Re: Roth and Berlin

[George Robinson <GRComm...>]

Alex Lubet wrote:

Referring specifically to Irving Berlin, I don't remember which Phillip
Roth novel it's in, but explains that Berlin deliberately wrote the most
famous songs of two Xtian holidays in a manner devoid of any religious
content in a  calculated effort to combat  anti-Semitism.  I think that
says a lot more about  Roth than it does about Berlin and I thought it
was a real hoot when I read it,  but it's worth noting that White Xmas
and Easter Parade are about the so-called  secular aspects of those
holidays.

Khaverim --
I hate to rain on anyone's Easter Parade (especially as we in NYC are
having a White Christmas), but the passage from Roth -- it's from
Operation Shylock, by the way -- has a rather different, more barbed
spin than Dr. Lubet's recollection of it. The fake Philip Roth, the
novelist's doppelganger and exponent of a philosophy he calls
Diasporism, argues that it was Berlin's genius to write the two most
popular songs about the most sacred Christian holidays that serve to
de-sacralize them, to rob them of their Christian-ness, reducing them to
holidays about haberdashery and weather. I, too, was tickled by this
passage, but I think the intent is much darker. No disrespect to Dr.
Lubet intended.

George Robinson