A Second Brooklyn Novel by Daniel Fuchs: Homage to Blenholt (1936)

Of the ten or so novels that I've read since I began this project, Homage to Blenholt is certainly the most regional and the most "Jewish." It is positively marinated in local color. Even in the first few paragraphs, we encounter the "dirty cobbled streets" of Williamsburg, a milkman's plodding horse, the subway and the trolley, "gutters," "seltzer," and a "stoop."  Kids play Johnnie-on-the-pony, punchball, and ringolevio. There's a pickle man and a hot corn man and a peddler selling imitation pearls. Even when characters are not kvetching outright, they speak in a thick dialect that ladles English words onto Yiddish structures and inflections. 

The thin but adequate plot concerns young Max Balkan, who yearns for a more glamorous, more powerful life. -- but every reader soon realizes that despite his ambitions he's doomed to a life of slicing pastrami behind the counter of someone else's delicatessen. Max admires Blenholt, a corrupt politician whose graft has earned him a shiny suit and an extravagant funeral, -- but in his more romantic moments he dreams of being an Alexander, a Caesar, or, his favorite role model, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, the Scythian shepherd who rose from poverty to become the scourge of God and conqueror of Persia.

In the novel's finest phrase, poor Max's unromantic mother dismisses her son's fantasies: "Tamburlaine, Schmamburlaine." 

The bell of nostalgia rang most powerfully with the appearance of a word, well known to me but no doubt unfamiliar to most readers. The word is "Forverts." It was my task, on Sunday mornings, to buy and deliver a copy of the Jewish Daily Forward to my Yiddish-speaking grandparents, who lived around the corner on Coney Island Avenue. So with 50 cents in hand, I purchased the Times and the Eagle for my parents and for my grandparents, the "Forverts." Until Homage to Blenholt, I had not seen or heard that strange foreign word in 65 or 70 years. My thanks to Daniel Fuchs.

I should add that, like Balkan, youthful me was dazzled by Tamburlaine. Marlowe -- a young man's poet -- was my first serious literary love. He offered me romantic escapism of a high order. But I was far too unimaginative to see myself as the conqueror of the known world. For me, it was quite enough to appreciate Marlowe's exotic landscape and still unsurpassed poetry. 

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

My favorite line from Tamburlaine: "Hath Bajazeth been fed today?" And he is not talking about a parrot.

I think you are creating a readership for Daniel Fuchs.