Adina Hoffman: Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures

Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures – Adina Hoffman – 9780300180428 – Yale University Press – Hardcover – 264 pages – $26 – February 12, 2019 – ebook versions available at lower prices

I grew up in a family where the movie business was in our blood, and part of the conversations of everyday life, so I have long known about – and appreciated – the amazing screen writing of Ben Hecht. Hecht’s many screenplays in many ways established and defined what is now standard movie practice. He wrote some of the greatest and most watched films in history, and made a well paid career out of “doctoring” other writers’ scripts. Hollywood was his reluctant artistic base for many years, though he would never be completely comfortable there.

Reading this very comprehensive, but highly readable biography by Adina Hoffman, brought Hecht’s life and work into focus for me for the first time. Hecht’s story was that of a classic 20th century second generation Jewish immigrant. He was raised in Wisconsin, made his way to Chicago, became a newspaper writer and then a novelist in the glory years after World War I, where he helped create and define the literary scene in that great city, before moving to New York, where he truly established himself as literary star.

Hecht and Charles MacArthur together wrote the now-classic play, The Front Page, becoming writing partners and pals for many years thereafter. Some of Hecht’s most famous screenplays include Scarface, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Notorious and His Girl Friday. Hecht worked on literally hundreds of films, was a powerful enough writer to be able to be given the opportunity to produce four films with MacArthur (a mis-adventure described wonderfully by Hoffman). Hecht worked with some of the greatest directors, producers and actors in 20th century film. His work literally defined what a Hollywood movie could be, and much of what we think about 20th century American culture is derived from his cynical, yet optimistic worldview.

Hecht’s many novels and nonfiction books are not widely read or known today, and according to Hoffman, who has read them all, some are lost to literary history for good reason. Still, it is quite possible that this fully formed biography with its clear eyed evaluation of Hecht as passionate human, brilliant intellect and outstanding writer, will help their cause. For myself, I have made a commitment to read at least one or two of the books that Hoffman tells us are important enough to seek out, including at least one novel. I have thought about reading Hecht’s very early novel Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, even though Hoffman pretty much dismisses it, except for one great sentence that is said to have inspired Ginsberg’s Howl. But it is his autobiography, A Child of the Century that calls out to me the most, and that I will be reading soon.

Though he was decidedly a non-secular Jew during World War II, Hecht rediscovered his Jewish identity and became a powerful public voice pressuring American politicians to save the Jews of Europe. After the war, Hecht’s Zionism led him to support the nascent Jewish state of Israel with the burning fervor of a convert, his trademark enthusiasm focused on building a safe haven for Jews, which ironically, he never visited. Hecht, as Hoffman shows us, was a complicated human being – and frequently an unforgivable one as well.

Ben Hecht was emblematic as the “child of the [20th] century” who helped to define modern Jewish America and modern popular culture. Adina Hoffman is a terrific writer and a gifted storyteller, perfectly suited to tell this story. Thanks to Yale University Press for creating an absolutely beautiful book, one that serves her writing well, and makes reading it a better experience.

Adina Hoffman is an essayist and biographer who splits her time between New Haven and Jerusalem. Fortunately, she was in New Haven when I wanted to talk to her about this book and the work that went into it. Hoffman is the author of four books, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. She was a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post, and was a founder and editor of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of the literature of the Levant. She has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, and NYU, and was notably one of the inaugural (2013) winners of the Windham Campbell prize. Read more about Adina and Ibis Editions here.

And you can find a good bibliographical of Hecht’s work here.

Note to listeners, this interview was recording live in a room with a bit of echo, so apologies to all for the sound quality.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Bram Presser: The Book of Dirt (a novel)

The Book of Dirt – Bram Presser –  Text Publishing Company (Australia) – Paperback – 9781925240269 – 325 pages – $15.95 – September 11, 2018 – ebook versions available at lower prices

Personal and family history for most contemporary Jews is frequently fraught. Most of us have relatives who disappeared without a trace, except for scattered entries in German records of extermination. Some fewer of us have had living relatives whose lives were entwined with and defined by the Holocaust, almost always in horrific and devastating ways.

Bram Presser, an Australian punk rocker and practicing attorney who also happens to be a brilliant writer, spent eight years working on this novel, The Book of Dirt. It is a fabulous story that explores the real life story of Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, from the 1920s onward through the Holocaust and beyond. Presser addresses history in all its complexity with the only tool that could possibly make sense of it – imagination.

Presser starts with family stories and personal legends, combined with archival research and interviews to create this novel. Of course it becomes partly fact, partly fiction. Some is memory and much is imagined.

The relatively large number of characters and the movement between places can be confusing for the reader, but Bram Presser’s grandfather, Jakub Rand, and his grandmother, Dasa Roubicek, and their immediate family are the focus of the book, and their story of survival shines through. The pain and suffering was immense and the power of humanity was as well.

You do not need to be Jewish to find this novel compelling and real. All of us can share through this novel what it means to find hope, and for the descendants of survivors of terror and loss to try to understand the stories of their forebears. This is a wonderful and transformative literary work.

The Book of Dirt has won a number of well-deserved awards in Australia. Bram Presser was born in Melbourne in 1976. He has been a punk rocker, an academic and a criminal attorney. He writes the blog Bait For Bookworms and is a founding member of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. His stories have appeared in Vice Magazine, The Sleepers Almanac, Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing and Higher Arc. In 2011, Bram won The Age Short Story Award. Presser’s own website is very active and includes a great deal of material related to the stories behind The Book of Dirt; it is worthwhile to explore.

‘Meet Bram Presser, aged five, smoking a cigarette with his grandmother in Prague. Meet Jakub Rand, one of the Jews chosen to assemble the Nazi’s Museum of the Extinct Race. Such details, like lightning flashes, illuminate this audacious work about the author’s search for the grandfather he loved but hardly knew. Working in the wake of writers like Modiano and Safran Foer, Presser brilliantly shows how fresh facts can derail old truths, how fiction can amplify memory. A smart and tender meditation on who we become when we attempt to survive survival.’
Mireille Juchau

I hope you enjoy listening to Bram Presser talk about The Book of Dirt, a book I strongly recommend you seek out and read.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Martin Goldsmith: Alex’s Wake

978-0-306823-71-8 – DaCapo Press – paperback – 352 pages – $15.99 (ebook editions available at lower prices)

I seem to have an inordinate interest in books about the Holocaust, doubtless because I think about my unknown relatives who perished in Lithuania and Poland during WW II, and feel somehow that knowing what happened to other Jews in that awful time will help me imagine the story of what happened to my own relatives. It’s difficult not to wish that there were more accounts of heroic escapes from the Nazis and their allies in every country they occupied, but more often than not, the stories we do get to know are deeply sad, frustrating, or horrific.

Martin Goldsmith’s parents came to the United States in 1939 from Germany, having survived the Nazi regime only because they were classical musicians who played in the Kulturbund, a special group of Jewish musicians that entertained other Jews in Germany (that was the subject of Martin Goldsmith’s last book, THE INEXTINGUISHABLE SYMPHONY: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany).

This new book, Alex’s Wake, is principally the story of Goldsmith’s grandfather and uncle, who tried to escape Germany in 1939 on the ill-fated journey of the German luxury liner, the SS St. Louis, which took more than 900 Jewish refugees (at their own expense, paying high prices to the German steamship company) across the Atlantic, first to Havana and then, having been turned away by the Cubans, to the USA and Canada, which also refused the refugees entry to their countries. This meant that the ship had to sail back to Europe, where amazingly and after great effort, the refugees were accepted by England, Holland and France. Only those who went to England truly escaped, however, as soon after the Germans overran both France and Holland, and these forlorn, long suffering escapees were once again under the thrall of the Nazis, who now could kill European Jews without restraint.

Goldsmith’s father suffered lifelong guilt for not being able to rescue his father and brother (and one must imagine, also his mother and sister, whose stories are really not told here, but who also were murdered in the war). That guilt was ineffably passed on to the grandson, and this book is Martin’s attempt to expiate that guilt, and to understand as much as it is possible, the story of his family’s travails more than 70 years ago.

Goldsmith and his wife traveled to Europe, spending six weeks retracing the journey of his antecedents, Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt. That journey forms the structure of the book, around which is built the narrative of his family’s formerly happy and successful life in Germany, their struggles to escape the Nazis, the terrible journey of the SS St. Louis , and especially moving, the detailed tracking of Alex and Helmut’s terrible time in occupied France where their hopes were truly lost, and where, after great suffering, they were transported to Auschwitz and finally their deaths. Along the way, Goldsmith learns a great deal about his family’s life in Germany, meets many interesting people, and in fact helps to change the lives of others as well as his own.

This is a fine example of narrative nonfiction and while at times painful, well worth reading. Goldsmith’s improbable effort to expiate his family’s guilt and suffering brought forth forgiveness and a sort of transcendence both for himself and others involved in the story, and the book’s honesty and beauty in the face of pain enables us to overcome the sorrow that inevitably arises when experiencing a story of deeply felt pain and loss. He’s an engaging writer and memoirist, and a fine storyteller.

Martin Goldsmith has been a radio host for public radio and Sirius XM, where he now is director of classical music programming and appears on the Symphony Hall channel. Goldsmith has also sung with the Baltimore Opera Company and the Washington Opera. He has also acted in Washington-area theaters, including Arena Stage. His music reviews have appeared in the Washington Post and he is the author now of three books, including Alex’s Wake.

Website for the book is here. Alert – we had a really good conversation so this interview runs slightly long at almost 42 minutes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download