George Gershwin hit the nail on the head when he penned a catchy little number titled “When You Want ‘Em You Can’t Get ‘Em, When You’ve Got ‘Em You Don’t Want ‘Em.”
Dollars to doughnuts that George wasn’t thinking about doughnuts; we’re going to venture a guess he had girls on the brain. But he just as well could have been writing about “Matzo Balls for Breakfast.”
The book is the last work of legendary comedian Alan King, but, due to his death a year ago, he had about as much to do with the final product as Ronald McDonald has into the day-to-day running of the Golden Arches.
King’s idea was to elicit every Jew in show business, public life or — failing that — the New York City phone book, to pen a vignette about his or her experiences growing up Jewish. And the scores of respondents range from doctors to politicians to actors varying from Oscar winners to one billed as “The Voice of Skeletor on the ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’ Cartoon.”
The writers’ fame doesn’t correlate with the readability of their work; one of the best pieces was penned by Stuart Eizenstat (the majority of you thinking “Who?” are proving this point). Incidentally, he was Bill Clinton’s undersecretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs, among numerous other government positions.
But here’s where that catchy Gershwin number comes in. Whether it’s written by a world leader or the voice of Skeletor and be it riveting or a snoozer, most of these vignettes average something like six paragraphs. Too many of the good ones cut off quicker than the end of an old “Gong Show” skit, and a disturbing number of the mundane ones go on and on.
Case in point: Monty Hall. Turns out the longtime host of “Let’s Make a Deal” is both Jewish and Canadian, and his story starts out with a bang, describing young Monty growing up during the Depression in Winnipeg living with 13 other relatives in a one-bathroom house. And then, it ends.
Case in point: Neil Simon. He starts out describing being chased throughout the neighborhood by Italian kids, Irish kids and German kids. And then, it ends.
And here’s Sid Caesar’s entire entry: “The keeper of the flame: Jewish humor.”
On the other hand, a number of the brief entries are very sweet. Amazingly, one of the sweetest comes from Don Rickles, the primordial father of insult humor. The comedian who famously told Frank Sinatra to get off the floor “because it looks fruity” recalls the hauntingly beautiful moment his lifelong cantor sang a prayer at Rickles’ father’s grave the day before Rickles’ wedding.
Here’s another from actor Bill Macy (not William H. Macy from “Fargo” but Bill Macy from “Maude” with Bea Arthur). It’s short enough we can include the entire passage:
“In New York City in 1968 I was in a production of George Tabori’s ‘The Cannibals,’ a play about the Holocaust. At the end of the play the cast walked through the audience to our deaths. My mother had a seat on the aisle, and, as I passed her, she leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Excellent.’ Everyone should have a Jewish mother.”
While those short vignettes work, it grows exceedingly frustrating for the reader to turn the page and see good stories come to an abrupt end, again and again. Furthermore, whoever compiled these stories should have noted that about 15 different guys wrote about being the only Jew in their military outfit.
Woody Allen said that 90 percent of life is just showing up, and the Jews who responded to King’s entreaty for a story did indeed show up. But for this book to be special, an editor would have had to ask those with good stories to write longer and those without to write shorter — or, perhaps, in invisible ink.
“Matzo Balls for Breakfast” by Alan King and Friends (251 pages, Free Press, $24).