Читать книгу Harvey Keitel - Marshall Fine - Страница 8

How do you explain a nice Jewish boy from Brighton Beach, scion of an Orthodox Jewish family, quitting high school – turning his back on education – to join the Marines? It simply wasn’t done. As one long-time friend observed, ‘What kind of Jew goes into the Marines? And likes it!’

One seeking to rebel against and distance himself from a background he found oppressive and limiting. One who could see that his current form of rebellion – hanging out in the poolroom with his friends – was a dead end. But one who wound up substituting one rigid system of behavior (that of the United States Marine Corps) for another (Orthodox Judaism).

Keitel’s parents had escaped the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe, emigrating to New York where they settled in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. His father, who was from Poland, worked as a hatmaker and a garment worker, meager wages on which to raise a growing family. His mother, who had come from Romania, supplemented the family income by working at a luncheonette.

When Harvey was born on May 13, 1939, he was the youngest of three children, with an older brother and sister. The family all lived in a small apartment in Brighton Beach on Avenue X and Brighton Beach Avenue.

The second-floor walk-up rattled and shook every time the elevated subway, on tracks twenty feet from the window, screeched by. The apartment was small and dark, but it overlooked a colorful neighborhood of immigrant families staking out second-generation roots. Keitel’s Brighton Beach blended together Jews, Italians, Irish. ‘It was an incredibly colorful place to grow up,’ he said. ‘Brooklyn was a culture unto itself – Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, the music, the dances.’

His turf during his boyhood summers was the ocean and the nearby Coney Island amusement park. Swimming, climbing on and fishing off the rocks – what more could a kid ask for? There were fireworks every Tuesday night in the summer and an annual Mardi Gras at Coney Island, where the young Keitel would sell confetti.

The proceeds would go toward stuffing himself with Nathan’s Kosher hot dogs or, occasionally, buying rides on the Steeplechase. Somehow, though, the high-speed ride was never as exciting as the thrill of trying to sneak in without paying or the fear of getting caught. It was never easy.

As Keitel observed, ‘Everything was right there on those streets, in that poolroom. It was limiting only in that we had very few teachers to show us where that elevated train led to. That was our limitation. We didn’t know the avenues of possibilities. Manhattan could have been the moon to us.’

If he had fears as a kid, they were more of the movie-inspired kind. He walked around in a state of mild terror, fearful that he might encounter deadly quicksand or molten lava or some other natural disaster he’d seen at a Saturday matinee.

In fact, the worst thing he was likely to run into during those early days of the Eisenhower administration was the occasional fist fight. The toughest decision he had to make was where to hang out that day: the poolroom or the candy store at Avenue U and East 8th Street, where they would sip egg creams and eat Mello Rolls.

Yet even the tough kids understood certain innate rules of respect and discipline, which they made clear to the young Harvey one day in the luncheonette his mother ran on Avenue X. He had been acting the big shot with the help, while a few boys sat and had coffee and talked among themselves. The final straw was when Keitel’s mother sat down next to him and asked him if he’d be able to help that day.

‘Oh, man,’ Keitel said loudly, upset at being pressed into service.

Before he knew it, he had been swatted across the back of the head by one of the more imposing Avenue X boys, who now loomed over Keitel. ‘Don’t talk that way to your mother,’ he told Keitel, who could only rub his head and nod mutely.

Home life was something else: ‘I’ve had many problems in my life that I’ve had to get through, beginning with being a little boy,’ Keitel observed.

Such as the fact that he began stuttering at the age of six or seven, a problem that carried on into his teens. What is a painful and emotionally challenging period in anyone’s life became excruciating for a young man who stuttered:

It was a huge, huge, deep, deep embarrassment, the object of humiliation by other children. It took years to go away. I still stutter at times. The stutter is something that occurs as the result of something else. It’s sort of a road to your identity. It’s a clue about something, it’s a clue about disturbance.

It was very painful because I was shy to begin with. Confrontation means asserting yourself. Stuttering is an attempt to stop the assertion of the self. I can’t think of anything more frustrating or more detrimental to evolving than not allowing yourself whatever thought comes to mind.

What kind of thoughts? Ones that went against the rigid interpretation of life practiced by his parents, Orthodox Jews in the middle of a secular world exploding with the expanding and engulfing youth culture of movies and rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s not hard to imagine the lectures Keitel must have received from his parents, strict Eastern European people who had escaped annihilation in Europe only to be forced to start all over again – and in a new language. Nor is it difficult to conjure up the grinding combination of Orthodox Judaism and Depression-era economic pressures – which squeezed the neighborhood long after World War II had ended, well into the 1950s, even as the rest of America seemed to be enjoying a much-vaunted post-war prosperity.

‘My mother worked at a luncheonette and my father worked at a factory as a sewing-machine operator and they could barely read or write,’ Keitel recalled. ‘Life demanded of them that they work hard for their family and they did so and I admire them deeply for that.’

Here, however, was Keitel, with all the raging hormones and sexually charged thoughts of a normal teenage boy in the Elvis era, when his peers were rocking and rolling, affecting the hairstyles and attitudes of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One – none of which had penetrated the world of Keitel’s parents.

Undoubtedly the lectures were long and stern: about the forbidden nature of sex and everything else young Harvey deemed most interesting, on the need to remember and honor the old way and resist the temptation of this godless new popular culture. Not to do so was not just wrong – it was punishable. But Harvey found himself irresistibly drawn to what he could see of the outside world and suffered the wrath and disappointment of his parents as a result.

Which may have led to the stuttering, he decided:

Guilt can be insidious, which helps to repress thoughts. You pick it up quickly – in your home, in your neighborhood. Once children are taught guilt, they will stutter in one way or another. If you’re ashamed of one feeling, you’re going to be ashamed of all your feelings. That’s the basis for neurosis. Unfortunately, as a youngster I learned that certain feelings and thoughts were bad. You learn it’s wrong to have a certain thought. As a young man, there were thoughts I had and propensities to do certain things, which I was very ashamed of. So if you have that thought, you say, ‘I’m bad. I must get rid of that thought.’ But how do you get rid of a thought? What do you do as a child? You choke yourself.

A doctor I know said to me, ‘You are allowed any thought. Every thought is a worthwhile thought.’ You are not responsible for your thoughts. One is only responsible for what he does. It took me a long time to learn what that doctor expressed to me.

Self-satisfaction was unknown to me as a young man. That came late in my life. The pain of my journey led me to satisfaction. Avoiding the pain led to strangulation, to self-loathing. By descending into the pain, I learned satisfaction.

Without that kind of repression and longing Keitel might not be the actor he eventually became: ‘I’ve learned over the course of my life,’ he said, ‘that memories I once considered painful have been the greatest source of revelation in my life, so it’s too simple to say they’re positive or negative.’

Obviously, he wasn’t the only Jewish kid from Brighton Beach who argued with his parents about dressing like a hood. Indeed, at Keitel’s bar mitzvah, the rabbi performing the Jewish coming-of-age ritual booted one of Keitel’s young pals out of the synagogue. His crime? Wearing such incipient hipster garb as a checkered cabana-style jacket, peg pants and pointy-toed shoes.

The conflict between Keitel’s need to conform to his parents’ wishes and his urge to create an identity of his own didn’t really come to a head until after his bar mitzvah.

It was a Kosher household, which meant that they followed the Jewish dietary laws prohibiting, among other things, the eating of any pork or shellfish products as well as proscribing milk and meat products at the same meal. Though he moved away from Judaism, the habits of keeping Kosher stuck with Keitel, at least through his stint in the Marines. There, his friends would battle to sit next to him in the mess hall, because he would give away the milk that was invariably served with the meat of the day.

Keitel went to Hebrew school and studied at home with his grandfather, a man whose imposing strictness daunted him: ‘I remember my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, making me read from my Hebrew book,’ he recalled. ‘My brother, who is five years older, stuck his head in the kitchen and said, “Aleph bais, gimme a raise, ches tes, kiss mein ess.” Then he ran out, with my grandfather hollering at him. I couldn’t believe my brother had done that. I was scared to death.’

Once the bar mitzvah was past, however, Keitel began to re-evaluate Judaism, losing faith as he looked at the problems that seemed to threaten the world’s very existence in those days of Cold War panic. What kind of God would allow such things to go on?

In his crowd Keitel became known as someone who was willing to put his life on the line and confront God himself: as an act of rebellion, he started spitting on mezuzahs, the little metal sacraments containing a small piece of parchment with writings from the Torah that some Jews attach to the front doorpost. Observant Jews kiss their fingers and touch the mezuzah as they enter and leave their homes.

And Keitel was spitting on them:

I was literally spitting. My friends would say, with great fear, ‘Don’t do that, Harvey!, don’t do that!’ I said, ‘Why? What’s going to happen? Here I am, God – do something!’ I wasn’t ashamed of being a Jew – I had just lost faith. There was so much misery and so much deprivation. I didn’t understand how God fit into that. I thought God was responsible.

Religion meant nothing to me when I was growing up because it was never made clear to me how the stories and myths in the Bible were relevant to my life. We were simply taught to be fearful. It’s a sin religion isn’t taught with more feeling for the beauty of the stories.

Back then, someone said to me, ‘It’s people like you who are the true believers.’ I spat on the mezuzah again. That person was right, though. It’s been a long journey but I’ve come back. I would now say that I am a devout believer in the divinity but for a long time I just adopted Thomas Paine’s credo, that my religion was to do what is right.

His rebellion extended beyond attempts at blasphemy into his efforts to attain juvenile-delinquency status: the duck’s-ass hairstyle, the leather jacket, the peg pants set off by pointy shoes with metal cleats to announce his arrival from a block away. He wanted to be a tough guy because that’s the way the guys were.

Not out-and-out gangsters, of course: just wiseguys who caused a little commotion now and then. According to one classmate of Keitel’s at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach,

We were what was called trumbnicks, troublemakers. We were tough but we weren’t bad. By today’s standards, we were angels. We got into fights, local things. We would go to a dance and end up in a brawl. We’d go to the old Manhattan-Brooklyn Jewish Center. We were Ashkenazi Jews and we’d get into fights with the Syrian Jews. We’d talk to their girls or they’d talk to ours and the next thing you know, you’d have fifty guys fighting in the street. But not with guns or knives – just with fists.

As Keitel recalled it, ‘You had to be tough, otherwise you were considered a fag, a sissy. We used to have rock fights with black people. I had some black friends and we’d kid one another. The divisiveness and the rock fights always seemed absurd to us. I threw rocks at them and they threw rocks at me.’

Being tough meant doing things that scared you, things you knew could get you in trouble with the police or worse. Being tough meant never copping to that fear, no matter how overpowering it might become. For Keitel, being tough meant hiding his fear along with all the other unwanted, unwelcome emotions swirling around in his adolescent mind:

I remember being scared to rob pigeon coops, but you couldn’t admit that. There was nothing to be but tough. Now the other kids who were going to school and studying to be something – a doctor, lawyer, an Indian chief – they had a different identity. But the tough guys, their identity was to be tough. It was as if you were living in Africa and you had a tribe. You had to go out and kill animals to survive. Well, in this particular environment, to survive, you had to steal a car, tap a pigeon coop, steal things, wear certain clothing, put on the whole show. Otherwise you would be an outcast.

Which was already an identity Keitel was dealing with in everyday life. As the son of immigrants who resented his ever-more-Americanized worldview, he dealt every day with being an outsider in his own home; outside the house, on the other hand, he knew he would never be the all-American kid. As a Jew, he had grown up with the idea of anti-Semitism, its specter emanating from Europe during the war against Germany. As a teenager, he coped with the mercurial nature of social standing in the ever-shifting world of high school. And the only place he seemed to fit was with the tough guys.

Mark Reiner, a high-school friend, said, ‘Harvey was streetwise and tough, but he was never mean. He knew how to handle himself and while he wouldn’t back off from a fight, he never went looking for trouble either. He did some things I wouldn’t, but he never lost his sense of decency.’ And Keitel acknowledged:

I knew, deep down, that I didn’t belong with that crowd. I was scared and didn’t feel part of it but I couldn’t admit that to myself, much less to them. So I played the game. I was not a real tough guy. The Brighton Beach Sinners were a group of friends of mine. The name was created by the press after a serious incident of vandalism at a neighborhood school. We didn’t consider ourselves great sinners. We were trying to learn what life was about, we were trying to survive life. I saw myself trying to develop the power to live. I didn’t think so much that I could be something as much as I needed to be something.

There was so much energy and talent among those guys. I wish I could have sat down with them and talked about things I was interested in – about feelings, about life, about personal problems. I wanted to do that but I couldn’t. That wasn’t tough. That was soft.

Yet he was a popular kid with his classmates, being elected by his peers as leader of the eighth-grade honor society, much to the chagrin of teacher Edna Dinkel, who took one look at the grinning juvenile-delinquent-in-training and said, ‘I do not consider that an appropriate choice.’ She ordered a new election, with different results and, being the teacher, she got what she ordered.

Meanwhile, Keitel was discovering new paradigms for his notions of toughness – in the movies of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Here, too, were misunderstood young men, at odds with both parents and society, trying simply to find out who they were amid a world of misunderstanding and opposition. The films showed the young Keitel that toughness could be associated with emotional honesty and not simply a readiness to be quick with the fists:

I related to James Dean because he was in situations that we were in. I never related to his tough guy side. It was always his sensitivity and yet that’s exactly what I couldn’t be. I always buried it.

My comrades and I didn’t know about being nourished and we didn’t have the courage to love somebody. That wasn’t something we pursued. We weren’t brought up to nourish one another’s thoughts, to discuss our deep conflicts. Who the hell ever walked over to someone back then and said, ‘Uh, listen, I really feel very lonely’, or ‘I feel very scared’ or ‘I’m not sure where I’m at.’ We never spoke like that.

I began to get a sense that courage was something other than what I thought it was. I saw people such as Dean, Brando and John Cassavetes as being heroic. As growing up has its difficulties, we look for heroes to help us through that shadowy forest. The work these people did represented a struggle to cope with the difficulty of being that stimulated and gave hope to me and my friends.

They began to take the place of these warrior-like gods who had been my heroes. Somewhere along the line I have the sense that I was pursuing being tough in the wrong fashion. I wasn’t really becoming tough. I was building a stronger facade because now I see tough as being a whole different animal, as being someone who can face problems, who can try to solve them without a baseball bat. All those guys back in the old days I used to call fags were tougher than anybody because they knew how to be scared.

I began to want to be less of a war hero and more of what those men were. They gave me courage, they gave me hope. The courage to express their feelings, their emotions, their thoughts. That was stunning. Frightening. It took more courage than I ever imagined, much more courage than picking up a gun.

And part of that courage had to do with facing his own fears, something Keitel was not ready to do: ‘I never thought I could do what [Dean and Brando] did,’ he noted. ‘I was just glad someone was doing it – the “it” being something so personal and so revealing that it gave me some hope of understanding myself at a time when I was lying to myself with such ferocity. They somehow penetrated my defense, stirred things up.’