TAIPEI, Taiwan — Overseas, and in India in particular, the big movie gossip involving the 2012 Warner Bros. remake of The Great Gatsby has nothing to do with Leonardo DiCaprio or Tobey Maguire. Rather, it involves Bollywood film star Amitabh Bachchan and what will amount to the actor’s first-ever Hollywood
film appearance playing ”a crooked Jewish associate” of the novel’s Jay Gatsby. The F. Scott Fitzgerald-created character named Meyer Wolfsheim was modeled after a real-life Jewish mobster of the period and his portrayal in the novel was far from friendly. It was downright antisemitiic, some scholars claim.
A huge huge starof India’s film industry, Bachchan has agreed to play the one-scene role of the stereotyped Jewish gangster — and for free. That’s right, he told Australian film director pal Baz Luhrmann that he’ll do the role for free.
So, will Indian newspapers and websites pick up on Fitzgerald’s genteel antisemitism of the period?
Here’s Bachchan’s take on his own personal blog: “Baz …..called last month and wondered if I would do [a]
small role in his [‘Gatsby’] film and I agreed. It is a gesture. I have refused any remuneration on this, too.”
“As to why Baz chose to ask me, is something that perhaps he would be better placed to answer,” Bachman added, “I have gone down to Sydney and had a preliminary reading of the script with the entire cast and done hair
makeup costume rehearsals. It has been a wonderful experience to be a part of [the Hollywood] system and to observe with what detail and diligence they work.”
But playing the crooked Jewish Gatsby associate Meyer Wolfsheim, a Fitzgerald stereotype?
As everyone in India surely knows, F. Scott Fitzgerald used the real-life Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein as the inspiration for Jay Gatsby’s crooked associate Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby‘. At one point, Gatsby says to narrator Nick Carraway, “He’s the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.” Fitzgerald also used parts of Rothstein’s life to mold Gatsby into the suave gangster he is known to be.
Arnold Rothstein (1882 – 1928) was a real New York character nicknamed “The Brain” who “worked” as a New York ”businessman” and gambler who became a famous kingpin of the Jewish mafia in those days. Rothstein was also widely reputed to have been behind baseball’s Black Sox Scandal, in which the 1919 World Series was fixed. His notoriety inspired the Wolfsheim character in Fitzgerald’s novel.
According to crime writer Leo Katcher, Rothstein “transformed organized crime from a thuggish activity by hoodlums into a big business, run like a corporation, with himself at the top.” According to Rich Cohen, Rothstein was the person who first saw in Prohibition a business opportunity, a means to enormous wealth, who “understood the truths of early century capitalism and came to dominate them”. Rothstein was the Moses of the Jewish gangsters, according to Cohen, the progenitor, a rich man’s son who showed the young hoodlums of the
Bowery how to have style; indeed, the man who, the Sicilian-American gangster Lucky Luciano later said, “taught me how to dress.”
So it has come to this? Hiring an Indian superstar to play an ugly Jewish stereotype in an upcoming Hollywood production?
According to some scholars, the Wolfsheim character betrays Fitzgerald’s blatant anti-semitism of that period in American life. Here we have Wolfsheim, identified, in the most stereotypical ways, as a Jew, who is the sleaziest and most nefarious character in the novel. He does his dirty business deals through a cover company named the The
Swastika Holding Company. Really. And this same man, though he knows Gatsby well and has been doing shady business with him, refuses to have anything to do with his funeral and prefers to remain anonymous. I think Fitzgerald’s intentions are obvious. And I am not alone.
Here’s an excerpt from an essay by Martin Hindus at the College of the University of Chicago titled ”
“Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism: A Footnote on the Mind of the 1920s” — written in June 1947. Okay, so it’s 2011 now. Read on:
”I recently read ‘The Great Gatsby’ for the first time, and it struck me that in all the praise of the book I had heard from both Jews and non-Jews, something important had been omitted — that viewed in a certain light the novel reads very much like an antisemitic document,” Hindus wrote. “It is an excellent novel, no doubt of that, and part of its appeal is that the reader knows (though he may be unable to define his knowledge) that the story and the characters are general and representative rather than particular and confined. Fitzgerald has
written a tragic satire on American civilization, with the implicit invitation to disentangle the idea of which the personages and events are outward symbols. The individuals portrayed stand for the classes (but not in the Marxian sense) to which they belong. That is nothing new: the same is true of every serious literary work of art.”
“The Jew who appears in ‘The Great Gatsby’ is not the villain of the piece, but he is easily its most obnoxious character. His name is Meyer Wolfsheim. He is a gambler by profession. [The way Fitzgerald writes the story, Wolfsheim’s nose is flat and out of both nostrils two fine growths of hair “luxuriate.” His eyes are “tiny.” When he talks he “covers” Gatsby with his “expressive nose.” We first glimpse him in a mysterious conversation with Gatsby about a man named Katspaugh. When, at this point, the narrator, Nick, comes in and meets him, Wolfsheim mistakes him for somebody else whom Gatsby has mentioned and he immediately begins to talk of a business
“gonnegtion.” That “gonnegtion” runs like a theme through the whole book whenever Nick thinks of Wolfsheim.”
Of course, you are free to draw your own conclusions. But one wonders what the Indian media in the Asian subcontinent — and Mr Bachman himself — will make of a Bollywood star playing an ugly Jewish stereotype from an
antisemitic novel of past Americana?
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Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com