Margaret Kingman: CIA Agent Turned Innkeeper

Peirson House, Richmond, MA (Library of Congress photo)

Washington Irving described the fictional town of Sleepy Hollow as a place that “continues under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air.” Irving could have been waxing rhapsodic about the bucolic Berkshire County, Mass., in the decades before it became overrun by wealthy Bostonians and New Yorkers who transformed its quaint, somnambulistic hamlets into tony second-home enclaves with all the trappings.

I met Margaret Mace Kingman just before the real estate grubbing took place. She often seemed like she stepped out of Washington Irving’s tale. She had an other-worldliness about her. She moved about Peirson Place, a pre-Colonial estate in Richmond, Mass., her silver hair tied in a tight bun, and she favored wearing throw-back laced aprons, Amish-style, with rough hewn woolen sweaters and clogs. A former university science professor who had previously served as a CIA spy overseas and in Washington, D.C, she had returned to her birthplace to become an innkeeper.

It was the late 1970s. I had been scouting affordable places to stay so I could attend Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts in Lenox, five miles away. Margaret offered me a room in the barn in exchange for chores around the property. She let me borrow a bike, and I pedaled along roads with views of the Taconic Range. During summer mornings, I’d swim in Richmond Pond in the shadow of Lenox Mountain, or drive along Swamp Road past farmland populated with barns, abundant crops, and livestock. In the nearby town of Hancock, which abutted her land, I found grassy lanes once trod upon by Shakers who built the circular barn (still used today by caretakers at the Hancock Shaker Village). A sense of timelessness pervaded the paths where creeks gurgle musically before vanishing underbrush to join larger streams and rivers.

I was working on my graduate school thesis on Herman Melville – he once called Berkshire County home on a farm called Arrowhead in nearby Pittsfield. During pristine summer days he wrote that he experienced the “all” feeling — a brief respite from the “carking cares of life” and the pressures of raising his family as an author of unpopular books. Margaret and I often sat on the screened porch of Peirson Place talking about Melville and Hawthorne (who summered in Lenox), or she’d share stories about Richmond summer residents such as sculptor Alexander “Sandy” Calder who cobbled together mobiles in a nearby barn, or futurist Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller who erected his geodesic domes in an open field, or “Fanfare for the Common Man” composer Aaron Copland, and others. 

But she took more delight talking about her wildlife friends. She had assigned snakes first names and I watched as they slithered about and lay, half-coiled, on the moist flagstones she had placed for them near the Hoyas and wildflowers.

During one of our many walks about the property, she pointed out the paths she created to accommodate the blind students who visited from the Perkins School in Watertown, Mass. She and a landscaper created what she called a “smell and tell trail” so blind students could experience the area’s unique fauna and flora.

“The suggestion came from a blind student,” Margaret said. “We called it a ‘smell and tell trail’ we  placed posts here and there with descriptions written in Braille.  One of the students said, ‘What building is that?’ I replied, ‘There is no building there,’ but he insisted, saying, ‘Yes, there is a building there.’ And he described how many feet away it was. I said, ‘But there isn’t any building. Let’s walk down.’ True enough, my neighbors had built a new garage there I didn’t know about, and, of course, he could get the echo. And from the echo he could tell me how big it was and how far away it was.”

That led her to discuss the bats that lived in her barn and how they use ecolocation to find each other and places where they feed. Just then I saw as they streamed past us, leaving inky streaks against the pale sky.

“We have a large population of bats,” she continued. “You notice I have a bat house up here and another one there. They feed off those pesky mosquitoes and gnats and such. It looks like they touch the surface of the pond, but they only skim it. One time I had the Richmond Boy Scouts over, and I teamed them off with the blind scouts from Perkins so they could work on a merit badge about bats.”

I spent a few nights camping behind the pond. Margaret told me the trail had once been used by Native Americans.  I never followed it, but learned it led to Chatham, New York, and then meandered along until it reached the banks of the Hudson River, 14 miles away.

One morning I mentioned I had been out to dinner in West Stockbridge, around six miles away. I had returned late. There was no moon, only starlight, and the place was pitch-dark. I had forgotten my flashlight. I entered the woods with trepidation, waiting until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. To my surprise, the path to my campsite was lit with scattered bits of phosphorescence as if placed there on purpose. I found my way without incident. I immediately thought of the seaweed I had seen aglow during a nighttime ferryboat crossing from Block Island to Point Judith. Ralph Waldo Emerson had a similar sighting during his visit the Adirondacks in 1858; he described in his journal that his campsite was littered with “decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks, lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.”

Margaret would have none of it.

“You and your friend Mr. Emerson have it wrong,” she said indignantly. “It’s the work of the faeries. The wood-sprites. I’ve seen them. They are most certainly aware you are camping there. They helped you to find your way. You should thank them. They scattered those lights for you,” she said, sounding like a resident of Sleepy Hollow.

**

Margaret was born in 1912 in room 4 of the inn, destined to become a woman of substance.

“I come from a long line of strong women, and I was educated and supported in my career by very strong men,” she told me. “There was never any question that I would do exactly what I wanted to do in life. That’s just how women were always treated in my family.”

She worked with four U.S. presidents; she was interrogated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 50s, and, before that, traveled with John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World and memorialized in the movie Reds, and with the socialist/author H.G. Wells.

An early role model for Kingman was Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League, now known as Planned Parenthood, and an early advocate for women’s health care. Kingman had been introduced to Sanger by her mother. In July 1931, the two young women sailed to Europe together. Sanger had been invited by the Russian government to visit their birth control clinics and abortion centers, which Kingman says Sanger found “appalling.” Kingman remembers being stopped to have their luggage searched at the Finnish/Russian border. “Sanger was carrying a plaster of Paris model of the female organs, so she could demonstrate how to use a diaphragm,” Kingman recalls. “The authorities examined it with such interest that it delayed our departure and made us miss dinner that night.”

In August of that summer, Kingman witnessed Nazism for the first time. While attending lectures at the University of Warsaw, she saw Jewish students forced to sit in the back of study halls on benches painted bright yellow, the same color as the cloth Stars of David they wore on their clothing, one of the crucial steps the Nazis implemented to dehumanize Jews as criminals of the Reich.

That was the first of her many trips to Europe. She later became involved in the American Youth Hostel movement, which was developing an international network of supervised low-cost lodging for students. She led a group of Smith College students abroad in 1935. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1934, Kingman studied the relatively new science of photogrammetry –making reliable measurements by the use of aerial photography at the Harvard Institute of Geographic Exploration. After receiving her master’s degree, she taught this science at Smith College.

Although she liked academia, she applied for a position with the government, as did many others during the Depression. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, she was asked to join the Coordinator of Information, later known as the Office of Strategic Services (today’s CIA). Essentially an intelligence officer with a cover of “cartographer,” Kingman worked for the combined British and American Chiefs of Staff. She moved back and forth between Europe and the U.S. gathering secret information for the war effort. “In those days, you didn’t tell people what you did or who you worked for,” she said.

After returning from Europe in 1946, she married Lucius Kingman, a lawyer with the Reconstruction Finance Commission and later with the National Labor Board, and bore a son, Louis Jr.

In 1951, Congress summoned Kingman to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee wanted her to justify her frequent trips abroad in the company of Margaret Sanger, John Reed, and H.G. Wells, all branded as dangerous radicals by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting committee.

“Even though I traveled to Germany and the Soviet Union at different times, I was accused of getting my orders from Russia and then smuggling them into Germany, which was a lot of nonsense,” Kingman recalls. “It was frightening to expect to sit across from Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn, as my immediate supervisor at the OSS and many others I knew had to.”

Nixon at the time was a young right-wing republican congressman from California. He assumed a prominent committee position after his pivotal role in indicting Alger Hiss, the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for his participation in communist party affairs in Washington, D.C. Cohn, a young upstart, was a chief counsel for the committee and later president of the American Jewish League Against Communism.

Despite repeated lie detector test clearances and answers of innocence on communist activity, Kingman was denied “Q” clearance from the FBI, the highest clearance allowed.

Even after her ordeal in front of the HUAC, she still managed to perform top secret work with the government — unlike many other blacklisted civil servants who could no longer work in their chosen fields.

When the OSS was dissolved in 1951, she became a cartographic consultant to President Truman’s Water Resource Policy Commission. When the OSS became the CIA, she was again given the chance to perform the top secret work. After 25 years of governmental service, Kingman returned to teaching and the Berkshires and her childhood home. With the help of her students at State University of New York at New Paltz, she made Peirson Place into an inn for summer visitors to Tanglewood.

**

In the late 1980s, Margaret’s health began failing. During a Bob Dylan concert she attended with me and my family at Tanglewood, she was taken by ambulance to Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield for treatment for cardiac issues. After she was released, she asked me to arrange a meeting with the Boston Symphony in hopes they might develop Peirson Place as an extension of their Lenox campus for classical music students to live and practice music in return for a promise that she could remain there in perpetuity. The BSO initially favored the idea. They sent representatives to Peirson Place to investigate the property. Then they discovered that she owed a large sum – we’re talking six figures – to the Town of Richmond and to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in unpaid taxes. In order to take over the property, the matter of these taxes would have to be reconciled. The BSO bowed out.

During one of our last visits, Margaret announced she had made plans to close Peirson Place.

“There is just no way I can manage this place and pay all the taxes they want from me, it’s simply ridiculous. I refuse to be part of it,” she said.

I inquired about the taxes. She bristled. She had earned advanced degrees from Harvard and M.I.T., had taught at Smith and the State University of New York, but she arrogantly maintained that commonplace hurdles we all face as citizens, like paying taxes, were beneath her. “I’ve got too many other tasks that require my attention than to take time out of my busy life to deal with all of that nonsense,” she huffed, and waltzed into the kitchen to fix herself a cup of tea.

The tax collectors from Richmond and the I.R.S. disagreed and forced Margaret’s hand. She paid up by liquidating her assets, including an assortment of antiques, a vintage Volkswagen she could no longer drive, an autographed monograph of the poem “The Congo” by Vachel Lindsay, and a grandfather clock built in the late 1600s in Great Barrington, Mass., by pre-Colonial clockmakers. And she sold a trove of her papers to Harvard’s Schlesinger Library.

Her last letter to me thanked me for my piece that appeared in the Albany newspaper.

“Your newspaper story about me came at a time when my sagging ego needed a lift,” she wrote me. She moved to a Quaker retirement facility in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she died, in 1998, at the age of 86.

**

Endnote: “Dusty” R. Bahlman, a reporter for the Berkshire Eagle, telephoned me years later to ask me to share recollections. His piece was accompanied by a photo of Peirson Place on a snowy morning, boarded up and abandoned. Today a fence surrounds the historic property; the new owners do not welcome visitors.

(Portions of this story first appeared in Times Union, Albany, NY).

Visual Art Review: “Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away” at Boston’s Saunders Castle

Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. is compelling, but its message feels hermetically sealed — the exhibit needs to draw crucial connections with what is going on now.

Yellow badge bearing the-word Jood (Jew), issued to Jenny Hanf. Photo: Musealia

By Robert Israel

Does the traveling exhibit Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away., now on view at The Saunders Castle at 130 Columbus Ave., across from Park Plaza in Boston, deliver on the promises implied in its title? Does it make viewers go beyond its startling images and think seriously about what led up to the creation of a Holocaust death camp? Does it challenge us to reflect on how this horrific chapter of the 20th century shapes our lives today? And one more question: does this exhibition force us to consider how the hard-earned lessons of the Second World War impact our world now — specifically in Boston, one of 14 cities on the show’s roving schedule?

For me, the answers to these questions are mixed. Yes, the exhibit is brilliantly staged and the staff of Musealia, a Spanish-based company that is responsible for mounting the show, deserves high praise. But the experience on display faltered because it did not forcefully connect the lessons of the Holocaust to the resurgent conflagrations of antisemitism that inflame our daily lives.

The exhibit unfolds along dark corridors with graphic images of life before, during, and after the Holocaust. The visual narrative traces the roots of antisemitism, exploring how — slowly and methodically — the Nazi rise to power nurtured a systematic process in which those deemed unworthy of Aryan value — namely Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others — were singled out as less than human and marked as expendable. Mug shots taken by the Politische Abteilung (Political Department) line one wall. Like mug shots of suspected criminals today, this process set into motion a mechanized process that inevitably led to their ultimate imprisonment and extermination.

The prose explaining each step is terse and succinct, leaving no room for doubt. This was how methodically the Nazis worked, adhering to a systematic approach to identifying, persecuting, corralling, and then eliminating perceived enemies of the Reich.

In the exhibition: a woman’s dress shoe belonging to a deportee. Photo: Musealia

What makes this exhibit particularly compelling is its focus on the whole of the Holocaust and the sum of its parts. We see large photos of so-called “round-ups” of Jews and others, the stripping of their citizenship, the looting of their personal items, and their eventual transportation to the death camps. No Jewish population escaped their purview: Jews, arrested from as far away as Ioannina, Greece, were sent to be murdered in Auschwitz. There is, in a small display case, a small red dress shoe worn by a woman. It was found among the thousands upon thousands of shoes taken from Auschwitz’s prisoners. That one small shoe reminded me of the image of a girl in a red coat in Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List. The image speaks volumes about the losses that occurred.

But what troubled me was the lack of connection to Boston, in particular, and to the rise in antisemitism in these United States, and, indeed, the world, especially in the wake of the Hamas massacre of innocent Jews in Israel in October 2023.

I asked Luis Ferreiro, director and CEO of Musealia, why a stronger statement was not being made that conjoined these links.

“The aim of the exhibit,” Ferreiro told me, “is to show how societies make small steps leading to this kind of terror, and that we all need to understand that the Holocaust brought engineers, doctors, and many others together to plan it and to operate it. It is being aimed at educating those in the 21st century that the responsibilities lie within each of us to prevent such human tragedies from occurring.”

And what of the New England Holocaust Memorial, erected in 1995, which abuts the Freedom Trail across from Blackstone Block on Union Street? Or the plan to build a Holocaust museum on Tremont Street? Surely it is the exhibit’s responsibility to at least inform those visiting — many of them new to Boston — that we are aware of our history and are taking a stand.

And to that, I would add that a mandatory request be made for viewing a small statue, hidden by the side entrance of the State House on Beacon Street: a shadowy, less pride-worthy monument to Boston’s history, the oft-ignored bronze statue of Mary Dyer. Dyer and several of her brethren were hanged in Boston in 1660. Their crime? They were Quakers. On my way to Park Plaza, I walked past the spot where the Quaker lynchings took place on Boston Common. The passage of years from 1660 to 1940-45 indeed seemed “not long ago.” Puritan henchmen built public gallows to do away with Quakers in Boston; Nazi henchmen built the killing factories and murdered Jews in Oswiecim, Poland. In Boston, five innocent people were lynched; in Poland, the number of blameless Jewish men, women, and children who met their deaths — by hanging, asphyxiation, torture, starvation, and exhaustion — exceeded one million.

In the exhibition: A sign from Auschwitz. Photo: Musealia

But the exhibit does not provide these crucial details that connect its purpose to the very city that is hosting it. The least the organizers could to is to provide a detailed map of the aforementioned statue and Memorial, and to include additional resources directing visitors to where they might learn more about Boston’s role in WWII, about antisemitism here and in the United States, and how this exhibit links up to them.

The need to connect the past with the present is obvious. Two weeks ago, a Jewish student at SUNY Binghamton said she received online insults. Among them, “We tried our best to put you in Auschwitz” and “History will judge Hitler as a hero” were among the taunts she heard as she defended Israel’s existence on campus. Last week there was the plea of Jewish director Jonathan Glazer, whose film The Zone of Interest had just won the Academy Award for best international film. The movie presents images of the death camp as seen from the perspective of the Nazis; it is a harrowing study in cold-blooded indifference to inhumanity. Glazer bravely told the Academy Award audience when he accepted the award, “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.”

Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. is compelling, but its message feels hermetically sealed — it needs to draw crucial connections with what is going on now.

**

An earlier version of this review appeared in The Arts Fuse magazine (Boston), on March 17, 2024.

Review: “A Case for the Existence of God”

Jessie Hinton and De’Lon Grant in the Speakeasy Stage production of A Case for the Existence of God. Photo: Nile Scott Studios

By Robert Israel

The play invites the audience members to introspect as it probes the pasts, presents, and futures of its two male characters, Keith (De’Lon Grant), a Black gay man who labors at the mortgage game, and his client (and later friend) Ryan (Jesse Hinson), a straight Caucasian man on a quest to acquire a parcel of property and, in so doing, to claim a piece of the American dream that has slipped through his family’s fingers. Both men are new dads, too. They sit, slumped on office chairs in a cubicle (set design by Cristino Todesco), the weight of their familial responsibilities sitting like tons on their shoulders. As in many of Hunter’s plays, Case is set in the playwright’s native Idaho. We learn that the landscape there — reflected in the flat, parched speech — is similarly semi-arid, rambling, with “nothing out there” except vast stretches of emptiness that his characters can’t help but absorb.

A play that is a cause for celebration. Huzzahs for Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God – a two-hander with a 90-minute running time — which is being given a stellar production at Speakeasy Stage under Melinda Lopez’s feisty and insightful direction.

A bit of back story: It has been several years since Speakeasy Stage produced Hunter’s The Whale – which I nominated as one of the best stage productions in 2014. That was the same year the playwright was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for “crafting quietly captivating dramas that explore the human capacity for empathy and confront the socially isolating aspects of contemporary life across the American landscape.” (Hunter later adapted his play into a film, with director Darren Aronofsky; it earned lead actor Brendan Fraser an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2022.) Case draws on the playwright’s decision to enter into parenthood when he and his husband adopted a baby. In a video interview produced by Signature Theatre in NYC, Hunter spoke about how this act of unselfish love has changed his life: “My husband and I … realized that cynicism is cheap and easy and kind of perversely comforting.… Once I had a kid I didn’t have the luxury of being cynical or pessimistic. I had to find some kind of hope.” This is the “faith” the playwright explores in A Case for the Existence of God.

The title of the script forecasts that the dramatist will be grappling with serious issues. Hunter’s challenge is to fit all of the promised substance into a 90-minute running time. The compression works, mostly, with a few exceptions. There are places where the script doesn’t provide us with enough credible evidence about the other men and women who populate the two men’s lives. A slight reference to Keith’s boss, for example, is effective; the quick allusion supplies us with just enough evidence of Keith’s tenuous standing in the office. But the script gives short shrift to Keith’s lawyer father, for example, in the same way it holds back information about just who Ryan’s wife is (he’s going through a divorce). Secondary characters come across as cardboard figures, not flesh and blood.

Director Lopez keeps the play pivoting; points are made via scenes that move along like flashes of lightning. Transitions flicker by, in a blink of the eye. This speed is in contrast to the reluctance of the characters to connect; there is considerable restraint on the part of both actors from reaching across the cramped space of the office cubicle. When they finally do physically connect over drinks — and open up to more revealing conversation — we experience another layer of intimacy as their friendship gratifyingly develops.

Both actors invest themselves completely in the production; in their hands, the quicksilver action unspools naturally. There is considerable humor in the play but the laughs — per the playwright’s insistence that sarcasm and cynicism be avoided — emerge as spontaneous outbursts rather than forced punch lines. Because this script is so distinctly homegrown, I thought of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. A Case for the Existence of God makes good on Wilder’s insistence that we “become attentive to what disparate moments have in common, to repetitive patterns” — via Hunter’s flat, open, noncynical Midwestern (and Western) American speech. We connect those “disparate moments” and marvel as they unfold, pulled into his characters’ experiences of fleeting joy — which inevitably arrive brimming with anxiety and pain. In terms of the joy that theater can provide, this production sets the bar high.

**

A previous version of this review appeared in The Arts Fuse magazine (Boston) on Jan. 20, 2024.

Creating a Culture of Preparedness: A First Look

“Vigilance, not hope, rules the day.”
— Rabbi Marc Katz

By Robert Israel

I have completed my report for Harvard University, now being finalized for publication, on how Jews are adopting security strategies as threats to their lives and houses of worship have increased. 

Some of my findings:

> According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),antisemitic incidents nationally, post October 7 (when Hamas attacked border settlements in Israel), have increased more than 337-percent, with over 2,000 incident reported.

> One terror weapon that predominated is arson, which was the used against two synagogues in Massachusetts several years ago, including my hometown of Arlington and the nearby town of Needham. Despite a reward that was offered for information leading to the arrests of the arsonists, no arrests have been made. My report documents that synagogues are not the only targets, and arson is increasingly being used as a weapon against mosques and churches.

> “Thing have gotten so bad that hope alone cannot be considered a strategy,” said Scott Richman, director of ADL’s New York and New Jersey region. My report details the efforts on behalf of the ADL and the Attorney Generals in N.Y. and N.J. (and nationally) to combat the scourge of antisemitism.

My report goes on to document specific action steps set by the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism that is working in concert with President Biden and the governors of these United States to combat the scourge of antisemitism through awareness campaigns and other measures. Programs like the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” are described in my report (as well as an awareness campaign funded by New England Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft). 

I report on how aggressive security systems are being implemented at synagogues nationally, and how local clergy are working with law enforcement to ensure that citizens can attend worship services unharmed.

My report details training programs now being implemented at synagogues so that clergy and support staff are prepared for potential terror attacks. I provide extensive details about how these programs are creating a “culture of preparedness” in the event of attacks that claimed the lives of Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh, Penn., and in Powray, Calif.

My report features in-depth interviews with Rabbi Marc Katz at Temple Nir Tamid in New Jersey, as well as local Massachusetts clergy and others about steps they are taking to protect their congregants and their houses of worship.

Harvard will publish my report later this year.

“Tikkun Olam” at Boston’s Holiday Pops

Holiday Pops at Symphony Hall, Boston: songs of hope during troubled times.

By Robert Israel

As wars rage in the Ukraine and in Israel, protests flare on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, a few miles from my home.

“Twenty-six years I’ve given my life to this community,” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad said in an interview with the New York Times, “and I’ve never felt so alone.”

The protests against Israel’s involvement in the war have caused him extreme chagrin, he told the paper, but what troubles him even more is what he says he has perceived as “Jew hate and antisemitism” which he claims “is thriving on campus.”

I, too, have seen evidence of hatred in Cambridge and among protesters at Government Center, in Boston. I’ve listened to the speeches descrying the horrific loss of life that has turned Gaza into a devastated landscape. I’ve seen it among protesters at Boston Common and in the Financial District, where protesters last week shut down rush hour traffic as they demanded a ceasefire in Gaza.

Yet even though I have endured decades of personal experience confronting hatred, and, during my years as a newspaper editor, I have witnessed it in numerous countries I visited, I do not share Rabbi Zarchi’s feeling of solitariness during this troubled time. I believe light triumphs over darkness, and I also believe that Rabbi Zarchi shares this hope. Why else would he invite students and staff – including Harvard President Dr. Claudine Gay — who joined him in the candle lighting ceremony — to light the Hanukah lights on Wednesday evening? While expressing despair is crucial, activism in the face of that despair is even more so.

Back to the BSO concert. I agree with T.S. Eliot who once said that “too much clarity” is too heavy a burden for us mere mortals and that, every now and again, and we need to put our troubles so that they are “far away,” as one popular Christmas song champions. And while that song was sung aloud at Symphony Hall, it was not the only message of the concert. Yes, the concert includes many of these wistful and whimsical songs: they are part of our holiday tradition. But the orchestra is to be commended for reminding us we have a responsibility to Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew expression meaning to “heal the world,” and they performed a six-minute song with that exact title, written for orchestra and chorus by Lucas Richman. The late Leonard Bernstein commented on the piece as follows: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

At the annual Holiday Pops concert at Symphony Hall in Boston, I experienced the power of music to heal during times of despair. In the two decades that I have been attending these concerts, I leave the famed Hall with my spirits renewed and my commitment to expressing that common bond to others. It will take the combined efforts of us all to repair this broken world. Music alone cannot be expected to heal the wounds. But it’s a necessary ingredient to that effort. It renews our hope during a troubled time by widening the crack in the walls that divide us. To quote Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

**

Listen to “Tikkun Olam” on YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Oa0kMrnxHQ.

“The Heart Sellers” — Homage to Friendship

Left to right: Jenna Agbayani, Judy Song in the Huntington Theatre Company production of The Heart Sellers. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

By Robert Israel

There is much to admire and enjoy – and to recommend, with an advisory – about the Huntington Theatre Company production of Lloyd Suh’s long one-act play, The Heart Sellers.

On the plus side, the script tells a touching story about two Asian women, Luna (Jenna Agbayani) and Jane (Judy Song), who hail from the Philippines and Korea respectively. It is 1973, and the pair are in a drab apartment in a “mid-sized U.S. city.” They bond as they prepare a modest (and often hilarious) turkey dinner together during what would otherwise have been a lonely Thanksgiving holiday. Suh takes us into his characters’ private worlds: we share their various joys and aches and we also learn about their painful repatriations in these United States, a country with a history that (reluctantly) welcomes/ abuses its immigrant populations.

The advisory I mentioned above is that the production presents an aural challenge. The accents of the performers too often interfere with our ability to fully comprehend the ebbs and flows of the script. This is a loss, because there is so much to learn about our (historic and ongoing) treatment of immigrants. Unless you pay close attention, you might miss the script’s subtle references to the 1965 exclusionary act (known as the Hart-Celler Immigration Act) that reduced and restricted Asians from entry to America. You might also not take in key details about the personal lives of Luna and Jane and miss important facets of their relationship as the women pare back their protective layers to reveal how fragile (and, conversely, how strong) they truly are, alone and together.

Both actors give the production their all, but there are too many instances when the dialogue is lost, sometimes as they traipse noisily around the set (effectively designed by Jungyun Georgia Lee). The difficulty reminded me of a production of Sean O’Casey’s Plough and Stars at the American Repertory Theater some years ago (Arts Fuse review): the density of the Irish brogue played havoc with grasping the emotional devastation the characters experienced as they were pitted against British repression during the Easter Rising. Similarly, in Suh’s play, there are numerous references to patriarchal repression the women endure not only in their families, but also in their marriages.

The solution would be to limit the noisy thundering of footfalls the women make as they literally gallop about the set while simultaneously speaking the dialogue. The aural rhythms could be more carefully balanced and more restraint introduced. Certainly the performers should go full tilt (in terms of decibels) during unspoken scenes. But we need more moments between them with the noise level turned down, so we can grasp the story behind the heavily accented dialogue. It’s a tall order and, in many scenes, that’s indeed what happens. The problem is that there are far too many scenes when that doesn’t happen, making for an uneven production that places a considerable burden on the actors.

Aforementioned, we get outstanding performances from motor-mouth Jenna Agbatani, who commands early scenes with superb comic timing, in contrast to the more tightly wound Judy Song, who finally shows us that she can bust-a-move and let out her inner-groove in a scene that features an impromptu boogie-woogie — after she consumes a large quantity of vino. I also appreciated that Suh set the play at Thanksgiving. The last time I attended a play set during our national holiday, which testifies to our being grateful for the nation’s bounty, it was in 2018 at Boston’s Shubert Theatre for a production of The Humans (Arts Fuse review). Hard to think of a better day on the calendar to underline the dramatic contrast between those enjoying the high ideals of our American democracy and those who have been exploited in the process of bringing plenty — to some.

Further, I have considerable admiration for Suh’s craftsmanship. I enjoyed how he takes us on an inner journey by weaving silences into his script that encourage his characters (and us) to reflect and pause. I grew up in a multilingual Russian-Jewish immigrant household where often-combustible emotions ruled. Unless one was cautious, one could easily ignite a firestorm that would end with verbal abuse.

The Heart Sellers supplies snippets of that kind of fierce pain, rooted in recognition of the suffering our fellow humans inflict on each other when they are engaged in the politics of superiority and exploitation. Yet we are also given a smidgen of hope. At a time for giving thanks, two women gratefully bond over the gift of friendship.

**

A previous version of this review was published in The Arts Fuse magazine (Boston) on Dec. 3, 2023.

Reasons to be Thankful

By Robert Israel

Downtown Crossing, Boston (photo by Ronnie Zhang)

It had been a particularly grueling couple weeks. I got felled by a bout of covid that kept me housebound. Thanks to the vaccines and boosters I had taken months before, I experienced only mild symptoms, compared to those who reported severe reactions to the virus during the onset of the pandemic.

Yet anytime one loses vitality, the person you are used to being – pink with health – is altered, and even a temporary interruption feels awful. One’s imagination visits dark places. “Even the smallest illness changes that,” wrote the poet Robert Creeley, in a poem titled “An Illness,” about a loss of vitality he experienced.

So, after submitting to the required quarantine, I emerged from the seclusion of my rooms and headed to downtown Boston. It was a Saturday. I grew up in New England and spent many Saturdays over the years going to the downtown shopping area with my family, and I relived those long ago excursions. At first, the crowds I encountered – shoppers and skateboarders, children and their parents, hot dog vendors, scruffy pot smokers huddled in pungent miasma near the Filene’s clock – was almost too much to take in. Everyone was buzzing about. It was difficult to get my land legs.

I retreated to one of my favorite luncheon spots – in Chinatown – and ordered a scrumptious repast of dim sum and hot tea. I shared a table with a father and his two sons who ordered liberally from the menu. “I spent $500.00 on food for these guys last week,” the dad sighed. “They eat everything in sight.”

Fortified by my luncheon, I wandered down West Street, stopped at the Brattle Book Shop, browsed the used books in the outdoor parking lot next to the store, and then strolled through the Public Garden. No matter what time of year one visits this historic park, one is greeted by waves of calm. It is an urban oasis one can stroll through under an expanse of open sky. On this afternoon, tourists were taking selfies, children were riding the Swan Boats with their parents, and the overfed squirrels were lumbering about, almost too fat to get out of harm’s reach.

I had my fill of the city and made it the subway. As I waited for the Red Line train to Alewife, I encountered a woman wearing a burka. She wanted to plug in her cell phone at the only electrical outlet available which happened to be located beside where I was seated. She hesitated to ask me to move. So she placed her handheld device on the filthy floor.

“Let me move so you can rest it on the bench,” I offered.

“It doesn’t take much to be friendly,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

I learned from her that she hailed from Somalia by way of Texas and worked in a coffee shop downtown. She enjoyed meeting people, she said, and added that when she greeted people her pleasant demeanor had a positive effect on others.

“There are so many people who didn’t wake up this morning,” she said.

On this Thanksgiving, when the world teeter-totters on chaos and destruction, when wars tear apart families and cities and destroys homes and scars landscapes, I am thankful to live in a city at peace and to have had the occasion to meet a Somali woman who took the time to greet me warmly and to affirm our common humanity.

The Corpse in the Alley (1961-1971)

Short order chef Sal O’Brien dressing up the wieners at New York System, Providence (photo: The Associated Press)

Read the Providence Evening Bulletin/No one you knew/got married/had children/got divorced/died/got born/tho many familiar names flicker & disappear – Ted Berrigan, “Things to Do in Providence”

By Robert Israel

1.

I made it to Doc Nemtzow’s, but I never got my eyeglasses.

The bus from the Lexington Avenue school delivered me to the Weybosset depot. Doc’s was a ten-minute walk away. New eyeglasses meant my teacher would never have to drag me to the front of the class again just so I could read the blackboard. But something happened when I crossed the plaza. A neon sign that blinked “New York System Hot Wieners” caught my eye. My family kept kosher. I told myself, stay away, and don’t break the law. But I had never tasted gaggas, beef, pork and veal short links served on a steamed bun with all the fixings, two bits apiece. My best friend, Allen Paul, he told me they were some kind of crazy tasty, he said he ate four pups at one sitting and they were so good he wished he had ordered two more.

I hatched a plan: I’d order a couple of pups, scarf them down, dispose of the wrapper in the Tippy McCann trash can, splash water on my face at the bubbla, the public drinking fountain, wash away my smelly sins, and hoof it to Doc Nemtzow’s. No one would be the wiser. I yanked the waistband of my jeans. I heard a jingle-jangle. Yup, I had enough coin.

The man behind the grill, everyone called him Shorty, he paid me no never mind. He was too busy manhandling wieners, plucking them from a crock of scalding water with his fingers, slapping them onto a grill so hot the droplets sputtered and steamed and the links danced the herky-jerky. Then he grabbed the charred dogs by their tails and plopped them onto steamed buns lined up along the full length of his bare arm. Moving like a superhero from one of my comic books, he gussied those dogs up with hefty dollops of meat sauce, chopped onions, celery salt, mustard, relish, and ketchup.

Smoke blanketed the air like fog. Customers shouted, “Hey Shorty! Gimmie three all the way!” A cowbell clanged. New customers elbowed their way in. New York System was a first come, push-the-guy-in-front-of-you-out-of-the-way place, where you pays your money and you woofs your wieners down.

“Okay, half-pint, whaddaya want?” Shortie said.

“Twins with the works!” I shouted.

Five minutes later, swaggering down Mathewson Street, a cocky nine year old, I held in my hand two savory links poking their greasy snouts from a wax paper wrapper, my admittance ticket to non-kosher Hell. I took a bite. I heard those dogs bark their telltale snap and crunch. A blot of mustard drooled down my chinny chin chin; I wiped it onto my shirtsleeve. I finished in no time, like those chowhounds at Nathan’s on Coney Island. I promised myself I’d return and order three more and risk a stomachache, just to see Allen Paul’s face when I told him I bested him.

After disposing the evidence in the Tippy McCann, I continued walking. Up ahead I spied Rubber, a double amputee, his wheelchair beside him. He was leaning against the wall of Grace Episcopal Church. He had company, a cluster of sailors wearing Dixie cup hats, chatting him up. His tray was crammed with Life Savers, Juicy Fruit chewing gum, two or three brands of cigarettes, and boxes of strike anywhere matches. Years later I learned he lost both legs in World War II; he got his nickname because he sold condoms.

Grace Episcopal Church, Westminster Street, Providence.

Bounding down Westminster Street, I passed the R.K.O. Albee Theatre, where on most Saturdays my friends and I sank into velvet seats as the lights in the auditorium dimmed and the titles appeared through a scrim. There was a smoking section at the rear; tobacco fumes drifting down made the screen look like the swampy mist in the movie Creature from the Black Lagoon. For a Ben Franklin fifty-cent piece, I could watch a double feature, actually three films if you counted the Looney Tunes cartoons, or the newsreels narrated by Lowell Thomas. My parents supported my movie-going habit by rewarding me with loose change for household tasks. If I were especially dutiful, they might fork over four bits, which meant I could afford roundtrip bus rides, a candy bar, and a double feature at the Albee.

On this particular October afternoon, wieners consumed, I decided to make one last pit stop: to stand in front of the pet shop window to watch live puppies frolic on pee-stained sawdust. Three people were there, serenading the whelps with the Lennon Sisters’ “Doggy in the Window” tune. Each week different doggies appeared behind the glass, so I figured they had all found good homes, just like the song promised.

I walked past Tolchinsky’s  — my cousins from Croyland Road worked there cleaning and repairing fur coats. As I rounded the corner, I caught sight of Doc Nemtzow. He must have been waiting for me, I figured, because he was pacing back and forth nervously looking up and down the adjacent streets. He had not noticed me yet, which I took this as a sign of good luck: what with all my wiener scarfing and doggie-in-the-window ogling, I was no doubt late for my eyeglass fitting. I immediately shifted into tall tale mode. I hought to tell him the bus got a flat tire, thinking, nah, he’d never go for that. So I rehearsed a tale about all the chalkboard erasers I took out to the schoolyard for cleaning, and if that didn’t fly, I’d admit to visiting the puppies. Under no circumstances would I confess to eating wieners.

That’s when a cop car pulled curbside. Red lights pulsating. Sirens blasting. Decked out in blue with shiny buttons, service revolvers drawn. Doc rushed over to me and placed both hands over my eyes. He was too late. Never mind new eyeglasses: I saw the cops drag a corpse, their gloved hands wedged under his armpits, one of his shoes had gone missing and so was the side of his head, matted in blood. Doc drove me home. My parents were on the front porch when we arrived on Gordon Avenue.

“The police have identified the bad man,” my father said. “He was wanted for several crimes. A shame you had to see that, Robert.”

At supper I dropped the salt shaker at the same moment my mother directed her gaze toward me but she didn’t see me roll up my shirtsleeves and hide the mustard stain. I had become skilled at evasive maneuvers like this. And I was good at making up stories on the spot. But I excelled at keeping secrets. I never told my parents I had met other bad men at Bessie’s, a bodega on Potters Avenue, where the owner trafficked in penny candy at the front while raking greenbacks at a betting parlor in the back. He hired Allen Paul and his older brother Peter to run errands. They told their mom they delivered coffee and snacks to the workers at the factories. Not quite. All along they were passing slips of scrap paper to a man in a booth at the Prairie Diner. They worked after school on weekdays, but their busiest day was on Sundays when Mass let out at St. Michael the Archangel Church.

I was playing pitch cards when a black Cadillac pulled up. A driver stepped out. “Any of youze guys seen Peter?” the man asked. Somebody told him that Peter was at Bessie’s. I kept my focus on the cards. I wobbled my shoulders and stretched the full length of my arm like a pitcher on the mound. With the flick of my wrist, I let the card fly. Ted Williams sailed forth, he fluttered in midair, and then he landed atop Mickey Mantle. I won. I got to keep “The Kid,” I took home “The Mick.” I collected a Ben Franklin half-buck coin to boot.

“Bobby,” Peter said later, “you done good. But listen up and listen good. You can do better than a half-buck. Small potatoes. Stick with me and my brother. We’ll show you how to make real money playing craps.”

I kept mum about the stolen furs and jewelry I knew my pals kept in a locked cabinet in my neighbor’s basement that they kept replenishing by prying open the metal grate and shimmying down the coal chute, delivering the stolen goods to the guy in the Caddy to fence. And I made a solemn promise to Allen Paul – the Jewish equivalent to “cross my heart and hope to die” without actually making the sign of the Holy Trinity across my chest — that I would never, ever, not even in a thousand years, ever rat him out about how he earned that wad cash that kept growing fatter in his jeans pocket.

“Just let ’em try to steal my stash from me,” Allen Paul said, unfolding his pocket knife and jabbing the air. “I swear I’ll slice ’em, Bobby, I swear on my mother, I’ll do it, I’m not scared of any of ’em, Bobby, not even one little bit.” 

2.

My boyhood home at 118-120 Gordon Avenue, built in 1908, stood in a row of identical triple-deckers flanking Beaman and Smith Company, a five story precision tool mill founded in the late 1800s. B&S comprised two brick buildings and a vacant lot earmarked for a planned expansion that never happened; my friends and I claimed it as our turf. In the summer, when the weeds shielded us from casual curbside scrutiny, our mothers, with their binocular vision, scutinized our comings and goings from second and third floor porches. Allen Paul’s family, like mine, were Russian Jews. His grandparents rented the second floor to a family of German Jewish refugees. But no one explained why, during summer, when the men took to wearing tank tee shirts that exposed their arms, we saw numbers tattooed on their forearms. No one had time to impart history lessons. Everyone in the neighborhood was too busy trying to make money, or else, scheming to steal it.

B & S employed three shifts of workers. Each day the street bustled with men reporting for work, or, having finished their shifts, bolting in the direction of the barrooms and lunch counters on Broad Street or Saratoga Street or Prairie Avenue. At night in the summer, their shadows moved across my bedroom wall.

During my bar mitzvah year, my family moved to the suburbs. By then, B&S ran only one shift. We returned to the neighborhood to attend worship services at Congregation Sons of Abraham that had since merged with another Orthodox shul, Congregation Mishkan Tifileh. On most days, the combined congregations could barely gather ten souls for a minyan (a quorum required for daily prayer service). Soon afterward, the Willard Avenue shopping plaza – the site of a kosher poultry shop where my grandmother purchased freshly slaughtered fowl — closed. My grandfather died, and my grandmother followed him two years later. The board of directors at the shul sold the building and it morphed into a tabernacle to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The U.S.Census reported in 1964 the population in Providence had shrunk to 170,000 from 250,000 the previous decade. The jewelry factories emptied, textile mills went bankrupt, and arsonists lit matches; Beaman and Smith, now shuttered, was torched repeatedly.

The triple-decker on Gordon Avenue, my grandparents’ foothold in America when they emigrated from Russia, was repossessed by the Old Stone Bank, so ,y grandparents bought it a second time. After my grandparents died, my mother and her two sisters sold the triple-decker for less than their parents had paid for it both times put together.

3.

I registered with the Selective Service in 1969, the year I entered college, and was issued a student deferment. I figured I was safe. I figured wrong. It was wartime. Every day, troops were sent to Southeast Asia and every day corpses draped with American flags were shipped home. A week after I turned eighteen, a letter informed me my student deferment was revoked; I could be drafted at any moment. I met with a counselor from the American Friends Service Committee. Save your money, he advised, you’re going to need it if you decide to move to Canada.

That winter, I took a job as an “irregular extra” at the Providence Evening Bulletin, substituting for a classmate while he recovered from surgery. The paper’s front section ran humdrum rehashes of town meetings and debates at the state legislature. The real news was in the Metro section in the vital statistics columns. The print for those columns was around 8-pitch. On any given day, in a small state like Rhode Island, there was a good chance you knew (or were related to) someone who got busted, applied for a marriage license at City Hall, or got divorced. On any given day, you could read whose property or auto had been boosted or vandalized, who was born at the Lying-In Hospital or St. Joe’s, or who died. Every now and again the front section trumpeted the most sensational crimes — murders of or by local Mafiosi – in 12-pitch bold type. One story involved two punks who got into it heavy inside Gasparro’s, a liquor store on Atwells Avenue, an area known as a Mafia stronghold. Gunfire was exchanged. The late city edition ran a three-column photo that could have been snapped by New York City’s crime photographer Weegee: a corpse bleeding out amidst shattered bottles of Chivas Regal and Manischewitz, with this headline: Shooter Remains at Large. The next morning’s paper ran a photo of the alleged shooter perp-walked to a patrol wagon, with this headline: Shooter Nabbed; Returns to Spit on Corpse.

For my “irregular extra” gig, I reported to police headquarters, assigned to the corner of the squad room when I typed on a battered Smith Corona — red ink for all-caps headlines, black ink for body copy. The only difficult part of the job was to accurately decipher the cops’ handwritten scrawls from their activity logs, and, at deadline, wait for the desk sergeant to scribble his sign-off. Then I had ten minutes to hoof it three blocks to Hope’s Bar on Fountain Street to hand the copy to a reporter. It was an open secret that the owners ran a brothel upstairs; swabbies wearing their Dixie cup hats, identical to the men I had seen buying condoms from Rubber on Mathewson Street years before, waited for a wink and nod before traipsing upstairs. I got paid union scale, but was not a union member, so I could not claim the work as my own. My ghosted copy appeared the next day, unchanged, under the reporter’s byline.

On a particularly slow night, the desk sergeant motioned for me to follow him down a lime green corridor to a room equipped with a one-way mirror. On the opposite side, a plain-clothes cop paced behind a suspect who sat handcuffed to a chair. When the interrogation started going badly, the cop hoisted a copy of the yellow pages with both hands and whacked the thug across his head and face. Then he commenced to pacing again, leaning into the suspect. He repeated the pummeling. The speakers in the observation room were muted; from behind the one-way glass, I could hear howls.

“That scumbag’ll get worse where he’s going,” the desk cop said. “He’s lookin’ at 6 to 10 at the ACI, easy. And I can see you’re itching to ask me how come the yellow pages. A brain boy like you can figger that out. But since this conversation never happened and since you never saw nothing, I’ll tell you: phone books don’t leave no marks.”

The next night, Allen Paul’s name topped a rap sheet. He and two guys from the neighborhood were foiled in their attempt to boost furs from a home on Cole Avenue. The arresting officer told me my friend was being held in a cell in the basement. I asked the desk sergeant if I could visit – my intention was to warn Allen Paul to keep his wiseguy mouth shut for fear he’d get the phone book treatment — but my request was denied.

Months later, Allen Paul called to brag that he made the newspaper. I opened the Metro section. Below an ad for pastrami on sale at Miller’s Deli, I read a two-paragraph report that Allen Paul’s case got thrown out of court because of insufficient evidence.

4.

In January 1970, Selective Service notified me my student deferment would be reinstated: I had fetched a high number in the draft lottery. Allen Paul, who had contracted polio as a kid, submitted a letter from his uncle — who also happened to be a doctor –requesting a medical exemption. The Army was suspicious, and insisted Allen Paul show up at the Induction Center. “So I made up my mind to lay it on thick,” he told me. When they called his name, he dragged his leg across the room. “I was thinking of of Festus,” Allen Paul said, referring to the handicapped sidekick to Sheriff Matt Dillon from the cowboy television series “Gunsmoke.” “I bit my tongue ‘so I wouldn’t ‘cuz I was just about to call the seargent Mr. Dillon,” Allen Paul chortled. He limped away with a 4-F classification, unfit for military service. Peter got drafted. We had a party for him on Gordon Avenue. The following day, hung over from too much Narragansett lager and some kind of swill whiskey, we waved goodbye in the parking lot of the armory on Cranston Street as Peter and the other recruits boarded a bus bound for basic training in Georgia.

Peter and three men from his platoon were ambushed six months later while on patrol in Vietnam. His family opted to forgo a traditional shiva at home, and, since no remains were found, there was no burial. A memorial service was held at the synagogue. My father, a World War II veteran, donned his dress uniform and led the color guard at the social hall. The congregation crowded in the foyer, the rabbi recited prayers, and Peter’s name was added to the bronze memorial plaque.

I boarded the ferry a week later from the India Street docks for Newport. I slept in a park near Festival Field. On Sunday morning I woke to the Dixie Hummingbirds singing “Down by the Riverside,” with the refrain, “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” That’s when it hit me: I had beaten the draft. I could dream again about what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t have to a clue, only that I would not be moving to Montreal. The war raged on. I kept seeing images of Peter and his fallen brothers in arms every time the evening news showed corpses carried away on stretchers.

On the ferry home, a man who looked like Barney Google invited me to join him and his gaggle of Jean Nate-scented middle-aged women. Barney wore a polka-dotted bowtie knotted below a bulging Adam’s apple, his eyes magnified by Coke-bottle lenses like the kind Doc Nemtzow had once prescribed for me. He pounded out songs made popular during the previous war on a spinet piano lashed to the ship’s standpipe by a hank of rope.

“C’mon, take a slug, it won’t kill you,” Barney insisted, offering up his flask.

I retreated to the upper deck. Barney and his girls hit all the wrong notes, the buoys in the harbor clanged percussively, and the engine belched black smoke as the ferry backed into a slip at India Point.

                                                          **

“The Corpse in the Alley” is the lead piece in Robert Israel’s new collection of stories set to be published November, 2024 by Harbinger Press. Copyright 2023 by Harbinger Press, Arlington, Mass.

August Wilson: Poet, Pugilist, Playwright

August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan, Simon and Schuster, 544 pages, $32.50.

By Robert Israel

I met playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) at Penumbra, an African-American troupe, in St. Paul in 1979 when I was writing for a Twin Cities weekly paper. Wilson had a day job as a writer at the Minnesota Science Museum. He introduced himself as a poet, but looked like a pugilist, as if he had just stepped out of the boxing ring. He had a self-assured demeanor and a randy glint to his eye. Wilson made it clear that, when it came to writing, he’d only settle for delivering knockout punches and would never exit the boxing ring unless he held his hard-won trophy aloft. A group of us, mostly ink-stained wretches, would retreat to a local bar after performances in which we’d marvel at his impromptu poetic recitations, words gushing forth in rhyming torrents. During these alcohol-fueled sessions, Wilson embodied this description, from a poem by Sylvia Plath: “You leave the same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating.”

At the time, there were no poetry slams. Their precursors, in the African-American tradition, were called “toasts,” memorized vocal narrations of sexual conquests and violent altercations spoken aloud via bawdy, musical rhymes. In this genre, Wilson had a rival, the African American poet Etheridge Knight, who lived nearby in South Minneapolis. My feeling is that Knight could have gone a few rounds with Wilson and possibly bested him. Knight was an ex-convict, a disabled Korean War veteran, and a recovering drug addict. I attended several of his mesmerizing poetry recitals at the Cedar Riverside People’s Center. “Run sister run — the Bugga man comes!,” Knight chanted from his gut-wrenching poem “The Violent Space, (or when your sister sleeps around for money).” If the two poets ever met in real life — after all, they occupied the same “violent space” — I have found no record of it.

You will not find the aforementioned discussion of Wilson’s poetic roots in Patti Hartigan’s authorized biography of Wilson, August Wilson: A Life. In fact, her book contains only a few brief citations of Wilson’s poetry. She explains that “the August Wilson Estate declined authorization.” Sadly, this omission results in a huge loss when it comes to understanding, and appreciating, Wilson and his writing. Time magazine insisted that Wilson wrote “pure poetry” that was drawn from a deep well. One finds many “toasts” in his plays, verbal jousts between characters, intoned with the same mesmerizing torrent of words he used during those St. Paul booze sessions that illustrated what he called “blood memory,” streams of language that tapped into what he claimed were ancestral roots that stretched back over the centuries.

Wilson wove these “blood memories” forcefully into his plays, beginning with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, first developed at the O’Neill Center in Connecticut, then at Yale Rep, and finally on Broadway, and in Fences, which had a similar development arc and went on to win both the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award (both plays were later made into films). It was during the tryout run of Fences in New Haven, starring James Earl Jones, that I was reintroduced to Wilson by the late Trinity Rep actor Ed Hall (who gets a special mention in Hartigan’s book). Hall, a favorite of Wilson’s, was my neighbor from Providence; he premiered the role of Bynum Walker in Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

Hartigan takes us behind the scenes, looking at the stressful business challenges Wilson faced, particularly when he sparred with wealthy sponsors and exploitative lawyers. She offers some sharp glimpses into Wilson’s private life, describing his voracious proclivity to pursue women in extramarital affairs. She examines the consequences of his infidelities, namely that two out of his three marriages ended in divorce. Wilson was also given to fits of violent temper, and Hartigan describes his outbursts of rage in unsparing detail. Those close to him attributed his anger as the product of his troubled youth. Born Frederick August Kittel, Jr., Wilson endured poverty and racism during his formative years and dropped out of school at age 15, living hand-to-mouth in his hometown of Pittsburgh as he developed his artistic métier.

Wilson benefited from tutelage by disciplined directors, theater critics, and dramaturges, among them Michael Feingold, Edith Oliver, and Yale Drama School dean Lloyd Richards, who helped him shape his scripts for the stage. Before succumbing to cancer at the age 60, Wilson had finished 10 scripts that chronicle, decade by decade, the Black experience in America in the 20th century. He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1990 for The Piano Lesson.

Hartigan also reveals that Wilson was a bit of a “fabulist,” and she cites instances in his late career autobiographical work, How I Learned What I Learned, that were outright lies. These embellishments do not diminish Wilson’s accomplishments or tarnish his artistry, which was profound. American authors, such as Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, have indulged in expansive egotistical fancies: they were, like Wilson, fiction writers. Hartigan also reports that, near the end of his life, even after learning of his dire health issues, Wilson never stopped working, mulling over writing a novel and screenplays (several scripts were left unfinished at the time of his passing).

Hartigan’s writing style is dry and reportorial, honed during her years at the Boston Globe where she was an arts reviewer and reporter. While this disciplined approach works well when it comes to resuscitating the multifarious facts of Wilson’s life, it fails to capture the combustible passion that Wilson — as playwright and poet — infused into his works. As a biographer, she has the nagging habit of repeating details, sometimes on the same page, and often within later chapters, that even casual readers will have already absorbed at first reference. She seems oblivious to the fact that readers possess the intelligence to recall multiple details — that there is no need for her to insert pesky reminders.

What we get from Hartigan’s book is a workmanlike portrait of August Wilson, a dutiful timeline that never delves deep enough into his poetic soul. Wilson emerges as a writer who fought hard, kept his eyes on the prize, and accepted nothing less than triumph. He was a champion in the boxing ring that is the American theater.

**

A previous version of this review appeared in The Arts Fuse magazine (Boston), on August 13, 2024.

Remembering William Friedkin

William Friedkin (1935-2023)

By Robert Israel

The man was seated closest to the swinging doors at the edge of the horseshoe bar. He was bespectacled, wearing a suit with his tie askew, the penultimate lonely-man-at-the-bar.

It had to be a Wednesday night, in the fall of 1990, because, as editor of The Jewish Advocate, that was my late night at the office, and after putting the newspaper to bed, I celebrated by hoofing it a few blocks to my favorite watering-hole, the Union Oyster House on Blackstone Block. I also knew my friend, the late John Ferrarri, would be working. John, who held the unofficial title of Chairman of the Bar, knew what I liked – three little neck clams and three oysters, a cup of chowder, and a draught of Bass ale. Upon entering the establishment, once we locked eyes, he’d commence to prepare these items to serve me. My usual seat at the center of the bar – it afforded me a view of the foot traffic on Union Street – was taken, so I sat next to the bespectacled man, and bid him good evening.

“How do you do?” this sullen man said. “I’m Bill.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I replied, and then John approached.

“This is Mr. Israel,” John said, “he’s a teacher.”

John knew that I had left my job teaching high school drop outs in the inner city a few years before, but he insisted on identifying me as a teacher anyway, always introducing me as “Mr.”

“Mr. Friedkin is a movie director,” John said, and he placed a cup of chowder in front of me, wedged in place by folded napkins to compensate for the horseshoe bar’s tilt.

“I know your work,” I said to Friedkin.

“I’m sure you do,” he replied, laughing. “And you want to know all about it, I bet.”

“Mr. Friedkin is in town to scout locations,” John interrupted, placing the plate of clams and oysters next to the bowl of chowder.

“I’m really here to say hello to John,” Friedkin said.

“So you’re not scouting locations?”

“I’m always scouting,” Friedkin said, “but I really just wanted to check in with John.”

John Ferrarri had that effect on most everyone who visited the restaurant. He had an uncanny ability to make you feel welcomed and comfortable and willing to share your stories with complete strangers. He did this simply, directly, and without fanfare, breaking the ice by telling jokes – and they were terrible jokes – and making sure you knew you were the only one that mattered, even if the place was crammed to the rafters with customers.

“So I want to know how you did that scene in The Exorcist,” I began, “the one where the young girl is in the bedroom…”

“Not going to happen,” he cut me off.

“Oh, c’mon,” I begged.

“Not tonight, Bob,” he said, “but we can talk about other stuff.”

And so we chatted for the next hour or so about our shared Ukrainian Jewish roots. He talked about his parents, about growing up as a first-generation Jewish kid in Chicago, and told me about his grasp of the Yiddish language and how, by understanding the harsh sounds of Yiddish, he felt he had an advantage when he began filming the clipped dialog found in The French Connection, a film that won him an Academy Award for Best Director.

“I had to learn how to get the nub of things in English because I was always translating Yiddish into English in my head,” he told me. “You’ve got to cut through the verbiage, especially when your making a film about cops chasing drug dealers.”

After awhile, it was time to head home. We shook hands. I told him I was a newspaper editor and reporter. He laughed.

“I knew right away you weren’t a teacher,” he said, chortling. “So I’m especially glad I didn’t discuss my films.”

Friedkin, who died this week at age 87, was a man who never forgot his roots. Before we both exited the Union Oyster House that night, he told me a joke in Yiddish – and no, I cannot remember it all these years later – but it was very much like him, earthy, a bit bawdy, and he delivered with just the right punch and swagger. I handed him my card and invited him to be formally interviewed for the newspaper. He thanked me. He said he abhorred interviews, but he’d certainly enjoy meeting up again when he returned to Boston.

“Any friend of John’s is ok with me,” he said.