneur. But Solomon is not just a typical hardworking Jewish businessman, frozen out of the established business community, who pioneers in new areas of the economy. (The sociologist Herbert J. Gans says that “an enterprising spirit and a willingness to take risks” are characteristic of the second-generation Jewish businessman.) He is SuperJew, fighting and defeating the anti-Semites, and not only making an honored place for himself in the little America that is Valley Falls, but also bringing it blessings and earning its love—all in the space of a year! Moreover, he has no inner conflicts. In him Du Bois’s “two souls” are effortlessly one. Nothing stands between him and happiness except anti-Semitism, which he overcomes. The core of the fantasy—the idea that a Jew can be a successful American and still be openly a Jew—is, of course, much more than a fantasy, as the career of Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, among many others, can attest. But most Jewish American plays suggest that even without anti-Semitism, Jewish Americans have problems of their own. The opposite extreme from Isaac Wolfson’s total assimilation by selfderacination is the total rejection (as far as that is possible) of the Gentile world, the attempt to recreate the shtetl in Brooklyn or elsewhere, on the assumption that America is just another place of exile. This mode of living as a Jew in America—increasingly prominent in the twenty-first century— has seldom been represented in the English-speaking theatre; for that we have to look at the novels of Chaim Potok and others, or films such as the documentary A World Apart. The American theatre has been mainly

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concerned with the rich range of responses in between the two extremes, of which Welcome Stranger, that genial comedy, provides an exceptionally benign example. *

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SAMSON RAPHAELSON: THE JAZZ SINGER (1925) The anguish of “two-ness,” of being torn apart by “warring ideals,” in Du Bois’s phrase, is dramatized overtly, not to say blatantly, in The Jazz Singer. Most people, of course, know The Jazz Singer as the first talking picture, with Al Jolson in blackface singing “Mammy,” but before it was a movie it was a successful Broadway play by Samson Raphaelson (1896–1983). The Jazz Singer illustrates something very basic about these questions of identity and self-definition, of Jewish versus American. They are seldom decided on the basis of abstract principle or calm deliberation. They are hotly emotional matters—which is what makes them such rich material for drama—inextricably enmeshed, first of all, in the relations between children and parents, in the revolt of the younger generation. In the old country, according to Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, “One of the things that kept the Jews together under conditions of extreme adversity was their shared belief in the value—even, if you will, the sanctity—of the family, [which] became the one place of security for Jews of the shtetl.” Earlier in his career, Howe had written, “A people deprived of the sense of nationhood and constantly dissevered by overwhelming enemies could only turn inward towards the family unit as a substitute . . . the family was the last shelter to which the persecuted and miserable Jew could retire.” But in America, adversity was less extreme, enemies less overwhelming, Jews less persecuted and miserable. All the old ties loosened—family ties not least. Home often came to seem not a shelter but a prison to the younger generation, as American possibilities opened that their elders could not understand. And so, again and again in Jewish American plays, Americanization takes the form of rebellion against the family and against the Jewish community, of which the family is in some measure a microcosm. Jewish children struggle to leave home, literally or figuratively, or have already left, bearing scars, in plays by Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Jules Feiffer, Donald Margulies, Herb Gardner, Barbara Lebow, Wendy Wasserstein, and others. (Could these children be reenacting, in diminished form, the great leavinghome of their immigrant ancestors?) Again and again in these plays, Dad or

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Mom or both, the figures with closest ties to the past, the enforcers of the Law in whatever form it appears, stand for traditional Jewishness, opposing the rebellion of the children. Uncle Mendel in The Melting-Pot, who so fiercely opposes David’s marriage to a Gentile, is clearly a surrogate father; Mendel’s old mother weeps because he and David must violate the Sabbath. Even in Welcome Stranger, which is mainly concerned with other matters, the evidence that forces Whitson/Wolfson to acknowledge his Jewishness is a letter in Yiddish from his mother. And to break away from the Jewish home is, to a greater or lesser degree, to break away from Jewishness. In the words of the French Jewish writer Alain Finkielkraut, In Christian society, the Jewish family and Jewish nation are two indistinguishable structures: leaving one in any way means deserting the other. . . . The family and Judaism join together in an inextricable emotional knot.

(But is this knotting together of family and heritage unique to the Jews?) The patrons of the Yiddish theatre were often treated to heart-rending dramas of parents neglected by their callous offspring; Welcome Stranger seems related to this tradition. But Jewish American drama in English almost always sympathizes with the children, breaking away, in the immemorial fashion of children, from the restrictions of a way of life that seems to them oppressive and outmoded. And yet the parents, often seen as narrow and arbitrary, are seldom outright villains; the playwrights have sympathy to spare for them. As in The Jazz Singer, the struggle is often complicated by the fact that the young protagonist has internalized the ancestral Jewish values he is struggling against—“two souls.” Unlike The Melting-Pot, which is set, rather strangely, on Staten Island, The Jazz Singer takes place mainly on the Lower East Side, at that time the heart of the New York Jewish community, where Jewish roots were still strong, where the older generation spoke English, if they spoke it at all, in a Jewish American dialect plainly derived from Yiddish, and where the synagogue was still a center of communal life. Everyone knows the outline of the plot. Jakie Rabinowitz, star pupil of his father the cantor and descendant of a long line of cantors, has run away from the East Side to become Jack Robin, the jazz singer. Like Whitson/ Wolfson, he has two names, one for each of his two souls. (The character was inspired by Jolson, born Asa Yoelson, who actually was a cantor’s son.) Five years later, on the brink of stardom, Jack has come home, still carrying the “little ivory prayer book” that his father had given him. “It’s a funny thing about that prayer book, Ma,” he says. “When I was traveling on the

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road, I bet I left a million things behind, but I always carried that.” His Jewishness has stayed with him. W. E. B. Du Bois says that the “American Negro” yearns “to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the old selves to be lost.” That is what Jack wants: I came home because I thought I could bring together all the things in my life that are dear to me, that made me happy from the time when I was a little kid till now— singing and playing in the streets—the East Side—shooting craps—baseball—my mama—my papa—the synagogue,—and now my work in the theatre.

“Singing and playing in the streets”—that great school of American-ness, the streets. Irving Howe writes that “the streets, despite their squalor, spoke of freedom. . . . freedom, if only for an hour or two, to be the ‘street bum’ against whom fathers warned.” Now Jack, naively, wants to fuse his rebellion with what he is rebelling against. But Cantor Rabinowitz, the incarnation of thousands of years of tradition, of Jewish cohesion and separation from the surrounding world, has zero tolerance for what he calls “dirty music from the sidewalks” and the people who sing it. He sees that the Gentile world threatens his way of life, and that Jack has betrayed him by joining it. “You are no son of mine,” says the Cantor. “I never want to see you again”—sounding very much like Uncle Mendel in The Melting Pot when he discovers that David is in love with a Gentile woman. (Jack too is in love with a Gentile woman—that symbol of American opportunity—but in The Jazz Singer that is only a side issue.) And thus matters stand until the eve of Yom Kippur. Jack’s father is seriously ill and cannot sing in the synagogue. His mother begs her son to sing in his father’s place. But by an interesting coincidence it is also Jack’s opening night on Broadway, his big chance. He has to choose. Who is he, really, cantor or jazz singer? Synagogue or theatre: where do his deepest loyalties lie? Which of his “two souls” will he embrace as his real self? What will it be, Kol Nidre or Cole Porter? For David in The Melting-Pot, infatuated with America, Jewishness seems to entail little more than the memory of persecution, the “river of blood” that temporarily parts him from Vera; otherwise his choice is easy. But Jack’s father the Cantor, a real father, with a community and a rich, living tradition at his back, is far more powerful a symbol and proponent of Jewish identity than poor isolated Uncle Mendel. Hutchins Hapgood, that friendly turn-of-the-century Gentile chronicler of the East Side, wrote that

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if the generic Jewish boy were able entirely to forget his origin, to cast off the ethical and religious influences that are his birthright, there would be no serious struggle in his soul. . . . The struggle is strong because the boy’s nature, at once religious and susceptible, is strongly appealed to by both the old and the new. At the same time that he is keenly sensitive to the charm of his American environment, with its practical and national opportunities, he has still a deep love for his race and the old things.

Jack Robin—torn between tradition and opportunity, religion and show business—is precisely Hapgood’s agonized, two-souled Jewish boy. He vacillates desperately: The old songs from the synagogue start wailing in my ears ... and I—I cry ... I used to get down on my knees in the dark and talk to God in Hebrew. I—bawled him out. ... because he made me only half a Cantor—half a Cantor, and half a bum. [He begins to black up.] If I was all bum, I wouldn’t care. What does a bum care? But if I was all Cantor, I would be happy.

On the other hand: I’ve got Broadway in my blood. There’s something sweet about the sound of the English language in my ears ... I want to be part of America. I want to take it in my arms.

He dismisses the prayers of the synagogue as “stuff that doesn’t mean anything to me any more.” “I emphasized,” says the playwright, the moral bewilderment of the traditionless, first-generation American Jew, deprived of his orthodoxy. I branded my hero as a lost soul, singing his dilemma, black faced, in tortured jazz.

Although Gentile boys too have been tempted to run away from home to join the circus, Jews have long had a special tropism toward show business—dramatized later, as we shall see, in several plays by Neil Simon. “No minority group,” writes a scholar of Jewish culture, “was quicker to satisfy the hunger for the sensations of mass entertainment (and often for liberation from Victorian gentility) than Jewish entrepreneurs and performers.” Irving Howe offers a reason for this: Just as blacks would later turn to baseball and basketball knowing that here at least their skin color counted for less than their skills, so in the early 1900’s

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Beyond the Golden Door young Jews broke into vaudeville because here too people asked not, who are you? but, what can you do?

Thus many Jewish boys, and some girls as well, have faced some version of Jakie/Jack’s dilemma, as they tried to escape from the constrictions of their Jewish upbringing into some form of American show business—but few, perhaps, have faced the dilemma in quite so stark a form. The playwright overlooks the fact that that even by the 1920s, show business itself had already become in good part a Jewish milieu, however different from the Cantor’s Orthodox East Side community. Jack makes up his mind and unmakes it more than once. He is just about to decide definitively in favor of the theatre when the news comes: his father has died. Jack’s response: He told me God would punish me! I thought I could get away from Cantors! Well, God showed me ... Mama! I’m going with you! I’m going to the synagogue! ... I’m your son. I’m the son of my father. Mama, I’m a Cantor, see? ... I’m Cantor Rabinowitz! God’s going to hear me sing Kol Nidre tonight!

You can take the boy out of the synagogue, but you can’t take the synagogue out of the boy. And yet, Raphaelson suggests that the deepest reason why Jakie/Jack’s dilemma is so agonizing is that although being a cantor and being a jazz singer are apparently polar opposites, on a deeper level they are really expressions of the same impulse. In his preface to the play, Raphaelson writes, “In seeking a symbol of the vital chaos of America’s soul, I find no more adequate one than jazz.” The fact that this “jazz” is music in a highly adulterated African American idiom sung by a Jew in grotesque blackface—music that nowadays would hardly be considered jazz at all— has ironies all its own. When Jack says, “I want to be part of America,” he is in the act of blacking up—an ironic juxtaposition that Bertolt Brecht would have admired. Being “American” evidently includes making a connection with African American culture—but what kind of connection? Not only Jolson but Eddie Cantor, George Jessel (the original Jakie/Jack on Broadway), Sophie Tucker, and many other Jewish entertainers sang in blackface. Were they expressing solidarity as oppressed people with black fellow Americans—“one woe speaking through the voice of another,” as Irving Howe put it—or, by claiming the right to impersonate blacks, were they insisting on their own American whiteness, as others have argued? At any rate, “jazz” is American. But when Raphaelson first saw Jolson perform, his reaction was, “My God, this isn’t a jazz singer. This is a cantor!”

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What is the connection between cantorial singing and jazz singing? Raphaelson says of Jolson: This grotesque figure in blackface, kneeling at the end of a runway which projected him into the heart of his audience, flinging out his white-gloved hands, was embracing that audience with a prayer—an evangelical moan—a tortured, imperious call that hurtled through the house like a swift electrical lariat with a twist that swept the audience right to the edge of the runway. The words didn’t matter, the melody didn’t matter. It was the emotion—the emotion of a cantor.

As Raphaelson says more succinctly in his preface, “Jazz is prayer. It is too passionate to be anything else.” He is at pains to insist in his stage directions that jazz songs are “cheap” while synagogue music is “noble,” but ultimately that does not seem to matter much (except, of course, to Jack’s father) in the face of their shared emotionality. Thus when Jack sings “Dixie Mammy,” “His rendition is excellent jazz—that is, it has an evangelical fervor, a fanatical frenzy. . . . We are listening to a Cantor in blackface.” Jack says to his mother, “You forget that I’m an American boy, and Papa is from the Old World. If he were born here, like I was, he would probably be singing jazz too.” Not surprisingly, this is more than the old Cantor can swallow, but his mother is able to accept “that by you being a ragtime singer is like by your papa being a Cantor.” She realizes that by defying his father, Jack is emulating him, not denying his Jewish heritage, but turning that heritage into a new, American channel. Reviewing the Jazz Singer movie, a Yiddish paper detected again and again the minor key of Jewish music, the wail of the Chazan [cantor], the cry of anguish of a people who had suffered. The son of a line of rabbis well knows how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history.

Michael Alexander suggests that the yearning for a distant home, second only to “Mammy” as a frequent theme of the jazz singer’s repertory, is not inappropriate for a people in exile: Dixie 5 Zion? Perhaps, also, the “mammy songs” owe something to the fervid sentimentality directed toward the “Yiddishe mama” in the Yiddish theatre. It was said of the celebrated Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky, “No matter if the scene was laid in the hot sandy desert or the Halls of the Inquisition, Thomashefsky always managed to get in a song about Mama.” So did Al Jolson; so does Jack Robin. Such out-of-context emotionalism might have seemed out of

24 Beyond the Golden Door place in the English-speaking theatre, which, even for musicals, observed more decorum than the famously over-the-top, anything-goes Yiddish theater, but it was licensed by the mask of blackness. As Irving Howe suggests, “Blacking their faces seems to have enabled Jewish performers to reach a spontaneity and assertiveness in the declaration of their Jewish selves.” At the end of the play, Jack’s girlfriend announces, “You are going to hear a blackface comedian singing to his God,” implying that perhaps his “two souls,” his “warring ideals” in Du Bois’s terminology, are not irreconcilable after all. A further hint in the play that Jack’s rejection of jazz singing will not be permanent is amplified in the movie, which adds an epilogue showing Jack singing “Mammy” at the Winter Garden Theater as his own mother sits beaming in the audience.

2. Elmer Rice’s Multiethnic New York STREET SCENE (1929) The time is long past when Elmer Rice (1892–1967) was commonly compared to Eugene O’Neill, but he retains a place in the history of American drama. Of his twenty-four Broadway plays, produced over four decades, The Adding Machine (1923) and Street Scene (1929) are taught in colleges as examples of American expressionism and naturalism, respectively, and receive occasional productions. Counsellor-at-Law, revived offoff-Broadway in 2004, proved to be still a dynamic piece of theatre. Rice was born in New York to a lower-middle-class German Jewish family. His parents were not religious, though his mother fasted on Yom Kippur; he himself “heartily disliked” the Jewish Sunday school to which they sent him. Judaism, he once wrote, was “a creed that meant nothing to me,” adding later, “religion never played a part in my life. I have never regretted my refusal to adopt the Jewish faith; nor have I embraced any other faith.” As a young man, he changed his name from Reizenstein to Rice, explaining in his autobiography, as an American born of American parents, I saw no reason for hanging on to a foreign-looking name with which I had no associations or emotional ties. . . . There were those who charged me with wanting to conceal my Jewish antecedents. No such consideration entered my mind. I have never paraded my origin, but I have never tried to deny it, either. It is a matter to which I have paid no attention.

It would be hard to imagine a more categorical denial of any meaningful sense of Jewish identity. “[T]he happiest day of my year,” he adds, “is the Christmas dinner, for which I manage to assemble my five children and five grandchildren.” Greatly to the grief of Jewish community leaders, there

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are many Jewish Americans who, with no desire to hide their Jewishness, are indifferent, like Rice, to the very idea of a Jewish community. Rice was typically Jewish only in his love of books and high culture, and in his socialist ideals and vigorous liberal activism. (The term “socialism” has been used to describe various sorts of left-wing people and things, from cautious reformers to hot-eyed revolutionaries. With a small “s,” it is often a category that includes Communism; with a capital “S,” it denotes a less extreme rival of Communism; I will use it, with a small “s,” to cover anyone and anything to the left of Eleanor Roosevelt.) He believed in tikkun olam, the obligation to heal or repair the world that has been the first commandment for so many modern Jews, though he would not have recognized the term; he was a lifelong foe of prejudice and censorship. Like other Jewish American playwrights of his time, Rice did not often write about Jewish characters, though he wrote an anti-Nazi play entitled Judgement Day, about the Reichstag fire, as early as 1934. In Flight to the West (1940), a rather stiffly drawn, assimilated young Jewish American pacifist encounters a couple of Nazis and resolves to become a pilot in order to fight them; this resolution, however, is not the result of any strong new sense of Jewish identity. More interesting for our purposes is Street Scene, a teeming ensemble piece that was a huge hit and won the Pulitzer Prize. It is set in front of “a ‘walk-up’ apartment house, in a mean quarter of New York.” The people who live there come and go, sit on the stoop, lean out the windows, arguing, gossiping, living their lives, which include a birth, an eviction, an adulterous affair, and a murder. Shrewdly, Rice seasons the naturalistic dailiness of tenement life with a spice of melodrama. Among the Italian, German, Scandinavian, and miscellaneous other tenants of Rice’s tenement is a Jewish family. Unlike the Jewish families in other plays who live in Jewish neighborhoods, the Kaplans live among Gentiles. Totally secular—Sam Kaplan at the age of twenty-one has never been inside a synagogue—and with no apparent interest in any sort of overt Jewishness, they still understand themselves to be Jewish and are so understood by those around them. Though part of the tenement community, they are still subject at times to the casual, conversational antiSemitism of their neighbors, and even to occasional physical bullying. Abraham Kaplan sits in a window overlooking the street, “reading a Yiddish newspaper,” says Rice’s stage direction. “He is a Russian Jew, well past sixty [with] hooked nose, horn-rimmed spectacles. . . . He speaks with a strong accent, over-emphatically, and with much gesticulation,” in angry bursts of second-hand Marxist rhetoric, as if he were making a soapbox

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speech in Union Square: “So long as de institution of priwate property exeests, de verkers vill be at de moicy of de property-owning klesses.” Evidently retired, he makes a little money by writing for radical newspapers. Perhaps his socialism can be considered his form of Jewishness—even, perhaps, his religion. Many Jewish immigrants brought strong radical beliefs with them to America, as anti-Semites and anti-immigrationists (historically two heavily overlapping categories) have been quick to point out. But endless numbers of Jewish playwrights, novelists, historians, and sociologists, of varying shades of opinion, have also written about Jewish American radicals, who were also of varying shades of opinion; in the next chapter we will meet an elderly Marxist with more dignity than raucous, overbearing Mr. Kaplan. Rice himself was a socialist, but not a Marxist. With his strong belief in freedom of speech, he was suspicious of orthodox Communism. Kaplan’s daughter Shirley, “a dark, unattractive Jewess, past thirty,” is a hard-working schoolteacher who takes summer courses at Teachers’ College. She has given up her chances of getting married in order to devote herself to putting her brother Sam through college and law school. Sam is a sensitive youth, about to graduate from college with honors, who reads The Nation (then as now a liberal periodical) and who loves Beethoven and Walt Whitman. But he is no match physically for the local bully. Put the Kaplans together and what do we have? Hooked nose, radical politics, high culture, intellectual strength, physical weakness: all these are standard components of Jewish stereotypes. There were, of course, straight-nosed, conservative, ignorant, philistine, stupid Jewish Americans in 1929, and there were famous Jewish prizefighters and gangsters as well, yet the stereotypes Rice is dealing in are also realities. Poor Sam is in love with a sweet Gentile girl who lives upstairs. AntiSemitic neighbors warn her against him—and so does Sam’s sister Shirley: “When you marry outside your own kind,” she says, “nothing good ever comes of it. You can’t mix oil and water.” Even when all religious feeling has gone, a sense of the need for Jewish cohesion and continuity often remains and generates Jewish opposition to intermarriage. We will see this again. But Shirley has a deeper reason for her opposition: Her brother, she says, is “all I’ve got in the world. What else have I got to live for?” Marriage is an expensive luxury and would force Sam to give up law school and go to work to support his family. In the days before birth control, children came unbidden, often in large numbers. “[A] marriage without an economic future,” writes Riv-Ellen Prell, “provided the tragic plots of many tales of

28 Beyond the Golden Door popular fiction and personal letters that appeared in the Yiddish press”; Shirley is determined that no such tragedy should befall Sam. She lives for Sam, but for Sam as a lawyer. Though it is usually a parent (or both parents), and not a sibling, who applies the pressure to achieve status— and freedom from poverty—as an American professional, Sam is like so many young Jewish American men, in life and in the drama that represents that life, bearing the heavy burden of his family’s hopes. Social mobility through education, hard work, and sacrifice can be an imperative as well as an opportunity. *

*

*

COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW (1931) Counsellor-at Law is set in the skyscraper offices of Simon and Tedesco, a busy New York law firm. (Rice worked for years in such a firm and even passed the bar exam, before his success as a playwright enabled him to quit.) Like the constant street noise in Street Scene, the buzzing of the telephone switchboard suggests, more or less subliminally, the energy of the great surrounding city. As in Street Scene, various sorts of people come and go; in these two large-cast plays, Rice sees New York as a multi-ethnic meeting place. But whereas the Jewish Kaplan family is only one thread in the tapestry of Street Scene, Counsellor-at-Law is totally dominated by George Simon, its charismatic Jewish title character—originally played by that charismatic Jewish actor Paul Muni, né Muni Weisenfreund, late of the Yiddish theatre. Jews have been better than any other American ethnic group at upward social mobility—at prospering and moving up the ladder of class. “The rise in socio-economic status of the Eastern European Jews and their descendants,” declares a sociologist, is “the greatest collective Horatio Alger story in American immigration history.” A good half of the plays in this book deal, centrally or peripherally, with the attempt at upward mobility or the implications of success or failure at that attempt. Most of those rebellious Jewish protagonists, from The Jazz Singer onward, are not only trying to get out, they are trying to get out and up. Other Jewish sons, however, like Sam Kaplan in Street Scene, have the full support of their families. In Counsellor-at-Law, George Simon’s mother fairly basks in his success. The standard model of Jewish American social mobility has been that the immigrant toils in the working class; his son becomes a businessman;

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and his grandson, in the third generation, enters a profession, solidly established in the upper middle class. George Simon, like many other Jewish immigrants, has transcended this paradigm, not stopping at upper-middle-class comfort but rising from rags to riches, and doing it all himself, without waiting for sons and grandsons. I have mainly avoided the common generalizations about Jewish generations because they have so many exceptions. What is supposed to happen in three generations often happens in one. In the words of the eminent sociologist Paul Riesman, “It is not easy to say when one generation ends and another begins, for people are not produced in batches, as are pancakes, but born continuously.” Simon came to America as a boy, “in the steerage,” among the many Jewish immigrants who came pouring in, mostly from Eastern Europe, before the immigration-restrictive laws of the early 1920s closed the Golden Door. He grew up, as one old friend reminds him, “peddlin’ papers in the rain and your toes comin’ through your boots.” Now he is a high-priced, high-profile attorney. “It costs me,” he says, “a hundred thousand a year to live”—in 1931! His waiting room is filled with petitioners; a senator returns his phone calls; he is accustomed to giving orders in impeccable, unaccented English. As he says, I’m mixed up in more front-page cases than any lawyer in New York. People from old families come in and think I’m doing them a favor if I accept their retainers. If I don’t happen to like a millionaire’s looks, I throw him out of the office.

Counsellor-at-Law is one of the few Jewish American plays that depict a Jew as powerful. Sam Kaplan in Street Scene, who will become a lawyer, is a nice boy who plays by the rules; so is Bernard, the neighbor boy in Death of a Salesman, who is already a lawyer before the play ends. George Simon is a different kind of lawyer, a reminder that not all successful Jews are studious types who play by the rules. When an enemy gets the goods on him for helping to set up a fake alibi to keep a decent kid out of jail, Simon faces ruin— which he triumphantly avoids by blackmailing his accuser with letters obtained by burglary. Some writers, notably Budd Schulberg in his novel What Makes Sammy Run?, have depicted up-from-poverty Jewish strivers as crude, sleazy manipulators, but George Simon is presented as a virile hero, admired, almost worshipped, by nearly everyone around him—including, unmistakably, the playwright. Simon belongs to a familiar type not often depicted as a Jew: the scrapper, the hard-nosed kid from the slums who has

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fought his way to the top by fair means and sometimes foul, but who loves his old mother, and never forgets his old friends from the old neighborhood. Simon is not a noticeably Jewish Jew. He does swap a couple of words of Yiddish with his mother, who has a much lighter accent than another Jewish mother in the play; a number of his employees have Jewish names, one of them a bright lad from Harvard. But the critic who complained that the play was “written with a racial consciousness that diminishes its appeal” must have had a morbidly anti-Semitic sensibility. Perhaps in an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to disarm such criticism, Rice avoids Jewish specifics. Like the playwright himself, and like many other Jews, George Simon is evidently not interested in his own Jewishness. Change just a few lines, and there would be no indication that he is Jewish at all. When Paul Muni turned down the role of Simon in the movie—Rice suspected that Muni was afraid to be typed as a Jewish actor—the role went to, of all people, John Barrymore, who gave a smashing, though not at all Jewish, performance. Simon experiences himself not particularly as a Jew, but as an upstart, an immigrant, a poor boy, a working-class man, who has pushed his way in among the swells. He is characterized by the feelings that successful Jewish upstarts share with successful Gentile upstarts: ambivalent feelings of pride and inferiority, hostility and yearning toward the ruling class. Counsellor-at-Law is a study in the psychology of the upstart. That its hero is a Jewish upstart seems more or less incidental—as it is for many actual Jewish upstarts; this is a play about class. Although Simon has divested himself of Jewish markers, he is not one of those “allrightniks” who are ashamed of their humble origins. On the contrary, he is proud of those origins: they indicate how far he has come by his own efforts. Rice avoids exploring how his protagonist feels about the specifically Jewish aspect of those origins. Simon goes out of his way to help his old friends and neighbors and their children, feeling his own power by using it in princely fashion to do good to needy people, many of whom were once his equals. He does so irrespective of whether those he helps are Jews or Gentiles. We meet two former criminals, both acquaintances from the old days, whom he has helped to go straight. One vows, “I’d cut off my right hand for him that’s what I’d do.” The other is the lad whom Simon has saved from prison, at the risk of his own career, by means of a fake alibi; this boy tells his benefactor, “I’d go through fire and water for you.” Neither is Jewish. The important division for George Simon is not between Jew and Gentile, but between the multiethnic rising newcomers and the WASP aristocrats.

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And yet, Simon is explicitly identified as a Jew: somebody asks about his law partner, “Is he a Jew too?” [italics mine]. Since we know Simon is Jewish, everything he is and does, everything that happens to him, has a Jewish subtext for those who wish to see it, a subtext about the Jew as upstart. Simon is accepted by his Gentile fellow ethnics (to use a term Rice would not have known), but the WASP establishment will ultimately have none of him. His great enemy, the man who threatens to get him disbarred for suborning perjury, is Francis Clark Baird, a pillar of that establishment, a member of the Parole Board and the grievance committee of the Bar Association. “I’ve licked him to a fare-you-well in half a dozen cases,” Simon explains. “It’s not the first time this Baird and the rest of those silk-stocking babies in the Bar Association have tried to get me.” Rice could easily have suggested that Baird was actuated by antiSemitism, but, strikingly, he does not do so. As Simon’s friend Malone says, “Those guys that came over on the Mayflower don’t like to see the boys from Second Avenue sittin’ in the high places. We’re just a lot of riffraff to them.” Simon’s partner, John P. Tedesco, agrees: “He’s after our scalps, isn’t he? And why? Because we came from the streets and our parents talk with an accent.” The Jewish American, the Irish American, and the Italian American are in this together. Baird’s malice extends to all three of them, motivated by his fear of the immigrants’ sons who presume to rival him, who demand a share of his long-established power and privilege. Anti-Semitism is often motivated by such fears—think of the Ivy League colleges that instituted admissions quotas for fear of being overrun by brilliant, pushy, uncouth Jews. But, as the play suggests, such fears are not directed at Jews only. Baird’s attack threatens to destroy the life that Simon has built for himself. “God, disbarment!” he says to his partner. “After all those years, and all I’ve sweated through to get where I am, I don’t think I could face it, John.” In this condition, he is plunged into two bruising confrontations. The first is with his wife. Cora Simon is a silk stocking baby herself, “one of the four hundred,” as Bessie, the telephone girl, says. “Her father used to be the governor of some state—Connecticut, I guess it was. . . . Well, you know the way all these society dames are, sort of proud and haughty. They kind of have a way of lookin’ at you, as if they didn’t see you.” We see Cora ordering a suite on a transatlantic ocean liner and demanding a particular steward: “He’s served me several times before, and I prefer to have someone who is familiar with my requirements.” She, of course, is an unmitigated stereotype: the Rich Bitch.

32 Beyond the Golden Door But what a coup, what a symbol of attainment it is, for a Jewish upstart to have carried off this spoiled WASP ice princess! Rice only hints at the Jewish/Gentile aspect of it—Cora’s snooty children from her previous marriage are aware that their stepfather, whom they dislike, is a Jew—what he explicitly shows us is a marriage between an upstart and an aristocrat. But we are at liberty to infer a Jewish/Gentile subtext. Like most of the plays in this book, Counsellor-at-Law shows a Jewish man trying strenuously to be, by his lights, an American. It suggests, through Cora, that the fruits of the struggle are not always worth having; this is a theme that becomes overwhelmingly prominent in later Jewish American plays from the decades of prosperity that followed World War II. Simon adores his wife and feels a deep sense of inferiority before her; the flip side of his robust pugnacity toward the aristocracy is a slavish reverence toward it. “I told you from the start I wasn’t good enough for you,” he tells her, without irony. “I know there are lots of ways in which I don’t measure up to your standards.” He has no idea how little she loves him. Baird and Cora represent the two sides of his ambivalence toward the WASPocracy; he does not realize how similar they are. When he is forced to tell her that their trip to Europe is off because he is threatened with disbarment, her response is freezingly unsympathetic: There’s something distasteful—frankly, something rather repellent—about the whole atmosphere of the thing. This association with thieves and perjurers, and all the intrigue and conniving that goes with it. . . . The best thing for me to do is to go to Europe as I had planned. . . . SIMON : You mean you’re going to walk out on me? CORA : That’s a very crude way of putting it. And very unfair to me, too . . . SIMON : Yes, I guess you’re right.

This tough, smart, proud man is so abjectly enthralled by his glittering trophy wife, the symbol of all he has attained, that he rejects his own awareness that she is deserting him at his moment of greatest need. Only later, when he learns that she is going off to Europe with a man from her own social circle, does he realize that she has in fact walked out on him—and then for a moment he considers suicide. Cora never mentions that her husband is a Jew, but her tone of snobbish disdain sounds very much like highWASP anti-Semitism. Conceivably that was the playwright’s intention. Simon’s other confrontation is with a fellow Jew from the old neighborhood, a twenty-year-old kid named Harry Becker, who was making a Communist speech in Union Square when a policeman beat him over

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the head and arrested him for disorderly conduct. Out of sympathy for Becker’s mother, “a good, honest hard-working woman,” Simon has bailed out the boy and pulled strings to get him released. But he has no sympathy for Communist agitators and has called Becker into his office for a scolding, presumably expecting the humble gratitude he is accustomed to receiving from the powerless young men that he helps because he knew their mothers. Becker, however, is far from grateful: “I don’t want your advice or your help or your friendship. You and I have nothing in common. I’m on one side of the class war and you’re on the other.” Unsurprisingly, Simon is furious: Class war, my backside. . . . Do you think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth? I started working before I was through shedding my milk teeth. I began life in the same gutter that you did. If I were to tell you what I had to go through to get where I am, it would take me a week. . . . Do you think I don’t know what it is to sweat and to freeze and to go hungry?

This narrative of poverty and hard work, which Simon repeats so often in various forms, is basic to his sense of himself: the more he has suffered to get where he is, the more his success reflects credit on him. But Harry Becker is unimpressed: Do you think it’s to your credit that you started in the working class? You ought to be ashamed of it. . . . How did you get where you are? I’ll tell you. By betraying your own class, that’s how. By climbing on the backs of the working class,that’s how. Getting in right with crooked bourgeois politicians and pimping for corporations that feed on the blood and sweat of the workers. . . . You’re a cheap prostitute, that’s what you are, you and your cars and your country estate and your kept parasite of a wife. . . . [He spits venomously on the floor and exits.]

At the moment when his exemplary success seems on the point of being destroyed, Simon is suddenly faced with the idea that it was of no value in the first place, that he ought to be ashamed of what he has been most proud of, that his struggle has really been his surrender. He is staggered, and when he hears that Becker has died of a cerebral hemorrhage—presumably a delayed result of having his head broken by the police—he admits that “after all, it’s not such a bad thing to die at twenty, believing in the millennium and the brotherhood of man.” But this is just a momentary reaction; the playwright is not really interested in exploring the effect on Simon of Becker’s attack. Simon is quickly

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distracted from it, by his joyous relief at the plot twist that checkmates his WASP would-be nemesis, and he is distracted from that by suicidal despair when he finally realizes that his wife has left him. Then the phone rings: Wingdale of the American Steel Company. His twenty-seven-year-old son had a quarrel with his wife this afternoon and shot her dead. . . . The daughter of one of the richest oil men in Texas. Can you imagine what a case that’s going to be? We’ve got to get right on the job. Come on!

Simon is speaking to his faithful, indispensable secretary. Suddenly he is energized, excited, saved by his genuine love of his work, cynical and sensational as that work is. Simon’s himself again. His wife despises his work, involved as it is with crime and scandal; his efficient, workaholic secretary is as devoted to it as he is. She is obviously in love with him. Will anything come of this? We don’t know. (Is she Jewish? We don’t know. But we are at liberty to suppose so.) But meanwhile the game’s afoot, and boss and secretary are out the door after it, much to the delight of the audience, as the curtain falls. Happy ending—Francis Clark Baird and his WASP revenge have been defeated. Simon has survived the defection of his wife and is presumably cured of his infatuation with her WASP elegance. Harry Becker and his powerful indictment of Simon’s life are forgotten. But the play might have been richer if they had been remembered. Simon the hungry individualist, devoted to his own success, and Becker the altruist, devoted (whatever you may think of his particular beliefs) to repairing the world, represent two characteristically Jewish—but not, of course, exclusively Jewish—ways of responding to America. Three years after Counsellor-at-Law opened on Broadway, Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets played out a similar contrast.

3. The Bronx

CLIFFORD ODETS: AWAKE AND SING! (1935) When Clifford Odets (1906–1963) finished writing Awake and Sing!—originally titled I’ve Got the Blues—he was still a bit-part actor, unknown and penniless. He had found an artistic family in the Group Theater, that band of (mostly Jewish) brothers and sisters, struggling to bring radical idealism and Stanislavskian realism to Broadway. But of the Group’s three directors, only Odets’s friend Harold Clurman showed any interest in Awake and Sing! Lee Strasberg, another director, later to become the guru of the Actors Studio, told the young playwright, “We don’t like your play. We don’t want to do your play. It has a small horizon.” Only a revolt of the Group Theater’s actors forced the directors to put it into rehearsal. Meanwhile, Odets dashed off a one-act agitprop play called Waiting for Lefty, about a taxi strike, which was produced at a benefit for a short-lived left-wing theatre magazine. To everyone’s surprise, it caused a sensation. When Awake and Sing! opened six weeks later, its reviews were positive, though not unreservedly so, and it reinforced Odets’s new reputation as the dynamic young standard-bearer of revolutionary theatre. Five weeks later, the Group Theater moved Lefty to Broadway, on a double bill with a new Odets one-act, Till the Day I Die. He was twenty-eight years old, and he was famous. When the Group revived Awake and Sing! four years later, it “was received,” says his biographer, “as an honored classic.” Though Odets was a Communist when he wrote Awake and Sing!, we can see it today as a family play, a closely observed, authentically rendered play about a Jewish American family in the midst of the Great Depression, engaged, as the playwright says, in “a struggle for life amidst petty conditions.” It was first produced only ten years after The Jazz Singer, but it represents a further stage in the Americanization process. The senior Rabinowitzes live on the Lower East Side, close to the synagogue, and are clearly ill at ease

36 Beyond the Golden Door outside of their tightly knit East Side world. Not many plays, however, are set in the Ghetto, as the East Side was called. Novelists—Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth—have chronicled the Ghetto extensively, but the playwrights, coming later, writing mainly not about the immigrants but about their descendants, tend to find their characters elsewhere. The Bergers, the family Odets shows us in Awake and Sing!, live in the Bronx, in what the sociologists call an “area of second settlement,” a step up the American ladder from the East Side. Myron Berger insists, rather pathetically (he does everything rather pathetically), “I’m not foreign born. I’m an American.” So of course are his grown children, Hennie and Ralph. We don’t know about Myron’s formidable wife Bessie or her brother Morty; their father Jacob is presumably from the old country. Hennie scorns her future husband, a recent immigrant, as a “mockie,” a “foreigner.” The Bergers go to movies and to vaudeville theatres (they clearly do not share Cantor Rabinowitz’s views about popular music); Myron bets a little on the horses; Uncle Morty reads the comics in the newspaper; Hennie eats chop suey; Ralph wants a pair of black and white shoes. Unlike the Rabinowitzes and the Quixanos, the Bergers give little attention to the question of what it means to be Jewish, or how Jewish to be. With the partial exception of old Jacob, they have no apparent interest in Jewish religious observance or Jewish communal cohesion or Jewish identity. They have left all that behind them; they have achieved, in their way, the liberation that Jack Robin was seeking. The great question of the play is not, as in The Melting-Pot and The Jazz Singer, how to choose between Jewish and American values, but, as in most of the plays that we will be looking at, how to fill the vacuum caused by the abandonment of traditional Jewish values. And yet the Bergers are unmistakably, intensely, almost riotously Jewish. Alfred Kazin, not yet an eminent literary critic, saw the Group Theatre’s famous original production of Awake and Sing! from the second balcony and was thrilled by its vigorous Jewish authenticity: In Odets’s play there was a lyric uplifting of blunt Jewish speech, boiling over and explosive . . . Everybody on that stage was furious, kicking, alive—the words, always real but never flat, brilliantly authentic like no other theatre speech on Broadway . . . my mother and father and uncles and aunts [were] occupying the stage in Awake and Sing by as much right as if they were Hamlet and Lear.

Walter Winchell expressed something of the same feeling more briefly: “It is as non-Aryan as a Bronx Express.” “In these inner-city Jewish areas,”

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says the sociologist Nathan Glazer, “one was Jewish by osmosis rather than by choice.” The Bergers swim in Jewishness without thinking about it, the way a fish swims in water. Their lives are pervaded by American circumstances and American values, to which they respond in a very Jewish manner—or rather, in several very Jewish manners. The dominant figure in the Berger household is dauntless, heroic, horrifying Bessie, one of the most tremendous incarnations in literature of that legendary figure, the Jewish Mother. According to the feminist scholar Riv-Ellen Prell, “Immigrant American Jewish literature and music initially celebrated an idealized mother capable not only of perfect love, but also of superhuman, slavish labor.” She instances Sophie Tucker’s famous song “My Yiddishe Momme.” Jack Robin’s mother in The Jazz Singer is just such a “momme.” But “As the immigrant’s yearning for ‘home’ in Europe, epitomized by the mother, diminished with time, the image changed.” Even in the old country, there was a countercurrent pushing against the traditional patriarchy (exemplified by Cantor Rabinowitz) of Orthodox Judaism. Talmudic scholars were considered highly desirable husbands; frequently, they withdrew into their studies while their wives took entire charge of the family. In the new country, as Irving Howe says, One crucial result of the migration was that changes in Jewish family life often led to a flow of power toward the mother. If she often used this power with legendary selflessness, it could also seize her like a dybbuk, transforming her into the brassy-voiced, smothering, and shrewish mama.

Bessie’s husband Myron drifts through life in a sad little fog, ineffectually dreaming American dreams of his assertive, powerful hero, Teddy Roosevelt, and of winning big money in the Irish Sweepstakes. So, as Bessie says, “Here I’m not only the mother, but also the father. . . . If I didn’t worry about the family, who would?” Her family is her life, and to protect it, she is utterly ruthless. “She knows,” says Odets, “that when one lives in the jungle one must look out for the wild life.” Within the family, she is a classic wielder of guilt (“When it’s too late you’ll remember how you sucked away a mother’s life”), yet she is not a monster. Odets, whose own mother was meek and long-suffering, gives her an impressive speech of self-justification: “Mom, what does she know? She’s old-fashioned!” But I’ll tell you a big secret: My whole life I wanted to go away too, but with children a woman stays home. A fire burned in my heart too, but now it’s too late.

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The Bergers are not desperately poor. Their apartment has a dining room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms, even though Ralph has to sleep “on a daybed in the front room.” There is always food in the house—Bessie sees to that. They can even afford a dog, “a small, white poodle.” Rich Uncle Morty helps out. But life has been a struggle for Bessie. Her father Jacob could never keep a job—a fact that she resents bitterly. Money has always been tight, and the Depression has made things worse. Financial insecurity gnaws at her. Bessie scolds Jacob for not believing in God, but what she really believes in is the Yankee Dollar. “You got money and money talks,” she says to her brother Morty. “But without the dollar who sleeps at night?” To Ralph she says, “here without a dollar you don’t look the world in the eye. Talk from now to next year—this is life in America.” This being the case, she loads her frustrated yearnings on the back of her son: Ralph should only be a success like you, Morty. I should only live to see the day when he rides up to the door in a big car with a chauffeur and a radio. I could die happy, believe me.

Morty is Bessie’s idea of what a man should be—Morty, who, as he boasts, “started from a poor boy who worked on an ice wagon for two dollars a week” and made it big in the dress business. Ladies’ ready-to-wear got under way at about the same time as the great wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, and many Jewish entrepreneurs made their fortunes in this new industry not preempted by Gentiles. Now Morty lives in a penthouse and has a Japanese butler. Naturally, he is a great patriot. “This is Uncle Sam’s country,” he says. Morty the capitalist is monumentally complacent, “a fat tomcat,” but the rest of the Bergers are trapped and frustrated. “Don’t live, just make success”—as Jacob sums up the American imperative to which Bessie and Morty subscribe. (The critic Robert Warshow implies that Bessie resents Jacob for making moral demands she feels are impossible to meet.) The economic opportunity for which the golden land is famous is a goad and a torment for those unable to avail themselves of it. What with economic pressures and the personal pressure of their formidable mother, Ralph and Hennie feel stifled. Hennie rebels in the way that young women of all ethnicities have traditionally rebelled: by acting out sexually. When she gets pregnant by a man who deserts her, Bessie forces her to marry a gullible suitor and pretend the baby is his. After “success,” “respect” is the second plank in Bessie’s platform—we would say “respectability.”

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“Respect?” says Jacob. “(Spits.) For the neighbors’opinion!” Odets says that Bessie “is proper according to her own standards, which are fairly close to those of most middle-class families.” But Hennie escapes by leaving her husband and baby to run off to Havana with a one-legged gangster—with the full approval of both her brother and the playwright. Ralph likes to listen to the Boston airmail plane as “it cuts across the Bronx every night.” Its sound is the sound of flight, of freedom, of getting out. As the play was taking form, Odets wrote in a letter, “I’m restless. I want, I want! But what. I haven’t any idea.” Ralph Berger has that same restlessness, that unfocussed craving. “All I want’s a chance to get to first base!” he says. But where and what is “first base?” Ralph is the prize in the contest between Bessie and Jacob, spokespersons for two great value systems, two alternatives that have offered themselves to American Jews (and others!) for whom all-encompassing religious tradition is no longer the answer. Bessie speaks for the dollar; her Marxist father speaks for the revolution. Irving Howe (himself a famous socialist, though not a revolutionary) and Kenneth Libo write, “Jewish socialism was far more than a politics—it was a gleaming faith, at once splendid and naïve in its dreams of perfection and brotherhood.” Howe and Libo were thinking mainly of the days before the October Revolution, and Howe would have disliked the pro-Russian side of Jacob’s capital-C Communism, but Awake and Sing! provides a classic picture of “Jewish socialism” in the largest sense, in both its splendor and its naivete—though the naivete in this case represents the naïvete of the author more than his conscious intention. It is a truism to say that Marxism has functioned as a modern substitute for old-time religion, reassuring its adherents that the universe is orderly, understandable, and fundamentally good, and providing a coherent ethical code. And I am not the first to observe that the great future revolution, so confidently expected by so many generations of Marxists, is the secular, or perhaps not so secular, equivalent of the Messiah. “[A]ncient Messianic dreams live on,” said Martin Buber, “in the ideologies of Jewish socialists.” “O workers’ Revolution,” rhapsodized Michael Gold at the end of Jews without Money, his autobiographical novel, “you brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah.” The coming of the Messiah, or of the revolution, is understood to be inevitable, yet we can give our lives meaning by striving to bring it about. “If this life leads to a revolution,” says Jacob, “it’s a good life. Otherwise, it’s for nothing.” So, for idealistic Jews, who needed a higher belief and a social ethic to give their lives meaning, Marxism was ideally adapted to fill the vacuum left by the decline of traditional religious belief—a decline accelerated, as

40 Beyond the Golden Door we have seen, by immigration to the treyfene medina. Judaism and Marxism were in competition; religion, to the Marxists, was famously “the opiate of the masses.” Further, as Arthur Hertzberg has pointed out, “The Jewish true believers in Marxism had no doubt that the revolution required that they sever all allegiance to the Jewish community and abandon their own group identity.” (Hertzberg cites Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, né Bronstein, as examples.) Arthur Miller has written of his younger, Marxist self: “I was struggling to identify myself with mankind rather than a small tribal fraction of it.” Yet Jacob, though he voices a scathing attack on belief in God, is the only person in the play who is in touch with traditional Judaism, the only one, apparently, with any conscious sense of Jewish identity. (Of course, he is the oldest, and therefore, like Mendel Quixano’s mother and Cantor Rabinowitz, the one most closely connected to the past.) The Bible has living meaning for him. He speaks the words of the prophet Isaiah that give the play its title: “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.” As old men in plays frequently are, Jacob is somewhat of a prophet himself, saying of his beloved grandson Ralph: It says in the Bible how the Red Sea opened and the Egyptians went in and the sea rolled over them. (Quotes two lines of Hebrew.) In this boy’s life a Red Sea will happen again. I see it!

Two lines of Hebrew! Jacob has reconciled his “two souls,” his “warring ideals.” Through him, Odets suggests a harmony, a connection, a continuity between the two ethical systems, between the Jewish past and the universal future—an admirable ideal, all too seldom discernible in the real world, though perhaps to be found, divested of its apocalyptic, revolutionary dimension, in the proponents of tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative to “repair the world.” Jacob espouses the same ideology as Mr. Kaplan in Street Scene, but Mr. Kaplan merely recycles Communist boilerplate, while Jacob speaks from the heart, out of grief and yearning. Old, poor, helpless, despised by his children, he sits in his room and plays his Caruso records: From “L’Africana” … a big explorer comes on a new land—“O Paradiso.” From act four this piece. Caruso stands on the ship and looks on a Utopia. You hear? “Oh paradise! Oh paradise on earth! Oh blue sky, oh fragrant air—”

But the real “new land” has been a cruel disappointment to him, and to all the Bergers except Uncle Morty. Jacob has only one project left in his

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life: to pass on his wisdom, his revolutionary imperative, to his grandson, to rescue him from the Berger household and its values and enroll him among those who will create a real “paradise on earth.” Jacob is aware of the pervasive forces that assail Ralph: In my day the propaganda was for God. [A hint perhaps of Jacob’s own longago rebellion.] Now it’s for success. A boy don’t turn around without having shoved in him he should make success. . . . He dreams all night of fortunes. Why not? Don’t it say in the movies he should have a personal steamship, pyjamas for fifty dollars a pair and a toilet like a monument?

The old man offers a grander, less material goal. He begs his grandson: Boychick, wake up! Be something! Make your life something good. For the love of an old man who sees in your young days his new life, for such love take the world in your two hands and make it like new. Go out and fight so life shouldn’t be printed on dollar bills.

And again: “DO! Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution.” Jacob tells Bessie, “Ralph you don’t make like you. Before you do it, I’ll die first.” And he does. His suicide precipitates his grandson’s conversion: “The night he died, I saw it like a thunderbolt! I saw he was dead and I was born!” Ralph defies his mother and demands the life insurance money that Jacob left him, money that could give him “wings,” like that Boston mail plane. But ultimately he decides, “Let Mom have the dough.” He’ll stay “Right here in the house!” He no longer needs to leave home literally; he has already left in the way that matters most. He pledges to start fighting at the warehouse where he works: Sure, inventory tomorrow. Coletti to Driscoll to Berger—that’s how we work. It’s a team down the warehouse. Driscoll’s a show-off, a wiseguy, and Joe talks pigeons day and night. But they’re like me, looking for a chance to get to first base too. Joe razzed me about my girl. But he don’t know why. I’ll tell him. Hell, he might tell me something I don’t know. Get teams together all over. Spit on your hands and get to work. And with enough teams together maybe we’ll get steam in the warehouse so our fingers don’t freeze off. Maybe we’ll fix it so life won’t be printed on dollar bills.

As in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, the revolution begins when workers join together and take action. “Coletti to Driscoll to Berger”—notice the names: an Italian, an Irishman, a Jew. “It’s a team down the warehouse.” Bessie runs the family as a tight defensive unit, suspicious of the jungle outside. Instead, Ralph will reach out toward worker solidarity,

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irrespective of ethnicity or religion. Du Bois’s “warring ideals” will be replaced by a new ideal. Arthur Hertzberg speaks of “otherness” as an essential Jewish condition; others would call it “marginality.” Some, like Bessie and Morty, think that financial success is the way to cure or at least palliate it; others, like Ralph, more idealistic, want to dissolve it in revolutionary comradeship. Odets told his friend Harold Clurman that “he was going to join the Communist party because he wanted to be called ‘Comrade.’ ” Now that Communism has been so thoroughly discredited, I wonder what there is in America today that would satisfy this yearning. *

*

*

GERTRUDE BERG: ME AND MOLLY (1948) It is striking how few serious plays celebrate the Jewish encounter with America as the great success story that, on many levels, it certainly is. But then, serious American drama in general is a running commentary on Eugene O’Neill’s statement that “the United States, instead of being the most successful country in the world is the greatest failure.” For success stories we have to look elsewhere—to light comedy, for instance. And as it happens, in the Bronx, not very far from the Bergers of Awake and Sing!, there lived another fictional Jewish family, very similar and very different. The Rise of the Goldbergs—later called just The Goldbergs, but that word “rise” says a lot—was first broadcast in 1929 and remained popular for decades, on the radio and later on television. It spread goodwill toward the Jews through a period of rising anti-Semitism. It brought America good news that America wanted to hear: the golden land, to the Goldberg family, was truly golden. The Goldbergs were particularly good at resolving the conflict between “warring ideals”—the conflict that nearly tore Jack Robin apart. According to Gertrude Berg (1899–1966), who wrote the show and played Molly, the Goldbergs’ shrewd matriarch: Molly became a person who lived in the world of today but kept many of the values of yesterday. She could change with the times, as did my grandmother and my mother, but she had some basic ideas that she learned long ago and wanted to pass on to her children. Next to the Constitution of the United States, the Ten Commandments came first. Not only were all men created equal, they also had to honor their mother and their father. Abraham, Isaac,

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and Jacob interchanged easily with Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, and the Philistines had nothing on a person who didn’t vote.

Molly was thus the domestic equivalent of Jewish leaders such as Louis Marshall and Louis Brandeis, who, according to a study entitled Rabbis and Lawyers, “fused Torah and Constitution as the sacred text of a JudeoAmerican legal tradition.” Analogously, Saul Bellow reported that his immigrant father “took an exceptional interest in the U.S. Constitution and the privileges of citizenship, for which Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy had prepared him. . . . he was a great patriot.” As historians have pointed out, Jewishness, in burgeoning Jewish neighborhoods like those in the Bronx, became thoroughly intermixed with American middle-class values. Molly Goldberg and Bessie Berger represent opposite poles of Jewish motherhood. Like Bessie, Molly is the dominant force in her household, but she has none of Bessie’s bitterness. However, she also has few of Bessie’s frustrations: for her, everything turns out well in the end. Life has not taught her to value money above everything; she is full of American idealism and American optimism. As Riv-Ellen Prell says, “Gertrude Berg idealized the Jewish Mother through Molly Goldberg’s good sense and care for others.” Her yoke was easy, and her children, unlike Bessie’s, had no need for any very profound rebellion. The children, Sammy and Rosie [said Berg], were myself, my cousins, my own children, and some parts of all the friends I had grown up with. . . . trying to make sense out of growing up in one world, America, but coming from another, the European world of their parents. They were being pulled by the new and held back by the old. [A little tension here.] It was a difficult position, even for two nice children. . . . Sammy and Rosie were important to The Goldbergs because they helped to teach their immigrant parents how to become Americans. At the same time, the parents tried to teach them some of the rich traditions of the Old World, thus combining the best elements of two dissimilar worlds. [Tension resolved.]

Me and Molly, a play by (of course) Gertrude Berg, starring (of course) Gertrude Berg, was only a modest success on Broadway, perhaps because audiences were accustomed to getting the Goldbergs free of charge in their own living rooms. Unlike Awake and Sing!, written and taking place in the midst of the Great Depression, Me and Molly was written in the postwar year of 1948 and set in the postwar year of 1919. More ambitious than the radio and television episodes, it seems designed as a pocket-sized epic of upward mobility. As it begins, the family is moving from “downtown”

44 Beyond the Golden Door into their Bronx apartment: “a new beginning.” They are part of the great Jewish American movement of the early twentieth century out of workingclass “areas of first settlement,” such as the Lower East Side, into “areas of second settlement,” new Jewish neighborhoods such as those in the Bronx, where the Goldbergs can establish themselves in the middle class. They are delighted to discover that from the kitchen window of their new home, they can actually see a tree. (On television, the Goldbergs, conforming to the standard post–World War II Jewish pattern, took the next step up the ladder and moved into an “area of third settlement,” the suburbs.) Though nothing could be more obvious than the Jewishness of the Goldbergs, Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times insisted that basically [Me and Molly] is authentic, not only of the Goldbergs in the Bronx but of middle-class people all over America who are trying to bring up their children well and live respectable lives. . . . Me and Molly has been put together out of American experience. . . . [Berg’s] gifts go beyond intimate knowledge of middle-class life to belief in it.

For this highly influential Gentile critic, the Jewish Goldbergs stood not as exotic “others,” but as ideal exemplars of middle-class America. Berg must have been pleased. Poverty and suffering have left their mark on Molly’s husband Jake, whose father exemplified the shtetl ideal of the dedicated Torah scholar who left worldly affairs, like making a living, to his wife—an ideal not viable in the New World. As Molly explains to her son, Papa’s life, when he was young, wasn’t your life. The things Papa remembers when he looks back are things he can’t forget; his mother’s face when Thursday came and there was nothing in the house for Friday; or his father always with his head in a book preparing for the next world while his children were starving in this world. When you live from your hand to your mouth, always poor, always worried about making a living…no matter what happens you’ll always worry. Papa’ll worry about the future as long as he lives. He can’t help it.

But the children will not be haunted by such memories: “For you and Rosiely it’ll be different.” Their father is a dedicated provider, a worker struggling to rise into the middle class. The Goldbergs have three great ambitions. Rosie wants a piano, Molly wants to become literate—in English—and Jake wants his own dressmanufacturing business. The arts, education, commerce: three characteristically Jewish pathways to social mobility and successful Americanization. Rosie and Molly attain their goals; for Jake, things are more complicated.

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The garment industry, where Jewish workers worked for—and sometimes went on strike against—Jewish bosses and sometimes themselves became Jewish bosses, figures not only in Me and Molly, but, as we have seen, in Awake and Sing! as well, and also in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and the musical Rags. As Nathan Glazer says, “The expansion of ready-made clothing in American economy meant new jobs for immigrants, and entrepreneurial opportunities for those who could scrape together a bit of capital.” Scraping up the capital is what Jake is trying, and failing, to do. For much of the play, he is angry and frustrated. For years what has been my hope, my dream, my desire, what? To be a man in business; to build something for myself that was mine—the fruit of my labor.

But it is not just for himself: “To me life is to give my family everything they want.” He is not the only character in Jewish American drama who mixes up business success with his value as a human being. But Jake’s ambition is not seen as unworthy or pathological. Like Bessie Berger, he is reacting against an unworldly Jewish father who could not make a decent living for his family. But Bessie despises her father, while Jake, paradoxically, is able to declare with pride, in allegiance to a deeply traditional Jewish value, “My father’s house was a house of learning.” Moreover, as Donald Weber writes in an essay on The Goldbergs, Molly is “always tempering [Jake’s] impulsive, excessive desires with a down-to-earth reality check designed to remind him—and her listeners—about the spiritual costs of acquisition.” The Goldbergs, like the Bergers, have a rich relative in the dress business, but while Bessie looks up to her brother Morty, Molly and Jake look down on their cousin Simon, who doesn’t care about other people. “A man is not a money bag!” Molly tells Simon. “There’s a meaning to life besides.” Without Simon’s help, but with Molly’s help, Jake will prevail. At the end of the play, the Goldbergs go off to Sammy’s bar mitzvah (unlike most of the families in Jewish American drama, they observe religious traditions): JAKE : What I want is for you and the children and for a promise I made myself. Can you understand that? MOLLY: I think so. Come, Jake! Rosiely, Sammy! (They come.) It’s time to go—to the Temple with a free and a happy heart. . . . CURTAIN. A year after Me and Molly, however, came Death of a Salesman—another play about a man who yearns to have his own business.

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4. Arthur Miller and the Jews DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949) Arthur Miller (1915–2005) is manifestly the most eminent Jewish playwright who ever lived (unless you believe the rumor that Shakespeare was a Marrano), but in what sense is he a Jewish playwright? Allen Guttmann, in what is generally an admirable book about Jewish American writers, places Miller with Nathanael West and J. D. Salinger as “nominally Jewish, but . . . in no sense Jewish writers, nor does their work deal significantly with the process of assimilation and the resultant crisis of identity.” That was in 1971—I doubt if Guttmann would say that today—but the question of Jewishness, or the lack of it, still comes up frequently in discussions of Miller’s work. More temperately, Morris Freedman writes about Miller’s All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, After the Fall, and The Price, The ethnic anonymity of these plays is striking, if only in comparison with the plays of Odets and O’Neill, whose Jewish and Irish Catholic families in Awake and Sing and Long Day’s Journey into Night are so plainly identified for us. . . . It is difficult to find ethnic clues in Miller.

Difficult, but not impossible (as Freedman himself makes clear). As you might expect, the controversy about Miller and Jewishness centers around the iconic figure of Willy Loman, the downtrodden hero of Death of a Salesman, by general agreement Miller’s most important play. Christopher Bigsby, perhaps the world’s leading Millerologist, once (in 1984) stated categorically that “Willy was not Jewish.” But in 1951, one George Ross saw Joseph Buloff play Toyt fun a Salesman—Death of a Salesman in Yiddish—and wrote, in the Jewish magazine Commentary, “What one feels most strikingly is that this Yiddish play is really the

48 Beyond the Golden Door original, and the Broadway production was merely—Arthur Miller’s translation into English”—even though, as Ross acknowledges, Yiddish has no word for “salesman.” “[I]n many places,” says Ross, “one felt in the English version as if Miller was thinking in Yiddish and unconsciously translating.” He adds that the play loses a great deal in this English “translation”: The vivid impression is that translating from his mixed American-Jewish experience Miller tried to ignore or censor out the Jewish part, and as a result succeeded only in making the Loman family anonymous. What we saw on Broadway was a kind of American Everyman, an attempt at generalization which in fact ended in limitation . . . Arthur Miller, one feels, has almost deliberately deprived himself of some of the resources of his experience. . . . Buloff has caught Miller, as it were, in the act of changing his name.

Notice the peculiar quality of personal accusation here: Miller is caught in the act of trying to hide his origins. Ross was perhaps unaware that in 1945, before his first success as a playwright, Miller had published Focus, a novel about anti-Semitism that sold 90,000 copies, and Ross could not know that in later years Miller would write very specifically about Jewish protagonists and Jewish issues in some of his short stories and in his plays Incident at Vichy and Broken Glass. As early as 1951 (just a month after Ross’s article came out), in a story called “Monte Saint Angelo,” a Miller protagonist, an American Jew, discovers quite explicitly that his lack of connection to a Jewish past signified “a broken part of himself.” A number of very high-powered critics picked up Ross’s main point. The novelist Mary McCarthy, not generally noted as an expert on Jewish affairs, wrote, A disturbing aspect of Death of a Salesman was that Willy Loman seemed to be Jewish, to judge by his speech-cadences, but there was no mention of this on the stage. He could not be Jewish because he had to be “American.” . . . he is a capitalized Human Being without being anyone . . . Willy is only a type . . .

And Leslie Fiedler, once the wild man of American literary criticism, wrote that Miller creates crypto-Jewish characters; characters who are in habit, speech, and condition of life typically Jewish-American, but who are presented as something else— general-American say, as in Death of a Salesman . . . Such pseudo-universalizing represents, however, a loss of artistic faith . . . The works influenced by pseudouniversalizing lose authenticity and strength.

Arthur Miller and the Jews 49 Echoing Allen Guttman’s association of Miller with J. D. Salinger and Nathanael West, Fiedler adds the ad hominem note, charging that these three writers “sought to conceal or camouflage, or at the very least to distance themselves from, their Jewishness.” When Fiedler’s attack was brought up by an interviewer in 1969, Miller replied, somewhat grumpily, that in his plays, where the theme seems to require a Jew to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness, he does so. Where it seems to me irrelevant what the religious or cultural background of a character may be, it is treated as such.

This is reasonable enough, but the question of Jewishness in Miller’s plays is not quite that simple. The stern morality of those plays recalls the Old Testament, but the Old Testament belongs to the world as well as to the Jews. I have already quoted the playwright’s comment that, as a young man, he “was struggling to identify myself with mankind rather than one small tribal fraction of it,” implying a desire to transcend his Jewishness—a desire shared by other young radicals of the 1930s, and perhaps not entirely discarded by Miller at the time he wrote Salesman. Conceivably there was an unconscious element of shame—difficult for members of a stigmatized minority to avoid entirely—and thus of the wish that Fiedler and the others attribute to him, the wish to conceal his Jewishness. In his autobiography he records an agonizing memory: As a small boy applying for a library card, he is asked by the librarian for his father’s name. “Looking up into her blue eyes, I could not bring to voice my father’s so Jewish name, Isidore. I was paralyzed, could only shake my head.” The critic Donald Weber says, in a book called Haunted in the New World, that “scenes of filial shame pervade Jewish American expression in the first half of the twentieth century.” At any rate, the generalizing impulse that Miller’s detractors make so much of is certainly there in Salesman. The lack of specific ethnic markers is paralleled by a lack of specific chronological markers. The play takes place “today,” say the stage directions, which presumably means 1949, the year of its premiere. But there is little that is specifically 1949 about it: no memories of the Depression or World War II, no postwar prosperity, no cold war, no atomic anxiety, no television—just a couple of references to radio, a couple of car brands (Chevvy, Studebaker), and a scene with a wire recorder. Does this make the play merely vague, inauthentic, ahistorical, or does it help the audience to believe that the process we are seeing is not the product of one historical moment, but a possibility over many decades, and even now?

50 Beyond the Golden Door Whether the generalizing impulse is a fault or a virtue is an open question. Is Death of a Salesman indeed “pseudo-universalized,” or is it genuinely universal? Elia Kazan, the Greek American who directed the first production, was only the first of many who found in Willy Loman an image of their own fathers. Miller said that Chinese audiences told him the same thing. When Brian Dennehy played Willy, with his broad geniality and his big grin, the Lomans seemed as if they might be Irish Americans. Miller reported that the road company, with Thomas Mitchell as Willy, was hailed in Boston as presenting “the best Irish play ever.” There have been productions with all-African American casts. Death of a Salesman, says a Miller scholar, “has been produced on six continents, in every country that has a Western theatrical tradition, and in some that have not. . . . There is no need at this point to demonstrate Salesman’s universality.” And yet, some of the Loman “speech-cadences”—“attention must be paid”—can indeed be thought of as typically Jewish, even as translated Yiddish. The critic Henry Bial usefully suggests that “Rather than asking ‘Is this character Jewish?’ we should be asking ‘Could this character be Jewish?’ ” What the Lomans are and do and suffer is never uniquely or parochially Jewish—crucially, they are Americans. But it is not unreasonable—and can be illuminating—to think of them as Jewish. Certainly the real people and the personal experiences that provided the germ of the play were Jewish. In his autobiography, Timebends, Miller tells us that his own salesman uncle, Manny Newman, was a primary model for Willy. But the little Loman house in Brooklyn, with two brothers, and a father humiliated by financial failure, more than coincidentally resembles the little house in Brooklyn where Arthur Miller and his brother Kermit lived as teenagers, after their father lost his business in the Depression. In a new preface to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Salesman, Miller— for the first time, as far as I know—publicly and explicitly identified the Lomans as Jews—but as Jews who have lost their Jewishness. By 1999, the melting pot in which ethnic differences were to be dissolved was no longer the American ideal. The acceptance of ethnicity as something positive, something that deserved to be talked about, was far more widespread, and Miller was ready to comment on the ethnic implications of his play. And so he wrote of the Lomans: “As Jews light-years away from religion or community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that probably most Americans feel they inhabit—on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at a well-lighted place.” Thus their lack of explicit ethnic markers is not merely an attempt, successful or not, at universality, but an integral part of their characterization. Their separation from their roots,

Arthur Miller and the Jews 51 their isolation, the very absence of ethnic, religious, or cultural context that so many critics have complained about—this is what makes them so terribly vulnerable to the false values that undo them; nature abhors a vacuum. Arthur Hertzberg writes that “Watching [Joseph] Buloff’s [Yiddish] performance, one knew that the family’s deepest, most repressed pain came from the Jewishness Willy had surrendered.” The Lomans are assimilated but not assimilated and have the worst of both. They are victims of the process by which the American nation was formed. Uprooted, cut off from their past (Willy’s father, like many Jewish immigrants, was an itinerant peddler, and Willy evidently grew up in a wagon), needing beliefs that will order their lives and tell them what to do, they are trying to be “American.” But how? The only exception to all this is Linda Loman, who has found her identity and her moral compass in preserving, protecting, and defending her husband. Allen Guttmann, in his book The Jewish Writer in America, places Miller among writers whose work does not “deal significantly with the process of assimilation and the resultant crisis of identity.” But that is precisely what Death of a Salesman deals with. For Willy, desperate to break into that “well-lighted place,” the model to be emulated is his hallucinatory brother Ben, who says, “when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. [He laughs.] And by God I was rich.” “We’ll do it here, Ben!” Willy says. “You hear me? We’re gonna do it here!” “The jungle is dark but full of diamonds,” says Ben. For Willy, America is the jungle through which you fight your way to those diamonds. In the words of the critic Ronald Bryden, he “has been lost in that jungle all his life.” And as Benjamin Nelson has written, Willy is . . . in some respects, the archetypal diaspora Jew, a stranger in a strange land, clutching at his dream with fervent, if illogical, valor, as if the American success myth is his new Jerusalem.

But the “American success myth” destroys him. America is famously the Land of Opportunity, the land where anyone can make good, meaning make money. But if anyone can, then everyone should, and what excuse is there for those who do not? “Don’t live, just make success,” is old Jacob’s grumpy summary of American values in Awake and Sing! —success, again, meaning money. Willy Loman, says Miller, “has broken a law . . . which says that a failure in society and in business has no right to live.” This is a common American situation, of course—but perhaps exacerbated for Jews, since Jews have historically been so good at “making success.”

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“The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge. Willy might or might not put it that way, but in practice he agrees. The Jewish social ethic of tikkun olam, repairing the world, means nothing to him; he or some ancestor lost it along the way. For Willy, “the business world” is the America that counts, that will validate him, that will bring him and his sons the money, status, and love that are so terribly mixed up in his mind. A crucial part of Willy’s problem is that the business world to him is not just about making money: it is the context where he expects to become, or imagines he is, “well liked,” a term that comes up over and over again, meaning accepted, embraced, a real American at last. America, to Willy, is not only a jungle: it is also a benign paradise, “the greatest country in the world.” “America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people.” To his sons this marginal man spins a feverish fantasy of acceptance: Well, I got on the road, and I went north to Providence. Met the mayor. . . . He said, “Morning!” And I said, you got a fine city here, mayor. And then he had coffee with me . . . they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people.

For Willy, “the wonder of this country” is “that a man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked.” Being well liked enables you to make money, which, in turn, is the sign that you are well liked. If you are well liked, people will come to your funeral. Willy seeks in business the acceptance, the comradeship, that Ralph Berger seeks in revolutionary action—both of them, in opposite ways, perhaps trying to salve the alienation inherited from immigrant ancestors, the famous Jewish “otherness.” This is Willy’s own personal variation on the success imperative. Perhaps that is why he never got anywhere in business: looking for love, he lacks the ruthlessness of Uncle Morty in Awake and Sing!, or of his own brother Ben, who says, “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.” Willy believes that he is Ben’s loyal disciple; he never realizes how different they are. Willy’s obsession with success for himself and his family through business is an extreme but not atypical Jewish adaptation to what Jews and non-Jews alike tend to believe is the American imperative. (Of course, so little is Willy’s obsession uniquely Jewish that Willy’s yearnings are often cited as exemplifying “the American dream.” But this overlooks how many versions of the American dream there are, and how desperately self-contradictory Willy’s version is.) Miller’s novel Focus offers a vivid

Arthur Miller and the Jews 53 description of the barriers that American Jews faced, even toward the middle of the twentieth century, when seeking employment in Gentile-owned businesses. Not permitted, in most cases, to rise through the ranks of big corporations, they generally achieved success in business, if they did, by going into business on their own, like Willy’s neighbor Charley and his former boss, “old man Wagner,” or as Jake Goldberg hopes to in Me and Molly. “The Jewish businessman is traditionally a small businessman, in his own or a family-owned firm,” says the sociologist Nathan Glazer. By the late 1930s, Jews owned nearly two-thirds of all the factories in New York, and nearly two-thirds of the wholesale and retail establishments. Thus when Willy dreams, “Someday I’ll have my own business,” it is not, on the face of it, an unreasonable ambition for a midcentury New York Jew. Like Miller’s Uncle Manny, one of the models for Willy, and like so many real Jewish fathers, Willy hopes to make “a business for the boys.” Exactly the same words appear in Miller’s autobiography, apropos of Uncle Manny, and in Salesman: “a business for the boys.” Willy has humiliatingly failed to meet this standard for Jewish fathers; killing himself for his insurance money is the only way he can provide a business for his favorite son. Biff, he thinks at the end, will compensate for all his disappointments; Biff will win the success that has eluded Willy; Biff will justify his father’s life. “Can you imagine that magnificence with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket?” His boys bear the crushing burden of his hopes for them—in characteristically (though, again, not uniquely) Jewish fashion. Alfred Kazin remembered, “It was not for myself alone that I was expected to shine, but for them [his parents]—to relieve the constant anxiety of their existence.” A witty journalist remarks that “Judaism and parental ambition have been inextricable since the early days—the really early days, back to when old Jacob let his hopes get too high for poor Joseph.” Biff, the favorite son, is repelled by business: “it’s a measly manner of existence.” He loves working outdoors. But Willy has the stereotypical Jewish contempt for country life and manual labor. In the old country, “manual labor was frequently regarded as a mark of social disgrace, a badge of coarseness and ignorance.” And so Willy says: “How can [Biff] find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand?” When Biff says, “We should be mixing cement on some open plain, or—or carpenters. A carpenter is allowed to whistle!,” Willy replies, “Even your grandfather was better than a carpenter. “Even your grandfather,” as if grandfathers are the lowest of the low, except for carpenters. What a raging imperative to social mobility is implied in this flash of contempt for his own insufficiently “successful”—insufficiently American?—ancestor! Biff is not allowed to

54 Beyond the Golden Door be a carpenter. That’s no way to make success. Of course, the irony is that Willy too, as Biff sees, gets his real satisfaction not by selling but by working with his hands, but Willy is too blinded by his dream to realize it. The demand to rise through the business world is as much a violation of his true nature as it is of Biff’s. But though Willy despises manual labor, in other respects he is strikingly at odds with the Jewish tradition of favoring mental over physical qualities. He tells his sons, “I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises.” He has them steal materials from a nearby building site: “I got a couple of fearless characters there.” He encourages them to be athletes, buys them a punching bag. Jewish American boys, like other American boys, have frequently wanted to be athletes, but Jewish parents have traditionally been skeptical. One father wrote to the Jewish Daily Forward, It makes sense to teach a child to play dominoes or chess. But what is the point of a crazy game like baseball? The children can get crippled. . . . I want my boy to grow up to be a mensch, not a wild American runner.

The Forward replied, Chess is good, but the body needs to develop also. . . . Baseball develops the arms, legs, and eyesight. It is played in the fresh air. The really wild game is football—the aristocratic game in the colleges.

That was in 1903, but it is still a mark of Willy’s fervid American-ness that the day Biff gets to play football in Ebbets Field for the high school championship of the city, Willy is almost delerious with joy. It is as if he is running away with all his might from the ghetto/shtetl stereotype of the pale, intellectual, cringing, physically helpless Jew (as the pioneers of Zionism were doing in a very different way). Who ever heard of nice Jewish boys called Biff and Happy? Next door to the Lomans, however, lives Biff’s studious friend, Bernard, whose first words in the play are, “Biff, where are you? You’re supposed to study with me today.” Willy thinks that good looks and athletic ability will make his sons “well liked,” and therefore successful. He dismisses Bernard as “anemic,” “a worm.” But when all three boys are grown up, Biff is “one dollar an hour” (his words), Happy is a “philandering bum” (his mother’s words), and nerdy Bernard, now “a quiet, earnest, but selfassured young man” (according to the stage directions), is married with two sons, is a lawyer, is about to go to Washington to plead a case before the Supreme Court and to stay with friends who have their own tennis court.

Arthur Miller and the Jews 55 He has fulfilled—in spades—the Jewish paradigm whereby the son of the businessman becomes a professional. In every way—even athletically!— Bernard has achieved the success that eludes Biff and Happy. The emptiness of the great Jewish American success story is a theme of Jewish American fiction from Abraham Cahan to Philip Roth, and it is far from unknown in Jewish American drama, but there is no suggestion in Death of a Salesman that Bernard’s success is anything but genuine and fulfilling. As Miller has written, “And even as Willy’s sons are unhappy men, Charley’s boy, Bernard, works hard, attends to his studies, and attains a worthwhile objective.” Evidently, then, according to this play, real success can be achieved in America, if not by someone like Willy, than by someone like Bernard, through studying hard, being smart, and playing by the rules—a combination not unknown to Jewish Americans. Death of a Salesman certainly takes its place in the great indictment of American values that serious American drama has produced, but at the same time, it is kinder to the American dream than is often supposed. “The truth was,” says Miller in Timebends, “that I had always lived in the belief that a good man could still make it, capitalism or no capitalism.” *

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AFTER THE FALL (1964) I have quoted Miller as saying, Where the theme [of a play] seems to me to require a Jew to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness, he does so. Where it seems to me irrelevant what the religious or cultural background of a character may be, it is treated as such.

This is a perfectly reasonable statement, and yet . . . After the Fall is an overtly autobiographical play, and Miller himself is, of course, Jewish. As in Miller’s life, as in Death of a Salesman, so in After the Fall there are two brothers, and a father who is a financial failure. In this play, moreover, the three leading women are recognizably based on Miller’s three wives. The themes of the play are guilt and identity. Its hero, Quentin, is obsessed by a Nazi death camp. Yet in his endless exploration of his own psyche— clearly meant to represent the playwright’s own psyche—he never thinks to connect the Holocaust with his own Jewishness. He identifies himself, in a general way, with the victims (“My brothers died here”), but what worries him is his sense of identification with the Nazi murderers (“my

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brothers built this place”). In fact, there is no indication that Quentin is Jewish, except for an occasional Jewish locution from his parents: “Who knew he’d end up so big in gallstones?” Leslie Fiedler records a “departing theatergoer” remarking of Quentin, “If his mother is Jewish and his father is Jewish, how come he ain’t Jewish?” Apropos of this play in particular, Judd L. Teller, a historian of American Jewry, suggests that Miller perhaps has a “wish to kill the Jew within himself”—an ad hominem speculation that, it seems to me, goes more than a bit too far. But in this play, Miller’s famous urge toward universality does have a damaging effect. Incident at Vichy (1964), Miller’s next play, is centered on a group of French Jews, about to be taken away by the Nazis during World War II. The most thoughtful among them insists, “Each man has his Jew; it is the other. And the Jews have their Jews.” Is Miller really saying that the Jews are involved in the same guilt as their Nazi murderers? On the other hand, in Playing for Time, written as a television play (produced in 1980 with Vanessa Redgrave in the lead) and reworked as a stage play (1985), Miller writes with harrowing sympathy about specifically Jewish concentrationcamp inmates. As I have said, the matter of Miller and his Jewishness is complicated. His plays bear unmistakable signs of his ambivalence. But clearly, to dismiss Miller as a self-hating Jew is a crude oversimplification. *

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THE PRICE (1968) Miller’s first play, No Villain, written in 1936 while he was still an undergraduate and then twice rewritten and retitled, was about a Jewish American businessman and his two sons; it was heavily influenced by Clifford Odets. Not counting this work from, as it were, the prehistoric phase of Miller’s career, the first unmistakably, explicitly Jewish American character to appear in a Miller play is Gregory Solomon, the wonderfully charming eighty-nine-year-old furniture dealer who turns up, coughing and panting, in the attic that is the setting for The Price. Miller told an interviewer that during the mid-1960s I became far more aware of what Jewishness meant to me. I quite honestly hadn’t any such sensation earlier on. It probably was suppressed by the fact that we lived in a country with a lot of anti-Semitism, in the forties, the thirties, too. And what that does to somebody is to suppress his identity in a way. . . . I think the establishment of a new Jewish state probably meant a lot to me.

Arthur Miller and the Jews 57 According to Miller, Gregory Solomon has to be Jewish, for one thing because the theme of survival, of a kind of acceptance of life, seemed to me to point directly to the Jewish experience through centuries of oppression.

Solomon seems almost to revel in his Jewishness: he wields his slyly benevolent, wheedling, joking, Jewish salesman’s persona with zest. But The Price is not his story; he is there to dispense his semi-Solomonic wisdom to the play’s protagonists, two brothers struggling over their memories of their father, a victim, like so many of Miller’s fathers (including his own), of financial failure. One brother, like Quentin in After the Fall, like Miller himself, has gone to college, leaving the other, like Miller’s brother Kermit, to take care of what is left of the family. “The characters [in The Price] were not based on Kermit and me,” says the playwright, “but the magnetic underlying situation was deep in my bones.” One critic suggests that the play represents Miller’s own internal struggle between his Jewish heritage of family loyalty, incarnated in the brother who stayed, and his American heritage of revolt, incarnated in the brother who left. And yet, the brothers in The Price are presented as ethnically neutral. Still, Miller might reasonably argue, in terms of his own dictum on ethnic/religious marking, that the “religious or cultural background” of the brothers is “irrelevant,” while the theme of The Price “require[s]” Solomon “to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness.” In a Tel Aviv production, however, according to The New York Times, the brothers “were, though no word of theirs proclaimed it, unmistakably Israelis and Jews. Prominent among the family objects waiting to be disposed of was a large menorah.” *

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BROKEN GLASS (1994) Miller’s first success as a writer was his novel Focus, in 1945, which depicted an America—a New York—where a Jew could not get a job at a Gentile firm, where fascist mobs were being exhorted to anti-Jewish violence. Just short of fifty years later, when he was seventy-eight years old, Broken Glass opened on Broadway. It was his first play to focus explicitly on what it could mean to be Jewish in America. Over the decades, it had become more and more permissible to face this question in the American theatre.

58 Beyond the Golden Door Set in Brooklyn in 1938, Broken Glass has no violent mobs rampaging through American streets, but it dramatizes a terrible sense of insecurity, of precariousness, in a middle-class Jewish couple that recalls the atmosphere of Focus. Rabbi Marc Gellman reminds us, Demons surface. For most people, demons surface in nightmares, but for us, for Jews, demons seem to surface in history. Pharaoh, Amalek, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus, Torquemada, Chmielnitsky, and Hitler were real demons. They killed real Jews. . . . These demons have changed something in the Jewish soul. . . . we Jews cannot fully trust the world again.

Doris in The Loman Family Picnic, by Donald Margulies (produced in 1989, set “Around 1965”), is haunted by those demons even in the midst of comfortable post–World War II Brooklyn; the Gellburgs in 1938, with Hitler on the rise and anti-Semitism rampant in America, have it much worse. Sylvia Gellburg has become obsessed with reading in the newspapers about Kristallnacht, so called after the broken glass—thus Miller’s title—that littered German streets after Hitler let loose Nazi mobs against the Jews. “When she talks about it,” her doctor says, “it’s not the other side of the world, it’s on the next block.” Sylvia is so frightened that, though perfectly healthy, she has lost the ability to walk. Her husband Philip reacts differently to his sense of precariousness. As Sylvia’s doctor says, “He doesn’t like being Jewish.” He tries to separate himself from other Jews. He is punctilious—obsessive—in his insistence that his name is “Gellburg, not Goldberg . . . G-e-l-l-b-u-r-g. It’s the only one in the phone book. . . .We’re from Finland originally.” Finland! A comically unlikely story, but it enables him to distance himself from both German Jews and those from Eastern Europe. Apropos of Kristallnacht, he says, It’s no excuse for what’s happening over there, but German Jews can be pretty … you know … Pushes up his nose with his forefinger. Not that they’re pushy like the ones from Poland or Russia.

By expressing distaste for his coreligionists, he implies that he is not one of them. In his working life, exploited by a formidable Gentile financial institution, Gellburg is an upscale version of Alexander Portnoy’s put-upon father in Portnoy’s Complaint: GELLBURG : Above me is only Mr. Case. Stanton Wylie Case; he’s chairman and president. You’re not interested in boat racing. HYMAN [Sylvia’s doctor]: Why?

Arthur Miller and the Jews 59 GELLBURG : His yacht won the America’s Cup two years ago. For the second time. The Aurora? HYMAN : Oh yes! I think I read about … GELLBURG : He’s had me aboard twice. HYMAN : Really. GELLBURG, the grin: The only Jew to ever set foot on that deck. HYMAN : Don’t say. GELLBURG : In fact, I’m the only Jew ever worked for Brooklyn Guarantee in their whole history. The favor of his High WASP employer is precious to him—the more so because Gellburg is the “only Jew” to receive it from the obviously antiSemitic Mr. Case. If Case were not anti-Semitic, Gellburg would probably not be the “only Jew,” and Case’s patronage would be less valuable. Similarly, Gellburg is proud of his son, the army officer, much as Willy Loman is proud of his son, the star athlete: I wanted people to see that a Jew doesn’t have to be a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman. . . . For a Jewish boy, West Point is an honor. Without Mr. Case’s connections, he never would have gotten in. He could be the first Jewish general in the United States Army.

For his son as for himself, he greedily picks up crumbs of condescension from the highly-placed Gentiles who are his arbiters of value: “General MacArthur talked to him twice.” When his WASP boss turns on him, Philip is heartbroken (“it was like a hammer between the eyes”), but he comes to a new realization: I never wanted to see it this way but he goes sailing around on the ocean and meanwhile I’m foreclosing Brooklyn for them. That’s what it boils down to. You got some lousy rotten job to do, . . . send in the Yid. Close down a business, throw somebody out of his home …

In the old country, a nobleman might have a “court Jew” as his agent in oppressing the peasants; such a figure appears in Miller’s novel Focus and is destroyed, caught between the anger of those below him and the indifference of those above. Realizing how he has been used by the anti-Semitic boss he has idolized, Philip admits, “I don’t know where I am . . . Why is it so hard to be a Jew?” When Dr. Hyman tells him “You hate yourself,” he responds, But there are some days I feel like going and sitting in the schul with the old men and pulling the talles over my head and be a full-time Jew the rest of my life. With the sidelocks and the black hat, and settle it once and for all.

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In the midst of self-hatred, suddenly, there is a nostalgia for the synagogue, a yearning to be released from self-division, a racking ambivalence, reminiscent of Jack Robin in The Jazz Singer (“the old songs from the synagogue start wailing in my ears ... and I-I cry”). And then immediately a wish to kill the Jew in himself and gain release from self-division that way: And other times … yes, I could almost kill them. They infuriate me. I am ashamed of them and that I look like them. Gasping again:—Why must we be different? Why is it? What is it for?

Philip admits to his wife that he too has been afraid: “Of Germany. Mr. Case. Of what could happen to us here. I think I was more afraid than you are, a hundred times more!” Miller’s probing into the Gellburg marriage is not entirely convincing, and it is unclear what we are to make of Sylvia’s Jewish doctor, the play’s raisonneur, who, rather absurdly, goes horseback-riding every day on Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn. But Philip Gellburg is a brilliant, complex portrait of what Miller himself has been accused of being: a self-hating Jew, yearning to escape his Jewishness, knowing that he never can.

5. Prosperity and Its Discontents PADDY CHAYEFSKY: THE TENTH MAN (1959) After World War II, awareness of the Holocaust among American Jews stimulated an anxious concern with Jewish identity and the loss of it. Irving Howe observed that the New York Jewish intellectuals who emerged in the late 1930s come at a moment in the development of immigrant Jewish culture when there is a strong drive not only to break out of the ghetto but also to leave behind the bonds of Jewishness entirely.

Remember Arthur Miller’s description of his youthful self “struggling to identify myself with mankind rather than one small tribal fraction of it.” But after World War II, Howe continued, We might scorn our origins; we might crush America with discoveries of ardor; we might change our names. But we knew that but for an accident of geography we might also now be bars of soap. At least some of us could not help feeling that in our earlier claims to have shaken off all ethnic distinctiveness there had been something false, something shaming.

This feeling, I think, is behind some of the attacks against Death of a Salesman for being insufficiently Jewish, and also behind some of Arthur Miller’s post-Salesman works, especially Broken Glass. Something like this feeling is also behind most of the post–World War II plays discussed in this book. Hitler reminded Jewish Americans of their inalienable Jewishness. Up through Death of a Salesman, the plays discussed in this book are about Jews struggling to be “American,” whatever that means to them, and often about poor Jews struggling to be prosperous. After Death of a Salesman, the plays (except for remembrances of things past by Neil Simon

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and others) are mainly about the troubles of Jews who have achieved these goals and moved solidly into the great American middle class. In this, the plays parallel what was happening to Jewish Americans in the real world. As awareness of the Holocaust put anti-Semitism increasingly out of fashion, the great surge of postwar prosperity opened vast opportunities for Jews as well as Gentiles. The process of upward mobility, long characteristic of Jewish Americans—and depicted in many of the plays we have looked at—shifted into high gear. Indeed, by the 1950s, the “social ascent” of American Jews,” in Howe’s words, was “without parallel for speed or range in any other immigrant group.” Other ethnic groups might breed generations of sturdy working-class Americans, but for the Jews, Americanization has been inextricably linked to climbing the socioeconomic ladder. “Sociologist Steven M. Cohen estimated in 1988 that income among American Jews was close to double that of Gentiles.” Many newly prosperous Jews, including the fictional Molly and Jake Goldberg, dispersed from tightly knit Jewish neighborhoods (“areas of second settlement”), into the suburbs (“areas of third settlement”), where they were more likely to have Gentile neighbors. Americanization—assimilation—became easier and easier. But this very ease tended to increase assimilation anxiety: the fear among Jews that as Jews increasingly blend into American society, they are diminishing themselves, falsifying themselves, cutting themselves off from their roots, losing not only their heritage but also their integrity, exchanging ethical and spiritual values for materialism and snobbery, or for alienated nothingness. This assimilation anxiety is a recurrent theme in Jewish American plays during the second half of the twentieth century. Over and over again, our post-midcentury playwrights have been showing us “successful” Jewish Americans in whom the American side of the “double self ” has won out, with unhappy results. Awake and Sing! and Death of a Salesman can be read this way (except, of course, the part about prosperity and “success”), but there is no real suggestion in either play that a return to stronger Jewish connection is the answer to anything. Old Jacob in Awake and Sing! quotes the Bible in Hebrew, but like Odets at the time, he is a Marxist first. Bernard, the studious, hardworking, highly successful lawyer and family man in Salesman, could be an ideal Jewish son, except that he shows no sign of Jewish selfidentification. But in The Tenth Man by Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981), the synagogue itself becomes a place of redemption. This particular synagogue is a shabby little storefront in Mineola, Long Island—a type of shul more common on the Lower East Side than in the suburbs—where a few old immigrant men come to pray, and chat, and

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argue, and generally pass the time. Postwar prosperity has passed it by. As one of them says, Here you have the decline of orthodox Judaism graphically before your eyes. This is a synagogue? A converted grocery store, flanked on one side by a dry cleaner and on the other by a shoemaker. Really, if it wasn’t for the Holy Ark there, this place would look like the local headquarters of the American Labor Party. In Poland, where we were all one step from starvation, we had a synagogue whose shadow had more dignity than this place.

Even though the speaker is a self-proclaimed atheist, he sees America as the treyfene medina in which Orthodoxy withers, and he doesn’t like it. As so often happens, in plays as in life, a strong sense of Jewish identity—even a strong sense of the synagogue as the focus of that identity—survives the loss of the Jewish God. A lifelong atheist, the father of a friend of mine, was president of his synagogue for many years. The congregation’s young rabbi hopes to turn this sleepy little shul into an up-to-date American temple. In a shrewdly written satiric speech, he offers some advice to an even younger colleague: You are a saintly, scholarly, and truly pious man, and you have no business being a rabbi. You’ve got to be a go-getter, Harry, unfortunately. . . . I’ve started a Youth Group, a Young Married People’s Club, a Theater Club which is putting on its first production next month, The Man Who Came to Dinner, I’d like you to come, Harry, bring the wife, I’m sure you’ll have an entertaining evening. And let me recommend that you organize a little-league baseball team. It’s a marvelous gimmick. . . . Harry, I’m afraid there are times when I don’t care if they believe in God as long as they come to the synagogue.

Historians and sociologists have written a great deal about that great American institution, the postwar suburban synagogue, the “shul with a pool”: a focal point of the local Jewish community, of Jewish identity, of Bonds for Israel, but, say many authorities, a little light on actual worship. As Nathan Glazer has it, “The religious services often seemed the least vital of the many ‘services’ supplied by the new synagogues.” But this rabbi is still relatively new at this synagogue, and so far his go-getting has had little effect. We see only the old men, funny but sad, left behind, not fully absorbed into America. (They invariably get lost on the subway.) The congregation is so depleted that the shammes (Chayefsky calls him the sexton) often has to go out into the street and drag in a Jewish stranger—a tenth man—in order to assemble a minyan, or quorum needed for prayers. Today’s tenth man is “a fine-looking, if troubled young fellow,” according

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to the stage directions, named Arthur Landau (in some editions, Arthur Brooks), very different from the old immigrant congregants. He is visibly uncomfortable at finding himself in a synagogue, so alienated from his Jewish religious heritage that one of the old men mutters, “I wonder if he’s still circumcised.” Arthur is a real mess: divorced, despondent, suicidal: I cannot think of a more meaningless sham than my own life. . . . I left the Communist Party when I discovered there were easier ways to seduce girls. . . . Then I fell in love—that is to say, I found living alone so unbearable I was willing to marry. She married me because all her friends were marrying somebody. Needless to say, we told each other how deeply in love we were. . . . [But] ardent love is an immense drain on one’s energy. I began to work day and night at my law office, and besides becoming very successful, I managed to avoid my wife entirely. For this deceit, I was called ambitious and was respected by everyone including my wife, who was quite as bored with me as I was with her. We decided to have children, because we couldn’t possibly believe, we were that miserable together. All this while I drove myself mercilessly for fear that if I paused for just one moment, the whole slim, trembling sanity of my life would come crashing down about my feet without the slightest sound. I went to a psychoanalyst who wanted to know about my childhood, when I could barely remember whether I took a taxi or a bus to his office that day. I began to drink myself into stupors, pursuing other men’s wives, and generally behaving badly. One morning, I stared into the mirror and could barely make out my features. Life is utterly meaningless. I have had everything a man can get out of life—prestige, power, money, women, children, and a handsome home only three blocks from the Scarsdale Country Club, and all I can think of is I want to get out of this as fast as I can.

Arthur is another hardworking, successful young Jewish lawyer, like Bernard in Death of a Salesman, married, with children—but his life, unlike Bernard’s, is ashes in his mouth. One critic calls him a “paradigm of contemporary cynicism and anomie”; more than that, he is a Horrible Example of an American Jew assimilated into emptiness. And unlike various Bergers (in Awake and Sing!) and Lomans (in Salesman), who also live in spiritual wastelands, trying to obey what they think are America’s demands, Arthur, in the postwar American paradise of prosperity and tolerance, has not been frustrated by the failure of the Golden Land to deliver economically. He has everything, and it means nothing. Arthur makes his confession to a peculiar young woman he meets in the Rabbi’s office. Her name is Evelyn, and she seems, astonishingly enough, to be possessed by a dybbuk. (A dybbuk, that famous figment of Jewish superstition, is an unquiet, malevolent ghost that takes refuge in

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a living person and speaks through her mouth. The Dybbuk by S. Anski, a classic of the Yiddish theatre, was clearly in Chayefsky’s mind.) Evelyn keeps insisting, “I am the Whore of Kiev, the companion of sailors.” At other times, however, she thinks she is Susan Hayward, so maybe she is just schizophrenic. The climax of the play is a ceremony of exorcism, complete with a shofar, or ram’s horn, blowing the ritual succession of notes known as the Great Tekiah. In The Jazz Singer, the dignity of religious Judaism is conveyed through the sounds of the synagogue floating in through the window. But The Tenth Man takes place in the synagogue—the shabby synagogue, hitherto the gathering place for a few comically quarrelsome old men, that now becomes the scene of an impressive and powerful ageold ritual. At the climax of the ritual comes a stunning coup de theatre: not Evelyn but Arthur begins to moan softly, and then with swift violence a horrible scream tears out of his throat. He staggers one brief step forward. At the peak of his scream, he falls heavily down on the floor of the synagogue in a complete faint.

Evelyn has said to Arthur, “You are possessed by a dybbuk that does not allow you to love.” Unaccountably, it is Arthur’s dybbuk, not Evelyn’s, that has been exorcised: the dybbuk of lovelessness, which the wisest of the synagogue’s old men has ascribed to a lack of faith. Arthur wakes up saying, “I want to live,” praying to the God of his fathers, and ready to plight his troth to Evelyn, dybbuk-ridden as she still is. What could never happen in the office of Arthur’s analyst has happened, by a convenient miracle, in a shabby suburban shul. In attacking the spiritual and moral emptiness of American life, Chayefsky takes his place in a tradition that unites Jewish and Gentile playwrights. Unlike most of them, however, Chayefsky has a solution. He shows us a totally secular Jew in totally desperate straits, made whole in a synagogue through an ancient Jewish rite. It is highly unlikely that Chayefsky himself believed literally in dybbuks, or wanted us to; the point seems to be that it does not matter what you believe in—even dybbuks—as long as you believe in something. Of course, real believers tend to believe that it makes a great deal of difference what you believe. But for Chayefsky, you just gotta believe, and belief will enable you to love (another questionable notion), and the synagogue is a place where Jews can find belief. Of course, The Tenth Man is a parable, not a realistic drama; nevertheless, the redemption

66 Beyond the Golden Door of Arthur Landau is perhaps just a little simplistic, a little sentimental, a little too easy, a little too neat. Or perhaps there is no perhaps about it. *

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JULES FEIFFER: GROWN UPS (1981) It is not surprising that the cartoonist Jules Feiffer (b. 1929) should have become a playwright: as many people have observed, many of his cartoons were really little illustrated dramas, or at least little revue sketches, and a number of them were successfully staged in a revue entitled Feiffer’s People. His actual plays are often satirically hyperbolical or outrightly fantastic. In Little Murders, the members of the respectable Newquist family end up leaning out of their living room window, taking potshots with a rifle at passersby. In Knock Knock, two middle-aged Jewish men in a little house in the woods are visited by Joan of Arc. But Grown Ups, funny as it is, is a work of somber naturalism. With keen precision, it shows how the refusal to understand, the refusal even to listen, can be used as a weapon in domestic infighting. This, however, is not what is particularly Jewish about Grown Ups. Perhaps it is the Jewish sense of precariousness, even in America, combined in postwar America with the tremendous opportunities offered to Jewish brains and hard work, that causes some Jewish parents to be so obsessed with “success” for their sons, in the form of money or prestige. “Help! Help!” cries the Jewish mother in the old joke (which found its way into Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s painfully hilarious novel), “My son the doctor is drowning!” Jake (we never learn his last name), the hero of Grown Ups, is a smart, hardworking, high-achieving Jewish son, like Bernard in Salesman or Arthur Landau in The Tenth Man or Roth’s Alexander Portnoy: not a lawyer this time, but a reporter at The New York Times. Jake is almost as miserable as Arthur Landau, disabled, not by a mysterious metaphorical dybbuk, but, it is pretty clear, by his parents, who, like the senior Portnoys, take their daughter for granted but smother their son. (Of course, as usual, the play is written from the son’s point of view.) Like Biff Loman, Jake is staggering under the burden of parental expectations, even though he has already achieved the “success” that Biff neither has nor wants. Unmistakably Jewish, Jake’s parents are no greenhorns, no Bronxy Bergers or Goldbergs, no lower-middle-class Portnoys. The time is “The Present”—1981—the great Eastern European immigration has been over

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for nearly sixty years. Having long since left the Yiddish-speaking ghetto of the Lower East Side for Jewish neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, Jews, like other Americans, have been steadily moving up the social ladder and into the suburbs. Jake’s father, Jack, owns a men’s clothing store that seems to be doing pretty well, since Jack and his wife Helen have moved from Queens to Riverdale, the most upscale part of the Bronx. Jake’s sister Marilyn lives with her family in the comfortable suburb of New Rochelle. Jake, as befits a member of the intelligentsia, lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. For all their prosperity and acculturation, Helen and Jack are still protective and possessive Jewish parents. Helen in particular is subtly observed: Feiffer warns that she cannot be played as a stereotypical stage or t.v. Jewish mother or the play sinks like a stone. She derives from another, less familiar tradition. Her style is cheerful; she has cultivated a genteel, educated, ladylike manner. Her forays into Yiddishisms, while used fondly, have a touch of condescension.

Frank Rich observed in the Times that Frances Sternhagen, who played Helen on Broadway, “is dressed in Bergdorf chic . . . her manner resembles that of a Park Avenue grande dame . . . she has the elegant manners and style of a woman who has succeeded in assimilating herself into the mainstream of upper-middle-class American life.” But she is still able to dispense a great deal of unwanted advice, to fuss over Jake’s health, and to ask, half-pretending to be kidding, “You can’t for once please your poor old mother?” Jack is a more conventional type, gruff and demanding like the Jewish father in Neil Simon’s Come Blow Your Horn. Like Mr. Portnoy, he is constantly asking, “When are we going to see you?” even when Jake is standing in front of him. Both parents are free with complaints about how Jake and his wife are raising their daughter; Jack is constantly demanding to see more of her and has no respect for her privacy: I come all the way from Riverdale to see my granddaughter and I can’t see her because her door is closed. That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.

With keen understanding and lapidary precision, Feiffer shows us the parents’ double-edged response to Jake’s journalistic achievements. “My son, Walter Lippmann!” Helen effuses. And later, “I’m so excited I can hardly breathe!” Jack tapes one of Jake’s articles to the cash register at his store: “Any customer who came into the store, I wouldn’t sell him a shirt until he read your report.” But Jake’s exploits are never enough for them.

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Jack is constantly asking his son “What’s new?” or “What else?”—a demand for more success, more prizes, more honors. More! When he asks, “When are they going to make you editor of the Times?” he is joking, but behind the joke is the demand, which Jake hears very well. “Oh, I didn’t tell you? They fired me,” he replies; behind his joke is anger and defiance that foreshadow his rebellion two acts later. But Jake at this point is still unable to resist playing the game, meeting the demand, gaining the approval: “You see my story yesterday on the dangerous drugs U. S. corporations are selling in the Third World?” Like Alexander Portnoy’s parents, Jake’s parents idolize their son, yet resent him. “I’m your father,” Jack grumbles, “I knew you even before you were a big shot.” “The book I could write,” Helen muses competitively, “I could teach you all a thing or two.” We have seen parental resentment against Americanized children cropping up also in Awake and Sing!, and we will see it again. Jake’s parents are fascinated by the famous people their son knows. “David Halberstam and John Kenneth Galbraith. Oh, Sonny,” says Helen, “there are tears in my eyes.” But they batten voraciously on the recognition he receives without ever quite believing in him. When he tells them about the book he is writing, on “the moral and ethical disintegration of the American Dream, basically,” his mother says, “You don’t want to get into trouble, Jake,” while his father says, “It’s a damned clever idea. Where did you get it from? Kissinger?” “Thank God I work at the Times,” says Jake of his father, “or he’d have trouble remembering my name.” Jake the writer and his admiring parents are the heirs of a fundamental Jewish tradition, stemming as they do from “a people,” in Irving Howe’s words, “that has always placed an enormous faith in the sheer power of words.” But Jake is also a product of his parents’ deep unconscious unease, the yearning and the fear they feel, acculturated though they are, before the great, mysterious American world of power and glory that looms, alluring and threatening, over nearly every play discussed in this book. Unlike Arthur Landau, Jake has no miracle in store. Reconnecting with anything he would recognize as his Jewish roots is not in the cards; his Jewish roots are his parents. At the end of the play, in an angry gesture of revolt, he announces to them, or rather throws it in their faces, that he is leaving his wife—a clear violation of the Rules for Jewish Sons—and, worse, quitting the Times. They are appalled. “Are you crazy? Have you gone crazy?” shouts his father. “Oh, what a tragedy, what a tragedy! . . . You’re killing us, Sonny, you’re killing us,” moans his mother. Jake has his revenge, as his little daughter looks on pathetically. He has upset the applecart for good

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and all—showing even more deeply the extent to which he is living his life in response to his overbearing Jewish parents. *

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JON ROBIN BAITZ: THREE HOTELS (1993) Like The Tenth Man and Grown Ups, Three Hotels is a Jewish American success story in which the fruits of success have turned to ashes in the mouth of its protagonist. But Jon Robin Baitz (b. 1961), its author, is a generation younger than Paddy Chayefsky or Jules Feiffer. In Willy Loman’s time, success in business for a Jew still usually meant a business of his own, just as it did in 1935 to Bessie Berger’s brother Morty and in 1919 to Molly Goldberg’s husband Jake. The postwar protagonists of The Tenth Man and Grown Ups, in accord with the standard model of postwar Jewish American social ascent, are highly successful professionals: a lawyer and a journalist. By the 1990s, however, the time of Three Hotels, anti-Semitism in employment had declined to the point where Jews were moving more or less freely up various corporate ladders. Still, Kenneth Hirshkovitz, the protagonist of Three Hotels, felt it incumbent upon him to change his name to Hoyle when he left the Peace Corps and went to work for a large corporation: “Well of course I changed my name. ‘Vice-President Hirshkovitz’? What are you nuts? I knew the world I was going into.” And now he is gainfully employed selling infant formula to Third World mothers who would be better off breast-feeding. Baitz’s father worked for Carnation, the canned milk company, and the playwright has said that “atmospherically and psychically, the play is informed by the world I saw.” It is the fiercest indictment of American corporate capitalism that I know. Hoyle has a special skill, much valued by his superiors: firing people. Like Philip Gellburg in Broken Glass, he is the Jew sent by his Gentile bosses to do their dirty work. In the first of the three blistering monologues that comprise Three Hotels, the pleasure he takes in his skill at corporate Machiavellianism and in the power this skill has brought him mixes complexly with scorn and self-loathing. In the second monologue, Hoyle’s wife tells us how she has just told a group of company wives the truth about what her husband’s “success” has done to her and to him. In the third monologue, Hoyle reveals that because of his wife’s outburst of rebellious honesty, he, the firing specialist, has been fired—fired with a cruelty that makes Willy Loman’s boss look almost like a gentleman.

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All three monologues take place in hotels. “I came of age in hotels,” Hoyle says. I drew comfort from them and when I fired people, or made some sort of bad deal, I did it in a hotel; for some reason, in a hotel, nothing sticks. It’s all transitional and you’re never stuck with the vital you.

“[T]he company was probably a bit of a mom for me,” says this man without roots, and his corporate mother has rejected him. So has his wife, who has disappeared. He thinks of his real mother, who is eighty-nine and senile at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Baltimore: I’ve always wondered Mother, what the day was like when you left Odessa. You certainly never talked about it. Listen to me. Casting about for a history. Now. At this late date. Silly.

Chewed up and spat out by rapacious, globalizing, corporate America, Hoyle identifies his lost integrity with his lost Jewishness, but both seem now out of his reach, even though, at the very end of the play, he “begins to sing, very softly, a Yiddish lullaby.”

6. Neil Simon: Brighton Beach to Broadway COME BLOW YOUR HORN (1961) It is easy, and not entirely unjust, to dismiss Neil Simon (b. 1927) as a purveyor of bourgeois triviality. His characters, like his audiences, have been for the most part unmistakably bourgeois—a fact that clearly does not bother him as much as some people think it ought to. Most of his work is devoted to the comic exaggeration of familiar foibles—not a matter of much interest to serious critics, except when provided by writers long since dead. When Simon himself tries to be overtly serious, his work is often vitiated by glibness, sentimentality, and unearned optimism. But along with the wisecracks and the happy endings is some authentic reality: personal, Jewish, American, even universal. Simon’s characters are often ethnically neutral, with a “manner of speaking and acting [that] represented both urban Jews and urban Gentiles,” to quote from one of the few books that have been written about him. His Plaza Suite (1968), for instance, in its insistence that there are cracks in the facade of prosperous postwar American happiness, is strikingly similar to the plays discussed in the last chapter. Its profusion of wisecracks and its climaxes of farce have prevented many viewers from noting how serious it is (otherwise it would scarcely have run for 1,097 performances). It features a bride from a prosperous family who locks herself in a bathroom and refuses to get married, suddenly panicked at the prospect of becoming like her parents; not even the play’s optimistic ending can erase this image of generational revolt, of alienation from conventional upper-middle-class life. The bride’s family, the Hubleys, could easily be Jewish. Or not. The play is totally devoid of specific markers, either Jewish or Christian. On the other hand, Simon’s characters, even when not explicitly Jewish, tend to be urban, middle class, excitable, voluble, armed with wisecrack wit as a weapon of defense and offense—all of which are widely known

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as Jewish characteristics. And yet he is the most popular playwright of the twentieth century. Popularity, of course, is no guarantee of merit, but surely it says something positive about Simon—and about Jews in relation to the world—that so many Gentiles as well as Jews have looked at Simon’s Jewish and could-be Jewish characters and seen themselves. Simon is despised in high-minded circles as Broadway’s super-success, the ultimate symbol of popular commercial theatre; he is seldom mentioned in the same sentence with August Strindberg and Eugene O’Neill. But he shares with these distinguished forebears a penchant for writing about himself. “Writing plays,” he has said, “is a way of working out your life.” Of course, all playwrights do this to some extent, but Simon, so often considered a grinder-out of impersonal product, has spent much of his career exploring, with unusual closeness to the facts, his own experiences. As he acknowledges, “I suppose you could practically trace my life through my plays.” His first play, Come Blow Your Horn, is about a family named Baker, and it is never mentioned explicitly that they are Jewish. But, as Simon says in his memoirs, Come Blow Your Horn is about an “obviously Jewish family.” The father says to his rebellious son, “May you and your brother live and be well. God bless you, all the luck in the world, you should know nothing but happiness. If I ever speak to either one of you again, my tongue should fall out!” What could he be but Jewish? Here as elsewhere, like other Jewish playwrights, Simon resorts to what the critic Henry Bial calls “double coding”: If you know what Jews are like, you know that these characters are Jewish; if not, you are “free to ignore or miss” their Jewishness (as Bial remarks about Seinfeld). In fact, the Bakers, like so many of the families that Simon writes about, are the playwright’s own family. He tells us in his memoirs how relieved he was when his father saw the play and failed to recognize himself. On the other hand, he told an interviewer that when Come Blow Your Horn was playing, the theatre doorman, a black man in his sixties, was standing in the back of the theatre, laughing his head off. I went over to him after the play and asked, “Why were you laughing so much?” He said, “That’s my family up there.”

Come Blow Your Horn is a highly conventional Broadway light comedy, produced at a time when Jewish-flavored comedies were popular; it was modestly successful at the box office. But it contains uncanny echoes of some very different plays. Like those other Jewish family plays, The Jazz Singer, Awake and Sing! and Death of a Salesman, Simon’s little

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comedy dramatizes that central theme of Jewish American drama and fiction, the effort of a son to declare his independence from an overbearing parent—or, in this case, two overbearing parents. And, as always, this means distancing himself from one aspect or another of Jewishness. Buddy Baker (Simon’s self-portrait), suitcase in hand, appears one evening at the apartment of his elder brother Alan; at the age of twenty-one, he has run away from home. “You mean,” says Alan, “my baby brother finally broke out of prison?” Like Alexander Portnoy, but in a far more circumspect way, virginal Buddy is eager for some sexual experimentation; his brother, an accomplished ladies’ man, is his role model. (Simon has frequently acknowledged his own older brother Danny as his mentor in art and in life.) The home life of the Bakers, like that of the Bergers in Awake and Sing!, is disputatious and histrionic. Mr. Baker, like Bessie Berger, is given to vehement sarcasm. The decibel level in both plays gets pretty high. “We don’t talk,” says Alan. “We have heart to heart threatening.” In Come Blow Your Horn as in Awake and Sing!, a parent, feeling betrayed, flashes out in envious resentment against a more Americanized child. Awake and Sing!: BESSIE [to her daughter]: . . . I’m old-fashioned—like your friends I’m not smart—I don’t eat chop suey and run around Coney Island with tramps.

Come Blow Your Horn: [MR. BAKER to his son]: . . . I don’t talk fancy enough for you like your brother and his show business friends.

This parental envy surfaces also in Grown Ups and The Loman Family Picnic, and is latent in many other plays. The Baker family is patriarchal like the Lomans, not matriarchal like the Bergers. (Linda Loman, in her quiet way, keeps Willy together for as long as he can be kept together, but she defers to him at every point, whereas Bessie Berger openly rules the household.) As the critic Daniel Walden summarizes: Mr. Baker, a Jewish father in the old sense, wanted to preside over a unified family in which his sons followed his lead, as it had always been. His reference points were the shtetl culture of Eastern Europe. To him a son should be wellmotivated, work hard, and marry and have children.

74 Beyond the Golden Door Like Biff Loman, Buddy, who wants to become a playwright, is the victim of his father’s determination that he be a success in business. Like Happy Loman, Alan is better able to come to terms with the business world, but, like Happy, Alan has other things on his mind besides work. As Willy is furious at Biff’s recalcitrance, Mr. Baker is furious at both his sons. But Mr. Baker, like Joe Keller in Miller’s All My Sons, has actually achieved Willy’s unrealized ambition of “a business for the boys”: “I give the boy the biggest artificial fruit manufacturing house in the East.” It may sound frivolous to add that Cantor Rabinowitz, in The Jazz Singer, also wants his son to join the family business, but the cantor, the salesman, and the wax-fruit manufacturer all demand that their sons validate them by following in their footsteps along what they consider traditional and proper vocational paths, while Jack, Biff, and Buddy, eager to live in a wider world than their fathers, will have none of it. “The story of Jews in the South,” the historian Eli Evans has written, “is the story of fathers who built businesses to give to their sons who didn’t want them.” It is the story of many Jews in the North as well. The father of Leonard Bernstein is on record as regretting that his son became a musician instead of joining the family’s beauty-supply business. Mrs. Baker, in obedience to the Jewish-mother stereotype, pursues her runaway son with offers of food, in what is obviously a continuing attempt to infantilize and possess him: MOTHER : Did you have dinner yet? BUDDY: What? Dinner? I had a sandwich. MOTHER : A sandwich? For supper? That’s how you start the minute you’re away? BUDDY: I’m not hungry, Mom. . . . MOTHER : What’d you have, one of those greasy hamburgers? BUDDY: No. Roast beef. I had a big roast beef sandwich. MOTHER : That’s not enough for you. Let me make you some eggs. And so on. Mrs. Baker lacks Bessie Berger’s fierceness, but as the homemaker, she has done her share in making home a prison. Like Bessie, she has certain controlling tendencies that are features of the stereotypical Jewish mother. Bessie rules largely by sheer intimidation, but she is also adept at using selfpity in the infliction of guilt: BESSIE : In a minute I’ll get up from the table. I can’t take a bite in my mouth no more.

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MYRON (restraining her): Now, Momma, just don’t excite yourself— BESSIE : I’m so nervous I can’t hold a knife in my hand. MYRON : Is that a way to talk, Ralphie? Don’t Momma work hard enough all day? (BESSIE allows herself to be reseated.) And later, when Ralph shows signs of independence: Wait, the day comes when you’ll be punished. When it’s too late you’ll remember how you sucked away a mother’s life. Talk to him, tell him how I don’t sleep at night. (Bursts into tears and exits.)

See also Mrs. Sophie Portnoy: “Tell me please what horrible things we have done to you all our lives that this should be our reward?” As for Mrs. Baker, the playwright describes her as “a woman who has managed to find a little misery in the best of things. Sorrow and trouble are the only things that can make her happy.” And so: BUDDY: . . . Do you feel any better? MOTHER : When did I ever feel better? When Buddy, unable to take any more of his mother’s badgering about food, “(practically screams) Mom, for Pete’s sakes, it doesn’t matter,” she replies (near tears) What are you yelling? I’m only trying to make you happy. Who do I cook for, myself? I haven’t eaten anything besides coffee for ten years.

No wonder the boys left home. Riv-Ellen Prell, the feminist scholar, points out that this image of the Jewish Mother, wielding her twin weapons of Food and Guilt, was a stand-up comedy staple of the postwar years, appearing on television, on comedy record albums, and in books with titles like How to Become a Jewish Mother. She quotes a routine that the Jewish comedian Jack Carter performed on the Ed Sullivan Show the year before Come Blow Your Horn opened on Broadway, with jokes about the Jewish Mother startlingly similar to those in Simon’s play, featuring food, “She has eighty courses already,” and guilt, as in the mother’s self-pitying whine, “All I am is a servant to you and your father.” (Simon’s jokes are better.) Feminist scholars maintain that the Jewish Mother was merely a scapegoat for the anxieties that came with the increased prosperity and

76 Beyond the Golden Door increased contact with the Gentile world of the postwar years. According to Paula E. Hyman, Faced with the need to establish their own identities in societies in which they were both fully acculturated and yet perceived as partially Other because they were Jews, Jewish men were eager to distinguish themselves from the women of their community, whom they saw as the guardians of Jewishness. The negative representations of women that they produced reflected their own ambivalence about assimilation and its limits.

As mothers in general remind their sons of the weak, dependent boyhood status that they have outgrown, so the Jewish Mother reminded her sons of the immigrant stigma, or, later, the stuffy Jewish bourgeois stigma, that they wished to put behind them. But is that the whole story? When Prell writes that the Jewish Mother’s “excessive and dangerous nurturance held back her sons—the producers of this humor—from moving forward into adulthood,” she is stating the theme behind the stereotype, not agreeing with it. But those very numerous humor-producing sons: after all, they were there. Yes, their testimony is inevitably biased and exaggerated. But is it entirely an unprovoked attack? Not all the attackers were comedians. The young Irving Howe wrote, in a Commentary article entitled “The Lost Young Intellectual,” that the Jewish mother constantly hovers over [her son], . . . The psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, in her book, Psychology of Women, notes that “Jewish women show an overstressed oral-motherly giving towards their children . . . the mother develops a special interest in the nutritional process of the objects of her love and shows much solicitude about their food. . . . This over-emphasis on eating is especially typical of Jewish women.” Even when the son is a grown-up man, the mother will still fuss and fume about his food . . . as if to maintain the same modes of affection and dependence. In later years, again, the mother will exploit all sorts of desperate devices to maintain her hold on her son. She is constantly appealing, no matter how subtly, to his guilt feelings

It can certainly be argued that in writing Mrs. Baker, Simon is merely recycling a cliché. But it is striking that the young Neil Simon, trying to do nothing more than amuse an audience, unwittingly echoes not only Jack Carter, a fellow purveyor of comedy, but also such serious observers as Irving Howe and Helen Deutsch.

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In creating the Baker family, Simon evokes the same pressures, the same conflicts, out of which Samson Raphaelson, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller made their very different plays—and out of which Philip Roth made Portnoy’s Complaint (published in 1969, eight years after Come Blow Your Horn opened). This suggests that these pressures and conflicts, and the character traits that generate them, are, or at least were, recurrent features of the Jewish adjustment to life in America, where so much hope for the future is vested in the sons, who, being so much more adept at the ways and opportunities of this rapidly changing country, are so hard to control. Stereotypes, both positive and negative, usually have a kernel of truth; what gives them a bad name is the assumption that they are the whole truth, applying totally to all members of the group to which they are applied. The Jewish Mother stereotype, however, seems rather old hat today. As Prell points out, she was superseded as the favored dartboard of Jewish men by the Jewish American Princess, who has not figured as prominently on the stage. In his Brighton Beach trilogy, Simon himself has depicted an immigrant mother, based on his own, with great sympathy. The basic hysterical mama, brandishing Food and Guilt, may have receded into history, as Jewish families, generation after generation, move farther and farther from their difficult early days in this country. But Jewish children in plays have continued to rebel against their parents. New, more Americanized, styles of Jewish motherhood appear in plays by younger playwrights—Jules Feiffer’s Grown Ups, Donald Margulies’s Loman Family Picnic, Wendy Wasserstein’s Isn’t It Romantic?—refining, varying, complicating the stereotype in various ways. Come Blow Your Horn, as befits such a light comedy, has a transparently contrived happy ending. Alan gets engaged to a suitable girl, as they were called in those days. Her name is Connie Dayton, but his parents never even ask if she is Jewish; Simon at this stage of his career is not ready for that much Jewish reality. Assuming his new role as Good (Jewish) Son, Alan pledges himself to the wax-fruit business, enabling Buddy to leave home, leave the business, sow some sexual wild oats, and become a writer “for television or the theatre,” with his parents’ permission. Of course, he has to promise to come back home for dinner on Friday night—Sabbath eve, as Daniel Walden points out (though the playwright does not say so). No conflicts are insoluble, no damage is permanent. Other playwrights, as we know—to some extent, even Simon himself in later years—are less optimistic. *

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THE BRIGHTON BEACH TRILOGY Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982, 1983), Biloxi Blues (1984, 1985), and Broadway Bound (1986) Not counting the musical Little Me (1962), written for the (Jewish) comedian Sid Caesar, Simon’s next play after Come Blow Your Horn was Barefoot in the Park (1963), which was inspired, according to Simon, by the early days of his own marriage. But its protagonists, Paul and Corie Bratter, are ethnically neutral. (They were originally played by Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, not exactly a couple of yidn.) When Simon writes about himself as a married or marrying man, as in God’s Favorite (1974), Chapter Two (1977), and Jake’s Women (1990), the authorial characters are not, or are very dimly, identified as Jews; only his self-portraits as a boy or a premarital young man have specifically Jewish experiences. Does this suggest that Jewishness played a less important part in his life as he matured? At any rate, Eugene Morris Jerome, the narrator-protagonist of Brighton Beach Memoirs and its two sequels, has been acknowledged by Neil Simon as “no doubt my own alter ego,” like Buddy Baker in Come Blow Your Horn. Eugene’s family members, then, correspond to the Bakers—with a difference, or rather a number of differences. The time is not “The Present,” not prosperous, postwar 1961, but hardscrabble, prewar “September 1937”; the place, not “Alan’s apartment in the East Sixties, New York City,” but “A wooden frame house” in “a lower-middle-income area,” Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York. (Simon himself grew up in Washington Heights, another “lower-middle-income area.”) The father is not the owner of “the biggest artificial fruit manufacturing house in the East,” but a salesman like Willy Loman and like Simon’s own father, a tired worrier who works two jobs to support his family. The mother is still concerned with food and cleanliness, like Mrs. Baker, but she is a woman of dignity and fortitude, not a caricature. Brighton Beach Memoirs is a realistic comedy-drama, purposely without the bright, slick, farcical dizziness of Come Blow Your Horn. “I wanted some depth to the characters,” Simon writes, “to show their anguish and fears in the face of hard times in America during the Depression, and their worries about their relatives in Poland, who might never get out in time.” Simon’s admirers find Brighton Beach Memoirs and its sequels richer and deeper than his early comedies; his detractors find them merely more sentimental. They are certainly wider in their range of feeling.

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As suggested by the references to relatives getting out of Poland in time, the Jeromes, in spite of their neutral name, are explicitly Jewish. Like Arthur Miller, Simon became more comfortable about writing Jewish characters as times changed around him, as anti-Semitism diminished, as Jews became more comfortable in America. Thus the Jeromes go to “temple.” Eugene’s mother says of her own mother, The day they packed up and left the house in Russia, she cleaned the place from top to bottom. She said, “No matter what the Cossacks did to us, when they broke into our house, they would have respect for the Jews.”

Mrs. Jerome has a deep distrust of the entire Gentile world: she equates the friendly Irish family across the street with the Cossacks. This feeling was, and in some places still is, a common old-country survival. A Jewish man tells an oral historian: My parents had this sense about Christians that they were no good, that sooner or later they would get you. My mother used to tell me, “You may think they’re all right, but sooner or later you’ll learn that you’re a Jew.”

Such feelings tend to diminish from one generation to the next. Fourteen-year-old Eugene is very much an American kid, for whom the Gentile world apparently holds no terrors. In fact, he wants to join it. He hates his name: “It is the second worst name ever given to a male child. The first worst is Haskell Fleischmann”—which is, of course, an unmistakably Jewish name. However, Eugene has no desire to become a WASP. He wishes he were “born Italian,” so he could play baseball for the Yankees: “All the best Yankees are Italian.” (Just in case we are in any doubt as to whether Eugene represents the author, he tells us that his second choice is to become a writer. American body versus Jewish mind?) But Simon does not develop this potential source of conflict; the family is preoccupied by poverty, and Eugene is preoccupied by puberty. Biloxi Blues takes place five years later, in the middle of World War II. Eugene, still the narrator-protagonist, still eager and naive, is in the army: the big world, the Gentile world. There he discovers sex (with a prostitute), love (with a sweet Catholic girl—nothing comes of it), and anti-Semitism (not from WASP power figures, but from fellow recruits). Eugene and his brilliant, fractious friend Arnold are the only Jews in the unit, and the only sensitive, literary types. Both are totally secular Jews. Arnold is “slight of build,” wears glasses, and has a nervous stomach: intellectually superior, physically inferior. When another soldier insults

80 Beyond the Golden Door him with anti-Semitic slurs, Eugene feels guilty for not standing up for his friend. But nothing really damaging ever happens to Eugene—which may be a clue to Simon’s limitations as a playwright. Arnold is by far the most interesting character in the play. Is there anything particularly Jewish about his dogged refusal to submit to army discipline? That, I think, is a judgement call. In an excellent essay about Simon as a Jewish playwright, Ellen Schiff writes: Arnold is unshakably true to his Jewish self, his logic, and his principles, insisting on their validity in the uniformed, arbitrary, and intolerant world of the military.

At any rate, his deep sense of alienation is a well-known Jewish response to America, one exemplified by many plays discussed in this book. The most important play of the trilogy for our purposes is the final one, Broadway Bound. The year is 1949, the war is over, financial pressures have eased, but a touch of insecurity about Gentile America seems to be a family tradition. Eugene’s mother, who was so threatened by the Irish family across the street in Brighton Beach Memoirs, now tells a story about her immigrant grandparents’ first sight of the Statue of Liberty. It could almost be an epigraph to this book: K ATE : This is what they dreamed of. Their whole life. To get to America. And when they saw that statue, they started to cry. The women were wailing, the men were shaking, everybody praying. You know why? EUGENE : Because they were free. K ATE : Because they took one look at that statue and said, “That’s not a Jewish woman. We’re going to have problems again.” Similarly, Eugene still has his problem with Jewish names. Learning that his new nephew will be called Myron Isaac Eisenberg, he says, “Poor kid. Wait till he tries to date a girl from Mount Holyoke.” Snooty Gentile girls won’t want to date an obviously Jewish boy. Eugene, now twenty-three, is back home in Brighton Beach, still the narrator, still, like nearly all of Simon’s youthful self-evocations, shy, naive, and eager for life—for more life, at this point, than Brighton Beach can provide. In spite of those Mount Holyoke girls, he is eager to take on the world. His mother is still a housewife. Her own father says of her, “If she can’t make dinner for somebody, her life is over.” But there is maternal dignity in the way she polishes the beloved dining table that her grandfather

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made for her grandmother, recognizing it as the center of family life and as a link between past and future. As she helped her grandmother polish it, so she hopes for a granddaughter who will help her polish it. In Kate Jerome, Simon dramatizes Irving Howe’s description of his own mother, “who held us together . . . She was the kind of woman who blooms through sustaining others.” She is nearer to the positive stereotype, the Yiddishe Momme, than to the negative Jewish Mother. All the same, Kate is not above a touch of Jewish-Mother possessiveness: when Eugene complains, “Mom, I’m not eight years old,” she replies, “You are until you move out of this house.” (Cf. Portnoy’s Complaint: “Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die! ”) And yet in a famous scene, she tells Eugene about the night she danced with George Raft. She was not always a mother. The stereotypes, both positive and negative, are not the whole story. Like Jakie Rabinowitz in The Jazz Singer, Eugene and his older-brother/ mentor Stanley want to leave home and find a new life in show business: they want to become a team of comedy writers, like Neil Simon and his older-brother/mentor Danny. But Broadway Bound takes place almost twenty-five years after The Jazz Singer and was written more than sixty years later. The Jewish household and the outside world have moved inexorably closer to each other, and the brothers do not face Jakie/Jack’s drastic, melodramatic, either/or choice. No religious commitment holds them back. There is no need for any explicit rebellion. They do not even have to change their names. Yet, though it is poverty and narrowness that the boys want to escape, not Jewishness specifically, they are moving out of Jewish life as they have known it, leaving behind their variously uncomprehending and unsympathetic family, rejecting the old—but not unwilling to use it for material. Their first radio sketch, like Simon’s first play, is about their family, but no one in the family is enthusiastic. Their mother says, “Everybody remembered their lines”—not a savvy comment about something on the radio. Their grandfather is a socialist, not an eloquent visionary like the Marxist grandfather in Awake and Sing!, but a crabby old man. “To me,” he says, “comedy has to have a point. What was the point of this?” “To make people laugh,” says Eugene. “That’s not a point,” says the grandfather—anticipating a common attitude toward Simon’s work. And their father, unlike Simon’s real father, is deeply offended: “I will never forgive either one of you for ridiculing me in front of my neighbors,

82 Beyond the Golden Door in front of my friends, in front of strangers.” Eugene admits that the indictment is not unjust. But this sketch is their ticket out of Brighton Beach. By laughing, however affectionately, at their own family’s Jewish ways, Eugene and Stanley (read Neil and Danny) are defining themselves as separate from the family and superior to it. Distanced from it psychologically, they can earn the money to distance themselves literally. “It’s time to move, Gene,” says Stanley after their sketch is broadcast. “They liked our work at C.B.S., we can afford a place in New York. We should go, Gene, and we should go soon.” And they do. Eugene and Stanley are enacting what Norman Podhoretz has called “the brutal bargain,” in which, in order to gain the big world out there, talented Jewish (and perhaps other) young men reject, in a sense betray, their families and the whole way of being in which they were raised. *

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LOST IN YONKERS (1991) Those two wisecracking Jewish brothers, Alan and Buddy Baker, Stanley and Eugene Jerome, Danny and Neil Simon, make one more appearance in Simon’s oeuvre, as Jay and Arty Kurnitz in Lost in Yonkers, teenaged boys, too young to break away from their family. On the contrary, with the death of their mother, their family has broken away from them, and they are sent to live with their cold, bitter, tyrannical grandmother. Grandma Kurnitz is not an Eastern European Jew and has none of the characteristics associated with them, unless you count her iron determination to survive. She is a Jewish refugee from Germany, lame from an injury sustained when she was caught up in a Nazi rally, who has crippled her children by her obsession with showing them the harshness of the world. Lost in Yonkers is an impressive play, and it brought Simon his only Pulitzer Prize. It makes the point that the psychological damage inflicted by the Nazis even on those who escaped can be passed down, a malign heritage, from generation to generation. And yet, an entirely different explanation for Grandma Kurnitz’s warped personality could have been substituted without making the play much different. Neil Simon is not the man to grapple at any depth with the Holocaust. But then, why should he be? *

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THREE SHOW-BUSINESS PLAYS The Sunshine Boys (1972), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway (2001) Show business, especially comedy, is a subject far closer to Simon’s heart. Show business, of course—managing, writing, performing—has been the way into the wider world for so many Jewish men and women that it has long since become itself a kind of Jewish milieu, providing one of many new American ways of being Jewish. This has become so widely acknowledged that a hit Broadway musical, Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005), featured a song that merrily proclaims, “We won’t succeed on Broadway if we don’t have any Jews.” Show business, as demonstrated in The Jazz Singer and Broadway Bound, can be a way of escaping the ghetto of the Jewish family. Even Ralph Berger in Awake and Sing!, who is scarcely a Broadway baby, briefly considers show business as a possible way to escape, to “be something! Didn’t I want to take up tap dancing too?” But the Jewish escapees into show business, whether dramatic characters or real-life entertainers, took valuable Jewish baggage with them, as Broadway Bound and certainly The Jazz Singer make clear. Much has been written that argues for the Jewishness of Jewish showbiz, Jewish comedy in particular, even when it contains no specifically Jewish references. The playwright Tony Kushner cites “the great Jewish theatrical mandate, ‘A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.’ ” Jewish comedy, the argument goes, is a Jewish heritage, a response to Jewish history, Jewish marginality, Jewish suffering, a way of asserting Jewish power—characteristically Jewish mental power (often the only kind that Jews possessed)—against the world. (“Sigmund Freud,” Arthur Hertzberg and Aaron Hirt-Manheimer remind us, “observed that Jewish humor and folklore often express the need of the powerless to take revenge on their oppressors”) Or, if not a hostile assertion, a placatory one: a Jewish man remembered how as a boy he disarmed his Gentile classmates: [I]t dawned on me that people who are liked don’t get harassed. Nobody notices they’re different. And what better way to be liked than to be funny? So I became the class clown. I’d sit around telling jokes, fooling around, cracking everyone up. It worked. Sometimes I wonder whether that’s why there are so many Jewish comedians.

84 Beyond the Golden Door It can be a way to bond with fellow Jews, to cheer each other up, in the absence of Gentiles, or over the heads of the Gentiles in the audience. Or, in friendship, to share something Jewish with the Gentiles. A British sociologist, the author of The Mirth of Nations, told The New York Times that the world’s funniest people were the Ashkenazi (Northern European) Jews; “There’s not really anybody in the same league,” he said. But if Jewish comedy is rooted in Jewish heritage, it has blossomed unprecedentedly in America. A book about Jewish comedians entitled The Haunted Smile reports that “In 1979, for example, Time estimated that whereas Jews made up only 3 percent of the American population, fully 80 percent of professional comedians were Jewish.” Neil Simon returns to the subject of Jewish comedy again and again— not to analyze, but to depict and to celebrate it in a variety of its forms. Al Lewis and Willie Clark, the title characters of The Sunshine Boys, are patterned after Smith and Dale, the famous Jewish comedy team, who starred for many years in vaudeville. Willie, Simon’s protagonist, is a rude, bitter, demanding, pathetic, impossible old man, a has-been in a cheap hotel room, but Simon writes about him and his long-estranged partner with love. There is no indication that Lewis and Clark are Jewish, except every word they say. As Simon himself has observed, their conversation has the same rhythms as the material they perform. In Broadway Bound, Simon provides a chunk of the radio sketch that Eugene and Stanley have written, and it is a pitch-perfect piece of 1940s radio comedy; similarly, he provides Lewis and Clark with a chunk of their famous vehicle, “The Doctor Will See You Now,” that is fit to stand beside “Doctor Kronkite,” the famous vehicle of Smith and Dale. Laughter on the 23rd Floor, a kind of sequel to Broadway Bound, is Simon’s fictionalized memoir of his days as a writer for Sid Caesar’s television shows, along with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and a number of other brilliant Jewish wits, “a group of people,” says Simon, “only Sid Caesar knew how to put together.” In the play, the writing staff of The Max Prince Show consists of six Jews (including one woman) and a lone Gentile. The youngest of the Jews, who also acts as narrator, is a shy, naive, eager fellow named Lucas, easily recognizable as a Simon self-portrait. (There is no Danny Simon figure, although Danny also wrote for Sid Caesar; Lucas is on his own.) Mel Tolkin, who toiled with Simon in Caesar’s Writers’ Room, said of this play that “Not a single word said onstage was ever uttered by any of us. But all of it is true.” The Jews in the Writers’ Room make no effort to soft-pedal their Jewishness. Yiddish words crop up in their deliberations, especially “putz”

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and “schmuck.” Trying to come up with a nom de sketch for Senator Joseph McCarthy, Max Prince, their boss, who deliberates with them, suggests, “McFahrblungett. It means crazy in Yiddish, he’ll never understand it.” For a change, it is the Gentile writer who is marginalized, usually in a friendly way, though at one point one of the Jews tells him, “My family, all brilliant Talmudic scholars, almost drowned coming over on the boat to America because your drunken people kept beating the shit out of the captain.” This sense of pride in being Jewish is part of the gleeful, regressive comic freedom that these writers exercise. They throw shoes out the window. Lucas says, “what I think cemented the job for me was the day I poured lighting fluid on the desk and set fire to it . . . I was made an honorary lunatic.” Simon told an interviewer that working for Caesar “was for me, creatively, aside from doing some of the plays, the most fun I ever had; because I was around the funniest people in the world,” and all the writers in the play are compulsively funny. The chief outlet for their anarchic energies is a constant stream of wisecracks, mainly not defensive, as Simon’s wisecracks tend to be, but offensive—often in more ways than one. They are forever trying to top one another; their rhythms are nervous, staccato, turbocharged; the sheer profusion of jokes (most of them good ones) is dazzling. Having provided a pitch-perfect piece of vaudeville comedy for The Sunshine Boys, and an equally dead-on piece of 1940s radio comedy for Broadway Bound, Simon inserts into Laughter on the 23rd Floor an accurate sample of the kind of material he used to write for Sid Caesar’s television shows: fragments of a parody of Julius Caesar, the movie version, with Max Prince, unmistakably a portrait of Sid Caesar, doing Brando as Marc Antony. Max is a tortured, unstable genius, who gets in his limo every night, after work, takes two tranquilizers the size of hand grenades and washes them down with a ladle full of scotch. His driver helps him into his house and he falls asleep on the floor of his den next to his dogs. . . . The funniest man since Chaplin and he still throws up before every show.

There is not much plot in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which is probably the reason it was not a hit; what there is revolves around Max’s losing battle with the executives at NBC, who want to cut his ninety-minute show by thirty minutes and reduce his budget. They complain that the show is “too sophisticated” and “too smart.” Max refuses their demand to “Give the people shit,” and when the ratings go down, the show is cancelled. As Lucas explains, “America wanted comedy closer to their own lives. Julius Caesar wasn’t as familiar to them as kids named Beaver and

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fathers who knew best.” In other words, Gentile America rejected Jewish smartness and sophistication in favor of idyllic representations of Gentile America. (Simon’s own, less rambunctious plays, by contrast, have been hugely popular in Gentile America.) Simon’s more serious plays are often attacked for their glibly upbeat endings, but this play, perhaps the most uproarious of all, ends in noble defeat: “That night Max took us all out to dinner, and he was so unbelievably funny, the tears ran down our faces, and only some of it was from laughter.” Still, Laughter on the 27th Floor is more about celebrating the existence of Sid Caesar’s television career than about mourning its demise. Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway, one of Simon’s later, lesser plays, contains his most recent (as of this writing) tribute to Jewish popular comedy. It is set in a theatre-district coffee shop known affectionately as the “Polish Tea Room.” The most prominent among the regulars there is Mickey Fox, a Jewish comedian whose one-man show is playing at a theatre next door. We are not given explicit excerpts from Mickey’s act, but he is always “on,” always performing, often riffing on his frank Jewishness. “[O]nly fifty per cent of my audience is Jewish,” he says. “The other half sits next to the Jews so someone can tell them what the show’s about.” Mickey Fox is Simon’s unmistakable, brilliantly accurate portrait of Jackie Mason, the most obstreperously Jewish of all comedians, who has turned Jewish uncouthness into an asset: an ordained rabbi, descended from a long line of rabbis; a comedian whose most famous subject is the differences between Jews and Gentiles, and whose most recent one-man Broadway show was subtitled, “Just One Jew Talking.” Along with a magazine called Heeb and a sophomoric but hugely successful play called Jewtopia, Mason represents a kind of Jewish brashness that is at once a response to black pride and gay pride, and an indication of how secure at least some American Jews now feel in the twenty-first century. Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway is for the most part lame and implausible, but Mickey Fox’s material is indistinguishable from Jackie Mason’s, just as funny and just as Jewish.

7. The Musicals JOSEPH STEIN (BOOK), JERRY BOCK (MUSIC), AND SHELDON HARNICK (LYRICS): FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1964) When Joseph Stein (b. 1912), Jerry Bock (b. 1925), and Sheldon Harnick (b. 1924) began work on Fiddler on the Roof, a prospective producer remarked, “What made you fellows decide to write a musical about a bunch of poor Jews in a Russian village? Who cares?” It turned out that a great many people cared. Fiddler had a Broadway run of 3,242 performances—seven years and nine months—and was for a time the longest-running show in Broadway history. By 1964, not just an intangible “Jewish sensibility” but Jewish characters in Jewish situations too were more than acceptable as popular entertainment. Watching Fiddler on the Roof, Jews felt validated, confirmed in their identity as Jews, by seeing their collective past, or a version thereof, alive onstage. Topol, who played Tevye the dairyman in Israel, London, and the movie, “said that the part gave him ‘an opportunity to put a tombstone on the grave of my grandfather.’ ” And Gentiles found the ambient Jewishness no barrier to becoming involved with this show about a man who loves his daughters. (Jewish drama, by and large, is about families: an important reason for its popularity.) When I first saw it I was greatly moved, and so, as far as I could tell, were the nuns who sat all around me in the balcony. Nowadays Fiddler is staged in high schools all over America. Moreover, like certain plays of Arthur Miller and Neil Simon, its appeal is transnational: by 1971, it had been produced in England, France, Holland, Israel, South Africa, Austria, East and West Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Spain, Greece, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Rhodesia, Switzerland, plus fifteen different productions in Finland. And every time it is staged for a Gentile audience, it makes Jews seem less strange and more sympathetic.

88 Beyond the Golden Door But why does Fiddler on the Roof, set in Russia among Russian Jews, belong in a book about the drama of Jewish American experience? Because its characters are future Jewish Americans. Fiddler begins with a song about “Tradition!” expressed visually in Jerome Robbins’s choreography as a circledance. “Because of our traditions,” says Tevye, the spokesman for the Jews of Anatevka, “everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” The show pays tribute to the beauty of those traditions: when Tevye’s wife lights Sabbath candles, and she and Tevye sing a Sabbath prayer, “The lights go up behind them, showing other families, behind a transparent curtain, singing over Sabbath candles.” In the Yiddish theatre, according to its historian Nahma Sandrow, “scenes of traditional ritual, such as lighting Sabbath candles . . . served to preserve and reinforce communal identity in the face of isolation and assimilation.” This magic still works, even in English, even (especially?) for Jews who have never known this ritual in their own homes: it provides an affecting moment of unity, stability, holiness, and peace. But— reflecting an often-overlooked historical truth—Anatevka is not immune from outside influences that erode traditional certainties. This process did not begin on Ellis Island. In the words of Hillel Halkin, a translator of the stories by Sholom Aleichem on which Fiddler is based, Jewish life in Russia at the turn of the century “was in a state of flux, disarray, decomposition.” And that is what this musical is essentially about. The erosion of tradition that it depicts continues in Jewish American life today, and in the lives of many who are not Jewish, and many who are not American. Beneath its nostalgic “there and then” are implications for “here and now”—a probable factor in its immense popularity that is generally overlooked. Modernity impinges on Tevye and his wife as, one by one, their daughters marry and leave them. Tzeitel rejects a traditional arranged marriage and marries a man she has chosen for herself. At their wedding, men and women dance with each other, in violation of Orthodox law. Hodel marries a young revolutionary, the instigator of the mixed dancing, and goes off to join him in exile in Siberia. (Jewish radicalism is by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. Think of Leon Trotsky, né Bronstein.) Tevye reluctantly accepts these matches, but he cannot accept Chava’s marriage to a Gentile, by which she has exiled herself from the Jewish community and become a Christian. “Chava is dead to us!” Tevye declares. “We will forget her.” But of course he cannot forget her. Near the end of the show, a government edict arrives: All Jews must leave Anatevka within three days. Tevye and his wife and his remaining daughters load their worldly goods onto his wagon. The villagers gather to say goodbye to one another and to form once more into a circle for the

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dance of “Tradition.” But when they reach out, they cannot touch each other. It is a piercing moment: the circle of tradition is broken forever. And Tevye and his family set out for America, as Sholom Aleichem himself did. America—where Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller and the other writers discussed in this book will take up the story. Fiddler has not been universally admired. Philip Roth dismissed it as “shtetl kitsch.” For Irving Howe, who regarded the prosperous Jewish middle class of the 1960s as a sad come-down from the vibrant Yiddish-speaking culture of his beloved “World of Our Fathers,” Fiddler reflected “the spiritual anemia of Broadway and of the middle-class Jewish world.” Dismissing the hunger of this Jewish world for a usable Jewish past, he dismissed the show as “irresistible bait for the nostalgia-smitten audience.” Indeed the love that it evokes can have a narrow, possessive aspect. A Broadway revival in 2004, which stripped away the familiar Chagallesque décor and starred Alfred Molina as a younger and more forceful Tevye than usual, was angrily accused of lacking “Jewish soul.” Some people wanted only the more cozy Fiddler that they had always known. It was sourly noted that neither the director of the revival (David Leveaux) nor the star was Jewish. But I believe that the old-country nostalgia that the show both stimulates and gratifies is not essentially an unworthy emotion. (It is, after all, an emotion that was extensively evoked—catered to—pandered to, if you will, by Howe’s beloved Yiddish theatre.) Reviewing that 2004 revival in the Village Voice, Michael Feingold wrote, Tevye the dairyman and his five daughters are the family that bridges the gap from the shtetl to the city, from the pre-modern to the industrial age (the family’s new baby is Motel’s sewing machine), and from the Old World to the New. This transition is fraught with pain and terror—not least the terror of wondering whether the tradition that sustains the family can survive such a barrage of changes. As a work, Fiddler affirms the survival, not of the literal tradition, but of its spirit: Jews watching it are by definition no longer shtetl Jews, blindly religious and helpless to fight czarist edicts, but active members of a melting-pot democracy, looking back on the path they traveled to say, “Something of this still lives in us.”

Fiddler is a true ancestral myth for American Jews, celebrating the great founding trauma that was our immigration, memorializing how we came to be where and what we are. And its story of exile—its beautiful image of the broken circle of tradition—does not pertain only to Jews. As I have suggested before, virtually all Americans became Americans through some similar trauma, uprooted from Europe, from Africa, from

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Asia. Even the American Indians have had the experience of exile: think, for one example, of the Cherokees deported from North Carolina to Oklahoma along the “Trail of Tears.” They, too, could have used Tevye’s wagon for their worldly goods; their circle of tradition, too, was broken. Sentimental it may be, but Fiddler on the Roof ends by posing the great American—the great modern—question: When the circle of tradition is broken, and none of us “knows who he is and what God expects him to do,” how then do we live our lives? *

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JOSEPH STEIN (BOOK), CHARLES STROUSE (MUSIC), AND STEPHEN SCHWARTZ (LYRICS): RAGS (1986) Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof, also wrote the book for Rags. Fiddler is set in 1905, Rags in 1910, and the main characters of the latter, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, must have come from someplace much like Anatevka. The lyric by Stephen Schwartz (b. 1948) for the musical’s most poignant song describes them as “Children of the wind, blown across the earth.” Charles Strouse (b. 1928), the composer, speaking for himself and his collaborators, has said, “These were our grandmothers’ journeys and they are very important to us.” Rebecca Hershkowitz, their heroine and ours, has fled from a pogrom, like David in The Melting-Pot. She debarks in New York with her young son, expecting her husband to meet them, but he is nowhere to be seen, and Rebecca bravely takes up the task of making a life for herself and her son in the new country. Rags is the only work discussed in this book, unless you count The Melting-Pot (written by an Englishman), that focuses directly on the immigrant experience in America. To oversimplify for a moment: Jewish American playwrights, themselves American-born, are usually too busy working out their struggles with their parents, who are often also American-born, to pay tribute to their immigrant grandparents. Of course, the pitfalls of paying tribute are obvious: portentous platitudes, pious incense that obscures the reality. The creators of Rags seem aware of these pitfalls and have striven to present a more comprehensive view. They know that a struggle against obstacles is meaningful only if the obstacles are daunting and real. As the immigrants, chanting “Long live Columbus!,” land beneath a huge cutout of the Statue of Liberty on the

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backdrop, and Rebecca, bewildered and frightened, searches for her husband, a couple of men in white suits do a cheery little soft-shoe number as they sing Another load of greenhorns Fresh off the boat Another wave of refugees To fill the mills and factories A little grist For the capital system . . . Greenhorns Ship ‘em in They keep our pockets full of green

It is a bracing Brechtian moment, unexpectedly revealing a down-anddirty aspect of a complex reality, seen from a not-too-doctrinaire Marxist perspective. The rest of Rebecca’s struggle takes place on the Lower East Side, that great locus of Jewish American nostalgia, where for a few decades East European Jews famously had their own vibrant Yiddish-speaking culture. The classic account of this culture and the community that spawned it is Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers. (I disagree with Howe about Fiddler on the Roof and other matters, but World of Our Fathers is a magnificent achievement.) The creators of Rags seem to have read Howe’s book and tried to get all of it into their show, systematically turning the facts of history into the personal experience of their characters. Howe writes of “abandoned wives” and reports that the Jewish Daily Forward, most famous of Yiddish papers, ran a feature headed “Gallery of Missing Husbands.” Rebecca puts an advertisement in a Jewish paper seeking the whereabouts of her husband and is told that hers is one of many such advertisements from “abandoned wives.” Historically the German Jews, mostly earlier arrivals in America, offered charitable assistance to their uncouth East European cousins. This assistance, as Howe points out, was often deeply resented. Rebecca asks for help from a social agency, but the condescending German Jewish social worker can only offer to put her son in an orphanage. “The Cossacks already tried to make him an orphan,” Rebecca screams in response; “I don’t need you to do it.” Howe writes of the sweatshops, the unions, the Yiddish theater. Rebecca gets a job in a garment-industry sweatshop and by refusing to go on strike—she needs the work—makes the acquaintance of a personable young union organizer (this is a musical, after all), who takes her to see a Yiddish-theatre production of Hamlet.

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Rags captures the excitement that some of the immigrants must have felt at the street life around them: noise, crowds, music, pushcarts, automobiles—“a brand new world,” as Rebecca sings to her son. But the show also acknowledges poverty, overcrowding, dirt. Rebecca’s friend Bella sings of This land of freedom that we had to run to where Now we’re free just like everyone to wear Rags

Bella is later killed in a sweatshop fire, reminiscent of the terrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company (1911), in which, as Howe says, “146 workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian girls, were burned to death.” At the end of Act I, Rebecca’s husband Nathan finally turns up: no longer a greenhorn, he has changed his name from Hershkowitz to Harris and become a ward heeler for a Tammany Hall politician called Big Tim Sullivan. Howe mentions an actual East Side Tammany boss called Big Tim Sullivan and adds that “By the nineties, ambitious young Jews were beginning to be accepted as Tammany hangers-on, messengers, and flunkies.” Nathan is nothing if not ambitious; he has his own version of the American dream: Six years ago When I first got off the boat I saw a man I wanted to be I saw a fat cat In a derby hat And said some day that’ll be me

And he sings, in an ironic hommage to George M. Cohan’s ultrapatriotic “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy”: I’m gonna be A Yankee boy My Uncle Sammy’s pride and joy I’m gonna strut down the street Gold at my feet White bread and meat My favorite thing to eat … delicious And I think it’s grand To hear the Navy band When they start to play

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Oh, say can you see That Yankee boy— That’s me!

He despises the poor people whose votes he seeks: Greasy little maggots Swarming in the streets With the noises of their wheedling And the smell of rotting meats

By delivering lower-class Jewish votes, he is trying to get away from his own lower-class Jewishness. He looks forward to the day when he and Rebecca can leave the crowded, bad-smelling streets of the Lower East Side and move to the Promised Land within the Promised Land, “Uptown,” among “the real Americans.” Like a character from Abraham Cahan’s fiction, he has been corrupted by his desire to Americanize himself. But Rebecca has been radicalized by her union-organizer friend. When Nathan tries to drag her away from a strike rally that Tammany goons are about to break up, she realizes that he has joined the “Cossacks” and refuses to go with him. “What’s happened to you?” he asks, and she replies, “America happened to me.” She has achieved an American identity, an ideal of American freedom, more honorable than his. Like Ralph Berger in Awake and Sing!, she is offered two competing visions of America; like Ralph, she rejects the American freedom of ruthless material acquisition and seeks a new community in the American freedom of working-class social action. But Rags was written fifty years after Awake and Sing!; by 1986, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, working-class social action seemed incongruously old-fashioned. Was this the reason why Rags was a four-performance Broadway flop? Perhaps, partly, although plenty of Broadway tastemakers and audience members were sentimental about unions and radicals even in 1986, and some are so to this day. But Rags is dramaturgically flawed, with a leaden subplot involving Bella and a young man who sells “gramophones.” Its title does not suggest what it is really about. Since its Broadway failure, it has been produced all over the country, and its authors have continued to tinker with it, but it will probably never be quite right. Which is a pity. In its evasions, implausibilities, uncertainties, crudities, as in its bold, shameless sentimentality, its warm, populist vigor, its emotional power, Rags reminds me of Dickens. It partakes of Dickens’s great

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subject: the perils of our modern, capitalist, industrial, urban, mass society, the uncertain possibilities of surviving in our great, terrible, heedless cities. Rags is Dickensian, too, in expressing these perils and possibilities through the touching vicissitudes of sympathetic human beings, especially those of separated families and endangered children. As the show ends, Rebecca sings that she and hers are “No more/ The children of the wind.” Thanks in no small measure to Charles Strouse’s score, Rags is one of the few works of any stature to present the story of an American Jew as a story of heroic struggle and triumph. Rags does honor to my grandmother, who bribed the officials with her wedding ring in order to bring her children to America. ***

WILLIAM FINN (BOOK, LYRICS, MUSIC) AND JAMES LAPINE (BOOK): FALSETTOS (1992) William Finn (b. 1952) has written three long-one-act musicals about a Jewish man named Marvin. In In Trousers (1979), Marvin leaves his wife and son for a male lover. In March of the Falsettos (1981), his ex-wife marries his psychiatrist. In Falsettoland (1990), for which James Lapine (b. 1949) was co-author of the book, Marvin survives the death of his lover from AIDS. The three were published together as The Marvin Songs but are generally known collectively as the Marvin trilogy. Under the title Falsettos, a double bill of March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland was produced in Hartford in 1991 and, in a different production, on Broadway in 1992. Four Jews in a room bitching Four Jews talking like Jew-ish men. I’m neurotic, he’s neurotic. They’re neurotic, we’re neurotic. Bitch bitch bitch bitch Funny funny funny funny ... Can’t lose. Loose screws. Four Jews.

These lyrics, from the opening number of March of the Falsettos, might have been considered grossly anti-Semitic, were it not that they are sung by the four Jewish men themselves—Marvin, his son Jason, his lover Whizzer,

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and his not-yet-ex-psychiatrist Mendel—in a spirit of reasonably cheerful self-acceptance. Any of these men might be descended from Rebecca Hershkowitz, but they live in a Jewish American world she could not have imagined. Falsettoland is a world of “Homosexuals,” “Ex-ex-lovers,” “Child insomniacs,” “Liberal democrats,” “Spiky lesbians,” “Yiddish Americans,” “Intellectuals./ Nervous wrecks”: a Woody Allen world of self-deprecation, psychiatry, and sexual liberation. In real life, of course, there are Gentiles too living in this world, though we do not meet them in Falsettos. But it is a world that Jews have created, chronicled, and lived in, out of proportion to their numbers. There is no heroism in this world, no poverty, and the struggles are all personal, domestic, private—yet these struggles are shaped by forces larger than the characters. Trina, Marvin’s ex-wife, finds it at one point very dispiriting: I was sure growing up I would live the life My mother assumed I’d live. Very Jewish Very middle class. And very straight. ... I’m trying to keep sane as the rules keep changing. Families aren’t what they were.

For Trina, Jewishness is associated with a comfortable, conventional middle-class family life that, for her, no longer exists. Jason, aged almost thirteen, conforms to the stereotype of mental over physical prowess, which—in spite of Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg, not to mention Biff Loman—is still frequently found as part of Jewish baggage. “I don’t live the life of a normal child,” Jason complains, “ ’Cause I’m too smart for my own good.” But he is an American kid, and so we find his family and their friends at a Little League game, singing, We’re watching Jewish boys Who cannot play baseball Play baseball . . . And watching Jason make errors, The most pathetical errors. We’re watching Jewish boys Who almost read Latin, Up battin’

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The only one who can help Jason turns out to be his father’s once and future lover, Whizzer, who is only half Jewish. With the aid of Whizzer’s batting tips, Jason actually hits the ball—but has to be reminded to run toward first base. The world of Falsettos is not a religious milieu. Jason begins an attempt to pray with the words, “Mister God./ This is the first time,/ I think, we’ve spoken.” Neverthless, his mother and father want him to have a bar mitzvah, although his stepfather Mendel remembers, “My own bar mitzvah was/ A miserable occasion/ The cause for such abrasion in my family./ It still gives me hives.” But Marvin and Trina get so excited, quarreling about round tables and square tables, that Jason cries “Stop! I don’t want a bar mitzvah!” It looks as if the bar mitzvah will be depicted, as it often is, as a social ritual devoid of spiritual significance. But meanwhile Whizzer has become very sick—the year is 1981, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic—and Jason decides that his bar mitzvah should take place after all—in Whizzer’s hospital room. Thus Jason does his modest bit toward the great Jewish American task of redefining Jewishness. And thus, among this distinctly secular group of Jews, an unorthodox bar mitzvah becomes the occasion for a boy’s giant step toward maturation in sympathy, in sensitivity, in humanity. Tevye the Dairyman would be amazed to have a descendant like Jason (he would be amazed to have a descendant named Jason), but the two share an ability to bend tradition while holding on to something essentially Jewish.

8. German Jews, Southern Jews ALFRED UHRY: DRIVING MISS DAISY (1987) The overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans, including Jewish American playwrights, are descendants of Eastern European Jews. So it is not surprising that few characters on the American stage have been recognizable as descendants of German Jews, who formed the majority of Jewish immigrants during the middle years of the nineteenth century, before the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe began. Moreover, as we have seen, German Jewish playwrights like George S. Kaufman and Lillian Hellman were not much interested in writing about Jews at all. But the long-established German Jewish families have had their own way of responding to America, and in Alfred Uhry (b. 1936) they have their playwright. (There are, of course, other German Jews in America, refugees from Hitler and their descendants. Many, perhaps most, of these refugees had been thoroughly assimilated Germans, brutally betrayed by the culture and the polity to which they had given their allegiance. Neil Simon has touched on their plight in Lost in Yonkers. Even in the old world, the nineteenth-century German Jews, by and large, had more contact with their Christian neighbors, and more knowledge of the ways of the larger world, than the Jews of Eastern Europe. In America, “with an ease the Russian and Polish Jews could not—indeed, seldom cared to emulate,” to quote Irving Howe, “the German Jews had thoroughly Americanized themselves, many of them finding a road to the Republican party and bourgeois affluence.” They brought with them and greatly amplified the doctrines of Reform Judaism, which sought to create a Judaism free from antiquated beliefs and rituals. Moreover, until well into the twentieth century, Reform rabbis often preached that Jews were, or should be, just like everybody else (which meant, in practice, just like upper-middle-class Protestants)—except, of course, that instead of going

98 Beyond the Golden Door to church, they went to temple (where the services, however, were often remarkably churchy). As Leonard Dinnerstein writes, in a book entitled Anti-Semitism in America, Many Jews of German origin tried every method to impress their Gentile peers. They mimed the speech and dress of the Protestant elite . . . But they were never accepted by those they tried to emulate.

Nevertheless, by the 1880s, when Eastern European Jews began arriving in overwhelming numbers, many of their German Jewish predecessors were sufficiently prosperous, sufficiently respectable, and sufficiently Americanized to be embarrassed by their poverty-stricken, uncouth, and unmistakably foreign coreligionists. That embarrassment, and the disdainful condescension to which it gave rise, became part of the German Jewish American heritage, passed down through the generations. My own grandmother, from somewhere near Minsk, maintained that the German Jews were “stuck-up.” Philip Gellburg, in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, agreed. The sociologist/historian Nathan Glazer notes that many of the nineteenth-century German Jewish immigrants became peddlers, in the cities and through the countryside, and many left the seaboard cities to strike inland. They peddled in the South, beyond the Appalachians, in the Midwest, and in the Far West . . . Where they could, they established clothing and drygoods and general stores. . . . Most of the Jewish communities of this country were established by these small groups of German Jewish peddlers.

A few German Jewish immigrants who stayed in, or came to, New York (including a few ex-peddlers) became very wealthy financiers and formed a tight aristocratic circle they called “Our Crowd,” the subject of a lively book of that name by Stephen Birmingham. German Jews elsewhere formed less opulent, but not necessarily less self-regarding, Jewish aristocracies, in imitation of the local Gentile aristocracies from which they were excluded. According to Eli N. Evans, the genial chronicler of Southern Jewry, there were Jews in Atlanta, Georgia, as early as 1844, before it was even called Atlanta. Alfred Uhry, described by Evans as “Atlanta’s Jewish soul poet,” says that his mother’s family was in Atlanta before 1850, though his father was a poor boy from Louisiana. Uhry grew up as a member of Atlanta’s German Jewish aristocracy, and he has written two plays and a musical about them and their history.

German Jews, Southern Jews 99 The most recent and least popular of these is the somber musical Parade (1998), with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. Set in and around Atlanta in 1913, Parade dramatizes the famous case of Leo Frank. A Jewish businessman falsely accused of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl, Frank was dragged out of jail and hanged by a mob amid a firestorm of anti-Semitic hysteria. To the best of my knowledge, nowhere else in American drama is American anti-Semitism depicted as so dangerous a threat. Uhry had personal connections to Leo Frank: his great-uncle owned the pencil factory where both Frank and the victim worked, and Frank’s wife Lucille was a friend of the playwright’s grandmother. The Leo Frank case traumatized Atlanta Jewry for decades; it almost certainly lurks subliminally behind Uhry’s other Atlanta plays. By far the most popular work in Uhry’s informal Atlanta trilogy is Driving Miss Daisy, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The movie version won an Oscar as Best Picture, and Uhry himself won an Oscar for writing the screenplay. He calls Driving Miss Daisy “a play about my grandmother and her driver.” In a series of brief vignettes taking place between 1948 and 1973, it depicts the developing relationship between Jewish but eminently aristocratic Daisy Werthan, already seventy-two when the play begins, and Hoke Coleburn, her African American chauffeur. (Why is it, I wonder, that sentimental plays and books about the warm affection between white employers and black servants are always written by white authors?) Eli Evans writes that Southern Jews, imitating their Christian neighbors, “would know deference and come to expect it of the blacks.” Miss Daisy and her businessman son Boolie clearly do. She goes further: They all take things, you know. . . . They are like having little children in the house. They want something so they just take it. Not a smidgen of manners. No conscience.

But her feelings are complicated. Having power over blacks and feeling superior to them makes Jews feel white, but it conflicts with the Jewish imperative to identify with the oppressed; every year at Passover, after all, Jews recite, “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt.” Thus when Boolie compares his mother to Governor Talmadge, a leading segregationist, she is insulted: “What a thing to say! I’m not prejudiced.” She buys tickets to a dinner honoring Martin Luther King; when Boolie declines to go because he is afraid people would call him “Martin Luther Werthan” behind his back, and his business would suffer, she vacillates uneasily about whether to invite Hoke. By the end of the play she is able to tell her chauffeur, “You’re my best friend.”

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She is critical of her social-climbing daughter-in-law Florine, whose “idea of heaven on earth,” Daisy says, is “Socializing with Episcopalians”: The Garden Club this and the Junior League that! As if any one of them would ever give her the time of day! But she’d die before she’d fix a glass of iced tea for the Temple Sisterhood!

And most witheringly, “If I had a nose like Florine, I wouldn’t go around saying Merry Christmas to anybody.” In other words, Florine is a fool to act like a Christian, because her stereotypically Jewish nose gives her away. Driving Miss Daisy incorporates the second most traumatic event in Atlanta Jewish history, after the Leo Frank case: the bombing of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, generally known simply as the Temple, in 1958. Daisy’s response: “I’m sure they meant to bomb one of the conservative synagogues or the orthodox one. The Temple is reform. Everybody knows that.” Evidently for her there are Jews, and there are Jews. Hoke sets her straight: “It doan’ matter to them people. A Jew is a Jew to them folks. Jes like light or dark we all the same nigger.” But even in 1958, anti-Semitism was receding into Atlanta’s past. Mayor William Hartsfield, a white Christian, went immediately to the bombed temple to show his solidarity with the congregation. And in the play, the very next scene shows Boolie Werthan accepting an award from the Atlanta Business Council as “man of the year”: I sure wish my father and my grandfather could see this. Seventy-two years ago they opened a little hole-in-the-wall shop on Whitehall Street with one printing press. They managed to grow with Atlanta and to this day, the Werthan Company believes we want what Atlanta wants. This award proves we must be right.

Jewish social mobility in action. And, in fact, Atlanta elected a Jewish mayor in 1969. *

*

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ALFRED UHRY: THE LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO (1997) Commissioned to be performed in Atlanta during the Olympic Games there, and later produced on Broadway, The Last Night of Ballyhoo is Uhry’s most searching examination of old-line Atlanta German Jewry

German Jews, Southern Jews 101 and its uneasy feelings about being Jewish. Most of it takes place in the big, comfortable house where Adolph Freitag, president of the Dixie Bedding Company, lives with his widowed sister Boo (short for Beulah), his widowed sister-in-law Reba, Boo’s daughter Lala, and Reba’s daughter Sunny. The two cousins, both in their early twenties, are rather programmatically different: Lala is awkward and troubled, while Sunny is bright, level-headed, and beautiful. Like Miller’s Broken Glass and Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, Ballyhoo is set in the late 1930s. As bad news comes from Europe, Adolph is troubled, but Atlanta is more interested in the world premiere of the movie version of Gone with the Wind. The play begins with Lala decorating a Christmas tree and cheerily singing, “Nooo-ell/ Nooo-elll/ Born is the King of Israel!” She has hung a star at the top of the tree, but her mother rebukes her with a categorical statement that implies an exceptionally tangled complex of feelings: “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars.” Lala would be happy to have a manger scene in the front yard, to which Boo replies, “Then everybody that drives down Habersham Road will think we’re a bunch of Jewish fools pretending we’re Christian.” Like Daisy’s daughter-in-law, Florine, Lala imitates the Christians as much as she dares; like Daisy, Boo is scornful of Jews who reveal a longing to be Christian. But Boo adds, A Christmas tree is another thing altogether. It’s a festive decoration like a Halloween pumpkin or a Valentine heart. Everybody with any sense in their head knows that Christmas is just another American holiday if you leave out all that silly nonsense about Jesus being born.

Her vehemence carries an undertone of fear that she too might be accused of putting on Christian airs. On the other hand, perhaps Boo has a point. Why shouldn’t Jews celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday, since that is what it mainly is nowadays? These people are concerned with where they stand in America, with assimilating and not assimilating, in a very different sense from the Eastern European Jews we encounter in other plays. They want to be Americans, but a very specific kind of Americans. When Boo lectures Lala about her “place in society,” Lala retorts, We’re Jews. We have no place in society. BOO : We most certainly do! Maybe not right up there at the tip top with the best set of Christians, but we come mighty close. After all,

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your Great Grandma’s Cousin Clemmie was—(Here Lala joins in and they say the next sentence together.) BOO AND LALA : The first white child born in Atlanta! LALA : God knows I’ve had that information drilled into my skull enough times. Boo admits their inferiority as Jews to “the best set of Christians,” but, imitating the snobbery of that “best set,” insists that as members of an old Atlanta family, they “come mighty close.” As Eli Evans says, “The German Jew soon would grasp the Southerner’s penchant for genealogy, and fancifully falsify his roots and his pedigree just as the aristocrats had done.” In a more positive mood, Lala asserts that her family has “come mighty close” to the Gentiles literally, boasting to a visitor, This is just about the best address in Atlanta. . . . You have only to look at the mail boxes up and down this street and you’ll see half the membership of the Junior League! . . . I’ll have you know that we are the only Jews on Habersham Road except for one house way on the other side of Paces Ferry where it gets tacky.

Like Phillip Gellburg in Broken Glass, she loves being the only Jew in a privileged Gentile context; it implies a superiority to all the other Jews, as if it made her less Jewish. Gentiles are Lala’s arbiters; they set her standards; the best Gentiles (i. e., the Junior League) define “the best address.” Her presence among them indicates that she has a “place in society” after all. But underneath Lala’s snobbish boasting is a deep insecurity that takes the form of despair at her own inability to be not Jewish. She is fiercely jealous of her cousin Sunny: You’ve always gotten all the attention. Even from God! . . . He didn’t give you one Jewish feature and look at me! . . . Look at my hair! Look at my skin! Look at my eyes! Listen to my voice! I try and I try and no matter what I do it shows and there’s just nothing I can do about it.

At this moment Lala transcends being a German Jew or a Southern Jew. She is simply a miserable young woman who projects all her miseries onto her Jewishness; she is a classic, agonized self-hating Jew, like Philip Gellburg, who claims to be from Finland, or like that famous German German Jew, the poet Heinrich Heine, who wrote of “three evil maladies:/ poverty, physical pain, and Jewishness./ The last named is

German Jews, Southern Jews 103 the worst of all the three.” Self-hatred, for many people in many places, has been part of the Jewish heritage, however much it may have been stimulated in Lala’s case by her prosperous Southern German Jewish upbringing. The immediate cause of Lala’s outburst is her discovery that a young man who has been indifferent to her charms has just made a date with Sunny. Paradoxically, the young man in question is not only a Jew, but an Eastern European Jew, who would presumably not mind Lala’s Jewish features, but in Lala’s mind they are always there to mark her as inferior. At any rate, Joe Farkas is a poor Jewish boy from Brooklyn who has come to Atlanta to work for the Dixie Bedding Company. Like the Bergers of Awake and Sing! and the Goldbergs of Me and Molly, he comes from an outerborough Jewish neighborhood, an “area of second settlement” where everyone is Jewish. A stage direction specifies: “He has a New York accent.” This smart, self-confident, go-getting Jewish American sees no conflict between his “two souls.” Joe is not Orthodox—he takes Sunny to a White Castle for hamburgers—but he is happy to be Jewish, and the playwright is at pains to contrast him with the lukewarm Atlanta German Jews. Asked if he is going home for Christmas, he replies, My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas. . . . I’ll be home for Pesach, though. L ALA : Pesach? JOE : Passover. BOO : You remember, Lala. That time we went to the Seder supper with one of Daddy’s business acquaintances. . . . It was very interesting. ... JOE : . . . First night at Aunt Sadie’s. Second night at home. . . . I wouldn’t miss either one of ‘em for anything in the world.

As soon as Joe is out the door, having politely fended off Lala’s expressions of interest in him, Boo says to her brother, “Adolph, that kike you hired has no manners.” It is a stunning curtain line, but by no means implausible. Stephen Birmingham, who wrote three books of popular social history about Jewish Americans, alleges that the word “kike” is “a German Jewish contribution to the American vernacular,” to describe and denigrate their coreligionists from Eastern Europe. Eli Evans quotes “a Temple member whose family roots went back into Atlanta history” as saying, “My parents, in their most liberal moments referred to Russian Jews as ‘kikes.’ ” Sunny’s mother Reba, more discreetly, calls them “the other kind.”

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SUNNY: Other kind? Other kind of what? REBA : You know perfectly well what I mean. . . . East of the Elbe. SUNNY: What? REBA : That’s how Grandma used to explain it. SUNNY: What’s the Elbe? REBA : Well, I believe it’s a river somewhere. ADOLPH : Separates Germany from Czechoslovakia. REBA : And west of it is us and east of it is the other kind. SUNNY: But why are they the other kind? REBA : Well—they just are.

As a character says in Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, “the Jews have their Jews.” Imitating the anti-Semitic Gentiles who look down on them, the German Jews in the play look down on the Eastern Europeans. And many authorities (including my grandmother) would agree that many German Jews in the real American world have done likewise. As Sander L. Gilman says, in a work called Jewish Self-Hatred, “By creating the image of a Jew somewhere in the world who embodied all the negative qualities feared within oneself, one could distance the specter of self-hatred, at least for the moment.” And so, “the other kind” goes back a long way: Gilman tells us that “the German Jews [in Germany] had, by the closing decades of the eighteenth century, localized the source of their anxiety about their own status. It was located in the East, where the Eastern Jews were seen as the reification of the German anti-Semitic stereotype.” You could argue that the Ostjuden are to the German Jews as the Jewish Mother was to her Americanizing, stereotyping sons. The play’s tensions of pride and prejudice come to a head, as its title suggests, on the last night of Ballyhoo. But what is Ballyhoo? Reba and Lala explain to Joe that “young people come from all over the South” for “hay rides and weenie roasts and parties, and, the last night, a dance.” The playwright says, There was such a thing as Ballyhoo, and yes, I did go to the very last one, I think, when I was sixteen, in the early fifties. It really existed mostly between the wars, as a sort of German Jewish meat market, for lack of a better term, when the right boys could meet the right girls, and indeed I think a lot of marriages and engagements were made through this thing. There was a whole network of these Southern Jewish get-togethers . . . and there was always Ballyhoo in Atlanta at Christmas.

Eli Evans corroborates: “I had been bouncing from Atlanta to Charleston to New Orleans all my life, by virtue of those devices Southern Jewish

German Jews, Southern Jews 105 mothers use to bring their sons into contact with Jewish girls.” Judging from the play, it was not only the mothers of sons who had their “devices.” Boo makes sure and certain that Lala has a date for Ballyhoo with Sylvan “Peachy” Weil: “A Louisiana Weil! Finest family in the south.” (There again is the concern with pedigree.) Sunny has dismissed Ballyhoo as “asinine . . . a lot of dressed up Jews dancing around wishing they could kiss their elbows and turn into Episcopalians,” but she agrees to go to the dance with Joe. The dance is held, in the play as it was in life, at the Standard Club. As in many American cities, upper-class Gentile social clubs in Atlanta barred Jews from membership. Sunny tells how as a child she went swimming with a Gentile friend but was ordered out because “Jews weren’t allowed to swim in the Venetian [Club] Pool.” In response, upper-class German Jews formed their own social clubs—from which they excluded “the other kind.” The historian Howard M. Sachar, referring to the whole country, not just the South, speaks of “German-Jewish restrictionism against East European Jews that swiftly emulated Gentile snobbery in every respect.” Peachy explains to Joe that although he will be “treated like a prince” at the dance because Sunny’s uncle is the past president, the Standard Club is for German Jews. “German Jews only?” asks Joe. “Well,” says Peachy, “they’re startin’ to let in a few others because they need the initiation fees. But they try to only take the ones that are toilet trained.” Furious, Joe stalks out of the club, leaving Sunny stranded. For all the sharpness of its social observation, however, The Last Night of Ballyhoo is a romantic comedy, so Sunny and Joe have to get back together again; it would take a harder heart than Uhry’s to keep those two nice kids apart—especially since, as he has said, they are based on his parents. (Perhaps that is why they are both depicted as such paragons.) Sunny gently denies Joe’s accusation of “Jew-hater talk”: “Don’t you see? It’s only ignorance. I don’t know anything. There’s just a big hole where the Judaism is supposed to be”—a deep indictment of her family’s way of construing their identity (although Uhry, in an interview, speaks of “an ignorance, a hole where the Judaism should be” in reference to himself ). And so they kiss and make up. The brief last scene shifts into fantasy. “The Christmas tree,” says the stage direction, “is gone.” Sunny lights Sabbath candles and says the blessing over them, and every one in the cast, in turn, says “Shabat Shalom,” the Hebrew Sabbath greeting. All those snooty Southern German Jews have rejected their immediate heritage and embraced Joe’s idea of what it means to be Jewish; nothing could be less plausible. Uhry is very hard on his own folks, and a little starry-eyed about those proud, authentic Eastern

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European Jews from Brooklyn. Like The Tenth Man, The Last Night of Ballyhoo seems to be advocating a return to traditional religion as the way forward for American Jews. I wonder what percentage of the Jews in the Atlanta and Broadway audiences who applauded the play are accustomed to saying “Shabat Shalom.” Until that last scene, the observation of customs and beliefs in The Last Night of Ballyhoo is almost anthropological in its specificity (although anthropologists seldom write about the tribe into which they were born). It is thoroughly corroborated by Eli Evans’s history/memoir. Of course, the Atlanta Jews that Uhry writes about were an extreme case. Their money and upbringing created possibilities for them to act like wealthy Gentiles, but they were a small minority and were evidently made to feel it. Sunny points out to Joe that it’s easier to feel Jewish when you grow up, as he did, in a neighborhood where being Jewish is the norm. Moreover, The Last Night of Ballyhoo is a period piece. After World War II, to quote Nathan Glazer, the East European Jews of America attained the level of wealth and social status already attained by the German Jews around 1880 and have thus wiped out most of the distinctions between the two.

Even in Atlanta, things have changed since 1939. “In the South today,” writes Eli Evans, “there are only traces of the early conflicts between the German Jews and the East Europeans.” In 1969, Sam Massell became modern Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor. He came from a Lithuanian Jewish family, well to the east of the Elbe, but he had an uncle so rich that Sam was able to join the Standard Club. As mayor, he refused an invitation to become an honorary member of the (Gentile) Capitol City Club and added, Incidentally, before I would continue my membership in the Standard Club, which is predominantly, or maybe completely, Jewish, and where I have been a member for many, many years, I got an agreement from them that they would file a nondiscriminatory statement of policy with the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

The old order changeth, giving place to new. In 1996, only 30 percent of Atlanta Jews were born in Georgia. Furthermore, the attempts of American Jews to be like the Gentiles since, being Jews, they could not be Gentiles, seem nowadays to be far less blatant, and far less widespread, than they used to be. What is the point of pining and pretending to be Gentile when, aside from Christianity itself,

German Jews, Southern Jews 107 so much of American life is now open to Jews and Gentiles on equal terms? How do you draw the line between pretending to be Gentile and simply being American? And yet, is the desire to “kiss their elbows and turn into Episcopalians”—so near the surface in Uhry’s play—the exclusive property of wealthy German Jews? Has this desire become extinct in the twenty-first century? Are not unease and ambivalence and uncertainty about being Jewish and, more broadly, about being oneself, still with us? “That’s all we wanted,” says Sunny, “to be like everybody else.” Who doesn’t, from time to time? What else is the meaning of the endless fantasies of being un-Jewish created by the great movie moguls, by the Jewish creators of Superman, and in our own times by the Jewish inventor of Barbie and Ken? It was Woody Allen, not a German Jew, who wrote of himself, “His one regret in life is that he is not someone else.” The distinction between German Jews and Eastern European Jews has eroded, not only in Atlanta. But Jewish self-hatred, or at least Jewish selfunease, still exists. And even if it did not, the broader subject of Uhry’s play is still with us: the eternal human attempt to purge ourselves of the faults we fear we have by attributing them to others. The playwright provides a final paradox about Jewish identity: Not only was I never bar mitzvahed, I never went to one or saw one. No seders, I didn’t go to any seders. I had Christmas trees, Easter egg hunts, all that stuff. . . . But I knew that I didn’t want to be Jewish and I knew that I was. It took me a long time to work through all that. By marrying an Episcopalian who encouraged me to be what I am.

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9. More Fathers and Sons DONALD MARGULIES: THE LOMAN FAMILY PICNIC (1989) Donald Margulies (b. 1954) declares, I am a playwright who unapologetically writes what he knows. I am a lower-middle-class, urban American Jew who grew up in the double shadow of the Depression and the Holocaust.” Dinner with Friends (1999), which won him the Pulitzer Prize, is about sleek Connecticut suburbanites of no particular ethnicity, but all five of the plays in Sight Unseen and Other Plays, his first trade publication, are in one way or another about middle-class Brooklyn Jews. Two of them, The Loman Family Picnic and Sight Unseen, dramatize different generations of Jewish American unease. In the Afterword to his published plays, Margulies writes: I was eleven years old when I read Death of a Salesman, and I remember the guilt and shame I felt for recognizing in the Lomans truths about my own family . . . I studied it with great fascination, as if it were a key to understanding what was happening to the people I loved, so that I might somehow alter my family’s fate. As a boy growing up in Trump Village (the Coney Island housing project built by Donald Trump’s father), I imagined that our high-rise was one of the buildings that overshadowed the Lomans’ modest house. Years later, in The Loman Family Picnic, I took that notion and made a play out of it.

A very dark comedy, The Loman Family Picnic was produced off-Broadway in 1989 but takes place “Around 1965.” One of the characters is an elevenyear-old boy who is writing a musical version of Death of a Salesman, trying to cope with the tensions in his own family by sending the Lomans to Prospect Park for a picnic. In 1965, Donald Margulies was also eleven— the age at which he first read Death of a Salesman. 1965 notwithstanding, there is no sign in The Loman Family Picnic of “the sixties”: no sexual revolution, no drugs, no rock and roll, no Vietnam.

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(We forget how misleading those decade-by-decade blanket labels are.) Herbie, his wife Doris, their kids Stewie the bar mitzvah boy and Mitchell the budding playwright, are just another lower-middle-class New York outer-borough Jewish family, not unlike the Bergers of Awake and Sing! and the Lomans of Death of a Salesman, but a few decades onward. Herbie is a salesman like Willy Loman, but in retail, like Myron Berger. He sells home furnishings, like Bob Margulies, Donald’s late father, and is haunted, as the playwright has said his father was, by fear of losing his job. Margulies has acknowledged that Herbie is his attempt to come to terms with his tired, silent father. Herbie and Doris have come up in the world. The standard of living in this play is higher than in Awake and Sing! or Death of a Salesman, opportunities for the kids are greater, but the parents are still weary and disappointed. Like Bessie and Myron Berger, like Willy and Linda Loman, they have lost touch with what was meaningful in their heritage and found nothing of real value to replace it. In one of her chats with her Aunt Marsha, who committed suicide many years ago but still comes to visit, Doris says, You should’ve seen the place we lived before. I don’t know how we did it. A slum; the neighborhood was going to hell. But here! Hot water always. Rec room. Elevators that work. Security patrolled by German shepherds. A Waldbaums that delivers. This is a big step up for us. Luxury, I’m telling you. . . . I love our high-rise ghetto. . . . We’re not alone. You know how good that feels? They moved us up, closer to heaven. Jews upon Jews who are glad to be here, who came as far as we did, from Flatbush, from Williamsburg, from East New York. Jews who escaped the Nazis, who escaped their relatives, who fled the schvartzes. [That’s letting a cat out of the bag. Schvartzes = black people. It is not a term of respect.] Millions of miles of wall-to wall-carpeting that, if placed end to end, would reach from here to Jupiter and back.

You can feel the Jewish insecurity, the anxiety, the sense of running and hiding, the desperation of Doris’s attempt to convince herself that she is safe by wrapping herself in wall-to-wall carpeting. Doris is afflicted with the sense of outsider-hood, so common among immigrants and even the children of immigrants from all sorts of places, that leads them to huddle together for protection. But Jews often feel this with special force, for obvious historical reasons. In A Walker in the City, his famous memoir of Brooklyn boyhood, Alfred Kazin wrote, “To be a Jew meant that one’s very right to existence was always being brought into question.” Doris, of course, is in no danger; she is as safe in Coney Island

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as she says she is. But she clearly does not believe what she says. She has something in common with Sylvia Gellburg in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, who like Doris is safe in Brooklyn, but who is so frightened by the news of Kristallnacht in Germany that she has lost the ability to walk. Habits of fear, millennia-old, die hard. They are part of Doris’s heritage—reinforced, as the playwright says, by the Depression and the Holocaust, those two great weights on the spirit of her generation of American Jews. Doris lacks even the nerve to push Jewish upward mobility as far as it can go. She is proud of her “wonderful,” “smart,” “talented” sons, but when eleven-year-old Mitchell mentions the possibility of going to an Ivy League college, she is frightened: DORIS : Look, sweetheart, we are not Ivy League. . . . City College was invented for people like us. . . . MITCHELL : Whatever happened to the immigrant ideal of education or death? DORIS : It died in the Depression. She has told us (the characters in this play often talk directly to the audience): I raised my boys to stand out but not too much, you know?, otherwise people won’t like you anymore. Look what happened to the Jews in Europe.

The famous Jewish impulse toward achievement and excellence, so powerful in so many plays and so many lives, can sometimes be undercut by fear, the age-old fear of the Gentile world, greatly exacerbated by the Holocaust. Willy Loman mixed up being well-liked with being a big shot. For Doris, they are opposites. “Dream, my son,” she says, “but not too big.” When you have no power, it can be dangerous to be noticed. Charles E. Silberman testifies that “the fundamental rule on which my generation of American Jews was raised was ‘Shah!’—Be quiet!—Do not call attention to yourself.” Margulies himself has said, The notion of distinguishing yourself but not too much, of not calling attention to yourself, was part of the particular ethos of my family psychology. It definitely has informed my life.

The famous Jewish chutzpah (nerve, as in “You have some nerve!”) is not the whole story; the imperative to lie low is also part of the heritage. It could even be seen, in certain quarters, in a fearful reaction to the

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vice presidential nomination of Senator Joseph Lieberman, who told an interviewer that “the ones most nervous about me running in the first place were Jews.” Doris adores her Aunt Marsha, who died at the age of twenty-three and so is forever young. I took a trip to the wrong side of the tracks [says Marsha] and got lost there, accidentally on purpose. The wrong side has its moments, you know, depends on where you’re standing. I liked the parties. And the booze. I liked watching my Yiddishe Momma rip hair from her head. . . . I loved the men. Oh, the men.

Aunt Marsha has a lot in common with Hennie in Awake and Sing!, who also rebels sexually—the most accessible way for an attractive young woman to rebel. Notice that it is the “Yiddishe Momma”—standing as parents do for tradition, for connection with the past, for those Jewish inhibitions that so fascinate Philip Roth—that Marsha rebelled against. Doris did not rebel. “I had to be the good girl for the both of us,” she says. “I did all the right things,” like Trina in Falsettos. Now, after eighteen years of marriage, she begins the play sitting on her Spanish Provincial sofa, cutting up her wedding dress to make a Bride of Frankenstein costume for Halloween. The more she says, “I love the way my life has turned out,” the less we believe her. Herbie is equally disappointed by life, but instead of Doris’s nervous volubility, he is silent and beaten-down. He works hard all day and comes home too exhausted to talk much; when he does, his wife and children are not interested. I go through every day [he says] with my eyes shut tight and holding my breath, till the day is over and I can come home. To what? What kind of home is left to come home to by the time I come home?

He is offered a chance to manage four lighting showrooms in New Mexico, but Doris, clinging to the “Jews upon Jews” who surround her in Brooklyn, rejects the idea out of hand. “There are no Jewish people in New Mexico,” she says. Herbie is too sunk in his routine, too “disturbed by change of any kind” (as the playwright has said of his own father) to think seriously about taking the offer. He too is afraid, insecure in America; he too is afflicted with the opposite of chutzpah. Doris and Herbie have no thought of distancing themselves from Jewishness, but religion as such has no meaning for them. They stumble along, observing the Jewish rituals expected of them, because they have too

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little independence of mind to do anything else. The central event in The Loman Family Picnic is Stewie’s bar mitzvah, mercilessly depicted as being totally devoid of spiritual significance (as Jason’s bar mitzvah in Falsettos threatened to be). Stewie comes home from a bar mitzvah lesson, one of the long series needed to prepare him to chant his portion of the synagogue service, furious because the rabbi will not even tell him the meaning of the words he is chanting. “I’ve had it,” he shouts. “Cancel the bar mitzvah.” But Doris replies: Don’t do this to me, Stewie! Don’t make me cancel! We’ll lose all our deposits! Is that what you want?! Hm?! Your father’s blood money down the drain?! The hall, the band, the flowers?! The caterers?! I already bought my dress, what do you want me to do with it?, hock it? . . . [She sounds very much like the father in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, whose daughter, about to be married, locks herself in the bathroom and won’t come out. But that play has a happier ending.] One more week. That’s all I ask. Give me the nachas [the prideful satisfaction], then you can do whatever the hell you want. You want to renounce Judaism?, renounce Judaism. Become a monk, I don’t care. A beat.

STEWIE (Teeth gritted again): Remember, Ma, I’m doing this for you. I’ll go through with it, and sing nice, and make you proud, and make the relatives cry, but once I’m bar mitzvahed, that’s it, Ma, I’m never stepping foot in that place again. Never again. DORIS : Thank you, darling, thank you. Among contemporary American Jews, Stewie’s reaction is almost a tradition in itself. The journalist Jim Sleeper, interviewed for an oral history, remembered: You learned . . . from teachers who did not speak English well. We didn’t like them; they didn’t like us. It was all gobbledygook, part of what I thought being Jewish was—stuff you had to memorize. I didn’t want a bar mitzvah.

Arthur Laurents, the playwright/screenwriter/director, wrote in his memoirs that his “meaningless Bar Mitzvah . . . was the end of my religious training and the beginning of my turning against religion.” And Doris’s response is not atypical. Other oral-history interviewees reported, “Once my bar mitzvah was over, I was not encouraged to continue my Jewish education.” “With my parents’ approval, my brother stopped religious school the day after his bar

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mitzvah.” A social historian sums up: No sooner did the bar mitzvah boy’s parents pay the bill, it seemed, than the bar mitzvah boy dropped from sight, rarely setting foot in a synagogue again, let alone continuing his Jewish education.

On the big day, nevertheless, Doris is radiant: What a party this is gonna be! A hundred and sixty-seven people, including four of Stewie’s closest friends. Sandy Rose and His Orchestra—they’re very good; you hear them? A separate rented room for the smorgasbord. Open bar. Swedish meatballs, cocktail franks, bite-sized knishes, little frilly toothpicks to go with them. Roast beef au jus. Julienne potatoes. Salad a la Stewie. Fruitflavored sherbet shaped like fruit. Viennese table with sparklers, make your own non-dairy sundaes.

This transformation of a religious ceremony into an occasion for conspicuous consumption is a continuing phenomenon that, as the Forward, a leading Jewish American weekly, observed in 2002, cuts across all styles of Jewish life. Whether you’re an observant or twice-a-year Jew, whether you’re an ex-hippie baby-boomer or a reformed Gen-X slacker, whether the economy’s up or the economy’s down, nobody seems to have made a dent in the idea that a Jewish child’s coming-of-age celebration must be a blowout.

One of the oral history interviewees says that his bar mitzvah “was a ticket that enabled my father to stage a massive party that would prove to his peers that he had arrived.” The bar mitzvah blowout has become a symbol of the withering of Jewish religious tradition and religious feeling in late twentieth-century America. And yet, among the guests whom Doris points out to her sons are Grandma’s Uncle Izzy, a Holocaust victim, and Cousin Rifka: “Remember I told you boys about the Triangle Factory Fire?” Visible just for a moment, at a distance (to Doris only, not to us), these phantoms of family history, haunting, however faintly, the family feast, are phantoms of Jewish history. When the feast is over, Stewie is relieved (“I’m free! No more Hebrew school”). He and Mitchell have a great time calling out the names of the guests and the amounts of money they gave: MITCHELL : And the winner is . . . Aunt Reba and Uncle Morris! Fiftydollar bond!! MITCHELL AND STEWIE : YAYY!!!

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The total take is $2,375. But Herbie, furious at having to throw a huge, fancy, expensive bar mitzvah party such as he never had, contrasting “twenty-three hundred bucks” with his own measly take-home pay of $114 a week, confiscates Stewie’s gift-money to pay for the party: I’m two grand in the hole! [he shouts] Even with your precious gifts! Two grand in the hole! ... STEWIE : So why did we do this? I didn’t want it. HERBIE : Why did we do this?, everybody does it . . . How would it look if we didn’t throw you a bar mitzvah? . . . It would look very funny. Like something was wrong. STEWIE : Isn’t something wrong? HERBIE : Hm? STEWIE : You mean it would’ve looked like we couldn’t afford it, so you made one anyway, even though we couldn’t afford it! This accurate summary detonates a lifetime of resentments. Arthur Miller wrote that Willy Loman and his family “exist in a spot that probably most Americans feel they inhabit—on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at a well-lighted place.” Herbie, feeling excluded from all life has to offer, sees his son on the other side, the privileged, well-lighted side of the glass, defying him. He explodes, nearly beating up both boys, blaming them for all his sacrifices and frustrations. The bitterness of some Jewish—and other—parents against their more privileged, more American children is one of the unanticipated results of American social mobility; here we see it in full force. Finally Herbie shouts, “WHAT DO I HAVE? I HAVE NOTHING! I HAVE SHIT!” and storms out of the apartment. The play has four endings, played one after another: Herbie comes home, and Doris declares the marriage over; Herbie comes home, and Doris commits suicide by jumping off the balcony; Herbie comes home, Doris says “I need you, Herbie, don’t let me go,” and they dance to “Autumn Leaves”; and, after three “dramatic” endings, the real ending: Herbie comes home, Doris serves him his tuna plate, and they sit in silence, immobilized, defeated by a religious ritual that has dried up into a rite of conspicuous consumption and social conformity, and ultimately by big, Gentile America. They have no idea that, to return to W. E. B. Du Bois’ terminology, their “two souls, two thoughts, . . . two

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warring ideals” have merged, not “into a better and truer self,” but into a helpless, spiritless death-in-life. *

*

*

DONALD MARGULIES: SIGHT UNSEEN (1991, 1992) Sight Unseen begins in “The present.” It was produced in California in 1991 and in New York in 1992, and Jonathan Waxman, its protagonist, is “35–40” years old, which means he was born around 1954, like Mitchell, the boy playwright in The Loman Family Picnic, and Donald Margulies, the playwright in real life. Mitchell is a finalist in a citywide poster contest; Margulies was an art major in college; Jonathan is a painter, some of whose paintings are described in the play as “depictions of middle-class life, obviously Jewish.” Draw your own conclusions. Mine is that inventing Jonathan Waxman, a successful Jewish artist from Brooklyn, has enabled Donald Margulies, another kind of successful Jewish artist from Brooklyn, to examine certain actual or potential challenges common to both of them, concerning art, and fame, and being Jewish. But it would be unwarranted to assume that because certain details match up, all do, or that the real playwright meets or would meet his challenges in the same way as the fictional painter. A generation younger than Herbie and Doris, Jonathan has infinitely more options. Smart, talented, unafraid of the big world, he is in a position, as they are not, to worry explicitly about how to be Jewish and how Jewish to be. He reembodies, in a very different way, the struggle of Jakie Rabinowitz, aka Jack Robin, in The Jazz Singer, to be both a Jewish boy and an American artist. For Jonathan, as for Jakie/Jack, the crucially significant family relationship is with his just-deceased father, who, of course, represents the Jewish past, and whose death only increases the pressure on his son. As in Death of a Salesman as well as The Loman Family Picnic, the struggle over values is also a form of oedipal conflict. In The Jazz Singer (1925), the issues are clear-cut. The father is a cantor, a formidable patriarch who wields the full weight of the ancestral Jewish tradition; for him, his son’s jazz singing is “dirty music from the sidewalks.” In Sight Unseen, however, the issues are less easily graspable. The father is, as the author says, “a shadowy figure” (unlike Cantor Rabinowitz, he never appears in the play) with no strong views on anything that we know of. As in The Loman Family Picnic, it is the father’s confusion, not his certainty,

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that the son has to reckon with: My father, God!, my father loved seeing my name in print. . . . He couldn’t believe the New York Times could possibly have that much to say about his kid. “All these words,” he said, “are about you? What is there to say about you?” . . . He was serious; he wasn’t just teasing. Oh, he was teasing, too, but it threatened him. No, it did. It pointed up the fact that he could be my father and still not know a thing about me. Not have a clue. What did the fancyschmancy art world see that he didn’t? What were those big dirty paintings about, anyway? . . . all the hype . . . that’s very seductive in the beginning, I got to admit. Vindicating, even: “Ah hah! See? I am a genius. Now maybe my father will respect me.” But it had the opposite effect on him. It didn’t make him proud. It bewildered him. It alienated him. How could he have produced a “visionary?” It shamed him somehow.

One of the themes of Yiddish culture in America is the gap that opens up between immigrant parents and their successful, “allrightnik,” Americanized children, usually with the parents as pathetic victims and the children as callous, though perhaps ultimately remorseful, villains. But there can be an analogous, if less melodramatic, gap between humble, lower-middle-class, presumably second-generation parents, distanced equally from Orthodox religion and Yiddish culture, but still living as Jews in Jewish enclaves— parents like Herbie and Doris in The Loman Family Picnic—and their bigtime-successful, even-more-Americanized children. Like Herbie, Jonathan’s father is clearly no greenhorn; he presumably lived in an “area of second settlement”; yet he felt threatened and shamed by his more privileged, more Americanized offspring. Social mobility has many stages, and generational tensions are common to all. Older-generational hostility against freer, more Americanized youth has been a recurrent motif in Jewish American drama, flashing out in various economic and social contexts, not only in The Jazz Singer, but also in Awake and Sing!, Grown Ups, and Come Blow Your Horn; it will reappear in A Shayna Maidel. Margulies describes his protagonist as a lapsed Jew who had assimilated into mainstream culture at the same time that he was being embraced on a large scale in his profession—the compromise that entails, the feelings of emptiness and fraudulence.

This brings us back to the sense of inauthenticity felt by those other worldly, successful Jewish protagonists, Arthur Landau in The Tenth Man and Kenneth Hoyle in Three Hotels. It suggests a typical Jewish family

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history, much like the one Karen Brodkin reports in a book interestingly titled How Jews Became White Folks: We all had a sense that each of us was the first generation to make a new world—my grandparents immigrated, my parents moved beyond the small world of the immigrant ghetto and took on the entitlements of middle-class life, and I rebelled against the homogeneity of that life. With each generation, we emphasized our social self-invention, with no continuity from our parents save our rebellions against them. . . . Alongside a sense of excitement and pride that we could master the mainstream, there was also a feeling that this cost us something. I think we feared the loss of an authentic Jewish self—that we might easily exchange personal connection for a few of the glittering trinkets that were always dangling on the edge of one’s vision in those prosperous years.

As the playwright has written in his Afterword, Jonathan is jolted by the death of his father into examining his loss of cultural identity [presumably Jewish] and artistic purpose. His journey leads him to Patricia, the woman with whom he long ago had a relationship, which symbolized the themes of his life and which remains unresolved.

Patricia is a figure who does not appear as often as you might expect in the works of Jewish American playwrights (she does turn up in The Jazz Singer and Counsellor-at-Law): that mythical but very real being, that traditional star of Jewish male sexual fantasy, the Gentile woman, known in many unpleasant Jewish family conversations as the shiksa. I hope I can use the term without offense; it is the term used in the play, and in real life. Embodying all the allure of the forbidden, the shiksa represents the challenge—the temptation, the danger—of assimilation in its most immediate form: the most intimate engagement a Jewish man can have with the nonJewish world. (I am still waiting for a contemporary play about a Jewish woman struggling with her love for an alluring shaygets, the shiksa’s male equivalent. This was a popular theme in the nineteenth century—nearly always with a tragic ending. Aside from the subplot in Fiddler on the Roof about Tevye’s daughter Chava and her Christian husband, I can think of no recent example.) Sight Unseen moves back and forth in time, ending with the first meeting of Jonathan and Patricia as college students. He is comically reluctant

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to respond to her: It’s the six million! [he says.] It’s, it’s the Diaspora, it’s the history of the Jewish people! You have no idea, the weight. You got to remember I come from Brooklyn. People where I come from, they don’t like to travel very far, let alone intermarry. They’ve still got this ghetto mentality: safety in numbers, no matter what. . . . This is the attitude about the world I grew up with. It’s a miracle I ever left the house!

Notice two things about this passage. First, how much it sounds like Doris, clinging to the “high-rise ghetto” where she is surrounded by “Jews upon Jews,” and second, how Jonathan makes fun of his fear and reluctance, distancing himself from it (“They’ve still got this ghetto mentality”) and expressing it at the same time: instant ambivalence, with intimations of Du Bois’s “two souls.” When Patricia replies, “We are not talking about the future of the Jewish race,” Jonathan gets to the heart of the matter: “See, but I think we are.” “Diaspora Jews,” as Charles E. Silberman says, “have always seen intermarriage as the ultimate threat to Jewish survival.” Jews who intermarry can hardly help loosening their connections to Judaism, and they tend not to raise their children as Jews. In recent decades, as the rate of intermarriage has increased, the organized Jewish community has become terribly worried about the rate at which its sons and daughters—and grandchildren, and so on—are being lost. This loss, and the possibility it raises of the diminution or even the extinction of the Jews, is commonly related, as Jonathan relates it, to the Holocaust (“It’s the six million”). But Jonathan is unable to resist Patricia’s eager appetite for life, and for him. Two years later, however, when his mother dies, he retreats emotionally into his ethnic enclave. It makes him uncomfortable to have Patricia in the house where his family is sitting shiva (the Jewish mourning ritual), and he ditches her brutally, unable to accept the love she offers him so freely. Of course, in none of his thinking or feeling, here or elsewhere, does the question of God come up. Whatever Judaism, or Jewishness, is to him, it is not, strictly speaking, a religion at all. This paradoxical phenomenon, as we have seen, is widespread in Jewish life, and in Jewish plays; in both, it is often simply taken for granted. Long after belief in God goes, the sense of Jewish identity, and often the sense of obligation to that identity and guilt about it, remains: pain in the amputated limb. The atheist father of a friend of mine was president of his synagogue for decades. Fifteen years later, Jonathan is rich, famous, arrogant, married to a shiksa, and about to become a father, while Patricia is an expatriate, living on very little

120 Beyond the Golden Door money in a chilly English farmhouse with a tongue-tied husband she does not love, whom she married in order to stay in England because there was nothing left for her in America. (In an interesting reversal, Patricia is thus the mirror image of the “belle juive” of nineteenth-century drama, the Jewess destroyed by her love for a Gentile swain.) She tells Jonathan that he is an expatriate too: When you married your wife, you married her world. Didn’t you? You can’t exist in two worlds; you’ve got to turn your back on one of them. ... Your wife should thank me. ... I laid the groundwork. I was the pioneer. ... The sacrificial shiksa.

Jonathan seems to have pretty well gotten over “ghetto mentality,” and not only in reference to his wife: instead of sitting shiva for his late father, he has come to England to supervise a show of his paintings; loyalty to a dead dad versus the imperative of a big career is not a problem to him as it was to Jakie/Jack in The Jazz Singer. Yet, like Jake in Jules Feiffer’s Grown Ups, he is uncomfortable in the midst of his great big-world success. He questions the validity of his own celebrity: Who are these people who are suddenly throwing money at you and telling you how wonderful and talented you are? What do they know? You begin to believe them. They begin to want things from you. They begin to expect things. The work loses its importance; the importance is on “Waxman.”

He says this, in the course of a particularly stimulating and troubling scene, to a journalist who turns out to have a gift for finding and probing his sore spot: GRETE [the interviewer]: Would you have preferred to remain an outsider? JONATHAN : Preferred? No. It’s cold and lonely on the outside. GRETE : And yet being cozy on the inside— JONATHAN : “Cozy”? GRETE (continuous): —seems to make you uncomfortable as well. She suggests that Jonathan’s discomfort about being an “insider” is “the problem Jews face” in the twentieth century. JONATHAN : What problem is that? GRETE : The problem of being on the inside while choosing to see themselves as outsiders?— JONATHAN : Is that a Jewish problem?

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GRETE : (Continuous): —even when they are very much on the inside? . . . All I am suggesting, Mr. Waxman, is that the artist, like the Jew, prefers to see himself as alien from the mainstream culture. For the Jewish artist to acknowledge that the contrary is true, that he is not alien, but rather assimilated into that mainstream culture— Here she touches on the challenge that America in particular, where they have been most successful, poses to the Jews: accepted by the dominant culture as never before, how can they go on being Jews if they are no longer victims? Her questioning is intelligent and serious, but at the same time, she is accusing Jonathan of bad faith, and her emphasis on Jews as “very much on the inside” has an unpleasant echo of the anti-Semitic obsession with sinister Jewish power. Jonathan’s angry response sidesteps the question: “I’m an American painter. American is the adjective, not Jewish, American.” Very soon thereafter he accuses her of anti-Semitism and abruptly stalks off. What is striking is how defensive he is, how unwilling even to think about the relation between his work and his Jewishness. What is also striking is that the interviewer is a very smart, very beautiful, very blonde GERMAN young woman (played in New York by Laura Linney, with very long legs and a very short skirt)—the ultimate shiksa, who clearly makes poor Jonathan very nervous. The questions she raises, the questions that Jonathan is unwilling to confront, hang in the air. To what extent is the Jew-outsider comparable to the artist-outsider? (A colleague of mine is thinking about the analogy between the Jew-outsider and the homosexual-outsider.) And is it possible to gain insider-hood, that is, “success,” in any context without losing your integrity? Or, as Grete may be suggesting, could fear of being corrupted by success be another form of ghetto mentality, of fear of the big outside world? These questions are not going to go away any time soon. A book called Insider/Outsider speaks of the consciousness Jews have of themselves as occupying an anomalous status: insiders who are outsiders and outsiders who are insiders. . . . Never before have so few barriers existed to Jews’ entering the corridors of political, cultural, and economic power. Yet the path to integration has also created enormous contradictions in Jewish self-consciousness. Identification and integration with the majority stands at odds with the Jews’ equal desire to preserve their identity as a minority.

122 Beyond the Golden Door That is what this scene dramatizes. Sight Unseen was produced in 1991; Insider/Outsider was published in 1998. Once more the playwright has anticipated the scholars. Alain Finkielkraut writes, The most common tack to take in a society bereft of common beliefs and collective heroism is to turn inward, value the self before all else and, most importantly, to carve out your individual niche.

Jonathan has done this so successfully that rich patrons line up to buy, sight unseen, pictures that he has not even painted yet. But, as a wellknown Jewish moralist once remarked, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” If Margulies is somewhat vague as to where Jonathan’s soul might be found, that is the point. There is no easy answer; perhaps there is no answer at all. Jonathan confesses that he has lost something. I’ve lost my way somehow, I don’t know. ... I’ve been trying to retrace my steps. ... Ever since my father died. ... I’m nobody’s son anymore, Patty. They’re all gone now, all the disappointable people. There’s no one left to shock with my paintings anymore.

With his parents gone, he has lost even his identity as the rebellious Jewish son. He finds in Patricia’s house the painting he made the day they met: When I saw this painting, though, it was like all of a sudden I remembered where I came from! There’s a kind of purity to it, you know?, before all the bullshit. Patty, I just need to hold on to it.

What is he trying to find again? Patricia? Innocence? Forgiveness? Youth? Himself? Confused, uncertain, defensive, caught between Brooklyn and the world, he is unlikely to have much luck. *

*

*

HERB GARDNER: CONVERSATIONS WITH MY FATHER (1991, 1992) Donald Margulies writes that A Thousand Clowns, by his friend Herb Gardner (1934–2003), was the first nonmusical play I ever saw . . . In retrospect, it seems fitting that my first exposure to drama was a play about a complex father figure and his

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surrogate son, for the theme of fathers and sons has long figured in my plays and in my life.

By a neat coincidence, Margulies’s Sight Unseen and Gardner’s Conversations with My Father were both produced on the West Coast in 1991 and in New York in 1992, and the similarities between them are uncanny. In both, a Jewish man, a very successful creative artist (a novelist in Conversations, instead of a painter)—clearly in some sense a stand-in for the author—is impelled by the death of a parent to confront his own life, including his Jewishness. In Sight Unseen, however, as Margulies says, “the father is offstage, a shadowy figure”; in Conversations, the father—played on Broadway by Judd Hirsch—is center stage, and the son lurks on the periphery, narrating and commenting as he tries to come to terms with his formidable progenitor. Conversations with My Father is a big play, more ambitious, more encompassing, more powerful than Gardner’s bigger hits, A Thousand Clowns (1962) and I’m Not Rappaport (1984). In an introduction to the published text of Conversations, the Irish American journalist Pete Hamill writes, This is a play about a father and his sons, about the nature of being Jewish, about survival and disaster. But it’s not at all narrow; by being specific, it’s also universal. As a result, this layered, beautifully crafted play is about all those fathers who came to New York from terrible places, and all the sons who had to learn the sometimes dark and dreadful lessons about becoming Americans.

Spanning forty years, from 1936 to 1976, the play begins and ends with Charlie, the novelist, clearing out the low-class bar on Canal Street in lower Manhattan that his late father had owned and run. I was skeptical at first: who ever heard of a Jewish saloon? But it turns out that Gardner’s real-life father had owned a bar on Canal Street; the future playwright used to do his homework in one of the booths, as the future novelist does in the play. We tend to forget that not all American Jews have been clean, sober, and law-abiding: Murder, Inc. was a Jewish outfit. Early in his career, Irving Berlin was a singing waiter at Nigger Mike’s saloon—and Nigger Mike was Jewish. There was an underside to Jewish immigrant life—saloon-keepers, gamblers, boxers, prostitutes, gangsters—largely unexplored by Jewish American playwrights. Though it has no prostitutes, and all the criminals are Gentiles, Conversations with My Father at least gives us a whiff of this underside. (Donald Margulies has made an awkward but intermittently effective English-language adaptation of God of Vengeance, Sholom Asch’s

124 Beyond the Golden Door famous Yiddish play about a brothel-keeper, transferring its locale from Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side; I can think of no other examples.) As its title suggests, Conversations with My Father is devoted to Charlie’s memories of his father, and especially to his father’s titanic struggle with his own Jewishness. Ambivalence about Jewishness is the order of the day in Jewish American drama, but the ambivalence in this play is something else again. Brought to this country at the age of ten, Charlie’s father Eddie, like David Quixano in The Melting-Pot, is haunted by the memory of a Russian pogrom, but unlike David, Eddie does not believe that America is “the place where God would wipe away tears from off all faces.” When The MeltingPot was written, a pogrom was a pogrom; by the time of Conversations, a pogrom must inevitably evoke the Holocaust. In The Loman Family Picnic, Doris evidently and Herbie presumably are controlled by the memory, largely unconscious, of Jewish powerlessness—of which the Holocaust is, of course, the ultimate example. Eddie, having witnessed a pogrom in person, is more aware than they are of Jewish powerlessness—obsessed by it controlled by it in a different way. Instead of being cowed by it, he dedicates his life to fighting against it. You’re Jewish you gotta be smarter than everybody else [he says]; or cuter or faster or funnier. Or tougher. Because, basically, they want to kill you; this is true maybe thirty, thirty-five hundred years now and is not likely to change next Tuesday.

Eddie is determined to be tougher. The critic David Lyle Solomon speaks of “a long line of Jewish male characters who, in order to be seen as manly, must overexert their masculinity; they must be hyper-masculine” and cites as examples “the Jewish boxers of the twenties and thirties, Norman Mailer’s bad boy Jews, the Jewish gangsters of such films as The Long Goodbye (1973), The Godfather, Part II (1975) and HBO’s The Sopranos, the WWF’s (World Wrestling Federation) Goldberg, or even Jewish adult film stars Ron Jeremy and Herschel Savage.” Eddie is that kind of character. An unsuccessful boxer turned saloonkeeper, he encourages his older son Joey to be a boxer and fantasizes that little Charlie’s first words will be, “Charlie Goldberg don’t take shit from nobody.” Like Willy Loman, who encourages his boys to excel in athletics and even to steal, Eddie wants his sons to be the opposite of the stereotypical weak, cringing Jewish male. Yet when Eddie himself, forever ambivalent, faces down an anti-Semitic gangster, he dances a dance of triumph to a Yiddish song.

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On the other hand, he also changes his name from Itzik Goldberg to Eddie Ross—Ross, a goyish-sounding name, in honor of Barney Ross, the Jewish boxing champion. Informed of the name change, Joey says, “I don’t get it, this mean we’re not Jewish any more?” Eddie replies, “Of course we’re still Jewish. We’re just not gonna push it.” But his wife’s Brisket Tzimmes he advertises as Mulligan Stew, and her Lokshen Kugel he calls Hot Apple Pie. He even tells Joey not to wear his yarmulkeh (skullcap) in the street. Eddie wants to be an American go-getter—perhaps that will save him from the suffering and humiliation of his grandfather, whose beard was torn out of his face in the pogrom, or his brother, who ran around with the top of his head sliced off, “for maybe thirty seconds before he drops, hollerin’ ‘Voo iz mine yarmulkeh?’ ” or his father, murdered in America by gangsters. He keeps changing the name and decor of his bar, in the hope of hitting it big—like Nathan Hershkowitz a.k.a.Nat Harris in Rags, he yearns to move “Uptown”—but it never happens. Eddie’s opposite in the matter of Jewish pride is an old Yiddish-theatre actor named Zaretsky, who comments, I knew a man once, Itzik Goldberg, with the colors of Odessa and the spirit of a Jew, and I saw this man turn white before my eyes, white as milk—Grade A, pasteurized, homogenized, American milk! . . . You came to the Melting Pot, sir, and melted . . . melted away.

Eddie retorts that Zaretsky is “a dyin’ man with a dead language and no place to go,” but though the actor incarnates the decline of Yiddish culture—he is reduced to performing a one-man, twelve-minute version of The Dybbuk and dies before Gardner’s play is over—he retains an integrity that Eddie has lost. Though Eddie bears a bitter resentment against God, he holds on to his religion—at arm’s length: I got my own deal with God, see; Joey does a few hours a week o’ Hebrew School, just enough to make the Bar Mitzvah shot—same with Charlie—I hit the shul Rosh Hashana, maybe Yom Kippur, and sometimes Fridays Gloria [formerly Gusta, his wife] does the candle routine; and that’s it.

Many readers of this book will have known a similar arrangement. But Eddie’s rationale, if that’s what it is, is not one that many people would admit to: “You treat God like you treat any dangerous looney—keep him calm and stay on his good side.” Still, he does have some conception of God, unlike so many American Jews in drama and in life.

126 Beyond the Golden Door Hebrew school, like the bar mitzvah lessons in The Loman Family Picnic, exemplifies the hollowness of organized Jewish religion: YOUNG CHARLIE : ... It’s just this ratty place on Houston Street. This ratty room on the second floor of a building, two Rabbis in a room makin’ a buck. ... Two ratty guys with bad breath [the bar mitzvah teacher in The Loman Family Picnic has bad breath too] who throw chalk at your head and slam books on your hand every time you miss a trick? I mean real angry guys with bugs in their beards; sometimes they just kick you in the ass on general principles. EDDIE : Yeah, that’s God all right; I’d know him anywhere. YOUNG CHARLIE : That ain’t God, those guys,— EDDIE : Sure they ain’t, I know that; but they’re connected. ... YOUNG CHARLIE : I don’t get it, Pop. Ma lights the candles Friday, starts the prayer, ya say, “Cut the shit and let’s eat”; ya never go to Temple anymore, the bar was open last Rosh Hashana, ... EDDIE : I stay in touch, Criminal! ... Because all God’s gotta do is come through once to make Him worth your time. Maybe twice. Just one big deal and once when you die so you ain’t scared shitless ... Whatta we talkin’ about?—a coupla years tops, it’s over; you’re joined up with my Pop and his Pop and his and all the Pops back forever—you’re covered, it’s set, I done my job; then ya do whatever the hell ya want. Whatever the cockeyed theology, Eddie Ross, né Goldberg, wants his son connected to the Jewish God and to his Jewish ancestors and thinks Hebrew school will do it. When, during World War II, news of the death camps begins filtering in, Eddie is heavily in denial: “How come Roosevelt don’t mention—if F.D.R. believed all that he’d be doin’ somethin’ about it this minute, guaranteed!” Like so many Jews, Eddie has adopted F.D.R. as his protector against Jewish vulnerability. (A chapter in Arthur Hertzberg’s history of American Jewry is called “FDR: The Benevolent King of the Jews.”) But when Joey joins the Navy during World War II, spurred by the death-camp news and by anti-Semitism at home, Eddie exults, “Show ‘em, kid, show ‘em how a Jew fights.” A son in the Navy rebuts the stereotype of Jewish weakness. When Joey is killed, however, Eddie shouts, You watch me, alla you, tonight I go to Beth-El [the synagogue], I go to the East Window because this is where God’s supposed t’hear ya better—and I tell

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‘im, I tell the Killer Bastard—get this, God, I ain’t a Jew no more! Over, pal! Fifty years of bein’ a Jew Loser; over, baby!

Yet Joey had asked, before he died, that the Kaddish read over him should name him as “Jussel Solomon Goldberg.” Charlie becomes a best-selling novelist, with a series of books featuring a highly idealized portrait of his father: Izzy, tough but warm, blunt yet wise, the impossible and eccentric Bleecker Street tavern-keeper who won not only your heart in the last chapter, but the Mayor’s Special Cultural Award that year for “embodying the essential charm and excitement of New York’s ethnic street life.”

Charlie’s novels are just the sort of cozy nostalgia-puddings that Herb Gardner, clearly, was determined that this play would not be. Shortly before he dies, Eddie demands NOT to be buried in a Jewish cemetery; he has no desire to be “stuck in some sacred Jew-ground with a buncha Yidlach for eternity!” Charlie honors this request but lights a yahrzeit (memorial) candle for the old man every year, reminded by an annual card from an organization called the Sons of Moses—complaining, as his father had, that no matter where he is, the Sons of Moses always manage to find him. (Eddie had called them “the Royal Mounted Rabbis.”) But it was Eddie who had signed up his son with the Sons of Moses. Suddenly Charlie crumples up the yahrzeit card and throws it away, furious at his maddeningly inconsistent, ineluctably Jewish father who could never come to terms with his Jewishness because Jews were persecuted, Jews were losers. But then— after nearly killing his own son because the young man wanted to take over his grandfather’s bar—Charlie picks up the yahrzeit card, uncrumples it, and is staring at it as the play ends. As Daphne Merkin (like Charlie, a member in good standing of the Jewish intelligentsia) wrote in the New Yorker, I’ve been trying to lose my religion for years now, but it refuses to go away. Just when I think I’ve shaken it—put it firmly behind me, a piece of my obscurantist past no longer suited to the faithless life I now lead—it turns up again, dogging me.

The playwright says: Many of these people who came here from eastern Europe desperately wanted to be American. They had escaped from pogroms, from the Czar’s army, and

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then it became a matter of how far from themselves they wanted to escape. To be someone in America, you would first have to become no one at all. How much of yourself do you have to erase? A lot of them were very tough, strong people who were constantly at war between wanting to fiercely defend their identities and lose them in order to become an American success. It’s a battle they fought with themselves and their families, a battle that never ended.

Once again, Du Bois’s “two souls” in conflict. Sholom Aleichem said it’s hard to be a Jew. Like Sight Unseen, Conversations with My Father shows how hard it can be for a Jew to get away from being a Jew, and how ambivalence about Jewishness is often, for twentieth-century American Jews, a central part of the Jewish inheritance.

10. Jewish Daughters BARBARA LEBOW: A SHAYNA MAIDEL (1985, 1987) There are many plays about the efforts of Jewish sons to free themselves from their parents, but what about the Jewish daughters? Most of the playwrights are like the parents in Feiffer’s Grown Ups, who fuss compulsively over their son and take their daughter for granted. Of course, most of the playwrights are male. The prominent women in their plays tend to be the mothers: Bessie Berger, Molly Goldberg, Kate Jerome in the Brighton Beach Trilogy. There are few dramatic equivalents to the Lower East Side fiction of Anzia Yezierska, in which young women fight to free themselves from traditional patriarchal fathers, although this theme is touched on, somewhat awkwardly, in a subplot of Rags, and it surfaces again in A Shayna Maidel by Barbara Lebow (b. 1936). The title is Yiddish for “a pretty girl.” The time is 1946. Polish-born Rose Weiss, nee Rayzel, a shayna maidel in her early twenties, was brought to America at the age of four by her father. America has not been kind to the father, who still lives with, and works for, a distant cousin; perhaps partly for that reason, he is accustomed to giving orders to his daughter, whom he regards with constant half-suppressed anger. Still, she has gotten more or less out from under his thumb. She has escaped from the cousin’s house in Brooklyn to her own apartment in Manhattan. “Brooklyn’s not good enough for you anymore,” grumbles her father, not the first parent we have met who resents his Americanized child. She has a job; she dates various men, none seriously. Her father demands that she keep kosher, but she mixes milk and meat on the sly. She has no memory of Poland; all she wants to be is an American young woman. When her father is not around, she sometimes calls herself Rose White, “Just to sound like everyone else.” In the successful off-Broadway production, she was played by Melissa Gilbert, best-known as Laura in the television version of Little House on the Prairie, that echt-Gentile saga of Middle-American pioneers.

130 Beyond the Golden Door However, the tensions between father and daughter never reach a climax and are never resolved. The playwright’s main concern is elsewhere. Remember, the year is 1946. When Rayzel/Rose and her father left for America, her elder sister Lusia, sick with scarlet fever, had to be left behind, and the girls’ mother stayed with the sick child. Lusia got well and grew up, but before their father could earn the money to send for his wife and elder daughter, the war came. Lusia’s mother and little daughter were killed, but Lusia has survived the camps, and one day she appears at Rose’s doorstep, bringing intimations of another Jewish way of life that Rose no longer remembers, and of the terrible end of that way of life. Rose looks in the mirror and says to herself, as if it had never occurred to her: “It could’ve been you, Rose.” And later: “Lusia, have you wondered about it, thought why you got sick and not me? . . . And I was playing stickball and going to the movies and eating Mello-Rolls!” Lusia, with her camp number tattooed on her arm, is Rose’s doppelganger: the two sisters represent the two extremes of Jewish life in the twentieth century. Rose gets Lusia to try on American clothes and is pleased with the result: “You look great! Turn around. It’s perfect! Very American. All we need to do is fix your hair and you’ll look like you were born here.” Lusia has to remind her: “Was born in Poland, like you.” But later, in a slightly insane act of solidarity, Rose embraces her sister’s suffering: she “gets the pen from the night table. Slowly and deliberately, as if she is carving, she draws a number on her left forearm and stares at it.” Especially since the Eichmann trial in 1961, an awareness of the Holocaust has been part of the Jewish identity of Jewish Americans. A survey in 1989 ranked it first among the markers of this identity. (God came in fourth, after the High Holy Days and anti-Semitism.) But since America is, crucially, a country where the Holocaust did not happen, its effects tend to be subtle and diffused, and hard to assess and to dramatize—except when, as in this play, a Holocaust survivor appears, disturbing the relatively placid surface of American life. (Holocaust survivors are also central characters in The Model Apartment by Donald Margulies and The Action against Sol Schumann by Jeffrey Sweet.) The situation of these two daughters and their father raises reverberant questions. What effect, finally, will the disturbing presence of her strangersister have on Rose? How can Lusia live comfortably on the West Side of Manhattan when her mother and her daughter are dead, and her husband is missing? How will her presence affect Rose’s relationship to “Papa?” And how can the old man deal with the girls’ knowledge that he in fact could have brought over his wife and daughter before it was too late? These questions

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lead to larger ones. What are the continuing effects of the Holocaust on those who survived—and on their close relatives, their flesh and blood, who were safe in America all along? And how, in the face of what happened, can we believe Papa when he says that everything is according to God’s plan? Lebow does not explore these questions very far. Instead, she launches her play at the heartstrings of the audience. In this she is by no means unsuccessful: when a letter turns up from dead Mama to Rose, accompanied by a souvenir baby-spoon, what audience could resist? It is reasonable enough that Lusia should periodically escape from the overwhelming present into memories and fantasies. But her memory-scenes are escapes for the play as well, escapes from developing relationships into evocations of idyllic domesticity with Mama and idyllic romance with Duvid, the childhood sweetheart who becomes her husband. Still, not even the happy ending, in which Duvid turns up alive and well, can efface the image of those two so-different women—the product of such cataclysmically different circumstances, who are nevertheless Jewish sisters and Jewish daughters. *

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WENDY WASSERSTEIN: ISN’T IT ROMANTIC? (1981, 1983) Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2005) wrote comedies, with an undercurrent of sadness, about a cohort of American women who came to maturity several decades after Rose Weiss, under more prosperous circumstances, insulated, like most Americans, from the terrible reality that Lusia Weiss brings with her. Her parents were “Jewish émigrés from central Europe who came to New York City as children in the late 1920’s.” Her father was a prosperous textile manufacturer who, according to his daughter, “invented velveteen.” Born in Brooklyn, she spent her early years “in a Jewish neighborhood in Flatbush. Our shopping strip included kosher butchers and Hymie’s Highway Appetizers.” Her education began at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, but, in a classic leap upward toward American heights and away from Jewish roots, she was enrolled in the posh, nonsectarian Calhoun School when the family moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The tension between Jewish Brooklyn and the nonsectarian world appears in Isn’t It Romantic? and is the subject of The Sisters Rosensweig. Wasserstein’s characters, like their author, are intelligent, witty, welleducated, upscale, urban, highly privileged, “liberated” American women, seriously trying to live decent and fulfilling personal and professional lives,

132 Beyond the Golden Door amid the changes in women’s expectations that have roiled the last half of the twentieth century. Not all these women, in her plays as in real life, are Jewish; on the whole, feminist concerns occupy her more than Jewish ones. “What drives me to write, the urgency,” she says, “comes from experiences I’ve actually had as a woman.” But two of her plays have Jewish protagonists—to whom, as we might have expected, the Jewish religion, as a religion, matters not at all, though being Jewish is a significant part of who they are. Wasserstein has called Isn’t It Romantic? “my most autobiographical play.” Like so many of the Jewish sons we have encountered, Janie Blumberg, its twenty-eight-year-old heroine, is trying to get out from under her loving, smothering Jewish parents. They worry about her, in not-so-subtly demeaning ways. Her father offers her the family business, just as if she were a son and not a daughter—a sign of the times—but he does so because he has no respect for her own career choice. If you were a lawyer like your brother, Ben, then it makes sense to go out on your own. But I don’t understand why a girl with your intelligence should be freelance writing when you could take over a business.

Mostly, however, they want to see her safely married to a nice Jewish boy. (They refer wryly to Janie’s brother’s non-Jewish wife, Chris, as “Your sister-in-law, Christ.”) They call Janie every morning to sing “Sunrise, Sunset,” a wedding song about how quickly time passes, from a musical about shtetl Jews—thus neatly linking pressure to get married and Jewish tradition. They bring her a Russian taxi-driver, presumably Jewish, as a prospective date. Janie’s voluble mother, Tasha, is clearly the dominant parent. Wasserstein has frequently acknowledged that Tasha is based on Lola, her own mother. As the playwright says, “Lola Wasserstein has always made great copy.” Lola believes, says her daughter, that “a woman should have . . . a nice family, a nice husband.” As an example of Lola’s telephone talk, Wendy quotes, “Your sister-in-law is pregnant and that means more to me than a million dollars or any play.” This might explain the ridicule and anger directed at Tasha in the play, but there is abundant affection as well. According to a stage direction, “Tasha is an untraditional Jewish mother with traditional values.” To put it another way, she transcends the stereotype while she fulfils it. On the one hand, Tasha is a free spirit, a zestful bohemian oddball who rushes off to endless dance classes wearing what Janie calls “tie-died underwear,” and whose motto is “I am.” When she

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boasts, “The girls at dancing say you can always have a good time with Tasha,” you believe her. But on the other hand, congratulating Janie on her new apartment, she adds pointedly, “I remember my first apartment in New York. Of course, I was much younger than you and I was married to your father.” She nags: “Janie, please don’t lie there like a body.” “Why do you belittle yourself all the time?” “Janie, please, only old ladies sigh.” Or she embarrasses her with fulsome praise: When you were in high school, the other mothers would stop me on the street and say, “You must be so proud of Janie. She’s such a brilliant child. If only my daughters were like Janie.”

Janie parries, good-naturedly, “What are the names of these mothers. I want names!” But by the end of the play, she is driven to say when her parents ring her doorbell, “Mother, you can’t come in until you repeat after me. My daughter is a grown woman.” (Cf. Eugene, aged 23, in Broadway Bound: “Mom, I’m not eight years old.”) Insecure, self-deprecating, and uncertain as she is, Janie finds a boyfriend, described in a stage direction as “Janie’s mother’s dream come true”: a Harvard-educated Jewish doctor, Marty Sterling, ne Murray Schlimovitz— once again, two names signalize a shift in the balance between Jewish and American. Marty’s father, once the proprietor of the Schlimovitz Kosher Dairy Restaurants in Brooklyn, now owns Yee Olde Sterling Tavernes, “a national chain,” in whose commercials he appears, dressed in colonial garb, to peddle popovers and (flagrantly unkosher) shrimp. But Mr. Sterling is still Jewish—in fact, he is Toastmaster General of the United Jewish Appeal, though the UJA is not happy about the shrimp. Once again, in just these few details, we find the endless combinations, complications, contradictions, paradoxes, tensions, negotiations, of Jewish American life. What is interesting about Marty is that he plans to go back to his old name. A famous sociologist promulgated the law that the third generation returns to the traditions that the second generation abandoned: “What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember.” In fact this is scarcely a law, but the return to tradition is a phenomenon much commented on in the Jewish press, a quarter of a century after Isn’t It Romantic? was first produced. Marty is consciously seeking a return to the Jewish roots that his father largely abandoned: MARTY: I think Jewish families should have at least three children. JANIE : Excuse me?

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MARTY: It’s a dying religion. Intermarriage [cf. Sight Unseen], Ivy League colleges, the New York Review of Books. So: I decided we should live in Flatbush or Brighton Beach, where people have real values. My father never sees those people anymore, the alta kakas in Brooklyn, the old men with the accents who sit in front of Hymie’s Highway Delicatessen. I miss them. . . . My father thought my brother was crazy when he named his son Schlomo. He kept asking my brother, “So what’s his real name?”

(I have cousins with names like Philip and Michael who have children with names like Yael and Yehuda.) However, unlike most American Jews in the twenty-first century who seek a closer connection to their Jewishness, Marty shows no signs of returning to Jewish religious observance or the Jewish God. He is seeking the dying world of neighborhood yiddishkeit— how much longer are those alte kakas going to be around? Most of all, however, Marty covets one aspect of the Jewish heritage that his father has retained: “All I want is a home, a family, something my father had so easily and I can’t seem to get started on.” He tells Janie: My sister-in-law had even less direction than you do, and she’s a bright girl too. But she met my brother and now she’s a wonderful mother, and, believe me, when Schlomo is a little older, she’ll go back to work in something nice. She’ll teach or she’ll work with the elderly—and she won’t conquer the world, but she’ll have a nice life.

And that is what he has in mind for Janie: the feminine mystique, seen as part of Jewish American tradition (Trina in Falsettos makes a similar connection), fading but capable of revival. The shades of the prison-house begin to close. But Janie refuses to move with Marty to Brooklyn, to the apartment he took for them without telling her. “If I did that,” she tells him, “I’d always be . . . a sweet little girl.” Unwilling to accept her refusal, he walks out of her life, and we see no more of him, interesting as he is. When Janie’s parents visit unannounced after the breakup, bringing her a mink coat and complaining that she doesn’t return their calls, she explodes: Do you really want to know why I don’t call you? You expect me to dial the phone and say, “Hello mother, hello father, here I am in my mink coat. I just came back from wearing it to walk the [baby] carriage. Everything is settled. Everything has worked out wonderfully.”

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Janie goes on to confront Tasha with Tasha’s own contradictions: Did you teach me to marry a nice Jewish doctor and make chicken for him? You order up breakfast from a Greek coffee shop every morning. . . . Did you teach me to compromise and lie to the man I live with and say I love you when I wasn’t sure?

She is more her mother’s daughter than her mother has been willing to recognize. Janie quotes Tasha’s own credo: I believe a person should have a little originality, a little you know, otherwise you just grow old like everybody else. And you know Janie, I like life-life-life.

Tasha retorts: Unfortunately, Janie, the clock has a funny habit of keeping on ticking. I want to know who’s going to take care of you when we’re not around anymore.

JANIE : I guess I will. (Janie takes her mother’s hand.) Mother, don’t worry. I’m Tasha’s daughter. I know, “I am.” [Tasha’s motto.] TASHA: That’s right. I am. (Tasha is crying slightly. Janie touches Tasha’s cheek, then they embrace.) Declaring her independence—and meaning it—she still embraces her Jewish mother, acknowledging her as a source of strength. Her rebellion, like the rebellion against the Jewish family in so many plays, is not without ambivalence. Isn’t It Romantic? is dedicated “To My Parents.” At the end of the play, Janie is alone; not happy about it, but tap-dancing bravely into the uncertain future that bright, well-educated, independent Jewish young women share with their Gentile classmates. “A spot picks up Janie dancing beautifully, alone.” “Janie’s mother is a dancer,” says the playwright, “and that is the gift from mother to daughter.” And she adds, “I’m the daughter who learns to dance alone.” *

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WENDY WASSERSTEIN: THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG (1992) Originally produced by the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theatre, The Sisters Rosensweig moved to Broadway and became a huge hit; clearly it

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said something that its audiences liked to hear. The mother of the three Rosensweig sisters has recently died, like a number of fathers we have been investigating; perhaps for this reason, we see them as Jewish daughters, even though they are all past forty, and two of them are mothers themselves. The sisters, like the playwright, are from Brooklyn, but the play is set in the sitting room of a very, very upscale house in Queen Anne’s Gate, London. You could almost say that the Rosensweig sisters are fleeing, in their various directions, from the looming shadow of Molly Goldberg. This is yet another play about wrestling with Jewishness. “Despite their maturity,” says the playwright, “most of the characters in the play are struggling with who they are.” The least clearly drawn of the sisters is Pfeni Rosensweig, formerly Penny, age forty. Like Wasserstein, she is the youngest of three sisters, unmarried, and a writer; unlike Wasserstein, she is a successful journalist who travels the world with shopping bags for luggage. “Aunt Pfeni, why don’t you have any suitcases?” asks her niece. “Because your grandmother Rita told me that only crazy people travel with shopping bags. So I’ve made it my personal signature ever since.” Pfeni’s boyfriend is a manic stage director who, in the course of the play, decides to go back to sleeping with men. The middle Rosensweig sister is known as Gorgeous, like the middle Wasserstein sister, but the playwright says that Gorgeous in the play “really isn’t like my sister Gorgeous; in some ways she’s more like my mother”— presumably because of her conviction that what a woman needs is a suitable, permanent man. According to the stage directions, Gorgeous Teitelbaum is “a very pretty but overdone woman of around 46 . . . she wears a fake Chanel suit with too many accessories, and carries imitation Louis Vuitton suitcases.” “Housewife, mother, and radio personality,” Gorgeous is a gorgeous caricature of a Jewish woman who has apparently succeeded in merging her “two souls”: she sees no conflict between traditional Jewish values and the most blatant consumerism. The catalogue of the “Too Jewish?” exhibition at the Jewish Museum points out that the primary stereotype of the Jewish woman has changed in one generation from the Jewish Mother to the Jewish Princess. Gorgeous is the Jewish Princess grown up, leading a group from the Newton Temple Beth El Sisterhood on a tour of the crown jewels and the department stores. She is the anti-Janie Blumberg. “So you’re the sister who did everything right,” she is told. “You married the attorney, you had the children, you moved to the suburbs.” “Now, don’t make me into a cliché,”she replies. “I’m much more than that.” And so she is. With the aid of a certain Rabbi Pearlstein, who is now under indictment—“Rabbi Pearlstein is a great man. His accountant was

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evil,” she says—she has become “Dr. Gorgeous,” who dispenses advice to callers on her own radio show—mainly psychobabble and beauty secrets, except that for her nothing is a secret. “When did you become a doctor?” she is asked. “You’ve heard of Dr. Pepper?” she replies. “Yes.” “So I’m Dr. Gorgeous.” As Tasha Blumberg transcends the Jewish Mother stereotype and becomes a memorable individual, Gorgeous transcends the Jewish American Princess stereotype—especially when it turns out that this woman whose favorite adjective is “funsy” has some fortitude under that vulgarity-incarnate exterior. The eldest Rosensweig sister, aged fifty-four, is the play’s protagonist: a highly successful businesswoman and a veteran of two divorces, like Sandra Meyer, the eldest Wasserstein sister, whom the playwright remembers from childhood as “My phantom neo-British sister in her gray flannel suit.” Sara Goode (she got the name from one of her ex-husbands) is the rather snobby managing director of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Europe, who owns the posh London sitting room in which the play takes place, and has practically become a self-made Englishwoman. “There’s no one as WASPy as a WASPy Jew,” says the playwright. “Sarah Goode would out-WASP a WASP.” Sara is a sharply intelligent, rather intimidating ice-goddess. She is seeing a smooth, smug English gentleman named Nicholas Pym, but what she really likes on Saturday night is “getting into bed early with a mystery novel and licking all the chocolate from my favorite wheat-meal biscuits.” When Gorgeous tells her, “Rabbi Pearlstein says we should openly discuss our feelings,” Sara replies, “I can’t tell you what a comfort it is to live in a country where ‘our feelings’ are openly repressed.” Sara is on the verge of being a Jewish anti-Semite, or perhaps over the verge. When Pfeni happens to say, “Pish-pish,” a dismissive Yiddish locution, Sara responds quite sharply, “Pfeni, there’s something very New York about your tone today”—“New York” being a well-known euphemism meaning “Jewish,” as in “too Jewish.” For Sara, the Brooklyn Jewish world of their childhood is “a world we never belonged to.” When Gorgeous lights Sabbath candles, Sara is intensely uncomfortable, and as soon as Gorgeous leaves the room Sara orders Pfeni to “blow out the goddam candles.” Although she is of Eastern European descent, she has much in common with the self-hating German Jews of Alfred Uhry’s Atlanta. Enter Mervyn Kant, formerly Kantlowitz, a brash, smart, cheerful businessman from Long Island who has made a modest pile in the synthetic fur trade, and who is now investigating European anti-Semitism as part of a delegation from the American Jewish Congress. Merv courts Sara by constantly reminding her that they are both Jewish—not the sort of approach

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that you would think would work on Sara. He even goes so far as to call her Sadie. She resists: Look, Merv, if you’re thinking, “I know who this woman is sitting next to me. I grew up with her, with women like her, only sometime in her life she decided to run away. She moved to England, she dyed her hair, she named her daughter Tess and sent her to Westminster [School]. She assimilated beyond her wildest dreams, and now she’s lonely and wants to come home,” you’re being too obvious. Yes, I’m lonely, but I don’t want to come home.

He insists: Sometimes I look at you and see all my mother’s photographs of her mother and her mother’s entire family. ... I see those women’s strength and their intelligence.

What he finds attractive in her are qualities he associates with Jewish women. But she rejects him, and he accuses her of thinking that he’s “too Jewish.” Sara [he says], you remind me of my classmates from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx who now pretend as if DeWitt Clinton was a prep school down the Connecticut River right around the bend from Groton or St. Paul’s.

She lashes back: Why won’t you give up, Merv? I’m a cold, bitter woman who’s turned her back on her family, her religion, and her country! ... Isn’t that the way the old assimilated story goes?

In fact, that is the way the old assimilated story goes, as told by assimilation’s opponents. “[T]he standard critique of assimilation” is summarized in a shrewd work of sociology as follows: “the assimilating Jew, by severing his connection to his people and past, would trade a rich, authentic ethnic and religious life for alienated rootlessness.” See, for example, Arthur Landau in The Tenth Man, or Kenneth Hoyle in Three Hotels. The playwright does not reject this critique as completely as her character does. Merv wants to know what Sara’s problem is: Is it because I remind you too much of home? SARA: Merv, the home you’re talking about is the Bronx, the Brooklyn, the America of forty years ago. It doesn’t even exist anymore.

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MERV: If it doesn’t exist, why the hell are you working so hard to make it go away? Touché. But The Sisters Rosensweig is a romantic comedy, and it has the traditional happy ending. Sara will certainly not give up Queen Anne’s Gate and move back to Long Island to be with Merv, but, however implausibly, the two of them are going to have some kind of future together. To make that possible, she must come to terms with her inalienable Jewishness, and she does, singing, “And I’m the only Yiddish girl in MacNamara’s Band.” We even get to hear her say “pish-pish”—in fact, “Double pish-pish.” And the sisters Rosensweig drink a toast to their mother, the incarnation of their Jewishness, against whom they have in various ways been struggling. Once again, roots and Jewish heritage are not merely matters to be discussed abstractly: they are personal, emotional, inextricably entwined with family. The play ends with Sara and her daughter Tess alone onstage: TESS : . . . Mother, if I’ve never really been Jewish, and I’m not actually American anymore, and I’m not English or European, then who am I? SARA: Tessie honey, as a child I was told that when your grandmother Rita was a girl, she was so smart, so competent, so beautiful and brave, that on the day the Cossacks came they were so impressed with her, they ran away. TESS : I don’t understand. SARA: Everyone always told me, “Sadie, that Tessie of yours is just like Rita.” So if Rita could make the Cossacks run away, you are smart enough, and brave enough, and certainly beautiful enough to find your place in the world. TESS : Thank you , Mommy. SARA: There are real possibilities in life, Tessie. As Janie Blumberg, tap-dancing, claims her mother’s strength, so Sara passes on her mother’s strength to her daughter. Wendy Wasserstein wants us to know that American Jews can pull their lives together, can gain strength from their ancestors to live fulfilling lives in the present, even if those lives are not conventionally Jewish. But being Jewish will clearly mean less to Tess than it did to her grandmother. Will she find an unconflicted, sustaining mode of secular Judaism? In what sense will she be Jewish at all?

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Epilogue TONY KUSHNER: ANGELS IN AMERICA (1991, 1992) Angels in America is the great American play of the 1990s. Its two parts, each longer than an ordinary play, are entitled Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, both titles suggesting a moment of world-historical change. Its subtitle, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” is too modest: it is a gay fantasia on cosmic themes. If it does not entirely live up to its staggering pretensions, it is still epic in scope; brilliant, flawed, bewildering, irresistible; a great firework shooting off sparks in all directions. Two of its seven main characters are Jewish, and Tony Kushner (b. 1957) is himself a rather old-fashioned sort of Jew: an argumentative, idealistic, left-wing public intellectual. He has said, “Judaism isn’t what the play is about, but I’m Jewish and it took me by surprise that it wound up being all over the play.” On the whole, Kushner is more interested in other matters than in what it means to be Jewish in America, yet this huge play begins with the funeral of an old Jewish immigrant woman. The rabbi’s eulogy provides us with our epilogue: She carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home. (Little pause) You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.

The turn of the millennium is a time of deep uncertainty about the future of American Jewry, a time when books are written with titles like

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The Vanishing American Jew. Intermarriage, which Jonathan Waxman worried about and Donald Margulies wrote about in Sight Unseen, has increased, says an eminent sociologist, “to historically unparalleled levels,” with “disastrous consequences for the perpetuation of Jewish attachment in succeeding generations.” In December 2003, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life sent out a fund-raising letter saying, Quite simply, more and more young Jewish people are not choosing to be Jewish. And while assimilation may be harder to see than a swastika painted on a synagogue, or an anti-Israel rally in the street, I assure you that it is a serious threat to Jewish survival.

On the other hand, Look magazine ran an article entitled “The Vanishing American Jew” as long ago as 1964. Forty-odd years later, the American Jew is still here, though Look magazine has vanished. A historian reminds us that “throughout American history Judaism has often been positioned for demise and hasn’t disappeared yet.” Today all three major Jewish denominations are moving toward more traditional observance. Skullcaps are more visible in the street than they used to be; even Reform Jews are wearing them. The extreme Orthodox are gaining in numbers and power. Orthodox Jews used to mourn their secular children, and, of course, some still do; but more and more secular Jews feel cut off from their black-hatted, ultra-Orthodox offspring. (Mike Leigh, the English filmmaker and playwright, has written a play on this theme.) The journalist Samuel G. Freedman speaks of “the essential duality of Jewish existence today, the coexistence of enormous intermarriage and acculturation on the one hand and a boom in religious study and observance on the other.” Many people think that the Jewish community in America is dividing into two groups: a large group that is losing all connection with Jewish identity, let alone Jewish religion, and a smaller group that is reaffirming its Jewish identity in rigidly traditional ways, joining forces with those who have never lost their traditional ways. But even that scenario, sounding the knell of secular Jewishness only, would leave the rich range of current Jewish American possibilities vastly impoverished. Is the great experiment in Jewishness without God, so extensively dramatized by Jewish American playwrights, merely a transitory phenomenon of the twentieth century?

Epilogue 143 But Kushner’s rabbi—and who knows to what extent he speaks for the author?—seems to be asserting, like Wendy Wasserstein’s protagonist in The Sisters Rosensweig, that even among “you and your children and their children with the goyische names,” something vitally Jewish persists. Whether the rabbi is right or wrong remains to be seen—and to be dramatized by future playwrights.

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Acknowledgments

M

y first thanks must go to Lisa Keller, my colleague at Purchase College of the State University of New York, for organizing a lecture series at her synagogue and asking me to participate. Since I was a theatre critic and a professor of drama studies, it seemed clear that I ought to do something about Jewish plays. I soon discovered that I had a rich subject, one with deep personal meaning. Along with a sabbatical that enabled me to look further into this subject, Purchase College gave me a Carl and Doris Kempner Distinguished Professor Award. For this award I am grateful to the college, to the late Mr. Kempner, and to Mrs. Kempner. I appreciate the honor, and the sum of money that came with it; most of all, I appreciate the proviso that Distinguished Professors give two public exhibitions, performances, or, as in my case, lectures, which provided me with that invaluable stimulus to achievement, a deadline—two, in fact. Not long afterward, I retired from Purchase to concentrate on what was clearly going to be a book. I am grateful to Ellen Schiff for the invaluable anthologies of Jewish American plays that she has edited, and for graciously welcoming me to the fellowship of Jewish drama scholars; to Michael Posnick for his encouragement, and for introducing me to Ellen Schiff; to Edna Nahshon, who gave me the chance to speak at two conventions of the Association for Jewish Studies; to my cousin Martin Silver, for stimulating conversations about American Jewry and its future; and to Ellen Schiff (again), Michael Posnick (again), Arthur Bloom, and Eileen Blumenthal, who read parts of the manuscript and gave me good counsel; to Al Zuckerman, my indefatigable agent, and to Don B. Wilmeth, the editor of this series, who gave me help and support when I needed it. Parts of this book appeared, in different forms, in the Forward and in American Jewish History and are reprinted by kind permission of Samuel Norich of the Forward and David Solomon of the American Jewish Historical Society.

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To all, my thanks—and especially to my wife Phyllis, who encouraged me throughout the long process of writing this book, and renewed my spirit when my energy flagged.

PERMISSIONS “Yankee Boy” “Children Of The Wind” from RAGS Lyric by Stephen Schwartz Music by Charles Strouse (c) 1986 Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz Publication and allied rights owned by Charles Strouse Music and Grey Dog Music. All rights on behalf of Charles Strouse Music and Grey Dog Music administered by Williamson Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. www.charlesstrouse.com “Uptown” Music by Charles Strouse, Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (c) 1986 by Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz Publication and allied rights owned by Charles Strouse Music and Grey Dog Music. All rights on behalf of Charles Strouse Music and Grey Dog Music administered by Williamson Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. www.charlesstrouse.com “Rags” “Greenhorns” from RAGS Lyric by Stephen Schwartz Music by Charles Strouse (c) 1984 Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz Publication and allied rights owned by Charles Strouse Music and Grey Dog Music. All rights on behalf of Charles Strouse Music and Grey Dog Music administered by Williamson Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. www.charlesstrouse.com

Notes Sources for quotations and other references are identified by a few words from the passage being documented.

INTRODUCTION Playtexts : George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly: Merton of the Movies (New York and London: Samuel French, 1925): Semitic-appearing, 25. Ring Lardner and George S. Kaufman: June Moon, in George S. Kaufman and His Collaborators (New York: Performing Arts Publications, 1984): It’s a Greek name, 43. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart: Merrily We Roll Along, in Six Plays by Kaufman and Hart (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1942): Winthrop, 125 ff.; Weintraub, 210–13. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart: Once in a Lifetime, in Six Plays by Kaufman and Hart: All my life, 44. Lillian Hellman: Watch on the Rhine, in Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (New York: Modern Library, Random House, Inc., 1960): Teck: A Jew? 262. Donald Margulies: The Loman Family Picnic, in Sight Unseen and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995): Viennese table, 235.

Other Sources: If one writes: Ellen Schiff, ed., Fruitful and Multiplying: Nine Contemporary Plays from the American Jewish Repertoire (New York: Mentor, Penguin Books, 1996), 385. relatives threatened to sue: Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, 1999), 117. One ever feels his two-ness: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 2. If you’re Jewish you’re also everyman: Quoted in Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 74.

148 Notes Indeed, in this apocalyptic: Leslie Fiedler, “What Can We Do about Fagin? The Jew-Villain in Western Tradition,” Commentary, May 1949, 418. the tension in human desire: Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 221. the history of immigration: Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), 4–6. Sometime during the 1930’s: Lloyd P. Gartner, “The Midpassage of American Jewry,” University of Cincinnati, 1982, rpt. Jonathan Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience, 2nd edition (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1997), 264. Most Italians: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Relics of an Italian Village Called New York,” New York Times, December 31, 1999.

1

THE GOLDEN LAND

Israel Zangwill: The Melting-Pot (1908) Playtext: Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, Drama in Four Acts, new and revised edition (New York: Macmillan Company, 1932, rpt. New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1975): In Spain, 123; He is crazy, 23; She knows, 24; God’s Crucible, 33–34; yer Sabbath, 6; cast off, 98; Jew-vermin, 106; you cannot come to me . . . river of blood, 155; heritage from the Old World, hate and vengeance and blood, 179; There she lies, 184–85; roaring fires, 95.

Other Sources: President Theodore Roosevelt: Quoted in Edna Nahshon, From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 241. seldom has an author: Quoted in Arthur Mann, The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 101. the Dickens . . . Hamlin Garland: Quoted in Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), 19–20. [p]layed through the length and breadth: Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, Afterword, 215. to bring home to America: Ibid., 215.

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Theodore Herzl: Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 239–40. America is our Zion: Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 207. An endless number of books: For instance, Fiction: Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Penguin Books, 1993; first published 1917); Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York: Persea Books, 1975; first published 1925; Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (New York: Random House, 2002; originally published 1941); Nonfiction: Moses Weinberger (Jonathan Sarna, tr. and ed.), People Walk on Their Heads (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982; written in Hebrew, 1887), an Orthodox rabbi’s anguished account; Howe, World of Our Fathers; Arthur Herzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). For many: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 117. spiritual miscegenation: Zangwill, Afterword, 207. American Judaism was beginning: Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 56. The process of American amalgamation: Zangwill, Afterword, 203. The experience of Zangwill’s hero: Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: MIT Press, 1970), 290. the Jewish pulpits of America: Zangwill, Afterword, 208.

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Aaron Hoffman: Welcome Stranger (1920) Playtext: Aaron Hoffman, Welcome Stranger, in Ellen Schiff, ed., Awake and Singing: Seven Classic Plays from the American Jewish Repertoire (New York: Mentor, Penguin Books, 1995): wipe you out, 47; I used to peddle, 15; your people, 63; damn fools, 64; My name, 80; I did it, 81; No matter, 82.

Other Sources: The Auctioneer: Summarized in Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ, and London, UK: Rutgers University Press, 1997, 108–09.

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Notes

vaudeville sketches: Schiff, Awake and Singing, 3. Fear of the alleged superiority: Robert K. Martin, Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged edition (New York and London: Free Press, 1968), 468. An anti-Semitic skinhead: Leslie Camhi, “In a Skinhead’s Tale, a Picture of Both Hate and Love,” New York Times, March 17, 2002. An enterprising spirit: Herbert J. Gans, “American Jewry: Present and Future, Part I: Present,” Commentary, May, 1956, 424.

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Samson Raphaelson: The Jazz Singer (1925) Playtext: Samson Raphaelson, The Jazz Singer (New York: Brentano’s, 1925): prayer book, 56; I came home, 8–59; dirty music, 50; no son, 58; the old songs, 107; stuff, 136; He told me, 150; part of America, 107; cheap . . . noble, 152; His rendition, 114–15; You forget, 52; ragtime singer, 148; blackface comedian, 152.

Other Sources: two-ness . . . warring ideals: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2. One of the things: Irving Howe and Kenneth Libo, How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America: 1880–1930 (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), 6. A people deprived: Irving Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual: A Marginal Man, Twice Alienated,” Commentary, October 1946, 362. In Christian society: Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff, trs. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 105. to merge his double self: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2–3. the streets: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 258. were able entirely: Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto, Moses Rischin, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 32. the moral bewilderment: Samson Raphaelson, The Human Nature of Playwriting (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 219. No minority group: Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 52. just as blacks: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 557. In seeking a symbol: Raphaelson, The Jazz Singer, Preface, 9. one woe speaking: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 563.

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their own American whiteness: “By looking and sounding conventionally ‘black,’ Jews could become, provisionally, ‘white.’” Mark Slobin, “Putting Blackface in its Place,” in J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (New York: Jewish Museum and Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 95. For more on this controversial question, see also Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996), 102; Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1999), 237; and Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 171–73, 212, 213. My God, this isn’t a jazz singer: Quoted in Robert L. Carringer, ed., The Jazz Singer (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 11. this grotesque figure: Ibid. Jazz is prayer: Raphaelson, The Jazz Singer, Preface, 9. detected again and again: Quoted in Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, 175. yearning for a distant home: Ibid., 135–37. No matter if the scene: Quoted in Howe, World of Our Fathers, 465. Blacking their faces: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 563. See also Stephen J. Whitfield, American Space Jewish Time: Essays in Modern Culture and Politics (Armonk, NY, London, UK: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 46–47.

2

ELMER RICE’S MULTIETHNIC NEW YORK Elmer Rice: Street Scene (1929)

Playtext: Elmer Rice, Street Scene, in Kenneth Macgowan, ed., Famous American Plays of the 1920’s (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1988): A “walk-up,” 311; Yiddish newspaper, 312; He speaks, 325; So long, 332; dark, unattractive, 325; Anyhow, all I’ve got, 381.

Other Sources: lower-middle-class German Jewish family: Biographical details from Elmer Rice, Minority Report: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 10–11, 17, 51–52, 66, 118–19. Jewish Sunday school . . . a creed that meant nothing to me: Ibid., 51. religion never played a part in my life: Ibid., 84. as an American: Ibid., 164.

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[T ]he happiest day of my year: Ibid., 473. [A] marriage without: Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 113.

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Elmer Rice: Counsellor-at-Law (1931) Playtext: Elmer Rice, Counsellor-at-Law, in Ellen Schiff, ed., Awake and Singing: Six Great American Jewish Plays, new edition (New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2004): in the steerage, 109; peddlin’ papers, 111; It costs me, 112; I’m mixed up, 104; Is he a Jew? 133; I’ d cut off, 98; I’ d go through, 120; I’ve licked him, 113; Those guys, 114; after our scalps, 124; God, disbarment, 125; one of the four hundred, 71–72; He’s served me, 107; I told you, 109; something distasteful, 143–44; good, honest, 147; I don’t want . . . class war, my backside . . . Do you think? 149–50; after all, 156; Wingdale, 173.

Other Sources: socio-economic status: Milton M. Gordon, quoted in Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (New York: Summit Books, Simon and Schuster, 1985), 125. It is not easy to say: David Riesman, Abundance for What? and Other Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964), 309. Quoted in Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, 209. Written with a racial consciousness: Quoted in Schiff, ed., Awake and Singing, 60.

3

THE BRONX

Clifford Odets: Awake and Sing! (1935) Playtext: Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing! in Six Plays by Clifford Odets (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1963):

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a struggle for life, 37; I’m not foreign born, 86; mockie, 43; foreigner, 55; movies and vaudeville theatres, 44; horses, 52; comics, 59; chop suey, 54; black and white shoes, 42; not only the mother, 95; She knows, 37; When it’s too late, 85; Mom, 96; Sleep on a day-bed, 42; poodle, 85; You got money, 66; here without a dollar, 95; Ralph should, 66; a poor boy, 71; Uncle Sam’s country, 73; a fat tomcat, 38; Don’t live, 66; respect . . . Respect? 55; is proper, 37; across the Bronx, 78; all I want’s, 41; If this life, 42; Awake and sing, 83; It says in the Bible, 72; From L”Africana, 50–51; In my day,” 71–72; Boychick, wake up! 48; DO! 78; Ralph you don’t, 55; The night he died, 100–01; Let Mom . . . Right here, 100; Sure, inventory tomorrow, 97.

Other Sources: We don’t like your play: Quoted in Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 (New York: Athaneum, 1982), 311. an honored classic: Ibid., 552. In Odets’s play: Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1980), 80–82. It is as non-Aryan: Quoted in Wendy Smith, Real Life Drama: The Group Theater and America, 1931–1940 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 208. In those inner-city Jewish areas: Nathan Glazer, “There and Back Again,” Forward, New York, June 4, 2004, 10. Immigrant American Jewish: Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat,” in Norman L. Kleebatt, Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (New York: Jewish Museum and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 75. One crucial result: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 254. Bessie resents Jacob: Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater and other aspects of popular culture, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30–37. I’m restless. I want, I want!: Quoted in Brenman-Gibson, 267. Jewish socialism: Howe and Libo, How We Lived, 161. ancient Messianic dreams: Martin Buber, On Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), 157. O workers’ Revolution: Michael Gold, Jews without Money (New York: Horace Liveright, Inc., 1930, repr. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc., 1993), 309. The Jewish true believers: Arthur Hertzberg and Aaron Hirt-Manheimer, Jews: The Essence and Character of a People (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 1988), 217–19. I was struggling: Arthur Miller, Timebends, A Life (New York: Perennial Library, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988), 70.

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two souls . . . warring ideals: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2. he was going to join the Communist Party: Harold Clurman, All People Are Famous (instead of an autobiography) (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 162.

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Gertrude Berg: Me and Molly (1948) Playtext: Gertrude Berg, Me and Molly (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1948): downtown, 10; a new beginning, 8; a tree, 15; Papa’s life, 10; For years, 23; To me life, 27; My father’s house, 34; A man, 76; what I want, 77.

Other Sources: the United States: Quoted in Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater (New York: Athaneum, 1953, 1975), 233. Molly became a person: Gertrude Berg with Cherney Berg, Molly and Me (New York, London, Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 190–91. fused Torah and Constitution: Jerold S. Auerbach, quoted in Elliot Abrams, “Judaism or Jewishness?” in Richard John Neuhaus, ed., The Chosen People in an Almost Chosen Nation: Jews and Judaism in America (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 10. Saul Bellow reported: Saul Bellow, “‘I Got a Scheme!’” New Yorker, April 25, 2005, 80. Jewishness, in burgeoning Jewish neighborhoods: See, for instance, Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 4, 11, 16, 64. Gertrude Berg idealized: Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men, 135. The Children, Sammy and Rosie: Berg, Molly and Me, 191–92. areas of first settlement: Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, 2nd edition, rev. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 81–82. First published 1957 by University of Chicago Press; 2nd edition, first published 1972. Basically [Me and Molly] is authentic: New York Times, March 7, 1948. The expansion of ready-made clothing: Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 154. Molly is always tempering: Donald Weber, “The Jewish-American World of Gertrude Berg: The Goldbergs on Radio and Television, 1930–1950,” in Joyce Antler, ed., Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture

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(Hanover, NH, and London, UK: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, 1998), 93.

4

ARTHUR MILLER AND THE JEWS

Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman (1949) Playtext: Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Penguin Books, 1998): today, unpaged; attention, 40; When I, 33; We’ ll do it, 66; jungle, 107; business world, 21; well liked, 18; greatest country, 6; America, 19; Well, 18–19; wonder, 65–66; Never, 34; old, 8; a business, 25; Can you, 108; measly, 10; How can, 5; mixing cement . . . even your grandfather, 44; Almighty God, 21; fearless characters, 35; Biff . . . well liked, anemic, 20; a worm, 27; one dollar, 106; philandering bum, 41; quiet, earnest, 69.

Other Sources: Shakespeare was a Marrano: See David Basch, The Hidden Shakespeare: A Rosetta Stone (West Hartford, CT: Revelatory Press, 1994). nominally Jewish: Allen Guttmann, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 13. The ethnic anonymity: Morris Freedman, American Drama in Social Context (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 48. Willy was not Jewish: C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Drama, vol. 2, Williams/Miller/Albee (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 174. What one feels: George Ross, “Death of a Salesman in the Original,” Commentary, February, 1951: 184–86, repr. in Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, Gerald Weales, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 259, 260. Miller had published: Arthur Miller, Focus (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945). 90,000 copies: Malcolm Bradbury, “Arthur Miller’s Fiction,” in Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1007), 215. a broken part: Arthur Miller, “Monte Saint Angelo,” Harper’s (March, 1951), repr. as “Monte Sant’Angelo,” in Arthur Miller, I Don’t Need You Any More (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 61. a disturbing aspect: Mary McCarthy, Sights and Spectacles: Theater Chronicles, 1937–1956 (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), xiv–xv, xvi.

156

Notes

crypto-Jewish characters: Leslie A. Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York: Stein and Day, 1964), 91. sought to conceal: Leslie A. Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991), 66. Where the theme: Quoted in Robert A. Martin, “The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller: An Interview,” Educational Theatre Journal 21 (1969), repr. Matthew C. Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller (Jackson, MS, and London, UK: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 183. was struggling: Miller, Timebends, 70. his father’s name: Ibid., 4. filial shame: Donald Weber, Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to The Goldbergs (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 165. Elia Kazan: Miller, Timebends, 185. Chinese audiences: Quoted in Christopher Bigsby, Arthur Miller and Company: Arthur Miller Talks about His Work in the Company of Actors, Designers, Directors, Reviewers and Writers (London, UK: Methuen, 1990), 64. the best Irish play: Miller, Timebends, 322. all-African-American: Brenda Murphy, Miller: Death of a Salesman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 83–87. has been produced: Ibid., 106. Rather than asking: Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage & Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 57. his own salesman uncle: Miller, Timebends, 126–31. As Jews light-years away: Arthur Miller, preface to Death of a Salesman, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), xii. Watching [ Joseph] Buloff ’s [Yiddish]: Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 305. the process of assimilation: Guttmann, The Jewish Writer in America, 13. lost in that jungle: Ronald Bryden, “A Model for the Future,” The Observer, London, February 19, 1967. archetypal diaspora Jew: Benjamin Nelson, “Arthur Miller,” in Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub, eds., Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Wesport, CT, and London, UK: Greenwood Press, 1999), 53–54. has broken a law: Arthur Miller, introduction to Collected Plays, repr. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, rev. edition, Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola, eds. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 149. The Jewish businessman: Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 147. Jews owned nearly two-thirds: Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews, 51. Exactly the same words: Miller, Timebends, 130. not for myself alone: Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: MJF Books, 1974), 21. First published 1951 by Harcourt Brace. Judaism and parental ambition: Steven Zeitchik, “A Jewish Family Drama, Minus the Shmaltz,” Forward, November 11, 2005, 21.

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157

manual labor was frequently: Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking Press, 1953), 5. It makes sense to teach a child: Jewish Daily Forward, August 6, 1903, quoted in Howe and Libo, How We Lived, 51–52. Willy’s sons: Miller, introduction to Collected Plays, repr. in Martin and Centola, 150–51. The truth was: Miller, Timebends, 397.

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Arthur Miller: After the Fall (1964) Playtext: Arthur Miller, After the Fall, in Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, v. 2 (New York: Viking Press, 1981): My brothers died . . . my brothers built, 241; Who knew, 144.

Other Sources: where the theme: Martin, “Creative Experience,” repr. Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller, 183. If his mother: Quoted in Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, 132. wish to kill: Judd L. Teller, Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), 260. each man: Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy, in Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, v. 2, 288. Playing for Time: Ibid., 447–531.

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Arthur Miller: The Price (1968) Playtext: Arthur Miller, The Price (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1969).

Other Sources: I became: Quoted in Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, v. 2, 217.

158 Notes has to be Jewish: Quoted in Martin, “Creative Experience,” repr. Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller, 183. The characters [in The Price]: Miller, Timebends, 13. One critic suggests: James A. Robinson, “Both His Sons: Arthur Miller’s The Price and Jewish Assimilation,” in Marc Maufort, ed., Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theater and Drama (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 122. unmistakably Israelis and Jews: Howard Taubman, “The Price in Tel Aviv,” New York Times, October 19, 1968.

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Arthur Miller: Broken Glass (1994) Playtext: Arthur Miller, Broken Glass (New York: Penguin Books, 1994): when she talks, 85; He doesn’t like, 49; Gellburg, not Goldberg, 4; It’s no excuse, 12; Above me, 21–22; I wanted people . . . General MacArthur, 36–37; like a hammer, 119; I never wanted, 118; I don’t know, 121–22; You hate yourself, 126–27; Of Germany, 131.

Other Sources: Demons surface: Marc Gellman, “The Demon in the Jewish Soul,” in Neuhaus, ed., The Chosen People in an Almost Chosen Nation: Jews and Judaism in America, 139. Donald Margulies, The Loman Family Picnic, in Margulies, Sight Unseen and Other Plays, 197–264.

5

PROSPERITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Paddy Chayefsky: The Tenth Man (1959)

Playtext: Paddy Chayefsky, The Tenth Man, in The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Stage Plays (New York: Applause 1995): decline of orthodox Judaism, 117; You are a saintly, 142; fine-looking, if troubled, 113; I wonder, 116; I cannot think, 134; Whore of Kiev, 104; begins to moan, 184; You are possessed, 170; I want to live, 185.

Notes

159

Other Sources: come at a moment: Irving Howe, Decline of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1970), 214–15. Struggling to identify: Miller, Timebends, 70. We might scorn: Howe, Decline, 244. social ascent: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 608. Sociologist Steven M. Cohen: Cited by Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 156. The religious services: Glazer, American Judaism, 2nd edition, 126. See also: Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, Inc., 1992), 681–82; Moore, At Home in America, 237; Sara Bershtel and Allen Graubard, Saving Remnants: Feeling Jewish in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 132; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 615; Shapiro, A Time for Healing, 162. All these books except Glazer’s (first issued in 1957) were anticipated by Chayefsky’s play. paradigm of contemporary cynicism: Schiff, Awake and Singing, 330.

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Jules Feiffer: Grown Ups (1981) Playtext: Jules Feiffer, Grown Ups (New York, Hollywood, London, Toronto: Samuel French, Inc., 1987): The Present, 4; cannot be played, 6; You can’t for once, 17; When are we, 20; I come, 70; My son, Walter Lippmann, 19; I’m so excited, 67; Any customer, 18; moral and ethical, 19; What’s new? 18, 19, 20, 75; When are they . . . I didn’t tell you? . . . You see my story, 18; I’m your father, 71; the book I could write, 67; David Halberstam, 67; You don’t want . . . Where did you, 20; Thank God, 37; Are you crazy . . . Oh, what a tragedy, 83.

Other Sources: My son the doctor: Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969), 111. Frank Rich: Review of Grown Ups, New York Times, January 14, 1982. a people: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 246.

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160 Notes

Jon Robin Baitz: Three Hotels (1993) Playtext: Jon Robin Baitz, Three Hotels, in Jon Robin Baitz, Three Hotels: Plays and Monologues (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994): Well of course, 10; I came of age, 35; the company was, 29; I’ve always wondered, 30; begins to sing, 37.

Other Sources: atmospherically and psychically: Quoted in Sheryl Flatow, “Three Hotels,” Playbill, August 1993, 37.

6

NEIL SIMON: BRIGHTON BEACH TO BROADWAY

Neil Simon: Come Blow Your Horn (1961) Playtext: Neil Simon, Come Blow Your Horn, in The Comedy of Neil Simon (New York: Equinox Books, Avon Books, 1973): May you and your brother, 72; You mean, 17; We don’t talk, 18; I don’t talk, 66; I give the boy, 67; MOTHER : Did you have dinner yet?; a woman who, 51; BUDDY: . . . Do you feel, 106; for television, 67.

Other Sources: manner of speaking: Robert K. Johnson, Neil Simon (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 7. When Come Blow Your Horn: Quoted in George Plimpton, ed., Playwrights at Work (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 212. Writing Plays: Ibid., 217. I suppose: Quoted in Daniel Walden, “Neil Simon’s Jewish-Style Comedies,” in Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., From Hester Street to Hollywood: The JewishAmerican Stage and Screen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 156. obviously Jewish family: Neil Simon, Rewrites, a Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 60.

Notes

161

May you and your brother: As Walden points out in “Neil Simon’s Jewish-Style Comedies,” 155, this speech “sounds like a direct translation from the Yiddish.” double coding: Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen, 2. Simon has frequently: See, for instance, Simon, Rewrites, 50–51, 90. how relieved he was: Simon, Rewrites, 124–25. BESSIE [to her daughter]: Odets, Awake and Sing! 54. Mr. Baker: Walden, “Neil Simon’s Jewish-Style Comedies,” 155. The story of Jews: Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today, 121. The father of Leonard Bernstein: Ibid. BESSIE : In a minute: Odets, Awake and Sing! 42. Wait, the day comes: Ibid., 85. Tell me please: Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 25. a stand-up comedy staple: Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men, 145. Jewish comedian Jack Carter: Ibid., 146. Faced with the need: Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle, WA, and London, UK: University of Washington Press, 1995), 169. excessive and dangerous nurturance: Prell, Fighting to Become Americans, 150. constantly hovers: Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual,” 365. Sabbath eve: Walden, “Neil Simon’s Jewish-Style Comedies,” 156.

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Neil Simon: The Brighton Beach Trilogy Brighton Beach Memoirs (1982, 1983), Biloxi Blues (1984, 1985), and Broadway Bound (1986) Playtext: Neil Simon, Brighton Beach Memoirs (New York: Signet, Penguin Books, 1986): September, 1937 . . . A wooden frame house . . . a lower-middle-income area, 3; temple, 35; The day they, 9; second worst name . . . born Italian . . . all the best Yankees, 6; his second choice, 7.

Playtext: Neil Simon, Biloxi Blues (New York: Random House, 1985): slight of build, 7.

162

Notes

Playtext: Neil Simon, Broadway Bound (New York: Samuel French, 1987): K ATE : This is what, 81; Myron Isaac, 23; If she can’t make dinner, 27; beloved dining table, 79–80; Mom, I’m not, 76; Everybody remembered, 67; To me, comedy, 68; I will never forgive, 71; It’s time to move, 113.

Other Sources: I wanted some depth: Neil Simon, The Play Goes On: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 192–93. My parents had: Howard Simons, Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience (New York: Doubleday, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1990), 216. Arnold is: Ellen Schiff, “Funny, He Does Look Jewish,” in Gary Konas, ed., Neil Simon: A Casebook (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997), 55. Irving Howe’s description: Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 7. Good Christ: Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 111. the brutal bargain: Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 3–27.

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Lost in Yonkers (1991) Playtext: Neil Simon, Lost in Yonkers, in The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, v. 4 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).

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Neil Simon: Three Show-Business Plays The Sunshine Boys (1972), Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993), and Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway (2001)

Notes

163

Playtext: Neil Simon, The Sunshine Boys, in The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, v. 2 (New York: Avon Books, 1980): The Doctor: 353–65.

Other Sources: We won’t succeed: Booklet for original cast CD of Monty Python’s Spamalot (New York: Decca Broadway B000426502, 2005), unpaged. be something!: Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing! 41. [I]t dawned on me: Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, Growing Up Jewish in America: An Oral History (New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 224. A British sociologist: Christie Davies, quoted in Mary Jo Murphy, “Looking for Laughs in This World,” New York Times, January 22, 2006. A book about Jewish comedians: Lawrence J. Epstein: The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), x.

Playtext: Neil Simon, Laughter on the Twenty-Third Floor, in The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, v. 4 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998): putz, 237, 244, 263; schmuck, 262, 269, 285; McFahrblungett, 258; My family, 262; what I think, 267; fragments of a parody, 281–87; gets in his limo, 243; too sophisticated, 251; too smart, 251; give the people shit, 254; America wanted comedy, 287; That night Max, 297.

Other Sources: a group of people: Quoted by James Lipton in Plimpton, ed., Playwrights at Work, 199. Mel Tolkin: Quoted by Margalit Fox in “Mel Tolkin, Lead Writer for ‘Show of Shows,’ Dies at 94,” New York Times, November 27, 2007.

Playtext: Neil Simon, Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway: Unpublished.

164 Notes

7 THE MUSICALS Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick: Fiddler on the Roof (1964) Playtext: Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996): Because of our traditions, 2; The lights go up, 38; Chava is dead, 135.

Other Sources: What made you fellows: Joseph Stein in program booklet for “New Broadway Cast Recording” CD of Fiddler on the Roof (Bronxville, NY: PS Classics, 2004), unpaged. said that the part: Quoted in Richard Altman with Mervyn Kaufman, The Making of a Musical (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1971), 167. it had been produced: Ibid., 151. scenes of traditional ritual: Nahma Sandrow, “Yiddish Theater and American Theater,” in Cohen ed., From Hester Street to Hollywood, 22. a state of flux: Hillel Halkin, Introduction to Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), xv. shtetl kitsch: Philip Roth, “Re-Reading Saul Bellow,” New Yorker, October 9, 2000, 84. the spiritual anemia: Irving Howe, “Tevye on Broadway,” Commentary, November 1964, 73–74. Jewish soul: Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times, quoted in Blake Eskin, “Fiddler Crabs,” March 5, 2004, <www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=12>. Tevye the dairyman: Michael Feingold, “Beyond the Pale,” Village Voice, March 3–9, 2004, 82.

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Joseph Stein, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz: Rags (1986) Playtext: Joseph Stein, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz, Rags, program booklet for CD (New York: Sony Masterworks, 1991), unpaged. All quotations from the lyrics are from this source.

Notes

165

Other Sources: These were our grandmothers’: Quoted on <www.musicalschwartz.com/ragswalnutstreet.htm>. Abandoned wives, Gallery of Missing Husbands: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 179. This assistance: Ibid., 229–35. 146 workers: Ibid., 304. Big Tim Sullivan: Ibid., 99, 370. By the nineties: Ibid., 368.

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William Finn and James Lapine: Falsettos (1992) Playtext: Falsettos, in William Finn and James Lapine, The Marvin Songs (Garden City, NY: Fireside Theatre, 1989): Four Jews, 97; I don’t live, 123; Falsettoland is a world, 183–84; We’re watching, 192–93; Jason actually hits, 198; Mister God, 236; My own bar mitzvah, 188; Stop! 211.

8

GERMAN JEWS, SOUTHERN JEWS Alfred Uhry: Driving Miss Daisy (1987)

Playtext: Alfred Uhry, Driving Miss Daisy (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1987): They all take things, 16; What a thing, 7; Martin Luther Werthan, 32; You’re my best friend, 36; idea of heaven, 7; The Garden Club, 20; If I had a nose, 20; I’m sure they meant, 30; I sure wish, 31.

Other Sources: With an ease: Howe, World of Our Fathers, 229 Many Jews: Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 92. became peddlers: Glazer, American Judaism, 2nd edition, 24. lively book: Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd,” The Great Jewish Families of New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996).

166

Notes

There were Jews: Eli N. Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 239. Atlanta’s Jewish soul poet: Ibid., 311. his mother’s family: Author’s interview with Alfred Uhry, New York, 1998. personal connections: Ibid. would know deference: Evans, The Provincials, 41. Mayor William Hartsfield: Ibid., 246. a Jewish mayor: Ibid., 226.

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Alfred Uhry: The Last Night of Ballyhoo (1997) Playtext: Alfred Uhry, The Last Night of Ballyhoo (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1996). Nooo-ell/ Noo-elll, 7; Jewish Christmas trees . . . Then everybody that drives, 8; A Christmas tree, 8–9; place in society, 12; This is just about, 20; You’ve always gotten, 47; New York accent, 16; White Castle, 44; My family, 22–23; Adolph, that kike, 24; the other kind, 35–36; The young people, 23; A Louisiana Weil, 10; asinine, 27; Jews weren’t allowed, 43; treated like a prince, 70; German Jews only? 69–70; Jew-hater talk, 75–76; The Christmas tree, 77; Sunny points out, 42; That’s all we wanted, 42.

Other Sources: The German Jew: Evans, The Provincials, 40. Three evil maladies: Heinrich Heine, “The New Jewish Hospital in Hamburg,” quoted in Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 384. a temple member: Evans, The Provincials, 243. a German Jewish contribution: Birmingham, “Our Crowd,” 291. the Jews have their Jews: Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy, in Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, v. 2, 288. By creating the image: Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 270. the German Jews [in Germany], Ibid., 138. There was such a thing: Author’s interview, 1998. I had been bouncing: Evans, The Provincials, xxii. German-Jewish restrictionism: Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, 102. See also Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 276.

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an ignorance, a hole: Quoted by Alex Witchel, “Remembering Prejudice, of a Different Sort,” New York Times, February 23, 1997. the level of wealth: Glazer, American Judaism, 2nd edition, 106. In the South today: Evans, The Provincials, 89. Sam Massell: Ibid., 226, 228. Incidentally, before I would: Ibid., 249 In 1996, Ibid., 315. His one regret: Woody Allen, Without Feathers (New York: Random House, 1975), 211. Not only: Author’s interview, 1998.

9 MORE FATHERS AND SONS Donald Margulies: The Loman Family Picnic (1989) Playtext: Donald Margulies: The Loman Family Picnic, in Margulies, Sight Unseen and Other Plays: Around 1965, 199; you should’ve seen, 217; wonderful . . . smart, 200; talented, 202; Look, sweetheart, 203; I raised my boys, 200; Dream, my son, 203; I took a trip . . . I had to be . . . I love the way, 220; I go through, 222; There are no, 227; I’ve had it, 203; Don’t do this, 205–06; What a party, 234–35; Remember I told, 236; I’m free, 234; MITCHELL: And the winner, 238; twenty-three hundred bucks, 246; I’m two grand, 249; WHAT DO I HAVE, 251; four endings, 260–64.

Other Sources: I am a playwright: Quoted in Schiff, ed., Fruitful and Multiplying, 385. I was eleven: Margulies, Sight Unseen and Other Plays, 340. All biographical information is derived from the Afterword, Production Credits, and jacket copy of this volume. To be a Jew: Kazin, A Walker in the City, 99. the fundamental rule: Silberman, A Certain People, 29. The notion of distinguishing: Quoted by Gregory Bossler, “Writers and Their Work: Donald Margulies,” The Dramatist, July–August 2000, 12. the ones most nervous: Quoted in New York Magazine, November 18, 2002. disturbed by change: Donald Margulies, afterword to Sight Unseen, 339. You learned: Quoted in Frommer and Frommer, Growing up Jewish, 196. meaningless bar mitzvah: Arthur Laurents, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 6–7.

168 Notes Once my bar mitzvah . . . With my parents’ approval: Frommer and Frommer, Growing up Jewish, 195. No sooner: Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880–1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 120. Cuts across: Lisa Keys, “Today I Am a Master Card,” Forward, February 22, 2002, 1. was a ticket: Frommer and Frommer, Growing up Jewish, 195. exist in a spot: Arthur Miller, preface to Death of a Salesman, 50th anniversary edition, xii. two souls: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2.

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Donald Margulies: Sight Unseen (1991, 1992) Playtext: Donald Margulies, Sight Unseen, in Donald Margulies, Sight Unseen and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996): The present . . . 35–40, 266; depictions of middle-class life, 316; My father, God! 276; It’s the six million! . . . We aren’t talking, 334; he ditches her brutally, 297–99; When you married, 272–73; Who are these people . . . Would you have preferred . . . I’m an American, 315–16; lost something . . . . When I saw this painting, 326.

Other Sources: a shadowy figure: Margulies, afterword to Sight Unseen, 338. a lapsed Jew: Quoted in Celia Wren, “The Timeless Dance of Art and Money Takes Center Stage,” New York Times, “Arts and Leisure,” February 25, 2001. We all had a sense: Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, and London, UK: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 70. Jonathan is jolted: Margulies, Afterword to Sight Unseen, 338–39. Diaspora Jews: Silberman, A Certain People, 286. the consciousness Jews have: David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susana Heschel, eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998), 5. The most common tack: Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, 88.

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Notes

169

Herb Gardner: Conversations with My Father (1991, 1992) Playtext: Herb Gardner, Conversations with My Father, in The Collected Plays (New York: Applause Books, 2000): You’re Jewish you gotta, 317; Charlie Goldberg, 316; a goyish-sounding name, 325; I don’t get it, 331; Brisket Tzimmes, 320; He even tells Joey, 330; Voo iz mine yarmulkeh, 325; I knew a man, 322; I got my own deal, 325; It’s a terrible place, 358–60; How come Roosevelt, 352; Show em, kid, 369; You watch me, 377; Yussel Solomon Goldberg, 376; Izzy, tough but warm, 379; stuck in some sacred, 385; the Royal Mounted Rabbis, 330; Charlie crumples, 381; Charlie picks up, 390.

Other Sources: Donald Margulies writes . . . the father is offstage: Afterword to Sight Unseen, 338. This is a play: Pete Hamill in Gardner, The Collected Plays, 302. Gardner’s real-life father: Quoted in William Wolf, “Conversations with Herb Gardner,” Playbill, April 1992, 54. Murder, Inc.: Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, 351. Irving Berlin: Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 21–22. the place where God: Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 34. a long line: David Lyle Solomon, A Stage for a Bima: American Jewish Theater and the Politics of Representation, unpublished diss. (University of Maryland, 2004). FDR: Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 282–300. I’ve been trying: Daphne Merkin, “Trouble in the Tribe,” New Yorker, September 11, 2000, 52. Many of these people: Quoted in Wolf, “Conversations with Herb Gardner,” 55.

10 JEWISH DAUGHTERS Barbara Lebow: A Shayna Maidel (1985, 1987) Playtext: Barbara Lebow, A Shayna Maidel, in Sarah Blacher Cohen, ed., Making a Scene: The Contemporary Drama of Jewish Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997).

170 Notes Brooklyn’s not good enough, 80; Just to sound like, 96; It could’ve been, 82; Lusia, have you wondered, 90; You look great! 96; gets the pen, 123.

Other Sources: A survey in 1989: Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture, 186.

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Wendy Wasserstein: Isn’t It Romantic? (1981, 1983) Playtext: Wendy Wasserstein, Isn’t It Romantic (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1984, 1985): When you were, 11; Mother, you can’t, 55; Janie’s mother’s dream, 7; Marty’s father, 8–9; Toastmaster General, 18, 19; I think Jewish families, 18; I decided, 28; All I want, 49; My sister-in-law, 27; If I did that, 49; Do you really, 56; Did you teach me, 57; I believe a person . . . Unfortunately, Janie, 58; A spot, 60.

Other Sources: Jewish émigrés: Walter Shapiro, “Chronicler of Frayed Feminism,” Time, March 27, 1989, 90–92, rpt. Roger Matuz, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 1989, v. 59 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990), 223. invented velveteen: Quoted in Sylviane Gold, “Wendy, the Wayward Wasserstein,” Wall Street Journal, February 7, 1984, 30, rpt. Jeff Chapman, Christopher Giroux, Brigham Narins, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 90 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 408. in a Jewish neighborhood: Wendy Wasserstein, Shiksa Goddess or, How I Spent My Forties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 3. What drives me to write: Quoted in Gerald Weales, “American Theatre Watch: 1988–89,” Georgia Review, XLIII, 3, 574–75, rpt. Matuz, ed., Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 1989, v. 59, 225. my most autobiographical play: Quoted in Charles Osgood, “Signature. Wendy Wasserstein,” aired on CBS, Eye on People, July 27, 1997, dist. Films for the Humanities and Sciences. Wasserstein has frequently acknowledged: For instance, in Esther Cohen, interview with Wasserstein in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15, 3, 257–70, rpt. Chapman, Giroux, Narins, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism 90, 415.

Notes

171

Lola Wasserstein has always: Wendy Wasserstein, Bachelor Girls (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 19. Lola believes: Quoted in Osgood, “Signature. Wendy Wasserstein.” Your sister-in-law: Wasserstein, Bachelor Girls, 20. Cf. Eugene: Simon, Broadway Bound, 76. A famous sociologist: Marcus Lee Hansen, “The Third Generation in America,” Commentary, November 1952, 495. Janie’s mother is a dancer: Quoted in Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 425. I’m the daughter: Quoted in Gail Ciociola, Wendy Wasserstein: Dramatizing Women, Their Choices and Their Boundaries (Jefferson, NC, and London, UK: McFarland, 1998), 55.

*

*

*

Wendy Wasserstein: The Sisters Rosensweig (1992) Playtext: Wendy Wasserstein, The Sisters Rosensweig (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994): Aunt Pfeni, 6; a very pretty, 27; Housewife, mother, 99; So you’re the sister, 30; Rabbi Pearlstein is a great man . . . When did you, 31; getting into bed, 104; Rabbi Pearlstein says, 35; Pish-pish, 8; a world we never, 9; blow out, 38; Look, Merv, 57; Sometimes I look, 79; too Jewish . . . Sara [he says] . . . Why won’t you give up, 81; Is it because, 82; And I’m the only, 83; Double pish-pish, 94; TESS : . . . Mother, 106.

Other Sources: Despite their maturity: Wendy Wasserstein, preface to The Sisters Rosensweig, x. really isn’t like my sister: Quoted by Claudia Barnett, “An Interview with Wendy Wasserstein,” in Claudia Barnett, ed., Wendy Wasserstein: A Casebook (New York and London: Garland Publishing Company, 1999), 186. Primary stereotype of the Jewish woman: Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat,” in Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish? 75–76. My phantom neo-British sister: Wasserstein, Shiksa Goddess, 84. There’s no one as WASPy: Quoted in Jan Balakian, “Wendy Wasserstein,” in Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman, eds., Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights (Tuscaloosa, AL, and London, UK: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 385. [T ]he standard critique: Bershtel and Graubard, Saving Remnants, 14–15.

172 Notes

EPILOGUE Tony Kushner: Angels in America (1991, 1992) Playtext: Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993): She carried the old world: 10–11; you and your children, 10.

Other Sources: Judaism isn’t: Quoted in Adam Mars Jones, “Tony Kushner at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain,” in Robert Vorlicky, ed., Tony Kushner in Conversation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 26. The Vanishing American Jew: Alan M. Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). to historically unparalleled levels: Steven M. Cohen, “The Ambivalent American Jewish Historian,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, 96 (Summer 2006): 435. See also Shapiro, A Time for Healing, 231–39. Quite simply: The letter was signed by Edgar M. Bronfman. See also Shapiro, A Time for Healing, 254–55. Look magazine published: Thomas B. Morgan, “The Vanishing American Jew,” Look, May 5, 1964, 42–46. throughout American history: Michael Alexander, “The Meaning of American Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96 (Summer 2006): 427. the essential duality: Samuel G. Freedman, “The Unassimilated,” New York Times Book Review, January 20, 2002, 21. many people think: See, for instance, Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), especially 338–43; and Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH, and London, UK: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, 1997), 188–96.

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Bibliography 177 Kaufman, George S., and Moss Hart. Merrily We Roll Along. In Six Plays by Kaufman and Hart, 117–227. New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1942. First published 1934 by Random House. ———. Once in a Lifetime. In Six Plays by Kaufman and Hart, 1–115. New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1942. First published 1930 by Farrar and Rinehart. Kazin, Alfred. Starting Out in the Thirties. New York: Random House, 1980. ——— A Walker in the City. New York: MJF Books, 1974. First published 1951 by Harcourt, Brace. Keys, Lisa. “Today I Am a Master Card.” Forward, February 22, 2002. Krementz, Jill. The Jewish Writer. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993. ———. Interviewed by Adam Mars Jones. In “Tony Kushner at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain.” In Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky, 18–29. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Lardner, Ring, and George S. Kaufman. June Moon. In George S. Kaufman and His Collaborators, edited by Anne Kaufman Schneider, 11–67. New York: Performing Arts Publications, 1984. Laurents, Arthur. Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Lebow, Barbara. A Shayna Maidel. In Making a Scene: The Contemporary Drama of Jewish Women, edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen, 72–127. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Mann, Arthur. The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Margulies, Donald. The Loman Family Picnic. In Sight Unseen and Other Plays, by Donald Margulies, 197–264. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996. ———. Sight Unseen. In Sight Unseen and Other Plays, by Donald Margulies, 265–335. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996. ———. “Writers and Their Work: Donald Margulies.” Interviewed by Gregory Bossler. The Dramatist, July–August 2000. Martin, Robert K. Social Theory and Social Structure, enlarged edition. New York and London: Free Press, 1968. McCarthy, Mary. Sights and Spectacles: Theatre Chronicles, 1937–1956. New York: Meridian Books, 1957. Melnick, Jeffrey. A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Merkin, Daphne. “Trouble in the Tribe.” New Yorker, September 11, 2000. Miller, Arthur. After the Fall. In Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, vol. 2, 125–242. New York: Viking Press, 1981. ———. The American Clock. In The Archbishop’s Ceiling, The American Clock: Two Plays, 103–204. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

178 Bibliography Miller, Arthur. Broken Glass. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. ———. “The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller: An Interview.” Interviewed by Robert A. Martin. Educational Theater Journal 21 (1969), 310–17. Reprinted in Conversations with Arthur Miller, edited by Matthew C. Roudané, 177–86. Jackson, MS, and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. ———. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. First published 1949 by Viking Press. ———. Focus. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945. ———. Introduction to The Collected Plays. Reprinted and edited by Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, rev. and expanded edition, 113–70. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. ———. “Monte Saint Angelo.” Harper’s, March 1951. Reprinted as “Monte Sant’Angelo.” In I Don’t Need You Any More. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. The Price. Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1969. ———. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. ———. “Salesman at Fifty,” preface to Death of a Salesman, 50th anniversary edition, ix–xiii. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. ———. Timebends, A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Moore, Deborah Dash. At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Morgan, Thomas B. “The Vanishing American Jew.” Look, 42–46. Des Moines, IA: Cowles Communications, May 5, 1964. Murphy, Brenda. Miller: Death of a Salesman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Murphy, Mary Jo. “Looking for Laughs in This World.” New York Times, “Week in Review,” January 22, 2006. Musicalschwartz.com/rags-walnutstreet.htm. Nahshon, Edna, editor. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Odets, Clifford. Awake and Sing! In Six Plays by Clifford Odets, 33–101. New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1963. First published 1935 by Covici-Friede. Plimpton, George, editor. Playwrights at Work. New York: Modern Library, 2000. Podhoretz, Norman. Making It. New York: Random House, 1967. Prell, Riv-Ellen. Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. ———. “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat.” In Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt, 74–92. New York: Jewish Museum, and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Raphaelson, Samson. The Human Nature of Playwriting. New York: Macmillan, 1949.

Bibliography 179 ———. The Jazz Singer. New York: Brentano’s, 1925. Rice, Elmer. Counsellor-at-Law. In Awake and Singing: Six Great American Jewish Plays, new edition, edited by Ellen Schiff, 53–173. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2004. First published 1931 by Samuel French. ———. Minority Report: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963. ———. Street Scene. In Famous American Plays of the 1920’s, edited by Kenneth Macgowan, 309–415. New York: Laurel, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1988. First published 1929 by Samuel French. Robinson, James A. “Both His Sons: Arthur Miller’s The Price and Jewish Assimilation.” In Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama, edited by Marc Maufort. New York: Peter Lang, 1955. Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996. Ross, George. “Death of a Salesman in the Original.” Commentary, February 1951, 184–86. Reprinted in Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, edited by Gerald Weales. 259–64. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. ——— “Re-reading Saul Bellow.” New Yorker, October 9, 2000. Sachar, Howard M. A History of the Jews in America. New York: Random House, 1992. Schiff, Ellen, editor, Awake and Singing: Six Great American Jewish Plays, new edition. New York: Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2004. ———, editor. Fruitful and Multiplying: Nine Contemporary Plays from the American Jewish Repertoire. New York: Mentor, Penguin Books, 1996. ———. “Funny, He Does Look Jewish.” In Neil Simon: A Casebook, edited by Gary Konas, including pages 47–57. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997. Shapiro, Edward S. A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Shapiro, Walter. “Chronicler of Frayed Feminism.” Time, March 27, 1989. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook 1989, vol. 59, 223, edited by Roger Matuz. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1990. Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub, editors, Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1999. Silberman, Charles E. A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Simon, Neil: Biloxi Blues. New York: Random House, 1985. First published 1986 by Random House. ———. Brighton Beach Memoirs. New York: Signet, Penguin Books, 1986. First published 1984 by Random House. ———. Broadway Bound. New York: Samuel French, 1987. Also published 1987 by Random House.

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Simon, Neil. Come Blow Your Horn. In The Comedy of Neil Simon, 11–102. Avon Books, 1973. First published 1961 by Samuel French. ———. “An Interview with Neil Simon.” Interviewed by Jackson R. Bryer. In Neil Simon: A Casebook, edited by Gary Konas, 217–32. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997. ———. Laughter on the Twenty-Third Floor. In The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, vol. 4, 231–98. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. First published 1995 by Random House. ———. Lost in Yonkers. In The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, vol. 4, 87–156. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. First published 1992 by Random House. ———. The Play Goes On: A Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. ———. Rewrites, a Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ———. The Sunshine Boys. In The Collected Plays of Neil Simon, vol. 2, 301–89. New York: Avon Books, 1980. First published 1973 by Random House. Simons, Howard. Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1990. Slobin, Mark. “Putting Blackface in Its Place.” In Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, edited by J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, 93–99. New York: The Jewish Museum, and Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Solomon, David Lyle. A Stage for a Bima: American Jewish Theater and the Politics of Representation. Unpublished dissertation, University of Maryland, 2004. Stein, Joseph, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz. Rags. Program booklet for CD. New York: Sony Masterworks SK 42657, 1991. Stein, Joseph, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick. Fiddler on the Roof. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996. Taubman, Howard. “The Price in Tel Aviv.” New York Times, October 19, 1968. Teller, Judd L. Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present. New York: Delacorte Press, 1968. Uhry, Alfred. Driving Miss Daisy. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1987. ———. The Last Night of Ballyhoo. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1996. Walden, Daniel. “Neil Simon’s Jewish-Style Comedies.” In From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen, edited by Sarah Blacher Cohen, 152–66. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, enlarged edition. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Wasserstein, Wendy. Bachelor Girls. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

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182 Bibliography Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Persea Books, 1975. First published in 1925 by Doubleday. Zangwill, Israel. The Melting-Pot. New York: Macmillan, 1932. Reprinted in New York: Arno Press, 1975. Zeitchik, Steven. “A Jewish Family Drama, Minus the Shmaltz.” Forward, November 11, 2005.

Index of Playwrights (including lyricists and composers)

(Principal reference, i.e. chapter or section devoted to subject of entry, in Bold type) Anski, S., 65 Arthur, Lee and Charles Klein, 14 Baitz, Jon Robin, 69–70, 117, 138 Berg, Gertrude, 42–5, 53, 62, 66, 69, 103, 129, 136 Bock, Jerry, see Stein, Joseph, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick Chayefsky, Paddy, 61–6, 69, 106, 117, 138 Connelly, Marc, see Kaufman, George S. Feiffer, Jules, 18, 66–9, 77, 117, 129 Finn, William and James Lapine, 94–6, 112, 113, 134

and Moss Hart, 2, 3 and Ring Lardner, 2 Kushner, Tony, 83, 141–3 Lapine, James, see Finn, William and James Lapine Lardner, Ring, see Kaufman, George S. Lebow, Barbara, 18, 129–31 Mamet, David, 7–8 Margulies, Donald, 1, 5, 18, 58, 77, 109–22, 122–4, 126, 130, 134 Miller, Arthur, 7, 8, 15, 18, 29, 40, 47–60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 69, 72, 74, 77, 78, 87, 89, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 109, 110, 111, 115, 124

Gardner, Herb, 18, 123–8 Nichols, Anne, 11 Hansberry, Lorraine, 7 Harnick, Sheldon, see Stein, Joseph, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick Hart, Moss, 1, 13 see also Kaufman, George S. Hellman, Lillian, 1–2, 3, 97 Hoffman, Aaron, 14–18, 19 Kaufman, George S., 1, 97 and Marc Connelly, 1

Odets, Clifford, 18, 34, 35–42, 43, 45, 47, 52, 56, 62, 64, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74–5, 77, 83, 89, 93, 103, 110, 112, 117, 129 O’Neill, Eugene, 7, 25, 42, 47, 72 Raphaelson, Samson, 18–24, 35–6, 60, 65, 72, 74, 77, 81, 83, 116, 117, 118

184

Index of Playwrights

Rice, Elmer, 25–34, 40 Schwartz, Stephen, see Stein, Joseph, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz Simon, Neil, 7, 18, 21, 45, 61, 67, 71–86, 87, 101, 117, 129 Stein, Joseph, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz, 90–4, 95, 129 Stein, Joseph, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick, 87–90, 90, 118, 132 Strindberg, August, 72

Strouse, Charles, see Stein, Joseph, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz Sweet, Jeffrey, 130 Uhry, Alfred, 97–107, 137 Wasserstein, Wendy, 18, 77, 131–9 Williams, Tennessee, 7 Zangwill, Israel, 9–13, 19, 20, 90, 124

Index of Plays

(Principal reference, i.e. chapter or section devoted to subject of entry, in Bold type) Abie’s Irish Rose, 11 Action against Sol Schumann, 130 After the Fall, 47, 55–6 All My Sons, 47, 74 Angels in America, 83, 141–3 Another Part of the Forest, 1–2, 3 Auctioneer, The, 14 Awake and Sing!, 34, 35–42, 43, 45, 47, 52, 62, 64, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74–5, 77, 83, 89, 93, 103, 110, 112, 117, 129 Barefoot in the Park, 78 Biloxi Blues, 78, 79–80 Brighton Beach Memoirs, 45, 78–9, 101 Broadway Bound, 78, 80–2, 83, 84, 85 Broken Glass, 48, 57–60, 61, 69, 98, 101, 102, 111 Chapter Two, 78 Come Blow Your Horn, 67, 71–7, 78, 117 Conversations with My Father, 123, 123–8 Counsellor-at-Law, 28–34 Death of a Salesman, 8, 15, 29, 47–55, 61, 62, 64, 66, 69, 72, 74, 77, 78, 95, 109, 110, 115, 124 Driving Miss Daisy, 97–100

Dybbuk, The, 65 Falsettos, 94–6, 112, 113, 134 Feiffer’s People, 66 Fiddler on the Roof, 87–90, 90, 118, 132 Flight to the West, 26 Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway, 83, 86 God’s Favorite, 78 Grown Ups, 66–69, 77, 117, 129 I’m Not Rappaport, 123 Incident at Vichy, 48, 56, 104 Isn’t It Romantic?, 77, 131–5 Jazz Singer, The, 18–24, 35–36, 60, 65, 72, 74, 77, 81, 83, 116, 117, 118 Jewtopia, 86 Judgement Day, 26 June Moon, 2 Knock Knock, 66 Last Night of Ballyhoo, The, 100–7 Laughter on the 23rd Floor, 83, 84–6 Little Foxes, The, 1–2, 3 Little Me, 78 Little Murders, 66

186 Index of Plays Loman Family Picnic, The, 5, 58, 77, 109–16, 116, 117, 119, 124, 126 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 7, 47 Lost in Yonkers, 82

Plaza Suite, 71 Price, The, 47, 56–7

Me and Molly, 42–5, 53, 62, 66, 69, 103, 129, 136 Melting-Pot, The, 9–13, 19, 20, 90, 124 Merrily We Roll Along, 2 Merton of the Movies, 1 Model Apartment, The, 130 My Mother, My Father, and Me, 3

Shayna Maidel, A, 18, 129–31 Sight Unseen, 109, 116–22, 134 Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The, 7 Sisters Rosensweig, The, 131, 135–9 Street Scene, 25–8, 29, 40 Sunshine Boys, The, 83, 84, 85

Rags, 90–4, 95, 129

Once in a Lifetime, 2

Tenth Man, The, 61–6, 69, 106, 117, 138 Thousand Clowns, A, 123 Three Hotels, The, 69–70 Touch of the Poet, A, 7

Parade, 99 Playing for Time, 56, 78

Watch on the Rhine, 3 Welcome, Stranger, 14–18, 19

No Villain, 56

General Index Aleichem, Sholom, 88, 89, 128 Alexander, Michael, 23 Allen, Woody, 84, 95, 107 anti-Semitism, 1, 3, 13, 14, 15, 16–17, 42, 98, 99, 105, 121, 124, 126, 137 Appelfeld, Aharon, 5 Asch, Sholem, 123–4 Ashley, Elizabeth, 78 Atkinson, Brooks, 44 Barrymore, John, 30 Believer, The (film), 17 Bellow, Saul, 1, 43 Berlin, Irving, 123 Berlin, Isaiah, 13 Bernstein, Leonard, 74 Bial, Henry, 50, 72 Bigsby, Christopher, 47 Birmingham, Stephen, 98, 103 Blechman, Burt, 3 Brodkin, Karen, 118 Brooks, Mel, 84 Bryden, Ronald, 51 Buber, Martin, 39 Buloff, Joseph, 48, 51 Bulworth, (film), 13 Caesar, Sid, 84–6 Cahan, Abraham, 36, 93 Cantor, Eddie, 22

Carter, Jack, 75, 76 Clurman, Harold, 35, 42 Cohan, George M., 92 Communism, see socialism Dennehy, Brian, 50 Depression, The, 35, 38, 43, 49, 50, 78, 109, 111 Deutsch, Helen, 76 Dickens, Charles, 93–4 Dinnerstein, Leonard, 98 Du Bois, W. E. B., 5, 6, 13, 18, 19, 20, 24, 40, 42, 103, 115, 119, 128 Evans, Eli, 74, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104–5, 106 Feingold, Michael, 89 Fiedler, Leslie, 5, 48–9, 56 Finkielkraut, Alain, 19 Forward (newspaper), see Jewish Daily Forward Frank, Leo, 99 Freedman, Morris, 47 Freedman, Samuel G., 142 Freud, Sigmund, 83 Gans, Herbert J., 17 Gellman, Marc, 58 Gilbert, Melissa, 129 Gilman, Sander L., 104

188 General Index Glazer, Nathan, 13, 36–7, 45, 53, 63, 98, 106 Godfather, The, Part II (film), 124 Gold, Michael, 39 Greenberg, Hank, 95 Group Theater, 35, 36 Guttmann, Allen, 47, 49, 51 Halkin, Hillel, 88 Hamill, Pete, 123 Handlin, Oscar, 6 Hapgood, Hutchins, 20–1 Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti, 6 Hartsfield, William, 100 Heeb (magazine), 86 Heine, Heinrich, 14, 102–3 Herzberg, Arthur, 12, 40, 42, 51, 83, 126 Herzl, Theodore, 10 Hirsch, Judd, 123 Hirt-Manheimer, Aaron, 83 Holocaust, 26, 55–6, 58, 60, 61, 62, 78, 79, 82, 97, 101, 109, 111, 114, 119, 124, 126, 130–1 Howe, Irving, 11, 18, 20, 21–2, 39, 61, 62, 68, 76, 81, 89, 91, 97 Hyman, Paula E., 76 intermarriage, 11, 12, 13, 20, 118–20, 134, 142 Jeremy, Ron, 124 Jessel, George, 22 Jewish Daily Forward, 54, 91, 114 Jewish mother, 19, 20, 23, 24, 28, 30, 33, 37–9, 42–6, 75–7, 112, 129, 132–3, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139 Jolson, Al, 18, 19, 23 Johnson-Reed Bill, 10 Kazan, Elia, 50 Kazin, Alfred, 36, 53, 110

Kishinev Pogrom, 10, 12 Koufax, Sandy, 95 Laurents, Arthur, 113 Leigh, Mike, 142 Leveaux, David, 89 Libo, Kenneth, 18, 39 Lieberman, Joseph, 17, 112 Lincoln Center Theater, 135 Long Goodbye, The (film), 124 Look (magazine), 142 Luxemburg, Rosa, 40 Mailer, Norman, 124 Marxism, see socialism Mason, Jackie, 86 Massell, Sam, 106 McCarthy, Mary, 48 Merkin, Daphne, 127 Merton, Robert K., 15–16 Mitchell, Thomas, 50 Molina, Alfred, 89 Monty Python’s Spamalot, 83 Muni, Paul, 28, 30 Nazis, 26 see also Holocaust New York Times, The, 17, 44, 57, 66, 67, 68, 84, 117 Orthodox Judaism, 11, 13, 22, 37, 63, 117, 142 Pasternak, Boris, 13 Podhoretz, Norman, 82 Potok, Chaim, 17 Prell, Riv-Ellen, 27–8, 37, 43, 75, 76 Redford, Robert, 78 Redgrave, Vanessa, 56 Reform Judaism, 97–8, 100, 142 Rich, Frank, 67

General Index 189 Riesman, Paul, 29 Robbins, Jerome, 88 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 126 Roosevelt, Theodore, 9 Ross, Barney, 125 Ross, George, 47–8 Roth, Henry, 36 Roth, Philip, 1, 55, 58, 66, 68, 73, 75, 77, 81, 89, 112 Sandrow, Nahma, 88 Savage, Herschel, 124 Schiff, Ellen, 80 Schulberg, Budd, 29 Silberman, Charles E., 111, 119 Simon, Danny, 73, 81, 82, 84 Sleeper, Jim, 113 Smith and Dale, 84 socialism, 26–7, 32–3, 34, 39–42, 64, 81 Sollors, Werner, 5 Solomon, David Lyle, 124

Sternhagen, Frances, 67 Strasberg, Lee, 35 Teller, Judd L., 56 Thomashefsky, Boris, 23 Time (magazine), 84 Tolkin, Mel, 84 “Too Jewish?” (exhibition), 136 Topol, 87 Trotsky, Leon, 40, 88 Tucker, Sophie, 22 Walden, Daniel, 73, 77 Warshow, Robert, 39 Weber, Donald, 45, 49 Winchell, Walter, 36 World Apart, A (film), 17 World Wrestling Federation, 124 Yezierska, Anzia, 36, 129 Yiddish Theater and Drama, 7, 19, 23–4, 28, 88, 90, 123–4, 125