Jewish Novels, Berlin Airlift, Leon Uris' "Armageddon-A Novel of Berlin" and Preserving Our Memory

“To me, a writer is one of the most important soldiers in the fight for survival of the human race. He must stay at his post in the thick of fire to serve the cause of mankind.” 
― Leon Uris

Dr. Suzanne Gossett was a great teacher in the English Department of Loyola University when I was an undergraduates in the early 1970's   I had a course in the Jewish American novel and we read Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Phillip Roth and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.  I loved Malamud, liked Bellow, detested Phillip Roth and found myself conflicted about the other Roth.  Call it Sleep took a kid by the name of David Schearl from the age of six into early adolescence - the tale is very much like James Joyce's early pages of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man in its imagism and sexual iconography - only in Yiddish, as opposed to Jackeen Dublinese.

The book is a compendium of fear boiling in a little guy.  He gets bullied by family, Reb Yidall his Hebrew instructor, older kids and, of course, a Catholic thug named Leo who gives David a rosary and rapes his little sister.

I presented my conflicts to Dr. Gossett, the novel is powerful and beautifully written, but seems dangerous.  David is a victim for scores of pages and is only freed somehow - Deus Ex Machina -by a step-father who relents from killing the boy and a mother who finally offers him some level of psychological comfort. Call It Sleep is an angst-addict's dope.  I countered Henry Roth with Leon Uris was not part of canon of Jewish novelists in the Loyola offering.

Leon Uris had not time for Freudian, Jungian, or Hegelian deconstructions and dithering.  Jews faced the existential reality of extinction.  Now, that is a problem.

Uris wrote about the common humanity that just might save not only Jews but stupid and self-absorbed planet full of carbon footprints.

Dr. Gossett assured me that, while Leon Uris sold millions books, wrote the screenplay to movies like Gunfight at OK Corral and others,  he was no Saul Bellow.  However, . . ." I could write a paper."

I did - got a B- and noted from my mentress " B'nai B'rith would love your point of view on the self-loathing Jew."   I used Armageddon and Exodus to counter Henry Roth.  Thin gruel. Armageddon and Exodus remain truly great reads. Exodus chronicles the birth of Israel in the wake of Holocaust and Armageddon the Berlin Airlift - contemporary to Israel's geopolitical obstetric agonistes.

This month marks the Anniversary of Berlin Airlift in 1948.  I believe that this event happened to be as much of an existential threat to mankind. The USSR and USA et al were at daggers drawn with blood lusts still up from the Second World War.  Gen. George Marshall and the hundreds of anonymous pilots and crews who flew food and fuel into the Soviet blockaded city of Berlin made Stalin blink.

Leon Uris gives humanity fair warning "It Can Happen Again"  and when it does everyone, not just the Jews, are fair game.

We, all of us, do not have  the time, the temperament, the memory or the luxury to self-loathe.

Baseball, Debt, Forgiving the Goons and Making Sense of the Goofy New World Order - Michaek Moriarty on Point

Wazzit Say? 

Sumpin aboud . . .Exercisin Yer Free Will . . .don't cost nutttin.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense: - Alexander Pope

 The measure the greatness of all other books against the greatest literary backdrop of all-time, the Bible, and I find with Joyce's Ulysses, the Bible doesn't even come close. If you're a writer, and you haven't read Ulysses, that fact is probably apparent in your writing  . . .
Joyce would have said as much. Joyce said a lot of things, such as: If Dublin was to be destroyed,Ulysses would be the book used to put it back together again. He said the same thing about the universe in accordance with Finnegans Wake.FW is a literary work that seems to have condensed time and space into a nutshell. Joyce also said of Ulysses: I'm writing a book to keep the scholars and professors guessing for centuries. That is the only way to ensure one's own immortality. Adam Michael Luebke

James Joyce is a tough read.  When a reader manages to get through with Dubliners, a collection of short-stories, the novel Portrait of the Artist as Young Man tosses up an offensive line of cultural tropes and references from Western Civilization that is as daunting as Jerry Kramer, Jim Otto, Fuzzy Thurston, Jim Ringo, Forrest Gregg and Bob Skoronski.  Those gents were the 1959-1963 Green Bay Packer offensive linemen - tough to get through.

Life is tough to get through.  James Joyce was said to have revolutionized literature - not really. Many, many, many ink-slingers are as thick with cross-references and dark conceits - Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift and Marcel Proust to name a few. Joyce, however,  could be as lucid and straightforward as a sportswriter when he chose to do so, or if the occasion demanded.

The more one brings to the blank paper, along with the standards of plain and truthful speaking, the richer the benefits for the writer's readers.    James Joyce brought music to his reader via the written word. Sound and Sense merged in a beautifully orchestrated and executed performance - Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake make the 1959-1963 Packers' offensive line seem like Mae Kennedy Kane Dancers *confronting Ragen's Colts with hangovers. Those are two obscure Chicago references for the energetic reader.

Ulysses offers this - Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine (55).

Is there anything left un-uttered? Ulysses is that Roman name for that Greek guy what wandered when he pissed off the gods and took a long time to get home to the Old Lady and the kid, right?  So, what's that got to do with Dublin on  16 June 1904?  Plenty.  That's the point.

Michael Moriarty writes much like James Joyce and brings a vast arsenal of culture to his prose.  This early morning before I could get to Kareem's Dunkin Donuts at 104th & Western, I was fully  caffeinated with the following offering by my pal Michael Moriarty.   Mr. Moriarty and I share a Jesuit education, a Catholic upbringing and Chicago roots.  We learned that First Principles based upon obligation to God as the foundation to living a good and happy life.  Without a sounding board, man is deaf.  If we refuse to hear the sound of the unborn child in mother's womb, what is the point of going to a symphony.

Michael Moriarty - read and listen:

THE NEW WORLD ORDER’S FIELD OF DREAMS
By Michael MoriartyAugust 7, 2012NewsWithViews.comMy grandfather, George Moriarty, first played for Chicago.No, he didn’t field for the Chicago White Sox, a team that eventually became known as the infamous Chicago Black Sox.He played for the Chicago Cubs. That baseball team hired my grandfather right off the sandlots of The Toddlin’ Town’s very, very tough and very, very Irish South Side.“Big George”, as we used to call him, then went on to play with the New York Highlanders – which later became the New York Yankees – and then he settled down for most of his playing career with the Detroit Tigers.There he became that team’s best third baseman … until George Kell, that is.My GrandfatherMy grandfather really couldn’t hit all that well. Never broke a seasonal .300.But what a base stealer!!Stole home more times in one season than anyone in baseball history … including Ty Cobb.Well, at least that’s what my father said he did.DON’T DIE ON THIRD!was written about him.The film, Gangs of New York, wasn’t all that different from gangs of Chicago.Tough.You had to know how to fight or you weren’t going to last long.You certainly couldn’t survive in the American Big League Anything if you batted under .300.Unless you knew how to protect the better hitters.I played a hockey “Goon” in television’s Deadliest Season. I was there on the ice to do nothing more than “intimidate.”Things get a little out of hand and my character kills another player on the ice.Bang The Drum Slowly was almost exactly the opposite message from my grandfather’s life and the lessons of The Deadliest Season: Protect the wounded and the infirm and you’ll build team spirit.Another baseball film, Field of Dreams, preaches a much more profoundly Liberal sermon than Bang The Drum Slowly.Field of Dreams is not only more palatably radical than any other American baseball film but more heart-warmingly revolutionary than any other American film in recent history.It basically echoes a breathtaking philosophic position that the writer Gary Wills offered us regarding the New Testament’s Judas:Gary Wills, another version of a Christian contradiction-in-terms, a Catholic Progressive – along with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi – has been trying to canonize Judas for quite some time, exalt him as the most Christ-like of characters, this side of Christ Himself.Judas performed the job he had to perform and, therefore, he was doing God’s Will.“He was only doing his job!”Judas deserves to be honored for that.“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!”Okay.Kind of.Field of Dreams is a beautifully made film of forgiveness and reconciliation … for everyone.It is ultimately everyone’s field of dreams in everyone’s most childlike reveries.According to this film, we all, good-bad-or-indiffently-evil, end up in heaven, even every member of the undeniably but poignantly corrupt Chicago Black Sox.Okay.Kind of.There is still, however, the last, big time I noticed a dividing line between the good and the evil.Between, say Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill.Then why did President Barack Hussein Obama send a gift from the Queen of England – a bust of Winston Churchill – why did he send that bust back to London?!And why did he promise Vladimir Putin of neo-Soviet Russia that he would be more “flexible” when he’s re-elected?Barack Obama must be a fan of something other than the World War II Free World.He’s not only a fan and booster but a major creator of what we now know of as “The Progressive New World Order.”Imagine a film wherein the victims of Stalinist oppression, relatives of the executed and worked to death, played soccer with Nikita Khrushchev?“All is forgiven!”Of course, a few cheating baseball players in Field of Dreams are hardly the Red Army.Dreams are the heart of an inevitably worldwide conflict; and since conflict is the heart of drama, let’s examine The Fields of Everyone’s Dreams.President Barack Hussein Obama dreams of a “fundamental transformation of the United States of America”.It’s all there in great detail within his tribute to his family, Dreams For My Father.Okay.He, however, is not the only one working on this.Guess what?The Progressive “New World Order” was most noticeably announced by George Bush Sr.A kinder gentler America” was,I believe,how Bush expressedhis own “field of dreams.”Eventually this New World Order just had to necessitate “the fundamental transformation of the United States of America.”What better way to begin it than by having George Bush Jr. put America into its biggest debt until, of course, Barack Hussein Obama showed up and tripled that same, record-breaking bankruptcy.Why?A Field of Dreams called the New World Order cannot be achieved without a “fundamental transformation of the United States.”What easier and simpler way to do that than by putting America into a debt that she cannot possibly extricate herself from?A field of dreams called The New World Order will take “strong medicine” in order to transform life on earth into the very heaven we experience in the filmField of Dreams.American debt is that “strong medicine”.Aside from suicidal, American debt, what is the main ingredient for creating The New World Order?Forgiveness.Apparently our feelings about the Soviet Union and Red China are the main obstacles to The New World Order’s Field of Dreams.We are in for the Obama Nation’s prolonged “teachable moment.”If we wholeheartedly forgive the Chicago Black Sox, put ourselves in heaven with them, then we can move on to forgiving the tyranny of Communism.After the revelations of America’s self-loathing, plus the opening punches to American self-respect in the patronizing brilliance of what I call “naïve genius,” the New World Order will keep America soft, warm and gooey withField of Dreams and Dreams For My Father until America welcomes her own death as a favor.I’m in Canada watching all this while rooting for the Tea Party and leadership such as Allen West. All of which are an embarrassingly painful minority.There is, however, the possibility of miracles.If such miracles don’t happen and the Obama Nation is reinstated by reelection, all of Canada had better start praying for her own miracles. My new homeland is much easier “pickings” than the former greatest nation of the Free World, the United States of America.Such death of individual freedom and responsibility is called “Progress”.With the virulently expanding death by legalized abortion and euthanasia, I call it The New World Order’s Fourth Reich.
What does that mean?The Progressively Digestible Survival of The Progressively Fittest.Until then, with the expanding control of Big Government over everything, we’ll be fed the palatable pap, the heart-warming, end-of-the-film suicide of James Earl Jones.
Perhaps never to return alive?His winningly and gently humorous dance into that heavenly field of corn?But only as a ghost of his former self?Death as merely an easily addictive field of dreams?The Western World’s Judeo-Christian culture, largely inspired by the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations?All to be melted away by a Progressively Marxist New World Order?Forgiveness for everyone?Including Judas, Mao and Joseph Stalin?When will that happen?When Hell freezes over and Heaven is a skating rink.© 2012 - Michael Moriarty - All Rights Reserved

* Mae Kennedy Kane 

Ragen's Colts - "Hit Me and You Hit 2,000". 



http://voices.yahoo.com/5-greatest-lines-james-joyces-ulysses-8361231.html?cat=9

http://newswithviews.com/Moriarty/michael133.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragen's_Colts
http://www.irishamericannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2511:chicagos-first-family-of-irish-radio&catid=86:region
http://www.dom.edu/library/collections/kane-irish-books

Reading Michael Moriarty - A Primer for James Joyce

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend 1
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to 2
Howth Castle and Environs. . . . Coming, far! End here. Us 13
then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thous- 14
endsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a 15
long the
Finnegan's Wake - James Joyce PARIS, 17. 1922-1939

None of them (George Soros, Vlad Putin and President Obama) reached their present standings by dint of a warm heart. Michael Moriarty - Canada 2012.

I had a a very good student at La Lumiere (1988-92) who wanted to read Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. I asked the young woman* if she had read Dubliners and she replied "No."

Had she read, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man? Again, "No."

Ulysses? " No,"

How about Chamber Music, Pomes Penny each? " No, but heard that if you read James Joyce, you'll have an easier time with college admissions and it helps in the interviews.

It do. Joyce is tough. Have you read Milton? " No."

Dante? " No."

Have ever listened to the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem? " No."

Ever heard of Oliver St. John Gogarty**?

" No."

Okay. Let's start there with the song " Finnegan's Wake."


" No thanks. I have to meet my counsellor. Bye."

Oliver St.John Gogarty was a pal of young James Joyce and became a prominent Dublin surgeon and man of letters. Interesting name -Oliver = both St. Oliver Plunkett Martyr, but, also Oliver Cromwell whose Death Panels made Martyrs. St. John the Gospel writer and also a great Norman family name that is pronounced Sin Jin across the pond and Gogarty at the caboose. A typical Paddy name related to Fogarty - meaning the banished, or exiled. (O'hOgartaigh)

Gogarty was the Alpha Male and James Joyce the wingman. Gogarty was a superb athlete, gregarious, handsome, confident,physically courageous, and social. Jimmy Joyce, was bookish, sickly, quietly witty, brooding, shy, and angry.

Gogarty was at home in Anglo-Irish Protestant circles and could work a pint glass in a dirty Dublin Moore Street shebeen with honest Tadgh and Paddy. Young James Joyce affected the air of a Pre-Raphaelite genius and often had the living shite beat out of him, unless Gogarty were near-by. Later in Paris, Old Jim Joyce picked fights after getting a snoot-full of absinthe and then declaring " Deal with them, Hemingway!" - which the Oak Park bully did and glad to do so.

Gogarty authored As I went Down Sackville Street, a witty and amusing memoir of pre-WWI and Civil War Dublin ( 1910-1922) and scores of articles, poems, plays and sketches. He was a hero of the IRA during the Black and Tans War and later was elected to the Irish Senate.

James Joyce had a falling out with the Alpha Male in 1904 and imposed exile on himself from dear old dirty Dublin, Ireland and going to regular Mass on Sundays.

My student never asked me about Oliver St. John Gogarty.

James Joyce is on literary Olympus with Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Gogarty is a fine bit of hill.

Joyce, like Milton read and absorbed words, sounds, rythms and rhymes in order to slowly develop works of genius. He did not begin with Finnegan's Wake. Nor should a sixteen year old girl. Nor should anyone. One must immerse oneself in the shallow waters before cliff diving in Mexico.

One of the best cliff-divers wielding a pen and keyboard is renowned actor Michael Moriarty. He passed another birthday on Friday April 5th. Mr. Moriarty lives in self-imposed political exile in Canada and could not be a happier man. He was angered by Bill Clinton, America's Alcibiades, and is appalled by the present occupant of the White House. I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Moriarty. He like Gogarty and Joyce welded to Vaughan Williams - an accomplished actor, musician, historian, journalist and fierce defender of the unborn.

I recommend reading Michael Moriarty, knowing that his prose is a plunge into the deep end of the pool. He is no silly bonhomie like Christopher Buckley, much less a timid titmouse like David Brooks; rather, he is liberal with literary and cultural allusions, lost on to many first time readers. His context is vast.

Click my post title for # 44 in his Michael Moriarty's Haunted Heaven.

* Last I heard this young woman held a Master of Arts and was near completion of her Ph.D. in English Literature.

** "He had a defect that prevented him being a companionable man: he had no reserve in speaking about people, even those he had cause to admire, even those who were close to him. If they had some pitiful disability or shortcoming, he brought it right out. It was an incontinence of speech... The result was that people gave him license and kept a distance from him." --Padraic Colum (emphasis my own)


O.St.J.Gogarty's "The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly sarcastic) Jesus" [e206]

I'm the queerest young fellow that ever was heard.
My mother's a Jew; my father's a Bird
With Joseph the Joiner I cannot agree
So 'Here's to Disciples and Calvary.'
If anyone thinks that I amn't divine,
He gets no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.

My methods are new and are causing surprise:
To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes
To signify merely there must be a cod
If the Commons will enter the Kingdom of Good

Now you know I don't swim and you know I don't skate
I came down to the ferry one day and was late.
So I walked on the water and all cried, in faith!
For a Jewman it's better than having to bathe.

Whenever I enter in triumph and pass
You will find that my triumph is due to an ass
(And public support is a grand sinecure
When you once get the public to pity the poor.)

Then give up your cabin and ask them for bread
And they'll give you a stone habitation instead
With fine grounds to walk in and raincoat to wear
And the Sheep will be naked before you'll go bare.

The more men are wretched the more you will rule
But thunder out 'Sinner' to each bloody fool;
For the Kingdom of God (that's within you) begins
When you once make a fellow acknowledge he sins.

Rebellion anticipates timely by 'Hope,'
And stories of Judas and Peter the Pope
And you'll find that you'll never be left in the lurch
By children of Sorrows and Mother the Church

Goodbye, now, goodbye, you are sure to be fed
You will come on My Grave when I rise from the Dead
What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
And Olivet's breezy-- Goodbye now Goodbye

http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/joyce_works_fw.html

Michael Moriarty, Sergei Rachmaninoff and James Joyce

“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the dusty odor of cretonne. She was tired.” James Joyce -'Eveline' from The Dubliners

Eveline or Evvy, refused to escape and buried her White face in the common-place -lace curtains, dust and a timorous obligation to the familiar.

In this very short story by James Joyce, the reader gets dragged into the soul-less commonplace that is Eveline.

She is a middle class woman in love with a a manly, kind, adventurous and alive man named Frank. Frank is leaving dear old dirty Dublin for Buenas Aires and wants to take Evvy with him. She refuses. She stays musty and dusty. Get these final lines -

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

"Come!"

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

"Come!"

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

"Eveline! Evvy!"

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

Old Jim could work a pen.

Another fine writer is my frequent e-mail pal, Michael Moriarty. This actor, musician, journalist and courageous defender of the unborn lives in Canada and is working on an autobiographical musical composition. This musical biography may be a Confessio like St. Augustine's or an Apologia ala John Cardinal Newman. We shall see, or hear.

Nevertheless, Mr. Moriarty wrote a touching remembrance for Exit Stage Right. Like his musical composition the essays are titled The Haunted Heaven. In the passage that I provide today, Mr. Moriarty explores the coming of the Holy Spirit through the music of Rachmaninoff. Here is the passage by the Russian composer refered to in Mr. Moriarty's essay -

Rachmaninoff!

What a Virgil, Sergei Rachmaninoff, to lead me into the Haunted Heavens of Life!

Then to be reintroduced to the Russian giant by a divinely gifted genius named Olga Kern!!

She is now ripping into the last movement with all the simultaneous speed, strength and sensitivity she can summon up with the same oceanic brilliance she has mustered throughout this virtual monster of a piano concerto.

Russian composers and Russian musicians will play a monumentally large role in my life as the years pass. The first of course was the vibrantly impassioned Russian genie, Sergei Rachmaninoff.

He and his Haunted Heaven entered my life before I could even talk.

To this day Rachmaninoff's protean lyricism seems unsurpassed by anyone.

He and his music became a virtual umbilical cord to my infancy's ecstasy.

His melodies are only the beginning of his abandon to whatever muse God chose to both plague and adore him with.

Oceanic is the only adjective that seems sufficient.

Unlike Eveline in Joyce's tale, Moriarty plunges into the waves.

Michael can work a pen.


http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/959/