Arthur Miller and the Jews

  • Julius Novick
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History book series (PSTPH)

Abstract

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) is manifestly the most eminent Jewish playwright who ever lived (unless you believe the rumor that Shakespeare was a Marrano), but in what sense is he a Jewish playwright? Allen Guttmann, in what is generally an admirable book about Jewish American writers, places Miller with Nathanael West and J. D. Salinger as “nominally Jewish, but … in no sense Jewish writers, nor does their work deal significantly with the process of assimilation and the resultant crisis of identity.” That was in 1971—I doubt if Guttmann would say that today—but the question of Jewishness, or the lack of it, still comes up frequently in discussions of Miller’s work. More temperately, Morris Freedman writes about Miller’s All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, After the Fall and The Price

The ethnic anonymity of these plays is striking, if only in comparison with the plays of Odets and O’Neill, whose Jewish and Irish Catholic families in Awake and Sing and Long Day’s Journey into Night are so plainly identified for us…. It is difficult to find ethnic clues in Miller.

Difficult, but not impossible (as Freedman himself makes clear).

Keywords

American Dream American Drama Ethnic Marker Jewish Father Nazi Death Camp 
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Notes

  1. Shakespeare was a Marrano: See David Basch, The Hidden Shakespeare: A Rosetta Stone (West Hartford, CT: Revelatory Press, 1994).Google Scholar
  2. nominally Jewish: Allen Guttmann, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 13.Google Scholar
  3. The ethnic anonymity: Morris Freedman, American Drama in Social Context (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 48.Google Scholar
  4. Willy was not Jewish: C. W. E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Drama, vol. 2, Williams/Miller/Albee (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 174.Google Scholar
  5. What one feels: George Ross, “Death of a Salesman in the Original,” Commentary, February, 1951: 184–86, repr. in Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism Gerald Weales, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 259, 260.Google Scholar
  6. Miller had published: Arthur Miller, Focus (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945).Google Scholar
  7. 90,000 copies: Malcolm Bradbury, “Arthur Miller’s Fiction,” in Christopher Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1007), 215.Google Scholar
  8. a broken part: Arthur Miller, “Monte Saint Angelo,” Harper’s (March, 1951), repr. as “Monte Sant’Angelo,” in Arthur Miller, I Don’t Need You Any More (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 61.Google Scholar
  9. a disturbing aspect: Mary McCarthy, Sights and Spectacles: Theater Chronicles, 1937–1956 (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), xiv–xv, xvi.Google Scholar
  10. crypto -Jewish characters: Leslie A. Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York: Stein and Day, 1964), 91.Google Scholar
  11. sought to conceal: Leslie A. Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991), 66.Google Scholar
  12. Where the theme: Quoted in Robert A. Martin, “The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller: An Interview,” Educational Theatre Journal 21 (1969), repr.Google Scholar
  13. Matthew C. Roudané, ed., Conversations with Arthur Miller (Jackson, MS, and London, UK: University Press of Mississippi, 1987), 183.Google Scholar
  14. Chinese audiences: Quoted in Christopher Bigsby, Arthur Miller and Company: Arthur Miller Talks about His Work in the Company of Actors, Designers, Directors, Reviewers and Writers (London, UK: Methuen, 1990), 64.Google Scholar
  15. all-African-American: Brenda Murphy, Miller: Death of a Salesman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 83–87.Google Scholar
  16. Rather than asking: Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 57.Google Scholar
  17. As Jews light-years away: Arthur Miller, preface to Death of a Salesman, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), xii.Google Scholar
  18. lost in that jungle: Ronald Bryden, “A Model for the Future,” The Observer, London, February 19, 1967.Google Scholar
  19. archetypal diaspora Jew: Benjamin Nelson, “Arthur Miller,” in Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub, eds., Contemporary Jewish -American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Wesport, CT, and London, UK: Greenwood Press, 1999), 53–54.Google Scholar
  20. not for myself alone: Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: MJF Books, 1974), 21. First published 1951 by Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
  21. Arthur Miller, After the Fall, in Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, v. 2 (New York: Viking Press, 1981):Google Scholar
  22. wish to kill: Judd L. Teller, Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), 260.Google Scholar
  23. Arthur Miller, The Price (Toronto, New York, and London: Bantam Books, 1969 ).Google Scholar

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© Julius Novick 2008

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  • Julius Novick

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