Having since gotten to know us in the flesh through six years of living in New York, she now questions whether there is truly anything distinguishing about a “New York Jew”—even if she still finds among our ranks excellent boyfriends. “I’m attracted to men who have obligations to people other than me,” she writes. “A Jewish mother guarantees this.”

Counterlife

The California I come from doesn’t have many rules or much reverence for family history. It’s a moneyed Eden populated by parents who didn’t like the rules and who forsook family history for a new world order on the Pacific Rim. They colonized a paradise, and 40 years later, mental exercise isn’t nearly so popular as Pilates class. Nobody was really Jewish. Nobody was really anything.

Like most teenagers, I wanted to belong to a pre-established, recognizable category of person. The quickest shortcuts are obvious to anyone: play a sport or party. Party I did, but not hard enough or often enough to secure an identity for myself. And dribbling a ball seemed silly. I was a child who read a lot, and I became a teenager who read more. It was really just a failure of imagination: I didn’t know what else to do. The novels I read were like social field guides. They helped me to identify different species of humans and told me how to evolve into the ones I liked best.

The authors I liked most, it turned out, were Jews—the long-famous ones with universal appeal. Judy Blume gave way to Cynthia Ozick. I never latched onto Bellow, but I like Nathanael West a lot. And of course there was Philip Roth, whose slapstick raunch was good for more than just prurient nights. His virile, foul-mouthed protagonists were particular while also representing something larger about a people I wasn’t a part of. There was manageable oppression everywhere—outside the home, where they were called “kikes,” and inside the home too, where mothers forced ungodly amounts of food on them and demanded intimate knowledge of their bodily functions. Here, in Newark, N.J., was a world of expectations and obligations, of ancient traditions and urgent ambitions—a world of enough pain to motivate.

Even John Updike, literary prince of the Protestants, seemed to share my envy. I understood while reading Bech: A Book—his parodic, postmodern novel-in-stories about a washed-up novelist—why, given the choice, Updike would choose as his alter-ego an esteemed writer like himself but with an extra sprinkle of charismatic glitter: Jewishness. While the adoring, fictional critics within the book may praise Henry Bech for his “quixotic, excessively tender, strangely anti-Semitic Semitic sensibility,” Bech himself doesn’t lack intellectual insecurity or the notorious neuroses native to his race. Updike’s shticky self-reflexivity (“Bech’s weakness for Wasps was well known”) also made sense to me. It’s what gave the book not only its prankishness but its heart, too. The aching antihero that emerges in Bech: A Book has little in common with Updike’s usual protagonists. As opposed to his gin-sipping, gentile counterparts, Bech is more interested in taking women than in taking stoic swims, more invested in earning public praise than in earning a silent father’s lock-jawed approval. I mean, who wouldn’t be?

As much as I identified with Updike’s covetous gaze, like so many 14-year-olds, what I really desired, more than anything else, was honorary membership in J.D. Salinger’s Glass family. They had everything I didn’t: a private language (of spiritual crisis, Sappho, and soap shards); a chicken soup-pushing mother; and a family mythology so mentally incestuous and hermetically sealed that it suffocated their leader in suicide. I was shrewd enough to be suspicious of Salinger’s obsessive reverence for his own characters, but it didn’t prevent me from wanting to be one of them.

It’s no wonder teenagers love the Glass family, and it’s no wonder I was so keen on focusing on their Jewishness and then glamorizing it. They are a flock of loners, too sentient for the world, all but homeless outside of the family apartment, and—most crucially—empowered by their collective Otherness. Kurt Cobain would have made a good Glass.

What doubt there is among Jews about Salinger’s Jewishness should be punctured at least a little by Franny’s agonized monologue about materialism, which she moans to Zooey from her pathologized place on the living room couch: “I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?” Until Zooey responds, it’s almost irrelevant that Franny’s not alone in the room. Her monologue about the hypocrisy of intellectual aspiration verges, at times, on soliloquy, and it’s nothing if not a display of crippling Jewish guilt.

There is a lot written about Salinger’s Jewishness (his father was Jewish, his mother an Irish Catholic who passed as Jewish when she married) and how relevant it was to his work. It’s hard to deny that the basic makeup of his characters matches that of the caricatured Jew: anxious, world-weary, simultaneously proud and self-loathing, forever grappling with a neurotic sense of foreboding. The Glass family is also only half-Jewish, but growing up, they seemed fully Jewish to me—mostly, I think, because they were from New York.

Then I actually moved to New York, for college, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by real New York Jews for the first time. Initially, it was intoxicating. That what distinguished them was clearly more geographical than it was religious didn’t matter in the least. Obviously, I knew Jews in California too, but they weren’t like these Jews. The California Jews hadn’t been bar mitzvahed. And they certainly hadn’t been familiar with magazine mastheads or new Criterion Collection releases. At home—on weekends—they ate foods whose literal English translations (whitefish salad, honey cake) were almost as rapturous as the Hebrew ones I was unable to pronounce.

It’s not on purpose that I’ve never dated a non-Jew, but one’s attractions are always a bit aspirational, so it makes sense that I haven’t. Even Ben, my “fake boyfriend,” is Jewish. We met within the first week of college and still chat online almost every day. For four years, we slept in the same bed on Friday nights but never thought to touch one another. We edited each others’ papers and sought each others’ romantic counsel. Ben always made a theatrical show of fairness. He made me replace the food I ate from his cupboards and always remembered when I owed him $5. I’d roll my eyes and fork over the cash. “What?” he’d ask, “You think I’m going to let some goy waltz in here and bleed me dry?” It was all sort of a joke, but not really. I always missed him when he went home for the High Holidays. In affectionate moods, he told me I could “pass.”

Jewish boyfriends (real and fake) certainly seem to call their mothers a lot, not that I have any point of reference. The cliché feels true, though. I’m good with other peoples’ mothers: I like conspiratorial exasperation, and I enjoy eating dinner almost as much as I enjoy wrapping the leftovers in tin foil afterwards. It’s possible, easy even—especially at mealtimes—to be too solicitous a shiksa, too curious a colonizer. I’ve attended enough Seders at this point to not treat them like study-abroad programs, but still, it’s good to express genuine interest in your competition. Perhaps this will change over the years—I imagine it will—but for now, I’m attracted to men who have obligations to people other than me. A Jewish mother guarantees this.

One Jewish friend had parents who hosted a huge, buffet-style brunch each fall in their apartment overlooking Central Park. Men with advanced degrees and well-trimmed beards introduced themselves between bites of bagels. Small children scampered down hallways and played games on the Oriental carpets. My friend’s mother enjoyed herself—smiling, chatting, cooing at babies—but she remained alert the whole time, seeing to it that no coffee cup went below half-full. The idea was that everyone felt taken care of. In California, such a celebration (casual, multigenerational) usually calls for potlucks. Picnic tables are laid with wooden bowls full of ancient grains. Dessert is fresh fruit, and you drink sulfite-free Merlot. Everyone goes heavy on the goat cheese, and nobody stresses out about anything. The idea is that everyone takes care of themselves.

Even the spectacularly wealthy, spectacularly fun kids in college were saved, in some elusive, Jewish way, from appearing as gauche as they otherwise might have. Their parents might have been rock stars or media moguls, but they still collected first editions and went to publishing parties. There were breathtaking socialites who skipped class to both walk in fashion shows and host exclusive Seders. Tangled artfully in delicate gold necklaces, they wore tiny, diamond-encrusted stars of David. They made elaborate attempts at concealing new tattoos from their parents, which of course weren’t only disapproved of but also forbidden. The regard for tradition was touching, even if it was half-assed. The fact that they attended to Jewish family obligations implied that besides beauty and undeniable charm, they knew they had something bigger than themselves to be proud of and preserve.

The lesson, I guess, is that we—the goyim who aspire to some cursory definition of Jewishness—see you in a different way than you see yourselves. I say “we” because my feelings on this score are widespread enough to have become something of a literary trope. “What was Zabar’s? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach? Please tell me,” pleads Mitchell Grammaticus, one of the three main characters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot. Like Eugenides himself, Mitchell is the son of Greek immigrants from Detroit. He’s a religious-studies major at Brown in the early 1980s, and his roommate, Larry Pleshette, is from Riverdale. Larry’s parents serve on the boards of artistic nonprofits; they house ballerinas defecting from Kiev; Leonard Bernstein is known to have come over for drinks. Their house is like a shrine for Mitchell, full of totemic objects. He describes the contents of their freezer (rum raisin ice cream) with more ecstasy than he does any of his spiritual epiphanies.

For a long time, I felt as Mitchell did about the Jews I met in college—awed and finally in the presence of people, not characters, whose image I could approximate. But the longer I live in New York, the less impressed I am with the Jews, which is as it should be. Scanning the world and classifying its inhabitants might be a useful way to live when you’re very young, but at a certain point, it becomes obvious that there are more exceptions to the rules than there are rules, enough people who surprise you to realize that there aren’t any meaningful classifications at all. I think I was stunted a bit in this regard because of my exposure to the Jews I met in college, who in the beginning at least, really did seem to confirm what I had read about and romanticized in high school.

After six years in New York, I can barely count on one hand the non-Jews I know. I hear of stylish Purims and secret latke recipes; friends catch the biblical allusions I don’t and are more comfortable than I am joking about Hasids. But it’s not like Judaism is some magical charm that makes for bookish, indoor superheroes. All the things I once took to be synecdoche for Semitism are really just certain sorts of class signifier—ones made accessible by a mere college degree. It’s not that they’re superficial so much as they are shared, and therefore no longer special-seeming.

Though I’ve finally shaken the simple syllogism held in my mind all these years that conflates Jewishness with literacy with virtue, you wouldn’t guess it from looking at my life. It’s all my adolescent daydreams made manifest. If I could sit my adolescent self down for a minute, I’d commend her impulses and tell her not to worry. I’d tell her that in a few years she’d be surrounded by real-life versions of the characters she read about, but not to get too excited—that it would be exciting at first, and then annoying, and before long totally normal. I’d tell her she’d live in New York and that her mayor would share a surname with Franny’s cat. I’d tell her to keep reading Jewish books that convince teenagers that it’s cool to be smart.

Whatever jokes were once made about “the Johns” (Cheever, Updike, Knowles) are now made about “the Jonathans” (Lethem, Safran Foer, Ames). The Johns have infidelity, swimming pools, and study hall proctors; the Jonathans have Tourette, shtetls, and HBO shows filmed in Cobble Hill. We are a better-read (and -fed) elite. We still have status symbols. And though it may sound specious to some, a ruling class that reads is better than one that doesn’t.

Venerating Jewishness as a teenager was not an act of rebellion, but it was a way of questioning and ultimately rejecting a culture whose sense of purpose—to say nothing of prestige—seemed extemporaneously contrived. I spent my youth wanting to belong to a club that I thought wouldn’t have someone like me for a member. What I didn’t know then was how easily, and how soon, I would be approved.

• There are elements of The Catcher in the Rye, “Franny,” and probably other works I can’t think of right now in this amazing recollection of a party (and an after-party) with J.D. Salinger in 1952. Must-read. [Paris Review]

• Remember that nice, funny, cute Super Bowl commercial with the Volkswagen and the little kid as like Darth Vader? Yeah, well, it was really about Nazis. [Badass Stuff]

• David Horowitz comes down against Bill Kristol’s non-hysteria over Egypt. [Right Wing Watch]

• The 11 students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine, a year ago were criminally charged by prosecutors. [JTA]

• Jan Gross is coming out with a new book about alleged Polish complicity in the Holocaust. [Haaretz]

Turns out that if you string together several McBain clips from different Simpsons episodes, they are all part of one coherent, larger feature. Trust me when I say that to some people this is really, really important news.

This brings about mixed emotions. I don’t like censorship. Censorship is bad. But on the other hand, the Tribe’s ability to push buttons fills me with counter-cultural pride. Apparently, Jews don’t do this anymore. Ouch.

The new list, after the jump.

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling 

2. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor 

3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier 

4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck 

6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou 

7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman 

9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Myracle, Lauren 

10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

The Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books [ALA]

The scene, which takes up almost a quarter of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, is classic American Jewish comedy, but it’s just as notable for the joke it doesn’t make: the obvious one about emasculating mothers who hang out in the bathroom with their grown sons. When the mother, Bessie Glass, touches her son Zooey’s bare back as he shaves and compliments how “broad and lovely” he’s gotten, he recoils—not because she’s broken an Oedipal taboo, but because he’s afraid that too much reflection on the beauty of his physical form will corrupt him spiritually. Zooey has plenty of complaints, but Portnoy’s is not one of them.

What do we do with J.D. Salinger, the midcentury American Jewish anomaly who wrote the episode above (which the writer Janet Malcolm has called “one of the most remarkable mother-and-son scenes in literature”) and many like it? As the writers who’ve eulogized him in the past week have demonstrated, we can love him with a slightly defensive fervor, as though a superior critic might at any moment squash his literary reputation forever; or look beyond his small oeuvre to the subcultures of fans it has spawned; or use the strange path of his career to think through larger questions of what we want from our authors. But how do we do with Salinger what we do with most famous writers when they die—that is, figure out where they fit into our individual and collective literary canons?

One potential place to “put” Salinger would be with the other American Jewish male writers who came to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s—authors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, who’ve come to define an era in American Jewish literature. Up to a point, this makes sense: like various among them, Salinger served in and wrote about World War II and critiqued the culture of the American boom times that followed. Like them, he masterfully combined elements of high and low art, a practice that since then has become almost synonymous with the American aesthetic. And like them, his work was frequently animated by a quarrel with the religious affiliation of his youth. But—and this slight distinction makes all the difference—he was picking a different fight with Jewishness. It had nothing to do with the strangulations of insular community life, or the struggle to move beyond immigrant parents and become American, or to move beyond a castrating old-world mother and become a man. Salinger’s assimilated, upper-middle-class characters don’t have to worry about these things; in fact, Franny and Zooey Glass and their five siblings—his most Jewishly identified characters—are, like Salinger himself, technically only half-Jewish. The specter of intermarriage (or, to put it in more Rothian terms, the possibility of banging shiksas) isn’t a taboo-smashing fantasy, here; it’s a very comfortable fact.

Salinger’s quarrel with Jewishness was about structures of thought that are much less visible and less risible than the clannishness of immigrants: he objects to the premiums placed on education, analysis, intelligence itself. The Glass family stories concern the attempt of seven brilliant siblings to escape from brilliance—and, in particular, from the psychoanalytic thought that permeated Jewish intellectual life at the time. If Alex Portnoy visits his Dr. Spielvogel in an attempt to cure himself of the strangulating effects of parochial Jewish community, the Glass children turn to eastern religion to escape the limitations of a world where everyone sees an analyst.

In a well-meaning educational experiment that forms the background of Franny and Zooey, the eldest and brainiest of the siblings, Seymour and Buddy, force-feed the youngest, Zooey and Franny, on a steady diet of Buddhist and Christian mysticism from the time they’re small children. Their syllabus includes “the Upanishads and the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart,” “Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankarachya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna.” (Moses, for his part, comes up exactly once, marshaled by Zooey as an example of a prophet who “was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that,” but was no Jesus.)

The plan backfires: like many graduates of progressive schools, Franny and Zooey grow up to feel that their idealistic education has rendered them even less capable of interacting with the outside world than they would be otherwise. Each twist of the knot makes the siblings more dependent on each other, trapped in a dialectic of knowledge and “no-knowledge” that no one else understands. They spend the duration of the book sitting around their messy Upper West Side apartment (“Bessie’s kibbutz,” Buddy calls it) stroking their cat, Bloomberg, and arguing about how to get out of the metaphysical mess they’ve gotten themselves into. Other than in relation to their heritage, no one ever explicitly mentions Jewishness, but the whole thing is so Jewish it makes you wonder if, by contrast, Alex Portnoy could just as well have been Armenian.

The tragedy of Salinger’s career, as many critics have noted, is that he seems to have been, ultimately, unable to get out of the intellectual trap he so brilliantly described his characters being stuck in. It’s hard not to wonder whether they—and he—might have been able to pry themselves loose if they had had a slightly less dismal view of sex. There’s virtually no sex, at least in any conventional sense of the word, in any of the Glass family stories. (There’s an implication in “Franny” that the young woman and her boyfriend have slept together, and some even read the story as implying that she’s pregnant.) The only way it even comes up, for the most part, is in abstracted form as “desire” or “attachment,” which the Buddhist-influenced siblings believe ought to be avoided; or, even more abstractly, as the cure for malaise recommended by psychoanalysis, for which they have unanimous contempt. This is, in fact, where Salinger diverges most sharply from Bellow, Mailer, and Roth, all of whom were profoundly influenced by psychoanalytic thought and whose explicit writing about sex changed the way sex was written about—and perhaps even how it was performed.

It’s quite possible that Salinger would have had a longer career if he had allowed his characters more plot-motivating desires (carnal or otherwise), but it’s just as likely that the very good work of his that we do have has been underappreciated because we just don’t know what to do with his lack of what, in Franny and Zooey, he derisively calls “testicularity.” Or, to be more precise, critics don’t know what to do with him. Fiction writers seem to, though. Mailer, Bellow, and company are hardly dusty, and Roth, for all we know, may have his best years still ahead of him—but it’s Salinger’s presence, more than any of theirs, that can be seen in much of the fiction currently being produced by young writers, including his lack of engagement with sex. Last month, cultural critic Katie Roiphe lamented in a New York Times Book Review essay that “young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent” to Roth, Mailer, Bellow, and Updike, have “repudiated the virility of their predecessors.” She blames a censorious brand of feminism for the alleged generational shift toward “passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite.” To whatever extent she’s right about the phenomenon, she’s wrong about the cause. Possibly one or two of the young male writers she accuses of prudery have read Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. Every one of them has read Salinger.

Until close to the end of the book that bears her name, Franny remains inconsolable, reciting the Jesus Prayer and refusing to eat. Finally, through a theatrical bit of trickery, Zooey gets her attention. “How in hell,” he asks her, “are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?” Compared with what Alex Portnoy might do with a cup of chicken soup, there’s nothing remotely shocking about this moment. But on its own terms, it’s radical. Chicken soup and the mothers who proffer it, here, have lost the power they have elsewhere to keep a young American in a Jewish ghetto. Instead, in this brief moment when Buddhist thought and Jewish family life are reconciled, chicken soup becomes an object of transcendence, a communion wafer or an om—and the mother who bears it just might be Buddha, or Christ, in disguise.

The Co-op in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I grew up grocery shopping with my mother, is not Zabar’s. You don’t get crabby with the deli guy. Actually, you don’t think of him as a deli guy. He’s a butcher who sometime in the ’80s began cutting meat for sandwiches, like they do in New York City. The Co-op counter sold what I used to think of as “regular food,” good apples, bad oranges, lots of ham, and local milk. Only after I moved to New York and became Jewish and started fighting with deli guys myself did I realize how much a person can pontificate about food. It was 1993 when I stood next to Salinger. By this point, he had lived in New Hampshire longer than I ever did, enjoying the anonymity the state—Live Free or Die—affords both loggers with guns and distinguished authors. Salinger was a Co-op regular, but he never took to the have-a-nice-day Co-op way. He was exacting, unsettled, discerning, worldly. He was Jewish.

Or he kind of was. Salinger, who died Thursday in Cornish, New Hampshire, at 91, was born to a Polish-Jewish dad who sold meat and cheese that either was or wasn’t kosher, depending on your source; and a Scotch-Irish mother who changed her name from Maria to Miriam and passed as Jewish, though she never converted. (Salinger learned that interesting twist right around his bar mitzvah.) In the racially homogenous Connecticut River Valley—home to both the artist-resort town where Salinger lived and the college town where I grew up—there have always been some former city people, people Jews might recognize as Jewish, though most of us didn’t, partly because they became, above all, echt New Hampshirites, with chickens and four-by-fours and forges and snowshoes and all the trappings of rural, cold-climate life.

A special subset of American Jewry—I’ve heard them called mountain Jews, as distinct from book Jews and money Jews—like New Hampshire, a fierce place full of loners that is not freighted with the nanny-state reputation of Vermont or the country-club crap in Connecticut. Mountain Jews grow beards, and their own food; they’re often atheists or Buddhists, and sometimes doctors or teachers; they don’t like people enough to live in cities, and they don’t like Jews enough to live in Israel. A high school friend, the son of a psychiatrist who’d moved to town from New York, told me that his father and some other Jews had decided in the ’60s and ’70s that clustering together in cities is what had made Jews (often their parents) vulnerable in Europe. It was an error they were determined not to repeat. When I saw him, Salinger looked just like those men: rangy, serious, and in picturesque country clothes that looked more J. Press than Sears.

And though he hazed the Co-op employees, they revered him. When I asked the deli guy if the shaved-turkey fanatic was indeed Salinger, he said, proudly, “Jerry comes in here all the time. He likes the doughnut holes.” The people of Cornish, especially, took on the cause of Salinger’s privacy as if it were the state’s sacrosanct opposition to sales and income tax; they took pleasure in deceiving tourists and scholars who came looking for him. Not far away, in Cavendish, Vermont, where Alexander Solzhenitsyn lived, townsfolk kept a sign in the general store that said, “No Directions to the Solzhenitsyn Home.” But in Cornish no one even acknowledged that they’d heard of Salinger, much less had him as a neighbor. You got a withering look if you mentioned his name.

Early on, at his father’s insistence, Salinger apprenticed in the meat-importing business, which he studied in Vienna, Austria; he knew from shaved turkey. He got out of Austria in 1938. Good timing for a Jew—almost-Jew—son of a Jew. Good timing for anyone. In New York, Salinger tried and failed to publish stories in The New Yorker (one reject I nominate for posthumous publication was called “I Went to School with Adolf Hitler”) and shipped off to war with the Army in 1942. By the end of the decade, he had helped to liberate a concentration camp, retooled himself as a Buddhist, and created the Glass family, seven fictional eccentric Upper East Side children and their parents: Les and Bessie. Bessie Glass, that is, née Gallagher.

A woman refusing to convert, and thereby compromising Salinger’s identity, loomed large in Salinger’s imagination. Salinger was not a nice Jewish boy, and he wasn’t a good Irish Catholic boy either. He was a purist, even a kind of puritan. That’s another reason northern New England suited him. His scorching misanthropy was gorgeous in his books, because there’s no time you’re more willing to hate flesh-and-blood people than when you’re reading and lost in the abstraction of words on a page. In his life, though—and in the lives of fans who used to strike the Holden Caulfield pose—it led to little more than a state of perpetual annoyance. The army bothered Salinger; glossy magazines bothered him; editors bothered him; the movie business bothered him; finally, everything bothered him, and he stopped publishing and bunkered himself in Cornish, which has its share of problems (poverty, etc.) but—to give the town its due—very, very few phonies.

Nothing was ever shaved right for Salinger. I’m surprised he ate meat, actually; he had been through earlier diet regimes including macrobiotics, fasting, forced vomiting, and doses of urine and vitamin C. He distrusted medicine and embraced Christian Science for a time. He liked the idea of sweet, clean, oracular young girls (like his creations Pheobe and Esmé), but in life they were never pure or wise enough for him. Joyce Maynard’s book about her affair with him—she was 18, he was 53—pulls off the unlikely trick of telling a Salinger story from the point of view of the pure thing that the Salinger hero desires. Pure things, though, should not write books, have their own desires, or sell off love letters that make august figures like Salinger seem lecherous and cruel. When Maynard auctioned off Salinger’s letters to her, the software mogul Peter Norton bought them, saying he’d return them to Salinger. Men are very, very protective of Salinger.

It used to be you could never mention that you admired Maynard for fear of losing your attractiveness to indie guys who suddenly would see you as impure. Now I don’t think indie or any guys remember Maynard-Salinger, but it’s still a good parable for women: if you like a guy who likes pure things, you must actually somehow stay pure or he will absolutely hate you. Salinger trapped his wife Claire Douglas in their house, and kept feeding her new ideologies and practices, including all the puking and macrobiotic stuff, and Dianetics, the prototext of Scientology. It exhausted her, and even turned her suicidal and murderous. In the end, she spared her own life and didn’t kill her daughter, as she had planned to. They merely got divorced.

Like a lot of puritans, Salinger liked litigation. He was always suing and banning screenings and enjoining publications and insisting on copyrights. He was a contractionist. He wanted to keep value close. To the extent that women yap and preen, they were the enemy. He detested the women who failed to become, in his view, sufficiently trained in Buddhism or Kriya yoga or special ways of eating. He seems to have said some pretty awful, even sick things to and about his wives, his daughter, his girlfriends. I’m not sure how he treated his widow, Colleen O’Neill, a local nurse. My last glimpse of Salinger was in the parking lot, where he and O’Neill were companionably loading their car with groceries.

To me, at that deli counter, he said only one thing: “That’s a lot of strawberries!” There was an exclamation point. I heard it. And take it from me: when Salinger acknowledges you, be you man or woman, Jew or Gentile, your heart leaps. You remember exactly why you love Holden Caulfield, and the prose of J.D. Salinger, and the myth of him. Because at a vulnerable time, say when you were home unmarried at your parents’ place throwing a silly teatime bridal shower for a silly bride and wishing you were a silly bride yourself, you so ferociously want to be unphony enough that Holden—Jerry—Salinger—the Jew—will like you, will find in you a reason to be happy and not fear another Holocaust or the demons of fame or the horror of existence. And that longing, of the small town white girl, to be something pure for someone like Salinger; that longing is so profound that you can’t distinguish it from the work itself, and for a time—a very important time—Nine Stories or Catcher in the Rye is the greatest book you have ever read.

Virginia Heffernan writes The Medium, a weekly column about Internet culture, for The New York Times Magazine.

Though we can be sad for his passing, in another sense this is actually potentially exciting news. Salinger has not published a book since 1963; the last thing of any kind he published, a story, appeared in The New Yorker in 1965. Since then, he has lived almost as a hermit in New Hampshire. We will now see if his typewriter has been on these past 45 years. Here’s hoping it has been.

***

Why does one book get translated while another does not? The answers are as various as the books themselves. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s And from There You Shall Seek (Ktav, April), for one example, was drafted in the 1940s but not published in Hebrew until 1978. Two of Soloveitchik’s other long essays from the 1940s, “Halakhic Man” and “The Lonely Man of Faith,” both translated in the 1980s, have become classic introductions to modern Orthodox thought. So why no translation until now of “Uvikashtem Misham,” the essay that completes this crucial set? Probably because so many of the people inclined to read a weighty Orthodox theological essay have the skills to read it in Hebrew.

Quite another story is Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Normance (Dalkey Archive, May), a novel first published in French in 1954. The influence of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan on the style of modern American literature, from Henry Miller to Joseph Heller, cannot be denied, but neither can the blistering anti-Semitism of the pamphlets he published during the run-up to World War II and the occupation of France. Though he began to write it in Denmark, where he was jailed as a Nazi collaborator, Normance is not one of Céline’s most notoriously hateful propagandistic texts, but a fragmented, invented description of the bombardment of Paris by the Royal Air Force in 1944. It’s not surprising that half a century elapsed before the book appeared in English. The politics of publishing an avowed anti-Semite aren’t exactly simple: who will be paid the royalties on Normance, even today? And will the complete rendering of Céline’s oeuvre into English mitigate the effect of his wartime propaganda?

***

Speaking of cultured anti-Semites, we can blame them, starting with Richard Wagner, for making music inherently political for Jews, but at the same time we should acknowledge that music has never existed outside politics as simply a collection of abstract, pleasurable sounds and rhythms. Consider Psalm 137, in which the exiled Israelites hang up their harps, asking, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

A similar question might have been on the minds of composers and conductors like Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Toch, and Otto Klemperer, who in their exiles from Nazi-controlled territories in the 1930s wound up in and around Los Angeles. Dorothy Lamb Crawford, a musician and musicologist, tells the stories of such refugee artists in A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigres and Exiles in Southern California (Yale, May).

Bizarre as their Californian exile may have seemed to former paragons of high German musical culture, it was certainly preferable to the fate of Jewish musicians under the Nazis. One such unfortunate was Zhanna Arshanskaya, a teenage prodigy at the Kharkov Conservatory of Music; her son, Orlando Sentinel columnist Greg Dawson, describes her ordeal in Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy’s Story of Survival, 1941-1946 (Pegasus, July). Like many of the composers who ended up in L.A., Arshanskaya finally found a safe haven on an American university campus, in Bloomington, Indiana.

Even without a genocidal dictator peering over their shoulders, many American Jews have found reasons to turn their musical careers into political platforms. Leonard Bernstein, for example, rose to national fame on November 14, 1943, when he substituted for his boss, Bruno Walter, and conducted the New York Philharmonic. A bisexual Zionist and an unconventional performer, Bernstein revealed just how complex a political act the composing or conducting of a symphony can be. Based on a stack of FBI files and Bernstein’s correspondence, Barry Seldes’s Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician (California, May) recounts the battles fought by an unusual partisan.

Even the poppiest music isn’t politically neutral. For one thing, Jews have profited from their engagements with African-American musical genres from the times when Irving Berlin was rumored to keep a “little colored boy,” who wrote all his music, locked in a closet, to the rise of Matisyahu. Is this cultural fusion, or the exploitation of poor African-American performers by rich Jewish record producers? That old debate may not be the explicit subject of Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, June), by songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with the help of prolific autobiographical collaborator (and “Sexual Healing” co-lyricist) David Ritz, but the book offers another set of characters to consider. What on earth was Big Mama Thornton thinking, for instance, when she bought “Hound Dog,” that classic blues number later made famous by Elvis Presley, from two Jewish R&B-loving kids from Baltimore and Long Island? That Leiber and Stoller wrote many classic rock ‘n’ roll numbers, as well as “Love Potion No. 9,” reminds us again how tricky it is to categorize a genre of music as “black” or “Jewish.”

***

Long before innovative websites like ritualwell.org and books like Vanessa Ochs’s Inventing Jewish Ritual, E. M. Broner was already rewriting Jewish ceremonies from a radical feminist perspective. In her experimental novel A Weave of Women and in The Women’s Haggadah, Broner has translated the spirit of the counterculture, second-wave feminism, and the havurah movement into resonant prose. She returns this spring with The Red Squad (Pantheon, May), a novel about adjunct faculty members and political dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s, and where they’ve ended up in our post-9/11 era.

***

J.D. Salinger’s lawsuit against the publishers of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye (1951) puts a famous name, if not quite a face, on the question of copyright extension. Should any hack be allowed to dream up and publish the further adventures of Holden Caulfield, or should Salinger retain that exclusive right? Prior to 1976, American copyright law offered a maximum of 56 years of protection to literary works, meaning that open season on Salinger’s beloved novel would have begun two years ago. The current law, passed in 1998, extended that protection to the author’s life plus 70 years, so Holden won’t be fair game until 2079, plus however many more years the 90-year-old Salinger lives. And if Mark Helprin, veteran of the Israeli army, crotchety contrarian, and author of Refiner’s Fire and A Dove of the East gets his way, we will have to wait even longer than that for Holden’s further adventures, and for inevitable hackwork sequels like Augie March Is a Zayde! and Marjorie Morningstar: Menopause. Helprin rants and raves against copyright minimalists in Digital Barbarism (Harper, April), proposing that Congress extend copyright as far as possible, even infinitely, because “no good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property.” The copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig disagrees—as does Jewish law, which protects intellectual property but for relatively limited terms—but at least Helprin can count on Salinger’s concurrence.

One of my mother’s most vivid early memories is of the Nazis trying to break down her door. She was five, and the door was the big, heavy front one on the house she was born in, a few yards from the Arno in Florence. It was 1944. As she tells it, the Nazis, who were occupying Florence and had ordered the evacuation of her neighborhood, pounded on the door for some time, while she, her mother, and her older sister cowered inside the house. (Her mother was part of the Resistance; her father, a surgeon in the Italian army, had died in Africa two years before.) But the door held, and the Nazis eventually went away.

Things were different for my father. Unlike my mother, he was Jewish, and in 1943, when he was nine, he, his parents, and his older sister left their home in Milan for a mountain village farther west. The village was called Valmosca, meaning Valley of Flies. It was no longer safe to be Jewish in Italy, so with the help of a colleague of my grandfather’s they lived under a fake surname in Valmosca until the end of the war. My father says that, despite frequently going hungry, he basically enjoyed his two years in hiding, because it was the one period in his life when he got to spend a lot of time with his father. (They went blueberry picking together.) One day the Nazis came to their door. His mother let them in, and when they entered the kitchen, his father yelled at them to keep their dirty boots on the rug—couldn’t they see the floor had just been cleaned? The Nazis checked the family’s forged papers, found them to be in order, and moved on.

My parents met in the medical library at the University of Florence when they were students there in the late 1950s. Before they married, my mother converted to Judaism to appease my father’s family. (Her own mother had moved to Los Angeles by then.) In the mid-’60s they moved to New York City, where I was born and raised. We weren’t observant. Growing up, I was as ignorant of the clichés of New York Jewish life as I was of Judaism’s substance, and though my older brother and I were sent for a year to Sunday school at an Upper West Side synagogue, my only memory of it is a day I now know to be November 20, 1977 (I was seven), when a TV was rolled into the basement room where my class was held, and we watched hours-old news footage of Anwar Sadat shaking hands with Menachem Begin on the tarmac in Israel. My father, who was dropping me off, wept.

My brother and I have always been close—we were born just 15 months apart—yet his interest in, or at least awareness of, Judaism has always been keener than mine. When he was in sixth grade and I was in fourth, I read an essay he wrote for school about our father’s father, titled “The Life of an Italian Jew.” The pride that came through in that title and in the essay surprised me; I’d never thought of putting the words Italian and Jew together. When he was 12, my brother told our parents he wanted to be bar mitzvahed at the Wailing Wall, because the bar mitzvahs of his classmates had more to do with materialism than with belief. I respected his reasoning, but as a burgeoning atheist I was baffled: why would he want a bar mitzvah? In Israel, a couple of days after the ceremony, my father and brother went to visit Masada. I’d come down with something, so my mother and I stayed behind in our hotel room with an issue of Newsweek. (I remember reading a profile of Richard Pryor, having to ask what the phrase “pleasures of the flesh” meant.)

When I was 12, I told my parents I didn’t want a bar mitzvah. They suggested that I should, because someday I might regret not having one. I assured them I wouldn’t. (I don’t.) I was in my fourth year at an Upper East Side boys’ school, where we recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning and sang Christmas hymns every winter. I had spent six summers at an athletic camp in Maine where all the campers went to church every Sunday; the Catholics were driven to a Catholic church, while the rest of us walked to a Baptist one nearby. The only time I recall my Judaism coming up at camp was when an older camper named David Cleary grinned down at me and said, “Kike.” Like the kid in Salinger’s “Down at the Dinghy,” I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was supposed to hurt.

Apparently it wasn’t exposure to conflicting religions that led me to atheism, as that exposure didn’t affect my brother’s beliefs. He didn’t attend the boys’ school I went to, but he was with me all six summers at camp, and he accompanied me to that Baptist church even after his bar mitzvah. (I remember little about my mornings in church, aside from the crushing boredom, but it occurs to me now that I’ve probably spent more hours of my life in churches than in synagogues.) Since then, our respective convictions haven’t wavered: my brother married an observant Jew and sends his daughters to a religious school; I married a Catholic and hope my two-year-old son will make his own religious choices. My parents seem more puzzled by my brother’s path than by mine. But the subject tends to come up only when we’re making plans on a Friday or Saturday.

Recently Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed in New York was quoted in the New York Times as saying, apropos of Bernard Madoff, that “what it means to be a religious person is to be terrified of the possibility that you’re going to harm someone else.” That sentiment, with its echoes of Buddha, the Torah, and Christ, is something I can get behind. (Of course, one could substitute “secular humanist” for “religious person” and make the same assertion.) My admiration for so much Jewish thought is wrapped up in my mind with my father’s years in hiding and my mother’s feeling pressured to convert. I’m also reminded of a scene in a horror movie that I watched at far too early an age (11, to be precise). In An American Werewolf in London, the Jewish protagonist has a nightmare in which his home is invaded by Nazi werewolves. Before his eyes they slaughter every member of his family. The night I saw the movie with my parents and my brother, I couldn’t sleep. Back then, I didn’t know why.

There is a moment—much longed for—in the life of the occasional writer when a door seems to swing open. Darkness becomes sunlight. The writer feels anointed, ready to step forward and to claim a reward for what often felt like years of pointless effort.

A door opened for me—just a crack—in the early 1960s, when my novel Stern was accepted for publication by Simon & Schuster. Or at least it seemed to have been accepted. There was something about it having to be made official, a procedure that lasted for several excruciating months, very much like the Sitzkrieg, the 1939 German invasion of Poland, when Germany, France, and England seemed to be at war but did little but glare at each other.

Friedman in 1960, and original cover of Stern

Finally, the official word did come through, and I was invited to come say hello to the staff at Simon & Schuster. First out of the gate to congratulate me was Mr. Simon, who was well along in years.

Nice to meet you, Friedman, he said. I’ve so admired your Dust Bowl novels.

Forgive me, sir, I said, but you may have me confused with another of your authors.

I don’t think so, he said, suspiciously. But thanks all the same for stopping by.

A group of young editors then gathered round and told me how much they admired my jacket.

Thank you, I said. My mother bought it for me at Saks. She was heartbroken that I hadn’t become a theatrical press agent. She’d been told that they all have big homes in Rockaway. But she wanted me to be properly dressed all the same.

After realizing they had been referring to my book jacket, I was treated to a lunch of carrots, celery, and radishes by my editor, Robert Gottlieb, who was ahead of his time on crudités. After we’d nibbled at our food, Gottlieb made typing signs in the air—a suggestion that I return home immediately and begin the next book. I took his advice—to an extent.

Soon afterward, Stern was published. The hero, such as he is, moves his family from the city to a distant suburb and becomes obsessed by a faceless man down the street who has told his child no playing here for kikes, then shoved Stern’s wife to the ground and may or may not have seen her (without panties). Stern’s manhood is threatened, his life thrown into chaos. Eventually, he makes some (publisher-ordered) small repair to his damaged psyche. The book was publicized as a first novel, though it was not the first I had attempted. It was preceded by a shapeless behemoth of an entity that I spent several years trying to shove uphill, as if it were an old Packard. A key character in the work—and it was work—was an early Martha Stewart type named Grace Dowdy. Her job was to tour America’s Air Force bases to buoy up the spirits of service wives who felt they were insufficient as hostesses. Her motivational message became the book’s title: You Are Your Own Hors d’oeuvres.

Why I felt I needed to write this book remains a mystery to me. Why I felt it would catch the attention of publishers is another.

Before Stern, I had published several short stories, the first in The New Yorker. This was occasion, in the early 1950s, to be carried heroically aloft on the shoulders of Bronx stickball players. During this period, word would spread, as if in the French underground, that a new J.D. Salinger story was in the works. Also considered an event was any new short story by Roald Dahl, before he transformed himself into a children’s book author and anti-Semite. (This type of transformation led to an unanswerable question for me: When Céline, as another example, is revealed to have written anti-Semitic tracts for the Gestapo, does one go back and dis-enjoy his novels?)

I received one of The New Yorker‘s trademark All of us here are delighted letters of acceptance.

All of us here in the Bronx, I replied, are delighted that all of you there are buying the story.

Someone at the magazine called to assure me that I would receive top dollar for my contribution. Actually, any dollar at all would have been more than welcome. I was still recovering from the fact that someone was willing to pay me to tell a story. To this day, I still treat literary money with reverence, to be spent with great care and consideration. I can practically hear organ music in the background as I part with each dollar, whereas film and television money exists to be thrown around frivolously.

From Mademoiselle

I was invited to visit the magazine’s offices and to meet Hollis Alpert, the editor who had fished my story out of the unsolicited pile. He advised me not to get married and referred to J. D. Salinger as Jerry, which impressed me tremendously. (“Just over at that desk is where Jerry did his revisions on ‘Uncle Wiggly.’”) He said that if I was interested in a job as a writer for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section, he would put in a good word for me. I thanked Alpert for his kindness, but I had already signed on as an assistant editor at the Magazine Management Company, which published, among a myriad of other titles, Male, Men, Man’s World, and True Action, and thought it would be shabby of me to back out.

I did not see him again until many years later, on Main Street in Sag Harbor.

I discovered you, said the ageless Alpert, who after leaving The New Yorker, became film critic for The Saturday Review and wrote biographies of film stars. Discover me back.

Stern sold 6,000 copies, although, as Gottlieb pointed out, they were the right copies. With an exception here and there, this has been my pattern. I often wonder what it would be like to sell a few hundred thousand of the wrong copies.

The book created ripples here and there. The New York Times critic Anatole Broyard invited me to dinner at his home in the Village. Another guest was Ralph Ellison, who waggishly referred to me throughout the evening as Mr. Stern. Broyard invited me into his study to see his magnificent and immaculately arranged collection of books and to test the solid construction of his desk.

Bring your full weight down on it, he said.

I did so and agreed that it was sturdy. He pointed to an in basket which was designed to hold first draft pages and an out basket for work that was further along. I had no doubt that he loved books, but I felt it would be difficult to write them in this fastidious setting.

Among my insecurities was a fear that my employer would recognize himself as a minor character in the novel. Stern, who writes the editorial material for product labels, is terrified of his boss, Bellavista, described in the book as a wealthy Brazilian man with giant feet and wood-chopping teeth. My actual boss was an innocuous-looking man, easily lost in a crowd. Still, I worried that he would fire me on the spot. As with most fears of this nature, mine were in vain. His reaction to the book was to put me in for an immediate raise and to warn me that I would be making a mistake if I left the company.

I was less concerned about the reaction of my mother and father. There is a hallucinated version of my parents in the novel. My mother was a flamboyant woman, writ much larger on the page: In restaurants, she would grab celebrities and hold them by the sleeve, hollering across to the embarrassed young Stern: ‘I’ve got Milton Berle‘ or ‘I just grabbed Bob Eberle.’ My father was gentle, detached, described in the book as a small, round-shouldered man who spent a great deal of time after meals scooping up bread crumbs….

While not commenting directly on the book itself, my mother had high praise for the publisher.

They’re smart people. They didn’t get where they are by accident. They must have seen something.

I watched my father read a few pages, then look over at me and shake his head in wonderment, perhaps marveling not so much over the book, but at having produced a son who was so much taller than he was.

An idea that had taken hold at the time—or at least it had taken hold of me—was that if you aspired to be a writer and hadn’t published a book by the time you were 30, the game was over. You might as well switch professions. The literary heroes of the time—Capote, Fitzgerald, Hemingway—may have ended their lives poorly, but all got off to an early start. I missed the target by two years. Still, being a published novelist, even at the advanced age of 32, must have added some extra bounce to my step. My father noticed a change in the way I entered restaurants. My social life fanned out a bit. Mademoiselle magazine, which had much literary content at the time, came up with the idea of a photo layout in which first novelists and other assorted writers were paired up with Swedish models. My team included Norman Podhoretz, George Plimpton, and Jack Richardson, who wore a cape. Plimpton, who came across as a highly agreeable person, invited me to a little get-together the following week at his place. Taking him up on the offer, I arrived a bit early and called up to him in what I assumed was his bedroom. Can I wash some glasses for you, George? He said no, no; he was fine on glasses. I took a walk around the block. When I arrived back, a group of pretty young women had turned up, all of whom might have studied under Sally Bowles, and what seemed like the entire publishing world began to appear—Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern—all came parading in, one by one, a march of the literary greats.

Jules Feiffer became a friend, showing up regularly at our rental house on Fire Island. It took awhile for me to realize that the lure was not my company but the excellent cole slaw and potato salad prepared punctually at six each day by Mrs. Sullivan, a woman who looked after my sons that one summer of brief affluence. Or perhaps it was the handsome and 60ish Isabel Sullivan herself, who had once received a marriage proposal from Nelson Algren.

A door had opened. It wasn’t apparent at the time, but the trick was to get it to remain open. In a sense, the door never closes entirely. But I’m sure I’m not the only writer who has found himself eased out into the corridor from time to time, having to start the whole process over again.