Update 5-22-12

Hi,

First, the scholarship checks arrived at South.  Liz King Giordano wrote:  The checks arrived in the mail today, Friday, May 18th.  I contacted Linda Kettering to confirm that she’ll be presenting the awards, and I will also contact Booker Gibson to see if he is attending the program.  The Awards Assembly is Wednesday, June 6th, in South Hall at 7 PM, and graduation is Friday, June 22nd.  I'll try to send you the programs soon after that and remind the students to write their thank-you notes.  Again, thanks to everyone for supporting these scholarships. 

Second, half of a correction from last week:  I think South's English teacher's name was Paul Hartman.  I had it as "Phil" in half the newsletters last week, and then I corrected it.  Phil Hartman was the late actor and comic.

Third, from Zelda White Nichols:  A continuation of a travelogue started by Larry Rugan is a visit to Low Country South Carolina.  We have spent numerous vacations in California’s wine countries -- Central Coast, Napa and Sonoma -- and the Pacific Northwest.  We lived within a half hour of the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine coasts and love that area, too.  It wasn’t until we purchased two beach rental properties in Garden City Beach, South Carolina, however, that we started falling in love with the Myrtle Beach south to Charleston coastal areas.
    To provide brochures of interesting places to stay for my renters, I visit as many places as possible each time we go to our beach houses for maintenance purposes.  I have learned of so many truly great animal sanctuaries of all kinds that provide life-long shelter for abused and abandoned animals, sea turtles, and raptors  -- birds of prey.  The variety makes my head spins.  This is truly a nature lover's paradise, especially with all the wildlife viewing areas along the coast.  If you are an American Revolution and Civil War history buff, this is the place to be as well.  This isn’t a solicitation for our beach rental properties -- we are completely booked for the summer -- but just want to share an experience that includes the above as well as great dining and hotels. If you're interested in further information, you can email me privately at:  Zelda .  nichols @ high-rock-lake . com  (please remove spaces)

Fourth and fifth, a pair of related stories from Robert Fiveson and Barbara Blitfield Pech:  First, from Robert:
    Arthur Miller and Death Of a Salesman have been a presence throughout my life.  My father was a salesman, and I once told him he was Willy Loman.  He asked, "Who the hell is that?" to which I responded "Exactly Dad."
    Also, my grandmother told me that my grandfather, Arthur Fiveson, had two sisters, one of whom married a man named Miller, and they had a son also named Arthur who became a playwright. 
    I may be misrembering the precise lineage, because it was an oral history, my grandmother told of how Arthur Miller was a third cousin on the Fiveson side.  My brother Mike traced to the name Fieveson from Kounas in Lithiuania (en . m . wikipedia . org/wiki / Kaunas_massacre_of_October_29,_1941)  (please remove spaces)  before the first E was dropped at Ellis Island.  He found proof of this in the archives.

Finally, from Barbara:  From The New York Times, May 18, 2012, by Samuel Freeman:  A Yiddish play with the title “Toyt fun a Salesman”opened at the Parkway Theater in Brooklyn early in 1951. As most of the audience recognized from the name alone, the show was a translation of Arthur Miller’s drama Death of a Salesman.  It seemed a mere footnote to the premiere production, which had completed its triumphal run on Broadway several months earlier, having won the Pulitzer Prize.
    Even so, a theater critic in Commentary magazine, George Ross, declared of the Brooklyn version, “What one feels most strikingly is that this Yiddish play is really the original, and the Broadway production was merely Arthur Miller’s translation into English.” 
    History, it must be said, has not exactly ratified Mr. Ross’s judgment.  In an enduring way, however, he framed a penetrating question about Miller’s masterpiece, which has echoed from the 1949 debut to the celebrated revival now on Broadway:  Is Willy Loman Jewish? 
    Did Miller create him devoid of ethnic or religious markings to better serve as an American Everyman broken on the wheel of capitalism?  Or did he subtly intend for part of Willy’s tragedy to be his estrangement from the Jewish and Judaic heritage that might have provided some ballast as his working life, and with it his very identity, falls to ruin? 
    These are the sort of questions that defy provable answers.  Miller himself changed his view of Willy over the decades, evolving from a fierce defense of his indeterminate identity to a perception of him as an untethered Jew.  Literary critics, especially Jewish ones, have long argued the point among themselves. Leslie Fiedler dismissed Willy as the “crypto-Jewish” product of Miller’s “pseudo-universalizing,” while Julius Novick maintained that the Loman family’s “separation from the roots ... is what makes them so vulnerable to the false values that undo them.” 
    Miller grew up in a thoroughly Jewish milieu, recalling in his autobiography, Timebends, how he sat on his great-grandfather’s lap in synagogue and later had a bar mitzvah ceremony. His adult belief system, though, took the form of left-wing politics, and critiques of capitalism and the McCarthy era’s Red Scare ultimately informed many of his finest plays -- All My Sons, A View From the Bridge, The Crucible,
Salesman -- had indisputably Jewish origins.  Miller based Willy Loman on his uncle Manny Newman, a salesman brought low by the Depression.  He tried out earlier versions of the character in stories he wrote in his teens and 20s about salesmen with apparently Jewish surnames — Schoenzeit and Schleifer.
So the intriguing question remains why Willy, as finally written, offers so little evidence of heritage.  Miller, in a 1969 interview, insisted that the character’s “religious or cultural background ... seems to me irrelevant.” The contemporary playwright Tony Kushner, who is editing Miller’s collected plays for the Library of America, suggested that for Jewish writers in the mid-20th century, “there wasn’t a sense of shame about being Jewish, but of reaching for something universal, and there was some sense that the immigrant experience and the ethnic specificity would limit it.” 
    Miller did write overtly Jewish characters, starting in his 1945 novel about anti-Semitism, Focus, and continuing through two plays about the Holocaust, Incident at Vichy (1964) and Broken Glass (1994).  So the decision to leave Willy’s identity indistinct represented a thought-through choice, not a chronic ambivalence about Jewish content.  Mr. Novick, for his part, called Salesman the sequel to Fiddler on the Roof -- the tragic culmination of the immigrant’s American dream.  Harold Bloom, a scholar of both biblical and modern literature, posited that the play’s heartbreaking, embittered reunion of Willy and his alienated son Biff is an inversion of the Bible’s reuniting of Jacob and Joseph, which he called “the paradigm of Jewish family love.” 
    The playwright David Mamet, himself the grandson of a traveling salesman, said that the play’s tension “between hope, confusion, aspiration and circumstance” was itself “the voice of the second-generation American-Jewish writers.”  Some critics have singled out Linda Loman’s famous speech about Willy --  “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person” -- as having a distinctively Yiddish cadence.
Over time, Miller came around to acknowledging some Jewish specificity to the Lomans. In an essay published for the play’s 50th anniversary, in 1999, he described them as “Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity.” Thus sundered, they are left “on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at the clean well-lighted place.” In the very absence of their Jewish identity, one might say, is its very presence. 
    The current production — widely lauded and nominated for seven Tony Awards — has been most notable for its fidelity to Miller’s original intent. It uses the set design and musical score from the original production, and it indelibly portrays Willy’s drift between present and past, between reality and memory and fantasy. Miller’s original title for the play, after all, was The Inside of His Head.
    The producer Scott Rudin was interested enough, though, in the matter of the Loman family’s roots to assemble a research folder of critical and biographical essays grappling with the Jew-Everyman debate.  “It’s so much a play about someone who wants to belong to the largest thing he can belong to — a fantasy of America,” Mr. Rudin said in a recent interview.  “And he’s become deracinated from his background in the process.” 
    Mike Nichols, the director of the current revival, came to the United States as a Jewish refugee child from Nazi Germany.  What he has seen in Willy is not the intensity of the immigrant generation of Jews, with its fervor for education, but the worship of materialism by the second generation, those disparaged in Yiddish as being “alrightniks.” 
    “Willy has no forebears,” Mr. Nichols said in an interview this month. “He’s not from any country. He has no holidays of any religion. So you have to assume Miller’s making a point. We who are struggling to sell enough have to drop everything — religion, nationality, family. There is nothing except, as Willy puts it, being known and being well-liked.”

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Rich