Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  The Lower East Side once boasted 14 Yiddish theatres, with five on Second Avenue alone. They boasted a huge repertory of plays and operettas both classical and folkloric, but the folk plays were the most popular. Lillian Lux made her name with almost continuous performances, from the 1940s onwards, of “A Khasene in Shtetl” (“A Village Wedding”), in which she played the bride. Her husband, Pesach’ke Burstein, played opposite her. Burstein, 22 years her senior, was a Second Avenue matinee idol, able not only to foot it like Fred Astaire in a top hat and tails and to sing Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy” (in Yiddish), but also to whistle like a bird. Whistling, like klezmer music, was a shtetl thing to do.

  Ms Lux and Burstein had met in 1938, when Ms Lux, trained since the age of six at the Yiddish Art Theatre, auditioned for Burstein’s tour of Latin America. A shtetl scene followed, while her parents appraised whether he was good enough for her; he was, she went, and they were married in Montevideo. Just before the war the couple also toured the remaining, increasingly terrorised, Jewish enclaves in Poland. (Yiddish theatre had always been itinerant, and Burstein had in fact run away with a Polish troupe when he was 15, destroying his family’s dreams of the rabbinate for him.) On this occasion, the Bursteins were lucky to catch the last ship out.

  Ms Lux wrote plays and operettas for them and, when her twins were born, they eventually joined the act too. It became “The Four Bursteins”. They played Second Avenue and, in summer, did the rounds of resorts in the Catskills where middle-class Jews took their holidays. Increasingly, though – tracking the scattered remnants of European Jewry – they went abroad. Ms Lux took to the boards in Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Melbourne, Tel Aviv and any number of small towns en route. Wherever there were Yiddish-speakers, and memories of the shtetl longing to be resurrected, she would play the crucial, central role of the blushing village bride. Her blonde hair, only so slightly aided by the peroxide bottle, earned her the name of “the Jewish shiksa”.

  There was little glamour in these journeys. The family went mostly by bus, their costumes and props stuffed into suitcases, seeking the next little pocket of Yiddishkeit in exile. They stayed in cheap hotels. Ms Lux made her children perform even when they had the measles, just as she had performed, when pregnant, under heavy disguise of ostrich feathers. Her daughter found many of the audiences frightening: camp survivors, disfigured, with numbers tattooed on their arms. On one bus trip in Europe they visited a camp,

  looking at the gas chambers. It was said that people had sometimes gone to their deaths singing tunes from “A Khasene in Shtetl”.

  Their audiences, however, were fading away. By the 1950s, Jews in America and elsewhere had largely assimilated. The theatres on Second Avenue emptied, then closed; by the 1990s, only one was left. In the Catskills, the very old crept around the shells of the hotels where Ms Lux, a pretty chorus-girl, had once danced opposite Danny Kaye.

  Many Jews, in any case, had always found Yiddish theatre vulgar and the language an embarrassing hybrid. This had been made shockingly obvious when the Four Bursteins toured Israel in the early 1950s. Zionist hooligans broke the theatre windows, and the government imposed a special tax on their show, because it was in Yiddish and not in Hebrew, the properlanguage of the new state.

  Ms Lux’s devotion to her enterprise was complete. Travelling and performing were the only life she wanted. Even her children’s bar- and bat-mitzvahs were staged as ticket-only events. When, as teenagers, they both left the act, she felt betrayed. Why, she asked, did they want to destroy her livelihood? One reason was that both could see that Yiddish, and its theatre, was a dead end. Another was the feeling that they had missed out on family life.

  Night after night, they had sung and danced as an ideal family troupe. But their way of life had guaranteed no neighbours and few friends. They had always moved on too fast to put down roots. Finding the perfect boyfriend or girlfriend was impossible. They had hardly known the rhythm even of regular meals. It was all quite unlike the close, settled, shtetl world of Ms Lux’s operettas and the Yiddish stage.

  She herself, however, did not seem to mind the discrepancy. Well into her 80s, she continued to perform. She was engaged in the business of evoking deep memories of a vanished home: so engaged, it was no wonder she did not have time to make a home herself.

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru and tycoon, died on February 5th 2008, aged 91 (probably)

  VISITORS entering the World Bank in Washington one sweaty day in 1987 might have been surprised to come upon a team of smiling young men, legs neatly folded into the lotus position, hopping like frogs. In fact, most visitors were probably not surprised at all. Like many happenings connected with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, this display of “yogic flying” had been well advertised. The only surprise was that the bank, usually cast as a bastion of hard-headed rationality, should provide such a ready audience for an event whose aim was not physical fitness but world peace.

  Thirty years earlier the maharishi, who had studied maths and physics at Allahabad University, had calculated that one person practising the transcendental meditation he promoted could induce virtuous behaviour among 99 non-meditators. He had already, in 1944, helped to get 2,000 Vedic pandits, learned followers of one of the four holy books of the Hindus, to chant mantras in an effort to bring the second world war to an end. He had again assembled meditators in 1962 to solve the Cuban missile crisis. But his ambitions were bigger – world peace, no less – and by the 1980s he had come to realise that to bring harmony to a world of 5 billion people, he would need 50m meditators.

  Undaunted, he did the arithmetic again, this time factoring in meditation of deep purity and concentration (including yogic flying), and happily found he needed a number no greater than the square root of 1% – a mere 7,000 or so. Accordingly, 7,000 flyers were assembled during the Taste of Utopia conference in Fairfield, Iowa, in 1984. Annoyingly, though, the “wide range of positive effects worldwide” ended with the conference. Something similar happened after 7,000 students gathered for yogic flying and Vedic chanting near Delhi in 1988. The Berlin Wall came down all right and the cold war ended, but the money needed to keep the group airborne ran out and, dammit, “new tensions” started to arise in the world.

  If only the maharishi had had the necessary funds. Actually, he had. He may not have known how to make peace, but he certainly knew how to make money. After years studying under a Hindu divine in the late 1950s, he had pronounced himself a maharishi (great seer) and set up the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. This took transcendental meditation, which he had trademarked, to the world, with Hollywood one of the first stops. Disciples paid $2,500 for a five-day course, learning how to reach a “deeper level” of consciousness by inwardly repeating a mantra twice a day for 20 minutes.

  Real fame came when the Beatles beat a path to his door, seeking enlightenment and spirituality through good vibrations. George Harrison had already fallen under the spell of the sitar and the maharishi’s message appealed to John Lennon’s angry pacifism. Before long the Fab Four were ensconced in the maharishi’s ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. Their stay was only a modified success, though, with Lennon and Ringo Starr complaining about the food, and all of them, perhaps, beginning to resent their host’s transcendental interest in using them for publicity, if not an outright percentage of their earnings.

  No matter. Plenty of others were ready to step forward for a dose of spiritual bliss, and not all were celebrities. In America meditation was judged to be just the tonic for a variety of people ranging from underperforming executives to recidivist prisoners. An army general even joined the board of Maharishi International University, set up in Fairfield in 1974. All in all, some 5m people are said to have been taught the maharishi’s techniques since 1955.

  His other ventures blossomed, too. A property empire was valued at over $3 billion ten years ago. A television station offered meditation courses to subscribers in 144 countries. Companies sold unguents, b
ooks, videos and Ayurvedic treatment. His political movement, the Natural Law Party, which in the 1990s pursued the goal of world government by fighting elections in America, Britain and several other countries, was less successful, and eventually folded. This, however, did not stop the maharishi then launching the raam, a global currency intended to foster development.

  Crank? Crackpot? Charlatan? Maybe all three. Yet the maharishi was generally benign. He did not use his money for sinister ends. He neither drank, nor

  smoked, nor took drugs. Indeed, he is credited with weaning the Beatles off dope (for a while). He did not accumulate scores of Rolls-Royces, like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh; his biggest self-indulgence was a helicopter. Nor was he ever accused of molesting choirboys; his greatest sexual impropriety, it was said, was to make a pass at Mia Farrow. He giggled a lot, and plainly had no lack of self-esteem. But his egotism did not mean he was always wringing his hands at pop concerts or blethering at Davos; after the 1960s he seldom appeared in public.

  Moreover, his message was entirely laudable. He did not promote a cult or even a mainstream religion preaching original sin, purgatory and the likelihood of eternal damnation. He just wanted to end poverty, teach people how to achieve personal fulfilment and help them to discover “Heaven on Earth in this generation”. And yogic flying, of course.

  Norman Mailer

  Norman Mailer, pugilist of American letters, died on November 10th 2007, aged 84

  IT WAS on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 that Mailer (always “Mailer” in his writings; “Mister” was needless polish and priming), three-tumblers drunk, angry, little eyes blue as a touchpaper, was needled by Gore Vidal into saying this:

  In Hemingway’s time there were great writers … Our time has been much more complicated and there hasn’t been that many really extraordinary writers around, and I have presumed with all my extraordinary arrogance and loutishness and crudeness to step forth and say, “I’m going to be the champ until one of you knocks me off.” Well, fine, but, you know, they don’t knock you off because they’re too damned simply yellow, and they kick me in the nuts, and I don’t like it.

  He had only half got going, but then the commercial came in. Much more could have been said. How Mailer had written what George Orwell called the best-ever book about the second world war, “The Naked and the Dead”. How he had won a Pulitzer for “The Armies of the Night”, the story of the 1968 anti-war march on the Pentagon, and every other book prize going except the Nobel. How, despite the critical bile spewed over much of his fiction, he still had germinating in him the Great American Novel that would out-Tolstoy Tolstoy and out-Dickens Dickens. How he had invented, with a nod to Truman Capote, the non-fiction novel and the novelised news report, through both of which strolled his best character, Mailer, with his crinkly electrified hair and his maudlin writer’s hang-ups, continually “in an intimate dialogue, a veritable dialectic with the swoops, spooks, starts, the masks and snarls, the calm lucid abilities of sin … his tonic, his jailer, his horse, his sword”.

  Mailer was brave. That was his virtue of virtues. In the 1950s he disdained “the stench of fear that has come out of every pore of American life … a collective failure of nerve”. He smelled fear in the dark, rotting jungle mud where he had fought as a soldier in the Philippines, in the blood, shit and slobber of the Chicago stockyards, but also at Washington parties, among his own stupid bouts of tongue-tiedness and circumlocution, as “the hard gemlike flame of bourbon” burned through him. At such points he would be rescued by the wild man Mailer, a creature “who would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast”.

  He talked and wrote of fighting more than he did it. Short and stocky, he was liable to be upended pretty fast. But he boxed a bit, and proudly jogged once with Muhammad Ali until his breath gave out. Instinctively, he put up his fists. In 1957, in an essay called “The White Negro”, he recommended that white Americans should live like inner-city blacks, hip and cool as cats on the edge of violence, rather than fall into the deadness of post-war conformity.

  The shock tactics sometimes misfired badly. He stuck a kitchen knife (or a pair of scissors, or a “three-inch dirty penknife”) into the neck of his second wife, the second of six, all of whom loved and forgave him as long as their alimony was paid. He acted as literary sponsor to a talented murderer, Jack Abbott, who murdered again when Mailer had helped to get him out of jail. He revelled in gross, boastful or mechanical descriptions of sex (“a hard punishing session with

  pulley weights, stationary bicycle and ten breath-seared laps round the track”), not least because this outraged the women’s libbers with whom, in the 1970s, he was permanently at war. Once Mailer, with a sparkle in his eye that was maybe aggression, maybe fun, acting his usual part of the hollering Jewish leprechaun, proclaimed that all women should be locked in cages.

  On form (as in “Miami and the Siege of Chicago”, about the 1968 political conventions, or “Of a Fire on the Moon”, about the first moon landing) he was a gloriously evocative, generous, sprawling writer, worthy of the scale of his country and his subjects. But Mailer dismissed these books as journalism, that ceaseless scavenging for “tidbits, gristle, gravel, garbage cans, charlotte russe, old rubber tyres, T-bone steaks” that went to feed “that old American goat, our newspapers”. Despite his founder-role on the radical Village Voice, he took little pride in that craft. The Great Novel was his quest: a quest that became weirder and more abstruse over time, taking him to Pharaoic Egypt and the corridors of the CIA and inserting Mailer (sometimes the very Sonof God, sometimes the Devil) into the made-up lives of Jesus and Hitler.

  By general consent, though not by Mailer’s, his best book was “The Executioner’s Song” of 1979. It won him his second Pulitzer. In it he told the story of Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed after the ending of the moratorium on the death penalty, in sentences as spare and unadorned as the Utah desert in which it was set. The style was almost reminiscent of his great hero, Hemingway. Those short, declarative sentences, he wrote once, had a suicide’s dread in their silences: dread that “at any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonising demands of his courage.” Mailer’s short sentences carried a more pugnacious message: he was the champ, and would be until someone braver and better knocked him off.

  Tommy Makem

  Tommy Makem, an Irish folk-singer, died on August 1st 2007, aged 74

  IT ALL began in the kitchen of a house in Keady, County Armagh, in Northern Ireland, where Tommy Makem’s mother Sarah, as she stirred a pan on the hob or filled the kettle, would sing of morning dew and magpies’ nests, Barney Mavourneen and Mary of Kilmore, ships and red roses:

  Red is the rose that in yonder garden grows

  Fair is the lily of the valley

  Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne

  But my love is fairer than any.

  Mrs Green from along the street would join in too, until the house became a regular ceilidh at times and collectors would come, even from America, to write the songs down. Tommy said he could sing before he could speak; and not long after he could play piccolo, fiddle, tin whistle and the five-string banjo. He would stand up in the church hall, no taller than a chair, and sing “The Little Beggarman”:

  I am a little beggarman, a begging I have been

  For three score years in this little isle of green.

  Music and tales filled not only his home but the rolling fields and hills of South Armagh itself. The heart of Ireland seemed to beat there beneath Slieve Gullion, the mystical mountain where the hero Cuchullain had learned his warrior skills and where the hunter Finn MacCumhail, bewitched and curious, had tracked a white doe to the summit. Tommy Makem picked up those legends too and, in 1955, took them to America, together with his bagpipes and a suitcase patched up with tape.

  He meant to work in a cotton mill and do a bit of acting, but one St Patrick’s nig
ht he was paid $30 for singing two songs in a club: “and I thought, by God, this is the land all right. Gold growing in the streets.” By 1958 he had teamed up with his friend Liam Clancy and Liam’s brothers Paddy and Tom, who had come from Tipperary to America before him, and the gold continued to accrue. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, all kitted out in Aran sweaters knitted by Mrs Clancy, triumphantly rode the wave of a folk revival that was turning Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie into stars. Adapting to the new world, they added tin whistle and banjo to the old songs and quickened the pace, because, as Tommy said, “The heartbeat of America is so much faster than the old country.” They did “The Morning Show” and “The Tonight Show”, Ed Sullivan and Carnegie Hall, landed a $100,000 contract with Columbia and ended up singing “We Want no Irish Here” in front of Jack Kennedy at the White House, while Kennedy flashed his white teeth and rocked with laughter.

  Tommy Makem was always the key man, with a baritone sweet as buttermilk or sharp as salt, nipping effortlessly over his “hi the dithery idle lum, dithery oodle idle loos” and his “roo run rye, fa the diddle dye, hey the O the diddle derry Os”. And for a lifelong teetotaller no man had more feeling when he sang of hoppy beer or dark-frothing porter or devilish golden whiskey, or almost anything at all served up in a jug in a bar: