[Jewish True Tales] Bob Dylan/Anzia Yezierska

[Lawrence J. Epstein]

[http://www.jewishtruetales.com]

Bob Dylan (1941-  ). Bob Dylan, named Robert Zimmerman at birth, was born to Jewish parents, raised as a Jew, given a lavish Bar Mitzvah, and attended Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin for four consecutive summers, from 1954-1958. As the camp's name suggests, it was Zionist, no surprise given that both Zimmerman parents were active in Jewish organizations. When Bobby Zimmerman first went to the University of Minnesota he stayed at the house of a Jewish fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu. His first marriage was to a Jewish woman. He remains loosely connected to the Lubavitch movement and has appeared on their telethons.

And then there’s Bob Dylan and Israel.

In May 1971 Dylan and his then wife Sara went to Israel without their children in hopes of escaping the media frenzy in America, having a bit of a second honeymoon, and exploring Jewish roots, a subject Dylan became increasingly interested in after his father's death on June 5, 1968. On May 24th, Dylan's 30th birthday, a photographer got a shot of him praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem while wearing a kippah, the traditional Jewish head covering. The photo ended any possible privacy. At some point in late May or early June, the Dylans visited Givat Haim, a kibbutz, to explore the possibility of staying there for a while. Eve Brandstein, a member of the kibbutz, told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin that Dylan wanted to stay in a guest house but not work on the kibbutz. The kibbutz members did not want to accept his conditions for living there and were scared their home would be a magnet for the curious.

From April 11th to May 17th 1983 Dylan spent 19 recording sessions producing his album Infidels. On April 19th he sang six versions of a new song, "Neighborhood Bully," and on May 17th, at the very last session recording the very last song, he did another take of the song, which, to me at least, indicates he wanted to get it right. "Neighborhood Bully" is a sarcastic, unvarnished full-throated defense of Israel. The Israelis, ironically called the bully of the neighborhood, have no please where they can retreat. They are constantly criticized just for living. There's no subtlety in this song, no nuanced view of Middle Eastern history. The persecuted Jews are in the right and are simply defending their lives. Dylan invokes the Jewish people's tragic history as a way of defending Israel.

The album wasn't released until November 1, 1983, but in September that year Jesse Dylan, Bob's then seventeen year old son, had a late bar mitzvah in Israel, and his father flew over for the event. He was again photographed wearing Jewish religious items.

Dylan played his first concerts in Israel on September 5th and 7th 1987. (Probably by coincidence, his very next concert was in Basle, Switzerland, the site of the First Zionist Congress in 1897). Dylan played three concerts in Israel on June 17th, 19th, and 20th in 1993. Symbolically or not, he ended the latter two concerts with "It Ain't Me Babe," about a relationship in which he rejects the expectations placed upon him.

Dylan’s story, that is, sounds like one of a middle-class Jewish success, a man who, because of his enormous talent and hard work, was on extraordinarily intimate terms with both America's musical traditions and the English language. But there was also an inner religious torment unnoticed by this surface analysis. All minority group members must navigate the general human struggles of maturing, but minorities must add sometimes multiple struggles about such issues as self-acceptance and desiring the sometimes contradictory goals of acceptance by a wider group and maintaining the born self. Bobby Zimmerman's self-administered ethnotherapy was to develop an American self, "Bob Dylan."

It would be cheap and easy to claim that Dylan's religious search came solely because his efforts to deal with anti-Semitism and minority status led at one point to his dealing with what he saw as the contradictions of being both Jewish and American by denying his Jewish self and fiercely embracing some sort of fundamentalist Christianity. Dylan's religious search was genuine. He deserves to have his quest taken seriously. But, ultimately, his attachment to Christianity was as problematic for him as his attachment to Judaism.

It is not possible to say precisely what his religion is, or what mixture it is, or what its shape is. All we can say is that Dylan orients his life toward a sacred reality. He seems to feel a personal, direct relationship to God, perhaps even to have "conversations" with God. He seems to feel guided by God, blessed by God, and morally indebted to God.

If Dylan seems conflicted about Jewish religious beliefs, he connects emotionally to a Jewish history punctuated by persecution. He grasps the longing for a Jewish homeland. Dylan's silence about Israel may reflect some ambivalence. Or he may just wish to keep his views private. It is significant that there are no negative songs about Israel, no comments hostile to the Zionist enterprise, no initial embrace and later abandonment of the Jewish people's heroic return to national history.

The ancient Israelites introduced the world to the idea of a single, personal, moral God. In that basic sense, Dylan is certainly Jewish. Additionally, the word "Israel" means someone who wrestles with God, not someone who obeys God or even believes in God. Has anyone more publicly wrestled with God than Bob Dylan? The wrestling has sometimes produced untraditional and even questionable results, but no one can doubt that it has also produced an enduring and uniquely magnificent body of art.

Bob Dylan will be 70 on May 24, 2011. I wonder what he will find as he examines himself at that age. I wonder if after all his wandering, his endless searches, his constant need for shedding skins and acquiring identities, he finally needs a place to land, a place connected to his understanding of God, a place where history and geography can't be separated, a place where outcasts have found a haven, a place where his ancestors originated. I wonder if Israel and Judaism will turn out to be his direction home.

Note: This is a revision of material that originally appeared in “The Dylan Watch” at The Best American Poetry Blog.

Anzia Yezierska (1885?-1970). The comedian George Burns once noted that he and his friends didn’t go into show business because they were hungry for recognition. He said they were hungry for food. No writer of the immigrant period caught the tragic side of what Burns was talking about better than Anzia Yezierska. She used that notion of hunger to represent all the needs of the immigrants, for love, for purpose, for a home, for learning.

Yezierska was herself an immigrant, arriving around the turn of the century. She worked in a sweatshop. She cooked. She taught. She desperately wanted to become an American, and found a central dramatic foil in her father whose old world ways were ones she considered impediments to her dreams. Starting in 1913, she discovered that all her emotions could be drained into prose. Her novel Bread Givers is my favorite immigrant novel. It teems with the frustrated energy that fueled so many people caught in the tenements of the Lower East Side.

Her writing career began when Hungry Hearts, a collection of her stories, was published in 1920. The book hadn’t sold very well. She had earned $200 in royalties that was long gone. But, in true Hollywood fashion, the producer Samuel Goldwyn was attracted by the stories. After all, he had come to America himself as a poor, Jewish immigrant. Goldwyn decided to make the stories into a film.

At the time Yezierska was living on Hester Street in a rooming house. As she drank tea, the warm, consoling drink so many immigrants liked, she heard her name being called out. She immediately concluded she was being evicted because she was behind in the rent. She walked to the door. There was a crowd assembled around the Western Union messenger. She ripped open the message, fearing the worst. The telegram read: TELEPHONE IMMEDIATELY TO DISCUSS MOTION PICTURE RIGHTS FOR HUNGRY HEARTS.

She lacked the nickel for the phone call and the dime for carfare to her agent’s office. Reluctantly, she pawned her mother’s memory-filled shawl, getting just a quarter for it. Her agent told her several producers wanted the book. Shyly, she asked if the agent could advance her a dollar because she hadn’t eaten. He gave her a ten dollar bill.

Child’s Restaurant was just across the street. She had the fleeting recollection of standing outside the restaurant just staring as food was being thrown away. She crossed over and went inside, ordering the most expensive steak they had. But she was only able to eat half of it. A waitress tried to remove the remaining food, but Yezierska grabbed it. She put the meat and potatoes into her handkerchief, covered that with a newspaper, and left. At home, she fed the steak to Lily, an alley cat.

The film was made, but Anzia Yezierska found it as difficult to deal with success as she had with failure. She turned down a contract for $100,000 to return to New York City. During the Great Depression she worked for the WPA’s Writer’s Project. Her job was to catalog trees in Central Park. Later she published her fascinating, but partially fictional, autobiography Red Ribbon on a White Horse.

The great, but too often forgotten, immigrant novelist died of a stroke on November 21, 1970.

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Posted By Lawrence J. Epstein to Jewish True Tales at 12/09/2010 01:00:00 PM