When you feel like the only kid in town
Without a Christmas tree
Here's a list of people who are Jewish
Just like you and me
Those first two lines are what informs the rest of the song – the feeling of isolation from, and resentment towards, the prevailing – Gentile - culture. Ever since I first heard the song, I have had the overwhelming feeling that it was an anthem of pain – the outcry of a Jewish kid growing up in a goyim world.
One name you won’t find on Sandler’s list of Jewish people is Nathanael West, author of the novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.(1) Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in 1903, his short-lived career as a novelist (just nine years) was beset with misfortune. His second and fourth novels, among the best writing of the 1930s, sold fewer than 2,300 copies in his lifetime. When his fortunes at last turned in his favor and he was enjoying happiness in marriage and success as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he was killed in a car crash.
In his monograph on West, Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote:
West received little or no education in the Jewish religion, and although he was probably circumcised, he was never confirmed in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. During his years at Brown [University], West threw off what he could of his Jewishness, and suffered for the rest. "More than anyone I ever knew," his friend John Sanford later reported, "[he] writhed under the accidental curse of his religion." West had nothing to do with any organized Jewish activity on campus, hung around the snobbish Gentile fraternities, and was intensely anxious to be pledged and intensely bitter that he never was. "Nobody ever thought of [him] as being Jewish," a college friend has said, but apparently the Brown fraternities did.
West's first novel, The Dream of Balso Snell, seems to have been first written in college, but he rewrote it and in 1931 he managed to get it privately printed in a limited edition of 500 copies. The book listed "Nathanael West" as author and thus marked West's official change of name. He had spent much of his class time at Brown doodling "Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein," which was the name signed to his [Brown literary magazine] contributions, but even that had turned out to be not Gentile enough. West explained to William Carlos Williams how he got the name: "Horace Greely said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did." West's anti-Semitism was now considerable. He referred to Jewish girls as "bagels," and avoided them.
West's personal life in the East was no more successful than his literary career. Balso Snell was dedicated to Alice Shephard, a Roman Catholic girl who had gone to Pembroke College with West's sister Laura. He was secretly engaged to her from 1929 to 1932, then publicly engaged, but they never married, although West had bought a marriage license and carried it around with him for several years. His poverty was the explanation given out, but in Sanford's opinion the engagement foundered on the religious difference.
West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts is a unique achievement in American literature. By interjecting interior states into its action of a newspaper columnist exiled to providing advice to the lovelorn (or the otherwise disenchanted), West takes the reader in the opposite direction of contemporary “realistic” writing, away from Hemingway and toward European modes, from Baudelaire through Kafka to the Surrealists. The novel's protagonist, whose name is always “Miss Lonelyhearts,” becomes so overwhelmed by the misery expressed so clumsily in the pile of letters he receives every day that he becomes ill both physically and emotionally. Miss Lonelyhearts becomes an alter ego, it possesses him and, eventually, destroys him. It doesn't matter that, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, Miss Lonelyhearts overestimates the veracity of the letters to him and ascribes disproportionate importance to them. As the son of a Baptist minister, he is predisposed to regard the suffering in the letters, and the moralizing responses they provoke that he publishes in his column, as demonstrations of Christian love and forgiveness. So it is not exactly surprising that, just as he is attaining a kind of Christian grace in his attitudes toward his subject, it leads him directly to disaster.
But West does offer his hero a real chance for human - not divine - salvation in the character of his fiancée, Betty. He has a transcendant idyll with Betty at a country farm in which West's language becomes suddenly explicit and expressive of the physical beauties of the natural world and the conditions of living in its proximity:
He sat on the porch and watched her work. She had her hair tied up in a checked handkerchief, otherwise she was completely naked. She looked a little fat, but when she lifted something to the line, all the fat disappeared. Her raised arms pulled her breasts up until they were like pink-tipped thumbs.
There was no wind to disturb the pull of the earth. The new green leaves hung straight down and shone in the hot sun like an army of little metal shields. Somewhere in the woods a thrush was singing. Its sound was like that of a flute choked with saliva.
Betty stopped with her arms high to listen to the bird. When it was quiet, she turned towards him with a guilty laugh. He blew her a kiss. She caught it with a gesture that was childishly sexual. He vaulted the porch rail and ran to kiss her. As they went down, he smelled a mixture of sweat, soap and crushed grass.
It is, of course, terribly ironic that Miss Lonelyhearts should be undone by Christian love. West's efforts to divest himself of his Jewishness, his having studied medieval Catholicism at Brown and his aborted engagement to a nice Catholic girl, led him, in his last months in Hollywood, to achieve the comfortable life of a successful screenwriter (even while attempting, with The Day of the Locust, to exploit that experience through a fictional attack on Hollywood). He had at last married a nice Gentile woman and was on his way home from a camping trip with her when they both died on Ventura Highway. West's remains were returned to New York where they were buried in a Jewish cemetery.
(1) Sandler’s ever-expanding list of people who are Jewish includes David Lee Roth, James Caan, Kirk Douglas, Rod Carew, Dinah Shore, and The Three Stooges.
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