Boy in Gangland
Friedman, Melvin J.
Boy in Gangland BILLY BATHGATE by E.L. Doctorow Random House. 323 pp. $19.95. FScott Fitzgerald cast Meyer Wolf-sheim in a cameo role to represent the Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein in The...
...Berman said might someday come to pass, the perverse proposition of a numbers man, to throw them away and all their imagery, the cuneiform, the hieroglyphic, the calculus, and the speed of light, the whole numbers and fractions, the rational and irrational numbers, the numbers for the infinite and the numbers of nothing...
...Melvin J. Friedman (Melvin J. Friedman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee...
...Doctorow, a Jew and a sympathetic orchestra-tor of Jewish subjects in The Book of Daniel and World's Fair, creates a largely Jewish ambiance in Billy Bathgate...
...This Mafia chieftain is present, we are told, because "a Catholic in good standing has to testify as a kind of character witness...
...Billy's changing, disruptive views of the last eight months in the life of Dutch Schultz result in a compelling story, elegantly told...
...Billy is another of those narrators who go through rites of initiation on the way to realizing that "my life as a boy was over...
...Though Schultz himself converts to Catholicism at one point in the novel, this gesture is viewed somewhat cynically, especially when the narrator reveals that a celebrated New York criminal, who is never named, had agreed "to speak for him as his godparent and present him formally to the priest for admission to the Church...
...Billy is half Jewish, with an Irish Catholic mother who would "rather go to temple than to church...
...Fitzgerald placed Meyer Wolfsheim in a Christian world that readily accepted the unpleasant stereotypes about Jews...
...his demeaning presence in Fitzgerald's novel underscores the author's long-suspected anti-Semitism...
...The gang members have mostly Jewish names—Lulu Rosen-krantz, Bo Weinberg, and Otto Berman...
...In Billy Bathgate, Schultz, Bo Weinberg, Thomas E. Dewey (described at one point as "that little Republican with the mustache...
...While he is only half Nick Carraway's age during the events of the novel, Doctorow has given him the same responsibilities in making sense of the world of Dutch Schultz that Carraway had in sorting out the affairs of Jay Gatsby...
...The novel is narrated by Billy Bathgate, who at fifteen manages to latch on to Schultz and his gang in the final year of their existence, 1935...
...His devotion to Dutch Schultz is unwavering to the end: "I was excited to be there alone with him in his cavernous transgression, he had slugged me and kicked my ribs in and now I felt a real love for him, I forgave him, I wanted him to love me...
...His deprived Bronx background—living with a mother who is "a little bit crazy" and with vague memories of a father who deserted them—offers an odd entryway to the complex gangland activities of the 1930s...
...The difference is that Doctorow tends to romanticize rather than debase Schultz as he negotiates the thin line separating fact from fiction—something he continues to manage more successfully than any of his contemporaries...
...Her "memory glasses," referred to frequently in the novel, are very likely what Jews call yahrzeit candles, which burn in memory of the dead...
...But somehow the two are made to work together...
...Doctorow, whose fictional strategies have occasionally been compared to Fitzgerald's, makes the Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz (born Arthur Flegenheimer) the centerpiece of his latest novel, Billy Bathgate...
...Doctorow has always moved easily between history and myth, blurring distinctions between the two...
...Otto (Ab-badabba) Berman, a member of the Schultz gang who has a way with numbers, is caught up in the verbal frenzy of this sentence: "It was what Mr...
...Wolfsheim is one of the least palatable characters in post-World War I American fiction...
...In Ragtime, for example, he worked such historical figures as Sigmund Freud, Harry Houdini, and Stanford White into the fictional texture of his narrative...
...He is the sole recorder of the events...
...Dutch Schultz's conversion from Judaism to Catholicism has no more assurance about it than the matter of names: "Insofar as names went they could be like license plates you could switch on cars, not welded into their construction but only tagged on for the temporary purposes of identification...
...While Billy spends little time with his mother during the months when he is involved with the Schultz gang, he seems genuinely to care for her and worry about her eccentricities...
...One of the narrator's favorite words is "micturation...
...The fifteen-year-old Billy Bathgate narrates with assurance and bravado, but reveals a sense of compassion and loyalty rarely found among confidence men...
...One ends up feeling that not only religion and names but almost everything in Billy Bathgate is protean...
...This elevated language bears an odd relationship to the speech patterns of the members of the gang, which favor the un-grammatical and the argot of the New York underworld...
...FScott Fitzgerald cast Meyer Wolf-sheim in a cameo role to represent the Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein in The Great Gatsby...
...The language of Billy Bathgate suggests the retrospective nature of the telling, the adult looking back on a period of his adolescence: "through the great schism of sun and shade and over the cupidinous howl of the masses...
...The New York Times of October 25,1935, reporting on the violent deaths of Schultz and his cohorts, referred to them as a "Jewish gang...
...And he with not a touch of the poet in him"), and others connected with American crime and punishment supply the fact part of the fact-fiction interplay...
...The surname Billy appropriates, Bathgate (after Bathgate Avenue), is the Bronx equivalent of Hester Street...
Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8
