Book Review: Rich Cohen's "Tough Jews"
Inspired by kcobweb, I'll be posting mini-reviews of the books I've been reading. Since I've been doing all my browsing lately at the temple's library, right now they're going to be for Jewish-themed books. They're not the Great Jewish Books, exactly, but they're pretty darn good.
The first book I've chosen to review is Rich Cohen's Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams. If you're not that interested in the subject and/or you like visual ratings systems, I'll just tell you here that I give Tough Jews three out of a possible five stars: *****. The rest of the review is after the cut.
Tough Jews is less a historical work than a memoir and an attempt by the author to come to terms with his history both as a Jew and as his father's son. I like that though, because it gives the book a lot more flavor than a bland historical text might have. So this review will delve into a little bit about the reviewer's history as well.
Rich Cohen's father Herb is famous in his own right as a corporate and governmental consultant, as well as author of the book You Can Negotiate Anything; however, in Herb's youth he was just another kid on the street corners of Brooklyn, "where every son was an immigrant's son, every dream the pipe dream of an immigrant's son." And one of Herb Cohen's friends on those streets was Larry King (né Zeiger), a much more fascinating character in these pages than watching his television show today would lead one to believe.
In Larry and Herbie's day, Jewish gangsters still walked the earth, powerful self-made men like Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky. The boys on the corner are fascinated by these colorful men and their charisma, and many years later Herb's son Rich can't get enough of these stories--so much so that he seeks out Herb's friends and their families to learn more about the Jewish Syndicate. The results are a hodgepodge of stories about characters with noms de guerre like Dutch Schultz (né Arthur Flegenheimer), Kid Twist Reles, and my personal favorite, Pretty Levine, shot through with Rich's own memories of growing up with the mercurial, larger-than-life Herb.
In particular, I was intrigued by Cohen's assertion that the Jewish gangster can be a powerful totem for a young Jewish boy raised in the post-Holocaust world, a reminder that Jews were not always thought of primarily as victims. He talks of fetishizing the Jewish Syndicate as many Jews today fetishize the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces.) That's a difficult concept for me to understand, but I don't know if it's because I'm not a man, or because I wasn't born Jewish. I don't know what it's like to have lost family in the Holocaust, I don't know what it's like to grow up as a Jew. But I do know what it's like to grow up around violence, to be surrounded by people who will fight sooner than talk, and I can't say that's anything of which one should be particularly envious.
A now-elderly and genial relative of mine is said to have once been a vicious gangster; my mother led her own girl gang before running off with my father. Hell, half my uncles, aunts, and cousins have been in and out of trouble with the law. And it's precisely because I've put a good deal of time and effort into distancing myself from those people and that sort of behavior that I can't understand lionizing men who stole, who killed, who reveled in breaking the laws of God and man.
To me, the most interesting part of the book is not so much the gangster stories as the story of the difficult dynamic between Rich and Herb. Although a successful writer, Rich is nagged by the idea that he will never be half the man his father is, that no man of his generation will ever be half the man their fathers were. This, to me, is the real heart of the book--the crisis of modern masculinity, a topic I have long been fascinated with. It's a concept that most of the men my age that I know have struggled with in their own way, and that I don't think has a counterpart in the minds and hearts of women. But we didn't grow up in their world; we don't know what made them do the things they did. And perhaps that's the whole problem of this book: it may not be advisable to romanticize the deeds and character of people from a time long gone, let alone to presume to know their thoughts and feelings.
The first book I've chosen to review is Rich Cohen's Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams. If you're not that interested in the subject and/or you like visual ratings systems, I'll just tell you here that I give Tough Jews three out of a possible five stars: *****. The rest of the review is after the cut.
Tough Jews is less a historical work than a memoir and an attempt by the author to come to terms with his history both as a Jew and as his father's son. I like that though, because it gives the book a lot more flavor than a bland historical text might have. So this review will delve into a little bit about the reviewer's history as well.
Rich Cohen's father Herb is famous in his own right as a corporate and governmental consultant, as well as author of the book You Can Negotiate Anything; however, in Herb's youth he was just another kid on the street corners of Brooklyn, "where every son was an immigrant's son, every dream the pipe dream of an immigrant's son." And one of Herb Cohen's friends on those streets was Larry King (né Zeiger), a much more fascinating character in these pages than watching his television show today would lead one to believe.
In Larry and Herbie's day, Jewish gangsters still walked the earth, powerful self-made men like Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky. The boys on the corner are fascinated by these colorful men and their charisma, and many years later Herb's son Rich can't get enough of these stories--so much so that he seeks out Herb's friends and their families to learn more about the Jewish Syndicate. The results are a hodgepodge of stories about characters with noms de guerre like Dutch Schultz (né Arthur Flegenheimer), Kid Twist Reles, and my personal favorite, Pretty Levine, shot through with Rich's own memories of growing up with the mercurial, larger-than-life Herb.
In particular, I was intrigued by Cohen's assertion that the Jewish gangster can be a powerful totem for a young Jewish boy raised in the post-Holocaust world, a reminder that Jews were not always thought of primarily as victims. He talks of fetishizing the Jewish Syndicate as many Jews today fetishize the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces.) That's a difficult concept for me to understand, but I don't know if it's because I'm not a man, or because I wasn't born Jewish. I don't know what it's like to have lost family in the Holocaust, I don't know what it's like to grow up as a Jew. But I do know what it's like to grow up around violence, to be surrounded by people who will fight sooner than talk, and I can't say that's anything of which one should be particularly envious.
A now-elderly and genial relative of mine is said to have once been a vicious gangster; my mother led her own girl gang before running off with my father. Hell, half my uncles, aunts, and cousins have been in and out of trouble with the law. And it's precisely because I've put a good deal of time and effort into distancing myself from those people and that sort of behavior that I can't understand lionizing men who stole, who killed, who reveled in breaking the laws of God and man.
To me, the most interesting part of the book is not so much the gangster stories as the story of the difficult dynamic between Rich and Herb. Although a successful writer, Rich is nagged by the idea that he will never be half the man his father is, that no man of his generation will ever be half the man their fathers were. This, to me, is the real heart of the book--the crisis of modern masculinity, a topic I have long been fascinated with. It's a concept that most of the men my age that I know have struggled with in their own way, and that I don't think has a counterpart in the minds and hearts of women. But we didn't grow up in their world; we don't know what made them do the things they did. And perhaps that's the whole problem of this book: it may not be advisable to romanticize the deeds and character of people from a time long gone, let alone to presume to know their thoughts and feelings.