Does the name Ben Hecht ring a bell?

Two new biographies tell the story of the brilliant but near-forgotten wordsmith and rebel.

 

  

My Hecht collection

The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach. (Purdue University Press, 403 pages, $32.95)

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman. 

(Yale: Jewish Lives, 264 pages, $26)

“There will always be Jews who imagine that if they are seen as crawling on their bellies among their enemies, they will be mistaken for non-Jews or at least for high-class Jews. I’m thinking of a white Christmas named Arthur Sulzberger, owner of the New York Times. Mr. Sulzberger’s stomach-tour among Anglo-Saxons is not a new spectacle in Jewish history. It is one of the few authentic bases for anti-Semitism. Looking on the immemorial Sulzberger’s the anti-Semite says, ‘If a Jew is so ashamed of his cause and his people what a shameful cause and people they must be.’”

-   ­Ben Hecht

Yes. He could be belligerent. 

But consider who might hypothetically turn up at a Ben Hecht dinner party. Anyone from Alfred Hitchcock and Marilyn Monroe to Menachem Begin and Mickey Cohen. Hecht associated with gangsters, journalists, poets, Hollywood types (from the silent movie era onwards), Jewish machers and Zionist troublemakers. 

When I was 17 and working at Biegeleisen’s bookstore on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I was handed a "required reading" list by my Jewish Defense League chapter chairman. It listed Perfidy by Ben Hecht. When I asked one of the Biegeleisen brothers if they could get me a copy, it was explained to me that not only was Perfidy out-of-print its author had been twice blacklisted – by the Jewish establishment and by the British film industry.

In the end, I was able to borrow the book, and my mother ע״ה photocopied Perfidy in its entirety since I had to give it back sooner than I could finish reading it. Over several early mornings, before her workmates arrived, she xeroxed the book two pages at a time on legal size paper.

I devoured Perfidy. Style-wise Hecht reminded me of Pete Hamill whose column I read addictively in The New York Post. I found myself appalled by the events surrounding the Kastner case as depicted by Hecht. 

For a long time afterward, I kept an eye out for all things Hecht. I eventually accumulated two volumes of Perfidy (to be sure - to be sure) and collected a dozen other books by Hecht from old-school book-finders. 

From the Lower East Side to Racine

Hecht was born in 1893 in New York City and lived on the Lower East Side. He went to school on Broome Street (but not to my Yeshiva Chasen Sofer which had yet to be transplanted from Europe) and (like me) spoke Yiddish before uttering a word in English. His family moved to Racine, Wisconsin around 1903 in search of a better life. 

He grew up in a haltingly upward mobile family. Went off to college. Quit college in a flash. And immediately, providentially, found work at the Chicago Journal. 

Ponder this: in 1910 Chicago had ten (!) daily newspapers. It was there that Hecht honed his gift for "breaking and entering" so that he could, by hook or by crook, gather photographs to go with news stories.
More importantly, he developed his craft. He learned how to write for newspapers, the stage, and cinema. He became streetwise about crime, the mob, women, and the dark side of human nature. 

His obsession with Jews and Zionism would come later.

Weimar Germany

Newspapers were evolving to the point that by 1922 accuracy and fair play in reporting began to matter. 

With the end of World War, I (1914-1918) and the creation of Germany’s Weimar Republic in 1919, Hecht arrived in Berlin as a novice foreign correspondent (for what turned out to be a six-month stint). 

He witnessed factions across the political spectrum violently vying for power. He reported on a massacre of radical Spartacists (Lenin-leaning reds) by soldiers loyal to the social democratic government. He picked up on the canard that Germany lost the Great War because of a traitorous Fifth column. And he observed that the military high command was scheming to blame the democratic socialists for the country’s post-war travails. This German episode would offer fodder for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921). 

How Hecht got from Eric Dorn to Perfidy and from being an uncomfortable Jew to a Holocaust-era hero and Irgun operative is part of what makes him a sufficiently compelling figure to have inspired two new biographies: The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach and Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman.

Hard to label

Gorbach, a reporter turned media studies professor offers a biography that is sprawling, contextual and detailed. What made Hecht “notorious” in his view is that after WWII he partnered with American Jewish gangsters and Palestinian Jewish terrorists – Hecht did not shy away from the word – and penned incendiary denunciations of the Jewish establishment. 

Still, “Labels like conservative or right-wing would be inaccurate for Hecht,” writes Gorbach.

Hecht’s life offers a huge canvas which allows Gorbach to pause and contextualize the Chicago scene, the evolution of newspapers in the 20^th century, Hollywood (Jews, scripts, personalities), and the gangster world. That’s just for starters.

Hoffman’s elegantly written short book necessarily telescopes Hecht’s life story. She focuses laser-like on what’s essential to know about Hecht. Gorbach’s less-rushed biography will give you more about the Chicago newspaper scene, the early days of cinema and the lay of the Zionist land. 

Hoffman is perhaps best known for her Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza which she wrote with her husband, Peter Cole. 

Both writers know and admire their subject; neither is oblivious to his faults. And neither has much sympathy for today’s Israeli right. But then neither would Hecht, I suppose.

Hecht’s Judaism

Ben Hecht was a cardiac Jew – Jewish in his heart and by osmosis; like a non-kosher delicatessen that serves Jewish-style cuisine. 

During WWII he would become Jewish also in his kishkes.

His parents spoke Yiddish of course. His mother and her sister Tante (aunt) Chasha “molded him into a hard-nosed realist and iconoclast,” Gorbach informs. 

Hoffman’s take is that “Hecht’s Americanness was arguably his true religion.” He must have remained attached to his parents for they moved to be closer to his California home. 

About his not unreasonable dark view of human nature: Ben Hecht was as skeptical of the man in the street as he was of the man in the White House. No one could be reasoned with. You might be able to sway public opinion by manipulation but not by appealing to “the better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln’s phrase.

This pragmatic ethos informed his thinking about Chicago racketeers, villainous Nazis, and (l'havdil) Roosevelt-era court Jews.

From Marie to Rose

For relationships, Hecht was attracted to smart women. He was twice married. In 1915, an Episcopalian priest officiated at his nuptials to Marie Armstrong, a fetching fellow reporter. They had a daughter Edwina or Teddy who became an actress and died tragically in 1971.

I don’t imagine Hecht was much of a presence as a father (which is not to say he didn’t genuinely love his children Edwina, Jackson, and Jenny). He divorced Marie and married the comely and Jewish Rose Caylor in 1926. His serial adultery notwithstanding theirs was an enduring 38-year-long partnership. He died in her arms.

Gorbach puts it this way, “Hecht would commit many infidelities and maintain two long-term affairs. Nevertheless, for the rest of their lives, Rose would remain his muse, confidante, collaborator, editor, and, on occasion, fierce interlocutor.”

He would leave the actress Mary “Mimsy” Taylor Zimbalist who was the love of his life to return to Rose, Gorbach writes.

Hoffman’s slim volume contains stunning evocative photographs. There is one of Hecht at 13 as well as pictures of Marie and Rose looking beautiful.

Like some of the characters he created, Hoffman writes that Hecht was "quick-witted, sexed-up, verbally carbonated – and it came naturally to him to bring that air of frenetic, suggestive japery he so enjoyed to the page, bound for the screen."

New York

Ben and Rose were back in New York by 1924 but despite trying could not stomach life on the teeming Lower East Side. They moved uptown.

Hecht formed intense and lasting friendships: There was the down and out poet Maxwell Bodenheim and his playwright buddy Charles MacArthur with whom he wrote The Front Page. Hecht had the most creative fun when he could enjoy “the camaraderie of collaboration,” in Hoffman’s words.

The Front Page, first performed in 1928, is set in the press room of a Chicago courthouse. 

Hollywood

By the time the Great Depression hit in 1929 Hecht was well ensconced in Hollywood writing for the likes of Alfred Zucker Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner brothers. 

A randy, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, workaholic, he was good at writing for every genre from newspapers and books to the stage and film. There were times that Hecht felt like a literary whore for producing lowbrow fare; and he held his interventionist, wrong-headed, movie mogul bosses in contempt. 

Money-wise, though, he was raking it in, according to Hoffman.

For the most part, it is his movies not books that have withstood the test of time. Hoffman concludes that “Screenwriting was Hecht's calling, whether he liked it or not.”

If a script, think Gone with the Wind, needed fixing Hecht was the man to do it – fast. His talent was in demand so he could live well – at times recklessly beyond his means. He kept homes in Nyack (Rockland County, NY), on Manhattan’s West Side, and in Oceanside, California. 

Hecht’s Complaint

In 1931 he published the self-loathing bestseller A Jew in Love which was received with the kind of disdain in Jewish circles that would greet Philip Roth’s Portnoy's Complaint 38 years later. Hecht dedicated the book to Hollywood producer Walter Wagner (born Feuchtwanger) with whom he would then collaborate on the 1963 film, Cleopatra. What motivated all this is anyone’s guess.

Purpose and prophecy

Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws came along in 1935. Hecht undoubtedly took Hitler seriously though perhaps not literally. 

Then in November 1938 came Kristallnacht. 

Hecht reported that that’s when he became a Jew. 

For Europe, the Second World War began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. Three months earlier, in June 1939, Hecht brought out A Book of Miracles a collection of stories.

The second one “The Little Candle” is ghastly. 

It imagines “that Europe decided to kill off the Jews – not many of them but all of them,” according to the Associated Press book review Gorbach tracked down. 

The only glimmer of hope was that in Hecht’s imagination, not all the candles would be extinguished.

Gorbach writes, “From late 1938 onward, Hecht seemed to know what was about to happen and was willing to do whatever he could to help stop it.” 

He began writing a column “1001 Afternoons in New York” in the city’s liberal-oriented PM newspaper. That became his bully pulpit. In 1941 he used the column to attack US ambassador to the Court of St James's Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father) for advocating the appeasement of Hitler.

90 Miles off Collins Avenue

In the summer of 1939, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt refused a last-resort appeal to allow 937 Jewish refugees to find refuge in Florida. They had set sail on the St. Louis from Hamburg bound for Cuba, but the Havana government of Federico Laredo Brú would not allow them in. Both Washington and Ottawa rebuffed Jewish pleas to make an exception to their closed-door policies. 

The St. Louis Jews were sent back to Europe where ultimately 254 were stranded and, eventually, murdered by the Nazis. 

FDR: Beloved by the Jews

Roosevelt

The US was hauled into WWII on December 7, 1941, by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. 

By then the destruction of European Jewry was well underway although the Germans had not at that point yet perfected systematic and industrialized genocide. 

Hecht worked feverishly to put pressure on the Roosevelt administration to do something, anything, to help Europe’s Jews. With Peter Bergson, he crafted publicity campaigns – pageants, stage shows, films, newspaper advertisements, and wrote scathing newspaper and magazine articles. 

His most vehement opposition came from the alphabet soup of Jewish organizations – in 1943 from the ADL but more typically from Stephen Weiss’s American Jewish Congress. 

During the dark days of the Holocaust having failed to get Jewish organizations to sit in the same room without turning on each other, Bergson told a disconsolate Hecht, "Jews must always battle Jews. It's the only politics open to a stateless people. The only victories they can hope to enjoy are victories over each other."

Of course, it turns out that even with a Jewish state the various Jewish tribes relish their intramural battles too much to give them up.

FDR was beloved among the Jews. To this day the Jew-haters claim he was Jewish. FDR must have intimated to Rabbi Stephen Wise that it would be unwise to make WWII into a Jewish issue. That would only make things worse. 

In going up against FDR and Wise, the most influential Jewish leader of the day, Hecht was not without resources. From Hollywood, he could field the likes of Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, and Groucho Marx. From his newspaper perch, he could do battle with the Jewish establishment as he did in a 1941 column called “My Tribe is Called Israel.” 

Here is Hecht without restraint:

“I write of Jews today, I who never knew himself as one before, because that part of me which is Jewish is under a violent and apelike attack. My way of defending myself is to answer as a Jew…

My angry critics all write that they are proud of being Americans and of wearing carnations and that they are sick to death of such efforts as mine to Judaize them and increase generally the Jew-consciousness of the world… I don’t advise you to take off your carnations. I only suggest that you don’t hide behind them too much. They conceal very little.”

Gevalt

A deserved chunk of Gorbach’s The Notorious Ben Hecht encompasses the Holocaust-era and the struggle to establish a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. The 1917 Balfour Declaration had promised it. The League of Nations had given Britain the Palestine mandate precisely so it could fulfill the declaration. At the brink of WWII Britain cravenly reneged on the letter to appease the Arabs. It also barred Europe’s Jews from finding refuge in Palestine.

If ever there was a time to yell gevalt this was it – against Roosevelt and Churchill (who did not, to my knowledge, reverse Chamberlain’s May 1939 White Paper barring the doors of Palestine even if only to telegraph his moral outrage to Hitler).

The Bergson Group

In April/May 1941, Hecht began coordinating with The Bergson Group led by twenty-six-year-old Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) and including Samuel Merlin, Yitshaq Ben-Ami, Arieh Ben-Eliezer, Eri Jabotinsky, and Alexander Rafaeli. 

Hoffman portrays Bergson-Hecht as an odd couple: "It was a most unlikely meeting of the minds. Here he was – a middle-aged, pork-chop-eating, Christmas-tree-lighting dyed-in-the-American-wool wise guy who 'disliked causes...disliked public speaking...never attended meetings of any sort ...had no interest in Palestine and had always bolted any conversation about a Jewish homeland.' Moreover, there was Bergson, a dashing young Lithuanian-born Palestinian activist, passionately committed to the cause of national Jewish liberation as conceived by the intellectual and ideological firebrand Ze'ev Jabotinsky."

Speaking of Jabotinsky, his followers had arrived in the US planning to carry out his instructions. However, on August 4, 1940, this towering, charismatic and prophetic Zionist personality died unexpectedly at age 59 in upstate New York. 

Mission(s)

The Bergson Group then made it their mission to facilitate “illegal” immigration to Palestine. When WWII broke out, the mission expanded to creating a Jewish army to help fight the Nazis. As news of Nazi genocide became known the mission expanded further to rescue of European Jewry.

Nazi leaders were determined to systematize the destruction of Europe's Jewish people bringing the relevant players together at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference. After this point, US officials could no longer spike the genocide story or string Stephen Wise along. 

On November 25, 1942, The New York Times reported: “HIMMLER PROGRAM KILLS POLISH JEWS; Slaughter of 250,000 in Plan to Wipe Out Half in Country This Year Is Reported REGIME IN LONDON ACTS Officials of Poland Publish Data – Dr. Wise Gets Check Here by State Department.

That same day, The Washington Post carried a dispatch from AP: “Half of Jews Ordered Slain, Poles Report.” 

Both newspapers were owned by assimilated Jews who like Rabbi Wise did not want the war to become a Jewish issue.

Fascists?

In their efforts to spotlight the genocide Hecht and Bergson faced strident opposition from the US Jewish establishment and the David Ben-Gurion-led Jewish Agency in Palestine. 

Stephen  Weiss

Ben-Gurion (like Chaim Weizmann) was conflicted about what to do on behalf of the European Jews, but both knew with full certainty that if Jabotinsky’s people were pursuing a strategy, they needed to be against it. Ben-Gurion pressed Stephen Weiss to follow his lead.

  

This antipathy was real before, during, and after the war (when the Bergson/Hecht mission became expelling the British from Palestine).   

But I am getting ahead of myself.

In the spring of 1939 (before the war broke out though after the British White Paper) the Bergson Group sought to lease ten dilapidated ships which were to deliver 10,000 Jews from Europe to Palestine per voyage. 

While Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann despised each other, they were united in their animosity toward The Bergson Group – denigrating them as “fascists” and extremists. 

Weizmann dissuaded wealthy Jews from donating funds for the ships while Stephen Weiss cautioned that conditions on board such ships were likely to be “revolting.”

Fascists? If Jabotinsky’s followers did business with gangsters, Mussolini’s henchmen or Polish anti-Semites it was because the ends justified the means. Moreover, as Gorbach takes pains to point out far from being a fascist Jabotinsky was a humanist and classical liberal. He cites Jabotinsky declaring before a Warsaw audience: “I belong to that old-fashioned school who still believe that in every civilized community there must be some respect of man for man, class for class, and race for race.”

Stephen Wise

Gorbach’s book has the added value of providing a capsule history of Jewish and Zionist politics in the first half of the 20^th century. The one constant – infuriatingly typical of Jewish history throughout millennia – is the infighting, backbiting and self-destructive behavior, the petty personality squabbles cloaked in ideology. 

Wise, whom Hecht slugged as “a pitiful Shtadlan,” was said to have reported Bergson to the FBI as a communist. The supercilious Nahum Goldmann, a global macher, urged American authorities to either draft or expel Bergson. 

Gorbach emphasizes that the Wise-Bergson struggle was not all black and white. Indeed, what would any one of us have done – without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight – if the president of the United States, popular beyond all measure in the Jewish community, urged us to trust him to do the right thing? I also try to keep in mind that during WWI Wise went against the grain and was a leading Zionist working for the Balfour Declaration while the Reform movement was staunchly anti-Zionist. 

1943 We Will Never Die event California

Hecht’s inadequacies

Hoffman quotes Norman Mailer as saying that Hecht was "never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose." Something to, perhaps, keep in mind when reading A Child of the Century his autobiography. 

Hecht was full of himself – one of those people who never grow up. He got by with help from his friends. At the same time, he stayed loyal (imperfectly) to them even when his fortunes soared, and theirs nosedived. 

He made enemies of friends and friends of enemies. The rabbi who once denounced him as a self-hating Jew tearfully officiated at his funeral.

Hecht was imperfect. He never visited Israel. The rebel was forever grappling with what it meant to be a Jew. If he was a hack, it was so that he could pay the bills. So what? However, his prodigious talent was undeniable; and politically he was mostly on the right side when it mattered most.

Which book is for you?

Gorbach makes a minor stumble, or so it seems to me. I don't see historian Lucy Dawidowicz and the Commentary of her time as “neoconservative.” He takes too seriously for my taste the scholarship of Ben Halpern and Zeev Sternhell. As the pages run out, the author tags on a tendentious kvetch about (a) Israeli settlements and the death of (b) peace process (c) liberal Zionism and (d) two-state solution. None of this should detract from the value of the book. 

Gorbach and Hoffman (who are politically, I think, on the same page) are writing for slightly different audiences. 

Gorbach’s book is more comprehensive and scholarly – it is based on the author’s 2013 doctoral dissertation, but it is jargon-free and accessible. 

Hoffman’s book is succinct, and her writing is remarkably graceful. 

Indulge yourself, if you can, and read both.

The End

When Hecht died suddenly at age 70 on April 18, 1964, in Manhattan, Menachem Begin the leader of the Herut Knesset opposition flew in to eulogize him. 

The actor Luther Adler and entertainer George Jessel also spoke.

Peter Bergson, who by this point probably barely spoke to Begin,  also delivered a eulogy, of course.

Hecht's obituary in The New York Times – of all places – concludes by quoting Hecht himself: "To retell anecdotes of a witty man is like staging a play without scenery or footlights. And the wrong cast. A man dies, and his anecdotes hang in the air like lessening echoes. It is like watching a soul vanish."

Further Reading

D. Fetherling, The Five Lives of Ben Hecht (1977)

W. MacAdams, Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend

The Snickersnee Press - Devoted to Rediscovering Ben Hecht Biography & Works

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