Marginally Jewish Poem by gershon hepner

Men have always fought their misery with dreams,
as Nathan Weinstein once declared, though not before
his name turned West, Nethanael. By changing teams
he thought he would remain a lonely heart no more,
his Jewishness seen only as a subtext for
the people who read texts with a midrashic mind.

Ultimately he was Jewish to the core
by hiding hints that only clever Jews can find.
Where angels fear to tread no hidden Jews will barge in,
for they will tiptoe in and hope you haven’t heard
about their origins, erased from text and margin,
but marginally, since they’re marginal, absurd.

Inspired by an article in Forward. January 1,2010, on Nathanael West by Ken Gordon (“The Marginally Jewish Reader: Nathanael West”) , who once wrote an essay for Sh’ma entitled “On Being a Marginally Jewish Reader.” “Men have always fought their misery with their dreams, ” is perhaps the most famous line in West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts, ” although his most famous two words are perhaps the name “Homer Simpson, ” a character in his “The Day of the Locust, ” played by Donald Sutherland in the 1975 movie. Nathan Weinstein changed his name to Nathanael West when he was 23. In this way he anticipated Bob Dyan (Robert Zimmerman) , Woody Allen (Allen Konigsberg) and Susan Sontag (Susan Rosenblatt) .

Harold Bloom wrote: “It is a melancholy paradox that West, who did not want to be Jewish in any way, remains the most indisputably Jewish writer yet to appear in America, a judgment at once aesthetic and moral.” Leslie Fiedler says that West “made no attempt to hide his own mythological identification and that of his characters with the self-proclaimed Jewish messiah rejected by his own people, ” leading Harold Bloom to declare that West is “a significant episode ina long and tormented history of Jewish Gnosticism.”

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