I Can Get It for You Wholesale: A Novel by Jerome Weidman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Second Generation Neuroses

The first generation of 20th century immigrants to New York City underwent a remarkably difficult transition to ‘The American Way’. By grit and luck they survived and clawed their way out of their Lower East Side slums to the relative splendour of The Bronx. They didn’t get rich but they were on the ladder of at least modest prosperity. They had lost only a nominal, often hostile, homeland and perhaps the stifling culture of an isolated shtetl. Their new life more than compensated for the loss.

The cultural calculus for the next generation, however, is less than clear cut. These children of immigrants know nothing of the historical community that produced and sustained their parents. What they do know is what it’s like to be on the bottom of an economic and social system which offers ‘opportunity’ but only at the price of cultural identity. They have assimilated the disdain for the foreigner that they have experienced for their entire lives.

And that includes the foreigner that they know themselves to be when they look at their own families. Their parents survival is not something they can hold as a success. They refuse to settle for lower middle class respectability. They hate the system that demands that they conform to its ethos of the moral and economic jungle. But they also hate being considered less than worthy of being part of that system.

This is the point at which the immigrant family becomes truly naturalized - when it’s children become alienated from whatever residue of culture they may have received and embark on pursuing the ambitions they perceive America wants them to have. These they adopt along with the ruthless guile appropriate to their reality. They scheme, lie, cheat, and double-deal because those are the practical skills required.

Harry Bogen is Weidman’s second generation protagonist. He is a clever, sarcastic, entirely amoral entrepreneur whose aim is to beat the system by exploiting every weakness he can find in everyone he knows. He exploits his business partners without mercy; hates the children of all other immigrants equally, including those of fellow-Jews; spouts casual racism as a mark of American sophistication; and is pathologically misogynistic to all women.

Except that Harry apparently loves his mother. He is devoted to her with a Freudian intensity that is disturbing. Interestingly, Harry never mentions why; he never mentions his childhood at all except to lament his father’s lowly position. Harry’s mother is for the reader an entirely symbolic being whom Harry adores and showers with presents. He buys her stylish dresses and fur coats. He wants her to frequent the beauty parlour and keep herself looking young. He wants to bask in her loving presence while she feeds him blintzes (his only cultural connection to the family’s past). She worries about how he’ll cope when she’s gone. She fusses over him continuously; waits for him returning from work while leaning on a pillow on the windowsill; criticises his business morals, gripes about his lack of suitable women-friends.

There are clues that this mutual devotion masks something deeper though. Why does Harry despise women so intensely? Why does the facial similarity to his mother of a girl he’s introduced to by her generate incipient violence against her? Why does Harry feel it necessary to buy his mother’s affection with such overt bribery? To what extent is his mother complicit in his alienation from the very culture and history she represents? There are layers of personal history that Weidman doesn’t reveal explicitly. But these too are part of Harry’s second generation neuroses. His relationship with his mother is the flip side of his business maliciousness; both have the same hidden source.

Weidman has written a very sophisticated fictional case study of this second generation condition. The book is almost entirely dialogue, mostly involving Harry’s nefarious schemes about either business or sex, interspersed with his real thoughts, always sarcastic and demeaning, about the people he comes in contact with. His slipping in and out of Yiddish-English idiom to demonstrate the gap in experience between Harry and his mother is masterful. And Weidman’s knowledge of the New York rag trade of the 30’s creates a social commentary of considerable worth in its own right.

This is a sort of Jewish Noir version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. It is a better book than Dreiser’s in technique, development and implicit themes. Weidman seems to be one of those writers who have been largely forgotten because they are simply too painful to remember. Harry Bogen is not merely a second generation immigrant corrupted by ‘the system’. He is an American Everyman who perceives in some way that what was lost in becoming assimilated was perhaps worth more than what had been realised at the time

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