Gifted American Playwright David Mamet Writes Angry, Often Profound Jewish Essays.
The Wicked Son
David Mamet
Schocken, 191 pp.
reviewed by Allan Gould
Are you familiar with the hard-hitting, filthy-language, make-you-think-a-lot-deeper plays and novels of David Mamet of Chicago? Oleanna took on nothing less than male/female relationships in academia, and Glengarry Glen Ross is a truly devastating attack on, or is a description of rapacious capitalism, as shown in the back-stabbing actions of a group of desperate men trying to sell homes in a new development of that name. (The movie was a solid version of the play; check it out). His best plays have won Pulitzer Prizes, and he is inarguably one of the most exciting playwrights and screenwriters of our times, and far more interesting and talented than 95% of Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams.
Perhaps one should not be taken aback to discover that he recently came out with a thin, 191-paged volume called The Wicked Son, sporting a sub-title which could well cause shivers in the (bleeding?) hearts of a number of North American Jews: the 75% who have never visited the State of Israel, perhaps, and certainly the 50% or so who never studied their faith, much less attended a Sabbath meal. The opening essay, which is the Foreward, leaps in your face like a traffic accident, only partly because the juiciest part is reprinted on the back cover. (The title of the book refers to the four boys described in the Passover Haggadah, of course.) Here is that offending/shocking/undeniably thought-provoking paragraph in full; were only more of the essays as powerful and as focused:
To the wicked son, who asks 'What does all this mean to you?' To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who, in the nineties, envied the Palestinians; who weep at Exodus but jeer at the Israeli Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises tradition but fidget through the seder; who might take their curiosity to a dogfight, to a bordello or an opium den but find ludicrous the notion of a visit to a synagogue; whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second-favorite does not exist; who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of Tu Bi'Shvat; who dread endogamy more than incest; who bow the head reverently at a baptism and have never attended a bris, to you, who find your religion and race repulsive, your ignorance of your history a satisfaction, here is a book from your brother.
Wow. And whew. How can almost any Jew in the world today, except the close followers of Halacha and the most serious, scholarly members of the more liberal interpreters of Jewish practice, not feel queasy about at least a few of Mamet's damning descriptions?
Much of the undeniable power in the better essays in this book (I doubt if any are longer than eight or nine pages, and too many of their screeds quickly melt like snow in April) seems dated now: not all Jews are rushing about cutting off their noses to spite their race as the old joke goes; not all Jews are joining groups who applaud Hamas and accuse Israel of apartheid or choose to run toward Buddhism, Maharishis, and anything BUT the faith of their parents and ancestors. Those numbers are probably less than in 1 in 10 but then, a religion/people/nation who recently lost 85% of its adherents during genocidal slaughters in the 1940s cannot afford any self-hating number, no matter how small.
Yet it is true, and widely known, that the number of Jews in the world today who have ever visited the Jewish State at all, much less study its history, its people, its place in a very tense Middle East, is outrageously small, and that gets under Mamet's skin like a hot coal.
This inability to assign to the Israelis a basic humanity is, to me, more deeply disturbing than the reluctance to endorse or accept any of their national positions . Do, can, or could the Israelis delight in reprisals,' in retaliation'? The very words are revelatory, for such actions by the United States are known as defense-- a country defends itself; reprisals and retaliation are the actions of a mob. . . . The outright denunciation of Israel as acquisitionist, bloodthirsty, colonial, etc.' is to me simply a modern instance of the blood libel; that Jews delight in the blood of others.
I could quote two dozen more sections from this highly-uneven, often dated, but often mind-blowing group of nearly three dozen brief essays, but I lack the space. Yet buying and photocopying off a choice essay or two could certainly liven up your next Passover Seder, because it is inarguable that three millennia of being hated has led large numbers of Jews to be embarrassed by their history ("We went like sheep to the slaughter! I continue to hear about the Shoah, which utterly ignores the crafty evil which kept every European Jew off balance (you're just being shipped to farms in the East), and is unaware that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, led by a few thousand starving Jews most of them women and children lasted longer than the entire country of Poland, which had hundreds of thousands of well-fed soldiers, rather more than the ghetto's 87 pistols and single machine gun.")
This book often sickened me, because for all its ranting and raving, its sometimes-unearned rage, it still hit home. Did I, myself, not go to work in Civil Rights in Mississippi in 1964, because I inarguably felt closer to, and more worried about, my black American brothers than my Jewish family in Israel? Did I not often feel embarrassed by the Israeli response to those awful kidnappings last summer in Lebanon? No, I'm not a self-hating Jew; I revel in our culture, rejoice in our heritage and faith, and study, teach, and thrill to (and weep over) our blood-stained history. If anything, perhaps we Jews should congratulate ourselves on how little real self-hatred there is, in our people; the black-on-black crime we still see around the world today shows how easy it is to absorb that ultimate of all self-destructive thoughts: if all these people hate my skin/religion so much, there must be some truth in their feelings; I shall hate it too. Of course, the Jew can always escape through renouncing his synagogue and her people; the descendants of African slaves can also try to run, but never fully hide. Mamet is a brilliant playwright, and although I was completely satisfied with only a half-dozen or so of this thin collection, my head is still spinning, and throbbing, from the occasional Truth that hit too close to home. Far too close.
Allan Gould is a Toronto-based author who often writes book reviews for this website, as well as attends and teaches at Kolel. (Visit his website: http://www.allangould.com)
