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Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
Conversations
with Leslie A. Fiedler
Newark,
Jews and the Boy on the White Horse
By BRUCE JACKSON
Leslie A. Fiedler died on January 29 of the year
that ends in the middle of this week. Leslie was one of the few
literary scholars whose work ordinary people read and found useful.
You saw and still see his Love and Death in the American Novel
on the bookshelves of people who were not academics. It is one
of the few books of literary criticism that has never gone stale
or out of date. Fiedler never used academic or any other kind
of jargon, or any words about which you had to ask, "who
is he when he's at home?" Leslie's words were always at
home.
He was one of the people who made the
University at Buffalo English department of the 1960s and 1970s
justifiably world-famous. He continued to give it coherence and
weight in the years after he retired because he never went away:
he was always around, dealing with graduate students, giving
an occasional lecture, being a presence, writing, always writing.
When Leslie died, his family wanted him
buried out of Temple Beth Zion, which is in the city, has a very
nice sanctuary with stained glass windows designed by Ben Shahn,
and has a large parking lot. But the rabbi, recently arrived
from Anchorage, Alaska, said No, this Fiedler wasn't a paid-up
member and we only use the temple to bury paid-up members.
People told him, Leslie Fiedler is the
most important literary critic in America and he helped put Buffalo
on the map as a literary place. The rabbi gave not an inch. If
this Fiedler wasn't a paid-up member of the congregation he couldn't
be buried out of his temple. The rabbi didn't know it, but two
richguys in town had offered to pay for Leslie's membership in
Beth Zion, but Leslie said absolutely not: he had never in his
adult life been a member of anything, and he wasn't going to
start in anticipation of death. Someone offered to pay Fiedler's
dues now. No, the rabbi said, after death is too late to pay
your dues.
A former president of the congregation
called him to plead Fiedler's case, but the rabbi was adamant.
"If we do it for this one," the former president told
me the rabbi said, "it will open the floodgates."
Floodgates for what? How many internationally
famous really important Jewish writers does Buffalo have? How
many internationally famous really important Jewish writers does
any city have? "How can he say no to a request like this?"
I asked the former president of the congregation.
"He's from Cleveland. He's been
in Alaska. He doesn't know who Leslie Fiedler is," the former
president said. "He's worried that all these not-members
will come flooding in, wanting a burial in his temple."
It was a moment of perfect Buffalo Jewish
loopiness and Leslie would have loved it.
Several months after Leslie died, the
Buffalo English department held a memorial service for him. Not
one of his friends was invited to take part. His wife Sally was
allowed to read some of Leslie's poems later in the day in another
building on the far side of the campus. During the memorial service,
one of the speakers used his allotted time saying how much better
a Jew he was than Leslie.
Leslie would have loved that too. Leslie
had a lot of sense, but two of the best senses Leslie had were
irony and humor, which, in Jews like him, were inextricable.
My friend John Gagnon used to say that
the community of intellectuals is no longer local, physical.
It is rather wherever people of like mind are in the world, connecting
through whatever technology is available to them. I was young
then and liked what John said and for many years thought it sufficient.
But more and more I understand there is another dimension for
those of us who grow older: our constant communion and conversation
with the dead who are gone but who are not only not forgotten,
but not, in our heads, the least bit silent. Their voices, the
words they said and the words they would in all likelihood say
now, resonate in the present with perfect clarity, if we only
stop the noise and take time to listen.
Leslie Fiedler was a man of words--written
words, spoken words. He always told stories, always used the
stories to make connections between people, places, ideas and
times. What follows are some things Leslie said to Diane Christian
and me several years ago.
--Bruce Jackson
Newark
Newark is a real place for me. Essentially
it was a very exciting place and I learned lots of things in
Newark. I hated it. I felt really in prison, trapped. I guess
that's one of the reasons why I wander so restlessly about the
world ever since.
You asked why I went to Montana. Well,
anyplace outside of Newark was okay. It's only later that I discovered
that's why everybody went to Montana to begin with. Not because
they wanted to go to someplace, but because they wanted to get
the hell out of someplace else. That's the whole basic motif
of the western movement in the United States. It worked out fine.
I didn't know exactly what I was going to, but you couldn't have
imagined anything that was more non-Newark, anti-Newark, than
Missoula, Montana.
The Newark I lived in was Jewish. The
grade school I went to--Southside Avenue School--.the classes
must have been 95% Jewish. When the Jewish holidays came, all
the students disappeared, and even the few loners in the class
who weren't Jewish stayed out too, including a boy who name was
Christos Christopholos. He was a Greek boy who was in our class,
and I thought it was really great that he stayed home on Yom
Kippur.
....I'm not sure what it explains in
my life, but it's important for me:. we were absolutely almost
entirely Jewish as a student body and not a single one of our
teachers was Jewish. They were all suburban Gentile ladies. They
were from the WASP world. They sort of discovered me, those ladies,
and they tried to teach me to talk right so I could mingle unnoticed
with the great Gentile multitudes. One thing that began to happen
to me in school (and I have mixed feelings about it) is they
took my mother tongue away from me, my mamaloschen, the language
of the streets which I spoke with the kids, which was a language
full of Yiddish words. None of us could speak Yiddish, but we
knew how to say schmuck at least and mumser and so forth. Our
inflections were Jewish and some of our pronunciations, and I
was brainwashed so finally I have ended up speaking no recognizable
dialect, just general American, right? It was odd. They thought
of themselves as missionaries, those teachers who were rescuing
us for the high life. But we went much further than they did,
so that they were shocked and horrified.
The first teacher I ever had who thought
I was a writer hoped that I would someday be able to write very
successful detective stories. Instead I was dreaming of the Revolution
of the Word and becoming James Joyce.
I had a double experience as a kid. Before
I went to school in Newark my father had lived for a while--he
was a pharmacist and had a drugstore--in East Orange, New Jersey,
where I went to the school where not only all the teachers not
Jewish, but every other kid in the school except me and my brother
were Gentiles. It was the bad old days before anybody worried
about separation of church and state, so we had "chapel",
assemblies once a week where the Bible was read. We all said
the Lord's Prayer, which I pretended to say, really mouthing
obscenities, because I felt somehow I was betraying something.
That was the school in which the only kind of religious division--nobody
really realized I was a Jew for a long time--but sometimes during
recess time or after school when we played in the playground,
the kids would divide up against each other, the Protestants
over on one side of the playground and the Catholics on the other.
One marvelous occasion when they thought all hell was going to
break lose, they wanted to make sure everybody was on the right
side and they asked me which I was, Protestant or Catholic, and
I said Jewish. The ecumenical movement was invented and they
all joined together and all chased me all the way home screaming,
"You killed our Christ." This disturbed my father so
much that he moved back to Newark. He sold his business in East
Orange, and we left. I was in kindergarten through the first
three grades of school in that school.
That third grade was also the great turning
point in my life because I had a teacher who dearly loved me
and was pleased with everything I did, but I could never please
myself. I performed well enough to please her but I could never
live up to my own expectations, which were beyond anything. And
I would burst into tears when I did something not as well as
I thought I should. One day she took me aside and said, "Leslie,
don't cry. You're going to be a great man." And I believed
her. I honestly believed her. I didn't know what a great man
was exactly. But I honest-to-God believed her. Her name was Miss
Wessel. I'll never forget that lovely lady. So then we moved
back to Newark and I was in school all the way through high school,
where the students were all Jewish. High school was maybe 80%
Jewish.
In some ways after I got to Newark I
began to believe there were only two kinds of people in the world:
Blacks and Jews. Because when I was in junior high school I went
to school in the third ward of Newark, which is the core of the
Black ghetto, where most of the kids in the Junior high school--just
the ninth grade in that school--were white and/or Jewish, and
all the kids in the primary grades and in the neighborhood were
Black. It was there that I learned about race relations in America,
because if you were black or white, you didn't walk down the
street alone; you walked in a pack. Both ways, we were a pack.
My deepest visceral reaction to memories
of Newark is of despair and disgust, but when I think about it
I realize I learned lots of things in Newark. There were two
institutions in Newark which really educated me more when I was
a kid than the schools I went to. One was the Newark Public Library,
which is one of the great public libraries of the world. It is
one of the largest open-stacked libraries. The one in downtown
Newark. It's absolutely marvelous. There's quite a good museum
next to it. In the library you were absolutely free to wander
through, and I would wander through and at age l4 I pulled Marcel
Proust out of the wall, first in English; and when I was l5 I
tried to learn enough French to read him in French.
Talk
But I was getting educated in another
way because I worked on Saturdays from the time I was l3. On
lunch hours I would go across from the shoe store in which I
worked in Military Park, which is the heart of Newark, where
all the hobos and bums would hang out, and I would sit and listen
to the stories they told and learned a kind of "street smarts"
from them. They used to be entertained everyday by the most literate
among the hobos, a guy called "Frenchie" who would
sit and read aloud chapter after chapter of Jack London's The
Iron Heel to the rest of the bums in the park. That was the first
time somebody made a homosexual pass at me. Other guys would
tell me that when they combed their hair that morning, their
scalp began to fall out because they had reached that stage of
syphilitic decay. I learned about life in Military Park. And
the setting was so marvelous because that park is called Military
Park because it's dominated by a huge statue called the Wars
of America. It's also a place where itinerant preachers would
turn up and also communist speakers. I learned what it's like
to heckle. But by the time I was 13 or 14 I was also trying out
talking on street corners myself. I talked about how Roosevelt
was a Fascist and was protecting the Capitalist system in America.
I also would stand in front of people I didn't approve of. I
learned how to heckle and I learned how to confront hecklers.
In some ways my style is street- corner style.
The audiences I spoke to were basically
white audiences, but when I went off to graduate school my first
year outside of Newark, was Madison, Wisconsin, which annoyed
me in some ways and I would always flee to Chicago. In Chicago
I used to speak on the southside in Washington Park and I would
talk to all black audiences. I learned this exchange: you would
say something, and they say, "Now you're preachin', brother."
And I'd say something else, and they'd say, "Go right on
preachin'." I learned that kind of back and forth thing.
Also in Newark, the other thing I tried
doing, we got very interested in theater. We learned Stanislowski
method; it later got shortened to "Method" acting.
We studied the theory of the thing and had a small group that
put on plays. We leaned how to cry. We learned how to laugh.
We also learned the same thing that I learned on the soap boxes
on street corners, that the motion has to go back and forth from
the stage to the audience, from the audience to the stage. For
a long time I was tempted away from my chosen career as a writer--poet,
I thought of myself in those days--and thought of becoming an
actor. For a long time I kept acting. I used to do amateur acting
in my early years in Montana. And even after I was here in Buffalo
I did a little. I once did the narration for Lucas Foss (the
Oedipus Rex, Stravinsky thing). I acted in a play of Al Cook's
once; the most miserable play that was ever written on the face
of the earth.
I can't even remember what it was called.
All I remember is that we actors would say, "Can't speak
this line and the director would say, "Strike it out."
It was half as long when we produced it as when we started.
Being Jewish
...My father's family was completely
assimilated. The only Jewishness my father had left was anti-Semitism.
He used to say at the top of his voice: "One thing I can't
stand about Jews is they always talked too damn loud."
[My grandfather] was the one who told
me all the fairy tales before I could read them in a book and
broke the whole tradition. He used to tell them to all the kids
in the neighborhood. And like an idiot, I never took down his
versions of them. They just slipped away. He had the best version
of "The Princess in the Glass Hill" that I ever heard.
All his stories began the same way. He always (when he told them
to me, at least) made them very male centered, boy-centered.
All his stories began, "Once there was a young man who got
on a white horse and rode out into the world." He himself
was more of a peasant and ran around with a bunch of kids who
would jump on a local farmer's horse and ride and steal stuff
from the orchards. He had a mark on his foot which he claimed
came from a horse's hoof; I think it just happened to be shaped
like that, but he had a great story about jumping on a blind
horse who ran into a tree. I couldn't believe anything he said,
but it was all done in very good humor. He was the strongest
human being I ever knew in my life, and the gentlest. We used
to beg him to feel his muscles. He was little. Slight. But strong.
Incredibly strong. And bullied all his life long by my grandmother,
who was much smaller than he was, whom he could have broken in
half with one hand. She bullied him. She was absolutely analphabetic,
and he could read and write and spoke six or seven languages.
He taught himself to read. He used to read aloud to my grandmother
stories, which I realized years later were Isaac Singer's. He
knew a lot. He told me the story of the story of The Merchant
of Venice the first time I ever heard it. He told it as a story.
I thought it was about a bad Litvak who gave the Galitizianers
a hard time. He was political. My father was political in his
own way. He always claimed he was a sturdily independent voter
and ended up voting for the Democratic candidate. Even Al Smith.
And he was extremely anti-communist. Talk about Puritans. I grew
up in a real Puritan household. My father used to write letters
to the newspaper about how the world is going to hell; now full
of long-haired men and short-haired women who confuse liberty
with license....
My grandfather was quite anti-religious.
Theoretically, anti-religious. But every once in a while he would
take me when I was a kid, when the high holidays came, to one
of those store-front synagogues they set up. He would always
say the same thing to me. "Not because I believe, but so
you should remember."
I remember. At one and the same time
I don't doubt for a moment that I'm Jewish, but what I mean when
I say it is absolutely problematical to me. I'm not very Jewish
culturally. Certainly not Jewish in a religious sense. I guess
mythologically, I'm Jewish. I believe that I come from an unbroken
line of people who go all the way back to Aaron and Abraham.
And if my pedigree ends with mythological characters, that's
true of all high pedigrees. Right? I am also Jewish in the sense
that if Hitler was around, he would have cleared me too. I would
have passed the test. I am also Jewish in the sense that if somebody
says to me, however friendly or hostile a fashion, "Are
you Jewish?" I say, "Yes, I'm Jewish."
I have actually written a little about
this whole problem of the strange nature of my Jewishness--an
article which I might have told you about before for a book on
the Holocaust. I have many Jewish vestiges. Every Yom Kippur
I fast. Every Chanukah I light the lights and place them beside
the Christmas tree. Every Pesach I have a seder, which doesn't
keep me from dashing out into the yard and shouting "Christ
is Risen" occasionally too. That's a past I feel continuous
with, however much it may be dissolving. I once wrote a story
called, "The Last Jew in America." I sometimes feel
like the last Jew in America. I really am. Of my grandsons, three
are not circumcised. How can I be a Jew if I have no one to say
Kaddish for me?
A book of Leslie Fiedler's
conversations with Bruce Jackson
and Diane Christian about literature, politics, war, race,
America, and other matters will be published in the Center
Working Papers series in 2004.
Bruce Jackson,
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo, edits the web journal
BuffaloReport.com.
His most recent book is Emile
de Antonio in Buffalo (Center Working Papers). Jackson
is also a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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