by Paula Guran
Yes, yes, Lovecraft married a Jewish woman. I’m not surprised. I’m sure she wasn’t like all those other Jews. Even so, they had a very traditional Ashkenazi marriage, with Lovecraft, hopeless at earning a living, playing the gentleman scholar-writer, while Sonia did the dirty work of trade to keep them both solvent and fed.
So the brilliant princeling shouldn’t have to dirty his hands with anything but ink.
There is something very Jewish about Lovecraft’s biography, isn’t there? The only child, the coddled, cosseted boychik raised by the domineering mother. No surprise at all that he married Sonia Greene. The real question, as far as I’m concerned, is why on Earth she married him.
Internalized anti-Semitism must be a real bitch.
Either way, the marriage dissolved after a few years.
I can’t imagine why.
Lovecraft’s thoughts on miscegenation and intermarriage are perhaps revealed nowhere more than in “The Dunwich Horror,” when the half-human Wilbur Whateley is referred to by the townsfolk of Dunwich as “Lavinny’s black brat” and special mention is made of his wide lips and “crinkly hair.” This demonic creature grows at a monstrous rate, and reaches full “manhood” at thirteen.
There’s a lot to be said about who gets to be an innocent child in the United States, and who is considered grown and dangerous.
Wilbur is not, however, the eponymous Dunwich Horror, an inhuman repulsive monster who shocks onlookers by crying out for help in a human voice, in English, even, as the heroes of the story destroy it.
In the end, Henry Armitage, an “aged scholar” explains that the horror they just dispatched was Wilbur’s twin brother, but that “it looked more like the father.”
Robert M. Price notes similarities between the portrayal of Wilbur and Lovecraft’s own identity, which goes to show the projection essential to racism.
Just as well, I think, that Lovecraft and Sonia had no children.
“My gawd – what a filthy dump! . . . damn me if I ever saw anything like the sprawling sty-atmosphere of N.Y.’s lower East Side. We walked – at my suggestion – in the middle of the street, for contact with the heterogeneous sidewalk denizens, spilled out of their bulging brick kennels as if by a spawning beyond the capacity of the places, was not by any means to be sought. At times, though, we struck peculiarly deserted areas – these swine have instinctive swarming movements, no doubt, which no ordinary biologist can fathom. Gawd knows what they are . . . a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to eye, nose, and imagination – would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place.”
– H. P. Lovecraft, 1922
I do not like H. P. Lovecraft, and I doubt he would have liked me.
I am the great-great-granddaughter of four and the great-granddaughter of two of those Lower East Side denizens he had wished would be gassed (an anti-Semite ahead of his time, was Lovecraft), the fifth generation in my family of the pushy, secular New York City Jews he so despised, and I am currently creating the sixth. Not one of us takes kindly to such statements as the one above.
A friend, a specialist, has recently done genealogical work for me, tracing parts of my family back to the late eighteenth century. One result is that I now know precisely the towns my ancestors came from, and so I know what happened to the Jews who remained in those towns in Eastern Europe.
In Klevan, where my father’s mother’s family was from, Ukrainian gentiles were all too happy to point out to the SS in 1941 the houses of the Jews. About 28 per cent of the Jews of Klevan – seven hundred people – were murdered during the first days of the invasion and occupation. The corpses were left in the street for dogs and pigs for three days, at which point the surviving Jews were made to take the bodies of their comrades to the local synagogue. Once the bodies were inside, the Germans burned the synagogue to the ground. Later, all Jewish men were ordered to report for work detail to the local castle, where the army murdered 1,160 more. Out of a local population of 2,500 Jews, 1,860 were murdered in 1941. That is about three out of every four. My grandmother’s parents had made it safely to Chicago decades earlier, but my grandmother remembered into her final years when letters to cousins stopped receiving answers.
My father’s father’s family was from Zhitomir, which had been a bustling center of Jewish life and culture. This was where Himmler set up his headquarters during the German invasion of the USSR. In September 1941, at four one morning, Ukrainian militiamen broke down the doors in the recently created ghetto and drove Jewish families out into waiting trucks. The trucks were driven a ways from the city, where POWs had dug giant pits, and 5,145 Jewish men, women, and children were registered, stripped, and shot. Their confiscated belongings were handed over to city officials to be distributed to their gentile neighbors. Again, my grandfather’s parents had taken their children (my grandfather not among them – he was the baby of the family and born in the United States) and left decades earlier. They had, however, been there for the 1905 pogrom, when only co-ordinated preparation for self-defense kept Jewish casualties down to twenty-nine dead and 150 wounded.
“[Hitler’s] vision is of course romantic and immature, and colored with a fact-ignoring emotionalism . . . There surely is an actual Hitler peril – yet that cannot blind us to the honest rightness of the man’s basic urge . . . I repeat that there is a great and pressing need behind every one of the major planks of Hitlerism . . . The crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it and starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by God, I like the boy!”
– H. P. Lovecraft, September 1933
By September 1933, Hitler’s policies toward the Jews were clear. Germany had already seen a series of attacks on Jewish businesses, professionals, and synagogues. Hitler had declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses; Jews were legally excluded from a number of professions and forbidden to practice. Those of mixed parentage – or grandparentage – were legally pronounced Jewish, and Jews were attacked economically as well as physically. I’m not sure that “romantic” is the word I would have chosen, but I suppose it’s technically accurate insofar as the rise of romantic nationalism in Germany in the early nineteenth century had also resulted in a wave of anti-Semitism.
“Here [among the Orthodox] exist assorted Jews in the absolutely unassimilated state, with their ancestral beards, skull-caps, and general costumes – which makes them very picturesque, and not nearly so offensive as the strident, pushing Jews who affect clean shaves and American dress. In this particular section . . . there are far less offensive faces than in the general subways of the town – probably because most of the pushing commercial Jews are from another colony where the blood is less pure.”
– H. P. Lovecraft, 1924
There is nothing so offensive as a strident, pushing Jew who affects American dress while taking the subways to and fro, I suppose.
As it turns out, I am the New York horror. I do indeed look a good deal like my father. And I am beautiful.
Acknowledgements
“A Clutch” © 2016 Laird Barron. Original to this volume.
“I Believe That We Will Win” © 2016 Nadia Bulkin. Original to this volume.
“The Sea Inside” © 2016 Amanda Downum. Original to this volume.
“Those Who Watch” © 2016 Ruthanna Emrys. Original to this volume.
“An Open Letter to Mister Edgar Allan Poe, from a Fervent Admirer” © 2016 Estate of Michael Shea. Original to this volume.
“Deep Eden” © 2016 Richard Gavin. Original to this volume.
“In the Sacred Cave” © 2016 Lois H. Gresh. Original to this volume.
“Introduction: Who, What, When, Where, Why . . .” © 2016 Paula Guran. Original to this volume.
“In Syllables of Elder Seas” © 2016 Lisa L. Hannett. Original to this volume.
“It’s All the Same Road in the End” © 2016 Brian Hodge. Original to this volume.
“The Peddler’s Tale, Or, Isobel’s Revenge” © 2014 Caitlín R. Kiernan. A version of this story was privately published in Sirena’s Digest 95.
“Outside the House, Watching for the Crows” © 2016 John Langan. Original to this volume.
“Falcon-and-Sparrows” © 2016 Yoon Ha Lee. Original to this volume.
“The Cthulhu Navy Wife” © 2016 Sandra McDonald. Original to this volume.
“In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro” © 2016 Usman T. Malik. Original to this volume.
“Caro in Carno” © 2016 Helen Marshall. Original to this volume.
“Legacy of Salt” © 2016 Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Original to this volume.
“Backbite” © 2016 Norman Partridge. Original to this volume.
“A Shadow of Thine Own Design” © 2016 W. H. Pugmire. Original to this volume.
“Variations on Lovecraftian Themes” © 2016 Veronica Schanoes
“Just Beyond the Trailer Park” © 2016 John Shirley. Original to this volume.
“Alexandra Lost” © 2016 Simon Strantzas. Original to this volume.
“Umbilicus” © 2016 Damien Angelica Walters
“The Future Eats Everything” © 2016 Don Webb. Original to this volume.
“I Do Not Count the Hours” © 2016 Michael Wehunt. Original to this volume.
“I Dress My Lover in Yellow” © 2016 A. C. Wise. Original to this volume.
