Call Us Toll Free!! 1-877-JCC-TAPE
Literary Shmooze #1
Literary Shmooze #2
Literary Shmooze #3
Literary Shmooze #5
Literary
Shmooze #4
STERN'S
ULCER, REMEMBERED
By Susan Dworkin
|
Susan Dworkin is co-author
of The Nazi Officer's Wife and
President of Jewish Contemporary Classics.
|
Back in 1962, years before the comic whining heroes
of Philip Roth and Woody Allen, Bruce Jay Friedman published an achingly
funny satirical novel about Jewish anxieties called Stern. Hailed
by critics, the author took his place alongside Saul Bellow and Bernard
Malamud in the Jewish literary hot spot. Then he journeyed beyond
it into the commercial world, becoming a success on Broadway and in
the movies with hilarious works that often had watery titles: Scuba
Duba, Steambath, Splash.
To my mind, Bruce Jay Friedman was a "guy writer"; his
fiction appeared in magazines like Playboy which I never read. But
now all these decades later, I have spent many months recording Stern
as an audiobook, and I realize that Friedman's work defined events
in my life in ways I never fully understood.
At the time Stern was published, I had a boyfriend who
possessed many of the same qualities as the hero of Friedman's novel.
Like Stern, my boyfriend was a sweet, sensitive, witty, theatre-loving
Jewish New Yorker. He cracked me up with his self-deprecating humor.
He yearned over mankind. Hated violence. And like Stern, he lived
in fear.
My boyfriend was afraid of all goyim. He thought of
them as a solid wall of muscle preparing at any moment to pummel his
soft body into a humiliating puddle of defeat. Even though he never
ever broke the law, he was afraid of the police, their guns and their
boots. He could not bear to hurt anybody's feelings.
As for women... well, the axiom that "girls just want
to have fun" struck terror into my boyfriend's heart.
One night I said: "Could we go dancing sometime?"
He looked at me with alarm. "Do you need to go dancing?!"
"Uh uh...no...well...but dancing is fun..."
"The only dancing I do is at weddings and bar mitzvahs,
with my date, which is you!" he cried. "Isn't that enough dancing?
Do we have to do more?! Anyway, I thought we were already having fun!"
"We are, we are," I responded soothingly. "Not to worry.
We don't have to go dancing. It's all right. It's not important. Forget
I ever said it."
One night my boyfriend and I went to a party in Connecticut.
On the way home, we got a flat tire. A dark road. No traffic. (Remember,
this was before cell phones.) "Oh my God, oh my God..." my boyfriend
whispered frantically as we sputtered and plopped to a halt. He was
going to have to change the tire, and he was scared to death.
Breathing raggedly, his hands trembling, he opened the
trunk and hauled out the jack, the wrench, and the spare. I offered
to help. "No!" he exclaimed. "I can do this myself!" I backed off,
pretending to be interested in the moonlit landscape, but really trying
not to add to his nervousness by standing over him and watching.
He changed the tire. Thank God. He was so excited and
so proud and so relieved to have been able to change that tire that
he told me he loved me and asked me to marry him.
Of course, I turned him down because even then I knew
that it takes more than mechanical success to hold up a chupah. But
we were both deeply affected by the incident in Connecticut.
He decided to join the Army. Military service, he would
later tell me, proved the answer to his prayers, making him, at last,
a man among men. Although he never lost his fear of the goyim, just
the fact that he could, if absolutely necessary, shoot back at them,
changed his life.
For myself, I went off to Israel and Detroit and other
exotic locales, looking for Jews who did not live in fear of tools.
With Stern, Bruce Jay Friedman defined the problem of
guys like my boyfriend: they were caught between a Jewish culture
that never equated manhood with the power to be tough, mechanical
and violent, and an American culture which said you weren't a real
man unless you could change tires, stand up to bad guys, and if absolutely
necessary, blow them away.
As a many-voiced actor named Adam Grupper read Stern
to us in the recording studio, regaling us with the story of Stern's
frantic battle with the local anti-Semite, his anxiety about women
(who always seem - Jews and Gentiles alike - to want to go dancing),
the ulcer that he got from just worrying about these terrible challenges,
I saw my boyfriend trembling on his knees before that flat tire in
the moonlight.
I caught a rerun of Seinfeld the other night, and it
seemed to me the character of George Castanza was strangely reminiscent
of my old boyfriend and Bruce Jay Freidman's comic hero, Stern. Has
anything changed in 40 years? Or does Stern's ulcer live on?
Susan Dworkin
Jewish Contemporary Classics, Inc.
Stern
Written by Bruce Jay Friedman.
Read by Adam Grupper.
3 Cassettes, plus Listener's Guide. Approx. 4.5 hours.
ISBN -1-893079-05-8 $29.95 SRP
Order direct from: Jewish Contemporary Classics, Inc.
Toll Free: 1-877-JCC-TAPE (522-8273) Online: www.jccaudiobooks.com
Note to Editors: You are free to reprint this article
at no cost. Please use the author identification line and let Jewish
Contemporary Classics, Inc. know (toll free 1-877-JCC-TAPE or HYPERLINK
"mailto:sales@jccaudiobooks.com" sales@jccaudiobooks.com) if you run
it. We also ask that you let your readers know that they can purchase
Stern on audio by calling 1-877-JCC-TAPE (522-8273) or www.jccaudiobooks.com.