Jewish Will Rogers

FOR 2-c- PLAIN (313 pp.)--Harry Golden--World ($4).

It is an absurd thing to be pelted with matzoth balls, and for some years now, the South's more sensitive segregationists have been feeling absurd. The barrage of wet kosher dumplings comes from an overweight (198 1/2 Ibs.) leprecohen named Harry Golden, who lives in Charlotte, N.C. and publishes an eccentric (no news, all editorials) newspaper called The Carolina Israelite (TIME, April 1, 1957). When he is not waging his blintzkrieg against the racists, Golden may be tweaking some fellow Jews by the short hair of their mink stoles, sentimentalizing about his boyhood in Manhattan's Lower East Side, or solemnly addressing the young ladies of a Presbyterian college on "Contributions of Calvinism to American Democracy." The combination is engaging and makes sense; Only in America, Golden's book of clippings from the Israelite, sold 270,000 hard-cover copies, is still going strong, and is being fashioned into a musical by Meredith (The Music Man) Willson.

For 2-c- Plain is more of the same, although here and there the pickle-barrel philosopher scrapes bottom. The new book offers nothing as trenchant as Only in America's "Vertical Negro Plan," which solves the problem of painless school integration by removing seats from classroom desks--on the theory that white Southerners think nothing of associating with Negroes when they are standing in elevators, supermarket queues, and the like. In the second collection, there is more blandness than bite, although Golden does return to the subject of segregation: "Free of charge, I offered the $64,000 people an idea to help get an additional ten million viewers in the South: Ask the questions they ask Negroes in Mississippi to qualify them as voters. They're interesting questions, like, How many bubbles in a pound of soap."

Wasted Whiskers. There is again much of the old nostalgia. Back on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Golden recalls, the old folks would mutter, "A klug zu Columbus'n" whenever a boy got a bloody nose or the steam was not hot enough in the Turkish baths. Rough translation: "Columbus should have broken his head before he discovered America." But there were consolations. "For 2^ plain" a lad could buy a large glass of clear Seltzer. Flavoring cost a penny more, but sometimes he could persuade the counterman to "put a little on the top" for nothing. Jewish boys seldom learned to swim, says Golden, because the waterfront lay deep in Irish territory. The immigrants had an enormous respect for learning, and in every photography studio, the appropriate props were on hand. "When the fellow posed you he said, 'How about a pair of eyeglasses?' You acted a bit coy, but you were very grateful to the man, especially when he also put a pencil in your hand."

Golden's friend Carl Sandburg, about whom he is writing a book, has called him the Jewish Will Rogers. He might be called the Jewish Edgar Guest, too, but at his best, the cigar-chewing editor does evoke the old Rogers twang. Golden on the U.S. Astronauts: "Having found the perfect man, it seems the last place they should send him is to the moon. They ought to shoot off the least qualified man, because we need the best man like we never needed him before."

On being the lone Jew in a Southern town: "The folks automatically identify him with Jeremiah, Isaiah. Amos, and the Second Coming . . . When the Baptist Sunday School teacher is puzzled by some involved Biblical problems he immediately runs over to Goldstein's to get the information, right from the original source . . . Poor Goldstein; with the bottom falling out of the textile machinery market, this fellow keeps worrying him about the Ark of the Covenant."

On converts to Judaism: "Fifty years ago my Orthodox mother said that Judaism in America is doomed. [Today] we have Elizabeth Taylor. Marilyn Monroe, too. Now all we need is Jayne Mansfield and we'll have it made."

On beards: "Every time I see a color advertisement now of the Schweppes man, I feel very sad. I am thinking of all the magnificent beards that went to waste on the Lower East Side when I was a boy."

Tennis, Everyone? Author Golden has a Negro bartender-chauffeur now and a packed lecture schedule, but otherwise seems little altered by his success (or by the disclosure last year that he had once served a prison term for mail fraud). Golden believes he is successful because not only Jews but others can identify themselves with his stories: "Until now, writers of immigrant literature treated it all like a case history. Some were frankly ashamed of it. They made out like it was mysterious, and something the quicker over with the better. I came along and told the same story without inhibition or aggression or a chip on the shoulder. And what happened? Now Lutherans up in the Northwest and Scotch Irish down in Georgia and Italians in Connecticut, they write and tell me, 'This is my mother and this is our house.' The identity is broader than we knew."

Actually, unpredictable Harry Golden is too complex to serve well as anyone's folk hero, and not all of his views endear him to liberals. Segregation of public facilities is evil, he says, but "private preference" is different. "When Dr. Bunche complains because he can't get into the West Side Tennis Club, that just obscures the issue. The Jews are just as bad. They want to get into the country club. Abe Ribicoff has gotten to be governor of Connecticut, and they worry about the country club."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.