FrontPage Magazine

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The Great Kisser

By Jamie Glazov

FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, November 24, 2006

Frontpage Interview's guest today is David Evanier, both a novelist and a journalist. He is the

author ofRed Love, The One-Star Jew, The Swinging Headhunter,Roman Candle: The Life of

Bobby Darin, and Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story. He is co-author with Joe

Pantoliano ofWho's Sorry Now. He is a former fiction editor of The Paris Review, assistant editor

of The New Leader, assistant editor of Hadassah Magazine, writer for the civil rights and research

division of the Anti-Defamation League, and a contributor to Commentary, The Weekly Standard,

National Review, and The American Enterprise.

He is the author of the new novel-in-stories, The Great Kisser.

FP: David Evanier, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Evanier: Pleased to be here.

FP: You were, at one time, a man of the Left. How did you get there? Were there some influences

within your family?

Evanier: My parents were a little crazy, so it was kind of an inevitable attraction when I

encountered the Jewish Stalinist Left. I first noticed them in 1950-53, during the trial and

execution of the Rosenbergs. They were truly bizarre--eternal malcontents who wanted life to be

perfect, the way they fantasized it to be in the Soviet Union. When you grow up in a crazy

household, crazy people are deeply familiar to you and in a paradoxical way, you feel comfortable

with them. That's how I felt.

By 1956, entering adolescence, I became more involved, although I never joined. I seem to recallfirst encountering David Horowitz in Sunnyside, Queens in those years. Khrushchev had given his

speech about Stalin's crimes and concentration camps, so I was wary. But since I was looking for a

girlfriend and a family, the Communists were perfect: they offered me unconditional love and

acceptance if I was "progressive." But there was an additional reason for their love of me: after

Khrushchev's speech, people were leaving the party in droves, crowding the exits. One little

fellow--me--was pounding the door, struggling to get in. They greeted me ecstatically, referring to

me as "a representative of the youth." I loved it; I could do no wrong with these people. Herbert

Aptheker even introduced me to his daughter, Bettina, as a potential suitor.


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I must say that the scene was ultimately too freakish for me, but its very oddity gave it a human

fascination. After all, the comrades knew about Stalin and the concentration camps as well as the

Soviet invasion of Hungary, yet they worshipped the Soviet slave empire. And at the same time

they prided themselves on their humanity. They loved to talk about "progressive humanity," a

phrase of Stalin's. That's how they thought of themselves. I left the Communist orbit in the early

1960's, but returned to it as subject matter in the 1980s, when I decided to write about the

Rosenbergs in my novel, "Red Love."

FP: So tell us a bit about your experiences on the Jewish Stalinist Left and how they influenced

your evolution and your writing.

Evanier: I remember the characters, and I write about them in "The Great Kisser." I attended

Rosenberg rallies: hysteria, choruses, music, fainting fits, screaming family members. Helen

Sobell stretching out her arms and pointed breasts and talking of her emotional needs. Money was

collected immediately after the most wrenching speech. The P.R. director of the Rosenberg

Committee, Ted Jacobs, confided to me (I must have been 11 or 12 at the time) over lunch after theexecution that he had just read the trial transcript of the Rosenberg case for the first time. He asked

me--of all people--"What if they are actually guilty?" This was the guy staging these rallies, and he

was asking me?

I attended Herbert Aptheker's classes in the final year of the dying party institution, the Jefferson

School of Social Science. He was my favourite Communist. I loved to watch him, with his blazing

red hair and blazing eyes. He was the hottest, last true believer, with a volatile personality. He had

a furious smile. Sometimes I thought he was about to explode and physically attack a questioner

who might timidly question Stalin's "oh....moodiness." On the blackboard he had quotes from

Stalin and a Brecht poem that said Communists did not kill, they stopped killing. He was pure,

upright, incontrovertible, brilliant, almost overcome by internal fury. Weaklings might be deserting

the cause, but not Aptheker. He was a rock. He had scientific reasons. He give you the feeling he

could hold up the entire rotting edifice of Stalinism on his shoulders.

There was an inspired lunacy about him. Once I ran into him on a subway platform. I was carrying

a briefcase, and he frisked me. He loved the word "indubitably." He was a chronicler of slave

rebellions, his best known work, and he would suddenly start "talking black:" "The man says this,the man says that," he intoned. What a performer: he would turn his back on the class entirely for

long periods of silent contemplation, gazing out the window. My favorite part was when he spat

out that American leaders were "garbage," "a nest of vermin," "human animals," "lice," "scum,"

"bedbugs," "faggot honeybuns," "trash [with] the morals of goats, the learning of gorillas." He was

speaking to a typical Communist ragtag crowd of that declining period: droolers, fat boys in shorts,

white socks and sneakers, FBI agents, Communist singles. For a kid like me, from a broken home

and a lot of anger, it was glorious to watch a man of such delicious extremes. This was so

entertaining; hot stuff. He fascinated me--he was the raging heart of the Left. You've got to

understand that I also thought he was a lunatic.

My complete break with the left came later, but even then it was impossible for me to be a true

believer. Part of me was recording all this in my head for the writing I wanted to do and did do

later. Aptheker was the party's last hope. He had a scholarly mien, he conferred a little legitimacy

on it. But strip away that veneer and beneath the surface was a permanent state of rage. Anyway,

he took me under his wing. He asked me, a kid, to evaluate his manuscript of "The Truth About

Hungary." I said it was great.

He led me to other characters, including Benjamin J. Davis, the black party leader, comrade of

Robeson, just out of prison. Davis was a Harvard Law School graduate and lawyer for the

Scottsboro boys. Like Robeson, he had been caught up in the fever swamps of ideology and lost

his mind. He was, like Robeson, imposing, tall and proud, and had been full of great promise.

But Robeson, who spoke like a robot at meetings of the party's National council of Soviet-

American Friendship, had become a bore. Davis had the human touch. I write of this in "The Great

Kisser": I had seen him in Harlem on the day he was released, lifted off the soapbox, lifted up and

carried on the shoulders of his people, who were cheering him. But there was something wrongwith this scene. Harlem didn't really believe what Ben believed; they just respected and loved him

as a man. And then Ben spoke, and said one of the most insane things I ever heard in my life: "I'd

rather be a lamppost in Moscow than President of the United States." Really? Well, I didn't know

about that. That was weird even for me. He didn't say it just once; he chanted it, like a litany.

Aptheker sent me up to party headquarters to be recruited into the party by Davis himself; a great

honor. I entered the party's red brick building and took the elevator up to the third floor. There was

Ben, behind his desk, reading. I stood there looking at him, and it was as if he were covered by

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And finally I'll add to my gallery Comrade Sophie, who ran the Jefferson Bookshop on East 16th

Street off Union Square. Sophie had a little moustache. She was a little Jewish lady married to a

retired Harlem Globetrotter. She called me a "young Lenin" and gave me socks and underwear.

She brought in whiskey miniatures, mixed them with ice water from the water cooler, and together

we toasted Fidel Castro. She would take me down to the basement of the bookstore where she

would give me "hidden" books; William Z. Foster's "Towards a Soviet America" and Stalin's

Collected Works in red leather, all of which she called "the real stuff."

FP: How about some of your early experiences with anti-Communism?

Evanier: Just as I was exposed to an unusually close-up picture of the American Communist Party

at an early age, I was also soon made aware of the realities of Communism by a number of notable

anti-Communists. When I was 16, my father, a man of very modest means, mustered up the funds

to send me to the Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Connecticut, one of the greatest experiences of

my life. You learned when you were loved. The school was run by a feisty, vibrant Swedish

woman, Dr. Christina Stael von Holstein Bogoslovsky, and her husband Boris Bogoslovsky, a

Russian emigre who worked for the U.N. The students sat outside in winter on the porch forhistory classes taught by Dr. Stael and for morning assemblies. Even now I can see Dr. Stael in her

garden, hear her lilting voice, and remember how she pounded us on the back in the snowy cold

days of winter, vapors rising from our breaths.

Boris was alarmed at my inviting a representative of the Communist-led New York Teachers

Union to speak at Cherry Lawn, and proceeded to begin my education in the realities of

Communism. And as the snow fell, icicles hanging from the awning over our heads, Boris' friend

Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Menshevik opposition to the Bolshevik revolution, spoke to

us of Stalin's murderous crimes and of the Soviet system of slavery. We studied Gorky through

Gorky's own autobiography and then were taught by Boris about Gorky's murder by Stalin and

read Gouzenko's "Fall of a Titan" and "The God That Failed." The school had a strong Quaker

orientation, but it was based on humanism; it was not the kind of Quakerism that leant itself

toward apologizing for tyrants and murderers--i.e. we learned that there was nothing "progressive"

or "humane" about the mass murder of innocent people.

My English teacher, Basil Burwell, a Quaker, was an inspiring person, and our curriculum

included Arthur Koestler and Dostoyevsky. Bazz, also a director, typecast me as a dreamy poetwho wanders across the stage reading a book and bumping into people in Koestler's play, "Twilight

Bar." He too made it plain that there was absolutely no difference between Nazism and

Communism. And so, at a very early age, and as a young Jew, I was gaining unusual insight and

awareness into the facts about Communism. It was during this time that I gained a chilling

awareness of a fact that never left me -- there were at least two Holocausts in the first half of the

20th century happening almost simultaneously: the Nazi and the Soviet. One inspired the other.

Between them they managed to torture and murder millions and millions of innocent human

beings in a slaughter that is still impossible to comprehend. That awareness has haunted and

shaped my life.

The themes of gratitude and love of America in "The Great Kisser" in the wake of the two

Holocausts and 9/11 were planted within me early on in my green and innocent days on the porch

of Cherry Lawn. The staff of Cherry Lawn were my introduction to Western Civilization. But I

would say that my anti-Communism (which for me is intertwined with my entire grasp of reality)

was shaped most indelibly by an experience in Israel when I was 20. I went there to work at

Kibbutz Sasa for the summer. Before I left, Comrade Sophie said to me, "Why in the world would

you go to that imperialist outpost?" she was clueless. After all, I could have gone to the SovietUnion or any of the People's Republics instead. Picking cherries in the fields, one day I looked out

in the sun and saw the tattooed concentration camp numbers on the arms of some of the kibbutz

members. At that moment I fully understood the meaning of Israel, America, democracy and

freedom, and the insanity of Stalinism. That was my entry into the real world, and I was altered

forever.

FP: How did you come to understand the Soviet connection to the American Communist Party in

your youth?

Evanier: As I said earlier, because the Communist Party was so decimated when I began to hang

around it, I was given a rare birds-eye view of things. As a novelist, I accumulate impressions and

feelings, not factual documents. Even in the mid-and late `50s, with party members fleeing in large

numbers, it was impossible not to recognize the huge number of front groups, institutions, hotels,

camps, publishing houses, unions, theaters and real estate that the party ran and owned--all paying

full-time homage to the Soviet Union. International Publishers, a party publisher headed by

Alexander Trachtenberg and James Allen, published hundreds of Soviet books and books on

Communism each year. Every iota of the party network was bound up with the Soviet Union. You

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history. The letters of the Rosenbergs, which I parodied in "Red Love," are purged of almost any

truth about their allegiance to the Soviet Union. They write that they are for "bread and roses,"

children's laughter and singing tomorrows. That's it. And yet for the Rosenbergs, as for all

Communists, serving Stalin was the most sacred act; Stalin was Moses. The few that were

detached from the party and selected for espionage work were the chosen ones.

But apart from the symbolism of it, everything I encountered in the Party was Soviet. Every living

moment was spent in devotion to a Soviet tomorrow. Yet how they loved to deny the thing theyloved and accuse McCarthyites, red-baiters and Nazis of slandering them. Earl Browder denied the

Party's connection to any underground apparatus to the end of his life. His room on the ninth floor

of party headquarters adjoined that of J. Peters, who helped coordinate the underground of the

party across the United States. They passed each other in the hall every day, but ostensibly they

were ships in the night. "I pledge myself," Browder said in 1935 to two thousand new Party

members taking the oath, "to remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of

the Party, the only line that ensures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States."

FP: How come you use humor so often in your fiction?

Evanier: Reviewing "Red Love," Kirkus Reviews wrote that it was "irreverent, unflinching, and

almost disgracefully entertaining." That was exactly my intention: to puncture the Left's myth of

the sainthood of the Rosenbergs, who got such a kick out of trying to destroy the United States.

While I use humor throughout my fiction as a way of hooking and seducing the reader and

entertaining him or her, it's a particularly devastating tool in political fiction. Humor and satire is

the Trojan horse that takes the readers by surprise and makes them see matters in a new and

unexpected lighta ridiculous and revelatory light. It takes us to a new level of understanding.

The wonderful new film satire "Borat" features a lead character who is a thorough anti-Semite who

refuses to fly because the Jews "might restage their attack of 9/11." As John Podhoretz writes,

"Borat is a satire of anti-Semitism--a riposte and retort to it in every conceivable way, akin to

Jonathan Swift recommending cannibalizing children as a solution to the problem of Irish hunger

in `A Modest Proposal.'"

In "The Great Kisser," for example, my narrator is prematurely balding. I write that Dr. Strugin,

who is fashioned after Herbert Aptheker, "promised to send me to the Soviet Unon soon, where, he

said, natural hair grew back as a matter of course." After I wrote this, I actually thought Apthekerhad once said this, since it seemed completely characteristic of him.

In another scene in "The Great Kisser," to capture the surreal, bizarre and duplicitous nature of the

party and its relationship to the Soviet Union, I create a scene in front of a dark, foreboding

building that has an innocent-sounding name, the "Soviet Film Club." Late at night my protagonist

walks by the building and sees "true believers beating their heads against its marble walls and

pleading to be sent to the first land of socialism...Other nights I passed by...when the front of the

building was deserted. There were strange sounds from within; I heard glee clubs, swimming

lessons, people being harshly questioned, food being consumed, the smacking of lips, I saw turkey

legs, gizzards, garter belts, red bras, and pasties being tossed out of the blackened windows." And

in "Red Love," I have pro-Rosenberg picketers marching with signs that say about the Rosenbergs,

"Whatever they did, they didn't do it." Now rereading that phrase, I could swear I actually saw

those signs, and of course I didn't. But they embody a deeper truth, and they encapsulate perfectly

the Communist point of view about the Rosenbergs--i.e. They were innocent because they were

guilty. And this was American Communism in a nutshell.

FP: Who were some of your mentors? Tell us a bit about some of them.

Evanier: First teachers; Morton Ballinzweig, in junior high, who, I wrote when he died (I was 13),

"made me love the days as I'd loved the nights." Teachers who let me call them on the phone

afternoons and kept me going. Robert M. Ravven and Theodore Mitrani, the shrinks who would

not let me fall, poor financial investment that I was. Ravven, with his map of Jerusalem on the

wall, traveling to Israel to see me on the kibbutz with his wife and daughter. I can't measure or

even understand all the boundless goodness that has been meted out to me.

Boris and Natasha Shragin, Soviet dissidents, who had fled the Soviet Union. Boris, sweet-voiced,strong, short, roly-poly, with little bits of hair atop his head, a scholar with a picture of

Dostoyevsky on his mantel, who had risked death to oppose the Soviets. In Vermont I watched

them hunting for mushrooms, running through the grass.

George Plimpton, who called me from a plane when he read a story of mine, published three

stories in The Paris Review, then gave me a job as fiction editor, helped establish me in the literary

world. Emile Capouya at the New School, superb literary critic, writer and teacher who introduced

me to de Montherlant, Silone and Solzhenitzyn. In my leftie days, when I needed a letter for an

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20th century, "Invisible Man." The most brilliant picture of Communism in Harlem is in that great

work. Harvey Shapiro, who I worked with at the New York Times, went home at night after

fulltime editorial work at the newspaper and quietly, without fanfare or self-promotion, produced,

decade after decade, some of the most brilliant poetry of our time in volume after volume. William

Herrick, writer and Spanish Civil War vet who told the truth about the Communists in Spain and

picketed the party during the Hitler-Stalin pact. Was true to his anti-Communism through thick and

thin, and was true to me as friend and guide and supporter until the day he died. Nate Perlmutter of

the ADL, simple, modest, every sentence chiselled, eloquent Jewish warrior and conservative, boldand witty speaker and writer, who let me sit by his bedside and told me his life story in his final

days. Lucy Dawidowicz, author of "The War Against the Jews," who came to me in loving

friendship in what was to be the last year of her life and was a staunch champion of "Red Love."

And the writers who have most inspired me both on the page and in life: Norman Podhoretz, great

memoirist, literary critic and breathtaking political thinker, unravelling complex issues with iron

logic and honest emotion, synthesizing the most complex set of ideas and issues in a way that

seems unparalleled and miraculous, a prescient and luminous writer. Thinking of how to

characterize him, a friend said, "Oh, a genius." And I wondered, why didn't I think of that? And ofcourse I've left out his kindness and generosity, true of everyone I have mentioned, but specific to

him and to the two other writers and friends of integrity and achievement that I admire and love:

Bill Buckley, and Stephen Dixon, the greatest fiction writer of my generation alongside Philip

Roth, although Steve would not agree with the comparison. And my agent Andrew Blauner, with

his transcendent and indefatigable commitment to real literature, friendship, and human kindness.

And my wife Dini, who has the courage of a lion, the unerring sense of goodness and the beauty to

stop time.

As I write in "The Great Kisser:" "Why have I been so lucky in this life, this Jew who came after

the Holocaust--the world had expended its Jew hatred for a while, having gotten it out of its

system--and seen such bountiful goodness, so much beauty, totally unsuitable beauty to make

literature out of because it is unbelievable--so incredible it would be pointless to try to write a

story about it."

FP: Mr. Evanier, it is a very small world my friend. I just wanted to take a moment out to say that

Boris and Natasha Shragin were also very dear friends of my family. My dad and Boris were both

former dissidents in the Soviet Union who fought for liberty under the Soviet regime. Togetherthey both signed theLetter of Twelve, which denounced Soviet human rights abuses.

We saw each other many times in North America. Boris passed away years back. A great loss. I

guess I just wanted to take a moment out and give respect to Boris and Natasha, two noble,

courageous and wonderful people.

Boris and Natasha Shragin

Evanier: I was at the hospital visiting him the final days before he died. I loved him very much,

Natasha too. I met them when I was researching "Red Love," and we all became very close, and

spent a great deal of time together at my home and theirs in Jackson Heights. I have many tapes of

his recollections of his dissident struggles in the Soviet Union. I also interviewed him shortly

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Well, let's move forward.

Norman Podhoretz has said of "The Great Kisser:" "I was struck once again by what an original

Evanier is. He sounds like no one else, and he has a great gift for infusing new life into material

from which one would have thought all the juice had already been squeezed." Your previous novel

about the Rosenberg case, "Red Love," was described by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, author of "The

War Against the Jews" as "representing life and true to history, combining imagination with the

documentary record, written with bite and black humor, tempered by compassion for the betrayedsacrifices, the lives lost." Entertainment Weekly gave the novel an 'A" and said it was "a

tragicomedy of good intentions gone mad," and Elie Wiesel said it had "amazing perception."

What reaction do you have to comments such as these about your work?

Evanier: Profound satisfaction and joy, of course, especially because in the cases of Podhoretz,

Dawidowicz and Wiesel, I have such admiration for their work. I respect anything they say, and in

these instances, they're talking about me. Writing takes so long, it is often so hard, and its isolation

engenders such self-doubt, that this kind of praise brings the feeling that one's long journey was

worth it and that you've reached your destination, your goal. It's the sense of recognition and mostimportantly, being understood by some of the best minds and creative artists in the country.

Most writers I know are so sensitive they tend to remember every damning word ever said about

them, perhaps more than the positive ones. When I worked at the Times, a novelist named Julius

Horwitz burst into the office looking for Christopher Lehman-Haupt, who had reviewed his book

negatively. Horwitz shouted in a rage, "Let me get my hands on him, that son of a bitch. I'll kick

him in the balls." Similarly, a novelist whose book I reviewed harshly perhaps 18 years ago has

never forgotten me. He has put me in a novel of his to lampoon me, although I've never met him.

He gives me a funny name, but that's all I know, since I haven't read this book and his work still

doesn't interest me.

But I can't stress enough how important it is to me when praise comes from those I respect most. I

have been asked at parties to greet writers whom I don't respect and have been at a loss at what to

say them. And finally, it's not only praise that matters to me but the depth, insight, accuracy and

eloquence of that praise, in addition to the stature and achievement of who is expressing the praise.

Podhoretz and Dawidowicz caught exactly what I intended to do, and said I had done it. One of the

saddest things one can do is read fiction which one has the feeling one has read before--but donewith far more originality, passion and incisiveness. Everything seems derivative about it. Norman

Podhoretz was alluding in his quote to the tired nature of most Jewish-American fiction today,

which tends to be either a pale reflection of what has already been done--a kind of kitchen-sink

naturalism, wrestling with sitting ducks, composed with cliches and platitudes--or an

exaggerated grotesquerie or surrealism to make it seem hip, fresh, and deep. Both techniques are

hollow. And so Podhoretz expressed that awareness and at the same time said I was doing

something new in "The Great Kisser." That was deeply gratifying to me; perhaps the most

important praise I have ever received in my life.

Lucy Dawidowicz's words about "Red Love" are on the same level; they are so exact in their

summary and understanding of what I attempted in "Red Love"--and exactly what I hoped and

intended to accomplish. When I began writing that novel, I started with the documentary record,

the FBI files of the Rosenberg case, and was intimidated and drowning in documents as I was

working on the novel at Yaddo. One day I put all the documents aside, realizing I had absorbed

them, but that now it was time to rely solely on my imagination. Then the question became, what

tone and approach to use for the material? the Rosenberg case was so well known by then and

everything had been said--and often so solemnly, so sentimentally. My research told me that theRosenbergs had had a ball screwing the system. I had interviewed so many principals: Morton and

Helen Sobell, and Julius Rosenberg's sister Ethel, John Harrington and Armand Cammarota, the

FBI agents who arrested the Rosenbergs, among many others. Other writers at the colony were

telling me how funny I was when I imitated the Communists, doing shticks about them and their

bizarre language. That's when I decided on satire and comedy to get at the truth of the case. And

yet I was not going to write a cartoon; I was trying to understand on a human and historical level a

mediocre couple shaped by the depression years and the rise of Nazism. Lucy Dawidowicz

understood all that: yes, it was humor, but "tempered by compassion for the betrayed sacrifices,

the lives lost." And Entertainment Weekly capped it by stating that in my novel the Rosenbergshad "good intentions gone mad."

FP: What are your thoughts about Jewish self-hatred on the Left? Chomsky embracing Nasrallah

is an eerie image that comes to mind in symbolizing this pathological phenomenon.

Evanier: There is a deep masochism in Jewish self-hatred on the Left, a denial of self and a

self-obliteration. Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are among the most odious "intellectual"

examples. In Britain Eric Hobsbawm is another. A true believer to this day, totally detached from

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tortured being, one Yiddish word. "Farfallen," he said. It meant, "The opportunity is lost."

FP: What writers influenced you the most?

Evanier: It would be highly presumptuous of me to cite these writers as "influences," but certainly

the five great masterpieces for me are Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed" (also the greatest novel on

terrorism), Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," "Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man,"

Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep."

Still, of course they have influenced me in the sense that I admire and love them. And I feel

virtually the same way about almost all of Dostoyevsky's work, Hemingway's "In Our Time,"

Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych," Knut Hamsun's "Hunger," Daniel Fuchs' Williamsburg trilogy,

Alexander Kuprin's "The Duel," Goncharov's "Oblomov," Silone's "Bread and Wine," Wiesel's

"Night," Schwartz-Bart's "The Last of the Just," Jiri Weil's "Life With A Star," Borowski's "This

Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio,"

Solzhenitzyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Saltykov-Schedrin's "The Golovlovs,"

Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," Brendan Behan's "Borstal Boy," Tillie Olsen's "TellMe a Riddle," Frank Norris' "McTeague," Celine's "Journey to the End of the Night," all of

Dickens and Gogol, Sologub's "The Petty Demon," Meyer Levin's "The Old Bunch," Chaim

Grade's "My Mother's Sabbath Days," Budd Schulberg's "What Makes Sammy Run" and his

screenplay for "On the Waterfront," Nabokov's "Lolita," Alfred Kazin's "A Walker in the City,"

Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel," Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes," the novels of John

McGahern, Theodore Weesner's "The Car Thief," Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," Dylan

Thomas' poetry and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog," David Black's "Like Father," Truman

Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and the stories of James Alan McPherson, Isaac Bshevis Singer,

Albert Murray, Delmore Schwartz, Grace Paley, Stuart Dybek and Ernest J. Gaines. Among the

prose writers I have already cited Norman Podhoretz (most recently "My Love Affair With

America" and "Ex-Friends" and Bill Buckley (recently "Miles Gone By,") and I would definitely

add Elia Kazan's autobiographical masterwork, "A Life," and the film and drama criticism of John

Simon.

Contemporaries who have certainly influenced me are the novelists Stephen Dixon, Philip Roth

and Stanley Elkin for their wild humor, imaginative boldness and creative relentlessness. Charles

Bukowski and John Fante are inspirations too because they are originals, and Fante's son DanFante is now following honorably in his father's footsteps with three novels and a book of stories. I

have to cite the young playwright Adam Rapp for "Red Light Winter," because it's a heartbreaking

and beautiful play, and so is Jonathan Marc Sherman's "Wallace and Women." Charles Reznikoff

and the previously cited Harvey Shapiro are wonderful poets, and Amanda Stern's "The Long

Haul" and Jonathan Rosen's "Joy Comes in the Morning are among the best new novels I have

read recently. It is elevating to even mention all of these writers and their work. As "The Great

Kisser" himself, I can tell you that I have kissed most of these books after reading them.

FP: Where do you consider yourself on the political spectrum?

Evanier: I would call myself a realist, but those who see things differently are sometimes eager to

pigeonhole me. I identify with the Henry Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bayard Rustin, Bob

Kerrey and Joe Lieberman kind of conservative, non-ideological Democrat who believe in

America and a strong defense and still see labor and a social net as important. I'm equally at home

with Rudy Giuliani, even sharing his points of view on abortion and most social issues, and feel he

would a very strong leader in fighting terrorism. I think John McCain would also lead us

effectively against the terrorists. Israel's security is one of my first priorities. The character of theperson affects me much more deeply than their mouthing the right political line.

FP: Can you tell us about your first trip to Israel?

Evanier: It was 1962. I spent a summer at Kibbutz Sasa in Tiberias with a group of high school

and college-age Americans almost as neurotic as myself. Sasa was a left-wing kibbutz. Its

members were disillusioned with Stalin, but, I seem to recall, some of them had switched their

allegiance to Mao. There was a much-loved composer there named Avi, who was going away on a

trip. He supported my request to have some time alone in his cottage to work on my writing whilehe was away. The kibbutz in its collective wisdom turned me down. That decision made me

question whether kibbutz life was for me. Admittedly, it might have seemed like a strange request

coming from such a young person, but by then I was already a committed writer.

I was in love with another member of our group, Corie Zweig from Montreal, but she was in love

with a dentist at home. A young soldier, Gideon, welcomed me to Israel, took me aside, showed

me his barracks, talked with me in the fields, guided me, advised me about the Israeli girls, the

nice ones, the cruel ones. When I left the kibbutz at the end of the summer, he gave me a picture of

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seeing the tattooed numbers on the arms of kibbutzniks, my most revelatory experience, and of Dr.

Robert Ravven's visiting me with his family from Boston. Shy as I was, I traveled on my own to

Haifa, hitching rides, an adventure I was incapable of in the States. I felt at home in Israel. I write

in "The Great Kisser" of Oscar Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor who endured the horrors of the

camps. Weeks after the liberation he took part in the wedding of a couple from the camp. The

bridesmaids were also women from the camp, "dressed in evening dresses," he said. "Bald, short,

tall." He shook his head in wonder. He moved his hands to express what he could not. "We sang

the Israeli national anthem, `Hatikvah,'" he said. And then he added what was for him the mostsignificant detail of all: "There was an Israeli soldier with the star of David." On another occasion

he told me of the impact on him of seeing in Israel a "Jewish policeman on a horse."

Even without his horrific experiences, I had some of the same emotions in seeing Jews in control

of their destinies, in charge. Montague Feist, a leftwing Jew I wrote of at length in "The Great

Kisser" told me of arriving in Israel in 1948. He had served in the Haganah in Rome. On his first

trip to Israel by boat, he said, "If you can imagine a boatload of passengers crying....Haifa was all

white. I couldn't eat. People just stared and cried.

"There was pandemonium when we got off the boat. When we reached our kibbutz, I didn't want

anyone to speak to me. I just wanted to look. My old friends who'd come before me greeted me.

We sat by the fire and sang. I stayed up all night."

His account reminded me of a thrilling photograph I purchased at the Tel Aviv Museum by Hans

H. Pinn of of joyous Israelis celebrating Israel's independence in 1948, holding up the Israeli flag.

I have kept that photograph close by always, for it symbolizes the entire meaning of Israel to me.

My experience was, of course, a different and more complex one than Schwartz's or Feist's, but it

was profoundly transformative. I was filled with emotion. it was like a coming to life. My

experience of Jewish life in New York had been a retrogressive one: it was redolent of the poverty-

stricken, tragic past. My father was always drawn back to the old neighborhoods, to the lower East

Side, to Yonah Schimmel's knishes, the Garden Cafeteria where Isaac Bashevis Singer would sit

and write, Ratner's, Molly's Restaurant with its singing waiters, the sacred Lower East Side

Streets: Cherry, Catherine (where Eddie Cantor was born), Stanton, Delancey, Rivington,

Monroe--where the Rosenbergs had lived in Knickerbocker Village. Israel was the miraculous

future.

I sat in the water tower at Sasa reading Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" for weeks, and

the lyricism, the sense of wonder, the transcendence, the accounts of first love, the embracing of

life and celebration of America in that book merged with my feelings about being in Israel.

Undoubtedly some books are meant to be read at certain stages of life, and reading Wolfe has been

consigned by the conventional wisdom to adolescence and early manhood. But while the rest of

Wolfe's work (except for a few short stories) ranges from incoherent to inchoate to fragmented, I

would swear that "Look Homeward, Angel" holds up as the masterpiece I remember it to be.

It was that trip that changed everything for me. It inspired hopefulness. I began to place my love

where it belonged, giving it to those who deserved it. And like all human change, it was slow,

ineffable, and inconsistent. But my sense of reality had been changed forever: about Israel, and

about America. From that moment, I formed my opinions based on what I saw in front of me, not

from abstraction and theory. And I would never have a close friendship with anyone who denied

the miracles in front of my eyes.

FP: Who are some people you intensely dislike?

Evanier: Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry, Al Sharpton, Noam Chomsky,

Howard Dean, Al Gore, Maxine Waters and Michael

Moore.

FP: Kindly give us a sentence or two on each of these individuals that would shed some light on

your disposition towards them:

Hillary: Scary. That Walter Keane look. She's robotic and mechanical, a block of ice. It'simpossible to know who she is. She has that set expression, wide-eyed, nodding her head,

expecially when her husband speaketh. Never says a spontaneous or original thing. Impossible to

believe her movement to the center or anything else about her, except her grasp for power and love

of monstrous amounts of money.

John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry: A lovely couple. I enjoy watching him because he's so

arrogant, haughty, boring and inauthentic. Top of the line for these qualities. Both of them seem

empty vessels. I imagine them as disliking each other intensely, with long empty silences between

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descent to rock bottom in the person of Sharpton, a scam artist who's never done a thing for the

civil rights movement or for anyone to my knowledge. His models were James Brown and Adam

Clayton Powell, but he inherited the worst of Powell, who despite his flamboyance and flim flam

had some substance, some real achievements to his credit and a good mind. On the positive side, I

think Sharpton is the end of a shameful and passing era. He has nothing in common with Barack

Obama or Harold Ford or Henry Louis Gates.

Chomsky: Arch Puddington has written eloquently about him in Commentary. As with the mostvirulent other Jewish anti-Semites, therapy is called for, but 40 years of it won't dispel his rage at

his father. Alan Dershowitz said it best when he commented that Chomsky is unreadable and no

one gets through his books anyway.

Kerry again, Dean and Al Gore: Gore is the Zelig of our time. I think we've come to the end of

an era and these types have had their day. At least it seems that way from some of the types of

moderate Democrats who recently won election. I could be wrong. The more I think of it, the more

I like Schwartznegger's comical phrase, "girlie-man." I don't mean anything sexual by that, but

there's something so inauthentic about Kerry, Dean and Gore, something unnatural. Think ofDean's shriek. Think of Kerry cursing a reporter as a "son of a bitch" because he got in his way by

mistake, causing him to fall off his skiis. Gore has had so many transmutations of personality and

weight I've given up. He remains very, very boring. My favorite recent Gore is his running to the

podium at the Move On conference to show how relevant, in-shape and dynamic he was. Wasn't he

wearing a Nehru jacket or am I imagining it?

Waters: She's really special. she radiates a free-floating chaos, inchoateness and incoherence,

laced with hate. She's always wrong, no matter what she touches on. Acutally, I think she's very

hard to follow on a rational level. I really don't follow much of what she says, but I do enjoy

watching her in much the same way I enjoy Kerry, Dean and Gore. But she's even more far out

somehow and her grasp on things seems a bit wavy.

Moore: Moore at least looks the part of a full-time hater. What you see is what you get. He is a

public enemy.

FP: What makes you angry?

Evanier: Hatred of the United States. I cannot imagine the barbarism that would engulf the world

without the existence of America. The phrase that enrages me is the one that says that other

cultures have higher morals and more civilized standards of conduct. This is the new version of the

phrase Communists used in the old days: "It would never be allowed to happen in the Soviet

Union." I will close with two incidents that I'm sure will be derided by all of the leftwing historical

revisionists and postmodernists who scorn expressions of genuine feeling, sentiment, emotion,

patriotism and love for America and Israel as archaic and old-fashioned, and save their sentiment,

emotion and "understanding" exclusively for the latest tyrants and murderers in the world, and for

the useful idiots here who defend them.

When I was living in Vancouver in 1975, (it was my first teaching job) I was subjected to an

endless barrage of Canadian nationalism which attacked America as uncouth, aggressive and

destructive. One day I heard the extraordinary Ray Charles recording of "America the Beautiful." I

felt chills going up my spine. Imagine what that version sounds like at first hearing. I turned to my

wife Dini and said, "It's time to go home." And we did, to New York.

In 2001 we were living in Hollywood, and subjected to a similar barrage of hate-Americasentiments. Lolling in their swimming pools, high on whatever, relaxed from their two-hour

massages, living incredibly easy lives, almost every beautiful person we met had told us that

America was a fascist country and the scourge of the world. And then 9/11 occurred. We knew we

had to go home. It is never easy to make a major move. Within months, we were back in Brooklyn,

and I was taking my daily walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into my beloved Manhattan.

FP: David Evanier, it was an immense pleasure and privilege to speak with you. Thank you kindly

for taking the time out to share your profound wisdom and fascinating life with us.

Evanier: Thank you.

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a

specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David

Horowitzs Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) ofThe Hate America Left

and the author ofCanadian Policy Toward Khrushchevs Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University

Press 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist To see his previous symposiums

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