Sherlock Holmes and the Jewish Imagination

I spent 1993, my first year of graduate school, in Russia, where I made one of the best friends of my life: a kid a little younger than myself named Max. Our friendship hit the ground running, and, more than two decades later, it’s still going strong. Why we hit it off so well I don’t know, but our shared Jewishness gave us our initial common ground. We met at a Russian synagogue which had recently been reopened by Chabad Hasidim after sixty years of Soviet closure. We both had a little Yiddish (on one occasion, I didn’t know the Russian word for pepper, and he didn’t know the English word for it, but we both knew the Yiddish word, feffer); and we shared a similarly darkly ironic and irreverent sense of humor.

And we were both crazy about Sherlock Holmes.

Why Max, I, and countless other Jews, are such passionate Sherlock Holmes fans is an interesting question. Jews are rarely mentioned in the Holmes canon, and when they are, it’s not flattering. One “seedy” client is described as “looking like a Jew pedlar;” another has gotten himself into debt and is “in the hands of the Jews;” and one has "a touch of the sheeny about his nose." There’s a smattering of characters with Jewish-sounding names: Irene Adler; a client of Holmes named “old Abrahams” in The Hound of the Baskervilles; and a tailor named Hyams in “The Norwood Builder.” Beyond that, though, the Holmes canon is judenrein. 

And Holmes himself—created by the Irish-English Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, based on the Scots Presbyterian physician Dr. Joseph Bell and as recognizably English a landmark in the literary world as Big Ben is in the physical one-- is as goyishe as an Easter ham. Nonetheless, Sherlock Holmes, much like Entenmann’s coffee cake and Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, is so beloved of the Chosen that he’s become part of Jewish culture.

This phenomenon – the adoption of a creation of one culture by another – is a pretty frequent occurrence, and it goes both ways. Andre Maurois wrote beautifully how Benjamin Disraeli, the grandson of an Italian-Jewish immigrant, became an English institution:

“Just as a beautiful Moorish doorway, brought back stone by stone by some colonist returned home, reconstructed on a trimly mown lawn, and gradually overgrown by ivy and climbing roses, will slowly acquire a grace that is altogether English… so too the old Disraeli… had become a natural ornament of Parliament and Society.”

And as the Jewish Disraeli became an element of English culture, so too has the English Sherlock Holmes taken a place of honor in the Jewish imagination.

And he did so almost from the moment he first appeared. The Holmes stories were translated into Yiddish soon after their publication in England and were an instant hit. Eastern European Jews (including the young Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said that it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that inspired him to become a writer) became ardent Holmes devotees. And when they left Eastern Europe for America and other points west, they brought their enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes with them. In 1947, a Russian-born New York bookseller named Ben Abramson became the editor of The Baker Street Journal, the official publication of the Baker Street Irregulars, the oldest and largest of the Sherlock Holmes fan societies.

Sherlock Holmes has proven his staying power among the Chosen. Even today, over half the BSI’s Board of Directors is Jewish. Reading the Holmes canon from start to finish has been as much a rite of passage as a bar mitzvah for countless Jewish kids.

Jews have also laid claim to Sherlock Holmes by writing their own stories about him, or characters based on him. This is not, of course, an exclusively Jewish pursuit – Sherlock Holmes is one of, if not the, earliest, subjects of what’s come to be known as “fan fiction,” and is probably the subject of more pastiches than any other character in history. But Jews were among the first. The Holmes stories had barely been translated into Yiddish and Russian before the Odessan writer Grigorii Breitman, in 1905, created a Jewish version of Holmes and Watson who tracked a gang of jewel thieves across Russia, and in 1908, the Vienna-based Yiddish writer Yoyne Kreppel published the first of fifteen adventures of Max Spitzkopf and his assistant Fuchs (shamelessly marketed by the publisher, Josef Fischer, as "The King of Detectives and the Viennese Sherlock Holmes").  

The trend continues to the present. Many, if not most, of the best known and most notable Holmes pastiches were written by Jews: Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Percent Solution, The Canary Trainer, and The West End Horror; and Pulitzer prizewinner Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution; Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk and Moriarty (which books were officially commissioned by the estate of Conan Doyle) stand out.

Jewish reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes didn't stop with books. On screen, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond - both Eastern European-born Jewish immigrants - wrote the screenplay for, and directed, one of the most acclaimed Holmes movies of all time (1970's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes). And on television, the best known and most successful Holmes pastiche of all, Doctor Who, was created by Jewish producer Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman, the Canadian-Jewish TV Head of Drama for the BBC who, writes Jill Lepore in the New Yorker, specifically instructed his writers to give the Doctor “something of the feeling of Sherlock Holmes.”

They succeeded. “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who,” observes Lepore, “are the same character: the Edwardian amateur. Their stories follow the same formula.”

And there is, finally, my favorite Jewish reimagining of Sherlock Holmes: Joann Sfar’s Professeur Bell graphic novels. Sfar, the French-Jewish comics genius best known to American audiences as the author of The Rabbi’s Cat, has created one of the cleverest and most original Holmes riffs yet with this series (which, sadly, remains untranslated into English  - an oversight which which I hope, for the sake of Anglophone Holmes fans, is soon corrected). In this series, Sfar turns Professor Joseph Bell himself, Conan Doyle’s professor at the University of Edinburgh and the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, into a character.

It’s a neat trick that allows Sfar to have great fun playing with the analogs. Watson has been split into two characters: Eliphas, his smart and useful side, and Ossour, his bumbling and comedic side. Lestrade’s role is played by the hulking Inspector Mazock, and in a twist that makes hard-core Holmes fans gasp by its sheer brilliance and audacity, Bell’s archnemesis, Adam Worth, is the real-life German-Jewish criminal mastermind who was Conan Doyle’s inspiration for Professor James Moriarty.

Joann Sfar's Professeur Bell, a rationalist in a world of ghosts.

Professeur Bell is not merely a pastiche. It's a sendup, too. Sherlock Holmes’s world is resolutely realistic. Holmes is a kind of Victorian James Randi, a skeptical and zealous debunker of the supernatural. No ghoulish hound stalks the Baskerville family; there is no vampire in Sussex; and it was a root vegetable with hallucinogenic properties, not Satan, that frightened the Tregennis family to death.

But Sfar mischievously turns Conan Doyle’s steely-eyed rationalism on its head. Sfar’s Bell moves in a magical world, a gothic phantasmagoria of devils and demons, ghosts and revenants, and Bell himself is as much a sorcerer as he is a scientist. While Holmes says, “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply,” Bell’s primary assistant, Eliphas, is himself a ghost.

• • • 

Why Jews should be so prominent among Holmes pastiche-artists may have something to do with the phenomenon of fandom itself, which, arguably, Sherlock Holmes inspired. Rabbi Rachel Barenblat writes perceptively that there is something very Jewish about the culture and act of fandom: “Just as Jews create community through engaging around our shared stories, so do fans. But instead of writing stories or essays or making short films which offer exegeses of Biblical or Talmudic texts, fans write stories and essays… which explore pop culture texts. We respond and re-purpose, turning and turning all kinds of stories to see what might be found inside.”

But Holmes is not the only character about whom countless pastiches have been written, nor is he the only character from that era who remains popular. What accounts for the particular appeal of Sherlock Holmes to the Jewish imagination? Why not Allen Quatermain, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, or countless other great characters? Why should the subject of that Talmudic dynamic of response and repurposing be Sherlock Holmes?

* * * 

The enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes with both Jews and non-Jews has, in my judgment, zero to do with mysteries or crime fiction. Neither genre interests me and never has. My first exposure to whodunits was Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown stories (arguably another example of a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes by a Jewish author), and I didn’t like them. Sobol hid clues in the text that the careful reader would notice and then use to solve the mystery. I very rarely figured them out, and that made me feel stupid.

Coming on the heels of Encyclopedia Brown, the first Sherlock Holmes story I ever read (a Big/Little Books edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles) confused me. Even a naar like me could see that Conan Doyle had given the reader no way to solve the mystery, had hidden no Sobolian clues in the text. It finally dawned on me that Conan Doyle didn’t want readers to solve the Holmes stories. We were supposed to read them. Conan Doyle didn’t give us brainteasers or word problems. He gave us stories—stories about, arguably, the most compelling character in literature. And that, in my view, is the secret of the Holmes stories’ lasting appeal: Sherlock Holmes himself.

I’m going to open myself to the charge of heresy when I say that the Sherlock Holmes stories aren’t really “mysteries,” in the genre sense, at all. Many of them - starting with the very first, A Study in Scarlet - are vehicles for Conan Doyle's real love, which was adventure stories - tales of cowboys, brigands, sailors at sea, mutinies, battles in the Khyber Pass, shoot-outs and gunfights, secret societies like the Klan and Mafia, vendettas and vengeance. Think of "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott," "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," "The Red Circle," The Valley of Fear, etc. They read more like stuff out of Boys' Own Magazine than they do like Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. And the crimes Holmes solves are, in many cases, incidental. They're merely the means by which Conan Doyle showcases the attributes and characteristics of his great character.

I assert this with confidence, because Joseph Bell himself, the inspiration for Holmes, was neither cop nor detective. He was a physician and a professor. And the mysteries he solved weren’t crimes, they were diseases.

It wasn't crime that Conan Doyle was showcasing, it was Bell himself and the processes of his mind—the diagnostic strategy of observation and deduction that Holmes enthusiasts even today refer to as “The Method” – that fascinated Conan Doyle, not “the petty puzzles of the police court,” as Sherlock’s brother Mycroft called his cases. And in fact, Sherlock Holmes himself says as much, when he tells Watson in “The Copper Beeches,” “Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.”

If it's the character and characteristics of Holmes, then, that attracts us, what are those characteristics, and what is the secret of their appeal to Jewish readers?

* * * 

The obvious and immediate answer is his intelligence. Holmes is brainy, and that in itself appeals to the Jewish reader. The archetypal hero or exemplar in Jewish culture isn’t the fighter, it's the thinker - the guy who uses his brains, not his fists. It isn’t brawny Esau who wins Isaac's paternal blessing, it’s clever Jacob. David the warrior may have built the empire, but it’s Solomon the Wise who is allowed to build the Temple.

And it isn’t just that Holmes is smart—his mental processes have a recognizably Jewish, almost a Talmudic, flavor.

The American humorist Leo Rosten, in The Joys of Yiddish, tells a version of the hoary Jewish joke about the old man on the train who sizes up the young man sitting across from him. By a long internal process of observing and deducing, he figures out that the young man is on his way to propose, and opens a conversation with the young man by blurting, “Mazel tov on your engagement to Miss Sylvia Rosenberg!” Dumbfounded, the young man asks the older one how he could possibly have known that, whereupon the old man smiles and answers, “My dear boy, it’s obvious!” Substitute “elementary” for “obvious,” and it could just as easily have been Holmes himself sitting on the train.

Holmes also resonates with Jewish readers, I suspect, because he’s eerily similar to a type that frequently recurs in Jewish folklore and literature: the Litvak.

Strictly translated, “Litvak”, in Yiddish, means “a Jew from Lithuania." But it implies far more than that. The Litvak had a certain reputation, as the YIVO Encyclopedia describes him:

The stereotypical Litvak is portrayed as unemotional, withdrawn, intellectual, and mercilessly critical; he challenges authority and is by nature skeptical, stubborn, and impatient with, and suspicious of, others. The Litvak’s commitment to tradition is suspect; his Judaism purely intellectual. 

This sounds an awful lot like Watson’s description of Holmes from “The Greek Interpreter”:

This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence. 

…and like that in “A Scandal in Bohemia:”

“All emotions, and [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.” 

This Litvish type—the cold, hyper-rational creature of pure intellect—appears throughout Jewish literature. Perhaps the best known instance of the type is Danny Saunders, the subject of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. Danny Saunders possesses this kind of cold, hard, merciless, crystalline intellect, and his father the Rebbe, who recognizes the type (his brother, Danny’s uncle, had been one of these brains without a heart), resorts to a drastic solution: he raises Danny in complete silence, devoid of any paternal warmth or love, to break his heart, teach him grief and suffering, and in doing so, teach him empathy, and what it means to be human - to give him a conscience.

Neil Gaiman, in his magisterial Sandman graphic novels, wrote about a dream-library of books never written, but which should have been. One of these volumes is The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes, which, as Gaiman says in an interview in The Sandman Companion, “is the one thing that Holmes didn’t have.” Which makes one wonder what would have happened had Holmes’ father raised him in silence as well.

But and in my more fanciful moments, it strikes me that Noam Chomsky, one of the most brilliant and indignant intellects of our time—he almost single-handedly created the entire discipline of cognitive science, and has been a fierce and uncompromising moral voice in politics --is precisely what Sherlock Holmes would have been, had he possessed a conscience. Chomsky, at least in his younger years, even resembled Conan Doyle’s description of Holmes from A Study in Scarlet:

The young Noam Chomsky--Holmes to the pipe. 

His very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer… His eyes were sharp and piercing… and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. 

• • • 

Intellectual similarities aside, there are other elements of Holmes’ character that resonate powerfully with the Jewish reader.

Perhaps foremost among these is the fact that Holmes is an outsider, a status which echoed the position of the stateless and marginalized Jews of Europe. He’s not a policeman or a member of any official or government force, and is, at times, openly antagonistic toward the official police. He doesn’t wear a uniform. He’s an amateur, an independent agent. European Jews, who lived on the margins of European life and who, throughout most of their history, had been prohibited from serving in armies or militias, may well have recognized in Holmes a fellow traveler. And it is perhaps worth remembering that when Sherlock Holmes was appearing in the Strand magazine, the Dreyfus case was raging in France, reminding the Jews of 19th-century Europe what would happen to them if they dared don a uniform or join any official State force.

Not only did he not belong to any instrument of official authority, he was openly contemptuous of it. Holmes answered to a higher morality than the official, state-sanctioned one: his own. Throughout the stories—in “The Blue Carbuncle,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” “Black Peter,” etc.—Holmes decides not to turn the “criminal” over to the state’s authority when he judges that justice would be better served by not doing so. He acts according to his own lights—another characteristic that parallels the Jewish experience. Jews, throughout the course of our long history, have frequently been obliged to choose between the law of the state and the law of God. Generally, we've opted for the higher authority.

In another echo of Holmes to Jews, he is the quintessential urbanite—a resident of one of Europe's largest and most cosmopolitan cities (so devoted to the London metropolis that he keeps an exact map of London in his head), an apartment dweller whose regard for rural life borders on revulsion. He detests and distrusts the countryside, as he says to Watson in “The Copper Beeches:”

All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and gray roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.

"Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street. But Holmes shook his head gravely.

"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."

"Good heavens!" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?"

"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

* * * 

And perhaps most powerfully, Holmes is arguably the most eminently adaptable character in all of literature.

One of the most thumbed-through volumes on my shelf of Holmesiana is Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, and others that place the Great Detective in a wild variety of settings: America, outer space, other planets, in the far future, etc. He moves effortlessly from era to era and place to place. And he was doing so long before that book’s publication. Basil Rathbone’s Holmes easily made the transition from fighting Moriarty to fighting the Nazis; and in more recent time, Benedict Cumberbatch’s incarnation is as at home using a smartphone as the original was using a magnifying glass.

Like the Jews, Sherlock Holmes originated in a time and place that no longer exists. His very name evokes Victorian London’s gaslit, fog-choked streets and his cozy digs in Baker Street as much as the Jewish sacred texts evoke a desert society of 3,000 years ago. But he is no more dependent upon his original context than is Judaism. Both Sherlock Holmes and Judaism are flexible tropes, adaptable enough to thrive in almost every human context, durable enough to survive the Diaspora and the Great Hiatus. They are both ageless yet contemporary, open to revision, reinterpretation, and reimagining by every generation.

Highway Zekhtsik-Eyn Revisited: Paul Kriwaczek's "Yiddish Civilization."

The late Paul Kriwaczek is one of those people I really wish I'd had the chance to meet. He was a fascinating guy who lived one of those big, bold lives that the more conventional among us envy. The son of Viennese-Jewish refugees who made it--barely--to London when he was three, he grew up to be a dental surgeon (who practiced in Kabul, of all places), and later became a radio and TV producer for the BBC. In his later years, he wrote histories--wonderful histories, wide-ranging, beautiful, personal, eminently readable, witty, erudite, and engaging. His books are the result of a lifetime of reading, listening, learning, thinking, synthesizing, and then finally turning it all loose on paper--tour-de-forces of the retentive and synthesizing mind.

It's the sort of mind that another late hero of mine, the shamefully unappreciated speculative fiction writer Avram Davidson, had. Shortly before he died, he produced a strange and rather marvelous book--Adventures in Unhistory--wherein he sifts through the accumulated data of a lifetime of reading and divines connections between them to trace the origins of legendary beasts like dragons, phoenixes, mermaids, the Rough Beast Slouching Towards Jerusalem, werewolves, etc--to their decidedly unlegendary and mundane origins. And so did my idol, the legendary Joseph Pulitzer, who was famous--in some quarters, feared--for his truly prodigious memory, for his eerie ability to recall from it the smallest, most niggling, and most arcane of data, and for his ability to draw connections between, and see patterns in, the seemingly unrelated bits of data residing in the massive storehouse of his powerful brain.

It's the kind of mind one might flippantly describe as "Talmudic," although, since Davidson, Pulitzer, and Kriwaczek were all Jewish, perhaps not as flippant as it might seem at first. Because their mental processes and methods--cramming the mind full of data and then training it to make connections between seemingly disparate and unconnected bits of information--are, in fact, precisely those utilized by generations of Talmud scholars of Central and Eastern Europe.

Which brings me back neatly to Paul Kriwaczek.

He died too soon, having written only three books. I wish he'd been able to write more. But the three that we do have--In Search of Zarathustra: The First Prophet and the Ideas that Changed the Word, Babylon, Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilizations, and Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Civilization--are magnificent. They are all about the fluidity of human civilizations, about how of ideas move from people to people, and the resulting transmutations of those civilizations themselves--how they shape, and are shaped by, the ideas which they transmit and to which they give rise, and all about the strange things that happen at those borders. These are the kinds of things I'm interested in. Yiddish Civilization--his second book, and the one he was most proud of--powerfully engaged me, perhaps because he says something I've been thinking about for a long time, and in doing so challenges something that's bothered me ever since I started thinking about it.

*     *     *

I watched the film Schindler's List with a granddaughter of victims of the Babi Yar massacre, which magnified the emotional effect of the movie a thousandfold. We were not romantically involved, but our hands sought out each others', and long after the movie was over, we continued to cling to each other.

But when I saw it a second time with my mother, the experience had much less of an impact. It didn't move me, it irritated me, and I wasn't sure why. But I realized what was bothering me later, as I watched Hollywood roll out a parade of other Holocaust-themed movies--Jakob the Liar, The Pianist, Life is Beautiful, etc.--in Schindler's wake.

The much maligned historian Norman Finkelstein, himself the child of Holocaust survivors, maintains that the Holocaust has been cynically suborned to drum up support and sympathy for what is essentially an apartheid state. While I don't agree completely with Finkelstein's analysis, I too am bothered by the emphasis placed on the Holocaust for two reasons.

First, it implies that Jewish suffering is unique, which is untrue. The Roma were also nearly wiped out by Nazis, and given enough time, the Slavs wouldn't have fared much better--the Nazis planned to murder half and use the other half as slave labor. And moving beyond the Holocaust, the Armenians, the Anatolian Greeks, the Kurds, the Tutsis, and many other peoples have suffered attempted genocide.

Secondly, this unrelenting emphasis on the Holocaust reduces three thousand years of a people's history to the six worst. If you ask any non-Jewish American one thing he or she can tell you about the Jewish people, chances are very few of them will be able to tell you about the aforementioned Joseph Pulitzer. Or Albert Einstein, or Sigmund Freud, or Benjamin Disraeli, or Jonas Salk, or Karl Marx or Moses Mendelssohn, or Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Franz Kafka, or David Ricardo or Judah Cresques, or Benedict Spinoza, who more or less singlehandedly ushered in the age of modernity, or Moses Maimonides. Or Jesus and Saint Paul, or Moses. Or any of the other Jewish luminaries whose ideas helped shape the world. But they WILL be able to tell you that the Jews are awfully good at getting killed.

Viewing Jewish history from our post-Holocaust vantage point only strengthens what Salo W. Baron, the great Columbia Jewish historian, called the "lachrymose interpretation": the tendency to read Jewish history as an unbroken chronicle of suffering, one long stretch of pogrom after expulsion, a long and miserable slog through the Valley of the Shadow of Death beginning with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

It's a depressing and, to be honest, rather self-indulgent view of Jewish history, leading, as it does, to the conclusion that the Jews survived as a people due to some inherent superiority of the culture or traditions, which is nonsense--Jewish exceptionalism is as pernicious and dangerous as is any other kind--or because of divine protection, which is also nonsense.

*     *     *

Kriwaczek opens his book by noting the amnesia among the Jews of his generation in regard to the most recent chapter of their past, which was Eastern Europe. If that first generation of immigrant Jewish children, and their children, identified with any aspect of Jewish history of all, it was with the Biblical rather than the more recent, a tendency perhaps strengthened by the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the land of the Bible itself, in 1948. Many of them had (or feigned having) no idea of, and no interest in, where in Europe their parents or grandparents had come from. It's a phenomenon I observed firsthand--only grudgingly did my grandmother reveal that she knew where her father, my great-grandfather, was born (in the Polish city of Plock). She was an American. The Old Country was irrelevant and an embarrassment. It was almost like incest or alcoholism--a dark and tragic episode of family history that we'd all be much better off forgetting, thank you very much, so let's not speak of it again.

Yiddish Civilization, I hope, will serve as at least a partial correction to that attitude, because it challenges this paradigm and paints a radically divergent picture of Jewish history.

Kriwaczek's opening contention that today's Jews are the descendants not only of Judaean exiles, but are a duke's mixture of many different peoples, isn't a new one. It's ground already well-trodden by many, including the Marxist historian Abram Leon (who wrote that "the most superficial examination of the question leads us to the conclusion that the Jews constitute in reality a mixture of the most diverse races. It is evidently the Diaspora character of Judaism which is the fundamental cause of this fact. But even in Palestine, the Jews were far from constituting a 'pure race'”) and Arthur Koestler, who, in his mischievous Thirteenth Tribe, suggested that the bulk of Ashkenazic Jewry descended not from exiled Judaeans but from a Turkic people, the Khazars, at least some of whom converted to Judaism somewhere around the 7th century.

The idea has further been explored by Kevin Brook, in his book The Jews of Khazaria, and by the Israeli linguist Paul Wexler, who self-hatingly claims, in his snarky and mean-spirited book The Ashkenazic "Jews"--A Turko-Slavic People in Search of an Identity  that Yiddish is nothing more than a Slavic dialect with a German vocabulary. And Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People contests the idea that there is actually a Jewish people at all.

Kriwaczek is more measured and humane than any of these, and his contentions less calculated to inflame. Certainly the Jewish people, even before the destruction of the Second Temple, was already both widely dispersed, with large communities in Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt, and even Rome itself, and highly heterogeneous, having already absorbed a fair amount of their neighbors, like the Aramaeans and the Idumaeans (the Edomites of the Bible). Moreover, they were at that time pretty active proselytizers as well. Many early Diaspora communities were comprised largely--in some cases, entirely--of local proselytes. And it is at this point, against the backdrop of the early Diaspora, that the Yiddish civilization and people begin.

Ethnogenesis--the beginning of a people--is a messy and imprecise process. Every national or ethnic group is, undoubtedly, made up of a bunch of different peoples who, over the course of time, a few shared experiences, and the gradual adoption of a genesis myth and a single language, begin to think of themselves as one people. The Ashkenazic Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were no different. Kriwaczek identifies two ancestral strains--the Latin-speaking Jews of the Roman Empire's west, and the Jews of the Empire's east, Greek by language, culture, and in many cases, ancestry--which moved across Europe in two different directions. Along the way, the Latin Jews moved north and east into the Germanic regions, abandoning Latin for German as they did so; the Jews of the Greek sphere moved north and west into the areas around the Black Sea, picking up Greek, Slavic, and Turkish converts on the route as well, abandoning Greek for Slavic as the Latin Jews ditched Latin for German, and settled across Slavic Eastern Europe.

Eventually, the two strains met in the middle--at Ratisbon, as the city was called by its original Celtic inhabitants, renamed Regensburg by the Germans who eventually came to possess it--and hammered out a shared language: Yiddish, that weird and wonderful hybrid of German, Slavic, and Hebrew. It is in Regensburg, he says, where the two strains: the western-Latin-German Jews and the eastern-Greek-Slavic Jews--came together in what became known as the Heym, or "homeland": the great Jewish nation within the Catholic Slavic heartland of Europe.

The fusion was a little imperfect. The German Jews looked down on their Eastern co-religionists, who were rather unlearned and whose "Judaism" was idiosyncratic at best, and certainly not according to Hoyle. This faultline persisted right down to the present day. But even if there was a little snobbery on the Germans' part, the two strains melded, creating one of the great nations of Europe--a nation not of eternal wanderers and aliens, guests in someone else's country, but just as "indigenous", and in some cases more so, as any of their neighbors.

Thinking of Yiddish Jewry (as differentiated from the Ladino-speaking Sephardim of the Mediterranean, or the Arabic-speaking Mizrachim of the Middle East) within the context of broader European history--as an emerging European nation alongside many other emerging European nations--gives us the opportunity to consider Jewish history comparatively instead of in a vacuum. And from that perspective, Jewish history doesn't look quite so bad.

Jews, along with many other peoples, poured into Eastern Europe in the medieval period the way American pioneers moved west, and for the same reason. Thinly-populated Eastern Europe, much like the American West, was the land of opportunity. And the Yiddish Jews of the Heym made out pretty well in Poland, Lithuania, and elsewhere throughout Eastern Europe. They enjoyed a remarkable amount of autonomy, regulated their own affairs through their own national government--the Council of the Four Lands--and on the local level through the Kehillot, the local self-governing units of individual Jewish communities. They outnumbered Christians in many places, and generally did better economically, enjoying favored status and exclusive control over certain economic functions, like tax-farming. granted by kings and noblemen who valued their expertise. They weren't merely a part of the emerging Eastern European economy, they WERE the emerging Eastern European economy, advantaged as they were by a long mercantile tradition and connected culturally and economically with other Jewish communities across the world.

Was there suffering? Undoubtedly. But those were brutal times, and everyone suffered, some peoples far worse. Nor, says Kriwaczek, were Jews generally singled out for persecution. The Inquisition, for example, didn't target Jews specifically. It went after everyone who deviated from orthodox Catholicism, including Muslims, Cathars and Bogomils (whose history as secret Zoroastrians he traces most enjoyably in his Zarathustra book), Albigensians, and everyone else. Jews may have been expelled from time to time and in certain places, but they weren't alone. Lots of people were expelled from lots of places, and in most cases, the Jews were let back in pretty quickly. The Crusaders may have gone after them, but they also went after Albigensians, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and, on occasion, each other. And being Jewish may actually have spared the Jews a good deal of suffering as well. As non-combatants in the Catholic-Protestant wars, they missed the worst of Christian internecine fighting, and even made out pretty well, numbers-wise--whole communities of Czech Protestants, when the fighting went against them, converted en masse to Judaism instead of returning to the Catholic fold, and were absorbed part and parcel into the Heym.

Kriwaczek is too much of a gentleman to say it aloud--his books refrain from attacking other historians--but there runs throughout Yiddish Civilization a sort of good-natured implied rebuke to those historians who concentrate on the Jews exclusively, throwing context out the window; and who extrapolate the worst events to befall them as emblematic of their entire history. In contrast to the picture presented by the "lachrymose interpretation," Kriwaczek reimagines the Heym as a large, vibrant, and in many ways quite powerful member of the European family of nations.

*     *     *

When things did go south in Eastern Europe, the Heym too suffered. Eastern Europe's economic collapse in the 17th century hit the Heym hard, as did the Khmelnitsky massacres in Ukraine (although, as Kriwaczek is quick to point out, the Cossacks who murdered Jews killed a lot more Poles, and generally did it far more brutally). The Heym's long, slow decline mirrored that of Eastern Europe's, culminating with the Third and final partition of Poland in 1795, which brought much of the Heym under Russian domination (although, as Kriwaczek also points out, the end of Poland was disastrous for the Poles as well). The Russians penned the Jews into the Pale of Settlement, severely circumscribing their movement, barred them from certain professions and from land ownership, and abolished the Kehillot (the Council of the Four Lands had been done away with earlier), ending their self-governing communal autonomy and hastening the Heym's demise. Under the Russian Tsars, the Yiddish Jews of the Heym became how they are viewed today: a despised, marginalized, downtrodden, and alien minority existing at the fringes of society, suffered only grudgingly, if at all, by the Christian masters of Europe.

It got worse after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (the assassins included within their number one Hessie Helfman, a Jewish girl), the ascension of the reactionary Alexander III, whose Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedenostsev, enacted policy designed to bring about what he thought would solve Russia's Jewish problem: one-third of the Jews should be killed, one-third forced to emigrate, and one-third totally assimilated into Russian society. Pogroms broke out, instigated, as Michael Aronson argues in his book Troubled Waters, by the Tsarist government.

In response to the latest wave of Tsarist persecution, much of the Heym, already reeling, simply uprooted itself. Millions of Yiddish Jews just picked up and left, going either West to Europe and America or south to Palestine. And the disasters of the 20th century simply finished the job. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and, finally, the Holocaust, conclusively killed off what was left of the Heym.

The great Jewish nation of the Heym is now one with plenty of other communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, which have moved elsewhere, merged with other communities, or ceased to exist altogether. But even if it no longer exists except as a fading (and often suppressed) memory, the Heym was the crucible of the modern Jewish people. It's where the vast majority of today's Jews originated, forming modern Jewry's attitudes and informing its identity. It is as as crucial a chapter in Jewish history as was the Babylonian, Greek, or Spanish chapters, and will, G-d willing, someday be remembered that way. 

Deconstructing Ann Coulter

Andre Maurois, in his beautiful, impressionistic biography of Benjamin Disraeli, writes of the words of consolation that Disraeli's great rival, William Ewart Gladstone, wrote to him upon the occasion of Disraeli’s wife’s death: “He was sincere, and for an instant, no doubt, each of the two rivals appeared to the other in his true light, no longer distorted by passion. Thus it happens that from time to time, a madman may have a few minutes of relief, during which his phantoms flee away.”

So it occasionally happens. Every so often, we are given the grace to view those whom we despise and detest with understanding and compassion. I recently had that sort of moment concerning Ann Coulter, whom I’ve never met and most likely never will, since I’m not famous, and whom I regard as the absolute worst, out of a strong field of contestants, of the far-right-wing political commentators and pundits.

There aren’t really words strong enough to describe the depths of my antipathy for Ann Coulter. Her smugness, her shrillness, her stridency, her mean-spiritedness, the jawdroppingly stupid outrageousness of her public statements, elicit in me a visceral disgust and a rise in my gorge not unlike the one I experienced when, as a child, I picked up the body of a dead bird I’d found in the woods, and saw its underside crawling with maggots.

Ann Coulter today, the snarling darling of the Far Right fringe. 

The sheer banality and calculated offensiveness of the stuff this detestable bitch says (“Liberalism is a mental disease,” “Enthusiasm for soccer is a sign of moral decay,” etc.) are shocking even to someone like me, who enjoys being offensive and appreciates the quality in others, and who is, as Robert Benchley once described himself, “an old public school boy with a strong stomach.” The terms she uses in reference to Arabs and Muslims—“ragheads,” “jihad monkeys,” “carpet merchants,” “camel jockeys,” and her demand that Muslims be barred from airplanes and suggestion that instead “They could use flying carpets”—are worse than racist, they’re not funny. She goes for the cheap shot—cheap shots like “Man Coulter,” “Stan Coulter,” “Dan Coulter,” and Ann-Drogynous Coulter.”

On one of these occasions, she reminded me forcibly of an asshole I knew in fourth grade who used to call a biracial friend of mine “nigger,” “zebra” and “Oreo,” as we rode the bus to school, looking around quickly after each insult to gauge the other kids' reaction to his bons mot. 

It was at that moment that my Mauroisian moment hit me like a ton of bricks. In one second, I got Ann Coulter. I understood her completely, right down to what I’m certain are the cracked and leathery soles of her greyhound-like feet. At that second, I could read her whole history and psychology like a book.

I don’t know anyone who knew her in her youth, so I’ll probably never get confirmation of my hypothesis, but I don’t really need it. Even if I were proven wrong about her, it wouldn’t do any good. Much as a religious zealot, confronted with unassailable evidence that his faith is malarkey, digs in his heels and continues to keep the faith, so would I. The following is purely hypothetical, but I’m sure as shootin’ that I’m right. But you judge for yourself.

Ann then, as a high school student at New Canaan High School. 

Ann Coulter was, throughout most of her childhood and adolescence, a painfully shy, gawky, awkward, clumsy girl who looked like she was built out of kneecaps and tinkertoys. She would have been mousily invisible had she not shot up to adult height somewhere around seventh or eighth grade, and thus became a magnet for mockery—not that of the genuinely cool kids, who probably ignored her, but that of the second-tier cool kids, the hangers-on and toadies. Throughout adolescence, she kept her mouth shut (no doubt to hide her braces and retainer as much as to keep quiet), and she walked with a stoop to try and hide her Amazonian height. She moved with the quick, small, mincing steps of a person both hurrying to class and petrified of her own clumsiness. Once, perhaps several times, in spite of her caution, she tripped over her own feet going down a staircase, scattering the books, notebooks, folders, pens, and pencils she usually kept clasped tightly to her chest all over hell’s half acre, to the hilarity of whomever happened to be standing around. She probably spent most evenings weeping herself to sleep.

When she got to college, however, that all changed.

At Cornell, she quickly discovered that some men like tall, blonde, blue-eyed, willowy women, and she, to quote Naomi Wolf, bloomed in the sunlight that is male sexual attention. Or to put it more concisely and less poetically, she slutted out. Once she realized she was desirable, she gave it away like candy at Halloween. She threw it out there like nobody’s business. She took all comers. She not only became easy, she became notoriously so.

Eventually, though, she realized her mistake. It was the wrong kind of attention. She’d been reduced to nothing but a slampiece, a toy, a three o’clock girl, a skank, a cooze, a disposable momentary diversion, a dehumanized walking means of the relief of unbearable urges.

Or maybe she just got a dose of the clap. Either way, it made her mean.

I’ve often thought that conservatism is the default political position of the mean. Political affiliation, most likely, is as much a due to temperament as it is to upbringing or conviction, and modern American conservatism is the preserve of the bilious and dyspeptic. Immigrants? Send ‘em back. Blacks? Cut ‘em off. Welfare, Affirmative Action, all of it. Let ‘em sink or swim. Hopefully sink. Gays? Don’t let ‘em marry. Women? Send ‘em back to the kitchen. Prisoners? Fry ‘em. Other countries? Bomb ‘em. Poor kids? Let ‘em starve. The environment? Trash it. Spotted owls? Shoot ‘em. Pristine wilderness? Drill, baby, drill!

It’s an ugly, selfish, and nihilistic political philosophy—hell with everyone except me. The only entity for which American conservatives seem to have any sympathy at all is the fetus, most likely because it hasn’t yet committed the sin of becoming the thing conservatives hate most, which is a person.

And, just as Gollum went to Mordor because Mordor draws all evil things, so did Ann Coulter, the embittered former fucktoy, gravitate toward the far right.

But she still craved the attention. Being desired made her feel pretty—the things those college boys told her to get into her pants made her feel good. Now that she’d tasted attention after an adolescence of being either ignored or derided, she still wanted it, even if she’d grown a little tired of the threesomes, the gangbangs, the fulfilling of humiliating requests, and having to walk home across campus after being told, “Okay, you can leave now,” at two in the morning. And she realized that she could still get that attention by saying outrageous things as loudly as possible.

It was sort of a perfect storm of personal discovery. She discovered that spewing filth, which she enjoys, brought her attention, which she also enjoys. I suppose we should count ourselves fortunate she got into conservative political commentary instead of scat porn (although I don’t see much difference between the two), but I’ll bet it was a horse race between the two career options.

Read one of her books sometime and tell me I’m wrong. I’ve read a couple of them. There’s nothing profound there. She doesn’t have an original thought in her head. There’s no research, no analysis, no synthesis, nothing worth reading. Her books are nothing but long, strident screeds, insult-fests that garner attention the way a toddler throwing a tantrum or a monkey its feces does. They are self-evidently, if inadvertently, pleas for attention.

It’s even more evident when you see her in action. Watch her on a talk show sometime—everything she says and does is calculated to bring attention to herself. The flamboyant, overblown and overenunciated manner of speaking. The ludicrously plunging necklines (which expose her bony ribcage). The laughably short skirts (which expose her camel-like knees and thighs). The constant tic of tossing her long, lustrous, luxuriant blonde tresses. The affected, insincere laughter. And most damningly, the tiny, tiny little pause that follows almost every statement she makes and the furtive little peek around to see how her witticism was received—the very same mannerism of the nasty little fourth-grade tormentor of my friend on the school-bus.

Try as I might to hate her—and I do, make no mistake—I can’t help but pity her, because she is pitiable.  Under her paper-thin veneer of bravado and belligerence, she’s brittle as hell. Fragile as a Ming vase. She’s morbidly vain, but blind to the laughable spectacle that she presents to the world. Incessant self-regard without a millisecond of self-awareness. As much as she insults and belittles, she desperately craves approval and appreciation. It’s as plain as the Adam’s apple on her neck.

Norman Mailer, in his last book, The Castle in the Forest, imagines the childhood of Adolf Hitler as a phantasmagorical, horrifying, scatological and squalid chronicle of demonic activity, incest (some of it between Hitler and his brother), rape, animal torture, violence, cruelty, coprophilia, murder, and sexual and emotional degradation, all of which turned an innocent child into the greatest monster that the human race has ever produced or witnessed. One reviewer called it “an utterly strange work of naked, wild empathy,” and it is. It’s tough to have compassion for an evildoer, but it’s much easier to have compassion on the child the evildoer used to be.

If my reading of Ann Coulter’s background is correct, and I bet it is, it illustrates the fundamental irony of her existence. If I’m right, she’s a deeply scarred and wounded being, the product of cavalier cruelty, a woman whose experiences crushed all the decency out of her, and who now trumpetingly advocates and celebrates the same lack of compassion that turned her into the miserable thing that she is.

She’s probably beyond redemption, but, properly interpreted, she serves as a terrific object lesson. If we want to keep others like her from spawning and germinating, all we must needs do tune her out, ignore her screeching prescriptions, and extend respect, compassion, and empathy in all arenas, personal and political, to those who need it. 

Plumbing Salinger for the Depths of Salinger

I have a perverse tendency to like authors not for their best-known books, but for the other ones. I appreciated Catch-22, but it’s Joseph Heller’s Good as Gold and God Knows that make me fall out of my chair laughing and to which I turn again and again. I enjoyed The Adventures of Huck Finn, but I think The Mysterious Stranger is the more meaningful, and superior, work. And while I, like damn near every other American adolescent since 1951, read The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s Glass Family stories mean infinitely more to me. I don’t care if I never read Catcher again. I didn’t particularly enjoy it the first time. I thought Holden was a self-important, insufferably condescending little jerkoff. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pulled Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories off the shelf.

J.D. Salinger is on my mind lately, I suppose, because of “Salinger,” the recent documentary by Shane Salerno and David Shields, and its bombshell revelation that there are five more complete books, which will be published over a period of years beginning in 2015. Which revelation, by the way, is the only reason to see it. Now that I’ve given away the spoiler, you can avoid it. It’s a gruesome piece of work that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about ol’ Jerry from the kiss-n-tell “memoir”, At Home in the World, by the profoundly unprofound and talentless Joyce Maynard, with whom he shacked up for a few months, and Dream Catcher, his daughter Margaret’s more interesting warts-and-all memoir (which, honestly, is about the closest thing to a legit Salinger bio we've got). 

Salinger, undoubtedly thinking about himself. 

Salinger fans tend to fall into one of two camps. One faction is made up of the kind of obsessive stalker-freaks in whom Dylan fans will see analogs to A.J. Weberman: the deeply disturbed cultist types who haunted the environs of Cornish, NH, where he holed up for the last five or six decades of his life, skulking around town hoping to go through his garbage, or talk to him and see if some kind of contact from The Master couldn’t heal their own tormented psyches, or just to get a glimpse of the guy.

The other group, less creepy but more irritating, is constituted by his self-appointed guardians, the ones who bellow, “JUST LEAVE HIM ALONE” whenever a new article or biography or reminiscence appears because, after all, that’s what he wanted. They swell up in righteous indignation when anyone attempts to shed a little more light on him. They regard curiosity about him as an incursion on his own legendary privacy. I have some issues with his daughter Margaret's memoir, Dream Catcher, (mostly about the style, not the content), but the chorus of Salinger fans acting like her writing about what is, after all, her own life and who was, after all, her own father was some kind of unforgivable betrayal of the guy struck me as almost psychotic. She’s no Judas.

I don’t belong to either of these camps. I like some of his stuff quite a bit, I think he’s an important American writer, and I, for one, would like to know more about him. Salinger isn’t sacred (nothing is, really), and his life ought to be as fair game as anyone else’s. What puzzles me is why the stuff we do have about him—the biographies, the memoirs, and now the documentary and its accompanying volume—is so uniformly shitty. The biographies are largely dreck. Kenneth Slawenski's is the best of a bad lot, which is kind of like being the tallest midget in the room. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, glosses over the unpleasant bits, and is generally unsatisfying. Why hasn’t anyone serious—a first-rate academic, critic, or biographer—someone who actually knows what he or she is doing, and who could actually give us some genuine insight into the guy—tackled him yet??

Because somebody damn well should. All of us who read and appreciate him would benefit from a good critical account of his life and work. His long-term significance remains to be seen. Maybe he’ll endure, maybe he won’t. I have my doubts. But his significance to the millions of people for whom Catcher resonated is undeniable. It’s not that he owes us anything. It’s that it’s natural for people to be curious about someone who means as much as he does to so many people, and, like it or not, as a major 20^th century American writer, he’s going to end up under the critical and biographical microscope no less than any other writer or public figure of such significance. So it might as well be someone good who does it.

Some of Salinger's more outre weirdnesses--his thing for young girls, his various religious phases, his short-lived enthusiasm for drinking his own urine, his parsimony in regard to food and money, and of course most notably his self-imposed seclusion, etc., etc.--are already well-known, and I don't care to know more about them. It isn't that uniquely Anglo-American obsession with celebrity that drives the desire of mine to know more about him. If salacious revelations and celebrity gossip is what butters your potatoes, go watch the Salinger documentary—that garbage was unalloyed Us Magazine. 
It’s that we simply won’t be able to understand his work in all its complexity without knowing more about him, because quite possibly no other American writer has been more obsessed with himself. It's all he ever wrote about. Other writers have written about the Civil War, or Jews and comic books, or North Korea, or any other topic under the sun, but the only answer to the question, when applied to anything he ever wrote, of "What did J.D. Salinger write about?" is "J.D. Salinger." 

The secret of Salinger's enduring appeal has less to do with his work than it does with a fascination about him--both his personality and the persona he created. He said, more or less in so many words, that HE didn’t matter, so don’t worry about him. Just read his stuff. Which is kind of ironic, because he spent his career writing about nothing BUT himself, thereby cultivating--perhaps unwittingly, although I don't think so--a cult of personality which he then took an almost sadistic pleasure in denying to damn near everyone (including his own family).

So maybe his defenders can forgive the rest of us for being interested in learning more about him. He was a fascinating guy who spent a lifetime thinking about a fascinating thing: himself.

It’s a truism, of course, to say that every character is an extension or facet of the author. We can’t get out of ourselves. Every word each of our characters says is us, or part of us, talking. But Dostoevsky wasn’t Raskolnikov, Twain wasn’t Huck, and Bellow wasn’t Herzog in quite the same way that Salinger was Holden. Perhaps no other character in literature is so unadulteratedly the author, which Salinger more or less admitted when he said that he would never allow Catcher to be made into a movie, because he was the only person on planet Earth he would allow to play Holden. 

Well, no other character in literature except for the Glass family. Because he was them even more so. 

This is why, I think, I like the Glass Family stories better than Catcher. Catcher was a young man’s book. Its darkness is an adolescent’s darkness, and its sneer is the sneer of every 17-year old in the world, who thinks he knows everything there is to know, but who doesn’t know himself nearly as well as, with any amount of honest introspection, he will later. Catcher is about precocity, not profundity.

The Glass Family stories, on the other hand, are written after many more years of Salinger’s obsessive self-contemplation, and the greater knowledge of himself that a few more decades of that activity. Narcissistic? Undoubtedly, but when you’re most likely the most interesting person you know, perhaps narcissism can be forgiven.

"I love working on these Glass stories," Salinger wrote on the dust jacket of Franny and Zooey, and it's no wonder, since he liked writing about himself, and the Glasses are nothing more than personifications of different aspects of himself. Taken as a whole--as I suspect they're meant to be--they amount to as complete a self-portrait as ever created. "I’ve been waiting for them most of my life," he added. Waiting for the Glasses? Perhaps that's another way of saying waiting for himself to get to the point where he could discuss himself honestly, which is what the Glass Family cycle is all about.

The Glass Family cycle, to me at least, reflects Salinger’s coming to terms with who he was, right down to their shared ethnicity. Holden was a WASP blueblood: an identity which Salinger, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a kosher cheese importer, probably envied, at least as a young man. Holden, has much as he despised Pencey Prep, belonged at an elite East Coast boarding school. It was the logical place for him to be. The prep schools Salinger’s own socially-ambitious parents sent him to were manifestly not, and I can’t help but wonder if Holden’s alienation didn’t spring, in part, from Salinger’s own experience of being a Jew thrown among Episcopalians.

Or, more accurately, a half-Jew, as he reportedly found out soon after his bar mitzvah. Turned out that his mother Miriam was really Mary, a German-Irish woman from Iowa, who was passing as Jewish so as not to upset her husband’s family. By the time Salinger got around to writing about the Glasses, he’d ditched his WASPy pseudopersona. His fictional avatars, the Glasses, were Jewish on their father’s side and Irish on their mother’s, a pedigree almost identical to Salinger’s own. 

Even Les and Bessie's prior occupations as vaudeville performers rings truer to Salinger’s experience—being the child of a vaudevillian is no more ridiculous to a kid brought up on Park Avenue and educated in elite boarding schools than being the son of a kosher cheese importer. Les and Bessie’s background of sawdusty shticklach on the vaudeville circuit is probably a wry, veiled nod to his own father’s less than glamorous livelihood.

I’m also a little surprised that no critic, or at least none that I’ve read thus far, has noticed the phonetic similarity of both Salinger’s and the Glass family’s names. Bessie’s (the Glass matriarch) maiden name is Gallagher—more recognizably Irish, but still phonetically similar to Salinger’s own mother’s maiden name of Jillich (they probably have the same Celtic root)—and every letter in “Glass”, S, A, L, and G, is represented in Salinger’s own surname.

The Glass kids’ own childhoods as prodigies on the radio show “It’s a Wise Child” likewise probably mirror Salinger’s own youthful conviction, nurtured by overdoting parents, that he was special, a junior genius destined for greatness. When Salinger, speaking through Buddy, describes the popular perception of the Glass kids as "a bunch of insufferably ‘superior’ little bastards that should have been drowned or gassed at birth," one can't help but feel that Salinger is looking back, less than enchantedly, on the guy who wrote Catcher.

Each Glass kid represents some aspect, some facet, of Salinger’s own character. Seymour commits the suicide that Salinger almost certainly flirted with, but couldn’t bring himself to commit. Buddy and Waker are the hermits—Waker becomes a Carthusian monk, and Buddy, the Glass family scribe and chronicler, disappears up into the mountains (but continues to teach at a women’s college where, conveniently, he’s surrounded by all those young, pure, innocent girls Salinger himself obsessed over and occasionally seduced). Boo Boo, the perfect mother who can heal the scars inflicted on her son Lionel by the anti-Semitism of the family servants, is the parent he probably simultaneously wished he had and could be (or is he Lionel, the little kid who wants to run away?) Franny’s breakdown mirrors the one Salinger experienced in Europe, after D-Day, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, and an ill-advised quickie marriage to a German woman with Nazi associations, and Zooey...

Ah, Zooey. My favorite Salinger character, and to my mind, the most memorable. Him with the insults, the neverending bath, the cigar, and the trickle of sweat that sticks his shirt to his back. Is it possible to read Zooey as Salinger’s sendup of himself? An irascible, know-it-all, prematurely gruff little twerp, who not only thinks he’s smarter than he is, but knows he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Is Zooey Glass Salinger’s own affectionate mockery of both Holden Caulfield and the guy who wrote Holden?

Because, at the end of the day, what very few of his critics seem to get is that the Glasses are funny. Seymour, for all the reverence his siblings slather onto him and his memory, is kind of a yutz. He’s clueless—selfish in the manner of people who are oblivious to other people’s feelings. What kind of person disappears the day of his wedding, show back up, and then blows his brains out laying next to his sleeping bride on their honeymoon?

Zooey, alone of all the Glass siblings, gets it. He’s the only one who calls out Seymour for being the jerk he was. A genius, a being of almost pure spirit, too pure for this fallen world and all its imperfections, yes, but a self-centered jerk nonetheless, a Vedantic Henry Higgins who deformed his younger siblings’ development by exposing them, prematurely, to Eastern mysticism. Zooey, the way I read him, is Salinger poking fun at himself, mocking his own pretensions and predilections. Zooey gives the rest of the Glasses the grounding that they need to survive in this miserable world. It came too late for some of them, but Franny, the youngest, subjected to Zooey’s own brand of tough love, might just be the redemption from Seymour’s suicide that the family needs so desperately.

One can’t read the Glass Family stories—or at least I can’t—without coming away from them with a sense of Salinger’s own loneliness. The Glasses aren’t merely his mouthpieces and different aspects of himself—they’re the family he wished he had, the family he wished he’d been a part of. And that, perhaps, is the central tragedy of J.D. Salinger’s life—the dumb son of a bitch HAD a family. He had two children whom, by his daughter’s account at least, he kept at arm’s length, ignored, belittled, and eventually brushed aside in favor of his fictional ones. 

At the end of the day, he preferred the company of his made-up friends to that of his own. He couldn’t forgive his children for not being as much like himself as the Glasses were, and he couldn’t forgive the world for not being the way he wanted it to be. Perhaps understandably—he went through some pretty stuff during the war. So he hunkered down in Cornish, drew the curtains tight, and dealt with the world on his own terms, filtering out whatever he didn’t like and whatever couldn’t live up to his standards.

Perhaps that’s the tension, and the tragedy, underlying Salinger’s life and work: knowing that that his narcissism was, ultimately, self-defeating and destructive--and that he was unable, and would never be able, to get beyond it.

The Found Child

Most of my blog posts are sort of polemical. Either I’m arguing a point, or trying to convince nonexistent readers of something, or just up on a soapbox ranting, like a homeless street-preacher. This is, however, just as tedious for me as it is for the readers (if they existed). So instead, today I’m just going to tell a story.

Last Sunday was, in the Orthodox Christian faith, the Feast of the Assumption, which marks the death and ascension to heaven of the Virgin Mary. It's a big deal at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, my wife's family's church, which is named for the event. The congregation celebrates the Assumption with a big formal sit-down luncheon and dancing following the church service. We're not particularly regular about church attendance, but we show up for this one.

This year, my family happened to be seated at a table with an elderly couple—immigrant Greeks with thick accents, like my in-laws—and their young grandson. 

Something about the kid's appearance and demeanor appealed to me. He was a short, skinny little guy with pointed, birdlike features, thick glasses and a mop of unruly hair. He wore a knit polo shirt buttoned to the neck, khaki cargo pants, and a crucifix and a couple of other religious medallions around his neck. The first hints of a downy mustache were appearing on his upper lip, and he blinked frequently. He looked like a Hellenic Harry Potter. He sat quietly next to me, picking uninterestedly at his salad, which he eventually offered to me, saying, "I'm really not crazy about salad."

After exchanging a few pleasantries, the two families mostly kept to themselves. Unlike most other congregants at Assumption, this family doesn't know my in-laws particularly well. I felt like I should say something to the little boy--some kind of small talk--but I didn't. I'm fine with my own, but talking to other people's kids always makes me nervous. So we talked amongst ourselves and they amongst themselves, until I overheard the boy say something to his papou (grandfather) about, of all places, Hobbiton.

“Did you know there are actually forty-four families living in the Hobbiton village they built for the movie?” he asked excitedly. His papou, who looked to be about eighty and, like most elderly Greek immigrant men of my acquaintance, neither knew nor cared anything about The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or the movies based on them. He just nodded indulgently.

But geek stuff like Tolkien is something I know a bit about, and his mention of Hobbiton provided a good conversational opening. We started chatting. Along the way, the little guy informed me that his name was Leftheri (short for Eleftherios), and that he was eleven years old.

His manner of speaking was, initially, marked by a certain kind of awkwardness, which I recognized immediately. It’s a variety commonly found in precocious boys in early adolescence. It's born of the competing desires to show an adult that they’re smart enough to be taken seriously, but not to sound too nerdy. It’s the awkwardness of someone who wants to impress favorably and not alienate. It’s the awkwardness of someone who wants to be liked. It worked, because I found myself liking him.

Having suffered painfully from that awkwardness during my own own early adolescence, I know how to set someone in that predicament at ease. I spoke to him like I would to an adult, listened intently, and nodded. Little by little, his woodenness and reserve melted away as he realized he was talking to someone who shared his enthusiasms--someone he didn't have to impress--and he grew more animated as we talked, his big religious medallions bouncing against his thin little chest, 

We talked hobbits for a while, and then moved on to the other area where we had some commonality, which was Greekness. I'm not Greek, but after fourteen years of marriage to one, having two half-Greek children, having been there four times, and being passably conversant in the language, I’m about as close to that culture as a xeno--a non-Greek--can be, so I felt like I was on pretty solid ground.

“So how’s your Greek?” I asked him, assuming that, like most of the young people at Assumption, he’d spoken it growing up.

“Not so good,” he said, surprising me. “I only started learning it after my mom died.”

When he said that, I realized that I knew who he was. I'd heard his story, which had been pretty big news on the St. Louis Greek gossip circuit.

As of about a year ago, his grandparents had no grandchildren. They had three children, but none of them had married, which caused them great sadness. Greeks, like all Mediterranean peoples, are deeply, almost smotheringly, family-oriented. Family ties, even across several generations, are suffocatingly strong—you’d better have a damn good reason if you miss a Sunday family dinner. God help you if you want to move to another city.

Being immigrants brought another, even more painful, dimension to having no grandchildren. Their family's eventual extinction would be an admission of defeat, a mockery of their wrenching dislocation from the old country for the sake of giving their family a better life in the new one, if, a generation hence, there wouldn't be a family to benefit from it. 

And then their son, who, like a lot of young Greek men, still lived at home with them, got a phone call.

It was from an old girlfriend, an American (as the Greeks refer to any white person who doesn’t belong to an identifiable ethnic group). After they’d broken up, she'd moved away from St. Louis, and he'd never heard from her again. She was dying of cancer, and was calling from her deathbed with a dying request.

He had a son. She'd never told him that he'd impregnated her before they broke up and she left town. And, as she had no family or friends to take the boy in after she died, she needed to find someone who could raise him. 

Naturally, the guy was astounded. He was also a little skeptical. Perhaps rightly so. I know nothing about Leftheri’s mother's character, but during the course of our conversation, he mentioned that he’d been moved around a lot when he was younger. That and her lack of any family or friends, any support system whatsoever, indicated to me a certain free-spiritedness (or instability) which may have merited a certain amount of skepticism on his part. 

But the DNA test he insisted upon left no room for doubt. The boy was his. And, with nowhere else to go, he came to live with his father's family in St. Louis.

I can't imagine what it was like for the boy. He'd had no idea who his father was. He didn’t know he was half Greek, or that his grandparents were immigrants. He may not have known any other Greek-Americans. They can can be a little overwhelming, and I suspect that the culture shock was significant. But his grandparents, unsurprisingly, were over the moon about it. They DID have a grandchild, after all. And, like all Greek parents, they know more about everything than you do, and decided to take over his upbringing.

Leftheri's embrace of his newfound Greekness was striking. His grandparents, naturally, had given him an Orthodox baptism and a Greek name, which he’d taken to using. I have no idea what his American name was, and I don’t suppose I need to, since he’d discarded it. He joined the youth Greek dance troupe in which my daughter also dances, enrolled in Greek school and began learning the language, and proudly wore his Greek bling on the outside of his shirt for all to see.

After they left, I got a little weepy at the table thinking about him. Drinking wine in the middle of the day might have had something to do with it. But I couldn’t help wondering what his nomadic little life had been like, before coming to St. Louis and meeting his father and his family, or why he'd been so eager to shed his original name for a Greek one. I couldn’t help feeling sad for a little boy who’d lost his mother and who hadn’t had a father for those crucial early formative years. And I couldn’t help but be happy that, having come through the greatest loss a child can experience, he’d found not merely a family, but an entire nationality to enfold him in its loud, close, boisterous arms--an ethnic identity to help a lost boy define himself.

Or maybe I just saw something of myself in a quiet, undersized, bookish kid with a penchant for losing himself in imaginary realms and who found a defining lodestar in an ancestral culture, as my grandmother's Jewishness had helped me carve out a path toward self-realization.  

Leftheri was luckier than most of the children in his situation—the casualties of life’s shuffles, the kids left bereft by the questionable life-choices of the people on whom they depend. He'd found a softer landing than most. But his story, this strange hybrid of Charles Dickens and Jeffrey Eugenides, still pierced me in a way that few other people’s have. And I'm concerned about him. His grandparents, as glad as they were to get him, aren't exactly spring chickens and won’t be around forever. I worry about that eventual loss coming on top of the horrific one he's already suffered. Something in me wants to adopt this little guy. I want to mentor him, to take him under my wing. He’s clearly on a fast track to geekdom, and he's going to need someone to help him navigate the process of melding geek and cool. Trust me, no one does that better than I do.

But mostly, I suppose, I just want him to be okay. 

A Lecture from a Dead Man: What Joseph Pulitzer Would Think of the American Press in 2013.

Because I’m one of about three people in the country who actually cares or knows anything about Joseph Pulitzer, the visionary genius who more or less singlehandedly created the modern American press—and because, irrepressible show-off that I am, a published a few articles about him—I’m occasionally asked to speak about him.

These aren’t big or important venues. Mostly they’re small retiree groups from churches and synagogues, groups of the kind of elderly people who read things like the Missouri Historical Society’s journal. But I’m always glad to do it. They’re nice people and they ask interesting questions, like the one I was asked at the most recent gathering: “What would Pulitzer have thought of the state of the media today?”

My immediate answer was, “Not much.” But a longer answer is probably in order. Joseph Pulitzer was one of the most demanding men who ever lived. He literally drove himself into an early grave, and expected no less of his employees, his papers, and his family. He was a martinet of the first water, constantly hectoring, badgering, cajoling, noodging, and demanding improvement—not perfection, but improvement—from everyone with whom he came into contact.

The American media is, in large part, his creation. Part of his genius was an almost uncanny sense of what would appeal to the reader—what would grab their interest and keep them coming back for more. He was probably the greatest huckster in our history, a carnival barker with the soul of a philosopher-king.

And although it sounds like a truism today, he genuinely wanted everyone to read the paper and came up with tricks and tips to reel the public in and keep them there. He realized that new labor laws were giving the working class at least one day off a week, so he created the Sunday Magazine—lighter and more interesting fare that people could read at their leisure. He stuck in games and puzzles and comics to snag the kids. He added sections on fashion and housekeeping to rope in women. Although he thought sports was a waste of time, he created the sports page because he knew people would read it.

Because ever-growing numbers of New Yorkers were recent immigrants, he made the paper easier to read. Simplified the style. Increased the font size and the headline size. And went crazy with the illustrations, which were so good and so evocative that you didn’t even have to be able to read to get the gist of the day’s news—you could get it from just looking at the pictures.

By creating a paper that cut across all lines—age, race, gender, class, creed, native born/immigrant, level of education, etc.—he created a truly People’s Paper which addressed issues of interest to all New Yorkers. And in doing so, he laid the foundations for the creation of a national media—one that all Americans would read, watch, or listen to, and which would serve as a sort of forum for the dissemination of information, and discussion of issues, of interest to all Americans.

So, considering it is, in many ways, his creation, the thought of what he’d say if he could see the current state of the American media is daunting.

In my self-appointed role as The Guy Who Thinks He Knows What Mr. Pulitzer Would Think, I’m confident when I say that, as regards the current state of the American news media, I don’t think he’s spinning in his grave. I think he’s doing triple axels in it. Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t drilled himself out of there by now, brushed off the grave-dust, and started haranguing at the top of his harsh, shrill voice. I think Joseph Pulitzer would be deeply disappointed in the American press for three major reasons.

~          ~          ~

First off, he’d be appalled at the extent to which the press is controlled by corporations. In 2013, 90% of the American media is controlled by six corporations: GE, Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Time/Warner, and CBS. Think about that. Six executives control what 277 million Americans see, hear, and read. Do you think any of these six guys have any interest beyond financial in controlling what goes into your head?

This is what Pulitzer feared the most, and the thing against which he fought hardest—that the flow of information would be controlled by interests which have something to gain by controlling it. Pulitzer himself went to lengths that would be considered absurd today to keep both himself and his newspapers free of any kind of entanglements—personal, political, or financial—that could potentially have compromised his ability to report the news.

He was terrified of debt, for example. When he bought his papers, he paid cash—when he built his buildings, he did so with cash. After the New York World built its new building on Park Row in Manhattan—it was, for about five minutes, the tallest building in the country—the World’s headlines trumpeted, “Tallest Building In The World, And Not A Penny In Debt.” This wasn’t just boasting about the proprietor’s financial acumen (which was substantial)—it was reassuring his public that he hadn’t sold his soul to build a new building, and that no lender would have any leverage on him.  

Including leverage from himself. He once pulled an editor aside, and said, “Boy, as you know, I am a large owner of stocks. If ever I order you to write a story favoring one of those companies, or withdraw one that might damage one of those companies, you are to disregard that order and remind me of this conversation.” He never had to, of course... but I find it very telling that Pulitzer held his papers’ independence to be so sacrosanct that he didn’t trust even himself with its safekeeping.

Joseph Pulitzer was no socialist. He understood, probably better than anyone before or since, that a newspaper is, first and foremost, a business, and that before it can do anything else, it has to make a profit. And he understood that newspapers are bought and sold. He didn’t found either of his papers, he bought both of them. But I think it’s fair to say that he would have regarded the sale of a newspaper to a corporate interest, which is accountable only to its bottom line and shareholders and which has absolutely no interest in either reporting the news or protecting the public, as a rank betrayal of the public trust.

But that’s precisely what’s happened.

~          ~          ~

Secondly, he’d be shocked at the extent to which the media has allowed itself to become the willing patsy of the United States Government.

I don’t know whether it’s more reflective of the government’s increasing stranglehold over all aspects of our lives, or whether it’s laziness on the part of the press, but the government is now an absolutely integral part of the news process, which shouldn’t have happened.

Pulitzer conceived of the press as the independent Fourth Branch of government, the Oversight Branch. Supported entirely by its own revenue generation, whether through ad sales or subscriptions, the Press, protected by the First Amendment and the Power of Public Opinion, is there to hold the government in check—a responsibility it abdicated when it became reliant on the government for its information. This puts the press in an extremely precarious position. If you’re not in the government’s good graces, then you’re out in the cold, cut off from precious information, and scooped by your competition. Ask Helen Thomas. After the legendary AP reporter asked one too many awkward questions of the Bush Administration, she was banished from press briefings. A disgraceful act—she deserved better treatment than that, and it should have sent up red flags across the nation. An administration with nothing to hide doesn’t send reporters to Siberia. But too little noticed at the time.

I’m thinking specifically of the New York Times, which, in spite of its status as the Paper of Record, has, under the leadership of Arthur O. “Pinch” Sulzberger, has taken some very serious missteps. Take the Valerie Plame case, for example. When the Bush Administration, on orders from Dick Cheney, outed her as a spy because her husband, Joe Wilson, told the truth about Iraq, the Times, on information from a government informant, published the story--and then fell all over itself to protect its secret sources, even to the extent of letting the main reporter on the story, Judith Miller, sit in jail for a month for contempt of court, with Pinch crowing, “We will not reveal our sources! We must protect our friends within the government!”

Which is all very noble and heroic, but misguided. Because, as Mr. Pulitzer said, that “A newspaper should have no friends.”

Why it shouldn't ought to be obvious. When you become dependent upon the government for your information, you have, ipso facto, allowed the government to control the flow of information.

If you think that sounds like paranoia or conspiracy theory, think about this. In late August of 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office “leaked” a story about weapons of mass destruction buildup in Iraq. Of course there was no leak. The story was placed there with Cheney’s full foreknowledge. It might even have been his idea. But the New York Times ran it on the front page on September 9, 2002, as some great expose, quoting “anonymous Administration officials.”

That very same day, Cheney himself appeared on “Meet The Press,” and said, “There's a story in the New York Times this morning... I don't want to talk about obviously specific intelligence sources, but it's now public that, in fact, he [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire... the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb."

In short, he cited a story that his office had placed there as justification for our government’s horrific actions in Iraq—a war crime far greater in scope and size than anything Saddam had ever done, or ever would do. 

Like him or loathe him, you have to admit that this was a masterstroke on Cheney’s part to achieve policy aims. And the Times looked like (hell, didn’t look like, was) a complete patsy.

This simply would not have happened on a Pulitzer paper, precisely because of Pulitzer’s dictum: “A newspaper should have no friends.” The government is not your friend, and no one in it can be expected to be. There may be leaks. There may be whistleblowers. And perhaps you can get some good information out of them from time to time... but when you are dependent upon the government for your information, then they control it.

~          ~          ~

Finally, Joseph Pulitzer would be disgusted by the press’s incessant whining that no one’s reading them.

This is true, actually. Newspaper circulation is at historic lows—it’s below pre-World War II numbers. In 2009, Bloomberg reported that the decline of daily average circulation for 395 papers nationwide had doubled in a six-month period—and the numbers have only continued to go down. Newspaper management and other industry apologists blame competition from television, the Internet, and general lack of interest in the news, but as a friend of mine who writes for the AP put it, “Newspapers sleepwalked through the 90’s.” Assuming that they’d always be there, as they always had, they ignored the trends and woke up, Rip Van Winkle-like, to find themselves irrelevant.

But one can almost hear Old Man Pulitzer’s throaty Eastern European gutturals screaming from beyond the grave, “Well, if no one’s reading you, then goddammit, find a way to make them. You want to talk competition? I got people to read the paper when they worked twelve hour days, six days a week!”

As a dedicated newspaper reader since the age of seven, a one-time aspiring journalist, editor of my high-school paper, staff writer on my college paper, a working writer, a freelance magazine writer, and a longtime observer of the industry, I can tell newspapers what the problem is and it’s not competition. It’s content.

Pick up the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—a battered, flickering shadow of a ghost of the magnificent paper that it used to be—and you’ll realize immediately why people don’t read the paper any more. It’s because there’s nothing there worth reading. It’s boring, more than 70% of the news on Section A comes from the wire, and the rest of it is bra ads. Which are, admittedly, fun to look at, but again, I can see better porn online. The rest of it is either ersatz or flat. Newspapers became irrelevant not because of competition from screens, but because of their own lassitude.

But newspapers reacted in a predictably stupid way to the plunge in revenue. They gutted staff--the very writers that actually write the stuff worth reading--and got rid of the elements that, back in the day, roped readers in in the first place. The comics page—the home and cradle of our greatest American art form—is a joke and a disgrace, still limping by on the same old “my wife, she’s such a bitch” yuks of Hagar the Horrible, the "Sarge, he's such a jackass" yuks of Beetle Bailey, and the three-frame antics of a fat cat. The great strips, like “Peanuts,” “Bloom County,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “The Far Side,” are gone—and with the comics page being ever shrunken and the future of newspapers themselves questionable, we will not see their like again. And many of them responded by raising prices to offset falling revenues--which, as any two-bit business major can tell you, is the last thing you should do.

Essentially, newspapers give us no reason to read them. Which is too bad, because we need them.

News on the ‘Net is bites and clips. You can absorb the headlines, but there’s no time and no space for the in-depth analysis that newspapers, as a medium, can provide. People simply don’t like to read the amount of material that good journalism requires online. It hurts the eyes. Online news isn’t journalism. It’s trivia. Online journalism and print journalism is the difference between multiple choice and an essay question.

And this is a tragedy, not merely for the newspaper industry, but for our democracy. A working democracy requires an informed and knowledgeable public. Pulitzer, who fled a repressive regime in Europe, knew this better than anyone. It’s why he worked so hard at what he did. He cherished liberty, and he knew that the price of it, as Jefferson had said, was eternal vigilance: a service that only the press can provide.

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," the old man wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. Look around and tell me Joseph Pulitzer wasn’t a prophet.