Page 10-The Canadian Jewish News, Thursday, August 27, 1987
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Fabled haunt of writers and editors in New York^s Algonquin Hotel
s crown
SHELDON KIRSHNER
A recent news item in The New Yorlc Times announcing the sale of Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel to a Brazilian subsidiary of a Tokyo corporation recalled a glittering era in American literary history.
In the 1920s and j 930s, the Algonquin was the fabled haunt of up-and-coming writers and editors whose eminently witty observations on any number of topics usually found their way into print sooner or later Gathered aroUnd the now-famous Round Tabic, in the hbtel's Oak Room, young; fun-loving and ambitious figures like Robert Sherwood, Edna Ferber, Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker would dissect the world and make of it what they could.
Gregarious, loquacious and articulate, they were brilliant conversationalists, and Parker, whose flippant quips were legendary even in her own time, may well have been the jewel in the crown of the Round Table.
Born in New York City in 1893 as Dorothy Rothschild, the product of a mixed marriage, Parker was a short story writer, journalist, critic, essayist, epigrammist, critic, screenwriter and playwright.
Renowned for her sardonic wit, she achieved fame with her first book of verse Enough Rope, and followed it up with such volumes as Death and Taxes and Not So Deep As A Well. Parker's collection of short stories, which included Laments for the Living and Hei-e Lies, were often wry and poignant.
Henry Rothschild, her father, was a well-to-do gannenl manufacturer, and her mother, Eliza Marston, died when she Was 6. She disliked her stepmother, a devout Protestant, but she loathed her father, writes Leslie Frewin in Vw Lite Mrs. Dorothy Parker (Collier Macmillan,
$34,95).    :y '/■
Dorothy Parker with Alan Campbell in mid-1940s.
Parker's loathing was a function of a pathetic self-hating personality. Frewin says that Parker, who got her new surname after marrying Wall Street broker Edwin Pond Parker II, hated Henry Rothschild because he had "marked down her Jewishness for all to see." Such was her hatred that, after he died, she declined to attend his funeraL
Clearly regarding her Jewish background as a burden, Parker had no formal connections with the Jewish community. Yet, for all her shame about her Jewishness; Parker was not entirely oblivious to it."
When Alan Campbell — her half-Jewish second husband — died, she surprised his family and all her friends by decreeing that he. would be buried in a Hebrew cemetery. After some resistance froni Campbell's Scottish relatives, she
compromised by agreeing that the ceremony should be conducted by an Episcopalian priest and a rabbi, Unfortunately, Frewin offers no plausible explanation for her behavior.
Relating another incident pertaining to her Jewishness, Frewin tells of the occasion when Alexander Wpollcott, the critic, lambasted Franklin Pierce Adams, a Jew, by screeching, "You goddam Christ killer!" As Frewin relates the story, George Kaufman, the Broadway playwright, got up and declared: "For my part, I've had enough slurs on my race. I am now leaving this table... never to return." And, grinning at Parker, he added, "I trust Mrs. Parker will walk out with me — halfway." She did. .
Parker made no bones about the fact that her first marriage was a matter of social mobility; As she put it, 'i married to change my name from
Washington wrong place^ says kraeli academic
PROF. SHLOMOAVINERI, who teaches political science at the Hebrew University and |s a former director-general of Israel's foreign ministry, says in this article for the Jerusalem Post Foreign Service that the mall in Washington is no place for a Holocaust memorial because the Holocaust is not part of the American experience.
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It may be already too late, but the plans for a United States national memorial to the Holocaust should be stopped. For American, as weil as for Jewish reasons, there is no place for such a Holocaust memorial on the mall in Washington.
The difficulties; into which the architectural design has already run seem to suggest the plethora of problems the project is going to face, both in its physical plannihg and exhibits.
The initiative of those Jewish organizations and individuals promoting the idea of such a memorial is commendable. But it is misplaced and involves serious flaws in judgment. Since the Holocaust is an understandably delicate issue, many American Jewish organizations and individuals who have serious doubts about the project have remained silent.
It is precisely because of its sensitivity that this issue should not be decided by default.
I feel uncomfortable to state the following: Despite the fact that my parents and I immigrated to Israel before World War II — and thus did not have inynediate experience of the Holocaust
— our whole family perished in Poland during the war.,
This included my two grandfathers, my grandmother, my mother's seven sisters and brothers
— as well as their spouses and children. So I hope nobody will accuse me of being insensitive to the
..issue.' ^
To put it crudely, the Holocaust is not, repeat not, part of ttie American experience. A memorial to it does not belong next to the American national shrine commemorating Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln — and the Vietnam War.
Tho.sc Jewish American activists who would like to inicgnile the Holocaust ^rtlas a warning io lis rill iniotlic symbolic language o.f the Anicficiifi.ciyil rcllgiijn may not have thought ilirdiij^h the implicaliuns. ;  ,, ,
Shiomo Avineri
The very existence of such a memorial in the area considered the- pantheon of the American ; historical experience may backfire. No other American religious or ethnic group — not even the Pilgrim Fathers — have a memorial there.
Many non-Jewish Americans may not express Uieir misgivings now, when plans are still t)n the drawing-board but when the memorial becomes a physical reality, next to the Smithsonian, some unexpected — but not totally unpredictable — reactions may be evoked.
The same applies to the memorial's exhibits. Should the memorial represent only Jewish suffering under the Nazis? What about the Gypsies, the one group which shared the fate of the Jews as an ethnic group condemned tit-extinction by the Nazis?
And is it inconceivable that the Poles'-^ maybe even the Ukrainians --will claim that their siiffer-. irigs,:different though they were, should be in-^ eluded? And what about the Armenians in World
'wari?^- -   - . ^■v'-
Is the American Jewish leadership ready for this debate — and its implications.
Similarly, What about the role of President Franklin Roosevelt? How will it be handled; especially in light of the revelations included in David Wyman's book?
Should all the respect due to an American President be used — and hence the historical falsification perpietuated — or should Roosevelt's inhumanity and cold-blooded in-sensitivity be cast in marble on the mall of the capital of the U.S.?
Gra/ve historical^ psychological error
The Holocaust was a terrible historical fate that befell Jews in Europe: it should be remembered in every European city from which Jews were" expelled.
It should be recalled in Auschwitz,;Majdanek, Treblinka-— and in Jerusalem. But not in a national A,merican memorial in Washington.
The wish of many American Jews to remember the Holocaust and integriate it into their collective experience shouldi of course, be honored and encouraged. Therefore, a Jewish museum of the Holocaust, preferably in one of the major Jewish centres in the U.S. should be established by the Arherican Jewish community.
To attempt to force it into the collective Ameri-caii experience is a grave historical and psychological error;
One final word about the argument regarding the Universal significance of a national Holocaust memorial in the U.S. as a symix)l of man's inhumanity towards man.
In a nation that still does not have a national monuihent to the enslavement of Blacks, or the fate of the-American Indians, a national memorial to the destruction of European Jewry is not the way to remind oneself of the furies that reside within each of us. ■
There is a national memorial to the Holocaust in the land of the Jews .— Yad Vasheni. Leave the mall in Washington to the American experience::'
Rothschild to Parker — that is all there was to it." But after the union ended, Frewin notes, she used the "convenient excuse" that his fiercely Protestant family had resented her because she was Jewish.
Obviously, there was more to Parker than met the eye atfirst glance, particulariy as it pertained to her personality,
Outwardly gay (in the old sense of the word) and effervescent, Parker was, in reality, a manic depr^iye who tried suicide twice, Frewin claims.
Beneath the brittle humor lay an unhappy woman, a "pathological drinker" and a frequent pill tiaker whose pithy epigrams ("woman wants monogamy, man delights in novelty") masked a lady under psychological distress.
But such deeply personal failings had no inhibiting effect on her meteoric career. When she was still very young, the precocious Parker resolved to be a writer. She .sent jight verse to magazines, and one landed on the desk of Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair. Recognizing her talent, he offered her a job as a caption writer.
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"Well-honed syntax, frequently amusing word eonstructions"
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Parker went on to become Vanity Fair's drama critic and, from there, the New Yorker's book critic. Fired by the New Yorker because her caustic reviews offended David Belasco, the prominent Broadway producer, Parker . became a freelancer, contributing to die leading magazines of the day. Editors clamored for her work, Frewin says, because they usually'got what they expected—-. "trim, well-honed snytax and frequently amiising word constructions that made them either think, laugh or admire hei' gift of literary satire..."
A night creature who caught a few hours worth of .sleep before meeting her friends for lunch at the Algonquin, Parker enjoyed a relatively brief career as a scriptwriter. In Hollywood, she collaborated with Alan Campbell, who was far more fit for the calling.
Parker disliked her work because of Hollywood's less than refined attitude toward writers and serious creative writing. She and Campbell churned out some clinkers, but they also wrote A Star is Bom, the screenplay of which was nominated for an Oscar.
During heryears in Hollwood, Parker was instrumental in the formation of the short-lived Anti-Nazi League, and, together with Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, organized the Screen Writers' Guild. These affiliations would haunt her in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Sub- : Committee on UnAmerican Affairs (HUAC) launched their smear campaign against anyone suspected of having participated in leftist causes.
In 1952, HUAC claimed she had been involved in supplying material of the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee to overseas libraries and information centres, and subpoened her.
Frewin says she bore up Well, neither apologizing for her past activities nor cringing in expressing her opinions. Furthermore, she consistently refused to name names or condemn any of her friends of the left. ■    ',.
"She rose above the scene with studied hauteur (and) crushing disinterest," Frewin writes.
The government dropped its case against her.
The last years of Parker's life were uneventful, her achievements well behind her. She died in relative obscurity, on the second day of the Six Day War. Despite the flood of news out of the Middle East, The New York Times carried her obituary on the front page.
Many people thought she had been dead for years. It was an irony she would have relished, says Frewin in this competent biography.
Edmund Wilson, the critic, summed up her career neatly."She is not Einily Bronte or Jane Austen, but she has been at some pauis to write well, and she has put into what she has written a voice, a state of mind, an era, a few moments of human experience that nobody else has conveyed," he wrote.
Dorothy Rothschild Parker, the Jewish girl from New York City who never quite succeeded in turning her back completely on her Jewishness, would probably have been pleaised at that assessment.