Originally appeared in The Jerusalem Report
Date Approximate
On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square,
by Marshall Berman
Random House; 304 pp.; $25
Harvey Blume New York
For Bronx-born and raised Marshall Berman, New York's fabled
Times Square was home away from home during his teen years in the 1950s. He's
maintained ties to the area since. Now sporting the official title of
Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City College, he has teaching
responsibilities that regularly bring him to City College's midtown campus,
only blocks from the Square. And he'd be the first to acknowledge that his
youthful experiences in the Square helped direct him toward his lifelong study
of city life.
"All That's Solid" focused mostly on European
venues -- mid-nineteenth-century Paris, for example, and pre-revolutionary St.
Petersburg. Berman's new book, "On The Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle
in Times Square," brings him back home. At the beginning of the book, we
find him mulling over a souvenir postcard he came across fifteen years ago.
Issued in 1903, the postcard shows a young woman blithely threading her way
above the buildings of the Square. The buildings, which are photographed,
convey a sense of density and weight. The woman, a cartoon, is lightly and
fashionably dressed as she bustles toward her own purposes in the dawning
century. Berman names her the Times Girl and suspects that in so doing he has
committed himself to writing a book for her. "On the Town" -- a blend
of scholarship and memoir, cultural and often poignant family history --
fulfills that commitment.
All roads lead Berman toward Times Square, then radiate out
toward his other concerns. When I met with him to talk about "On the
Town", conversation flowed easily to questions of modernism and Jewish
identity -- issues, as it happens, that he had hotly debated with Israeli
novelist A.B. Yehoshua two years before in an exchange that prefigures the
furor Yehoshua recently aroused in the Jewish world with remarks he made at a
symposium of the American Jewish Committee.
***
Times Square got its name when The New York Times
established itself at 42nd St. and Broadway in 1905. Berman's mother and
father, born a few years later, met on New York's Lower East Side and moved,
after marriage, to the Bronx, but always worked in or around the Square. And it
was always to the Square that they went to shuck responsibility for a bit and rekindle
romance. As Berman grew up, he learned how deeply the Square had entered into
his family's "founding myth."
When he was 12, he and his father played a guessing game
about visitors to the Square: Were they headed to the "theater? The
movies? A jazz club? A hotel -- which one? A restaurant -- what kind? A game
arcade?" The elder Berman was pleased that his son so often got it right.
("See, sonny," he congratulated him, "you know the
street!"). And he made sure Marshall met the local worthies, including a
pair of detectives -- distinctive, in Marshall's eyes for being *Jewish* detectives -- and Meyer Berger, a
well-known reporter for the Times who treated the Bermans to a tour of the
Times building, conversing all the while with Marshall's father in "raucous
. . . mile a minute" Yiddish.
This Times Square idyll came to a traumatic end in 1955,
when Marshall's 47-year-old father died suddenly of a heart attack. Grieving,
bitter Marshall, then 14, would have shunned the Square thereafter -- were it
not for his mother. She argued strenuously that: "We don't have much
money, but we're going to keep going to Broadway, so we don't become living
dead." Berman's Times Square dinners with her ended in evening promenades
she announced by saying: "Now we're going to take a bath of light."
What Berman calls her "delicious image" for a stroll in the Square
helped reconcile him to the area.
The Square has gone through several transformations since
the 1950s, but not at the expense of luminosity. Today, colossal computerized
displays rise up on buildings or curl around them. When I arranged to meet
Marshall Berman in the Square on a cold February afternoon, I assumed that
after we warmed ourselves with coffee, we'd go for a bath in digital light.
We convened in a tiny cafeteria tucked into the basement of
Virgin Records, a multi-story, multi-media bazaar. In his mid-60s, short, stout
and bearded, Berman couldn't look less like a typical visitor to the
youth-oriented venue. Books, in any case, rather than CDs and DVDs, remain his
main medium. Literature gives him clues to the moods, the inner lives of
cities. In "On the Town," he describes the Square as intensifying
normal urban experience and subjecting visitors to concentrated "semiotic
overflow." He illustrates the point by way of reference to an I. B. Singer
story -- "The Third One" -- in which two Holocaust survivors confront
a four-story-high billboard of Annie Oakley advertising the musical "Annie
Get Your Gun."
The two men had been gloomily discussing marital infidelity
and the death of God in the sort of cavernous Times Square cafeteria that has
not survived into the era of Virgin Records. When they emerge, they stare up at
enormous Annie. One of them muses: "If there is a God, she is our
God." The other concurs: "What *she* is promising, she can
deliver."
But what, Berman wonders, can she promise to these
characters, or anyone else? Some sort of new religion? The rebirth of an old
one? Did her presence imply that Times Square's collection of super-sized images
entitled it to be recognized as New York's real museum of modern art? Such
answers entertain but do not satisfy Berman, leading him to conclude that you
can no more capture or define Times Square's semiotic overflow than you can
bathe in Times Square light and hope to walk off with a cup of it.
Literature helped Berman with the Square, but was absolutely
indispensable to him when he wrote the St. Petersburg section of "All
That's Solid." Berman had neither visited that city nor studied Russian.
What gives his writing about St. Petersburg authority is his sensitive reading
of the relevant literature. Writers like Ossip Mandelstam and Fyodor
Dostoyevsky guided him to unique features of the city, including the
"babble of constant digressions," that, according to Mandelstam,
characterized St. Petersburg conversation.
Baudelaire was the literary guide Berman relied on for his
section on mid-19th-century Paris in "All That's Solid." The French
word "flaneur," connoting aimlessness or loafing, is often used in
connection with Baudelaire's urban ambling, but Berman shows that for
Baudelaire being a "flaneur" meant more than window shopping or
people-watching on the boulevard; it signified readiness to enter into
something like an altered state, willingness, the poet wrote, to "marry
the crowd," and to become, thereby, "both himself and someone
else."
The openness toward others and otherness that Baudelaire
articulated, is, for Berman, a gift that cities make to democracy; it is
modernism cum urbanism at its best. Berman planned to make Baudelaire's
writings the basis of a talk he was invited to give at a Tel Aviv conference on
Israeli cities in the spring of 2004. But the night before he was to speak, he
came across an interview A.B. Yehoshua had given to Haaretz in which the
novelist argued that for Jews, openness to otherness was a dead end.
Those familiar with the media storm triggered by Yehoshua's
speech, this past May, to the American Jewish Committee -- in which, for
example, he compared the meager "Jewishness of an American Jew" to
the "immeasurably fuller and broader and more meaningful" Jewishness
of an Israeli Jew -- will not be surprised by the tenor of Yehoshua's remarks
to Haaretz. But Berman, at that point, knew of Yehoshua only as a novelist, one
of his favorite contemporary writers, in fact. It was news to Berman that
Yehoshua regarded the Jewish ability to "enter into the fabric of others'
lives," and to "live without borders or clear identity," as
nothing short of "dangerous."
Berman's speech the next day threw down the gauntlet to
Yehoshua. (The speech was expanded into an essay for Dissent Magazine that
appeared in the summer 2004 issue, to which Yehoshua replied in the subsequent
winter issue). It galled Berman that Yehoshua supported the building of
Israel's barrier wall not so much because he believed it would defend against
terrorism -- "Yehoshua seemed skeptical about the Wall as security
policy," he thought -- but because it could serve as a "foundation
for a hard identity politics."
In response, Berman argued that "clear identity"
had been "one of the great chimeras of the twentieth century," and
that Jews, especially "need it like a hole in the head." It was
better for Jews, he said, that they stick to the "fluid and elusive and
contradictory identities" that served them for millennia. Solomon was one
of "our Bible's stars," he avowed, precisely because of his talent
for "inclusiveness and fluidity" -- as exemplified by his many
"foreign wives, each with her own gods and their temple in
Jerusalem." Besides, the era of wall and barrier building was over:
"Since 1989," he wrote, "many of the goyim have been tearing
their old walls down. Mightn't this mean that they yearn to be more like
us?"
In Virgin Records, Berman told me that he valued Yehoshua as
a great modernist writer: "Take his novel 'The Liberated Bride.' The
protagonist is an Israeli Jew who teaches Arab studies and gets very attached
to his Arab students, the way he's not attached to Jewish-Israeli students.
When he describes an Arab wedding, for instance, it's much more vivid than his
account of any Israeli event."
"Many great modern writers," Berman added,
"hate their modernism in some way. They want to be much more closed. They
can even hate literature, and feel that literature is degenerate." He
cited Tolstoy as an example of modernist and anti-modernist impulses warring
within a writer: "In his essay 'What Is Art,' Tolstoy foamed at the mouth
against the very existence of literature. And he intended 'Anna Karenina,' to be
a piece of misogynist propaganda about a whore who deserves to die. Somehow,
his genius forced him to create one of the great characters in modern
literature."
It was late when we finished talking. Berman had promised
his 9-year-old son that he would bring a Rolling Stones t-shirt back from
Virgin Records. When none were available, he settled for a hat advertising
"Green Day," one of the boy's favorite bands. We took our brief bath
in Times Square light on our way to the subway.
Harvey Blume is a frequent contributor to The Jerusalem
Report.
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