Returning, p.19
Returning, page 19
The only place in Europe where Edgar got the feeling of a Jewish crisis was in Warsaw, and that was not because of antisemitism, but because of the way the Jews themselves had chosen to live. At his request, his guide took him to the section of town occupied by traditional, unmodernized Jews, the kind of people he’d never actually seen but who occupied a large space in the consciousness of German Jews in America because our incomprehensible association with them was so threatening. He was profoundly shocked: nothing in his life had prepared him for this encounter; nothing could have upset him more. To let him tell the story:
I never thought I would see Jews so foul, filthy, and degraded as these people whom we saw by the thousands. They are literally so filthy on their persons that I would have shuddered to touch them, and their homes and shops wide open to the street, were unbelievably sordid. . . . You might conclude that I have had a strong injection of anti-Semitism, but I was filled, not so much with annoyance, as with disgust, shame, horror that any Jews could sink so low. . . . And here is the worst of the story: There people, practically every one of them, men, women, and children, looks less like human beings, with the minimum of dignity and decency which we like to associate with the “higher animal,” than like some sort of lower animal with half a brain and less than half a soul. They swarmed around us, bent, crooked, misshapen creatures, with grimacing distorted faces, and they gibbered and squawked and shrieked inquiries whether we were American, Spanish, etc. There was a suggestion from a few that we might be “judisch,” by the crowd but a great majority voted that down, and for the moment I was glad to abide by the opinion of the majority. At that instant I was almost ashamed to be a Jew, or at least, I was horrified, aghast, and immeasurably saddened that any group of this race could sink to the very bottom of the pit of human existence.
As people who greatly disapprove of something often do, Edgar wanted to see more. He had the guide take him to a cheder, an airless room crowded with black-clad men and boys wearing kippot, tallitot, and tefillin—small black boxes containing a scrap of paper inscribed with a few words of Torah, strapped to the forehead. They were swaying back and forth, mumbling prayers to themselves. Edgar reminded himself that Max Heller, the rabbi he’d grown up with at Temple Sinai in New Orleans, had told him that such Jews were admirable for their religious devotion and learning, but Edgar was having none of it. They were merely primitive fanatics, nothing more. Still, repulsed as he was, he was unable to stay away. He returned to the Jewish quarter once again for Friday night services. Then he tried to draw some conclusions from what he had seen. First, he fully appreciated how much of a heroic venture the advent of Reform Judaism had been, for lighting a path out of this unacceptable way of life. Second, “If I were a Pole, I wouldn’t want that kind around me, and neither Jews nor Gentiles would want them around in America. So they should get out of Poland and find another place to live.” Third, “There are too many Jews in Poland and I fear there will be trouble if a substantial number can’t be moved out.” One of the philanthropic ventures of Edgar’s father-in-law, Julius Rosenwald, who had died a few years earlier, was funding the establishment of agricultural colonies for Eastern European Jews. Edgar and Edith had visited some of these, in Ukraine, and had been impressed. The director of the program had told the Sterns that he was in touch with the Soviet government about establishing a new Jewish Soviet republic in Siberia, and he was optimistic that this might happen. In that case, additional Jews from Poland, Lithuania, and Romania could be sent there.
A few weeks later, the Sterns went to Palestine, where they had the opposite of their experience in Warsaw. They had set up the trip only because they felt philanthropically obligated to keep themselves apprised of efforts to establish colonies, like the ones they’d seen in Ukraine, for the more needy and distasteful Jews. But they found themselves deeply impressed, even moved, by the beauty of the country and by the work they saw the Jews there doing. Because of who the Sterns were, their visits were mainly to symphony conductors and university presidents rather than to collective farmers. They shared with earlier American visitors the feeling that in Palestine a new kind of Jew had been born, who evoked very different reactions in a visitor from the poor Jews of Europe. The disturbing qualities of those Jews had disappeared. The Jewish question had been solved. Ordinary Jews in Palestine were clean-shaven, healthy, proud, secular. They were normal, not freakish. Israel seemed even to have successfully addressed the bedeviling problem of the tasteless Jewish parvenu, which was, from the point of view of German Jews like the Sterns, so often an unfortunate step on the road to full assimilation. Even the more prosperous Jews they encountered in Palestine were not grasping or vulgar. They were Jews whom Jews like the Sterns could be proud of, could regard as peers. Although Edgar wasn’t quite ready yet to declare himself a Zionist, everything he had seen on his trip had left him far more open to the idea, and perhaps more willing to acknowledge the true nature of the situation for Jews in Europe, than he had been beforehand. In Europe whatever realistic assessment may have been possible for him was put out of reach by his visceral, ineradicable need to distance himself from the Jewish majority.
On their way home, the Sterns gathered up their children from boarding school and together attended the coronation of King George VI at Westminster Abbey in London, a glorious, grand affair that offered a reassuring picture, not so long before Britain came under Nazi bombardment, of a civilized and safe traditional social order, with a dignified royal family cheered by throngs of its adoring subjects. “There was every evidence of cordiality toward these peers and peeresses as they drew up to the Abbey, magnificently clad in red velvet and ermine capes, carrying their coronets,” Edgar wrote. “In spite of the tremendous changes in the world, it may fairly well be said that every Englishman loves a lord!” A few days later they embarked for New Orleans, where a team of architects and landscape designers imported from New York was working with them to superimpose a layer of elegance—their splendid new house and its gardens—over an expanse of Louisiana’s wet, fecund soil.
“I Have Become a Myth”
Most of the world doesn’t have royal courts anymore. Even in Britain the court is mainly symbolic. The term court Jew sounds archaic. And yet, Jewish history, Jewish life, is full of patterns that begin in Scripture and somehow keep recurring. When I look at the lives of Pop and his friend Felix Frankfurter, I see court Jews transposed to the twentieth century. Both of them, especially Frankfurter, rose to a very high level, transcending the boundaries of the Jewish world, and they were both constantly aware of being not just prominent people, but prominent Jews. They were seen, and treated, differently because they were Jews. Their high status was conditional, vulnerable both to expulsion from court and to the rage of the mob that so often seems to be waiting outside the castle walls. They always had to think about where their primary loyalties lay, with their people or with their patrons.
It may be a sign of the never-ending fascination with the court Jew as a type that in 1934 a British studio, the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, made a film version of Jud Süss, Feuchtwanger’s novel about an eighteenth-century court Jew in Germany, with Feuchtwanger himself as one of the screenwriters. The film—released in Britain as Jew Süss, and in the United States as Power—was meant as an anti-Nazi gesture, a work of philosemitism. It is faithful to the novel in ending with Süss’s martyrdom. Today it looks as if making the film must have been a challenging project, because having Süss read to 1930s audiences as Jewish (so as to maintain the impact of the revelation at the end that he actually wasn’t) required presenting him as off-puttingly exotic and foreign. He looks different, big-nosed and sallow, he has special abilities wielding money and political influence that are the basis of his special status but that automatically arouse suspicion and hostility. Even to their friends, Jews in those days weren’t quite normal; or, if they were Jewish and came across as normal, it was because they concealed their Jewishness.
Exoticizing of Jews as the film was, it infuriated Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, who retaliated by producing his own version of Jud Süss, released in 1940. In the Nazi film it’s Süss himself who is a rapist, rather than being falsely accused of rape. His death on the gallows at the end is treated as a joyous occasion, a liberation of the Gentiles from his insistent grasp. The Nazis’ film was a much bigger hit than the British one. It has been banned for decades, like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but occasionally a snippet pops up briefly online, before an algorithm discovers it and takes it down. From that you get a sense of the gravamen of the film, and it’s a familiar one: the cunning, greedy, lustful, misshapen Jew, who has a supernatural power to twist all of society to his and his people’s malign purposes.
When I was ten years old, Father took me to visit Justice Frankfurter in Washington. It was only a few months before he died. What I remember is a small and very old man sunk into a soft, enclosing armchair in the living room of a dark apartment. Everything Father communicated about the visit gave me the impression that this old friend of Pop was a very important, or formerly important, man, but I didn’t understand how. Now that I’ve read the hundreds of letters he and Pop wrote back and forth for decades, I have a better grasp of who both of them were and of how, individually and together, they managed the always present tension between being Jewish and being at court. Frankfurter had come to America as a twelve-year-old boy, when his father moved the family here from Austria in the hope of a big business success, which eluded him. Compared with Pop, Frankfurter was in much closer touch with Jewish life in Western Europe, where most of his family still lived, and in the Lower East Side tenements, where he had grown up. By the time he was in his midthirties, he was an ardent Zionist, and also a socialist. Pop was neither. Frankfurter was much more intensely ambitious than Pop to be at the center of the great events of his time. He knew everybody and wanted to be a part of everything; he combined an ardent desire to be at court with equally ardent views that weren’t acceptable at court. The provincial life that Pop had chosen had no appeal for him. He relentlessly pushed Pop to join him on the big stage, sometimes successfully.
Only once was Pop in an obviously more prominent public position than Frankfurter. That was when President Herbert Hoover appointed Pop as one of the eleven members of a national commission to review law enforcement in the United States. It was five months before the 1929 stock market crash; Hoover, an engineer celebrated for his work organizing relief efforts, was still a national hero. There’s a stiffly formal group portrait of the members and Hoover in front of the White House, with Pop looking self-conscious in a heavy, double-breasted suit. The commission’s nominal mission disguises what was really at stake, and what put the commission at the center of attention: it was supposed to assess whether Prohibition, the country’s brief, disastrous experiment with a national ban on alcohol, was working. It would help Hoover, a teetotaler, if the commission reported that it was—but it wasn’t; illegal drinking was ubiquitous, and because it was also illegal, Prohibition was a gift to organized crime.
Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, was raptly attentive to the commission’s doings. Because one member, Pop, was his close friend, and the commission’s staff director, Max Lowenthal (also Jewish), was one of his legion of protégés, Frankfurter knew a great deal about the commission’s deliberations. And he was already a constant informal advisor to the presidentially ambitious governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had no stake in Prohibition, which was far more a Republican cause than a Democratic one, and would not have wanted it endorsed by a prestigious commission. Frankfurter quickly became convinced that the commission was up to no good. Pop had confided to him that its private deliberations were amateurish; he’d been expecting to take part in a scientific inquiry, and instead it was merely political.
What should a court Jew do when things are going awry at court—keep quiet, or speak out at the risk of losing his high position? Pop told Frankfurter he was thinking of resigning. Frankfurter, acting out of some combination of friendship and his own political interest, instead urged Pop to stay on and become a public dissenter. He barraged Pop with sympathy, encouragement, ideas for potential strategies, and sometimes even flattery. His idea was that Pop should spend much more time in Washington, a long train trip from New Orleans, and battle the other commissioners at every point. It wound up that Pop protested less than Frankfurter wanted him to, but more than the other commissioners did. He issued a personal dissent from the commission’s main report on Prohibition. Drinking was unstoppable, he wrote, and everybody knew that even Prohibition’s official supporters (except for Hoover) were ignoring it. Therefore, “I see no alternative but repeal.” That was in January 1931. The Great Depression had begun. In 1932, Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the presidential election, and Prohibition was on the way out.
The newly appointed National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in front of the White House, 1929. Pop is standing second from left. President Herbert Hoover is sitting third from right.
Now, with Roosevelt’s election, Frankfurter became far more of a court Jew—the brainy, cosmopolitan essential advisor to the ruler—than Pop had ever been, even though for years he held no official position. Frankfurter’s boundless energy and his willingness to insert himself into situations, and Roosevelt’s informal way of conducting White House business, made for a perfect fit. Frankfurter was constantly suggesting that his allies, including Pop, be given high-ranking government jobs. He was frequently in Washington and when he wasn’t he was writing long letters to Roosevelt. All Pop’s episodes at court—top-level national politics, anyway—came to him via Frankfurter.
One Sunday evening in 1935, Frankfurter and Roosevelt were sitting on the White House balcony, drinking rum cocktails. Roosevelt mentioned that Huey Long, the dictatorially powerful populist senator from Louisiana, was maneuvering in a way that suggested that he might stage a challenge to Roosevelt, from the left, for the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination. What did Frankfurter think? Frankfurter told Roosevelt that he didn’t know enough about Long to answer. But he should ask Monte Lemann, in New Orleans. As Frankfurter remembered it years later, Roosevelt said, “There is a telephone. Call him and ask him to come see me.” Frankfurter called. Pop, whom I picture hastily packing a suitcase and jamming a straw boater on his head, booked passage on the first available train and went to Washington.
In the downtown business world where Pop worked, hatred of Long was nearly universal, except among a handful of men who had allied themselves with Long in exchange for economic favors. As Pop knew well, the sugarcane business wasn’t what it used to be, but Louisiana still had an extractive economy—if not sugar, then oil and gas, or rice, or sulfur—that made a few people rich but didn’t support much of a middle class. Even an electorate that didn’t include the state’s Black population, which had been disenfranchised, was mainly poor, and strongly attracted to Long’s slogan, “Share our wealth,” and his roaring, fearless attacks on business interests. Pop had confided to Frankfurter that he was so upset about Long’s steamrolling of Louisiana’s political institutions that he was thinking of moving away, so that his sons would not have to grow up in the Long regime. (For centuries, in many places and many guises, populism had regularly made a special target of Jews.) What made Pop unusual among Long-haters was that he was also an enthusiastic supporter of the New Deal. Roosevelt’s core voting constituency in Louisiana was the same as Long’s, poor whites, and it adored him for the same reason, that he was on their side and used government aggressively to make their lives better. Roosevelt didn’t have a lot of allies in Louisiana who were also anti-Long.
During the period when Frankfurter was old, sick, and retired, Father’s brother, my uncle Stephen, went to see him in Washington and got him to tell the story of Pop’s visit to the White House, which he still remembered vividly. Together, Frankfurter and Pop went to Roosevelt’s private study. There they found, along with Roosevelt himself, a group of Southern senators—tough, canny, long-serving, segregationist allies of Roosevelt—who were worried that Long was going to recruit populist opponents to run against them, as Long was himself planning to be the populist opponent of Roosevelt. The senators wanted Roosevelt to threaten to cut off federal funding for their states, unless Long ended his political rebellion. Pop said that was a bad idea—it would only strengthen Long’s hand by making him look like a lonely crusader against established interests.
Frankfurter, perhaps out of fondness, made it sound as if only Pop’s eloquence in making his case could have persuaded the Southern senators to stop pressuring Roosevelt to punish Long. We’ll never know whether Long would have made good on his insurrectionist plans, because not long afterward, the son-in-law of one of his political enemies (recast in All the King’s Men as the brother of one of Willie Stark’s mistresses) shot him in the lobby of the Louisiana state capitol as he was emerging from the legislative chamber. Long’s bodyguards fired a fusillade at the assassin so intense that you can still see pockmarks from their bullets in the lobby’s wall; Long himself had enough life in him to run down a corridor to safety, but after a day of agony in a hospital, he died, at the age of forty-two. Two hundred thousand adoring Louisianans lined up to see him lying in state in an open casket. In 1936 Roosevelt, having adeptly avoided any other challenges, was reelected in one of the most lopsided presidential votes in American history: he carried forty-six of the forty-eight states, won 523 of 531 electoral votes, and had the support of large majorities in both houses of Congress. He had as much political power as any American president has ever had.
For Pop, the Long episode was his only moment as a court Jew inside the White House; for Frankfurter, it was one of what must have been dozens of incidents when he demonstrated his value to Roosevelt. After Roosevelt was reelected, Frankfurter had to confront one of the moral dilemmas that present themselves to people in such positions. It’s the essence of the court Jew’s position that he’s not just another courtier. All courtiers have to decide whether to tell the king when he’s wrong, knowing that might bring their heady role to an end. Jewish courtiers also have to decide how much to stand up for their own people, knowing that to do so may imperil their standing even more, because of the special hatred Jews attract. At that moment, anti-Jewish passions were rising everywhere, not just in Germany. Frankfurter, on non-Jewish matters, was willing to trim. On Jewish matters, he stood firm.
