Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky (review)

210 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 the German post-war generation, yet the direction taken can influence the future course of history. For decades after World War II, most therapists ofHolocaust survivors were loath to delve into the wartime experience of their patients, a phenomenon which has been referred to as vicarious traumatization, namely a defense against being overwhelmed by the patient's painful recall. With the advent of time and of survivors' children coming to the attention of therapists with their unique problems, attention was also increasingly directed at the parents' Holocaust-related psychodynamics. This translated work is testimony to the reemergence of psychoanalysis in Germany and to the attempt at encouraging German therapists to enlarge their understanding of post-traumatic stress by senSitizing them to the Holocaust phenomenon of intergenerational trauma contagion. Given the mass killings which increasingly characterize the modern age, rehabilitative efforts of afflicted populations must take into account the trauma transmission theory which this volume elaborates. Werner Israel Halpern, M.D. Rochester, New York Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky, by Shaun Considine. New York: Random House, 1994. 426 pp. $25.00. Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Cbayefsky details the personal life and professional history of one of the most successful American writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Paddy Chayefsky was born Sidney Aaron Chayefsky in the Bronx, New York, on January 29, 1923. He achieved enormous success as a writer working in three media, creating teleplays during the heyday of the "Golden Years" of television, writing for the legitimate theater of Broadway, and creating immensely successful screenplays in Hollywood. He is the only writer to have earned three Academy Awards for Original Screenplays: Marty, The Hospital, and Network. Driven, temperamental, passionate, and inspired, Chayefsky lived a tumultuous professional life dictated by a vivid artistic vision dominated by an inner rage and an overwhelming need to control every aspect of the production of his work. Paradoxically, he was also a shy, sensitive, and gentle man. Shaun Considine explores the idea that Chayefsky suffered from a split, or fragmented, personality, and although the biography is neither a clinical exploration nor an evaluation of dual personalities, the Book Reviews 211 author uses his idea as a thread and through-line in the narrative of Chayefsky's life and work. It's a fascinating thesis. The brash, charming, aggressive, extroverted, and ambitious "Paddy" masked the artistic, lonely, decent, and vulnerable "Sidney." How "Sidney" came to be known as "Paddy" makes for a fascinating story in this tale about the life of a firstgeneration Russian Jew who became an icon of American culture. Chayefsky's parents, Harry and Gussie, escaped the tumult and terror of Russia, emigrating to America in 1907 and 1909, respectively. Sidney, their third son, a precocious child, inherited Gussie's innate intellectual curiosity and love of literature and his father's humor and theatrical talent. Chayefsky's imagination was fed by the cultural diversity of the Bronx during the 1930s, where the Irish and Italians and Jews from both Russia and Poland formed the basis of the future characters he created in his plays. The title character in Marty, an Italian butcher, rang true to life because Sidney grew up with young men like him, sharing their food, playing baseball and seeking boyhood adventures with them. Paddy set his Broadway play, The Tenth Man, in a storefront synagogue very like the one he attended on Tibbetts Avenue and in which he was bar mitzvahed. Many of Chayefsky's central characters are "autobiographical" in the sense that Sidney experienced something of the indignities and yearnings about which he wrote. As a young man, Sidney masked his sensitivity and insecurities with humor, bravura, and arrogance. However, it was during his service in World War II that this charming, brash, and extroverted self came to be known as "Paddy." When he was awakened at 5 a.m. one Sunday to serve kitchen duty, Sidney asked to be excused to attend Mass. His duty officer replied, "Yesterday you were Jewish." "Yes," Sidney acknowledged, "but my mother is Irish." "OK, Paddy," the officer said, and unknowingly baptized...