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25  1 Sexual Anti-Semitism and Pornotopia Theodore Dreiser, Ludwig Lewisohn, and The Harrad Experiment One Friday night in 1917, Theodore Dreiser accompanied Irwin Granich, a young Jewish playwright associated with the Provincetown Players, to the apartment on Chrystie Street, on New York’s Lower East Side, where Granich and his mother lived.1 Dreiser wanted atmospheric details for a play he had been writing about poor tenement dwellers. Though he had written about immigrant Jews as a journalist and had included Jews as minor characters in some of his fiction, this play was to be the only one of his literary works in which a Jewish character figured as the protagonist.2 When Dreiser had finished a draft of the four-act play, he sent it over to H. L. Mencken. Mencken was a supporter of free speech and of Dreiser’s work; he had lately campaigned on behalf of Dreiser’s novel The “Genius,” which had been suppressed as obscene in 1916 by John Sumner, Anthony Comstock’s successor at the NYSSV. Yet, having read Dreiser’s Jewish play, Mencken reacted unequivocally: “Put the ms. behind the clock,” he wrote, “and thank me and God for saving you from a mess.”3 Horace Liveright—the newly established Jewish publisher who was so eager to add Dreiser to his list in 1917 that he offered the celebrated author an unusually generous 25% royalty rate—felt similarly . According to the publisher’s biographer, despite Liveright’s general enthusiasm for Dreiser’s work, he had no desire to see this particular play in print, and, after first demurring, Liveright finally “agreed to publish the play solely to retain Dreiser as an author.”4 When Liveright 26  Sexual Anti-Semitism and Pornotopia eventually did publish it, in the fall of 1919, as The Hand of the Potter, many critics agreed with Mencken’s and Liveright’s initial assessments. One reviewer in Chicago expressed her disgust emphatically: “Ugh! It’s a horrible thing,” she wrote. “If I were a censor I would bar ‘The Hand of the Potter’ from circulation and turn Mr. Dreiser over to the psychiatric ward.”5 It is not difficult to guess what all these readers found objectionable: The Hand of the Potter focuses on Isadore Berchansky, a young Jewish man who, as the play opens, is a convicted child rapist who has just returned from two years at the state penitentiary to his parents’ apartment in East Harlem.6 His time away has not dampened his unhealthy desires: “It’s their faces an’ their nice make-ups an’ the way they do their hair,” he says, describing the lure of young women on the street. “That’s what’s the matter with me. It’s their stockin’s an’ their open shirtwaists an’ their shoulders an’ arms. I can’t stand it no more. I can’t seem to think of nothin’ else” (34). Isadore’s “uncontrolled and unnatural sexinterest ” (42) so overwhelms him that he even makes overtures to his own younger sister (36). Dreiser’s stage directions have him stare at an eleven-year-old neighbor in a “a greedy, savage, half-insane way” (49), and these adjectives link Isadore’s uncontrollable lusts to the stereotypes of Jewish avariciousness, primitiveness, and mental illness that were common during the fin de siècle.7 The drama’s first act ends with Isadore raping and killing the eleven-year-old neighbor, offstage, and the remaining acts detail the police investigation and Isadore’s suicide. Combining sexual accusations that surfaced during the 1910s around the Leo Frank trial (Jewish perversion leading to child rape and then murder) and, a few decades earlier, during the Jack the Ripper scandal in England (the notion that the murderer’s poor Jewish peers shielded him from the police)8 and folding these in with conventional trappings of literary representations of Jews in the period, including plenty of Jewish dialect speech and a reference to a “mezuze,” The Hand of the Potter seems to collect in a single literary work just about all the sexual anti-Semitic discourse that had been circulating in Europe and America since the mid19th century. No wonder, then, that some Jewish critics have lambasted the play as purveying the most egregious racist stereotypes: the theater scholar Ellen Schiff, for example, characterizes The Hand of the Potter as “one of the few blatantly anti-Semitic works in the American repertory.”9 [3.128.199.88] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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