A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  The thirties was an odd decade in that respect, for if Jews were excluded from elite colleges and some professions, they found places in other arenas like teaching, medicine, and the new profession of social work. In Hellman’s world of theater and film, being Jewish constituted no barrier at all. Hellman was not hurt by the continuing febrile anti-Semitism that persisted in many sectors of American society. She did not find herself excluded by the admissions quotas deployed by elite colleges and professional schools, or face the closed gates of the higher professions.

  But if she found no doors locked to her creative ambitions, Hellman could hardly have avoided noticing what we can only call the latent or casual anti-Semitism that surrounded her. This often took the form of simply attending to what was and was not Jewish, a practice common among her friends and acquaintances. Edmund Wilson, for example, who befriended Dash Hammett and with whom Hellman later had a close relationship, carefully noted the Jewish ancestry of his acquaintances in his diaries of the thirties.3 Mary McCarthy, who would marry Wilson at the end of the decade and later go on to play a major role in Hellman’s life, recalls her “stunning surprise” as a young woman when she discovered that an early boyfriend was Jewish. It was, she says, “a disillusionment, like learning the real names of one’s favorite movie stars.”4 She went on to conceal the existence of her Jewish grandmother from her Vassar college friends and to participate in marginalizing the only student in her circle who acknowledged her Jewish parentage.5

  Dashiell Hammett, who became Hellman’s lover and partner after 1931, participated in this culture of noticing, pointing out Hellman’s Jewish affiliation and simultaneously distancing himself from it by denominating Jews as “your people.” During the war years, from his remote posting in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, he plied her with loving, upbeat, and humorous accounts of his life on an army base. Amid his appreciation for her talents, her generous gifts of tobacco and warm clothing, and her love, Hammett casually reminded Hellman of her origins. Sometimes this came in the form of a joke, as when he repeated a comment to her from “one of your people.” A soldier by the name of Glick, he wrote, had remarked to him, “Thank God my people had sense enough to give me a good American first name, Irwin.”6 On another occasion, he wrote her that “one of your people just gave me the heel of a very fine hunk of salami.”7 Another time he told her that he’d just read a very good play written by “one of your people.”8 Once he asked her if in her “twisted oriental way, you look on Christmas as an extra day of atonement for your people.”9 None of this seemed to be tainted with malice, for as he told her once, “your people are sometimes remarkable.”10

  To her friends, and in letters to Arthur Kober, Hellman expressed a mixture of love and hate toward Jews, an acerbic irreverence that indicated both her identification with the talented core of literary and cosmopolitan people and an effort to distance herself from those Jews who did not share her values. She went to a bad concert, she wrote to Kober, where she was “sick and frightened at the homosexuals, rich Jews and refugees who were there.”11 Later she described the repulsive behavior of another Jewish writer (Irving Stone) by telling Kober, “If you were not a Jew, I would be anti-Semitic.”12 And yet she took comfort in claiming the bonds of family when it suited her. After one of her plays closed prematurely on Broadway, she sought solace with close friend Heywood Hale Broun, comforting herself by telling him: “We’re just two old Jewish failures.”13 Notorious for her capacity to swear, she demonstrated her self-consciousness about what it meant to be Jewish by throwing around offensive words like goy and kike. She used these in the ways that African-Americans today sometimes use the n-word—as an affectionate and comradely attribution, a signal that she too was a member of the group. “I myself make very anti-Semitic remarks,” she would later claim when challenged, “but I get very upset if anybody else does.”14

  Hellman’s associations with the left seemed merely natural in the thirties. Like her, many of Hellman’s creative and often Jewish friends entered the arena of politics through the twin gates of a search for social justice and a virulent opposition to fascism. At the same time, a new generation of men and women just a decade or so younger than Lillian dismissed their Jewish identities to find their places in the larger political world. Men such as Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, and Alfred Kazin who would go on to found magazines, write novels, and become influential critics began their careers in the halls of City College in the thirties, where their political differences guided affiliation into the many left-wing factions of the decade. Mary McCarthy boasted a particularly sensitive streak for the relationship between Jewish origins and political impulses. Herself a “Trotskyist,” she recalled the guests at the little dinners she attended at the end of the decade as “mostly Stalinists, which is what smart successful people in that New York world were. And they were mostly Jewish; as was often pointed out to me with gentle amusement, I was the only non-Jewish person in the room.” It was at such a dinner that McCarthy recalls first meeting Lillian Hellman.15

  It mattered little that some up-and-coming young men (Phillips, Bell, Howe, and Rahv among them) would change their names to meld more smoothly into the larger culture. Liberal or left-wing, they abandoned Jewish ritual and tradition for the religion of politics. Later some of these men would coalesce into “the New York intellectuals” and become powerful cultural voices in the postwar years. They would reorganize themselves along political lines, and Jewish identity would become one of many factors in their appraisals of left-wing politics. But in the 1930s and for most of the 1940s, their secondary attachment to Jewish descent resembled Hellman’s; she found herself firmly in the mainstream of the American Jewish intellectual and cultural tradition.

  This remained the case even during the decade and a half when German Nazis and others invested their political capital in racializing those born or descended from Jews. Despite these campaigns, and even in the face of widespread rumors of extermination strategies, a 1944 survey of young Jewish literary figures found that few of them placed their Jewish identities at the forefront of their self-definitions. Lionel Trilling, soon to become the first Jewish professor of English at Columbia University, declared that he did not regard himself as a specifically Jewish writer.16 He described himself, rather, as a minimalist Jew. “For me,” wrote Trilling, “The point of honor consists in feeling that I would not, even if I could, deny or escape being Jewish.”17 Muriel Rukeyser preferred “more than anything else to be invisible.”18 Delmore Schwartz took a position closer to Hellman’s, insisting that “the fact of Jewishness was a matter of naïve and innocent pride, untouched by any sense of fear.”19 In the aftermath of the Holocaust, in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel, and in the light of Cold War aspersions on “Commie Jews,” all this changed. Then many Jews who had been part of the left in the thirties became associated with being pro-Israel. Those who criticized Israel in any respect risked identification as Soviet sympathizers. It was then that Hellman faced disparagement about her refusal to meld her politics with her Jewish identity.

  Was Hellman then simply one of those Jews who preferred, in Muriel Rukeyser’s memorable phrase, “more than anything else … to be invisible”?20 Certainly her most famous work, The Little Foxes, supports this notion. Critics correctly identified the play (which opened in February 1939, at the height of anti-Semitic attacks in Germany) as a thinly disguised portrait of her mother’s family. Hellman avoided describing the rapacious Hubbard family as specifically Jewish, preferring instead to speak to a more general concern about the corrupting effects of money. Yet the family’s effort to profit from the industrializing new South could easily be interpreted as a depiction of the stereotypical money-grasping Jew. The Hubbards, two brothers and a sister, have since become symbols of how perverted ambition for money and power can ride roughshod over human feeling, discarding community and tradition along the way. At the time, Hellman insisted that the p
lay was meant as satire, a lesson to illuminate the impact of greed on the lives of innocent people and their children. And surely its success is attributable to the way that message struck an America still struggling to get out of the Depression. Only later would she acknowledge its relationship to her own childhood—and even then it was class, not Jewish identity, to which she pointed. She had reacted to her grandmother’s wealth and the abuse of her class position with anger and self-hatred, she wrote in one of her memoirs. She resolved this conflict only “after The Little Foxes was written and put away.”21

  But Hellman invoked her Jewish identity under other circumstances without a moment’s hesitation. After she returned from Spain in the spring of 1938, she called the New York Times (which she described as owned by Jews) to task for not featuring antifascist articles about Spain on its front page. “It stands to reason,” she wrote, that “every Jew must be an anti-Fascist to be either a good Jew or a good American.”22 As fascist regimes increasingly fastened on the salience of Jewish heritage as a cause of conflict, she wielded her identity like a weapon. “I am a writer, and I am also a Jew,” she told an audience of twelve hundred at a 1940 book luncheon. “I want to be quite sure that I can continue to be a writer and that if I want to say that greed is bad or persecution is worse, I can do so … I also want to go on saying that I am a Jew without being afraid that I will be called names or end in a prison camp or be forbidden to walk down the street at night.”23

  As the fight against fascism escalated and the Second World War loomed closer, Hellman increasingly perceived anti-Semitism and racism as of a piece. Her position in those years paralleled that of the Communist Party, which, during the Popular Front period from the mid-thirties to the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, promoted the values of brotherhood and recognized suffering as a universal condition engendered by capitalism. But the party also advocated acculturating “nationalities,” including Jews, in order to create solidarity across group lines. It supported activities like mandolin orchestras, folk singing, and summer camps that encouraged young people to take pride in their Jewish identities not for their own sake but as vehicles for social change.

  In the spring of 1939, Hammett became the editor of a new Communist Party–sponsored monthly journal called Equality, whose masthead proclaimed its mission “to defend democratic rights and combat anti-Semitism and racism.” The bold purpose of the journal, on whose editorial board Lillian Hellman was listed along with Bennett Cerf, Moss Hart, Louis Kronenberger, Donald Ogden Stewart (of the SWG), and Dorothy Parker, was to “combat every expression of defeatism among the Jews, to expose all fascist conspiracies in the United States and to defend the rights of labor and all minorities in this country.”24 Inspired and funded by the Communist Party, the journal was nevertheless praised by leaders of the Jewish community, who normally kept their distance from communism in any form. With the U.S. entry into war, Hellman’s efforts on behalf of racial justice escalated. Like other progressives, she sought “to use the outsider experience and the experience of discrimination to make common cause with other outsiders.”25 Hellman became particularly active in the struggle to end racial discrimination in the armed services, appearing on platforms with Paul Robeson to promote that cause and chairing luncheons to raise money for it. The FBI kept close track of her efforts on this score, deeming them subversive.26

  Hellman’s generalized condemnation of racism and anti-Semitism in all their forms got her into trouble when she wrote her only overtly antifascist play, Watch on the Rhine. Produced in 1941, the play focuses on the tensions generated in an American family when a German anti-Nazi fighter bringing his American-born wife and children to safety in the United States confronts a family guest who threatens to reveal his presence to German intelligence. The play forcefully advocated abandoning passivity to enter the war in order to defend the freedoms Americans valued. The argument ran counter to the policies of both the Soviet Union (which was still allied with Germany in a peace pact) and the United States (which was still formally neutral). Hellman chose not to comment on the specifically anti-Semitic activities of Germany at the time; she pleaded instead for people to join in resistance to anti-democratic regimes, for courage and bravery in the face of abusive power. Consistent with her resistance to racism wherever it appeared, she depicted the Nazis as bullies, their attack directed against freedom everywhere.

  In the context of the moment, Watch on the Rhine resonated differently with different groups. The play appeared at a time when, fearing outbursts of anti-Semitism, influential American Jews made little public noise about Hitler’s atrocities. Some Jewish critics distanced themselves from its message, wondering if it was a critique of their stance, while others attacked Hellman for neglecting to name Jews as pivotal targets in the fascist dream of an ethnically cleansed world. To Hellman, the larger morality involved in the brutal assertions of fascist power over many forms of human life seemed more important than identifying specific victims. It was wrong, she argued, to humiliate and beat up people in the streets, to take away their livelihoods and deport them—wrong no matter whether they were communists, gypsies, homosexuals, or Jews. In this sense, Hellman understood her identity as a Jew as deeply entwined with her commitment to human freedom and democracy. The White House recognized this sensibility when it scheduled the play for a command performance that the president and Mrs. Roosevelt both attended. The performance took place less than two months after the United States entered the war.

  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