A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Hellman’s blindness to Soviet anti-Semitism in the late forties and early fifties and her continued faith in the possibilities of a Soviet state in spite of its persecution of Jews contributed to the sense that she was a non-Jewish Jew, even an anti-Semitic Jew. If before the war to be a Jew had meant to be against fascism, and a claim to invisibility gone unremarked upon, the wartime extermination of millions of Jews, among others, brought issues of identity to the fore. Jews, especially intellectual Jews, in the words of Alfred Kazin, now lived “at the edge of the abyss,” vulnerable because they had put their faith in the life of the mind, which had failed them.34

  At the time, the latent anti-Semitism of the prewar period seemed to lift. New educational opportunities and home mortgages provided by the GI bill resulted in a dramatic expansion of the middle class, of which Jews took full advantage. They moved into the new suburbs, entered universities and the professions, and acquired respected political positions at a rapid pace. This did not mean an end to gentlemen’s agreements that denied Jews admission to the best clubs or law firms. But it did mean an increasing willingness on their part to fight for access. Many Jews who had willingly shed religion and tradition before 1939 began to protest their exclusion, to question the meaning of being Jewish, and to identify once again with their Jewish roots. Magazines like Partisan Review and the new Commentary spoke for this group. Men like Philip Rahv and William Phillips turned from more left-wing positions to a Jewish-identified stance. Arthur Miller commented later that he had been surprised by the numbers of his generation who, after the war, “began to contribute to something called temple.”35

  The fight over the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 aided and abetted a new consciousness by producing a healthy debate over a Jewish homeland as Jews of all kinds began to wonder whether their identity did not ultimately reside in identification with the new and vulnerable state. Hellman, along with many on the left, supported the creation of the Jewish state, though she quickly lost interest in it. But now the Jewish left fragmented once more. A surge of Zionist enthusiasm led some to fight in Israel’s war for independence: to them the new state represented both a home for persecuted Jews and a haven for restorative justice. To partisans of the left, Israel constituted hope for a social-democratic option. As Zionism attached itself to liberal and anticommunist Jewish opinion, those like Hellman who remained unconvinced of its centrality in creating a better world became suspect.36

  By the early fifties, Israel had become something of a litmus test among Jews. Jewish nationalism required primary allegiance to the imperiled refuge of a beleaguered European Jewry. Hellman, never a Zionist, withheld enthusiastic support. Her stance diverged from that of the Eastern European intellectuals with whom she had allied herself on many issues before and during the war. Liberal, anticommunist, and pro-Israel: their Eastern European Jewish culture and origins worn proudly on their sleeves, New York intellectuals, in the postwar years, came to depart from their former stance as minimalist Jews to understand themselves as distinctively Jewish-Americans. New and sparklingly successful writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth soon came to root their work in refugee and immigrant cultures, drawing their heroes and their stories from the Bronx and Brooklyn and Newark, New Jersey, and from the children these cities produced. Their position with respect to Israel became a decisive factor for identification of a brutally destroyed minority. Hellman never passed the test. As Norman Podhoretz noted later, he broke relations with Hellman because he was violently offended by her “extreme hostility (or perhaps hatred would be a better word)” to Israel.37

  The Cold War mentality, too, helped to highlight the particular role of Jews in politics—almost universally identifying their stance as communists, fellow travelers, or, in the jargon of the period, “pink.” To be sure, in the thirties and forties Jews constituted a disproportionately large and visible segment of the country’s small number of organized communists. Some thought the committee hearings and investigations of the McCarthy period sought not only to unmask secret communists but to test the patriotism of Jewish radicals as well.38 The procedures of the McCarthy period did little to ameliorate suspicion. The House Un-American Activities Committee that subpoenaed its first victims in 1948 went after Hollywood, according to most accounts, because the movie industry was heavily staffed by Jews who were identified with left-wing causes.39 Six of the famous Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted and sent to jail were Jews. One committee member, John Rankin, was an avowed anti-Semite who had once referred to Walter Winchell as “a little slime-mongering kike.”40 It didn’t help that there were Jews on both sides. Martin Gang, the Hollywood lawyer who became the clearance agent for Hollywood celebrities, was also a Jew. Nor did it help that Jews were implicated in some of the famous spy cases of the period. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg constitute only the best-known examples.

  Around the same time, word of the trials and subsequent executions of Jewish poets and artists in the Soviet Union reached the West, shattering what remained of the image of the Soviet Union as a tolerant nation. Jewish intellectuals who had once thought of themselves primarily as socialists of one kind or another turned a painful gaze onto the nature of authoritarian personalities and totalitarianism of the left as well as the right. We began to recognize, says Irving Howe, that “there was now a greater enemy by far—the totalitarian state, sometimes of the Right, sometimes of the Left.”41 But, as Howe notes, in 1952 a “totalitarianism of the left” seemed “the harder to cope with and, thereby, in a sense, more terrifying.” Howe handled the dilemma by becoming a democratic socialist. But many others shed any hope for socialism and turned sharply toward what would become known as free-market democracy.

  Hellman, not yet ready to make the break and not convinced that her Jewish identity should impinge on her politics, faced a set of difficult choices. During all this turmoil, Jewish community leaders feared an outburst of anti-Semitism. Leaders of national Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Anti-Defamation League, and many others responded to McCarthyism not by demanding that the hearings stop but by cleansing their own houses of communists and joining in the attack on communists in general. Leading Jewish intellectuals split, many of them not only recanting their former beliefs but branding those who could not or would not do so as Stalinists. A horrified Hellman, herself banned from the film industry, immediately labeled those who would not speak up “cowardly bastards.” Just a few years later she would tell her friend Bill Alfred that she no longer cared “about those so-called friends who never lifted a finger to protest the ban.”42 But now she was an outlier. The lions among the intellectual Jews (people like Elliot Cohen, Midge Decter, and Barbara and Jason Epstein) founded or became active in magazines such as Encounter and Commentary. Some of these organs became vehicles of a new politics, unashamedly Jewish, pro-Israel, anticommunist, and moralistic.

  In this context, whether or not one was a Jew mattered, and to be a Jew who did not denounce Stalin, whose murderous purges many now equated with Hitler’s slaughter, immediately drew suspicions of being a self-hating Jew.43 Hellman, who took a brave position for civil liberties and freedom of speech in 1952, took no public position in the debate over totalitarianism. She simply dropped out of it. Her silence as well as her hostility to Zionism fueled suspicions about a possible hostility to Judaism. In the context of the postwar turn toward Jewish identity, Hellman’s brand of “international” antiracism seemed particularly suspicious. While the intellectuals around Partisan Review, Commentary, and other influential journals adapted to the postwar environment, Hellman appeared increasingly rigid. By the mid-1950s, whispers of Hellman’s continuing Stalinism mingled with allegations about whether she too might be a self-hating Jew.

  This was the background behind attacks on Hellman around the publication and stage adaptation of the diary of Anne Frank, a subject worth exploring because it enacts the alliance of heightened Jewish nationalism and antico
mmunism. Together they created a political vortex in which Hellman found herself spinning, turning what might have been a trivial conflict into one with a much larger significance. The enormously popular diary, written by the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Dutch Jewish family who had hidden in an Amsterdam loft, appeared in Dutch, German, and French before it was finally published in English in 1952. Journalist and author Meyer Levin read the diary in French and contacted Otto Frank (Anne’s father and the only surviving member of the family) to see if he might play a role in its English-language publication. In the event the book was published by Doubleday, without Levin’s intervention.44

  Encouraged by Otto Frank and hoping to reach a larger audience, Levin then prepared a theatrical treatment of The Diary of a Young Girl. His purpose, he would later write, was to bring to the public “the voice from the mass grave.”45

  In Levin’s mind, Anne Frank’s diary spoke to the specifically Jewish suffering engendered by the Nazi policy of extermination. He and many others read the diary as a tribute to the six million Jews who had died and as a memorial to their brutal executions. In contrast, the diary was read by many, including Anne’s father, as a more generic tribute to human suffering. The Soviet Union, still wounded by the loss of twenty million civilians and soldiers, took a similar line around the Jewish question. It acknowledged Jews as a symbol of universal suffering but did not focus on them alone. These differences led Levin to target Lillian Hellman as the architect of the rejections that would follow.

  Levin’s dramatic treatment got short shrift. Herman Shumlin, Hellman’s now-estranged longtime producer, refused the play because he thought audiences wouldn’t come to a play about “people they know to have ended up in the crematorium.”46 Cheryl Crawford, an equally distinguished producer, considered the play at length. She turned it down after she asked for the opinion of good friends, including Hellman. Asking Hellman’s advice should have surprised no one. She was then a dominant figure in the literary world, her critical judgment highly valued. Writers as talented as Saul Bellow turned to her for criticism and advice, which she generously gave. Bellow commented at one point that he was reduced to misery by Hellman’s judgment that what he had written was “admirable, but not a play.”47

  Hellman read the play and didn’t like it, commenting only that it had little dramatic content. Crawford turned it down but suggested that Kermit Bloomgarden, producer of Hellman’s most recent play, The Autumn Garden, might be willing to produce it; Bloomgarden, too, refused. In the face of all these rejections, Otto Frank backed out of his commitment to Levin. Grateful to Levin for resurrecting the diary in English and reluctant to offend him, he nevertheless turned to other avenues to ensure that a play based on the diary would finally see the light of day. Bloomgarden took a new option on the diary and asked his old friend Lillian Hellman to suggest new writers. Soon the newspapers announced that Albert and Frances Goodrich Hackett had been commissioned to write a new play.

  Meyer Levin now began to wonder whether he had been somehow blacklisted. He was convinced that the diary should be produced as it existed, with Anne’s consciousness of suffering as a Jew intact. He could not imagine any better interpreter of the diary than himself. Only an anti-Jewish conspiracy, he believed, could account for his dismissal; only a “merciless critical cabal” of communists was powerful enough to explain the play’s rejection.48 Now he began, publicly, to talk about “possible ideological intrusion in the handling of the Jewish content of the Diary.”49 The implication was clear. He blamed anti-Semitic communists for suppressing his version of the diary.

  The Hacketts had been Lillian’s companions during her early days in Hollywood. Well known in Hollywood circles, they had successfully brought Hammett’s Thin Man stories to the screen and had since written a range of prizewinning films including It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Easter Parade (1948), and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), which was then in production. To Levin, however, they had two serious flaws: they were not Jews, and they were closely associated with Hammett and Hellman, in his mind two of Hollywood’s leading communists. It did not help that the Soviet Union was, at this moment, persecuting and executing Jewish writers. Levin, putting together his own interpretation of events, accused Hellman of blindly following a communist party line that denigrated Jewish suffering in deference to the human tragedy that the Holocaust represented. Hellman, he insisted, had exercised undue influence over Bloomgarden: she was a communist and an anti-Semite.50

  In desperation, Levin began what would become a lifelong campaign to produce his version of the diary. He wrote endless letters to Otto Frank begging for a chance to try his play out in Buffalo or other small venues; he took an advertisement in the New York Times claiming that he had been ousted by those who disliked his Jewish approach and accusing those who had suffered from McCarthyism of using innuendo to smear him and his reputation. He consulted distinguished lawyer Ephraim London (who reappears in our story later as Lillian’s lawyer in her suit against Mary McCarthy), who told him he had no grounds for legal action and no rights to the diary.

  The Hacketts’ play, which reached Broadway in 1955 to rave reviews and an almost two-year run, presented Anne as a teenager who identified with all of suffering humanity rather than as an Anne whose Jewish God had allowed her people “to suffer so terribly up to now.” Levin could not be controlled. Anne’s words had been altered to omit any hint of her Jewish identity and consciousness, he argued; the family’s commitment to Judaism had disappeared; one could hardly tell why they were in hiding. And the Hacketts were, in his view, guilty of plagiarism. They had quoted some of the same words from the diary that he had selected for his play. Small matter to him that by now Otto Frank wanted the play to provide a message that would embrace its audience, nor that the director Garson Kanin, agreed with the playwrights that removing most of the Jewish ritual, as well as references to Nazis and concentration camps, would yield a play whose audiences didn’t have to be Jewish to identify with it. The play’s heartfelt critical and popular reception suggests that it spoke effectively to its 1950s audience, affirming the accuracy of Hellman’s commercial instinct. In a decade when few were ready to come to terms with the Holocaust—indeed the word did not yet exist in the common vocabulary—the play hit the right note. Whatever the morality of the Hackett’s decision to de-emphasize the Jewish theme, it is plausible that any other interpretation would have failed to reach its mark.

  Tortured by the successful production, Meyer Levin first sued the Hacketts for plagiarism, and when that proved unsuccessful, he launched attacks on Bloomgarden and Hellman. To explain his rejection, Levin settled on the notion that he had been victimized by nothing less than Stalinism, and that Hellman (whom he characterized as an assimilationist German Jew) was at the center of a conspiracy against him and all Jews of his ilk. From the start, he later wrote, he “had suspected that some doctrinaire formulation rather than pure dramatic judgment had caused Miss Hellman’s attack on my play and after the substitute work was written, I became convinced that I had been banned because my work was in her political view ‘too Jewish.’”51 Neither the fact that others (including Otto Frank) shared Hellman’s view nor that Hellman had been only marginally involved deterred Levin. And the commercial success of the Hackett play infuriated him. In his eyes, Hellman had simply followed a party line that obfuscated Jewish suffering in a shroud of more generic hatred that was also directed at gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and communists.

  Little evidence supports the notion that Hellman was central to the diary’s transition to the stage and then to the screen.52 At the height of the McCarthy period, Hellman could hardly have been a major player, even had she wanted to be one. Hellman did suggest the Hacketts as writers, and she read their script toward the end, offering some suggestions for staging. As was her habit, she invested a small sum (in this case $750) in the company that staged the play. The play, and the movie that emerged four years later, were so successful that
over the years she managed to make a tidy amount from them. The total (about $25,000 over fourteen years) suggests the validity of her instincts about what made a good dramatic story.53

  Despite Hellman’s tangential association with the play, its producer, and its playwrights, Levin continued to attack Hellman both as a self-hating Jew and as a Stalinist. Over the course of two decades he brought one unsuccessful lawsuit after another and signed agreements to desist from accusations that he routinely violated. He accepted compensation not to seek productions of his play, then claimed exemptions; he agreed to stop talking publicly about the diary and continued to do so. The campaign drew many supporters in the Jewish community. Norman Podhoretz would say later that one reason he stopped speaking to Lillian Hellman was her “de-Judaization” of the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank.

  Hellman responded to these attacks wearily. She could not, she wrote to her friend Bill Alfred in 1959, sue Levin, because she lacked the money. And she did not know if she would, even if she had the resources. “Now I just think he’s crazy and I take my beating.”54 Arguing that the damage had been done once Levin’s accusations were printed, she would not accept invitations to respond to them in writing: “They all know full well the harm that has been done me on this and other grounds, and they can go fuck themselves before I defend myself from the Levins of the world.”55 As late as 1974, she complained to her lawyer that “Mr. Meyer Levin has begun the red baiting all over again.”56

  The Meyer Levin experience suggests something of the complexity of living as a secular Jew in the Cold War moment. As Hellman became caught in Levin’s obsession with his particular view of Jewishness, so the idea of what it meant to be a Jew became the subject of larger conversations and debates. Hellman’s reluctance to accede to the primacy of identification as a Jew, her recalcitrance in the face of the successful politics of the new Jewish nationalism, made her a perfect target. To her, a literature rooted in the Jewish immigrant tradition appeared to be only a momentary fad. Though she admired Arthur Miller and read Philip Roth, she did not see their work as great literature, nor believe that its use of Jews successfully captured the larger social meanings she thought important. When, in the early sixties, she tried to play in this ballpark by adapting Burt Blechman’s novel My Mother, My Father and Me into a stage play, she failed miserably. The play, like the book, meant to satirize the purposeless new middle class, whose lives contained no trace of old-world values of caring and community. But the satire is rooted in a Jewish family, and when it turns into a multipronged attack on the aimlessness of children, on business practices, on old-age homes, Hellman exposes her own bitterness about the failure of family life in general and Jewish family life in particular. Lacking empathy for Eastern European immigrant communities and without patience for the self-centered aimlessness of young people, Hellman turned family relationships into a parody of racism and materialism. What she had intended as comedy emerged as vulgar parody.