Love and Theft: From Jack Robin to Bob Dylan
Berman, Marshall
Mutual forgiveness of each vice, Such are the gates of paradise. —William Blake, "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise" My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than...
...it looks like he's really on his way...
...And, in Blake's words, "Mutual forgiveness of each vice / Such are the gates of paradise...
...Coral is far more red than her lips' red...
...It turns up on the front pages of modern mass culture and the twentieth-century consumer economy, with their "lowest common denominator" and reign of the House of Nielsen...
...What happened...
...Like it or not, we all have a stake in that...
...Not that I would ever try to race or chase or track or trace Bob Dylan's mind...
...the Marx brothers, Dorothy Parker, A. J. Liebling, Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Josephson, Max Gordon, Jerry Wexler, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Bernstein, Seymour Krim, Nat Hentoff, Norman Mailer, Larry Rivers, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Laura Nyro, Dr...
...The screen fades to black...
...After the Holocaust, "Eili, Eili" came to life again as an anthem of a whole people's martyrdom...
...But The Jazz Singer tells all Americans something crucial about their identity...
...In fact, this guilty unease defines The Jazz Singer's climax...
...At the movie's start, he was the cantor's friend, but also a flaneur and a lover of street culture...
...but the kid we see looks and sounds under ten...
...It happens on the night that begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement...
...and in fact the Kol Nidre ritual is conceived collectively, so that everybody covers for everybody else...
...I'VE BEEN focusing on Jewish identity up to now...
...Everything is set up to prepare us for the dress rehearsal, the solemn moment when we see the hero actually construct the self he is trying to become...
...Let's come back to Jack Robin's dressing room...
...We the audience have heard his soaring and expansive voice, and we know he's got the stuff, but we fear his morbid undertows...
...For the first time 68 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 in the movie, he looks like a serious and integrated person...
...That cult took on an ominous new life in the 1920s, the decade when America closed the gates...
...Identification helps people grow up, become more than they were, enlarge who they are, and learn to live in peace...
...For modern psychologists, the Shadow metaphor is about universal mental processes that they call "projection" and "identification...
...When Yudelson asks Jack/Jakie to return and to use his voice to help his father die, the music he wants the Jazz Singer to LOVE AND THEFT perform is called Kol Nidre...
...The most famous one is the cri de coeur of Jesus on the cross (Matt...
...He faces himself in the mirror to check out the changes...
...This shambling, sleazy figure (Otto Lederer) doesn't get much time on the screen, but plays a big role in the story, moving across vital boundaries...
...But that erased, rejected "nigger" is also part of the truth...
...Eric Lott, Love and Theft SINCE THE SPREAD of video shops all over America, the Warner Brothers-Al Jolson 1927 film The Jazz Singer has been easier than ever to see...
...In this new world, tragedy can metamorphose instantly into comedy, and the project of giving up everything can turn out to be just a chapter in the dialectics of having it all...
...His mother is in the audience, arm in arm with Yudelson, and an ecstatic smile passes between mother and son...
...Within a couple of minutes, maybe even a couple of seconds, a spit in the black face metamorphosed into something close to an embrace, and the movie grew up...
...For decades, people like these have helped to excavate the vast wealth of black culture and to open it up to millions of whites who knew it not...
...How low can you go...
...Any Jew who goes through this ritual remembers all the synagogue members who wonder what's the point of paying for a cantor, but then, after the great solo, leave the synagogue in tears and pray to be forgiven for their forgetting...
...If we look back with a long view, the name "Bob Dylan" sounds roughly as real—or real in the same way—as "Jack Robin...
...Still, this kid (played by Bobby Gordon) can sing, and he can hold the screen...
...In the movie, the shooting script ends with the hero's goyishe girlfriend's rather klunky lament, "You are listening to the stage's greatest blackface comedian singing to his God...
...I bring it up now only because the title of his latest album, "Love and Theft," and the refrain of its best song—"Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long"—suggest it's on his mind...
...he heard "Ragtime Jackie" in a grungy club and immediately betrayed him to his father...
...But none of us is capable of identifying with other people until we can identify with the dark side of ourselves, until we can bring our shadows into the light and find ways to live with them...
...We met him first as a kid, "Jakie Rabinowitz," son of a cantor on the Lower East Side...
...Maybe someday some graduate student somewhere will explore the theme through Dylan's forty-year oeuvre...
...The concert's climax is a Yiddish hit, "Eili, Eili": "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me...
...When I looked up this line in Alfred Cohn's shooting script, in the Wisconsin edition, it said something startlingly different from what's on the screen...
...Emphasis added] From the standpoint of consciousness expansion, personal growth, Bildung, the leap into blackness could open up fruitful cultural paths...
...The Christian version of this idea is elaborated in the Gospels...
...Now, at last, he has a chance to break through and be recognized as a star in his home town...
...This doesn't mean he would have put up with charges like those of my late dear friend Mike Rogin (in his book Black Masks, White Noise) that not only The Jazz Singer, but just about all pop culture created by twentieth-century Jews is part of a gigantic Jewish Primal Crime Against The Blacks...
...He can recognize the hero by his voice: "Yes, that's Jakie—with the cry in the voice, just like in the temple...
...And yet, and yet...
...Not only the hero's dead father with his commandments and his commands but the whole tragic dilemma that the movie blocked out so well seem to belong not just to another age but to another planet...
...The Jazz Singer takes us for a ride, but a ride that most of us would be glad to take...
...It's a dirty little hole on the East Side called the Hester Street Synagogue...
...But then, an instant later, DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 71 LOVE AND THEFT a title tells us: "The season passes—and time heals—the show goes on...
...What was it before...
...Hank Greenberg and later Sandy Koufax were Jewish stars who refused to play...
...I won't talk about this rich and fascinating book directly, but it has helped me see where it is I am trying to go...
...Isn't liberalism a belief that we can have it all...
...The second, called The Jazz Singer, was a stage adaptation, also by Raphaelson...
...If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun...
...Maybe that could justify the existence of Cultural Studies...
...These processes work within the self in radically different ways...
...The cantor in the movie is a real person, Yossele Rosenblatt, one of the first Jewish religious figures to record his voice and market it...
...When Jolson paints himself black, he performs multicultural America's first sacrament: he constitutes himself as both the mixer and the mix...
...More than any other Jewish ritual, Kol Nidre is driven by music...
...Congress passed several laws to create a system of quotas that effectively ended immigration for the next forty years...
...He is "Yudelson, the Kibitzer from the Ghetto...
...I'm not saying that any of Dylan's names is unreal...
...But no one imagined this in the 1920s...
...I still recall my outrage, at age nine, when I first saw that paint job, and winced at what I expected to see— What...
...Only the American," he said, "has a chance to become a citizen of the world...
...In identification, we yearn for others, want to reach out and touch them, talk to them, be close to them, be like them...
...Nothing else can break through peoples' resistance and open up their emotional floodgates...
...Come down right away...
...DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 73...
...But though he ran from it, he couldn't hide...
...Michael Alexander, at the very start of his recent study Jazz Age Jews, puts it well...
...What is the power of blackness for Jack...
...Spike Lee's wonderful Bamboozled showed that he is one of those children...
...For five decades, rock and roll has sweated blood to flesh out the bottom and make it dance...
...Its implicit leap of faith is that, if we can face each other in full knowledge of the bad things we have done, or even the bad things we have dreamed of doing, then we will have the right to ask for mutual forgiveness...
...BLACK WRITERS have generally treated the Jolson Jazz Singer amiably: "the black face tradition's crowning achievement and final success," says Donald Bogle, "the minstrel tradition at its sentimentalized, corrupt best...
...Jack/Jakie is stunned by all he's lost...
...is a paradox in the psychology of American Jewry...
...Hm, Bob Dylan, I wonder what it was before...
...But it isn't quite the whole story...
...You can see it any day in New York on LOVE AND THEFT the number seven subway line or hear it on music radio...
...Before we have a chance to say, "Hold it...
...You could say the kibitzer's "shadow" line gives away The Jazz Singer's whole story: a twentieth-century epic where immigrant Jews identify with blacks in ways that help to develop both mass culture and multicultural liberalism...
...His act evokes many of the sad clowns who haunt Western theatre—Harlequin, Pagliacci, "He Who Gets Slapped," and a whole line of great minstrels (Jolson had played with the Dockstader Minstrels as a kid)—except that, as we see him, he is not at home in his sadness...
...Outsider identification...
...But it's surely true that the emotional stew of The Jazz Singer includes some sort of sense of guilt toward blacks...
...Is there any hour late enough, any night dark enough, that the guys on the Harvard-Princeton Dream Team could talk...
...Jakie plunges into the melting pot of vaudeville, anoints himself with a new name, "Jack Robin," and, like so many great American performers, grows up on the road...
...Jack Robin" is the name of the performer who goes to work on himself in this scene...
...The most remarkable moment in the 1927 Jazz Singer occurs about two-thirds of the way through, when Al Jolson blacks up...
...Jakie's solo converts him, and he rushes to the corner drugstore to call his partner uptown: "Harry," said Lee, "do you want to hear the greatest ragtime singer in America in the making...
...We saw and heard him sing in clubs and on the street...
...When I was twenty, I thought that mass culture's only justification for existing was its capacity to put us all up against the wall...
...Locked out of social striving, they were forced to stay close to home, and, ironically, forced to preserve "the cry in their voice," the sound of primal human emotion...
...But the great majority were still, like Faulkner's characters, locked into the rural South...
...Look into those eyes: he looks like a mensch...
...It took awhile for Americans to get this...
...And they have confronted America with a j'accuse: its betrayal of its black people is proof of its betrayal of itself...
...If mass culture can make us happy, should we deny ourselves this happiness...
...The Jazz Singer's narrative, pacing, and tonalities have all been carefully constructed to show us that the hero's story is not mainly about theater, or about success, but about what Keats called "soul-making," and Erik Erikson "ego-identity...
...Our only record player was in my mother's room, and I couldn't listen to it without playing it for her...
...maybe his friends in show business, who believed in him and helped him reach the center stage that he is now (so he believes) throwing away...
...Johnny Rotten's "We are the future/ there is no future" may be its strongest affirmation...
...There must be some emotional strength that the Jazz Singer feels when he wears a black mask, which he feels deprived of when he walks around in just his own Jewish face...
...He knew that...
...Right after the revelatory moment at the mirror, another clown breaks onstage with another revelation...
...He is working on 100 Years of Spectacle: The Metamorphoses of Times Square...
...In the last scene, as Jack/Jakie sings "Mammy" and conquers Broadway, Yudelson will have an amorous arm around Jack's mother...
...The fact is, we all live in a culture that is deeply committed, not only to a mental life of binary oppositions, but to the paradoxical idea that "The last will be first...
...Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) showed how new media and America's developing mass culture could be mobilized in the service of this fantasy...
...What is more, many identified with less fortunate individuals and groups . . . by imitating, defending, and actually participating in the group life of marginalized Americans...
...It's easy to dismiss the Panglossian myth...
...William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 I wanna be black...
...There's something amazing about the black face he has constructed...
...As we do this, we constrict the scope of our being and enlist in an unending state of war, not only with the people next door, but with ourselves, prime suspects in a hopeless quest for purity...
...The encounter between him and his mirror image is arranged very carefully...
...What Yudelson says in the printed version is, "It talks like Jakie, but it looks like a nigger...
...I don't know...
...American popular comedy, from the earliest carnivals and minstrel shows through the heyday of vaudeville and burlesque, has always 72 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 heaped scorn and ridicule on the solemn official cult of white Anglo-Saxon purity...
...This song is an adaptation of Psalm 22, writDISSENT / Summer 2002 n 6 7 LOVE AND THEFT ten for Yiddish vaudeville in New York in the 1890s...
...The book that taught me this is Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class...
...The "trans-national" vision animates many all-inclusive Popular Front murals, anti-Nazi World War II films, the canonical Frank Sinatra-Albert Maltz short film The House I Live In, which won a special Oscar in 1945...
...It is the real meaning that underlies the contemporary word "multicultural," a word used in many confused and phony ways...
...Remember the historical context: in 1927, when The Jazz Singer was made, American Jews were believed to have "arrived," to be "at home" at last...
...There are many ways a black face can help a Jew...
...It often coincides with the World Series...
...As he gazes, his vision fragments kaleidescopically into montage (in the 1920s this genre was still fresh), and propels him back in time, into his father's synagogue, into "Jakie Rabinowitz," the kid whose spontaneity and joy he has repressed for twenty years...
...Emphasis added] So the first version was a crude racist insult...
...Do they expect us to swallow this?—and my amazement to see that it really worked...
...Not many people know about the abiding importance of our minstrel tradition, with its high seriousness wrapped in clowning...
...For years, he doesn't look back...
...On the other (left) hand, Charlie Chaplin's tramp gave a spectacular new visual life to the democratic dream of "the last will be first...
...In the movie, the cantor singing "Eili, Eili" dissolves into a dream vision of the hero's lost father, so that his family romance is drenched with the pathos of death and martyrdom...
...The screenplay, by Alfred Cohn (edited by Robert Carringer, University of Wisconsin, 1979), says Jakie/Jackie is thirteen, the Bar Mitzvah age when Jewish boys traditionally become men...
...Many secular Jews who wouldn't dream of going to synagogue all year still feel they have to be there for this...
...This noir romance made Nietzsche tear his white hair...
...But why black...
...Lou Reed, "Street Hassle" Acting black—a whole social world of irony, violence, negotiation and learning is contained in that phrase . . . an unstable or indeed contradictory power, linked to social and political conflicts, issues from the weak, the uncanny, the outside...
...Bourne argued that immigrants to America don't "assimilate" into a pre-existing Anglo world: they mix their old cultures with new conditions to create a blended, hybrid American culture that never existed anywhere until now...
...Alas, celebrations of the lowest and the last all present a chronic toxic hazard, an endless potential for slippage...
...But it isn't explored in the depth it deserves until the creation of modern psychology, whose time horizon is almost exactly that of the movies: Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was published on New Year's Day 1900...
...Most literate Americans have an idea of how important the bildungsroman has always been in our national self-scrutiny...
...THIS JOLSON movie was actually The Jazz Singer's third incarnation...
...How will he deal with the man he sees...
...Maybe his parents', whose world he could never belong to...
...Let's be honest: Is there anybody in the house who really doesn't want to have it all...
...But still, any Jew who is hip enough to want to be black—or even to be painted black—is smart enough to know that there is something unkosher about the deal...
...but people who have emigrated from nearly anywhere can feel the difference...
...But we can be pretty sure that Jakie's list, and Jolson's, includes the black people who taught him so much, whose faces, lips, eyes, rhythms, melodies, and whose hopes he seized, and grasped, and made his own, and crooned, and scatted, and shouted to the world...
...Not all, but much of the Yiddish audience knew that this was not the only adaptation, nor even the most famous one...
...But it goes farther back, at least as far as the book of Exodus, where the very enslavement and oppression of the people of Israel are seen as sources of their power and glory...
...A wonder, Harry, a wonder...
...In Jack Robin's dressing room, this self is black...
...At least since the end of slavery, and probably before, black people have used the word "nigger" to signify other black people whom they consider truly low, crude, grungy, unidealized—"nothing like the sun...
...He recognizes that the man next to him is Jackie, after all, but a Jackie who has put himself through big changes: "It talks like Jakie," he says, "but it looks like his shadow...
...Now he can sing "from the heart" for the first time in his life...
...Cut to a Broadway theater, where the blackfaced hero sings "Mammy" in a style at once cantorial and operatic, at an energy level that is overpowering...
...Kol Nidre is special in that it is a prayer addressed not to God, but to other men and women...
...Isn't Marxism a belief that we need to overthrow capitalism, and then we can have it all...
...My grandmother, who had lost most of her family, had Rosenblatt's "Eili" and played it obsessively...
...In those years, Hitler was still a face in the crowd...
...At least that was the aura through which sympathetic American Jews— and American Christians as well—came to see them...
...Over the generations, it could help them become Jerome Kern, the Gershwin brothers ("The real American folk song is—A RAG...
...His father, the cantor, is tipped off, drags him from the cafe, proclaims his eternal disgrace ("your lowlife music from the streets"), whips him, and kicks him out...
...P.S.: Almost forty years ago, I brought my first Bob Dylan album home to the Bronx...
...He wants to be forgiven on the ground that his grand theft sprang from love...
...For Jewish kids who did not want to become comfortable "allrightniks," blackface enabled them to feel firmly, even righteously American without having to feel white...
...Places such as these were the birthplace of movies and jazz and modern mass culture and everything that makes America a genuinely "new world...
...And neither can we...
...One of the movie's primary achievements, as Jim Hoberman pointed out in Vulgar Modernism, is to establish Jolson, the world's first cinematic voice, as "the first modern American superstar...
...The movie calls it "The New York Ghetto...
...For many Jews, this chanting is the most dramatic and spiritually intense moment of the year...
...As Jews moved up, they identified down...
...Not only is it the firstever "talkie" movie, and probably the first-ever music video, it's a surprising synthesis of two very different genres: the minstrel show and the bildungsroman...
...Did that word call up the horrors of The Birth of a Nation...
...He starts to brood, comes to feel something missing in the self he has made...
...Chaplin celebrated the comedy whose creative center is typically an urban immigrant slum, "a dirty little hole in the East Side," a neighborhood teeming with filthy streets and cellars and crowds of dark, dirty, raggedy, sleazy, undernourished, lecherous FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat...
...THE REASONS for this are complex...
...Randolph Bourne, a young disciple of John Dewey, wrote an essay, "Trans-National America (1916), that may be the first theory of this world...
...Even as Jolson's generation moved up from the ghetto into the American middle class, some of its members displayed a peculiar be70 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 havior that did not correspond to their new social positions...
...the movie is over...
...It adorns the golden door of American democracy, praising the Statue of Liberty as a goddess of immigration who opens herself to "the wretched refuse of [foreign] teeming shores...
...Maybe at Katz's Deli on Houston Street, the most fully integrated place in New York, open twenty-four hours a day...
...It's as if this singer has transformed the minstrel "Swanee River" into an inner River Jordan that he needs to cross in order to grow up...
...but Nu, so what have we done for them lately...
...All this is fine...
...In projection, we ascribe to other people feelings and desires that we cannot accept in ourselves...
...Blacks, on the other hand, although freed from slavery, were being lynched and humiliated by laws that could have been made by slaveholders...
...they were supposed to feel comfortable and grateful...
...Emphasis added] LOVE AND THEFT I N FACT, the Shadow is a prime image in the history of reflection on the self and the other...
...Then he turns to the audience, to comment on the action he is part of, and abruptly changes his mind...
...But somehow, in the process of cultural production, some obscure, unnoticed, maybe even unconscious revolution took place...
...But of course she was right...
...It starred George Jessel and played on Broadway from 1925 to 1927...
...indeed, his songs were the first sounds in the history of sound film...
...Ancient Jewish and Christian theology, modern Jewish radicalism, and black militancy come together around the glorification of the wretched of the earth, the lowest of the low...
...But our species deep down may be something rock can't crack: like Bottom's midsummer's night dream, "It hath no bottom...
...This movie forces us to feel that what's at stake here is identity...
...Some blacks were making a mark in the cities of the North, as in the development of jazz itself...
...John, Doc Pomus, Richard Price—and so many more whom I forget, or never knew...
...The first was a story by Samson Raphaelson, published in Everybody's Magazine in 1922 under the title "The Day of Atonement...
...Did the guys behind the scenes recoil and think "Never Again...
...but we the audience remember who and what he was "before...
...Yudelson is here now to tell the Jazz Singer his father is dying, and to urge him to return to the family, the neighborhood, the synagogue, and God...
...At The Jazz Singer's climax, Jolson sings the Kol Nidre prayer with an emotional force and intensity that have eluded him until now...
...It's too bad that hardly anyone rents it...
...Pangloss is handling the dramaturgy on this planet...
...Jack/Jakie hears him in a theater in Chicago, in a "Special Matinee of Sacred Songs...
...That said, we still don't know what's in those shadows...
...Now I'm sixty, I've mellowed out, and I want all the happiness I can get...
...MARSHALL BERMAN, author of All That Is Solid Melts into Air and Adventures in Marxism, teaches at CCNY/CUNY...
...I got so mad...
...She enjoyed it, more than I thought she would— maybe she picked up "the cry in his voice"— but she said she had a problem with his name...
...People who have grown up with it often take it for granted...
...It is a prayer for self-knowledge...
...Generations of black children have grown up with commandments from their parents ringing in their ears: "Don't behave like a nigger," "Don't dress like a nigger," "Don't be a nigger...
...We can be pretty sure they would not have been so amiable if that "nigger" had made it onto the screen...
...We know how much we've got from them...
...Think of the clips of Michael Jackson's Motown screen test...
...I thought I knew when I read Ralph Ellison or Franklin Frazier...
...Whose forgiveness is the Jazz Singer praying for...
...Still, I don't think it will make me happy to confuse magic realism with reality...
...D.W...
...Will he recognize himself...
...But one day he hears a cantor sing, and he is thrown back...
...It's hard to know who's on anybody's list...
...the planes in his face drift off in different directions, and don't connect...
...We are supposed to recognize all the ways we have hurt each other all year, not just in our overt behavior, but in our shadows, in fantasy, or desire...
...BY AND BY the hero lands a job in the "April Follies" on Broadway...
...The soundtrack turns upbeat and jazzy, and the screen quickcuts to a spectacular panorama of Times Square's blinding lights...
...27:46...
...DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 69 LOVE AND THEFT even if the United States of the future learns to treat all black people with decency and sensitivity, and even if Americans become as truly united as the people in the beautiful, moving mural that Lee created at the start of He Got Game, there will still be no vaccine that can immunize us against "the nigger," no balm in Gilead to wash the black wire out of our hair...
...The act of returning to his father and his mother and "the ghetto," of connecting his adulthood with his childhood, has freed unconscious energy and tapped emotional depths...
...it closed just a couple of months before the movie opened...
...Amazing...
...But the orbit it's rolling in today looks a lot like the one that Al Jolson defined, more than seventy years ago, when he invited us into his dressing room to watch him paint himself black...
...The cantor's solo is the most passionate, heartrending music of the liturgical year...
...But at the same time, framing that youthful being, is the face of a thoughtful, soulful, mature man—not a black man, but a man who has made blackness a project...
...In the story "The Day of Atonement," the cynical Broadway producer follows the hero down to the Lower East Side...
...It goes a long way back: remember the shadows in Plato's cave, 2,400 years ago...
...It plunges us into the "magic realism" that is at the heart of modern mass culture...
...Forgive...
...I'll meet you on the corner of Hester and Norfolk...
...If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head...
...Jolson blacks up, and, Behold...
...Above all, the slipperiness...
...I'm just saying that the whole issue of authenticity is a lot more slippery than either of us—than any of us—imagined when we were young...
...These are the black people that other black people warn their children against...
...But when he meets him face to face, in blackface, he is disoriented: "Jakie, this ain't you...
...Can this man pull his life together...
...It was affirmed officially a generation later, when Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Immigration Act opened the gates once more...
...They acted as though they were increasingly marginalized...
...But "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film (Viking Press, 1973...
...This meant "not a nationality, but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors...
...Given, taken, and changed names were a crucial issue for my parents' generation: it was central to their way of assessing authenticity...
...Those quotas were based on a dream of a lost white and Anglo-Saxon purity, polluted and corrupted by a great stream of dark and dirty "others...
...But what have they got from us...
...The story's incarnations diverge in various ways, but they all vindicate the myth that "the last will be first": the act of rejecting Broadway's artificiality in favor of values that are supposedly more "authentic" makes the hero authentically qualified for Broadway success...
...He sings the late-Victorian love ballad "My Gal Sal," and the Tin Pan Alley favorite "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee...
Vol. 49 • July 2002 • No. 3
