| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 56

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (London: Verso 2004)

I WAS LOOKING forward to reading this book, and indeed it is encyclopedic in scope — a virtual who's who of Jews, left-wing and otherwise, on stage, on the screen, and in comics including, for good measure, a few whom Buhle feels might as well be Jewish, like Chaplin, and the cartoonist R. Crumb. I share Buhle's passions for Yiddish, and secular Jewish culture. The particular position of left Jews living in a hostile anti-Semitic world and in revolt against the limitations of what they saw as the ossified theocracy of a shtetl life controlled by the rabbis and the wealthy has contributed to a particular creative sensibility from the margins.

Buhle begins his book with two big questions: What explains the impact of Jews on popular culture, and what is "Jewish" anyway? He spends a lot of time on who is Jewish, and less on why it matters. I once had a husband who loved to make his heroes Jewish, so he called the ballplayer Mickey Mantle "Mickey Mandell." It seems that the non-Jewish, Yiddish-speaking Buhle has the same inclination to not only inform us of the disproportionate number of Jews prominent in popular United States culture, but wherever possible, who had a left secular Jewish history. Like Isaac Deutscher in his essay, "The Non Jewish Jew," even Jews who do not personally identify either with Jewishness or left-wing politics are, for Buhle, part of the picture. But Deutscher explained why rather more convincingly.

This book seems to always be in a rush. Buhle is eager to tell us how much he knows about everything, who he talked to or knows personally, and to draw political connections with the left wherever he can. He begins with three cartoonists —Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, and Trina Robbins. Two had parents who were connected with the communist newspaper, the Morgn Freiheit, and the third had a mother who read the paper. That's nice, but I personally also know of at least one son of a Freiheit reader who became a Wall Street stock broker and as far as I know, Abby Hoffman's father attended synagogue and did not read the Freiheit. In passing, the description of Katchor, and the cartoonist's work and life in the introductory chapter, provide some interesting observations, such as the author's comment about Katchor's "semi-conscious questioning of self-identity or self-location outside the bounds of either religion or nationalism." (12)

I must confess I got a little lost along the way as to exactly what his argument was in his broader exploration of Jews in various arenas of popular culture. Given the personal connections he had with so many people in the book, it seems a lost opportunity to not have asked his interviewees directly — what do they see as Jewish influences in their work, or what is their left-wing Yiddish speaking parents' legacy in their own creativity?

The publication of The National Yiddish Book Center, the Pakn Treger (Book Carrier) devoted a good part of its summer 1997 issue to various viewpoints on what is a Jewish book, and what the contributors considered their favourite Jewish books and why. The choices included Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, as well as the popular potboiler Amboy Dukes: a Novel of Wayward Youth in Brooklyn. This was trash, eagerly and surreptitiously passed from hand to hand with the "good" "dirty" passages marked when I was in grade school in the 1950s. Perhaps the most thought-provoking contribution was by the Israeli author Appelfeld, who made a distinction between what he called Jewish authors and authors of Jewish descent. Appelfeld includes among Jewish writers those like Kafka or Proust or Babel who wrote in European languages and did not necessarily deal with Jewish themes but whose feeling and thought and creativity were influenced by Judaism. While there are many authors of Jewish descent, in his view we no longer have Jewish authors.

Buhle has so much information to impart that, unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to explain the connections which for him are self-evident, or to do more than mention in passing what kind of a Jew or Jewish theme we are dealing with — what is Jewish, and what creators simply happen to claim Jewish descent, or what does it mean to have left-wing parents. It gets confusing. Thus, in the chapter, "From Jewish Stage to Screen," we've got Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hart, Gershwin, ARTEF — the radical and very serious Yiddish theatre troupe, a page or two on the cartoon character Betty Boop, the dame with the low-cut dress produced by the Fleisher brothers, a discussion of movie moguls such as Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and David Selznik and a detailed description of the wonderful Yiddish films produced in Hollywood in the late 1930s, with reference sprinkled throughout to the devastating effects of the blacklist. I forgot to mention radio Jews like Eddie Cantor and Jack Benny are in there as well and I haven't even begun to list the many other themes and people that appear in this chapter.

As Irving Howe had pointed out, Jews were in the right place at the right time, but for Buhle this is but a corner of the reason for their strong presence in popular culture. As what seems to be further explication of his point, he goes on to describe his meeting with the volunteer nurse in the Bronx of the famous writer, Sholem Aleichem, whose death in the Bronx is apparently significant to Buhle. The first script for the film Malcolm X, Buhle mentions, was written by Arnold Perl, the black-listed author of "The World of Sholem Aleichem" performed in Jewish Cultural Centers. This, for Buhle is not coincidental. "The connection has the quality that shines like a beckoning North Star." (46) For me it doesn't. His method, he explains, "works mainly through analogy." I enjoyed the many mini-biographies throughout the book, but I want the author to explain why the narratives matter and what he sees as the linkages between them.

There is an affection and passion that Buhle has for the subjects in this book that is most appealing. He traces the enormous creative contributions from the Yiddishists of the Lower East Side in the first decades of the century to the Jews/ish presence on stage, in film, in the Blacklist, in the development of comics as an art form, and the contemporary self-identified Jew. The book ends with a visit to the forgotten artist and poet, Maurice Kish, in Brighton Beach and a note of notalgia for a Yiddishkayt that is fast disappearing as the native speakers die off; but then we switch to Abe Polonsky, a survivor of the blacklist and a description of the films he made. Finally, Buhle indicates that the connection is about capturing "something of our common dreams." Buhle has more than twenty authored and co-edited books to his credit. I hope in the future he allows himself the luxury of honouring his heroes by dreaming in slightly slower motion.


Ester Reiter York University

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