A Literary Orphan

...The writer no sooner delivers his work into the hands of that flinty surrogate parent, the publisher, than all concern for its future mysteriously goes dead...

...History can be suggested, alluded to, dramatized in the flesh and act of the writer's imagined characters, as perhaps only Tolstoy and Stendhal have even managed to do superbly well...

...Long before he is actually murdered, knowing instinctively that his maniacal devotion to principle would inevitably loose the wild beasts against him, Jake Gottlieb makes his two young sons swear that they will avenge his death when the times comes...

...And this, Litwak points out again and again, is how one separates the men from the brutes...

...He can be identified only by a dentist "whose imprint on our pa was more durable than any made by God or family...

...Vic fanatically, painfully trains himself to take on the enemy, O'Brien, and carry out the vengeance he swore in an oath of honor to his father years before...

...This is the story of Jake Gottlieb, a laundry driver with grand designs: "He left a trail of discord halfway around the globe, an advocate of revolution...

...Yet they could blot the tears, honk their noses, get down from their stools, and heave you through plate-glass windows...

...The slag haulers' union was rubbed out when its only member, Jake Love, was kicked off the premises and a scar was etched on his bald dome...

...The large designs of history, past or contemporaneous, are by their very nature part of any novel -men live, at any moment of time, both huge and small, privately and publicly, individually and in the uncounted mass...

...Too often he comes to a rigid stop to tell us what he should, more properly, be showing us, and the lessons seem superimposed on the story of Jake Gottlieb...

...It sits, unloved and unread, in an alien world until the remainder merchants cut short its agony...

...He saw all the world's furnishings as possible weapons...

...One night, though he is by now a union bureaucrat, no longer sorting filthy linens and shaking out roaches, Jake does not come home...

...The Detroit of two and a half decades ago is a beautifully wrought, sharply observed, smelled, lingering world, "a grubby waterfront heaped with the debris of old barges and tugs...

...Throughout the novel, as the title makes clear, the small and private world of Jake Gottlieb is haunted and obsessed by Hitler's war in Europe, raging always louder and more triumphant throughout the years of the story...

...And even after Jake has, improbably, won his scarcely imagined triumph, and all the laundries of Detroit have finally signed contracts with the union, he remains the intractable ideologue, the intransigent rememberer of the dead Persky...

...The terror that ravaged Europe sneaked into our house...

...I have photos of Jake as he appeared during his triumphal return to the continent that had expelled him...

...One of Jake's union brothers, O'Brien, clubs another, Sammy Persky, to death because he is sure Sammy has been finking to the boss...

...But Jake's sons were irresistibly drawn away from his visionary morality to their muscle and power, which the bosses could always buy cheap to crush the union men...

...He later returned as one of General Pershing's legionnaires...

...It is anything but a "wild" book-and it is interesting to realize how much that word is used now to stand for a vague and amorphous excellence that does not bear close scrutiny...

...How Ernie and Vic keep their promise is actually the least part of the story...

...Ernie will no longer be sucked into the bum's world of pool parlors and prizefights, he is through wanting " to learn the magic that enabled men to be brutes...

...The Happy Weinbergs "had no shame and they had no fear...

...A novel that has suffered unfairly this past autumn is Leo Lit-wak's Waiting for the News...

...Like a man possessed, Jake waits for the news of Hitler to come thundering obscenely out of the Philco...

...It hardly surprised me, the fate of literary orphans being what it is, to pick up the November 8 issue of the Saturday Review a few days ago, notice that Waiting for the News was listed in the table of contents as being reviewed inside, and then discover that the review-If it ever existed-had somehow been left out of the magazine...

...Men were his battlefield...

...Once again, someone with a genius for goofing had been led like a falcon to the unfortunate victim...

...In a world whose news is dominated by Hitler, raving and murdering thousands of miles away, O'Brien becomes the Gottliebs' private Fiihrer, the scourge that must be vanquished if all Jews, and Jake's sons, are to live...

...They didn't worry about Hitler operating in Europe like a plague...

...Litwak keeps adding up the moral, making the analogy for us out of fear that it will be overlooked, and this is a mistake...

...But how does a Jewish boy learn to shoot...

...Though Vic and Ernie are too old for toy soldiers, somehow they are pulled back into such childish games while they wait for their father to come home...

...The waterfront is bounded by a railroad that adds soot to air already fouled by the chimneys of Dearborn...

...Without the expository and doctrinaire asides, Waiting for the News would be an even better novel than it is...

...No one seems to know the book, although someone has set it in type and bound it in hard covers...

...But in his need to set his smaller drama so homiletically against the larger historical kaleidoscope, Litwak flaws his otherwise skillful book...

...I remembered instructions from cowboy movies...

...At the heart of industrial America, in the city where Henry Ford was king and the United Automobile Workers did not yet share the throne and the spoils, Jake Gottlieb spins his seditious dreams of a strike against all the laundry companies, beginning with his own, the Atlas...

...The writing most energetically praised in the last decade has been the extravagantly grotesque and outrageously comic...

...It is anything but fashionable or brightly "modern" in its subject and tone, as fashions in writing go these days...

...only kitsch travels a preordained trajectory-come into this world like doomed orphans...

...Waiting for Jake became our entire preoccupation...

...But despite this error in judgment, Litwak has portrayed a city and its people in prose that is lean, bitter, and most of the time very exact...

...Litwak's rogues' gallery of the Jewish gangsters who hung out at The Cream of Michigan dairy restaurant, with a jukebox at the rear that played Mein Yiddishe Momme, is particularly well done, an underworld that seems peculiarly Midwestern, somehow more tangibly "American" than the Brooklyn of Murder, Incorporated...

...Trying to discover who its publisher was, I consulted an exhaustive book-forecasting index at the library which claims to cover the field, but Lit-wak's name wasn't there...

...He was familiar with guns, brass knuckles, knives, pipes, blackjacks, and bare hands...

...And though many books that experience such a fate fully deserve it, there are always a few that do not, that in fact should have the committed attention we give to serious art...

...Knowing that these thugs are the real opposition he will have to face, Jake pulls the Atlas drivers out on strike anyway, and his wife and sons realize they are now at war...

...He settled in Detroit after the War and was hustled from the Ford River Rouge plant when he was caught haranguing the assembly line...

...On a blustery day smoke travels horizontally, and you get whiffs of sulfurous air...

...The irreversible act of murder finally puts an end to the shifting, wavering allegiance of Gottlieb's sons...

...The sky above is the color of the concrete roadway...

...Concentrating as it does on the seemingly small circumference of one man's experience-on the troubles of Jake Gottlieb, a fanatic un-ionizer in Detroit in the late '30s and early '40s, who runs into grave trouble when he organizes the laundry business-waiting for the News might at first, cursory glance appear to be arrested in causes and urgencies that are by now faded and almost forgotten...

...I dreamed of cornering O'Brien and Rommel and Hitler and destroying them like bugs...

...Its mood-elegiac, celebratory of real, not symbolic courage, intensely loving-does not proclaim its authority and originality with the trumpet blasts that are so much admired at the moment...

...He drove a truck hauling slag from a foundry...

...Yet one can, to some extent, guess why Waiting for the News was allowed to vanish into total unre-viewed obscurity...

...A few months later the police dredge his bloated, unrecognizable remains, a shredded rope tied around his middle, out of a lake miles away from Detroit...

...Litwak is not trying to tell us, through black comedy or outrageous smacks in the face, that man is an alienated, absurd mote in a cruel world of technological tyranny, or that we have forgotten how to communicate...

...Every day of his life, "Happy Weinberg plotted the most brutal use of his 250 pounds...

...how, in the course of growing up, they keep slipping and faltering away from the grim solemnity of their oath, is what Waiting for the News is really about...

...they are not the complex part of it that Hitler and the War in fact were to all men living at that time...

...Nor is all the brutality on the side of the bosses...

...We sat in the living room, the shades down because we feared snipers and brick-throwers...

...It is a tough and nasty world that Jake takes on, where hired fists are always ready to smash the heads of stubborn troublemakers, fists that are no less brutal because they happen to be Jewish...

...And if such ironclad purity seems, in paraphrase, more than a little cliche, the man himself, as he comes alive in the novel, never does...

...But it would be a pity if the kind of taut, realistic novel like Litwak's were to die out altogether for lack of attention...

...I would never have known of the book's existence if a friend of the author hadn't mentioned it to me last September, when it came out...

...The phrase becomes grimly literal...

...He was forbidden to operate in the auto business under the name of Jake Gottlieb and continued to work as Jake Love...

...For all his refusal to strain, Litwak has written a touching, stern, brilliantly sustained novel, and while its style seems at first unusually laconic, even overcasual, it is immensely passionate and superbly controlled, precisely because he sticks so consistently to the limit of what he means to do...

...As Jake's story is told by his younger son, Vic, we are given an extraordinary portrait-complete with bulging thighs, a lunatic love of bluster, and more than a slight flair for melodrama-of a man driven by an almost religious fanaticism about trade unionism, who literally dies in the cause of his stubborn incorruptibility...

...The novelist need not keep pointing this out, like a heavy-handed teacher with a big ruler...

...O'Brien will be allowed to do business in Detroit only over Jake Gottlieb's dead body...

...We put ourselves in Jake's shoes, experienced the dread he avoided by acting...

...Jake Gottlieb scorned bums like Happy Weinberg and sadistic hoods like Whitey Spiegelman: "These hulks grieved for mothers...

...At sixteen he had already served time in Siberia, thanks to the Czar, then fled Europe, conspiring all the way...

...It is a bitter tale, though not without a good deal of unemphatic humor, and Litwak commands such richness of remembered detail and ach-ingly sweet humanity in its telling that the effect of the novel is much more one of vividly recreated life than of a stern moral parable about the meaning of Jake Gottlieb's murder...