The New York Times did not run the story, which is interesting, but the paper seemed to make oblique reference to the research today in a story about a Jewish men’s club on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that has been holding meetings for 70 years. Frank Levy, Robert Brustein, Bob Schwartz, Marty Brustein, and Dick Zimmern share “a lifelong affection for one another somehow inscribed in their DNA,” wrote reporter N.R. Kleinfeld.

So, Mark, I can hear some people saying, where’s the Saul Bellow angle to this post?

Easy, sweetheart. It’s in Bellow’s short story, “Cousins,” which is about the powerful ties of “Jewish cousinhood” and “Jewish consanguinity—a special phenomenon.”

Chabon’s article addresses that fractional but loud part of his and our identity, but it is so unsatisfying. What claptrap. Maybe that is why it has generated so little heat in the blogosphere. Peter Beinart’s article launched a thousand posts. Chabon’s died. And no wonder. There is something about its self-consciously high-minded tone, its heart-on-its-sleeve beseeching plea (“Let us” “Let us not”) for a more charitable view of our ragged humanity, its facile lets-face-it assertion that peoples survive thanks to dumb luck that just makes you want to say, as an older generation did, “Tell it to the Marines.”

In other words, give me a break.

After I read Chabon I was hungry for something satisfying about the chosen people idea, and I went to my bookshelf for Stephen Whitfield’s In Search of American Jewish Culture. Granted, I reach for it often. But I remembered that he actually had provocative things to say about it, that it is a great story that improves Jewish lives. The Jews’ “self-definition as participants in a majestic and eternal destiny” is a powerful force in Jewish lives and Jewish history. And Whitfield quotes Freud on the effect of that story. It makes Jews “proud and confident.”

But I’m going to give the last word to Saul Bellow, who in his introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories wrote about the enormous value of a great story.

“For there is power in a story. It testifies to the worth, the significance of an individual. For a short while all the strength and all the radiance of the world are brought to bear upon a few human figures.”

The chosen people story does the same for the Jews.

If they sound as if they’re in a club, that’s deliberate; this is pure Chicago blues, raw as the liquor served in those joints and, in the slower numbers, smooth as the lines of sharp-dressed men working to seduce foxy women.

That’s classic cool white Jewish guy appreciation of a certain black scene, but nobody did it better than Krim. Here’s a taste from  his 1959 “Ask for a White Cadillac,” about the same sharp-dressed approach,

And through all this street-embattled life ran the perpetual beauty of clothes, threads, duds!—bold, high-style dresses and appointments on the girls (flashing jewelry, dyed platinum-blonde hair over a tan face, elbow-length white evening gloves handcuffed with a fake black-onyx bracelet) while the guys were as button-rolled and razor-sharp as hip clotheshorses stepping right out of a showroom.

And what’s really interesting is an equivalent 1951 observation by the great A.J. Liebling. He sized up and dug a crowd showing up at New York’s Garden to take in a Joe Louis fight.

A high percentage of them were from Harlem, and they were dressed as if for a levee, the men in shimmering gabardines and felt hats the color of freshly unwrapped chewing gum, women in spring suits and fur pieces—it was a cool night—and what seemed to me the prettiest hats of the season. They seemed to me the prettiest lot of women I had seen in a long time, too, and I reflected that if the fight had been televised, I would have missed them.

There’s a lot of vicarious living going on here. And a special Jewish appreciation for what black culture allowed and Jewish culture did not.

He’s a figure that gets people heated, and for good reason.

Big web guy and mensch Dave Winer wins my heart by being a Queens kid who never let his love for New York die, despite decades in the Bay Area (the un-New York).

A few days ago he posted about his high school newspaper, Bronx Science’s Daily Planet, and the photo (left) on the cover set off a wave of emotional upheaval more important than mere nostalgia.

Yeah, it’s youth. But that’s not it. It is the archetype of the youth that my friends and I, painfully aware that we were not at New York’s Bronx Science or Stuyvesant but just Flushing’s John Bowne, strove to enact. That cover says, to me, New York, sidewalks, Jews, zaniness, smarts, confidence, fun, girls-as-friends (and what’s cooler than that at 17?). It was the ideal high school life that was being lived by others even as we were living a runner-up version of that same life and knowing that it was the runner-up version.

Anyway.

Another thing it made me think of is how many great high school newspapers there must me, and what a great book there would be in a collection of writing and photos from high schools in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Or maybe the 1930s.

The Magpie was the student newspaper at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and during the Thirties it was so great that the New Deal Network created this website about it. A Seymour Krim book review from 1938 is here. Search here for student work by photographer Richard Avedon, writer James Baldwin, playwright Sidney (Paddy) Chayefsky, and others.

Know of another high school paper that was this great? Do tell.

I’ve put in a lot of time thinking about Greenberg-type characters — from Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day to self-declared failure Nicolas Slonimsky to Seymour Krim — and I’ve got a dose of the syndrome Greenberg is supposed to have, and which the others named above do have, which is a love of an ideal that makes ordinary life seem insipid.

And that’s where Baumbach got it all wrong.

He said on Charlie Rose that he was partly inspired by Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who writes unsent letters to various people in his private life and world history. Through the letters, Herzog unstuffs his mind of the half-understood ideas his education has left him. And through the letters Herzog also reveals himself to himself, writing letters even to God, in whom he still believes. And the letters inform him and us that there is still some good in Herzog.

But Greenberg writes letters to Starbucks and the Pet-Taxi company. His letters reveal his meanness. He has no longing for something better, no fineness of feeling or taste or ability to love or create. There is no evidence of his earlier love of music. Where is that?  (Playing “Duran Duran” because it is “good coke music” doesn’t count.) That doesn’t just die. That’s what the movie does not understand. Deeply rooted yearnings always find a way to express themselves.

Greenberg lacks the yearnings for something finer but nevertheless finds the world insufferable.

That’s not interesting. Especially when the filmmaker doesn’t realize that’s what he’d doing.

Baumbach offers a completely condescending view of people who don’t lead lives in the arts. If you are not a working musician then you live in a mental desert. In Greenberg, people don’t discuss books, write songs, write articles, talk about movies, play music. They just mentally wither.

That’s not what happens. Something much more interesting happens. They continue reading and talking and thinking and writing and playing. And they sometimes become admirable people.

p.s. The laziest thing about Greenberg is how it pirates interest by tapping into Jewish American archetypes, which it turns into stereotypes. Greenberg is a triumph of Jewish marketing savvy over Jewish creative powers. Without Baumbach and Stiller pushing it, it would have died the death it deserved. I guess there are still some people who think that anything Jewish is smart and cool. Greenberg should end that.

Patriotic tableau, Jewish Community Center, 1940

David Brooks yesterday found a way to proclaim his love for America that in its heartbreak and longing adds a page to an American Jewish literature of patriotism.

The news hook for his New York Times op-ed column was the healthcare reform bill and the Democrats. But he soon got emotional, and it wasn’t the bill’s extension of benefits that got him choked-up. Brooks got scared. Like any partner to a love affair, he is afraid his beloved is changing, and in changing, leaving him.

Yet I confess, watching all this, I feel again why I’m no longer spiritually attached to the Democratic Party. The essence of America is energy — the vibrancy of the market, the mobility of the people and the disruptive creativity of the entrepreneurs. This vibrancy grew up accidentally, out of a cocktail of religious fervor and material abundance, but it was nurtured by choice. It was nurtured by our founders, who created national capital markets to disrupt the ossifying grip of the agricultural landholders. It was nurtured by 19th-century Republicans who built the railroads and the land-grant colleges to weave free markets across great distances. It was nurtured by Progressives who broke the stultifying grip of the trusts.

Brooks goes on to say that the country’s energy is in danger of fading and “The task ahead is to save this country from stagnation and fiscal ruin.”

You may laugh but I find this combination of gee-whiz excitement and love and hand-wringing very moving. It is part of me and a large part of what attracted me to Jewish American literature, which brims with puppy-love eagerness for the America that offered the Jews so much.

There are no shortage of examples, but for convenience I’ll stick to my obsessions.

Seymour Krim was both thrilled and aghast at America’s energy, titillated even as he held his nose. “I was consumed by the voice and landscape and (be truthful!) romance of roaring-drunk modern America,” he wrote in his essay about poet Milton Klonsky.

The same could be said of the Saul Bellow who wrote Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, but late in his career Bellow saw that the patriotism of his generation was an artifact of another time.

In “Cousins,” the character Scholem is described as “a patriotic American (a terribly antiquated affect).” And the dilemma faced by Cousin Mendy and the story’s narrator is also Brooks’ dilemma and my dilemma and one faced by many American Jews.

“Jews who had grown up on the sidewalks of America, we were in no sense foreigners, and we had brought so much enthusiasm, verve, love to this American life that we had become it. Odd that it should begin to roll towards oblivion just as we were perfecting ourselves in this admirable democracy.”

Polanski bet that we are so identified with our cars that they could be used as stand-ins for people and still deliver the emotional weight the story needs; that the audience would view the car as a person, or as the natural symbol of a person, or as the natural extension and amplifier of human needs and “drives” and that we would feel what we need to feel without seeing a person.

And Polanski was right.

The movie’s opening shot of an abandoned car blocking the flow of cars off the ferry perfectly evoked death. We did not yet know if a person was also dead. But the car was effectively “dead” and the shot of it being towed off the ferry felt like the removal of a casket from a hearse. (The scene showing the actual writer lying dead in the ocean surf was less moving.) And the assistant to the English minister Rycart communicates with his boss from within a car by flashing the headlights. In these days of cell phones I expected to hear a voice. No. The car spoke for him.

It was also the first time I saw a movie make use of a car’s GPS system for dramatic effect.  It acts as the first murdered ghost writer’s ghost — it is the updated ghost of Hamlet’s father that appears from beyond the grave to direct Hamlet to avenge his murder. And what other form would a ghost take today to get through to us, to make its case?

In Hamlet, the ghost takes human form. It is the image of Hamlet’s father. But in Polanski’s world the ghost appears as a car, which is the natural home of today’s human form. In fact, the car is the place of refuge and safety. Pedestrians and bicycle riders are killed or almost killed (like when the Ghost Writer biked out of Lang’s compound). In the car the Ghost Writer can escape danger. He is vulnerable on the ferry because he is forced to leave his car.

And, of course, he is killed by a car. And again, the human death is not shown. The car is an adequate substitute for death, as it is for home, safety, and the yearning of murdered souls for some justice.

Damned good, provocative, original. Computers, usually cast as villains in film (e.g., HAL), are benign tools. They are demystified. Instead, Polanski re-imagines what is so prevalent that they have become invisible: cars.

Smart stuff.

I’ve got Seymour Krim on the brain, so naturally I thought of his great essay, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” which zeroes in on this problem of being “an aesthete without an art” as the problem faced by people like himself. And Krim pegs it is a problem not confined to artists. It is a general one. But I’ll get to Krim in a moment because I’m reminded of another literary example in “America! America!” by Delmore Schwartz.

The main character in the Schwartz story, Shenendoah Fish, listens to his mother’s tale about the troubles that befell a family they knew, and she tells him that “the salvation of the family would have been the summer hotel business, which they had once considered seriously as an enterprise. No one would have been better suited for that business than the Baumanns.”

Shenendoah, a troubled writer, sees that his mother “had perceived perfectly a profound necessity which he himself knew very well in literature, the necessity that the artist find the adequate subject and the adequate medium for his own powers.”

Now to “Failure Business.” Krim diagnoses his own problem, and that of the “thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me” as failing to find “the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. I think what I have to say here will speak for some of their secret life and for that other sad American you don’t hear too much about.”

And, of course, this is one of the biggest problems facing all of Saul Bellow’s dangling men, represented by unemployment.

So what is going on here with Schwartz, Krim, Bellow, and in “Greenberg.”  Why has it been so hard for some Jews to find “the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls?” Does the question answer itself? Is it because Jews are more likely to host a riot in their souls?