Murderers

03/01/2025

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  

There were so many Jewish-American writers in the post-war period that we would note the country’s richness if they came from a particular country. Yet this was only one area of American literature that was of import. There were the southern writers like Flannery O’Connor, William Styron and Truman Capote; the minimalists Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff; female voices including Ann Beattie, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Grace Paley, Marilyn Robinson and black writing, male and female: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. We haven’t even mentioned the cocktail crowd prose of John Updike, John Cheever, Richard Yates, or the inebriated and the injected, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. We haven’t yet mentioned the metafictionist and the maximalists: Donald Barthelme, John Barth and Robert Coover; Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Don De Lillo. Yet nothing seemed richer than Jewish-inflected writing: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, some already mentioned, and Leonard Michaels.

   Here we have a field so crowded it wasn’t much of a surprise that a writer who retreated from fame was inclined to go neglected, no matter the famed reclusiveness of Pynchon and Salinger’s disappearance from the publishing world. They managed to turn their rejection of publicity into a form of publicity. They became famously reclusive. Michaels was un-famously retreating from fame which almost inevitably arrived at public indifference. “Lenny had a conflicted relationship with success,” David Bezmozgis says. “Though he was socially gregarious, he was also temperamentally averse to promoting his work.” (Tablet) “The truth is that I've never felt I was part of any era or had any conscious relationship to what was in the air…” Michael says. “I’ve never gotten with it. I lack a sensibility that quivers at change in the cultural atmosphere.” (Paris Review) When a writer retreats from success and is bewildered by the zeitgeist, the work is easy to miss, even if Michaels had a big enough success with The Men’s Club that it was turned into a Hollywood film with Harvey Keitel and Roy Scheider. Michaels wrote the script; the film was deemed a disaster. 

    However, one of the other problems Bezmozgis reckons is that Michaels was a short story writer when money and success were far more likely to go to novelists, no matter if Carver defied that assumption by becoming one of the most important writers of the eighties without having written a novel. Nevertheless, when we look at the list of writers above, in almost every instance they established themselves as novelists even if in a few instances they remained most respected for their shorter work. Looking at The Men’s Club (the book) some years after Leonard’s death, Nicholas Lezard noted“Leonard Michaels died in 2003, aged 70, with a relatively small but well-respected oeuvre, mainly consisting of short stories, under his belt. Unfortunately for him, the respect was largely confined to the kind of circles in which someone ends up using the phrase ‘a writer’s writer’.” (Guardian) Perhaps if he were couched more as a Jewish writer than a writer’s writer this might have been limiting, but it may also have been a way of marketing him without Michaels feeling too obliged to promote himself. When you have Malamud, Bellow and Roth in the same niche; that isn’t a bad niche to be in.  

   In 'Murderers', the central character’s family are Ashkenazi Jews: “my family came from Poland, then never went anyplace until they had heart attacks. The consummation of years in one neighbourhood: a black Cadillac, corpse inside.” Such is the back story, but what about the story? This isn’t about yet another ageing family member meeting their inevitable demise but about a contingent horror. The narrator hangs out with Melvin and Arnold Bloom, and Harold Cohen, and they would sometimes go up on a water tank on the roof across the way, to take a peek at the local rabbi’s apartment, spying on the rabbi and his wife. They are there to witness the primal scene, an exciting prospect for kids in the early stages of puberty. But it isn’t without risks. “…we crossed a ledge 6 inches wide. A half-inch indentation in the brick gave us fingerholds as they precariously observe from a slanted roof events at an angle below them. “We risked life itself to achieve this eminence.” They watch as the couple go about their business and where the wife changes wigs, her head shaved. It is an erotic thrill matched by a sense of danger that isn’t only about getting caught but staying on the water tank roof. Arnold finds himself slipping and all that manages to remain hanging on is a ring that hooks a nailhead, and his finger. “The hand, the arm, the rest of him, were gone.” 

    The boy’s death is what turns it into a story but it is the general sense of death permeating it that makes it a richer tale than just a terrible anecdote. It is there in the opening sentence with Uncle Moe dropping dead of a heart attack, and in the other relatives and neighbours: “they were dropping on Henry Street and Cherry Street. Blue lips.” Near the end of the story, the boys are sent off to a camp in New Jersey where the counsellors are WWII veterans: “introspective men. Some carried shrapnel in their bodies. One had a metal plate in his head. Whatever you said to them they seemed to be thinking of something else.” They would have seen death too, and plenty of it. 

   Yet these deaths, like those of Uncle Moe and others, wouldn’t be narratively interesting, and it might be a variation of a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths a statistic. People were dying of heart attacks all the time, and over 400,000 Americans lost their lives in WWII, nothing next to the 24m Soviet deaths, and yet seven times more than the US lost in Vietnam. The counsellors might have seen it as nothing new even if it would no doubt permeate their mood and leave them constantly thinking of other things. Who would doubt those things would be about the war and friends and colleagues who died? Arnold’s death is exceptional, nobody else would have fallen off a water tower as soldiers were falling in battle, and yet Michaels’ purpose is to draw together the unlikely with the probable, the surprising death of a boy with the less surprising deaths of older and sometimes not so older men dying of heart attacks, and young men defending freedoms. If the story opens by telling us that the narrator’s family was from Europe and never went anywhere before dying of heart attacks; the soldiers at the end will have gone to Europe and died of mortar attacks. The older diasporic generation came to the States seeking a new life and there many more were compelled to go in the other direction to fight Fascism. They would have been liberating the very camps that Uncle Moe would have died in if he had stayed in Poland and so the story has a background density that nevertheless in itself wouldn’t have given it fictional heft.

    It doesn’t take much to understand what a story is, and maybe creative writing classes can help in making people aware of the structural elements that go into a well-told tale. A blind man manages to persuade a doubting narrator that there is far more to this man than meets the eye, so to speak, in 'Cathedral'; a couple have a disastrous couple of days together in 'A Romantic Weekend', a man comes into hospital with a knife sticking out next to his eye in 'Emergency'; a girl loses weight and regains it in 'The Fat Girl'. Often the story will take the event as an opportunity for a greater realisation. It isn’t enough that the blind man pays a visit and the narrator and the man get on; just as it isn’t enough that the central character in 'The Fat Girl' loses weight and she sees people view her differently. The stories are predicated on action but aren’t defined by them. If 'Murderers' ended on the boy’s death it would feel incomplete, even though there are no more events to detail. Further events would have included the boys getting beaten by Arnold’s father; the boy’s mother taking her life, the boys sentenced to a year or two in a remand centre. But one way of thinking of many a short story is that it contains both the anecdotal detail that would lead one to tell it conversationally and the residual thematic space that uses the situation to speak of more than simply the drama. In this sense, some anecdotal events are more dramatic than others and potentially less personal. That knife in the head in 'Emergency' would be the talk of the hospital, just as Arnold’s death would have everybody’s tongue wagging in the neighbourhood. The narrator might never share his thoughts about the blind person with anyone else, just as in 'The Fat Girl' the central character might choose carefully who she talks to about her weight loss and gain. All the stories are eventful, but some are more interior; others exterior. 

  However, a story only anecdotal can seem flat, even if it is the very thing that will grab someone’s attention, the detail that piques our interest but initself won’t be able to hold it. A person falling to their death, a friend cheating on their wife, a person getting a promotion, a relative giving birth to a baby. All of these are events worth reporting, but they aren’t perhaps worth more than a moment of our time as we offer the appropriate amount of horror, scorn or enthusiasm. When Kurt Vonnegut says “...use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted” (Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction) how can someone tell a story that gives magnitude to events or non-events, and that is where the thematic or the problematic comes in. Here perhaps the statistical and the singular come together: a story must be specific to be a story at all, and general to be of much import. Can the story carry a weight greater than its own anecdotal curiosity? “storytelling is a core feature of Jewish culture” says Jewish author and editor Nora Gold. “Our culture has both oral and written traditions, and in both, storytelling is regularly used to inculcate moral and ethical teachings, to transmit Jewish values, and to foster Jewish identity.” (JewishFiction.net)

  When early in 'Murderers' the narrator says “I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness. Who doesn’t? The poor in spirit, the ignorant, the frightened", we don’t yet know how much death will permeate the tale and we might wonder how much Jewish writing of the post-war years was contained by the events that immediately preceded it, where the camps would be at the back of Jewish writing as slavery would have been behind black prose. “The Holocaust is never absent from his writing” Michaels’ widow reckoned, in a claim that isn't obviously borne out by the Collected Stories. Yet she insisted “It was always the engine of his imagination.” He certainly had problems when it was the engine room of other writers who could use it too casually. Sigrid Nunez, notes "at dinner one night we lit somehow on Sylvia Plath’s use of the Holocaust as metaphor in her famous poem “Daddy.” Michaels, whose aunt and grandparents had been murdered by Nazis in Poland, said, through clenched teeth, “How dare she.” (Paris Review)This needn't mean that Jewish fiction in the post-war years was constantly commenting on the Genocide, but no statistic carried more post-war weight than the death of six millions Jews, and any singular loss could be both individually terrible and collectively horrific. It would be a stretch to say that 'Murderers' is about the Holocaust. It very clearly isn’t, but it is very much a Jewish story, with the friends' surnames Liebowitz, Bloom and Cohen and places like Market Street in the lower East Side — and of course, it is a Rabbi they are spying upon. if Jewish American writing after the war had an urgency and presence greater than perhaps any other, who could doubt the active removal of a people would have given those still alive a sense of responsibility and narrative purpose? Though Michaels, Bellow, Roth and others would usually write about subjects far removed from the death camps - with the narrator here sent instead sent to a camp in New Jersey where he needn’t fear for his life and only wonder instead what was going on in the minds of former soldiers who would have helped liberate Europe from the Nazis. 

   What makes a story worth telling and what makes writing worth reading seems to be much more than the ability to tell a good story. It exists within a broader framework. If we talk of Jewish writing after WWII, and use Michaels as an example of it, it rests on seeing the story within a Jewish milieu and carrying resonances that needn’t be articulated. It is thematically about death even if it is also about a death as we may find ourselves wondering about the title beyond the word the Rabbi yells after Arnold has lost his life. “He couldn’t know what he said”, the narrator claims, and neither perhaps can we. 

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Murderers

There were so many Jewish-American writers in the post-war period that we would note the country’s richness if they came from a particular country. Yet this was only one area of American literature that was of import. There were the southern writers like Flannery O’Connor, William Styron and Truman Capote; the minimalists Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff; female voices including Ann Beattie, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Grace Paley, Marilyn Robinson and black writing, male and female: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. We haven’t even mentioned the cocktail crowd prose of John Updike, John Cheever, Richard Yates, or the inebriated and the injected, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr. We haven’t yet mentioned the metafictionist and the maximalists: Donald Barthelme, John Barth and Robert Coover; Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Don De Lillo. Yet nothing seemed richer than Jewish-inflected writing: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, some already mentioned, and Leonard Michaels.

   Here we have a field so crowded it wasn’t much of a surprise that a writer who retreated from fame was inclined to go neglected, no matter the famed reclusiveness of Pynchon and Salinger’s disappearance from the publishing world. They managed to turn their rejection of publicity into a form of publicity. They became famously reclusive. Michaels was un-famously retreating from fame which almost inevitably arrived at public indifference. “Lenny had a conflicted relationship with success,” David Bezmozgis says. “Though he was socially gregarious, he was also temperamentally averse to promoting his work.” (Tablet) “The truth is that I've never felt I was part of any era or had any conscious relationship to what was in the air…” Michael says. “I’ve never gotten with it. I lack a sensibility that quivers at change in the cultural atmosphere.” (Paris Review) When a writer retreats from success and is bewildered by the zeitgeist, the work is easy to miss, even if Michaels had a big enough success with The Men’s Club that it was turned into a Hollywood film with Harvey Keitel and Roy Scheider. Michaels wrote the script; the film was deemed a disaster. 

    However, one of the other problems Bezmozgis reckons is that Michaels was a short story writer when money and success were far more likely to go to novelists, no matter if Carver defied that assumption by becoming one of the most important writers of the eighties without having written a novel. Nevertheless, when we look at the list of writers above, in almost every instance they established themselves as novelists even if in a few instances they remained most respected for their shorter work. Looking at The Men’s Club (the book) some years after Leonard’s death, Nicholas Lezard noted“Leonard Michaels died in 2003, aged 70, with a relatively small but well-respected oeuvre, mainly consisting of short stories, under his belt. Unfortunately for him, the respect was largely confined to the kind of circles in which someone ends up using the phrase ‘a writer’s writer’.” (Guardian) Perhaps if he were couched more as a Jewish writer than a writer’s writer this might have been limiting, but it may also have been a way of marketing him without Michaels feeling too obliged to promote himself. When you have Malamud, Bellow and Roth in the same niche; that isn’t a bad niche to be in.  

   In 'Murderers', the central character’s family are Ashkenazi Jews: “my family came from Poland, then never went anyplace until they had heart attacks. The consummation of years in one neighbourhood: a black Cadillac, corpse inside.” Such is the back story, but what about the story? This isn’t about yet another ageing family member meeting their inevitable demise but about a contingent horror. The narrator hangs out with Melvin and Arnold Bloom, and Harold Cohen, and they would sometimes go up on a water tank on the roof across the way, to take a peek at the local rabbi’s apartment, spying on the rabbi and his wife. They are there to witness the primal scene, an exciting prospect for kids in the early stages of puberty. But it isn’t without risks. “…we crossed a ledge 6 inches wide. A half-inch indentation in the brick gave us fingerholds as they precariously observe from a slanted roof events at an angle below them. “We risked life itself to achieve this eminence.” They watch as the couple go about their business and where the wife changes wigs, her head shaved. It is an erotic thrill matched by a sense of danger that isn’t only about getting caught but staying on the water tank roof. Arnold finds himself slipping and all that manages to remain hanging on is a ring that hooks a nailhead, and his finger. “The hand, the arm, the rest of him, were gone.” 

    The boy’s death is what turns it into a story but it is the general sense of death permeating it that makes it a richer tale than just a terrible anecdote. It is there in the opening sentence with Uncle Moe dropping dead of a heart attack, and in the other relatives and neighbours: “they were dropping on Henry Street and Cherry Street. Blue lips.” Near the end of the story, the boys are sent off to a camp in New Jersey where the counsellors are WWII veterans: “introspective men. Some carried shrapnel in their bodies. One had a metal plate in his head. Whatever you said to them they seemed to be thinking of something else.” They would have seen death too, and plenty of it. 

   Yet these deaths, like those of Uncle Moe and others, wouldn’t be narratively interesting, and it might be a variation of a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths a statistic. People were dying of heart attacks all the time, and over 400,000 Americans lost their lives in WWII, nothing next to the 24m Soviet deaths, and yet seven times more than the US lost in Vietnam. The counsellors might have seen it as nothing new even if it would no doubt permeate their mood and leave them constantly thinking of other things. Who would doubt those things would be about the war and friends and colleagues who died? Arnold’s death is exceptional, nobody else would have fallen off a water tower as soldiers were falling in battle, and yet Michaels’ purpose is to draw together the unlikely with the probable, the surprising death of a boy with the less surprising deaths of older and sometimes not so older men dying of heart attacks, and young men defending freedoms. If the story opens by telling us that the narrator’s family was from Europe and never went anywhere before dying of heart attacks; the soldiers at the end will have gone to Europe and died of mortar attacks. The older diasporic generation came to the States seeking a new life and there many more were compelled to go in the other direction to fight Fascism. They would have been liberating the very camps that Uncle Moe would have died in if he had stayed in Poland and so the story has a background density that nevertheless in itself wouldn’t have given it fictional heft.

    It doesn’t take much to understand what a story is, and maybe creative writing classes can help in making people aware of the structural elements that go into a well-told tale. A blind man manages to persuade a doubting narrator that there is far more to this man than meets the eye, so to speak, in 'Cathedral'; a couple have a disastrous couple of days together in 'A Romantic Weekend', a man comes into hospital with a knife sticking out next to his eye in 'Emergency'; a girl loses weight and regains it in 'The Fat Girl'. Often the story will take the event as an opportunity for a greater realisation. It isn’t enough that the blind man pays a visit and the narrator and the man get on; just as it isn’t enough that the central character in 'The Fat Girl' loses weight and she sees people view her differently. The stories are predicated on action but aren’t defined by them. If 'Murderers' ended on the boy’s death it would feel incomplete, even though there are no more events to detail. Further events would have included the boys getting beaten by Arnold’s father; the boy’s mother taking her life, the boys sentenced to a year or two in a remand centre. But one way of thinking of many a short story is that it contains both the anecdotal detail that would lead one to tell it conversationally and the residual thematic space that uses the situation to speak of more than simply the drama. In this sense, some anecdotal events are more dramatic than others and potentially less personal. That knife in the head in 'Emergency' would be the talk of the hospital, just as Arnold’s death would have everybody’s tongue wagging in the neighbourhood. The narrator might never share his thoughts about the blind person with anyone else, just as in 'The Fat Girl' the central character might choose carefully who she talks to about her weight loss and gain. All the stories are eventful, but some are more interior; others exterior. 

  However, a story only anecdotal can seem flat, even if it is the very thing that will grab someone’s attention, the detail that piques our interest but initself won’t be able to hold it. A person falling to their death, a friend cheating on their wife, a person getting a promotion, a relative giving birth to a baby. All of these are events worth reporting, but they aren’t perhaps worth more than a moment of our time as we offer the appropriate amount of horror, scorn or enthusiasm. When Kurt Vonnegut says “...use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted” (Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction) how can someone tell a story that gives magnitude to events or non-events, and that is where the thematic or the problematic comes in. Here perhaps the statistical and the singular come together: a story must be specific to be a story at all, and general to be of much import. Can the story carry a weight greater than its own anecdotal curiosity? “storytelling is a core feature of Jewish culture” says Jewish author and editor Nora Gold. “Our culture has both oral and written traditions, and in both, storytelling is regularly used to inculcate moral and ethical teachings, to transmit Jewish values, and to foster Jewish identity.” (JewishFiction.net)

  When early in 'Murderers' the narrator says “I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness. Who doesn’t? The poor in spirit, the ignorant, the frightened", we don’t yet know how much death will permeate the tale and we might wonder how much Jewish writing of the post-war years was contained by the events that immediately preceded it, where the camps would be at the back of Jewish writing as slavery would have been behind black prose. “The Holocaust is never absent from his writing” Michaels’ widow reckoned, in a claim that isn't obviously borne out by the Collected Stories. Yet she insisted “It was always the engine of his imagination.” He certainly had problems when it was the engine room of other writers who could use it too casually. Sigrid Nunez, notes "at dinner one night we lit somehow on Sylvia Plath’s use of the Holocaust as metaphor in her famous poem “Daddy.” Michaels, whose aunt and grandparents had been murdered by Nazis in Poland, said, through clenched teeth, “How dare she.” (Paris Review)This needn't mean that Jewish fiction in the post-war years was constantly commenting on the Genocide, but no statistic carried more post-war weight than the death of six millions Jews, and any singular loss could be both individually terrible and collectively horrific. It would be a stretch to say that 'Murderers' is about the Holocaust. It very clearly isn’t, but it is very much a Jewish story, with the friends' surnames Liebowitz, Bloom and Cohen and places like Market Street in the lower East Side — and of course, it is a Rabbi they are spying upon. if Jewish American writing after the war had an urgency and presence greater than perhaps any other, who could doubt the active removal of a people would have given those still alive a sense of responsibility and narrative purpose? Though Michaels, Bellow, Roth and others would usually write about subjects far removed from the death camps - with the narrator here sent instead sent to a camp in New Jersey where he needn’t fear for his life and only wonder instead what was going on in the minds of former soldiers who would have helped liberate Europe from the Nazis. 

   What makes a story worth telling and what makes writing worth reading seems to be much more than the ability to tell a good story. It exists within a broader framework. If we talk of Jewish writing after WWII, and use Michaels as an example of it, it rests on seeing the story within a Jewish milieu and carrying resonances that needn’t be articulated. It is thematically about death even if it is also about a death as we may find ourselves wondering about the title beyond the word the Rabbi yells after Arnold has lost his life. “He couldn’t know what he said”, the narrator claims, and neither perhaps can we. 

 


© Tony McKibbin