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Defenders of the faith
Since the Holocaust, the idealised version of the Jew has been Primo Levi, a 'latter
day saint'. But, argues Linda Grant, from Samson to Ariel Sharon there have always
been tougher, more aggressive role models
Linda Grant
Saturday July 6, 2002
The Guardian
"Tartakovsky has the soul of a murderer, but he is one of us. He originated with us.
He is our blood. He is our flesh, as though one momma had born us"
- Isaac Babel, How it was done in Odessa
In 1923, my father, a hungry, skinny 19-year-old, jumped ship from his berth as a
merchant seaman on the SS Lacona, whose Ellis Island manifest lists him as a "Jew
cook". He spent the rest of the decade in New York, returning to Liverpool on the eve
of the stock market crash, and until he died in 1983 he inhabited in his imagination
the world he had lost - that of the American gangsters he had watched eating
cheesecake in Lindy's Delicatessen on Broadway.
In the Damon Runyan stories, Lindy's was thinly disguised as Mindy's, but all the
types were recognisable to him - Harry the Horse, Dave the Dude, the Lemon Drop
Kid - little-league hoodlums he ran into while driving trucks of illegal beer over the
Canadian border into upstate New York during Prohibition. Back home, walking on
the shores of the Mersey in the 1930s, wearing a Panama beach suit and a straw
hat, his Scouse accent sharpened by an American twang, he spoke of Dutch Schultz,
Meyer Lansky and Louis Lepke, the then-rising stars of the Jewish underworld, but it
was Arnold Rothstein who, for him, was the embodying myth of American
immigration.
The gangster's biography sat in the bookcase next to the twin beds my parents slept
in, removed a few spines along, for decency's sake, from the collected essays of
Ralph Waldo Emerson and my mother's well-thumbed paperback editions of Harold
Robbins.
Rothstein, gunned down over a gambling debt in 1928, was a sophisticated fusion of
brains, chutzpah and brutality, the man on whom F Scott Fitzgerald would base the
character of Meyer Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby, the crook who was rumoured to
have fixed the 1919 World Series. There had been New York Jewish gangsters
before Rothstein: Monk Eastman, Kid Twist Zweibach, Big Jack Zelig, Dopey Benny
Fein, Little Augie Fein and Kid Dropper, but they were just petty street thugs,
immigrant kids trying to earn a bent living among the warring Irish and Italian gangs
of old Manhattan.
According to Rich Cohen, author of Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons and Gangster
Dreams (London: Cape, 1998), Rothstein was the person who first saw in Prohibition
a business opportunity, a means to enormous wealth, who "understood the truths of
early century capitalism (hypocrisy, exclusion, greed) and came to dominate them".
Rothstein was the Moses of the Jewish gangsters, he writes, the progenitor, a rich
man's son who showed the young hoodlums of the Bowery how to have style;
indeed, the man who, the Italian Lucky Luciano would later say, "taught me how to
dress".
My father was not alone in his reverence for Jewish gangsters in general and Arnold
Rothstein in particular. Cohen writes: "Jews of my father's generation and mind-set
have a favourite gangster the way Catholics have a patron saint: a mythic figure who
has left them a style lived, a way of doing things." His only partly convincing
explanation for this apparently un-Jewish admiration for thugs is that our fathers
came of age in the 30s and 40s: "As they were faced with the image of dead,
degraded Jews being bulldozed into mass graves, here was another image, closer to
home - Jews with guns, tough, fearless Jews. Don't let the yarmulke fool ya. These
Jews will kill you before you get round to killing them."
Michael Chabon's recent novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
(London: Fourth Estate, 2001), describes how the comic-book superheroes were
created by young Jews in the 1930s - Superman might look like a bespectacled
geek, but secretly possesses amazing powers to right wrong and battle evil!
My father died in 1983, the year of the release of the greatest Jewish gangster
picture, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. It was no accident, I think,
that it was an Italian who had to make it. After the war, the American Jews quietly
buried the public memory of the gangster past; unlike the Mafia, Meyer Lansky,
Dutch Schultz and Bugsy Siegel founded no Families. There are no Jewish crime
dynasties. The men in wide- lapelled suits with bulging waistbands made sure their
own kids went to law school and, as Cohen points out, by the end of the 40s the
Jews as a people had a legitimate collection of tough guys - the Israeli army. It had
as its goal the elimination from its fighters of every trace of the nebbish inside
them.
In The Joys of Yiddish , Leo Rothstein, author of the H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N
books, defines the nebbish succinctly, as "someone you feel sorry for".
In the past few months, non-Jews who are acutely conscious of the legacy of
antiSemitism in the 20th century, who recognise the historic inevitability of a Jewish
state in the Middle East, who have in the past applauded its achievements - these
non-Jews are asking, with sad perplexity, "How could the Jews who experienced the
Holocaust behave like this towards the Palestinians?" Writing in the Guardian in
1999, on his first visit to Israel, Hugo Young commented: "The Jews of Israel are
very different from the Jews of London, who happen to make up a large proportion of
my close friends. Among the governing class, toughness, immoderate obsession and
visceral dislike of another race replace the tolerance, quizzical intellectualism and
gentle manners I am used to."
As the comedian Jackie Mason has observed, "When Jews go to Israel, they
become Puerto Ricans."
Since the end of the war, the idealised version of the Jew has been the murdered
teenager, Anne Frank, and the latter-day saint, Primo Levi. Frank is inviolable; she
died of typhus before we could know whether or not, after the liberation, she would
have emigrated to Israel, got married, had children and lived in the seaside town of
Netanya (twinned with Bournemouth) where, like the man I met in a Tel Aviv hotel,
she might have displayed her tattooed wrist to all comers and explained why "the
Arabs want to drive us into the sea". There is no reason why Frank shouldn't have
wound up in Netanya: among the mainly elderly victims of the recent Passover
suicide bombing that killed 29 people in a hotel dining room, several were Holocaust
survivors.
Levi lived out his life as the man philo-Semitic intellectuals have in mind when they
think "Jew". He survived the worst tragedy of Jewish suffering and rose above it to
write an account of how the Nazis tried to murder his humanity, and how he
preserved it in himself. His achievement is colossal and is sometimes mistaken for
the normal response of survivors. It was not. I have read other camp memoirs and it
is obvious that Levi was exceptional. He was the embodiment of the Jewish mind, a
scientist who also wrote great literature, a modest, humble man who lived - until his
tragic, inexplicable death - with his mother, wife and children in the flat in which he
had been born.
In The Truce, the sequel to If This is a Man, he describes his journey home to Italy
and his encounter with a Salonikan Jew he calls the Greek who has survived
Auschwitz by always looking out for number one. The Greek despises Levi,
considers him a poor creature incapable of finding the necessary requisite for life, a
pair of good shoes. Adept at buying and selling anything, he is operating as a pimp
when Levi last sees him. Levi acknowledges that he himself survived Auschwitz
largely because of various pieces of good luck, such as being too ill to be taken on
the final death march. Those most likely to come out of the camps alive were those
willing to collaborate with the system. The Salonikan would doubtless have preferred
to have as his companion Arnold Rothstein. I have often wondered what happened to
the Greek. I see him among the society of cold-eyed businessmen drinking coffee in
the evenings on the Tel Aviv beachfront.
In the past few months, I've been thinking about what my father, the admirer of
Arnold Rothstein, would have made of the current Israeli prime minister, Ariel
Sharon. Inevitably, my dad was an ardent Zionist. Together with a group of Jewish
businessmen in Liverpool after the war, he had raised money to buy guns for the
Irgun, the rightwing terrorist group that was attempting to drive the British out of
Palestine. The Irgun, together with the Lehi (known to the British as the Stern Gang),
came from a stream of opposing Zionist thought called Revisionism, rooted in a view
of the establishment of a Jewish state originating in the revival of heroic episodes of
Jewish history. The Irgun and the Lehi (together known as the Etzel) modelled
themselves on the biblical Maccabees, the family whose name means "hammer",
who tried to fight for Jewish independence against the Greeks. The Revisionists saw
Britain as Greece and the mainstream Zionists of David Ben Gurion as Hellenised
Jews, ready to compromise with the conqueror and adopt his customs.
In his higher-minded moments, the ones that, when they came, caused him to reach
for the Ralph Waldo Emerson volume, my father would have esteemed Yitzhak
Rabin, the Israeli prime minister murdered by a Jewish extremist in 1995. He would
have awarded Rabin the highest compliments he could give: the man was a mensch
(which literally means a human being but really implies a person of honour and
rectitude), and a shayner Yid, a beautiful Jew. But my father would also have pointed
out that Rabin was dead while Sharon was alive and, in dealing with your enemies, it
was the here and now that counted.
My father would have been incensed at that strain of currently fashionable anti-
Zionism that empathises with and sanctifies the murdered anti-fascist victims of the
extermination camps, while condemning as racists the living survivors who illegally
entered Palestine and fought for a Jewish state. After Tough Jews, Rich Cohen's
next book was The Avengers: A Jewish War Story (London: Cape, 2000), which
describes how his cousin Ruzka Korczak, her friend Abba Kovner and Kovner's
future wife Vitka Klemperer created an armed, underground movement behind the
German lines in Poland with the goal of sabotaging the Nazis and helping the
Russians advance. "If we act cowardly, we die; if we act courageously, we die. So we
might as well act courageously," they proclaimed. After the war ended, the group
took vigilante action against German prisoners in Nuremberg and went on to fight for
Israel in the 1948 War of Independence.
Like many Israelis in the past few months, my father might well have regarded
Sharon with a combination of distaste and pragmatic acceptance. Like Abba Kovner,
like the Jewish gangsters of Odessa chronicled by the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac
Babel, Ariel Sharon is a shtarker, a word which derives from the Yiddish shtark,
meaning "strong". Such individuals are nothing to boast about (a Jewish mother does
not proudly tell her neighbours about how her son has conducted a massacre). But
my father might have reflected that, while Jews are the people of the book, while the
rabbinical tradition of Talmudic study pulses through our history, while we are the
law-makers, the originators of the Mosaic code, the Jews have never ignored the
need for self-defence and have repeatedly handed over the role to a thug element in
Jewish society. There have always been shtarkers, it's just that we keep quiet about
them. Look at the Old Testament, at the first and most mythic shtarker of them all,
Samson.
All I could remember about this biblical strongman was the Delilah story, the cutting
of his hair by a treacherous woman and the sapping away of his strength. Unlike the
prophets, Samson doesn't get a book of his own. He puts in his first appearance in
Judges chapter 13, during the period when the Jews are under occupation by the
Philistines. Samson is the product of divine infertility treatment. His father, Monoah,
and wife (unnamed) do a deal with God, who promises a son who will deliver the
Jews from colonialism as long as Samson never cuts his hair. Samson's progress
through the verses is a list of murder and massacre, revenge and counter- revenge.
For relaxation he sleeps with shiksa prostitutes in Gaza. After Delilah (in the pay of
the Philistines) persuades him to reveal the secret of his strength, his eyes are put
out and the enemies of the Jews "offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god... for
they say, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy, and the destroyer of our
country, which slew many of us".
But those stupid goyem don't realise that while Samson languishes in prison his hair
is growing. They take him out for a bit of sport and tie him to the pillars of the
building. Samson prays to God to grant him the strength to deliver a final crushing
revenge. Straining his muscles, he brings down the building on top of him, with 3,000
people gathered on the roof, "so the dead which he slew at his death were more than
they which he slew in his life".
It should be pointed out that every time Samson brandishes his ass's jawbone and
murders a few more Philistines, God couldn't be more delighted. Samson, like the
Golem (the medieval Prague progenitor of Frankenstein, built by a rabbi to fight anti-
Semitism), has been specifically created to be the defender of the Jews. Ariel Sharon
lacks a direct line to God (he is not religious though he courts the reli gious right
wing
for the purposes of coalition-building), but he has appointed himself the modern
Samson all the same. After the massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in
Lebanon in 1982 he was shorn of his power when an Israeli investigative committee
held him unfit ever again to hold the office of minister of defence. Now, as prime
minister at a crucial moment in Israeli history, his hunger for vengeance, together
with his unshakable belief in a united Jerusalem next to (at best) a weak, corrupt,
supine Palestinian state established over a fragmented area of cantonments, may
well bring down the whole of Israel and Palestine on top of him.
My father was never politically liberal. Having flirted with Marxism during the Sacco
and Vanzetti decade of American leftwing history, he tended to believe that people
should act in their own class interests. As a capitalist, he voted Tory. As a Jew, he
stood alongside the Israelis, not the conquered Palestinians, while as a Liverpool
businessman employing Catholics, he supported the nationalist cause in Ireland. Like
many Israelis and British Jews, he would have regarded Sharon as he did the Jewish
boxers who in the 30s went into the ring with the Star of David embroidered on their
shorts - with a mixture of admiration and embarrassment. A subtitle in a 1924 silent
film on the life of a Jewish boxer read: "A Box-fyteh!? So that's what you become?
For this we came to America? So that you should become a Box-fyteh? Better you
should be a gangster or even a murderer. The shame of it. A Box-fyteh!"
You wouldn't want them to marry your daughter (let's face it, you wouldn't want your
daughter to marry Dutch Schultz or Bugsy Siegel either), but when someone needed
a thrashing, you'd call on "Dangerous" Dana Rosenblatt, not Woody Allen.
Jewish psychology and indeed Jewish culture vacillate between the mensch and the
shtarker. A man's highest ambition is to be a mensch , to be honoured in the eyes of
the Jewish people. In the song "Sabbath Prayer", from Fiddler on the Roof, Tevya
asks of his daughters, "May you come to be, in Yisroel a shining name." But you
cannot be a member of a persecuted race for 2,000 years without the yearning to be
like your enemy: powerful.
This division is expressed most forcibly within the works of Norman Mailer and Philip
Roth. Mailer's wartime experience gave him the subject for his first novel, The Naked
and the Dead, and he remained drawn to exploring the consciousness of killers, as in
his long examination of the murderer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, and
his Vietnam novel, The Deer Park. Post-Mailer, Roth's breakthrough novel, Portnoy's
Complaint (1969) restored to the Jew his primary neurosis, mother- fixation and
sexual dysfunction. During middle-period Roth, his alter ego is Nathan Zuckerman,
the writer whose journey from adolescence to early old age plays every trick
imaginable with ideas of plot and character, like a dazzling post-modern magician.
Roth is fascinated by the idea of Jews behaving badly, but for him the physical
deviance is sexual. He undermines the icon of the mensch, the Jewish good-boy.
When Philip Roth interviewed Primo Levi in 1986, he criticised If Not Now, When?
(Levi's novel about Jewish partisans during the war), which he described as "more
narrowly tendentious... than the impulse that generates the autobiographical works".
Levi replied, a little defensively: "I wished to assault a commonplace still
prevailing in
Italy: a Jew is a mild person, a scholar (religious or profane), unwarlike, humiliated,
who tolerated centuries of persecution without ever fighting back. It seemed to me a
duty to pay homage to those Jews who, in desperate conditions, found the courage
and skill to resist (Philip Roth, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their
Work; London: Cape, 2001).
Even Levi fancied himself as something of a shtarker , indeed his capture by the
Germans was due to an ill- fated flirtation with the partisan life.
Thus the mensch, the nebbish and the shtarker are the three figures which form the
true trinity of Jewish culture, and they come together in the stories of Isaac Babel -
of
the Jewish gangsters of Odessa and of a Jew incongruously serving in a Cossack
regiment during the civil war. Babel based his stories on his own self, a child of
stunted growth growing up to be a writer, "with spectacles on his nose and autumn in
his heart". His father's escape fantasy for Isaac, the son born in Odessa in 1894
during the period of state-sponsored pogroms against the Jews, was that he might
become an infant prodigy on the violin, performing before the crowned heads of
Europe. Like the immigrant Jews of New York, Babel was drawn, instead, to the
Jewish gangsters of his city. As a young intellectual during the Revolution, he took
the advice of Maxim Gorky and went "among the people".
There has just been a new edition of Babel's Collected Works (London: Picador,
2002), but I want to cite Lionel Trilling's introduction to the (incomplete) 1955
Penguin
edition of the stories. Trilling sees as the principle joke of the "Red Cavalry"
stories
the anomaly of having, as their main character, a Jew who is a member of a
Cossack regiment, traditionally the persecutors of the Jews. The Cossack, he wrote,
"stood in total antithesis to the principle of the Jew's existence. The Jew conceived
his own ideal character to consist in his being intellectual, pacific, humane. The
Cossack was physical, violent, without mind or manners... the enemy not only of the
Jew... but the enemy also of all men who thought of liberty; he was the natural and
appropriate instrument of ruthless oppression."
But to 19th-century Russian intellectuals, including Tolstoy, Trilling points out, the
Cossack was rather an appealing figure: "He was the man as yet untrammelled by
civilisation, direct, immediate, fierce. He was the man of enviable simplicity, the man
of the body - and of the horse, the man who moved with speed and grace... For
[Tolstoy] the Cossack was indeed the noble savage, all too savage, not often noble,
yet having in his savagery some quality that might raise strange questions in a
Jewish mind."
Thus Trilling saw in the figure of the Cossack a yearning in Babel to throw off his own
liberal, intellectual instincts, an itch in him to become part of a people of the body
rather than a people of the mind. He points to the story which exposes the psychic
divisions within Babel's mind during this period. In "After the Battle", the narrator
is
discovered to have gone into battle with no ammunition in his gun; he is accused of
being a member of the Molokan Sect - a pacifist and God-worshipper. But this is not
it at all. Trudging through the rain, the narrator pleads for a favour, "imploring
fate to
grant me the simplest of proficiencies - the ability to kill my fellow- man". This
sentiment in Babel's mouth is, Trilling says, only partly ironic.
The period between the 1880s and the start of the first world war offered Jews in
eastern Europe three possible means of re-invention: the first was emigration to
America, where the Jewish gangsters of Odessa would thrive in the fresh air of
American capitalism; the second was Zionism, which was in the process of
discarding the neurasthenic shtetl Jew and re-engineering his soul in preparation for
the outdoor life of the kibbutz; the third was the Russian Revolution, in which Jews
were to play a leading role.
Those who adopted this final option abandoned the mystical baggage of an ancient
religion and their predicament as a tiny persecuted minority, protected only by their
irksome status as God's chosen people; they abandoned their history for the Marxist
notion of History. They signed up for equality, freedom and rights accorded to them
by virtue of their class. October 1917 was the defining moment when the mensch
and the shtarker were joined together. It was a Jewish dream come true. Only
through violence could man liberate himself from oppressive forces, but such
violence was not mindless at all. It served an ideology, one which was social,
political, economic and cultural.
Of the three choices Jews of the time could make, this turned out to be the worst.
Babel was executed in Lubyanka prison in 1940 on a trumped-up confession. Of
those Russian Jews who emerged into the tail end of the century in 1992 and
emigrated to Israel, some were scientists, some were chess grand masters, some
were prima ballerinas; others formed the country's new industry of organised crime,
drug dealing and prostitution - the shtarker with all the mensch-like elements
corroded by 75 years of Soviet socialism. According to eyewitness Palestinian
accounts of the Israeli incursions into Jenin, many of the soldiers were recent
immigrants from Russia who spoke little Hebrew and who looted the homes of
civilians. Their hatred of Muslims did not suddenly appear out of nowhere, inculcated
by the Israeli state, but was nurtured during the exceptionally brutal wars in
Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Contemplating the current situation in the Middle East and the various figures waiting
in the wings to succeed Ariel Sharon, including that smooth, snake-oil salesman
Benjamin Netanyahu, I am reminded of the comment made during the closing
months of last year by a Kabul shopkeeper, observing that there were only two Jews
left in the whole of Afghanistan, and they didn't speak to each other. "You know,
Jews are complicated people," he said. There was more truth in this simple
statement, I felt, than all the facile rhetoric of propagandists.
� This article appears in the Summer issue of the Jewish Quarterly, price �4.95,
which can be obtained in bookshops or from 01371 810433.Linda Grant's latest
novel is Still Here , published by Little, Brown.
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
End<{{{
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