| re: Which ones are meant to be? Thank you! nm | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 09:43 am EDT 09/30/24 | |
| In reply to: Which ones are meant to be? Thank you! nm - thtrgoer 04:53 am EDT 09/28/24 | |
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| I'm going to repost some stuff that I've posted here before. I will quote a couple of sections from an Adam Gropnik New Yorker piece on Runyon that I’m also linking. (Not sure if the link still works. I don't want to check and waste access to a free article.) “There are two layers of idiom-making laid one on top of the other in Runyon’s writing, a technique that accounts both for its complexity and for its comic, slightly out-of-focus nature—for its mixture of authenticity and unreality. As far as one can tell, Jewish crooks of the period really did speak a surprisingly elaborate and cautious diction. They didn’t speak like Runyon characters, but they tried to speak high for the same reason that they polished their shoes and tipped their hats and dressed in suits: fancy was classy. This tendency still shows in Sinatra’s recorded speech, which, when made for public consumption, is extremely ‘high,’ a Hoboken boy’s idea of a class act.” And later in the piece: “The other oddity in Runyon’s stories is how startlingly they reverse the normal ethnic roles in American writing. The Bellow generation has made us accustomed to ironically distanced Jewish narrators of violent or extreme events. But with Runyon the controlling sensibility is that of the Gentile author expressing his wonder (albeit through the puppet voice of the hamische narrator) at the violent antics of the Jews.” The world Runyon wrote about was an essentially Jewish world. Not every single male character in Runyon (or in Guys and Dolls) is Jewish (although Nathan seems quite clearly that the authors intended Nathan to be Jewish, hence the almost endless parade of Jewish actors to play the role from the very beginning), and I don’t think it’s ever made explicit, but it’s a Jewish world. Everyone hangs out in Mindy’s, which of course is Lindy’s, a Jewish deli, eating gefilte fish and cheesecake. It's not possible to state which characters in Guys and Dolls are definitely Jewish, apart from Nathan, but it's clearly a Jewish world. |
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