Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Norman Podhoretz

6 Norman Podhoretz Normie Pod is blatt [cool], but I’ll take Billie Bernstein— seven seasons in the mountains under his belt; Normie’s got the schooling, but Billie’s got the gelt! hus the neighborhood bard’s song, the rhythm banged out on the newsstand in front of the perennial candy store that was the center of social and communal life for boys in the ’hood during the thirties until shortly after World War II. That was on Pacific Street in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. We were in our teens, down the street from the school that was to erupt in a near riot in 1968 between the by-then black residents and the schoolteachers over the issue of neighborhood control of the schools. It was the occasion, among other events, for one of Podhoretz’s best known and perhaps incendiary pieces, “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” In the essay, he admits to admiring always the superior athletic abilities of the black players in that schoolyard, where we all played basketball, and to his basic fear of them too. His solution to America’s apparently intractable race “problem” was intermarriage, over time, etc. etc. When I read the piece, my first thought was that Normie was envious of all the ballplayers, white and black, since he never was much of an athlete. Now T 7 I wonder what he feels, besides fear and envy, about that pretty good black ballplayer in the White House. The doggerel above, remembered all these years since, was a mock celebration of money over brains—Billie B. did go on from his years of waiting on tables in the mountains to become an accountant, of course—but everyone really admired Norman’s superior intellect. Both of us had started college (he at Columbia and I at Brooklyn); he was reading Eliot’s “Wasteland” while I was deep into Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun—a foreshadowing, no doubt, of where our futures would take us. We talked a lot, about politics—he was a solid Democrat, along with about 97 percent of all the Jews in New York, while I was veering left—and Judaism, about which he influenced me positively. Academically talented and ambitious, he was going for a degree at night at the Jewish Theological Seminary as well as attending Columbia. Having broken away completely from my family’s Orthodoxy , after a philosophy course in college that shredded any lingering belief in the supernatural, I was nevertheless willing to give Judaism and religion one more try. He suggested I go to the Seminary School of Jewish Studies, which I did, taking two courses. Though it did not make me any more observant, alas, it did teach me a few things, especially about Jewish literature in a class with Rabbi Louis Gerstein of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Manhattan, starting with the Pirke Aboth. That has stood me in good stead as I went on to teach and write about, among other things, Jewish and Yiddish literature. Norman went off to Clare College, Cambridge on a twoNorman Podhoretz 8 year scholarship, where he reacted strongly to the strains of anti-Americanism during the Korean War, as I was told by one of his leftish British classmates there (who had come to Minnesota for a year), perhaps the beginning of his move to the right. That did not happen immediately. He came back and worked for The New Yorker, writing to me about that strange collection of people. He also chided me, not altogether incorrectly, about getting into “Talmudic Faulknerism,” because at the time I was editing, though still a graduate student, a small journal called Faulkner Studies. Podhoretz, who was by then an assistant editor at Commentary, earned me points in the Humanities Department at Minnesota when he came looking for me on his way to St. Paul to meet his fiancée Midge Decter’s family. I was not around the department just then and never did meet Midge Decter, except very briefly, until many years later. Pod had also written to me about the inner struggles at Commentary. The well-known long-time editor was in a psychiatric facility on Long Island for what promised to be a long time, while pretenders to the throne maneuvered for the job. Norman emerged, finally, as editor towards the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties...