A Peculiar Treasure

 I picked the book up at a book sale as much because it was a lovely, well-made book as for its content. It had that gratifying heft and that linen-rich matte paper, and jusicious number of illustration plates. When your library ranges from cheapo paperbacks to handsome early 19th century German black letter tomes, the feel of a good book is an automatic pleasure.

But when in my eeny-meeny-minry-mo-esque reading program my hand rested upon it, I had my misgivings.

Really? The autobiography of Edna Ferber? Isn't that taking eclecticism, not to mention randomness, a little too far?

Well, she was a vastly popular middlebrow American writer, and I have a certain fascination with faded fme. And while I'd never read one of her books, I knew her stuff: she wrote Showboat, for crissake. And Giant. And Cimarron. And then there's that list of plays with George S. Kaufman, who was not a genius every time out, but who has always been a red flag artist for me. (The Royal Family; Dinner at Eight; Stage Door). I really, really like the Richard Dix version of Cimarron, and that's what I wa telling myself as I took the book out of one of my boxes--while knowing that movies give little or no idea of the quality of the underlying book--that Ferber doesn't gets critical mention these days--and that there's a further infinite variability of writers' ability to do autobiography--particularly what one might call working writers.

So with misgivings and trepidation, due to my sacred vow to always finish a book I begin, I cracke the covers.

Well, I've only read the first chapter, but I'm sold.

You might expect to begin with a nice vivid image that will take you back to her childhood, and you get it, but you also get I didn't much relish the errand because the creamery had a curdled smell like that of a baby who has just had a digestive surprise. 

Thank you. 

And as it turns out, she's Jewish, growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin, getting her first job on the local newspaper. She takes her Jewishness seriously. And in a book published in 1939, promises more than just a well-grounded reminisce. She treats of the great division of American life the Great War made, and the strain the Depression has put on the American spirit, and the Nazis, as well as a wry self-appreciation.

And she says this:

America--rather, the United States--seems to me to be the Jew among nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly, quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners;craving entertainment, volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.

I'll readily admit that I've never heard that audacious analysis, and that I resisted it until she convinced me by main force. And it's also something I didn't expect to wrestle with in a chapter that began with a little girl going to the creamery across the railroad tracks.

The last time I was this surprised and this impressed by an autobiography was with Child of the Century by Ben Hecht--another Jewish writer of slightly faded fame from Wisconsin. Which says something, but I don't know what. 

Miss Ferber might settle down to a more modest pitch as she gets into the actual narrative--it's almost inevitable--but I'm no longer apprehensive. I wonder if I can pick up So Big at the next library book sale?

*(Goyische narrs like meinself will probably recognize schnuckle in it's non-diminutive (and therefore less-affectionate ) form schnook. Germanic philology experience strikes again!)