My familiarity with your fine family goes back, as you must know, to the nun of the century on Prince Street, where we were all poor people in a new land, struggling for our basic needs, our social and civil rights, and our spiritual dignity. I still remember you as one of the outstanding Jewish graduates of our Newark public-school system. I was most pleased to hear from your father that your college record was at the same high level of achievement that you had maintained throughout your school career here, and that you are already beginning to gam recognition in the field of short-story writing. Since there is nothing a judge likes better than to be right from time to time, I was delighted to know that my confidence in you as a high-school senior has already been substantiated in the larger world. I expect that your family and your community can look forward to great achievements from you in the not too distant future.
Your father, knowing of my interest in the development of our outstanding young people, recently asked if I would take time out from my judicial duties to write you with my candid opinion of one of your short stories. He informed me that you are soon to submit the short story entitled
“Higher Education”
to a leading national magazine, and he wanted to know
whether I thought the story contained material suitable for such a publication.
In our lengthy and interesting conversation here in my chambers, I informed him that classically, down through the ages and in all countries, the artist has always considered himself beyond the mores of the community in which he lived. Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated, who do not understand that the artist is a special individual with a unique contribution to make to mankind. Socrates was considered an enemy of the people and a corrupter of the young. The Norwegian playwright and Nobel Prize winner, Henrik Ibsen, was forced into exile because his countrymen failed to understand the profound truth of his great dramas. I explained to your father that I for one would never want to be allied with the intolerance shown by the Greeks towards Socrates, or by the Norwegians towards Ibsen. On the other hand, I do believe that, like all men, the artist has a responsibility to his fellow man, to the society in which he lives, and to the cause of truth and justice. With that responsibility and that alone as my criterion, I would attempt to give him an opinion on the suitability for publication in a national magazine of your latest fictional effort.
Attached you will find a questionnaire about your story, prepared jointly by my wife and myself. Because of Mrs. Wapter’s interest in literature and the arts—and because I did not think it fair to rely solely upon my reading—I have taken the liberty of securing her opinion. These are serious and difficult questions to which Mrs.
Wapter and I would like you to give just one hour of your time. We don’t want you to answer them to our satisfaction—we want you to answer them to your own. You are a young man of great promise and, we all think, of potentially great talent. But with great talent come great responsibilities, and an obligation to those who have stood behind you in the early days so that your talent might come to fruition. 1 would like to think that if and when the day should dawn that you receive your invitation to Stockholm to accept a Nobel Prize, we will have had some small share in awakening your conscience to the responsibilities of your calling.
Sincerely yours,
Leopold Wapter
P.S. If you have not yet seen the Broadway production of
The Diary of Anne Frank
. I strongly advise that you do so. Mrs. Wapter and I
were in the audience on opening night; we wish that Nathan Zuckerman could have been with us to benefit from that unforgettable experience.
The sheet of questions prepared for me by the Wapters read as follows:
TEN QUESTIONS FOR NATHAN ZUCKERMAN
If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?
Do you believe Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin have been of no use to anti-Semites?
Do you practice Judaism? If so, how? If not, what credentials qualify you for writing about Jewish life for national magazines?
Would you claim that the characters in your story represent a fair sample of the kinds of people that make up a typical contemporary community of Jews?
In a story with a Jewish background, what reason is there for a description of physical intimacy between a married Jewish man and an unmarried Christian woman? Why in a story with a Jewish background must there be (a) adultery; (b) incessant fighting within a family over money; (c) warped human .behavior in general?
What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than the sublime?
What in your character makes you associate so much of life’s ugliness with Jewish people?
Can you explain why in your story, in which a rabbi appears, there is nowhere the grandeur of oratory with which Stephen S. Wise and Abba Hillel Silver and Zvi Masliansky have stirred and touched their audiences?
Aside from the financial gain to yourself, what benefit do yon dunk publishing this story in a national magazine will have for (a) your family; (b) your community; (c) the Jewish religion; (d) the well-being of the Jewish people?
Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?
Three weeks after hearing from the judge and Mrs. Wapter, and only days before my visit to Lonoff, I was interrupted around noon by the Colony secretary. She had come out to my cabin in her coat, apologizing for the disturbance, but saying that I had a long-distance phone call that had been described by the other party as an emergency.
When my mother heard my voice she began to cry. “I know it’s wrong to bother you,” she said, “but I can’t take any more. I can’t take another night of it. I can’t sit through another meal.”
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Nathan, did you or didn’t you get a letter from Judge Wapter?”
“Oh, I got it all right.”
“But”—she was flabbergasted—”then why didn’t you answer it?”
“He should not have gone to Wapter with that story, Mother.”
“Oh, darling, maybe he shouldn’t. But he did. He did because he knows you respect the judge—”
“I don’t even know the judge.”
“That’s not
true
. He did so much for you when you were ready for college. He gave you such a wonderful boost. It turns out that in his files he still had the essay you wrote on the Balfour Declaration in high school. His secretary took out the files and there it was. Daddy saw it, right in his chambers. Why you haven’t given him the courtesy of a reply… Daddy is beside himself. He can’t believe it.”
“He’ll have to.”
“But all he wanted was for you not to bring yourself harm. You know that.”
“I thought it was the harm I was going to do the Jews that you’re all worried about.”
“Darling, please, for my sake, why won’t you answer Judge Wapter? Why won’t you give him the hour he asks for? Surely you have an hour where you are to write a letter. Because you cannot, at the age of twenty-three, ignore such a person. You cannot make enemies at twenty-three of people who are so ad mired and loved, and by Gentiles, too.”
“Is that what my father says?”
“He says so much, Nathan. It’s been three weeks now.”
“And how does he even know I haven’t answered?”
“From Teddy. He didn’t hear from, you, so finally he called
him. You can well imagine. Teddy is a little fit to be tied. He’s not used to this treatment, either. After all, he also extended himself on our behalf when you wanted to go to Chicago.”
“Ma, I hate to suggest this, but it could be that the judge’s famous letter, procured after great ass-kissing all around, had about as much effect on the University of Chicago as a letter about my qualifications from Rocky Graziano.”
“Oh, Nathan, where’s your humility, where’s your modesty—where’s the courtesy you have always had?”
“Where are my father’s
brains
!”
“He only wants to save you.”
“From what?”
“
Mistakes
.”
“Too late. Mother. Didn’t you read the Ten Questions for Nathan Zuckerman?”
“Dear, I did. He sent us a copy—and the letter, too.”
“The Big Three, Mama! Streicher, Goebbels, and your son! What about the
judge’s
humility? Where’s
his
modesty?”
“He only meant that what happened to the Jews—”
“In Europe—not in Newark! We are not the wretched of Belsen! We were not the victims of that crime!”
“But we
could
be—in their place we
would
be. Nathan, violence is nothing new to Jews, you know that!”
“Ma, you want to see physical violence done to the Jews of Newark, go to the office of the plastic surgeon where the girls get their noses fixed. That’s where the Jewish blood flows in Essex County, that’s where the blow is delivered—with a mallet! To their bones—and to their pride!”
“Please don’t shout at me. I’m not up to all of this, please—that’s why I’m calling. Judge Wapter did not mean you were Goebbels. God forbid. He was only a little shocked still from reading your story. We all were, you can understand that.”
“Oh, maybe then you all shock a little too easily. Jews are heirs to greater shocks than I can possibly deliver with a story that has a sharpie in it like Sidney. Or Essie’s hammer. Or Essie’s lawyer. You know as much yourself. You just said as much.”
“Oh, darling, then tell the judge that. Just tell him that, the way you told it to me, and that’ll do it. Your father will be happy. Write him something. You can write such wonderful and beautiful letters. When Grandma was dying, you wrote her a letter that was like a poem. It was like—like listening to French, it was so beautiful. What you wrote about the Balfour Declaration was so beautiful when you were only fifteen years old. The judge gave it back to Daddy and said he still remembered how much it-had impressed him. He’s not against you, Nathan. But if you get your back up and show disrespect, then he will be. And Teddy too, who could be such a help.”
“Nothing I could write Wapter would convince him of any thing: Or his wife.”
“You could tell him you went to see
The Diary of
Ann Frank
. You could at least do mat.”
“I didn’t see it. I read the book.
Everybody
read the book.”
“But you liked it, didn’t you?”
“That’s not the issue. How can you
dis
like it? Mother, I will not prate in platitudes to please the adults!”
“But if you just said that, about reading the book, and liking it… because Teddy told Daddy—well, Nathan, is this true?—that to him it looks like you don’t really like Jews very much.”
“No, Teddy’s got it confused. It’s him I don’t like very much.”
“Oh, darling, don’t be clever. Don’t start that last word business, please. Just answer me, I’m so confused in the middle of all this. Nathan, tell me something.”
“What?”
“I’m only quoting Teddy. Darling…”
“What is it, Ma?”
“Are you really anti-Semitic?”
“I’ll leave it to you. What do you think?”
“Me? I never heard of such a thing. But Teddy…”
“I know, he’s a college graduate and lives with wall-to-wall carpeting in Millburn. But they come pretty stupid too.”
“Nathan!”
“Sorry, but that’s my opinion.”
“Oh, I don’t know anything anymore—all this from that story! Please, if you will not do anything else I ask, at least phone your father. He’s been waiting for something for three whole weeks now. And he’s a doer, your father, he’s not a man who knows how to wait. Darling, please phone him at his office. Phone him now. For me.”
“No.”
“I beg of you.”
“No.”
“Oh, I can’t believe this is you.”
“It
is
me!”
“But—what about your father’s love?”
“I am on my own!”
In Lonoff’s study that night I began letter after letter explaining myself to my father, but each time I got to the point of repeating E. I. Lonoff’s praise for my work, I tore the thing up in a rage. I owed no explanations, and he wouldn’t buy those I offered anyway, if he even understood them. Because my voice started back of my knees and reached above my head wasn’t going to make him any happier about my informing on those unsavory family miscreants who were nobody’s business but our own. Nor would it help to argue that Essie wielding her hammer came off in my story as something more impressive than an embarrassment; that wasn’t what other people were going to say about a woman who behaved like that, and then expressed herself in a court of law like a man in a barroom brawl. Nor would a spin through the waxworks of my literary museum—from Babel’s Odessa gangsters to Abravanel’s Los Angeles worldlings—convince him that I was upholding the responsibilities placed on me by his hero, the judge. Odessa? Why not Mars? He was talking about what people would say when they read that story in North Jersey, where we happened to come from. He was talking about the
goyim
, who looked down on us with enough unearned con tempt already, and who would be only too pleased to call us all kikes because of what I had written for the whole world to read about Jews fighting over money. It was not for me to leak the news that such a thing could possibly happen. That was worse than informing—that was collaborating.