Dibs

Oldtimers remember the late actor Lloyd Bridges, star of the TV show “Sea Hunt,” which ran from 1958 to 1961. His widow, Dorothy Bridges — mother of the actors Jeff and Beau Bridges, died Monday in Los Angeles at age 93. This least-famous member of the Bridges clan was a poet for five decades, according to the Associated Press. 

“Born Dorothy Dean Simpson on Sept. 19, 1915, in Worcester, Mass., she was married to Lloyd Bridges for 60 years, until his death in 1998. The two met while performing in a play at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dorothy Bridges later appeared in a handful of movies and an episode of ‘Sea Hunt’ with her husband, whom she called Bud. She also coached her children….

“In 2005, at age 89, she published You Caught Me Kissing: A Love Story. It included a collection of Valentine’s Day poems she wrote to her husband each year, a practice she continued after his death.”

Some are calling the BBC’s new adaptation of Oliver Twist anti-Semitic because its co-star Timothy Spall portrays the thief-impresario Fagin as unmistakably, over-the-top Jewish. “I must have missed a few subtle literary points in college when I was taking a Charles Dickens seminar. I missed the spot where Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is wearing a gigondo yarmulke,” quips screenwriter Robert Avrech at Seraphic Secret. “Also, blasting right by yours truly—alas, never the best of students—is the part where Fagin abstains from eating pork chops because they’re not kosher. Who knew that Fagin was an observant Jew? And I must have skipped the part where Fagin—going all bi-polar—talks to himself in fractured Hebrew and intones: ‘Never trust the goyim.’” 

Likening PBS and the BBC to Al-Jazeera, Avrech continues: “ It was kind of scary. I mean I know the Arab world with its state controlled TV and film industries is a sewer of Jew-hatred, but this Fagin is pretty darn close to the image of the evil Jew pushed by the Nazi propaganda machine. He’s not just the Jew, he’s the devil. This Fagin is such a leering, salivating monster that I wouldn’t be surprised if, in next week’s exciting installment, he molests a few doe-eyed kids then slaughters them so he can use their blood to bake matzo.”

Dickens wrote Fagin as a Jewish character — basing him on a real-life figure: “a notorious Jewish fence called Ikey Solomons,” writes Jasper Rees in the Telegraph, “and he supplied the novel’s illustrator, George Cruikshank, with ample clues for a good likeness. He gave him red matted hair and beard, long black nails, a sizeable nose and ‘among his toothless gums a few such fangs as should have been a dog’s or rat’s’. … Dickens was as guilty as anyone of this anti-Semitic reflex. … ’Fagin is a Jew,’ Dickens later explained, ‘because it is unfortunately true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was Jewish.’ A complaint from a reader prompted Dickens to delete some instances of the J-word between the serial launched in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837 and later editions. But the insignia of his cartoon Jewishness stayed: he slinks, stoops, rubs his hands. We watch him ‘creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways?… like some loathsome reptile’.”

Nonetheless, Avrech notes, “You can bet your bottom dollar that no Muslim would ever appear in such a dark light in a BBC production.”

Now You’re One of Us, a thriller new in paperback from bestselling Japanese novelist Asa Nonami (and translated into English by Michael Volek and Mitsuko Volek), starts off so strong. Against her mother’s wishes, attractive if somewhat naive young Noriko has just married the eldest son in a strange family that lives in a large house and grows odd plants on a small property in a Tokyo suburb. When she met Kazuhito, “it was love at first sight. His voice, his smile,  his tanned arms — she liked it all.” On that first meeting, Kazuhito promised Noriko that his kinfolk were masters of familial concordance: “I’ll dispel your worries,” he assured her, that day. “If you don’t like something, my family will make it our mission to fix it.” Okay, so she meets the folks — and the grandfolks, and the sage-like great-grandma, and the mentally disabled brother and the perky younger sister, and they win her over. They praise her; they’re always grinning and going about their chores happily. “We all love flowers,” Kazuhito tells Noriko in a typical moment, reinforcing the sense that everything the Shito family does and feels, it does and feels in perfect unison.

A surreal Stepford Wives-ish smiliness pervades the first half of this book, becoming increasingly suspect as odd happenings unfold: a neighboring house burns to the ground, killing everyone inside. Noriko overhears secret conversations between family members late at night, when they think she isn’t listening. 

Trouble gets into high gear when the family finds out that Noriko’s starting to wonder about them. At this point, the author spins scenes of such tension and creepiness that the book becomes a serious page-turner. It’s the classic conundrum: Is the new bride onto something sinister? Or is she imagining everything? Also: If she’s not imagining it, then what IS it? Thereby hangs the tale. Nonami’s denouement will disappoint some, but those keen scenes in the is-she-isn’t-she sections make the whole ride worthwhile.

A British novelist has died because he walked home from the hospital that had just discharged him. “A hospital has been censured by health watchdogs for letting an elderly man walk home unsupervised to his death after a blood transfusion,” we read in the Daily Mail. “Aplyn Wynn-Jones, 80, was discharged from the hospital after receiving treatment for anaemia. He was found by his daughter Alison the next day at his home in his armchair wrapped in blankets, and died within hours of organ failure and a heart attack.” Wynn-Jones had just published his first book, Hidden Springs, an historical novel based on the life of Bonnie Prince Charlie. After the treatment, hospital authorities did not offer transportation home for Wynn-Jones, suggesting instead that he  use a pay phone to arrange for a ride. The phone was out of order and Wynn-Jones, who was relatively fit, set off walking on his own. But apparently the jaunt was too much for him in his weakened condition.

An author who advocated fiercely on behalf of autistic children has been murdered by her autistic son. Kent State political science/women’s studies professor Gertrude Steuernagel, the 60-year-old author of Political Philosophy as Therapy: Marcuse Reconsidered and coauthor of Foundations for a Feminist Restructuring of the Academic Disciplines, died last Friday in an Ohio hospital from injuries sustained in the January 29 beating. Her son Sky Walker, 18, is being held on $2 million bond, charged with murder and assaulting a police officer. Steuernagel wrote op-eds for the campus newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater, about life with an autistic child. “Try spending an evening sitting in a closet with your back to the door trying to hold it shut while your child kicks it in,” she wrote in one column. ”Sky, as he always does, showed me the way,” she wrote in another. “Even on the worst of days, Sky would find something to enjoy, even if it lasted less than 30 seconds … So I started to look for my joy.” In a post titled “My Son’s Trail of Sparkles” at an autism forum two years ago, Steuernagel wrote: “His verbal abilities are limited. I have never had a conversation with my son. … Sky had difficulties in preschool with scissors. He did not have the fine motor coordination or motor planning skills he needed to cut. … Today Sky is 16 and … has many rituals, one of which is cutting paper into tiny pieces. He particularly likes to cut cellophane fruit bar wrappers into confetti sized pieces. The fruit bar must be strawberry. My nightly ritual is to get down on my hands and knees and pick the sticky confetti off the hardwood floors in the kitchen and family room. I always miss pieces and these are tracked on the soles of our feet or shoes throughout the house. One night I was frustrated and angry with the universe. Why, I thought, does he do this? He doesn’t even eat the fruit bar. Then I thought back to the preschool days, the days when Sky did not ‘scissor.’ I started to smile. The smile turned into a laugh, the laugh into a guffaw. My son the cutup had once again proven to be my best teacher. Try your best; do what you can; the universe will come to you. … He is my dance partner and I his. Sometimes we step on each other’s toes and sometimes we navigate with great grace. I’ve learned when to lead and when to follow. I know Sky will continue to leave a trail for me, a trail of sparkles.”

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg’s groundbreaking semiautographical 1964 novel about life as a young schizophrenic, has just been reissued by Henry Holt.

Who said the following during a speech in Ohio? “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white an black races … I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office,  or intermarry with white people; … there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I … am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Who said it? Why, it was Abraham Lincoln, on September 16, 1859, as quoted in a new book from Princeton University Press: Lincoln on Race & Slavery, edited by the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Yet another celebrity is taking the literary route. This time it’s Kanye West, who plans to release a book this fall titled Kanye West: Glow In The Dark. Early reports say that it will include memories of his travels and photographs of fashion shows he has attended, as well as pictures spotlighting his Louis Vuitton sneaker line.

Well, The Vagrants, the long-awaited new novel by mega-mondo-multi-award-winning author Yiyun Li, has finally arrived. Li, who now lives in California, was born in Beijing in 1972, so she grew up during the last gasp of the Cultural Revolution and saw much of its aftermath. Thus this novel, uh, doesn’t make communism look good. At all. It begins as a young woman is about to be executed — on “a date as arbitrary as her crime, determined by the court, of being an unrepentant counterrevolutionary.” Her vocal cords have been severed to keep her from shouting. A jostling crowd watches her public “denunciation ceremony.” She is shot, and her father is billed for the bullet. Other gruesome inhumanities fill these pages in which, as one character sagely notes, “People [are] the most dangerous animals in the world.” … Thank you, Li, for telling the truth about a time and place where millions experienced true hell on earth.