'Genius & Anxiety' Connects Complex, Neurotic Jewish Lives
(REVIEW) The persistence of anti-Semitism is puzzling. Beyond even its evil, the deplorable wastefulness of this unrelenting sin is bewildering.
Norman Lebrecht's affectionate and enthralling reconstruction of a century of Jewish creativity in his 2019 book Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 only deepened my conviction that anti-Semites — especially those in the U.S. — are unable to recognize who their nations' true friends are.
An accomplished BBC journalist and novelist, Lebrecht skillfully traces dozens of threads of a complex, diasporic web of famous, infamous, occasionally obscure — but always neurotic — Jewish lives. Eighty years on, their legacies definitively shape the world of 2020.
Proudly Jewish himself, Lebrecht reveals some surprising ways (I will not spoil them here) that his upbringing in England intersects with this century of genius, though as a beneficiary rather than an example of it. Lebrecht does well keeping his own story to the margins, knowing when his connections to this vast web are most valuable to the reader.
He instead shines his spotlight constantly on transcendent personalities. He likewise takes care at the outset to show that his book is not a chauvinistic treatise nor an argument for genetic superiority. Rather, in Lebrecht's telling, the active ingredient in Jewish brilliance is — as the title suggests — anxiety. It is his people's millennia of unrequited love for their nation states and Gentile peers, their desire to belong and the fear and awareness of not belonging that spark their explosive genius.
An understandably partisan guide, Lebrecht nevertheless gleefully hacks at the rotted branches of his family tree. He argues that Sigmund Freud was a grifter, Leonard Bernstein was debauched and Karl Marx was a hypocrite.
Geniviéve Halévy was the Sephardic Jew and mentally unstable wife upon whom George Bizet based the man-eating heroine in the timeless Carmen. Halévy consumed rather than loved the people in her life. After Bizet's death, Halévy becomes a society woman in Paris hosting salons with the city's elite. Her son Jaques befriends a young Jewish man and brings him to these events. Despite being secretly gay, the young man becomes obsessed with Halévy, sitting at her feet in the salons. And thus the reader meets Marcel Proust. Such is Lebrecht's fascinating knot of Jewish lives and genius.
Lebrecht restores fascinating characters from obscurity: actress Sarah Bernhardt, whose popularity created the modern notion of "celebrity," and Rosalind Franklin, who discovered the double helix in human DNA. He details a hundred years of destructive egos, overbearing mothers, self-loathing gays, male and female philandering, sectarian infighting and strings of suicides. He chronicles dark ironies.
Franz Haber, the inventor of Germany's poison gas — developed in WWI and later used in the Final Solution — was Jewish. The nation of Israel, founded in zeal for Jewish safety and equality, failed to care for its own non-Jewish minorities. None of these weaknesses is unique to Jews, though Lebrecht allows they are perhaps more noticed in Jews.
Along the way Lebrecht delights in the greatness hovering over these difficult lives and grieves the tragedies that so frequently intrude.
Genius & Anxiety begins in Germany in 1847 with the life and early death of virtuoso composer Felix Mendelssohn and his conflicted and prolific Jewish-Lutheran-Prussian musical mind. Mendelssohn died at 38, just a few months after his beloved sister's death (whose own exorbitant talent was, due to the mores of the day, repressed by the family in order to cultivate Mendelssohn's).
Mendelssohn's tragedy becomes a kind of template that many of Lebrecht's taught biographies follow. Few of his subjects die peacefully in old age. There is often collateral damage. All his subjects cross-pollinate with, revere, punch or birth other Jewish geniuses. Across 393 pages, Lebrecht follows Jewish forebears through Argentina, China, Egypt, France, Palestine, England, Poland, Russia, Hungary and the USA, with many stops and time warps in between.
None of his vignettes is exhaustive. A few are a mere paragraph introducing and dismissing an interesting personality. Other biographies cover half a chapter. If the reader is seeking biographical depth, “Genius & Anxiety” will not satisfy. But Lebrecht delivers on his promise to show the Semitic forest, occasionally zooming in to inspect closely this or that specimen.
Genius & Anxiety ends in the birth pangs of the state of Israel. He takes us inside the statecraft and secret conversations in England, the Jewish diaspora and the USA. He links Jewish geniuses to the statehood movement, some of whose ruminations on the subject began in the 19th century.
Anyone interested in understanding the American Century, with its unparalleled U.S. soft and hard power, will see in Lebrecht's history the enormous debt owed to harried Jewish creatives.
Jewish ideas split the atom and spawned Hollywood. Jewish hands stitched blue jeans and pecked out hit melodies for radio and Broadway. As an American, I would like to believe we were unusually clever in attracting so many fertile Jewish minds, but perhaps we were just unusually lucky.
Lebrecht suggests the U.S. was simply the best-worst place for Jews at the time. While Jews have thrived here, the U.S. did not make that outcome easy or obvious. Jews instead succeeded in the U.S. for the same reason Jews succeed anywhere. Lebrecht quotes American-cum-Israeli-leader Golda Meir's succinct analysis: Jews succeed, she said, "because we had no choice."
As anti-Semitism flares again in Europe and the USA in 2020, the lucid histories in “Genius & Anxiety” remind us that anti-Semitism punishes its oppressed with misery and death, but it also punishes its oppressors with moral guilt and eviscerated cultural and scientific potential.