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

©

Remembering Samuel H. Friedman - Socialist (1897–1990)

Socialism in America is back in vogue.  Alas, it is the socialism of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and their enablers.

I knew a different kind of socialist, a man who ran for vice-president of the United States as the Socialist Party candidate. He sought office once before I was born (1952) and once when I was two (1956). I doubt he would have been comfortable with the direction taken by today’s American socialists and self-identified progressives as they maneuver to realign the Democratic Party into an illiberal and anti-Zionist orbit.

Sam Friedman

My old school American socialist was Samuel Herman Friedman -- שמואל פריעדמאן – who died on March 17, 1990, at age 93.  His yahrzeit according to the Hebrew calendar is 20 Adar I 5779 or Monday, February 25, 2019.

Lower East Side

Friedman was a recognized Lower East Side character. Our paths first crossed in the 1970s when he began coming to shul on Saturday mornings at Rabbi Seymour Nulman’s East Side Torah Center on Henry Street not far from his apartment on Grand Street and the FDR Drive.

He was a presence. A big whitehaired balding man usually dressed in a rumpled light grey suit, white shirt with black tie askew. My friend Aaron who sat upfront remembers him vaguely as "the guy who looked like Col. Sanders." 

His eyesight was failing, and he walked with a cane purportedly presented to him by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo.

Did I need to know more? Nasser. Socialist. Cairo. 

I also understood that he had married out – scandalous in my parochial world especially for a man of that age.

The Pull of an Old Socialist

In shul, he would stand in the back, without a tallit prayer shawl but with a flimsy black yarmulke on his head, against the wood-paneled wall and almost visibly absorb the sounds of the prayers. 

I have always had a soft spot for old people, for their  vulnerability so it was only natural that I struck up an acquittance with Mr. Friedman and tried to make him as welcome as possible. He and I had the back of the sanctuary mostly to ourselves. I had a pew of my own.  He had the wall. Nasser, socialism, Cairo, and out-marriage somehow never came up.

Almost no one else spoke to him, and he would never be given an aliya to the Torah or any other religious honor.

Later I discovered that he loved show biz and theatre songs especially if they came with a political message. He had a melodious (once booming ) voice and had been active with the Theatre Union and the Rebel Arts theatre group. 

Presumably, he found Rabbi Nulman’s sermon engaging at some level and the melodies that accompanied the service reassuring.

So, there he was with -- from my point of view -- all this Nasser, socialism, Cairo, out-marriage baggage in an orthodox synagogue on Shabbes. Not that there was any other kind in our immediate neighborhood.

Childless 

We became friendly enough for me to occasionally visit him and his wife Mary, who turned out to be gracious, at their home. The couple had no children. 

Mary Hough Freedman died on November 16, 2006, by which time I was already living in Israel.  

Up to his semi-retirement in the 1960s, he made his living mostly in journalism as a writer and editor at The New Leader and The Call, socialist newspapers, and as a teacher.  

In 1917, during World War I and the year of the Balfour Declaration,  he was the editor of The College Mercury a student newspaper at City College. His editorials controversially championed student pacifism. 

Bear in mind that many Jews in the US and Europe opposed the war because America and Britain were allied with the despicable Czarist Russian regime, a fountainhead of anti-Semitism. And at that juncture in history, the Germans were the good guys.

 

Working life

It did not fit the persona I had of him, but in the course of his career, he had been an editor at Women's Wear Daily magazine. With a graduate degree from Columbia, he also taught social science in high school and – this is worth underscoring – later in life working on behalf of the United Jewish Appeal. 

His sister Elizabeth Singer had made aliya.

 

He was the kind of socialist who had to work for a living, kept kosher after a fashion, and implicitly (at the very least) recognized the right of the Jewish people to a national home in Palestine.

Politics
Foremost, Friedman was a labor union activist. Politics was his passion. He and Mary would vacation in Putnam Valley, NY at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society with other socialists. Friedman was on the board of the Young People's Socialist League. In the 1940's he ran for one NYC or NY statewide office after another – state senator, comptroller, lieutenant governor, City Council president and so on. He was the socialist Harold Stassen – running frequently and never winning because the only viable election vehicles in the zero-sum US political system were and are the Democratic and Republican parties.

A good government reformer who went up against Tammany Hall (the corrupt Democratic machine) he got himself arrested lots of times – once in 1949 for supposedly speaking too loudly at a demonstration.

VP candidate

Norman Thomas

Darlington Hoopes

In 1952 and 1956 the country’s leading socialist Norman Thomas (a Christian but no friend of Israel's) argued against expending limited resources on another national presidential campaign, but the party decided otherwise. 

Friedman, a member of the Socialist Party's national executive board, was tapped to run for vice president with Darlington Hoopes (born to a Quaker family), who once served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, heading the ticket. 

They never garnered more than 20,000 votes countrywide in either attempt.  

However, Mr. Friedman was running to spread the message that capitalism, as embodied by the two major parties, was not primarily interested in working people. Winning elective office was not his primary goal.

Campaigning for Civil Rights 

Friedman like many left-leaning Jews during the 1960s engaged in civil disobedience on behalf of African-American and Puerto Ricans. 

To my mind, at the time, this agenda seemed perverse. Yet in this respect, he was very much in the accultured Jewish mainstream.

  

Here is the place to point out that for poor working-class Jews like me living in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side -- it was not the blacks and Puerto Ricans who needed help from the Jews; we needed to be saved from them. 

During the 1960s and 1970s, the minority community was the main source of violent anti-Semitism in New York City.

There were 10,000 mostly elderly Jews living under the poverty level in my neighborhood. Most Jewish establishment organizations (the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, for instance) were spending the money they raised within the Jewish community on programs and institutions (like the Educational Alliance) that mostly catered to non-Jews – at a time when these monies were needed, desperately, in our community to fight poverty, to relocate at risk elderly people, and help with yeshiva tuition.

Only after journalist Paul Cowen exposed the plight of the Jewish poor in the Village Voice did funding priorities eventually and incrementally change – but by then for many elderly Jews, it was too late.

Mississippi Burning

In 1964, Sam Friedman was arrested with another younger New Yorker named Michael Schwerner. This was the Schwerner who was viciously murdered along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman later that year by white racists in Mississippi. 

Friedman had planned to be in Mississippi with Schwerner to register blacks to vote. However, as fate would have it, he was drawn to visit Egypt (I suppose to lobby for peace) which is when, presumably, he got that walking cane from Nasser. 

 

Of course, Nasser was not interested in peace with Israel. Earlier in 1964, Nasser and the Arab League had created the Palestine Liberation Organization to legitimize their efforts to destroy Israel. The Arab League itself had been established in 1945 to block the emergence of a Jewish state, and when that failed in 1948-49, it organized a boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against a fledgling Israel. All this, of course, long before the West Bank came under Israeli control.  

But I digress.

Communists
Besides campaigning across America, Friedman frequently went abroad including as a delegate to the Socialist International no fewer than 16 times. (*)

Like all democratic socialists, he loathed Stalin for creating a genocidal totalitarian polity. In contrast, the US Communist Party led by Gus Hall was slavishly pro-Moscow. 

We once had a conversation about Lower East Side Congresswoman Bella Abzug who served in the US House of Representatives from 1971-1977 and had made her mark as an opponent of the war in Viet-Nam. 

Friedman disparaged Abzug as a Stalinist fellow-traveler perhaps because as a lawyer she defended Moscow-aligned American communists against the US government and had been a founder of Women Strike for Peace, a Soviet front-group.  

I am not sure where Mr. Friedman stood on the war in Viet-Nam (I myself flip-flopped on the war) but I do know that he supported NATO as a bulwark against Soviet aggression. 

Being a political junky, I took satisfaction in the company of a man who rubbed shoulders with Norman Thomas, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Sidney Hillman of the rival Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. 

In 1973, I moved to the more upscale Grand Street section of the Lower East Side into Co-Op Village constructed by the ILGWU and the ACW. Friedman lived in one of these buildings as well.

The New Left

Still, we came from different worlds, and our politics were informed by different eras and experiences. Born the previous century in Denver, he seemed to me to be genuinely American. I a New York-born baby-boomer was less secure in my skin. My father had survived Hitler's war against European Jewry. My mother had arrived from Poland before WWI. In her younger years she worked in a sweatshop. But Socialism was not on my horizon. 

As a teenager in the early 1970s, my route of political passage came via the Jewish Defense League not some socialist youth group. I took part in neighborhood safety patrols on Passover and raucous protests against Soviet treatment of Jews in the USSR outside Moscow’s UN Mission on East 67 Street.  

By then it was clear that the new left (alongside reactionary chauvinist demagogues of color) had spawned a new anti-Semitism to complement the Jew-haters on the old right.

I wish I had raised all this with Mr. Friedman, but I didn't. Maybe I thought it would seem unnecessarily contentious. 

At some point he became infirm and moved to a care facility in the Bronx and regrettably I did not stay in touch.

Post Ideological

If there is one thing, I learned in the decades since meeting Mr. Friedman -- and especially since I moved to Israel -- it is not to let ideology straitjacket my thinking. 

If socialism means Americans today benefit from old-age pension insurance (Medicare) and maybe – one day – universal health coverage such as we enjoy here in Israel than who cares if socialists pushed the idea? 

My politics do not always have to be either/or. Ideological consistency is not an end in itself.

For instance, I can oppose the criminalization of abortion while morally against abortion as a form of birth control. I can accept that some steps taken by Donald Trump are right and proper even though the president, unscripted, has caused grave damage to American political culture (and is a nasty piece of work).

Synagogue or socialism? Maybe by coming to shul, Mr. Friedman was late in life tacitly signaling against the world of either/or.

As for me, I’ll take a dash of Madison’s republicanism, a sprinkle of Jabotinsky’s iron wall liberalism, and, yes, a pinch of Samuel H. Friedman's socialism. 

May his memory be for a blessing.

View of New York City when Sam Friedman was in his 30s.

(*) As of 2019, the Jewish Labour Bund, Meretz, Labor, and the World Labour Zionist Movement are still members of the Socialist International.

Who Owns Kafka?

Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy

By Benjamin Balint

Norton 2018 - 227 pages

You might think everyone is familiar with Franz Kafka – but I suspect lots of people know the name and perhaps the expression "Kafkaesque" and not much more. The phrase, as a matter of fact, connotes the absurdity of being helplessly caught up in an opaque bureaucratic labyrinth. 

I am racking my brain trying to recall which classics professor at Brooklyn College in the 1970s assigned us to read The Metamorphosis (written in 1912). However, I never forgot the first line of the book: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” 

And I still own the Schocken bilingual German-English edition that I bought used for $1.45. 

The other opening Kafka line that has stayed with me is from The Trial which begins (at least in my translation): “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” 

I remember having to look up the word “traduced” which means defamed or slandered. I’m still waiting for a chance to use “traduced” in daily conversation.

Kafka’s books are not about the characters so much as they are about the situations in which they find themselves. If European Jewish philosopher Gunther Anders (1902-1992) is correct, Kafka could be pegged as the kind of skeptic who doubts his own skepticism.

Kafka 1.0

The Kafka basics are as follows: He was born in 1883 in Prague then part of Austria-Hungary into a German-speaking acculturated Jewish family. 

His day job after law school was as a risk-assessor at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Company. He wrote in his spare time and published little in his lifetime. 

In today’s parlance, we’d say Kafka had “issues.” His father who made his money in haberdashery goes down in history as domineering and aloof. The son as suffering from neuroses, low self-esteem (exemplified by how he denigrated his own writings) and difficulty forming lasting relationships with women. 

In a letter lashing out at his father, Franz wrote him: “You have been too strong for me. Sometimes, I imagine the map of the world spread out, and you stretched diagonally across it. Moreover, I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that are not covered by you…” 

His mother was of little comfort. Julie Lowy came from a well-to-do family but was no less ill-equipped for parenthood. What Franz may not have appreciated is that both his parents came from dysfunctional homes. They had their own issues.

All this may have influenced how they reared their six children Franz being the first-born. 

Franz correctly viewed the Judaism they passed down to him as perfunctory. He was both drawn to and repelled by his heritage. 

Attraction-Rejection epitomized Kafka’s personality.

“My Hebrew name is Amschel, after my mother’s maternal grandfather, whom my mother – she was six at the time of his death – remembers as a very pious and learned man with a long white beard,” Kafka recorded mordantly in 1911.

At age 28 he took an interest in Yiddish theater. Kafka even gave a talk, in 1912, about the Yiddish language. He read the Hebrew Bible. He subscribed to Zionist periodicals. He studied Jewish history. He seems to have been a thinker who grappled with Jewish civilization, not someone who capriciously rejected it.

Fortunately, Franz Kafka did not serve in the Great War (WWI). He suffered from headaches, insomnia not to mention hypochondria. Mainly, however, his induction was deferred because his insurance company employers insisted that he was indispensable. He had what we baby boomers might call a draft card with a classification that made it unlikely he’d be called up. 

By 1917 (WWI began in 1914 and did not end until November 1918) he was diagnosed with tuberculosis for which at the time there was no cure. 

In and out of TB sanatoriums he died June 3, 1924 (at almost age 41) leaving an oeuvre of challenging writings behind.

What happened and what should happen to these writings is at the core of Benjamin Balint’s engaging book Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy. 

Max Brod

Kafka was no social animal, but in 1902 at Charles University he made one particularly good friend in the writer Max Brod. He was to Kafka what Paul the Apostle was to Jesus (though Jesus and Paul probably never met). 

Had there been no Max Brod it is doubtful readers in 2019 would be acquainted with Franz Kafka who published little during his lifetime – and then only under urging from Brod.

When Kafka died, Brod gathered his friend’s manuscripts, notebooks and sketchings and – instead of burning them as was Kafka’s written dying wish – organized, edited and embarked on their publication. 

Bang, bang, bang – Brod brought out three unfinished works – The Trial (1925) The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927). 

If Kafka wanted his manuscripts destroyed, he asked the wrong guy. As Balint points out, “Even in self-renunciation Kafka was beset by indecision."

Brod believed that Kafka’s surviving works were masterful. He convinced the German (later American and Israeli) publisher Salman Schocken to publish Kafka. When he moved briefly to Palestine from Germany, Schocken bought the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz in 1935 and left it to his son Gershom to run. 

Brod arrived in Palestine in 1939 with a suitcase full of original Kafka papers. He soon entrusted this cache to Schocken the elder to put in his fireproof safe.

Kafka as literature

The central figures in Kafka’s seemingly simple “naturalistic” stories which are full of irony and symbolism exist outside the parameter’s normal life. They're thrust into bewildering situations in which they struggle to understand what is happening to them and who they are – issues that go unresolved. 

In this sense, Kafka is in the vanguard of modernist literature.

Some think that Kafka anticipated “the dehumanizing effects of faceless bureaucracies,” in Balint’s terms. Kafka's characters find themselves brutalized for no crime at all as people did later in Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” or at the hands of Islamist terrorists. 

Writing in brilliantly organized cleverly non-linear and compelling prose, Balint reveals the many shades of Kafka’s identity because resolving who Kafka was is central to determining what should happen to the original material that Kafka left behind. 

As Balint frames it the issue is whether the (a) Jewish people or (b) the State of Israel have a claim on his literary heritage or (c) should his papers be deposited in a repository that specializes in German-language literature? After all, he wrote in German.

More broadly, can an Israel that is ambivalent toward Diaspora Jewish culture claim to be the custodian of European literature survived that the Nazis? Post-Holocaust Zionists might have believed in the negation of the Galut but not in losing the Diaspora’s rich Jewish cultural heritage.

Balint informs us that after WWII, before the 1948 establishment of Israel, a committee of Zionists worked to salvage owner-less Jewish books and bring them safely to Israel for archiving. They were in a race to head off forfeiture of these books to the dustbins and junkyards of Europe. But they were also in competition with champions of Diaspora supremacy such as Hannah Arendt who wanted to bring the books to the US. 

Kafka’s Identity

In Balint’s telling Kafka was no "ASHamed" Jew ala the "Finkler" character created by British Jewish author Howard Jacobson. 

Was he a Zionist? Was he in some fashion a believer in divine salvation? Unclear. Was he a nihilistic existentialist wholly alienated from his heritage? Extremely unlikely, as I read Balint tell it. After all, how did he rebel against his father’s vacuous Judaism? By becoming after a fashion engaged in Yiddishkeit. 

Moreover, Kafka was touched personally by Jew-hatred. The only thing he was ambivalent about was what to do about it. 

He wrote in 1914 to a friend of his fiancée Felice Bauer – of course, he was unsure about Felice too, and they never married despite being engaged twice – that, “I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it.” 

Of course, if Kafka had jumped off the fence, he would not have been Kafka.

Elsewhere, in 1914, Kafka had written, “What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” 

The year before he had attended the Eleventh World Zionist Congress in Vienna. Kafka had to be in the city anyway for work, Balint reports. 

I find myself puzzled by Kafka’s thoughts about his Jewish identity like this one cited by Balint: “The insecure position of the Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, should explain better than anything else why they might think they own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live and that once they have lost something they will never again regain it, rather it will drift blissfully away from them forever.” 

Huh?

However, Balint references Kafka’s friend Georg Langer writing in 1941 from Tel Aviv, and I feel buoyed: “Yes, Kafka spoke Hebrew. In his later years, we always spoke Hebrew together. He, who always insisted that he was not a Zionist, learned our language at an advanced age and with great diligence. Moreover, unlike the Prague Zionists, he spoke Hebrew fluently, which gave him special satisfaction, and I don’t think that I’m exaggerating when I say he was secretly proud of it…”

In Israel Kafka gets Cold Shoulder

After the state was established, Kafka did not become part of the Israeli literary canon, Balint observes. Nor has any city named a street after him. His works have not been systematically translated. 

In part, this is because Kafka worked in the German language and in the years immediately following the destruction of European Jewry, many Zionists were viscerally revolted by all things German – reading it, hearing it spoken in public, listening to German composers (Richard Wagner, for example) even taking West German financial reparations for Hitler’s genocide. 

But also, because, as Balint astutely observes “Kafka’s motifs – humiliation and powerlessness, anomie and alienation, debilitating guilt and self-condemnation – were the very preoccupation Israel’s founding generations sought to overcome.”

The Zionists had little use for wishy-washy handwringing as in this 1921 epistle to Brod: “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.” 

Balint allows that “Kafka allowed himself to imagine moving to Palestine only when his illness was so far advanced as to make the move impossible.”

He also sketches Kafka’s fraught romantic life. Besides the many women along the way, he was engaged to Julie Wohryzek (a Yiddish-speaking Zionist), in a relationship with his translator Milena Jesenska (who was not Jewish but married to a Jew) and was tended to by his lover Dora Diamant (who had volunteered in the Jewish TB camp where they met) as his life was slipping away. She, not incidentally, did burn a few of his papers as he requested while he looked on. 

 
Best Buddies 

Prolific and better known, Max Brod (1884-1968) saved Kafka from obscurity. Since no good deed goes unpunished, Brod is today mostly remembered for his Kafka-connection rather than in his own right as a composer, author, playwright and newspaper columnist. 

Like Kafka, Brod was a Czech-born Jew who worked in the German language. Brod had the good fortune to escape the Nazi onslaught – just – and the daunting task of finding a place for himself in a Tel Aviv where his earlier Prague stature held little currency.  (*)

He settled for a less than prestigious job at the Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv and made the best of it.

Brod may not have been a passionate Zionist, but he did affiliate with the movement (seven years before meeting Kafka) when he joined Prague's Bar Kochba Association, which Balint tells us had only 52 members.

Brod’s subsequent literary work struggles with how the Creator of the Universe can allow evil – thinking of Hitler and the Holocaust – to have free reign. 

While still in Prague, he wrote a novel about Kafka (1928) and began arranging for the publication of his late friend’s work. He also wrote a biography of Kafka that came out in 1937.

As Balint characterizes it, Kafka and Brod were soulmates. Brod: “We completed each other and had so much to give one another.” Yet they were cut from a different cloth. Brod knew how to enjoy life; Kafka did go to brothels with him, but these were fundamentally different types. Brod was a high-volume writer who had many interests. Kafka took little pleasure from life, miserably destroyed some of what he wrote yet, parodoxically, found purpose only in his writing. 

“Brod,” writes Balint “obsessively collected anything that Kafka put his hand to. Kafka, in contrast, felt the impulse to shed everything.” 

Jewish angle

In the winter of 1981, I went to the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street which was devoting a significant exhibit to Kafka. As a brand, Kafka is an easy sell. You can see that when you visit Prague today. Back in 1981, I purchased a Kafka portrait poster that now hangs in my study. His face is haunting; he looks downhearted and waning. He would soon be dead.

The New York Jewish Museum curators decided Kafka wrote as a Jew and that his books The Metamorphosis, for instance, might best be understood in allegorical terms about the Jewish predicament in the period leading up to the First World War (though not only).

Legacy Battle

Balint’s book opens in 2016 at the Supreme Court of Israel. At issue: “Does the estate of the German-speaking Prague writer Max Brod, who died at the end of 1968 nearing age 85, belong to Eva Hoffe or the National Library of Israel, or would it be best housed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany?” 

Eva Hoffe’s late mother Esther was Brod’s secretary and close friend. Esther and her husband Otto met Max Brod (whose wife Elsa had died in 1942) in Hebrew-language ulpan class. Max quickly developed into an honorary member of the Hoffe family. He and Esther in due course became intimate, according to Balint. 

A childless man, Brod was loved by Esther’s daughters Eva and Ruthie. 

In a will written in 1948, Brod identified Esther Hoffe as his only heir and executor. Whether the Kafka papers, part of Brod’s estate, were an outright gift to Esther or part of her inheritance became a matter of legal debate.

As the story opens, Eva Hoffe now herself aging is in physical possession of the Kafka and Brod material. She is fighting to hold on to these manuscripts that her late mother Esther inherited or was gifted and left to her and her sister Ruth (who died age 80 in 2012). 

The State of Israel had tried to take the Kafka papers soon after Brod died seeing them as the heritage of the Jewish people. In 1974, in Tel Aviv District Court, Judge Yitzhak Shilo probated Brod’s will ruling that Esther Hoffe “during her lifetime” could do whatever she wanted with her inheritance. 

With Brod deceased, Esther Hoffe began selling Kafka papers starting in 1988. She wanted to continue to sell them to the Marbach archive to make money.

Esther Hoffe died in 2007 and Eva probated her mother will. The National Library of Israel had been monitoring what was happening with the Kafka papers and went to Family Court to argue that Brod had intended Esther Hoffe give them to a reputable archive. 

It appears that Brod wanted his literary estate turned over to the National Library or some other repository while Esther Hoffe was still around. Did that include the Kafka papers? Not clear.

Judge Talia Kopelman ruled that the Kafka papers were not part of the inheritance case since Brod gifted them to Esther Hoffe while he was alive. 

In 2012, a Tel Aviv Family Court held that “Brod had bequeathed his estate – Kafka papers included – to Esther Hoffe not as a gift but in trust,” writes Balint. So, the papers should have gone to a public archive during her lifetime. 

Her daughters, Eva and Ruth certainly could not keep them. 

In 2015, the case wound its way to the Tel Aviv District court which rendered its verdict against Eva Hoffe. The court held that the Kafka material was part of Brod’s literary estate and he had instructed her to have them deposited at the National Library (or some other appropriate archive). 

Worth mentioning is Brod’s view about ownership. He saw as his property some of the manuscripts and the Kafka’s letters to him. “Everything else belongs to the heirs of Kafka.” Balint informs us that Kafka does have distant relations in London but they appear not to claim ownership and – if I understand correctly – want to see the literary legacy safely in a public archive. 

In 2016 Israel’s Supreme Court ordered Eva Hoffe to turn over Brod’s literary estate to the National Library (she would get royalties for any branded products generated). The court also asserted that Brod had possessed Kafka’s papers (the very ones Kafka wanted to be destroyed) but he did not legally own them. 

Loose Ends

The Kafka papers saga which Balint sets forth as plainly as possible is – at least to me – still confusing. 

In 1956, Salman Schocken purportedly moved Kafka material (entrusted to him by Brod) to a vault in Switzerland. These manuscripts than somehow made their way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. To further muddy matters, Esther Hoffe also moved some Kafka papers to a Swiss bank vault. 

So, as I understand it, some Kafka papers are in Marbach; some in Oxford; some were in the Tel Aviv apartment – these by now in the National Library. Some had already been sold. No one seems to know precisely which papers were in the Hoffe home in Tel Aviv and which were stashed in safe deposit boxes outside Israel. 

For those of us who want closure, Balint reminds us that with Kafka things are never  straightforward. “In Kafka’s imagination,” he writes “intelligibility will not illuminate our messages until the Messiah comes. And yet the Messiah himself arrives too late. ‘The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary,” Kafka writes.”

If you are first now embarking on an exploration of Kafka, start with Balint’s multi-layered book. It is an excellent introduction to Kafka as literature, and it’s about who owns Kafka not just legally or literally but politically and morally. 

Further Reading

The Nightmare of Reason by Ernst Pawel

http://www.kafka-online.info/

https://kafkamuseum.cz/en/#domu

(*) Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. World War II began in September 1939.