ZGram - July 23, 2002 - "Defenders of the Faith"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

July 23, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A remarkable essay!

[START]

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

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 
=46rankenstein, 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.


=B7 This article appears in the Summer issue of the Jewish Quarterly, 
price =A34.95, which can be obtained in bookshops or from 01371 
810433.Linda Grant's latest novel is Still Here , published by 
Little, Brown.


(SOURCE"  http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,750534,00.html )