To the Editor:
Students of Dr. Morris Freedman’s writings in COMMENTARY will recognize in his entertaining, informative, and very artful “The Green Pastures of Grossinger’s” (July and August, 1954) his characteristic ambivalence towards large-scale luxury enterprise. On the one hand, his rich appreciation of the tangible had endless opportunities for exercise; his enlivened senses delighted in the thickness of rugs, walls, and steaks. Yet it is evident that he approached this assignment armed with skepticism and irony, and these check his response to all this splendor at every point, with the curious result that he recurrently evokes reminiscences of the setting of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (“. . . all day long white-jacketed men move slowly through the halls and lobbies. . . . The carefully trimmed lawns and flower beds have signs reading: ‘Please do not pick us. We bloom for your pleasure. Signed, The Flowers.’ . . . Members of the staff have the lethargy of persons with eternal tenure.” There is even a Joy Cottage). His defenses are soon riddled, however; his relations with the other guests foreshadow his ultimate collapse when, although mindful of Circe, he capitulates to Jennie’s warmth and elegance.
But his surrender is only conditional, after all. “Perhaps,” he muses at the outset of his article, “it is not actually the complete earthly paradise,” and the rest is in part a quest for those components of bliss that Grossinger’s has somehow not yet acquired. He finds them at last in a certain scantiness of cultural provision. It is to be feared that if he had chanced upon a set of Kafka, say, to preserve his memory of the world outside of Eden, he would have been absorbed among those beatified beings who once ascended for a weekend and never returned.
Ashur Baizer
New York City
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To the Editor:
Mr. Freedman says: “One gets the sense, after a few days at Grossinger’s, of dwelling in a place of utter tranquility and fulfillment. . . .” Did he not feel the tension of competition, the undercurrent of jealousy of the have-nots for the haves? Did he not hear the sly gossiping in the lobbies, the discontented mutterings behind closed doors?
What fulfillment does he speak of? Is it the fulfillment of artificially beautiful women as they stand before the jewelry counter purchasing bracelets and earrings to arouse their neighbors at the dinner tables? Or the fulfillment of a rumba contest? In what way is the man fulfilled who knows the most “big names,” who makes the most business contacts during the week, who takes the most wives away from their husbands, who plays the biggest stakes at a poker game? Or does Mr. Freedman mean the tranquillity and fulfillment of the bachelors and spinsters in search of mates and/or sex, competitive, disgruntled, tense, ever watchful?
Mr. Freedman writes well and long about Grossinger’s, but never gets to the heart of the matter: the character of Grossinger’s.
Ruth Dalin
New York City
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To the Editor:
Morris Freedman is to be complimented for his wonderful tongue-in-cheek panning of the grossness that is Grossinger’s. The concluding paragraph of the two articles is particularly devastating, even if somewhat unsubtle.
The presumption of these people to equate their materialism, self-satisfaction, self-indulgence, and commercialized charity with “Jewishness”—or, worse yet, with Judaism—is ludicrous, as Mr. Freedman so deftly demonstrates.
The statement of one of the managers of Grossinger’s—“Jewish people don’t have enough dignity”—should have been used as a subtitle.
Best of all, they probably never realized how utterly pulverized he left them.
Monroe H. Freedman
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
“The exceptional horror of Israel’s suffering is out of all proportion to the nature of its ‘sinning.’ The Midrash refuses at times to justify God’s ways, argues with His decisions—and often wins! At other times, it offers an idea more consolatory: the suggestion that the Jew’s fate is shared by God Himself. God suffers and weeps, and goes disconsolately into exile along with Israel.”
The above quotation is from the introduction to selections from the Midrash, in the August issue of COMMENTARY. It is impossible to read this passage without a chill of horror. Not for what it says, but for what it follows: namely, “Grossinger’s Green Pastures.” Indeed, from this article, and its companion piece in the July issue, we might conclude that the millennium has arrived. No more must Israel suffer and groan (except perhaps from indigestion); God has finally taken pity on His people. Or we just might conclude that values, particularly Jewish values, have vanished from the American scene.
Long ago Thorstein Veblen (to say nothing of the prophets!) pointed out the inherent evils of conspicuous consumption, conspicuous emulation, and conspicuous leisure. But everyone knows about these matters. Particularly the editors of COMMENTARY! The women in their minks, the adulation of “Miltie’s” mother, the superabundance of food, is this really the sort of thing which should be written about with kindly tolerance, or is it a condition—a malevolent growth—which must be pointed at with alarm and contrition? Are Jews no more than creatures to be entertained, to be cozened and fattened because, really, life could not possibly offer any greater reward? And Jennie’s Gentiles! Potiphar’s eunuchs seem manly servitors in comparison. Is it idle and malicious to feel that Grossinger’s not only debases its guests by giving them what they want (and possibly deserve), but helps destroy the very foundation of brotherhood by debasing the values upon which brotherhood is built?
If Judaism is concomitant with materialism, then “Grossinger’s would seem actually to offer a preview of Gan Eden to those who have proved they deserve it by having earned their way in.” How can we, as Jews, on the one page hold up life as all the nice fat lamb chops one can eat, and on the other page print God’s words: “For thy sake, Rachel, I will restore Israel to their place”?
Ivan B. Abrams
Stanford University
Stanford, California
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