From This He Makes a Living?
Bella, Bella Kissed a Fella.
By Arthur Kober.
Random House. 206 pp. $2.75.
The stereotypes of Jews which I dislike the most are the ones that Jews themselves develop; and of these, I have a special distaste for Arthur Kober’s. But it’s hard to say why. On the whole it’s a rather pleasant, dreamy, and remote little mishmash that he concocts, almost idyllic in tone; it appears so, at any rate, when you consider how successfully his Jews have been spared their own history. The time—though Kober goes to some trouble to establish it as “now”—is somewhere between the onset of immigration and 1933. The Jews have settled in the Bronx, and the girls have gone to work in offices: nothing else has happened. Bella, her friends, and her family go about making bilingual puns, saying, for example, Erev Flynn for Errol Flynn, mitt for meat, udder for or, etc. Most of the discussions conducted in this vocabulary bear on Bella’s love life, which is to say her efforts to trap a husband. A subsidiary theme, given to Ma and Pa Gross, is the standard American joke that the women wear the pants, spattered with their husbands’ brains, in the American family. Every now and then Kober lays aside the dialect to say something on his own, in pure Castilian: “Her mind was a seething cauldron, stirred by the spoon of self-pity.”
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The trouble with all this, as with every accurate heartless distortion, is that the closer it gets to reproducing accent and circumstance, the more it tells a lie. Humor may be wildly exaggerated, crude, mad—but so long as it pre-serves the style of its subject matter it is true. Mark Twain’s take-off on the Mississippi boat-man is a prodigious whopper, but its fidelity to the style of life makes it dead right, Sholom Aleichem, Gogol, Dickens, Cervantes, Swift—name any humorist, satirist, caricaturist that you please, the same holds for them all. It is precisely here, in this fundamental respect, that Kober goes wrong. What he has to say of the Jewish style of life is a complete perversion of it. He makes Jewish life seem like a perpetual Hoff cartoon.
Take Ma and Pa Gross. It is impossible not to think of them in the image of the bosomy and abdominal cetaceans, in housecoat and undershirt, with frying pan and newspaper, that Hoff draws. The fact that the publishers of Kober’s stories have encouraged this identification, using Hoff in their advertisements or juxtaposing them in magazines, is merely an external circumstance; the resemblance between the two is by natural affinity. Or Bella Gross. Whomever Kober may have had in mind in his conception of her, she has emerged as the equivalent in words of the smooth-faced, ball-breasted chick of the cartoons who sits with her fella in the parlor.
The limitations of the two styles are identical. Bella Gross has no more of an inner life than the girl of the cartoons, and this in spite of the greater resources that words presumably put in the service of characterization. The reason is obvious: Kober and his readers would be embarrassed by the revelation, it would destroy the smug, smooth rule of false abstraction, in terms of which Bella and her contemporaries can be moved about as in a game. The moment you stop playing this game, the moment you suspend the rule that nothing shall be represented that cannot be shown on Hoff’s drawing board, it ceases to be funny and appears as the heartsick, weary, and shameful thing it really is.
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Consider Bella’s secret life. She has been around, it seems to me, for at least fifteen years. Assuming that her current activities began in earnest when she was about twenty, she must now be a girl of not less than thirty-five, still unmarried, still untouched by human hand. Kober assures us that she would never allow a fella to get fresh with her. If this is the case, then Bella is hopelessly hung up, hoist by her own petard, the victim of a strategy of which the worst feature is that it cannot be revised. Bella’s was a campaign of strategic retreat designed to stave off frontal assault by falling back to the prepared defenses of parlor, kitchen, and dining room. The suitor is drawn in deeper and deeper, while his exit is cut off by Ma and Pa with food and comradely talk. This works only to a point. The crisis comes when the fella, by virtue of prolonged infiltration, accepts the substitution of food for sex. This is dangerous, one must act quickly. From now on the fella, on the verge of losing his “freshness,” is capable of fueling his campaign not on the resources of his own libido, but on the enemy’s larder. The only hope is to let him approach his real objective just as he is on the point of forgetting what it is. This will upset him completely; it will give him indigestion. While he suffers anxiety, the beleaguered force need only undertake a short advance, confront the siege force, and the battle’s won. Otherwise the food will grow stale, the borsht will lose its blood-red color, the latkes molder in the pan.
Now since we know that Bella did not stoop to conquer, we may assert that her position is desperate. At thirty-five, faced with a future in which she shall do nothing better than provide free loading for the Maxies and Mordies, the accountants and salesmen who come her way, she has certainly devoted a thought to Freud, and words like repression and neurotic, Kober to the contrary, have appeared in her speech. She may even be undergoing psycho-analytic treatment on the sly; it’s a sure thing that she attends public lectures on the subject (with the ultimate desperation of dragging her boy friend along). She has by now rebelled against the tactics which she cannot help practicing, she regards herself a liberated woman, and this conviction of her own daring makes her arguments with her mother vicious to hear. It’s a sad case, and it’s implied in every word of Kober’s stories. Not only is there nothing funny in this situation, it’s impossible to go on pre-tending that it doesn’t exist, and that Bella, who is caught in it, doesn’t suffer extremely.
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As a matter of mere statistics, Kober may be right. There may well be such Bellas, they may even be in the majority (which I doubt, but that’s beside the point), and he may have described their lives and characters as neatly as their accents. But existence is not the issue. What’s involved here is our casually treating this condition as just another joke, and the assent our laughter gives to Kober’s main assumption—that Jewish life is relentlessly bourgeois and calculated, fundamentally a matter of buying and selling, a transaction in goods throughout, and that Jewish girls are irrevocably trammeled and conventional, incapable of surrender in love.
If this is true (which it’s not), if Bella’s character, as Kober presents it, is really Jewish destiny, then it’s no joke. If this is not true, then it’s an insult and a lie. In either case there’s nothing to laugh at.
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