In Review: January 27, 1999
Jews and Christians in Germany
Michael Blumenthal *56 explores a rich, 400-year-old connection
The Invisible Wall: Germans and Jews, A Personal
Exploration
W. Michael Blumenthal *56
Counterpoint, $27.50
For most of his life, W. Michael Blumenthal *56 thought little about
the centuries that his Jewish ancestors spent in Germany. Blumenthal and
his family fled the Nazis, first settling in China, then after eight years
of stateless limbo, immigrated in 1947 to America, where Blumenthal ultimately
became both a corporate titan and U.S. secretary of the treasury. But his
family's years in Shanghai, combined with the shocking details of the Nazis'
Final Solution, were enough to wipe out any affinity they'd once had for
Germany, their native land.
As Blumenthal aged, however, he discovered that "there were too
many unanswered questions, not merely about my own family and their ancestors,
but about that entire group of German Jews into which I was born. What had
gone on between German Christians and Jews? Why had there been such a promising
beginning, so much hope and so much accomplishment -- and so terrible an
end?"
His thoughtful and nuanced answers are detailed in The Invisible Wall,
a deftly written book that is at once a multigenerational family memoir
and a sweeping historical epic. To frame the tale, Blumenthal focuses on
six of his ancestors, most of whom became economically successful but all
of whom struggled, to one degree or another, with the "invisible wall"
that separated them from the rest of German society. Though Blumenthal's
ancestors labored restlessly to establish a German identity as well as a
Jewish one, their efforts were largely in vain.
A crucial theme in Blumenthal's book is that Jews in Germany were always
treated as separate in one way or another -- geographically, linguistically,
legally. That distance from the social mainstream benefited a small but
significant proportion of Jews who short-circuited the system and rose economically
in a way most non-Jews could not. But that very same separateness also made
Jews stand out, thus ensuring that they would be first to be attacked in
hard times. What is striking -- and sad -- is how often the Jewish community
as a whole was punished for the indiscretions of individual Jews.
A second critical theme is the distinction drawn between one's deeds
and one's ancestry. This arose most clearly with patriotic German Jews:
They often fought bravely for their country in war, but too often found
that their countrymen placed more importance on their ethnicity than on
their medals for valor. This insight provides tantalizing clues as to why
Germany became such fertile soil for the Nazis' ideas of biological determinism
and Jewish inferiority.
Third and last, Blumenthal illustrates the profound self-conflict felt
by German Jews. The dilemma is best personified by Rahel Varnhagen von Ense,
a self-taught intellectual (and Blumenthal ancestor, 1771-1833) who tolerated
antisemitic comments by German aristocrats as long as they continued to
attend her literary salons. Like Rahel, German Jews for centuries -- right
up until the Holocaust -- felt warmly toward Germany despite its odious
restrictions, hassles and "Jew taxes." Yet despite this intense
desire to be German, surprisingly few gave in and converted to Christianity.
Naturally, Blumenthal's book is imperfect. While it's structure benefits
from focusing on just six ancestors, their unusual affluence and intellectual
tastes risks making the study somewhat skewed. In addition, one wishes the
author had written more about the history of German Jews in America, including
the author's own experiences.
Still, Blumenthal deserves immense credit for the way he has envisioned
his book. He provides a near-perfect balance between the stories of individuals
and the vast, historical backdrops upon which they were played out. Blumenthal
could have stuck to writing an exploration solely of Jewish history, but
instead he has produced an excellent primer on four centuries of German
and European history. In so doing, he demonstrates -- profoundly -- that
the dual histories of the Jews and of Europe are so deeply intertwined that
it is simply impossible to separate them.
-- Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson, a staff correspondent for National Journal magazine,
also writes for the Forward, a New York City-based Jewish newspaper.
Life in the '20s
A posthumous novel by a literary lion
The Higher Jazz
by Edmund Wilson '16,
edited by Neale Reinitz,
University of Iowa Press, $34.95
When Edmund Wilson '16 died in 1972, he left among his papers the beginning
of a novel, written in the early 1940s on 207 pages of lined yellow legal
sheets. This disconnected narrative, actually a series of separate vignettes,
covers 18 months in the life of a successful New York salesman and his wife,
culminating a few weeks after the stock market crash of 1929.
The manuscript, which surfaced among the Wilson collection in the Beinecke
Library at Yale, was apparently completed to Wilson's satisfaction but never
revised. Neale Reinitz, the book's editor and a professor emeritus of English
at Colorado College, reproduced the text from holograph manuscripts and
made only minor changes in spelling and the structuring of paragraphs. He
also named each chapter and took the title of the book from a Wilson essay
on contemporary music.
Wilson's intention was to write a massive, threevolume fictional study
of America in the 1920s under the title The Story of the Three Wishes.
Each section would describe a different aspect of life in the U.S., with
an emphasis on the social and political ills of the period following World
War I. In 1939 he sent a proposal to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's and received
an advance of $3,000.
For a number of reasons, Wilson never completed the project. For one
thing, the early 1940s were among the busiest years of his life. He was
finishing To the Finland Station and The Wound and the Bow,
and he was filling in for Malcolm Cowley as book editor of The New Republic.
He was also editing F. Scott Fitzgerald '17's The Last Tycoon and
bringing together the articles that became The CrackUp, his account
of Fitzgerald's final years.
The Higher Jazz is a brief roman-à-clef with specific references
to notable New Yorkers who made up Wilson's circle of literary and musical
friends. With the help of Reinitz's copious notes, it is interesting to
spot Dorothy Parker, pictured as the brittle Kay Burke, as well as Robert
Benchley, Cole Porter, Texas Guinan, Charles Ives, and George Gershwin.
The narrator, Fritz Dietrich, combines the easy sophistication of Fitzgerald
with the expensive tastes and distinguished ancestry of Gerald Murphy. His
wife, Caroline Stokes, is a fair approximation of Zelda Fitzgerald, with
Sarah Murphy not far in the background and Wilson's second wife, Margaret
Canby, a model for Caroline's physical characteristics.
The final effect of the novel is sketchy, which suggests that while Wilson
was serious in beginning his narrative of life in the '20s, he was uncertain
where to go with it. But as a companion piece to I Thought of Daisy
and Memoirs of Hecate County, the novels published in his lifetime,
The Higher Jazz fills in a side of Wilson never before realized or
appreciated. It is well worth attending to, not so much as a novel as a
social document, and it is essential for anyone interested in Wilson as
a major literary figure of the period.
-- Don Harrell
Money business
Strategies for holding on to your assets
Staying Wealthy: Strategies for Protecting Your
Assets
Brian H.Breuel '66
Bloomberg Press, $21.95
As the title implies, this isn't a book meant to compete with the hordes
of titles out there about creating wealth or investing wisely. It assumes
that the reader already has a goodly pile of assets.
Breuel organizes his book by "problem" topic, looking at eight
areas that threaten wealth: estate planning problems; business succession;
investment difficulties; outliving one's assets; family dilemmas such as
divorce, extended illness, and financing education; risks of potential liability
and loss; charitable giving issues; and issues confronting the super-wealthy,
those worth $20 million or more. Case studies exemplify each problem, and
for them Breuel suggests alternative strategies.
Breuel's writing is crisp and focused, and bullet points and references
to other sections of the book help unite the material. Flow charts, tables,
and graphs are crisp, too, and show up well even though green is the only
accent color used -- proof that publishers don't need four-color extravaganzas
to present graphics effectively.
The jacket notes say that Breuel has variously owned his own pension
design and administration company, run a fee-based planning firm, been a
senior executive with a life insurer, and worked for a national brokerage
firm. He draws ably from all those disciplines in devising his varied strategies,
making Staying Wealthy a valuable read for those with plenty of valuables.
-- Jeff Marshall '71
Oddballs on the loose
Director Ethan Coen '79 publishes fiction
Gates of Eden
Ethan Coen '79
Weisbach Morrow, $24
Filmmaking and fiction don't mix well: that's the consensus in creative
writing programs, where screenwriters and novelists enroll in separate workshops,
and in Hollywood, which famously crushed writers like William Faulkner and
F. Scott Fitzgerald '17. So Gates of Eden, a collection of short
stories penned by filmmaker Ethan Coen '79 (one half of the Coen brothers
team, best known for their quirky crime films like Fargo and Blood
Simple) comes as a surprise. The stories in this collection are entertaining
and clever, featuring witty dialogue that is spot-on.
Fans of Coen brothers' films will recognize familiar elements. Several
stories are set in the cold Minnesota landscape featured in Fargo.
Nearly every story revolves around a murder or other violent act, often
involving an unlikely person: a college grad finds himself on a mafia hit
list; a sensitive Torah student kills his father. And, like the films, these
stories are filled with bizarre situations and humor. In "Cosa Minapolidan"
an ineffectual criminal struggles to organize crime in Minneapolis. A hilarious
episode in "A Fever in the Blood" has a deaf private investigator
trying to communicate with a blind client who can't type.
Some of Coen's stories are written in dialogue and audio cues. Others
are monologues narrated by oddball characters. In the title story, a chauvinist
inspector from the California Weights and Measures Department describes
how he fell in love with a seemingly submissive woman only to discover he'd
been set up. The richest stories in Gates of Eden, however, involve
a different kind of violent landscape. Stories like "The Boys"
and "The Old Country" explore the violence and terror that come
with growing up. After a disappointing camping trip in "The Boys,"
a father contemplates his sons' futures: "His anger swelled at a world
he was certain would make losers of both of them, the one a suck-ass, the
other a mute. Why should disappointment be propagated through another generation,
a cruel snap traveling down an endless rope?" In "The Old Country"
an energetic boy's spirit is ruined after his parents punish him for insulting
a rabbi. In all, Coen's stories are rich and vivid. Hopefully this filmmaker
will keep on writing fiction.
-- Tamsin Todd '92
A bug's life
Thoughts on having sold a million copies of The Metamorphosis
Sometime in 1997, the millionth copy of my translation of Kafka's short
novel The Metamorphosis was sold. The date coincides with the 25th
anniversary of its first publication, in 1972. I hope my work has served
dear Franz's memory; certainly it has helped to spawn a hundred or more
worthy articles on the fate of the salesman Gregor Samsa, who, "one
morning, as he awoke from unsettling dreams, found himself transformed into
a monstrous vermin." I've read most of these essays and found them
all good: I think writing about Kafka improves everyone's style.
I first came across The Metamorphosis in high school, as a result
of some remarkable events that took place in our household, in Brooklyn,
in the 1940s. My older brother, Noel, who today is a physicist at Cal Tech,
came down with a cold and sore throat that grew critical and was diagnosed
as rheumatic fever. In those days, before antibiotics, bed-rest of about
a year was the prescribed therapy. So Noel lay in bed and was visited by
his high school chemistry teacher, who would come each week and bring Noel
homework and, seeing that he was ready to move along, assign extra work.
Noel did brilliantly, whereupon his teacher declared to my father that my
brother should not attend Brooklyn College after graduation, which would
have been in the cards; rather, he was "Columbia College material."
So Noel went up to Columbia and became the first in the family to read
The Metamorphosis. And then he just brought it home one day in a
Modern Library edition for me, thinking, no doubt, that it would not do
me any harm to add Kafka to the Lafayette High School reading list that
consisted of Emperor Jones, a much abridged Macbeth, and Giants
in the Earth, by O.E. Rolvaag.
I remember liking the first pages of the story, which describe vividly
Gregor Samsa's transformation into a kind of malodorous beetle but did not
like very much, or understand very well, the pages that describe his obscure
decline. I was quite disappointed with myself but felt an unjustified relief
when I read Kafka's own reflections on the story. The end was "unreadable,"
he wrote: it could have been much better, he thought, judging from the book's
"sweet" pages. Kafka never criticized the beginning, and he leads
us to think that he was quite satisfied with his inspiration, only that
a series of calamitous family distractions got in the way of his intention
to develop from the opening image the endlessly subtle structures it contains.
In the 1950s, it became my turn to attend Columbia College, where I learned
some German; I then served in the Army near Heidelberg, where I learned
some more. After graduate school at Cornell, where I got my Ph.D. in comparative
literature in a program that had been established by the National Defense
Education Act, I was now ready to start teaching in the German department
at Princeton.
Like many beginners in the humanities, I was asked to precept in Albert
Sonnenfeld's hugely popular course on masterpieces of modern European short
fiction. Among these were Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Tolstoy's
magnificent The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, which describes the slow,
fatal decline of a high official, a judge, who had never given a thought
to his mortality. I set about writing a comparative essay on the two stories
and learned, to my fascinated incredulity, that Kafka had been inspired
to write his Metamorphosis on reading The Death of Ivan Ilyitch.
At this moment a wonderful coincidence occurred: a friend, Allen Mandelbaum,
became editor of a series of classics at Bantam Books, and knowing that
I could read German, he asked me to translate Metamorphosis. I was
required to persuade the senior editors at Bantam that I could do the job,
and I remember somewhat unnerving them by suggesting that as a speaker of
Brooklynese, I had the lowdown on Kafka's Prague German and, furthermore,
like Gregor Samsa, my father had been a traveling salesman in his youth.
I proposed to give the story a local flavor, translating it into what the
poet Hölderlin calls the right "foreign, analogous material."
The editors were alarmed, but Allen Mandelbaum reminded them that he was
there to vet any inappropriateness of tone -- and, in the end, only one
such locution survives: When Gregor fails to emerge from his room for work,
his sister knocks on his bedroom door, saying, in German, something that
the previous translators, the Muirs, translate as, "Gregor, open the
door, do," but that, according to my lights, was not the tone in which
the Samsas spoke to one another. "Gregor, open up," I managed
to smuggle in, "I'm pleading with you." Now that's Prague
German.
I also agreed to supply some explanatory material, and with the usual
timidity and ambition of the beginner, I undertook to read every word that
had ever been written about The Metamorphosis in at least the major
European languages. As a result it was a year or two before I'd completed
my longhand summaries of the more than 100 chapters and articles I'd collected,
which I then had to type up (no computers then), with commentaries on each,
and then determine them to be right or wrong and extract cogent information
from them for a set of notes and decide which of these pieces I wanted to
translate and abridge for the "Critics" section of the edition;
and then I finally presented some of the results of my scholarship to the
editors at the Bantam office for their approval, unprepared for their expressions
of shock and dismay. This was to be a trade book; time and space were limited.
I was told in no uncertain terms to cut out (almost) everything and to produce
a preface posthaste: the project was long overdue. So I did, contemplating
the ruin of my hopes and of a great deal of effort -- though, fortunately,
much of it was later salvaged for another book.
The experience of publishing The Metamorphosis has not been without
its practical side. Professor Robert Fagles, the translator of Homer and
Aeschylus, also had a volume of his Oresteia in the Bantam series.
One day, chatting, we spoke of our translations -- and of our royalties.
My royalties were trifling -- I'd paid very little attention to the details
of the contract I'd originally signed, because I was passionate about the
job and eager to produce a work of interest to a community of scholars and
readers -- but it did appear that I'd signed on to terms that were hardly
favorable. So, in my naiveté, I wrote a letter to the vice-president
of Bantam Books, using the phrase "unequal treaty." As an assistant
professor with the commination "publish or perish" engraved on
my forehead, I had not felt free to quibble about terms with a publisher
who had offered a virtual guarantee of publication. The vice-president of
Bantam Books replied, with a fairness and generosity that took my breath
away, "You know, you're right. So here are nicer terms, and we'll make
them retroactive a bit." That experience led me to believe that if
you have demands on bureaucracy, forget byzantine strategy and simply write
the vice-president at his or her address and state your position in human
terms. As often as not, you'll get a fair-minded reply. Such a strategy
actually occurs to Gregor Samsa, but unfortunately it helped him very little.
-- Stanley Corngold
Stanley Corngold is a professor of German and comparative literature.
Web Sightings: Eye on the Earth
Conservation and economic policy can work in tandem to preserve the environment
while also bettering the lives of people, particularly those in ecologically
fragile areas. Two Websites deal with these issues, from different, but
complementary, perspectives:
www.rainforest-alliance.org
New york's Rainforest Alliance (RA) works for the conservation of tropical
forests. Its colorful Website provides plenty of information about the threats
to and the reasons for preserving these forests. Colorful and to the point,
the Website offers viewers several ways to get involved. Particularly effective
is the way in which the site's presentation of its environmental programs
is organized -- a problem, solution, and results format. Communications
Associate Sophia Perez '89 is the media contact, connecting reporters to
RA staff on topics from fish aqua-culture to indigenous peoples and intellectual
property rights. My only gripe about the site: RA should annotate some of
the site's assertions, such as, "In 1987, researchers found a tree
compound from the Malaysian rainforest that was 100% effective against the
HIV-1 virus. Sadly, they were never able to find that tree again."
Who says so?
www.thirdworld.org
The third world foundation in Washington, D.C., forms partnerships with
like-minded organizations to bring new technology and a scientific approach
to such third-world problems as disease, overpopulation, sustainable development,
and enviromental degradation. Carl Widell '67 is the foundation's CFO. The
Website does an excellent job of communicating the foundation's origins
and goals. Viewers can join an online ecology forum. Besides its basic mission,
the most interesting aspect of TWF is its links to third-world scientific
organizations (although some of their pages haven't been updated in four
years). The online ecology discussion is a useful feature.
-- Van Wallach '80
Books received
Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet
Union and Europe, by Rensselaer W. Lee III '59 (St. Martin's, $26.95)
-- A look at illegal trade in nuclear materials in the Newly Independent
States and Europe and at the threats to international security and stability.
Lee is associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The Environmental Crusaders: Confronting Disaster and Mobilizing Community,
by Penina Migdal Glazer and Myron Peretz Glazer *65 (Penn State, $50) --
A survey of grassroots environmentalism in Israel, the former Czechoslovakia,
and the U.S., featuring profiles of key citizen activists. Myron Glazer
is a professor of sociology at Smith.
Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-46, edited
by Omar Pound and Robert Spoo *86 (Oxford, $35) -- Previously unpublished
letters and documents record the poet's postwar incarceration and indictment
for treason, as well as the genesis of his "Pisan Canto." Spoo
is an associate professor of English at the University of Tulsa.
Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity,
by U.C. Knoepflmacher *61 (Chicago, $35) -- An exploration of the
19th-century debate about the nature of childhood. Knoepflmacher is a professor
of English.
paw@princeton.edu