I didn’t know A.J. Liebling was Jewish. Honest.
When I picked up The Sweet Science on a book table in Berkeley I was taken in by the dust jacket photo of heavyweights slugging it out. Who knew the great New Yorker writer was Jewish or that his biographer thought it was important?
And when I saw “Storm Clouds Over Manhattan?” Same thing. Sure, it knocked me over. I fell in love. But I swear I had never heard of the great print maker Louis Lozowick.
I’m innocent, really.
That night I watched The Big Carnival on television? Yeah, what about it? Sure, I had heard of Billy Wilder, but I didn’t know that was his film and I’m ready to go out on a limb and say it didn’t occur to me that Kirk Douglas was Jewish either.
Who thought that way back then? Give me a break.
I wasn’t looking for Jewish creations, I wasn’t researching some grand cultural thesis. I just keep stumbling into Jews. I can’t help it.
How about that time I went slumming and picked up some lowbrow Hollywood tell-all book? There’s this glossy blonde on the cover of The Rest of the Story. It’s the author, Sheila Graham, touted as Hollywood’s #1 gossip columnist. Turns out to be a great book with one of the greatest lines about how life works that I’ve ever read (I keep searching through it to find it and I’ve just got to locate it again). Do you think I knew she was Jewish, too? Knock it off.
So at a certain point I gave in. I quit fighting it and started to look into it.
What was I reacting to? What was it that I liked? It’s like the critic Vivian Gornick said in The Men In My Life, all we’ve got to go on is our response to the work. You either trust it or you’re toast. So I’ve adopted it. The Jewish subject showed up on my doorstep and wouldn’t go away so I let it inside.
Oh, and all those Jewish writers and artists and movie people who used to sneak up on me? Now they work for me. They are on my mental payroll and they’ll make appearances whenever my thoughts tap them on the shoulder.
Paging Seymour Krim!
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