Citizen Levine

YOU'RE NOT going to review that Halberstam book," my editor insisted, "you really can't." I began a dutiful protest, but knew he had a point. "Look, you're a nice Catholic kid who spent his whole life in some nice Catholic schools, going to Mass and rooting for Notre Dame. You probably think a bar mitzvah is some kind of Jewish saloon. Why do you want to review a novel about the first Jewish Presidential candidate?" Good question. "Because I liked it," I answered.

That was an understatement. The Wanting of Levine, the first venture into fiction by Dr. Michael Halberstam '53, is an eminently likeable book. The story of A.L. Levine, millionaire Jewish politico, and his accidental campaign for the presidency of an America grown tired and fat and eager for a new face, is most of what any novel should be: funny, touching, slapstick across the surface but with a strong subtle current running along the seabed, a roaring good story with a moral that doesn't have to hit you across the head. Halberstam, who won the 1953 Dana Reed Prize in his days as managing editor of The Crimson, has certainly proven that his days in medical school and as a Washington cardiologist haven't dulled his abilities at a typewriter. The question that must be floating around the minds of his classmates in why they had to wait a quarter of a century for his first novel.

Not, of course, that the book is perfect. Halberstam has set his story in the presidential year 1988, a time of serious decay in America. The fuel shortage has dropped the United States into the second division of world powers, border wars are flaring among the states, and "radical youth" has swung to the right to begin a guerilla war against the blacks who, having attained the nervous prosperity of the middle class, have taken over the military and the FBI. It's all in good fun, really--although Halberstam's vision of America has an underlying serious tone, his tongue seems at times to be straining through his cheek--but for anyone who ever chafed against the outrageous plotlines ox countless mid-60's America-is-dying political novels, the resemblance can be unsettling.

So don't worry about the excesses of plot. A.L. Levine is what this book is all about, and Halberstam's hero rises to beat back any challenge. Levine is a marvelously charming character: a poor Jewish orphan who works his way up from the seediness of the Bronx to the sweaty good times of a travelling salesman in the South, onward into the cushy, three-piece suited life of a millionaire real-estate developer and Democratic Party kingmaker, stopping off in countless bedrooms at every chance. Weaving together flashbacks and scenes from Levine's suddenly conceived campaign for the Presidency, Halberstam chronicles the education of a political mechanic cast unexpectedly into the starring role of candidate, a practical man suddenly on the verge of living out the dreams of power he had always been able to suppress. A.L. Levine thinks like no politician you've ever come across: idealistic but with the practical sense to attain his vision, knowing his limits, and not trying to hide his ugliness but instead turning it to the good. And always guarding a sense of humor, laughing at himself as easily as anyone could. A fantasy, perhaps, but an endearing one.

Had Halberstam intended merely to write a pleasant fable of American political life, he would have done well as an entertainer; happily, he has done more than that, and succeeded on both counts. For Levine's uniqueness, his drive as a character, comes not from his charm or his vision or his money, but from his Jewishness. He exudes Jewishness--not the Orthodox-rabbi variety, but the every-day brand, with all the stereotypical strengths and weaknesses. But Levine is not a cardboard man; he snatches up all the stereotypes in himself and twists them, turns them around, shatters them as any real person does just by living, and lets them color his life without defining it. He has a Jewish outlook, a Jewish sense of humor--some of which, as a confirmed goy, I could not comprehend--a Jewish pride, and yet he remains a universal character. To Levine, as to Halberstam, ethnicity and personal background are important parts of life, and learning to cope with them--when to use them as a form of instinct, and (more important) when to ignore them--is the key to personal growth.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that Levine manages to say a lot about the role of ethnic groups in politics, especially at a time when the conventional melting-pot wisdom has it that ethnic differences are growing ever less important as a political force. Indeed, it's tempting to compare Levine to Frank Skeffington, the endearingly roguish Irish political boss who cheerfully dominates everyone around him in Edwin O'Connor's classic The Last Hurrah. On the surface, it works. Like Skeffington, Levine has an acute awareness of his culture, and uses it to full advantage--although to Levine this requires much more subtle calculation, as he works through only the parts of the Jewish stereotype that appeal to the goy majority and discards the rest. Both men are natural politicians, marvelous dreamers and sharp tacticians, and both are most reassuringly, humanly, flawed.

But there the comparison ends. Where Skeffington is a symbol, the healthiest specimen around of the classic Irish pol, Levine is very much a human being, his own man rather than the property of every voter who happens to own a brogue or a pug nose.

That's understandable, of course: partly because there are so few Jewish politicians on the national scene to serve as stereotypes, and partly because Halberstam and O'Connor have written about two very different topics. The Last Hurrah comes across as O'Connor's dirge at the death of traditional Irish-American society, and Frank Skeffington, the larger-than-life caricature, served quite neatly as a symbol of a vanishing way of life. The Wanting of Levine, by contrast, takes on no such broad sociological theme. A.L. Levine's odyssey is an intensely personal one, the maturing of a fascinating character who happens to be Jewish and happens to be a politician and happens to be enormously successful. Less ambitious in scope than O'Connor's book, it is no less fascinating.

So after concluding all this I went back to my editor prepared to defend my choice of a book to review. So what if I didn't get some of the jokes or pick up some of the fine ethnic nuances or understand the particularly Jewish outlook of the minor characters. So what, I planned to say, it doesn't matter because, you see, Levine is no mere ethnic, he talks about so many common experiences like pride and happiness, anyone can understand. The old Levy's Rye ad came to mind. You really don't have to be Jewish...