A Difficult Woman (26 page)

Hellman's decision to speak to the universal theme of human brutality rather than to name Jews as particular victims in
Watch on the Rhine
tells us something about the politics of the moment. To her, Jews certainly constituted victims of fascism, but they were not the only victims. She devoted many hours during the war to specifically Jewish causes, to be sure, but just as many to the victimization of others. Among her commitments, she raised money for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a creature of the Soviet Communist Party intended to generate money and support for the Soviet Union when it went to war against Germany. In 1943, the JAFC sponsored the visits of Itzik Feffer (a beloved Yiddish poet well known in the American Jewish community) and Solomon Mikhoels (actor and director of Moscow's distinguished Yiddish-language theater). Hellman, along with notables like Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall, and Charlie Chaplin, served as part of a welcoming committee.

1943: Hellman was thinking about what it meant to be a Jew. (Photofest)

But other incidents suggest that Hellman was thinking about what it meant to be a Jew. As she moved between worlds, some of them rich, narrow-minded, and reactionary, others cosmopolitan, intellectual, and feisty, she developed a more specific concern for anti-Semitism. Hellman's script for
The North Star
—a prizewinning film about the brutal invasion of a peaceful Ukrainian village by German troops—includes an otherwise inexplicable exchange between two German military physicians that reveals the anti-Semite as the more brutal of the two. As the superior, Von Harden, is about to draw blood from helpless children, he
is confronted by a subordinate who challenges his medical ethics. The superior defends himself, boasting that he was the most famous pupil of Dr. Freedenthal at the University of Leipzig.

DR. RICHTER:    Freedenthal, the Jew?
VON HARDEN:    Yes, Freedenthal the Jew.
DR. RICHTER:    You did not mind his being a Jew?
VON HARDEN:    Mind? I never thought about it in those days.
²⁷

This episode, along with Hellman's wartime diary documenting her trip to Russia toward the end of the war, suggests just how much the question of what it meant to be a Jew permeated her consciousness. Her diary notes the Jewish identities of those she encountered along the way and comments critically on their dress, behavior, and generosity. One of her dinner companions, she noticed just a week after her arrival on November 7, 1944, was an American she described as “vicious with anti-Semitism.”
²⁸
A short time later, she attributed the absence of engaged political conversation to the scarcity of Jews among her companions. She had spent the evening conversing with Russians who spoke about leading Western artists such as Sargeant, Titian, and DaVinci in the most abstract terms. The experience led her to ask not about the stifling of political curiosity but “is the Jewish Intellectual anywhere?”
²⁹
On her way to the front on December 26, 1944, she reacted negatively to a
New York Times
reporter who accompanied her for part of the trip: “Mr. Lawrence scared me as all who aren't afraid and aren't Jews I guess, always do. Then I'm like the Jewish shopkeeper during a pogrom rumor.”
³⁰
When, toward the end of her trip, she met a sympathetic young man whose sister, an army doctor, was killed in Sevastopol, she added a parenthetical comment to her notes about the meeting: “Joseph was a Jew, I think.”
³¹

Once home, Hellman maintained her interest in Jewish causes supporting refugees, accepting honors from groups like the American Jewish Congress, Women's American ORT, the Jewish War Veterans, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. As late as 1950, she accepted a Woman of Achievement award from the Federation of Jewish Women's Organizations.
³²
And yet Russian anti-Semitism remained invisible to Hellman long after she should have begun to notice it. She did not distance herself from the Soviet Union when, after supporting the creation of the state of Israel, the Soviets changed their line and refused to recognize the distinctive claims of Jews as special victims of genocide. Nor did she see
Stalin's increasing paranoia against Jews in his regime. To her everlasting shame, she did not comment when Jewish writers and artists, many of whom she met and admired, were singled out for persecution. She uttered no public word when the poet Itzik Feffer and the director of the Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels—whom she had warmly welcomed to the United States in 1943—died in Soviet prisons.
³³

Hellman's blindness to Soviet anti-Semitism in the late forties and early fifties and her continued faith in the possibilities of a Soviet state in spite of its persecution of Jews contributed to the sense that she was a non-Jewish Jew, even an anti-Semitic Jew. If before the war to be a Jew had meant to be against fascism, and a claim to invisibility gone unremarked upon, the wartime extermination of millions of Jews, among others, brought issues of identity to the fore. Jews, especially intellectual Jews, in the words of Alfred Kazin, now lived “at the edge of the abyss,” vulnerable because they had put their faith in the life of the mind, which had failed them.
³⁴

At the time, the latent anti-Semitism of the prewar period seemed to lift. New educational opportunities and home mortgages provided by the GI bill resulted in a dramatic expansion of the middle class, of which Jews took full advantage. They moved into the new suburbs, entered universities and the professions, and acquired respected political positions at a rapid pace. This did not mean an end to gentlemen's agreements that denied Jews admission to the best clubs or law firms. But it did mean an increasing willingness on their part to fight for access. Many Jews who had willingly shed religion and tradition before 1939 began to protest their exclusion, to question the meaning of being Jewish, and to identify once again with their Jewish roots. Magazines like
Partisan Review
and the new
Commentary
spoke for this group. Men like Philip Rahv and William Phillips turned from more left-wing positions to a Jewish-identified stance. Arthur Miller commented later that he had been surprised by the numbers of his generation who, after the war, “began to contribute to something called temple.”
³⁵

The fight over the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 aided and abetted a new consciousness by producing a healthy debate over a Jewish homeland as Jews of all kinds began to wonder whether their identity did not ultimately reside in identification with the new and vulnerable state. Hellman, along with many on the left, supported the creation of
the Jewish state, though she quickly lost interest in it. But now the Jewish left fragmented once more. A surge of Zionist enthusiasm led some to fight in Israel's war for independence: to them the new state represented both a home for persecuted Jews and a haven for restorative justice. To partisans of the left, Israel constituted hope for a social-democratic option. As Zionism attached itself to liberal and anticommunist Jewish opinion, those like Hellman who remained unconvinced of its centrality in creating a better world became suspect.
³⁶

By the early fifties, Israel had become something of a litmus test among Jews. Jewish nationalism required primary allegiance to the imperiled refuge of a beleaguered European Jewry. Hellman, never a Zionist, withheld enthusiastic support. Her stance diverged from that of the Eastern European intellectuals with whom she had allied herself on many issues before and during the war. Liberal, anticommunist, and pro-Israel: their Eastern European Jewish culture and origins worn proudly on their sleeves, New York intellectuals, in the postwar years, came to depart from their former stance as minimalist Jews to understand themselves as distinctively Jewish-Americans. New and sparklingly successful writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth soon came to root their work in refugee and immigrant cultures, drawing their heroes and their stories from the Bronx and Brooklyn and Newark, New Jersey, and from the children these cities produced. Their position with respect to Israel became a decisive factor for identification of a brutally destroyed minority. Hellman never passed the test. As Norman Podhoretz noted later, he broke relations with Hellman because he was violently offended by her “extreme hostility (or perhaps hatred would be a better word)” to Israel.
³⁷

The Cold War mentality, too, helped to highlight the particular role of Jews in politics—almost universally identifying their stance as communists, fellow travelers, or, in the jargon of the period, “pink.” To be sure, in the thirties and forties Jews constituted a disproportionately large and visible segment of the country's small number of organized communists. Some thought the committee hearings and investigations of the McCarthy period sought not only to unmask secret communists but to test the patriotism of Jewish radicals as well.
³⁸
The procedures of the McCarthy period did little to ameliorate suspicion. The House Un-American Activities Committee that subpoenaed its first victims in 1948 went after Hollywood, according to most accounts, because the movie industry was heavily staffed by Jews who were identified with left-wing causes.
³⁹
Six of the famous Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted and sent to jail
were Jews. One committee member, John Rankin, was an avowed anti-Semite who had once referred to Walter Winchell as “a little slime-mongering kike.”
⁴⁰
It didn't help that there were Jews on both sides. Martin Gang, the Hollywood lawyer who became the clearance agent for Hollywood celebrities, was also a Jew. Nor did it help that Jews were implicated in some of the famous spy cases of the period. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg constitute only the best-known examples.

Around the same time, word of the trials and subsequent executions of Jewish poets and artists in the Soviet Union reached the West, shattering what remained of the image of the Soviet Union as a tolerant nation. Jewish intellectuals who had once thought of themselves primarily as socialists of one kind or another turned a painful gaze onto the nature of authoritarian personalities and totalitarianism of the left as well as the right. We began to recognize, says Irving Howe, that “there was now a greater enemy by far—the totalitarian state, sometimes of the Right, sometimes of the Left.”
⁴¹
But, as Howe notes, in 1952 a “totalitarianism of the left” seemed “the harder to cope with and, thereby, in a sense, more terrifying.” Howe handled the dilemma by becoming a democratic socialist. But many others shed any hope for socialism and turned sharply toward what would become known as free-market democracy.

Hellman, not yet ready to make the break and not convinced that her Jewish identity should impinge on her politics, faced a set of difficult choices. During all this turmoil, Jewish community leaders feared an outburst of anti-Semitism. Leaders of national Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Anti-Defamation League, and many others responded to McCarthyism not by demanding that the hearings stop but by cleansing their own houses of communists and joining in the attack on communists in general. Leading Jewish intellectuals split, many of them not only recanting their former beliefs but branding those who could not or would not do so as Stalinists. A horrified Hellman, herself banned from the film industry, immediately labeled those who would not speak up “cowardly bastards.” Just a few years later she would tell her friend Bill Alfred that she no longer cared “about those so-called friends who never lifted a finger to protest the ban.”
⁴²
But now she was an outlier. The lions among the intellectual Jews (people like Elliot Cohen, Midge Decter, and Barbara and Jason Epstein) founded or became active in magazines such as
Encounter
and
Commentary
. Some of these organs became vehicles of a new politics, unashamedly Jewish, pro-Israel, anticommunist, and moralistic.

In this context, whether or not one was a Jew mattered, and to be a Jew who did not denounce Stalin, whose murderous purges many now equated with Hitler's slaughter, immediately drew suspicions of being a self-hating Jew.
⁴³
Hellman, who took a brave position for civil liberties and freedom of speech in 1952, took no public position in the debate over totalitarianism. She simply dropped out of it. Her silence as well as her hostility to Zionism fueled suspicions about a possible hostility to Judaism. In the context of the postwar turn toward Jewish identity, Hellman's brand of “international” antiracism seemed particularly suspicious. While the intellectuals around
Partisan Review
,
Commentary
, and other influential journals adapted to the postwar environment, Hellman appeared increasingly rigid. By the mid-1950s, whispers of Hellman's continuing Stalinism mingled with allegations about whether she too might be a self-hating Jew.