Reviews: The Education of Arnold Hitler

Name Game

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 21:43:42 -0500

Name Game
BY PETER KURTH

Book review: The Education of Arnold Hitler by Marc Estrin (03.09.05)

http://www.sevendaysvt.com/features/2005/name_game/?&contUid=4884

The Education of Arnold Hitler by Marc Estrin. Unbridled Books, 464 pages. $14.95.

Before I commence to praise -- no, rave about -- Burlington writer Marc Estrin's new novel, The Education of Arnold Hitler, I need to confess that I'm a bit intimidated by the assignment, both his and mine. I don't write fiction, and I'm amazed at the mixture of erudition, imagination and sureness of purpose that went into the creation of a work as sharp and enticing as this.

Estrin's official biography describes him as "a writer, cellist and activist living in Burlington, Vermont." He's a member of the Vermont Philharmonic Orchestra as well as the author of Rehearsing With Gods ("an examination of The Bread &; Puppet Theater") and a highly praised first novel, Insect Dreams -- The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (Blue Hen Publishing, 2002). The latter is a riff, or extended meditation, on The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka's hair-raising tale of "a man turned inexplicably into vermin," as Estrin explains in an online interview, "alienated from all others."

"Most people don't like cockroaches," Estrin remarks; "others are equally wary of Kafka. I love both." On publication, Insect Dreams won such critical accolades as to send any writer's head spinning ("Brilliant . . . compelling . . . arresting . . . strikingly original . . . wrenching, funny, learned and, at times, poetic"). I confess I've had to tear myself away from reading it in order to get this review finished on time. About now, I'd read the phone book if it were written by Marc Estrin, and I can "critique" The Education of Arnold Hitler only with my eyes wide open with wonder.

Before I gush any further, some introduction is in order. The "Arnold Hitler" of Estrin's title is not, repeat, not related in any way to "the" Hitler, the uniquely evil master of the Third Reich. All they share is a surname and initials, the central conceit of Estrin's tale. Arnold is a boy from Mansfield, Texas, a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth. Blond, handsome, strong, Aryan, a football star and future Harvard graduate, his "earliest detailed memory is of being held above a crowd by his father," George, to watch the burning of a cross on the lawn of Mansfield High. It is 1956, the era of court-ordered desegregation, and, as Arnold overhears, "Three niggers think they're gonna register this morning." In fact, they don't; their path is blocked by a phalanx of Mansfield's roused and racist white citizenry.

"Three niggers," Arnold repeats aloud.

"Don't say 'nigger,'" his mother replies. So Arnold says it to himself: "Nigger, nigger, nigger." It is his first confrontation with the symbolic and finally arbitrary meaning and usage of words. This is mightily confusing to a boy with a sensitive mind, who thinks too much, broods a lot and cries easily.

"He said 'nigger,'" Arnold protests to his father. "Why can't I say 'nigger'?"

"Different people talk differently," George Hitler explains. "We don't say 'nigger' in this family. We say 'Negro'." For Arnold, this is no solution. And he will find, later on, that the name "Hitler" carries its own power, regardless of his own, innocent relation to it.

One who "talks differently" in Mansfield, Texas, is Arnold's mother Anna, an Italian native. She met his father when George, fighting the Nazis in Ferrara at the end of World War II, tossed a hand grenade through the window of what might have been a synagogue -- the building had a Star of David on the door -- and blew off one of Anna's legs before subsequently saving her life. The Hitlers' unlikely romance is at first uncomplicated, either by George's surname or the fact that Anna's father is Jewish. In small-town Texas, they live like anyone else. Mansfield is racist in only a stupid, unthinking way. As Estrin makes clear, it's a town where the only real crime is "agitation," "stirring things up."

George Andrew Hitler, Estrin writes, born in 1924, grew up at a time when it was fine to be so named. Until the age of nine, his last name was neither here nor there -- just another moniker, that of his own father, Tom. From nine to eighteen, the homonym was noticed by only a minority of North Texans whose newspaper reading went beyond the sports page, the funnies, the local letters and obits. And for them it was Adolf Hitler, if anyone, who seemed the imposter, some German politician who had made off with George's good name.

But for Arnold it will become a torture -- an existential agony that gives Estrin room to roam the whole map of 20th-century political, philosophical, metaphysical, religious, historical and linguistic concerns. In an early conversation with his mother, the course of Arnold's life and preoccupations is defined and revealed:

"Why is a fox called a fox?" he asked.

"It's called a fox just in English. In Italy, it's called un volpe."

"But it's a fox? The same fox?"

"It's the same fox, but it has a different name."

"How can it have a different name if it's the same?"

"I don't know. It just does. Italians call things differently than Americans."

He began to cry.

After Arnold badly burns his hand at the age of 4, Anna, in an effort to distract him, says that "if he would put his left knee to his mouth" he can speak directly to "Nonno Jacobo," his Jewish grandfather in Italy, who, she insists, "would feel a tickling in his left knee, and put his ear to it and listen, and he would be able to hear Arnold."

Sure enough, it works. Even Anna, who knows about legs, is mystified: "This was a little uncanny." But with this deft, unforced touch of magic realism, Estrin gives Arnold a friend and a mentor, whose voice will guide him, instruct him, soothe him, counsel him and confound him for years to come.

"Names are important," Jacobo advises. "Words are important . . . Death and life are in the power of the tongue." And another time: "Your life, Arnold, consider your life. The Jewish God is a god of onward -- and onward is you. ... Anything you do can be a channel to God -- or it can be a wall."

To talk too much about the actual story of Arnold's adventures would be a disservice to both author and reader. As a teenager, Arnold becomes an expert on the Kennedy assassination as a well as a football star. He finds a girlfriend and gets to "third base." After high school, he heads to Harvard, where no one will room with him on account of his name; where he struggles with the protests and violent unrest of the Vietnam era, meets Noam Chomsky and Leonard Bernstein; debates becoming a "full-fledged" Jew; is approached for enlistment in a proto-fascist student organization; has an affair with a female professor; falls in love with Bernstein's daughter; confronts the fury of nascent feminism; and emerges, so he thinks, no wiser than before.

"He seemed more bent and less handsome than he had been," Estrin observes. "There was a new tremor in his hand. His eyes were deeper in his skull. His mind was a question mark, walking." After Harvard, it's New York, no job, no friends, no money, strangers in the park and a stint on the Bowery, before Arnold meets an artist called Evelyn Brown. "Evelyn" being a diminutive for the original woman, "Eve," or, in German, "Eva" -- a point that Estrin does not belabor and leaves his readers to discern. The whole of the book is told in the same style of understatement, inference, suggestion and wonderment, at the same time never pausing at the expense of narration. The Education of Arnold Hitler is not just a book for the mind, but for the soul, the heart and pleasure.

If I have a quibble with Estrin's novel -- and I feel like an amateur saying so -- it's that the women in the story all tend to be and sound exactly the same. All of them are bright as hell; all of them know their own minds and speak to Arnold in tones of instruction and exasperated affection. But, perhaps, in a way, this is a true reflection of the choices we do make in our lovers and friends: As with everything else -- and finally, too, in Arnold's case -- we endow the words we hear and speak with meanings all our own.

From the Education of Arnold Hitler:

The Book of Questions -- its very title spoke of Arnold's being, its fragmented contents of the state to which his soul had been refracted. Jabès's imaginary rabbis seemed to direct their questions and commentaries directly into the uncomfortable space he occupied: they echoed painfully off its walls and pressured their way to higher volumes and temperatures. It was Jewish writing . . . stubbornly assailing the unsayable with paradox and contradiction. The book was impossible to read in the ordinary sense -- traversing blocks of consequential meaning. To read it so was to be defeated. Rather, one had to fill the lawless spaces with unstable, enigmatic meanings in this story of fragments and gaps, an account, beyond communication, 'of a love destroyed by men and by words.'"

What’s In A Name?

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 21:41:15 -0500

What’s In A Name?

Marc Estrin turns a gimlet eye on postwar American life for a kid named Hitler

By Matt Konrad
The Education of Arnold Hitler
By Marc Estrin
Unbridled Books, $14.95

Marc Estrin is well on his way to becoming a master of what Hollywood types call “high-concept:” his is the kind of work that takes off from one simple premise and runs in unexpected directions. His debut, Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa, started with a whopper—what happened to Kafka’s man-turned-cockroach after the original story ended? And his second novel appears to start with an equally compelling question: what would life be like in post-WWII America for a kid named Arnold Hitler?

But while that is the central conceit of The Education of Arnold Hitler, there’s also a higher concept at work here: is it possible to write a compelling novel about a guy who isn’t all that interesting? Because, at first, Arnold doesn’t seem to be—there’s not much to the guy aside from the unusual cognomen and family circumstances (his dad, an American soldier, nearly killed his Jewish-Italian mom during the war, then saved her, albeit minus a leg). He grows up a football and academic star in his small Texas hometown, popular but a loner. He’s good at grammar, lousy with girls, prone to drawing irrational hatred—Estrin sharply compares him to Melville’s Billy Budd, faced with one Claggart after another—and best friends with his unseen grandfather, with whom he communicates … er … through his knee. (Okay, that last bit’s kind of intriguing.)

Fortunately, Estrin answers that big question in the affirmative. His solution to Arnold’s drab situation is rather elegant, in fact: he puts Arnold through the standard coming-of-age paces in some of the most charged settings possible: the bumpily integrating, post-Brown v. Board of Education South; the Grassy Knoll on Dealey Plaza one fateful day in 1963; the late-’60s Harvard of Timothy Leary and SDS; the streets of early-’70s New York City. Estrin lets the world’s weirdness hit our hero like a bucket of cold water, along the way crossing his path with those of Al Gore, Noam Chomsky, Leonard Bernstein, and dozens of folks without famous names, each with their own preconception of what “Arnold Hitler” must be like. And lest you be cringing right now, afraid this sounds a lot like a certain Tom Hanks tearjerker, be assured: this is more like what Forrest Gump could have been, had it been written with more skill, style and a gimlet eye toward satire.

Nowhere is the latter more evident than in the book’s strongest section, the middle portion dealing with Arnold’s Harvard years. He arrives at college having just lost his first girlfriend to freshman-seminar feminism and an older man. Before his first week is up, he’s also lost a pair of roommates, one a Jewish music student, the other a Brahmin afraid to be associated with someone not named Cabot or Lowell. And things roll downhill from there—Arnold loses his passion for football; a promising relationship is nipped in the bud the second he mentions his surname; he’s shooed away from the infamous SDS occupation of the administration building because of the field day the student newspaper would have with the headline. When he visits Chomsky’s office to find out what he can do about his name, the famous linguist can only offer him one bit of advice—change it or suffer.

And you thought your freshman year was rough.

Even worse than those who disdain poor Arnold for nominal reasons, though, are those who are drawn to him. He gets a mysterious invitation to the Foxx Club, one of the school’s prestigious in-lieu-of-fraternity “dining clubs;” his host is Richard Mather, a descendent of the fiery Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who will eventually prove to be Arnold’s most persistent and fascinating bete noire. Angered when young Mr. Hitler quietly refuses to join the eerily fascistic group, Mather devotes much of his time and considerable erudition to making Arnold’s time at Harvard a living hell. His efforts—from exposing Arnold’s theatrical pseudonyms to wrecking a platonic-but-sensual relationship with an open-minded professor—are weirdly hilarious, biting send-ups of the power inherent in privilege. What’s in a name, indeed.

In addition to the ample satirical opportunities, Arnold’s Harvard years also let Estrin construct some of his marvelous set pieces, which alone are charming enough to recommend Education. The scene at the Foxx Club, for example, captures perfectly the concentrated purgatory of a college party gone desperately out of hand. Like Dante being ushered through the afterlife by Virgil, Arnold is led by Mather through room after room of incredibly smart people doing incredibly odd things, from a group grope “in its early stages” to the various games of the “Slough of Despond intramurals” to a guy “pitting the human mind against the tensile strength of aluminum” … by smashing his head against Coors can after Coors can, and drinking what’s left.

Opposite on the emotional spectrum from the debauched awkwardness of a college party is the recounting of Arnold’s performance in a choir directed by Leonard Bernstein. (He’s there, naturally, because of an earth-shatteringly huge crush on the conductor’s daughter). Estrin is a musician himself, and writes gorgeously about music; where the Foxx Club vignette is a recipe for painful laughter, the description of the final chorale in Mahler’s Second is just a beautiful confluence of great artists:

[Bernstein] raised his hands, and closed his eyes, and held his breath. A hundred other breaths were bated. Then, with almost no visible signal except a slight rise and fall of his spine, a hundred voices conspired in a sound wave of infinitesimal amplitude, an etheric vibration so subtly pervasive that it met with no resistance from the self-protecting material world. Auferstehen. Ja, auferstehen.

Arnold’s hair stood up on the back of his neck and he felt marrow pricks in his long bones. He had sung these notes before, but never in such a context. A quiet cutoff.

“That, sweethearts,” said the Maestro, “is wholly exalted expression.’

And he lit a cigarette.

As would anyone.

It’s a mark of Estrin’s skill, too, that he writes with equal acuity later in the book about skinhead punk music—and that Arnold’s broke, post-college life on the streets of New York doesn’t seem like too much of a letdown after the dazzling Harvard section. Instead, as the School of Hard Knocks portion of Arnold’s education takes over and the book careens toward its improbable, Dickensian ending, we finally get a feeling of the protagonist as a fully fleshed-out character. People are still projecting their perceptions onto his name, true, but after everything he’s been through, Arnold emerges with enough self-awareness to assert his own damn self.

And whattaya know? Turns out the guy’s pretty interesting after all. He just needed a little education.

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Matt Konrad is Ruminator’s fiction editor.

Carrigan Review

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 21:31:30 -0500

THE EDUCATION OF ARNOLD HITLER. BY MARC ESTRIN. UNBRIDLED BOOKS. $15.95 PAPERBACK. 464 PAGES.
In a brilliant follow-up to his first novel, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, Estrin offers a richly multi-layered coming of age story in which the hero struggles with the power of language and naming, the ambiguities of religious identity, the meaning of meaning, and the nature and force of alienation.
Part Huck Finn, part Eugene Gant (Look Homeward, Angel), part Oskar Matzerath (The Tin Drum), part Holden Caufield, and part Billy Budd, little Arnold Hitler makes his way from innocence to experience as he moves from the security of his small Texas town to the uncertain and often anxious world of Harvard during the Vietnam War protests and finally to the hustling world of the Bowery.
Arnold’s parents, George and Anna Hitler, wrap their only child in a blanket of love. His mother teaches Arnold to play chess, to read, to appreciate art, and how to converse with his Jewish grandfather through his knee. The precocious Arnold very quickly turns into a linguist, a chess master, and a commentator on the national news. In second grade he is encouraged to organize a “chess club, a reading club, and a greater-than-five-syllable-word-collecting-club.”
Before he enters high school, Arnold has become the town liberal and wise beyond his years. “Arnold remained popular with all his teachers, in spite of his outspokenly liberal positions on the U2 incident, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin Wall, the Soviet H-bomb, and the missile crisis. While others his age were religiously following Howdy Doody or Lassie, Arnold was reading the New York Times and writing critiques of articles in My Weekly Reader, comparing the facts presented with those in the newspaper of record.”
Throughout high school, Arnold remains popular, meets his first love, and stars as the quarterback on the football team. In spite of the glories of his adolescence, the sinister shadows of the world and his community reveal themselves in the town’s reaction to John Howard Griffin (the Mansfield, Texas, author who wrote Black Like Me), the Kennedy assassination (which Arnold witnesses up close), and the Vietnam War. While none of his friends ever tease him about his family name to his face, he receives notes in his locker on the eve of his graduation that insult and ridicule his “good looks” and “so-called intelligence.” Like the innocent Billy Budd who is betrayed by the evil John Claggart, Arnold hears the voice of his Claggart in these notes and decides it is time to move on.
When he enters Harvard, Arnold’s name turns into a liability he had never imagined. Potential roommates refuse to live with him, girls lose interest when they learn his last name, and neo-Nazis try to recruit him as their poster boy. At Harvard, Arnold hears Noam Chomsky lecture on linguistics, and chases after Chomsky to query him about the nature of names and the power of language. In his own way, Chomsky is something of a Claggart, for he gives Arnold little but a lecture in structuralism. Along the way at Harvard, though, he meets Al Gore (a fellow student) and Leonard Bernstein (whose daughter Arnold dates briefly). By the time he leaves Harvard, Arnold “seemed more bent and less handsome than he had been. There was a new tremor in his hand. His eyes were deeper in his skull. His mind was a question mark, walking.”
After Harvard, Arnold makes his way to New York where he ends up for a time living in the tenements of the Bowery. In a stroke of luck, a Newsday reporter writes a story on Arnold, and Arnold soon receives a letter from Evelyn Brown, a neo-Nazi stripper who takes him in and protects him from his Claggarts. They soon become lovers and build themselves a bunker beneath the Bruckner Expressway. She soon converts to Judaism, changes her name to Esther, and Arnold and Esther are married in a ceremony conducted by one of Arnold’s Bowery friends and Leonard Bernstein.
Yet, the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic contours of Arnold’s coming of age story simply provide Estrin the vehicle for his ingenious novel of ideas. Arnold may be a postmodern Billy Budd dogged by his Claggarts, but he is also a Joseph K. attempting to make his way inside a world from which he has been excluded by his name.
Even more cunning, though, is Estrin’s weaving of the work of Edmond Jabès into the novel. A darling of the late Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionists, Jabès invokes questions about the power of naming, the force of words, and the ambivalence of religious, especially Jewish, identity. Excerpts from Jabès’ writings appear at the beginning of each section, and both Arnold and Evelyn, who reads from Jabès’ book in her striptease act, immerse themselves in his work. Arnold’s theme through the book belongs to Jabès: “All invention flows from words. We are their tributaries. They mark us as strongly as we mark them.”
Estrin’s dazzling tale of Arnold’s journey from innocence to experience brilliantly highlights the many facets of an individual’s relationship to society and the power of culture to define individuals.
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.
Carrigan review Arnold
http://www.bibliobuffet.com/bb/content/view/241/216/