Do Not Go Gentile Poem by gershon hepner

Do Not Go Gentile

Rating: 2.8


Do not go gentile into that good night.
One Dylan almost said this, hardly gentle,
when raging against darkness with a fight
that often now involves experimental
procedures, medications to maintain
a life that’s sadly passed its “use by” date.
Another Dylan never said this. His refrain
reminds us that hard rain that falls won’t wait
for sad-eyed ladies, but gives no advice
about what being Jewish means to those
fine gentlemen who should be thinking twice
about the problems shaping life and nose.

Inspired by Tom Carson’s review of Harold Robbins: The Man who Invented Sex, by Andrew Wilson “Guy Gone Wild: Harold Robbins life resembled those of his naughty characters, ” NYT Book Review, October 21,2007) :
As Robbins’s fellow Brooklyn boy and close contemporary Arthur Miller might have put it, attention must be paid. So, duly making the beast with two hardbacks, Andrew Wilson — author of a well-regarded, as they say, life of Patricia Highsmith — has given us “Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex.” Besides answering nearly every question about its subject that any halfway brainy reader couldn’t be bothered to ask, it’s also better written than any of Robbins’s own behemoths, something I assume Wilson can’t help: he’s British. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that I doubt any future biography of Robbins will equal this one, but make of that claim what you will. Wilson is impressively if inexplicably determined to uncover the reality behind Robbins’s fabulations about his early years, some of which proved sturdy enough to show up in his obituaries. Not too surprisingly, the tales he fed compliant interviewers — about growing up in a Catholic orphanage before his adoption by a Jewish family, servicing lonely men for cash during his mean-streets adolescence and the like — turn out to have been fibs. The lone seedling of fact from which these Grade-Z Scheherazadisms sprang was that, unlike his siblings, young Harold Rubin (not Robbins, just his way of going Gentile into that good night, and in the heyday of the Jewish American novel, too) was the spawn of a previous marriage his father tried to conceal after Harold’s mom died young.


10/21/07

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