They are a Jewish American nightmare, these Bergers, real enough to make a reader flinch. Their niggling fears are all on the surface, exposed like cockroaches under a sink: eviction, starvation, shame. Bessie’s worldview is all the more frightening because even when her actions are despicable, her logic is sound: “Here without a dollar you don’t look the world in the eye. Talk from now to next year—this is life in America.”

Clifford Odets, 1935

Odets’ actor-collaborators at the two-year-old Group Theatre initially rejected the play, finding the Bergers not so much embattled as flat-out coarse. Odets had tailored the script, originally called I Got the Blues, to members of the Group with whom he worked and sometimes lived, but they nonetheless objected to its “rather gross Jewish humor” and “messy kitchen sink naturalism.” Two years later, when another producer wanted the play and the Group Theatre was desperate for material (and probably worried about losing all those good parts), they agreed to mount a revised version, with fewer Yiddish references and a more hopeful title, after Isaiah 26:19, “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust.”

By the time Awake and Sing! opened, Odets had rocketed from junior-level actor to the Group Theatre’s primary voice. His Waiting for Lefty, in which a taxi strike heralds revolution, caused a populist sensation, sparking a 45-minute curtain call on opening night, January 5, 1935. Even so, the Group had a hard time raising the money for Awake and Sing! and was able to produce the play only because of a steady stream of profits from Lefty, which continued to run in New York and spread to more than 60 cities within a year. Awake and Sing! was respectably but tentatively reviewed in 1935, then lauded as an American classic upon its revival as part of the Group’s repertory in 1939.

What happened in four years to change the reception of this story about a Jewish family whose moral values are all but lost in the clutches of life in the Bronx? It may have been Odets’ new prominence (he made the cover of Time in December of 1938) that caused a critic such as Brooks Atkinson to revise his opinion of the play. Or perhaps the shift from the Depression into wartime allowed the audience some distance from the circumstances of the Bergers’ lives. I suspect, too, that the play’s Jewish focus, disquieting in 1935 when Yiddishkeit was not often seen uptown, might have seemed more sympathetic, moving, or at least intriguing to audiences by 1939.

At the crux of Awake and Sing! is a premise that people get twisted away from their destinies by the conditions of their lives, that poverty blocks the soul. This suggests a different reality, and even a different aesthetic stance, from the dramas of Odets’ immediate predecessor Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill’s heroes tend to be romantics or addicts who refuse to allow facts to change who they are, even when that denial leads to madness or death. A decade after Odets, Tennessee Williams, too, would wring tragedy from delusion. In fact, most great American central characters insist on a haze that suffuses the plays themselves: Blanche’s dim lighting, or the morphine twilight of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

By contrast, the Bergers operate cold sober. Even the fierce idealism that Jacob imparts to his grandson Ralph is rooted in a hard look at Jacob’s own failings: “Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution. But you should act. Not like me. A man who had golden opportunities but drank instead a glass tea.”

Ralph, “a boy with a clean spirit,” yearns for a pair of black-and-white shoes, his own bedroom, and a chance to fix his teeth. He takes up his grandfather’s worldview, but only the Marxist part, ignoring the biblical foundations that support the title line. It seems that Jacob’s Hebrew and religious learning will die with him, as no one in the family reacts to his blessings or quotes. Ralph instead hears Jacob’s plea to make a world in which poor people can control their fates, a world in which “life isn’t printed on dollar bills.”

Stella Adler in Awake and Sing!, 1935

The people in Awake and Sing! need money. They need it badly. They live crammed together, and familiarity makes them vicious. They scrabble; they scrape; they cheat. They con one another out of coins, favors, and track winnings. They are dishonest, unhappy, and sometimes cruel. They wield whatever power they have with as much grit as they can muster, which is a lot. Bessie, the matriarch who claims, “Here I’m not only the mother but also the father,” is the hardest-edged and sharpest-eyed of all.

Odets describes Bessie one way and dramatizes her another. He writes, “She is constantly arranging and taking care of her family,” a generous gloss on such measures as pawning off her pregnant daughter in marriage to an unsuspecting immigrant. Bessie intercepts calls from Ralph’s girlfriend and then lies about it, because she counts on Ralph’s $16-a-week salary and doesn’t want him to marry. When Ralph confronts her, Bessie reverts to the popular Jewish grammatical tense my father used to call the Third Person Invisible:

BESSIE: A girl like that he wants to marry. A skinny consumptive-looking…. You should see her. In a year she’s dead on his hands.
RALPH: You’d cut her throat if you could.
BESSIE: That’s right! Before I’d ruin a nice boy’s life I would first go to prison.

The author tells us that Bessie “loves life, likes to laugh, has great resourcefulness and enjoys living from day to day.” It’s a kind appraisal of a woman who schemes to cheat her own son out of his grandfather’s insurance money.

The difference between how Odets sees Bessie and what she actually does suggests that the person in the opening description has been warped by the plotline of her own life. In another situation, maybe Bessie Berger would seem to love life, and maybe we’d even hear her laugh. But on Longwood Avenue she is a small-time hustler in her own home, steering the family’s narrow course between destitution and outright crime. Her husband, Myron, a dopey store clerk whom Bessie once tried to put through law school, is sweet but no patriarch. Her tycoon brother, Morty, isn’t offering any handouts and in fact literally eats up the family’s resources on his rare visits, when Bessie cooks budget-busting meals that nonetheless fail to meet his millionaire standards:

BESSIE: The best Long Island duck.
MORTY: I like goose.
BESSIE: A duck is just like a goose, only better.

Will Bessie Berger seem softer now, at Odets’ centenary, 70 years after Stella Adler originated the role? Will she be harder to digest, or easier to dismiss? Will Lincoln Center audiences, presumably for the most part a couple generations and a comfortable cushion removed from the Bronx, relax around Bessie, as if hearing a familiar Jewish-mother joke? Or will her blatant grasping and shrill geshray-ing embarrass, a peek into a culture we’d rather forget?

Bessie Berger could emerge as a huge character, potent enough to stand alongside the most important American female roles. Zoë Wanamaker, a reigning British classical actress with New York Russian Jewish roots, seems an inspired choice. In a Broadway season that highlights Mrs. Lovett, the murderously practical purveyor of meat pies in Sweeney Todd, maybe there’s room for a fierce Jewish lady who challenges the American ideal of motherhood because she sees too clearly to be nice.

Odets’ language is wide awake, and it doesn’t sing so much as snap in unflinching staccato, even in the love scenes. Today, I wonder if the urban specificity of his immigrant dialogue, the bare questions about class and opportunity, might land hard and clear for audiences contemplating a torn social safety net and “petty conditions” that seem anything but trivial. Some of Bessie’s fears, allayed by 70 years of New Deal legislation, seem to be coming home to roost.

When I heard Miller accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from New Dramatists in 2001, I was midway through writing a play about my own grandfather, Harry Hartman, the first radio baseball announcer for the Cincinnati Reds, who coined the phrase “Going, going, gone.” An obese immigrant with a grade-school education, he was voted the most popular Major League announcer in America twice during the 1930s before losing his job to Red Barber and the sleeker shape of network broadcast. He died shortly after my father’s bar mitzvah, so my research involved more holes than facts—an attempt to retrace and resurrect.

Miller addressed his remarks that day to the playwrights in the room, a few dozen among a group of 700. He was honored to be honored by writers, he said, and spoke plainly about a playwright’s capacity to shape truth, as if theater’s relevance were not a slogan but a fact. He seemed to urge each of us to get to the business at hand, his vital, cogent presence suggesting that such a business—an artist’s version of the American dream—may be embattled, but is not extinct.

I had already consulted what I believed were the sources for Going Gone, my family play. I read newspaper files in Cincinnati, spoke to the Society of American Baseball Research, tried—and failed—to find recordings of Hartman’s voice. I interviewed my father, whose terminal illness informed my wish to understand his past. I studied Yiddish intensively for two summers at the YIVO Institute, determined that if I could not hear my grandfather, I would learn his language, to put it onstage directly (Yiddish dialogue conceals secrets from the youngest son) and indirectly (English speech patterns mimic Yiddish grammar). I structured Going Gone around what seemed to be an idea inspired by baseball: cramped domestic scenes punctuated by “ups”—direct observations of the characters’ urgent fantasies, memories, and hopes. The family’s idolization of Hank Greenberg, for example, buoys each of them, particularly the mother, otherwise a souring fountain of nostalgia.

As Miller spoke, I recognized that my heritage-play-in-progress was more or less ripped off from Death of a Salesman. I never met my grandfather, so the man who becomes the voice of the all-American pastime but feels rootless as the airwaves is as much Loman as Hartman. So are the “ups,” which oscillate between material reality and an internal treadmill of aspiration and despair. Less embarrassingly, my decision to pay attention, to reexamine a man in my family who had the right gifts for the times until the times changed, to look at a chain of fathering through a foggy, cracked lens rather than not at all, probably started with Death of a Salesman.

I grew up in San Diego, so I first saw it on television. My high-school English class watched a tape of the 1985 Broadway revival, and I stayed in the classroom through lunch and wherever I was supposed to be after lunch, glued to that nine-inch-high epic family, unclear why I was sobbing. I did not know Arthur Miller was Jewish. I knew Dustin Hoffman was Jewish. Did I see Willy Loman as Jewish?

I saw him as haunted. That’s what terrified me about the slump of Hoffman’s shoulders, the visions that sprang forth when he settled into a chair or turned a corner. These are of an American salesman past, of course—a brother’s wealth, a father’s disappearance, sexual regret. Yet they reminded me of my father’s jokes about visitations from “the ancestors” before he married my stepmother, who is Catholic. My father was missing a father whom he never discussed (the baseball stories came later); my stepfather was a former wholesale dealer who hadn’t worked in five years. I recognized the jungle of worry inside the Lomans’ home, where Willy’s carried, buried grief erupts until it kills him. As a teenage girl, I took Death of a Salesman to be an insider’s view of manhood.

Death of a Salesman suggests but does not explain an immigrant anxiety, the fallout from Anatevka with all clues removed. The Lomans seem alone in the world, or at least in Brooklyn. The sense of them as a displaced family comes through the absence of any other relatives (Willy, the son of an unnamed Midwestern peddler, has lost his only brother two weeks before the play begins) or history, rather than culturally specific referents—no pogroms, no old country yarns, no particular cause for feeling “kind of temporary” about oneself. The play’s Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else—not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.

I’d suggest that the psychically fluid structure of Salesman tends to stick for contemporary playwrights, while its resistance to naming Jewish content has changed for now. For example, it’s impossible to envision the shifting structure of Angels in America without Death of a Salesman, but equally difficult to imagine Tony Kushner holding back cultural detail. Or I think about the tone of direct attack in Donald Margulies‘ early writing about Flatbush, including his Loman Family Picnic, which directly names and satirizes Jewish life by emphasizing that, of course, Lomans don’t picnic. Then again, I remember that Margulies, who was one of my teachers, spoke of receiving praise for finally writing a play, Dinner With Friends, that was universal instead of Jewish.

My grandfather’s name, like his Yiddish, seemed integral to the project of writing his story. It felt odd to sit in an audience and listen to “Hartman” throughout the theater, but I couldn’t match the pun—he died of a heart attack. And anyway, I liked it, as I liked hearing the Yiddish out loud. Cincinnati Playhouse received complaints that my portrayal was anti-Semitic because the family was unhappy, but I saw their Jewishness as compatible with their Americanness. I assumed that Jewish and American could be explicitly the same thing.

Death of a Salesman translates and travels because any culture can see itself within its gaps, the excruciating portrayal of father and sons. A grandchild of immigrants might also place herself within the fact of those gaps. Characters without context become everyone, and also a specifically severed kind of Jew. Rather than asking what is Jewish, Death of a Salesman asks, what is real? Chasmic fears are reduced to insurance payments and stolen fountain pens; the characters grab at artifacts because selling, like history, is intangible. Is reality the visible world, with whipped cheese and refrigerator debt to the penny, or the psychic riot of what has been lost? Or is it the migratory careening between those two?

Arthur Miller, our last living grandparent, has gone. His abstract portrait of Judaism helped forge American realism. He presented a domesticity built around absence, an ache the size of history. American Jewishness has become a cultural identity in a multicultural society, to be freely and concretely invoked. Writers of my generation and beyond will continue to work in detail, spilling more personal information than the young Arthur Miller would ever have considered. Yet I wonder when anyone will next build a play that is so clearly, cleanly real.