A Jewish Boy from a Small Town
Bob Dylan’s Early Life
My latest book, Bob Dylan, Jewish Roots American Soil is published in the UK this week and will be out in the States on June 10th. Here are a few extracts.
If you read Chronicles, the first and only published volume of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, you will learn that he came from a small town. You might deduce that his surname was Zimmerman. However, you would not know that he was Jewish. The word Jew only occurs once in the autobiography, and even that is only in a reference to the Pope. His first girlfriend, Echo Helstrom, who he met in the eleventh grade, once asked him if he was Jewish. She told Anthony Scaduto, Dylan’s earliest biographer, that he gave her a funny look. Their friend John Buckland, who overheard the exchange, told Echo never to ask him that again. And Scaduto reports conversations with other former acquaintances of Dylan too, all of whom are adamant that he was not prepared to own up to his origins.
Dylan’s early desire to conceal his origins may have come as a surprise to Scaduto and his readers. It shouldn’t really; thousands of sensitive, teenage Jewish boys have felt the same. Particularly in those days when identity was not something one shouted about, when the pressure to conform and fit in was still strong, before the social upheavals of the 1960s, upheavals in which self-conscious, reluctantly identifying Jews played a disproportionate part. The desire to conceal his origins would have been particularly apposite in Hibbing, a town where, according to a teacher in Dylan’s old school, speaking some years later, ‘the Finns hated the Bohemians and the Bohemians hated the Finns. Nearly everyone hated the Jews.’ It sounds like a quote from Tom Lehrer’s song, ‘National Brotherhood Week’, but pretty accurate, nevertheless: ‘Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, / And the Catholics hate the Protestants, / And the Hindus hate the Moslems, / And everybody hates the Jews.’
Thirteen years older than Dylan, a Jew from Manhattan where the need to conceal one’s Jewishness was never much of a priority, Tom Lehrer never seems to have had a problem sounding or appearing Jewish. He even gave up his successful musical career to go and teach Mathematics – academic subjects don’t come more Jewish than that. But Dylan was not Lehrer and Hibbing was not Manhattan. In small towns, prejudices reign supreme. As a Jew, Dylan’s father Abe Zimmerman wasn’t even able to join the local golf club.
There may have been only a scattering of Jews in Hibbing but Dylan’s parents played their part in the Jewish community. Abe served on committees of the B’nai B’rith charitable fraternity, his wife Beatty performed a leading role in the local branch of the women’s fellowship, Hadassah. Dylan’s parents invited 500 people to his barmitzvah party – or, to be more precise, the barmitzvah of Robert Zimmerman, because that is who he was at the age of 13 – of whom 400 came. Not a bad turnout for a small town with only 280 Jews. Unlike some Jewish boys, those at the most disconnected end of the religious spectrum, Bobby Zimmerman’s barmitzvah was not an outlier in an otherwise secular life . . . .
Woody Guthrie took an immediate shine to Dylan, and Dylan in turn was overwhelmed. He went back to visit him time and again, often three or four times a week. Visiting the sick is a fundamental Jewish obligation, but it is not likely that Bob’s visits to Guthrie in hospital were driven by any sort of religious imperative. Though it is, perhaps, possible that Woody saw it that way. Guthrie’s second wife, Marjorie Greenblatt, was Jewish, as were their four children. One is Arlo Guthrie, a social commentator like his father, best known for poking fun at the Vietnam draft in his song and film Alice’s Restaurant. Ten years or more before Dylan met him, Woody had started to take an interest in Judaism, studying its history and stories. He wrote seven songs about the festival of Hanukkah for his children and the local Jewish community – more than any Jewish composer has ever written about Hanukkah. He had no truck, though, with Jewish sentimentality. Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ is an uncompromisingly patriotic song written by an eternally grateful immigrant. Guthrie’s riposte, ‘This Land Is Your Land’, written by a man whose American roots ran deep, for whom American life and hardship were inseparable, is a world removed from such schmaltz. . . .
Happily believing himself to now be a part of Woody Guthrie’s orbit, even if the great man was too ill to recognise him as such, Bob was gradually meeting his hero’s closest friends and entourage. Chief among them was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. A cowboy folk singer a few years older than Bob Dylan, Jack Elliott’s mother had bought him a guitar when he was 13. Within a couple of years he was hanging out in Greenwich Village, playing guitar in the park, mixing with the small folk crowd until one day a friend gave him Woody Guthrie’s telephone number, suggesting he give him a call. With impeccable timing Elliott rang Woody just as he was being admitted to hospital with a ruptured appendix. Elliott picked up his guitar, headed for the hospital and – just as Dylan would do 10 years later – first met Woody Guthrie while he was lying in an infirmary bed.
Jack Elliott has been described as Guthrie’s first disciple, living with him between 1951 and 1952, watching him play and learning as much as he could, playing with him onstage just once. By the time that Bob Dylan met him, Jack Elliott had been following and imitating Guthrie for so long that he had picked up much of his style and mannerisms. As Bob Dylan drew closer to Ramblin’ Jack, he in turn acquired some of the same characteristics.
It was not just Woody Guthrie’s characteristics that Dylan and Elliott shared. The story goes that when Ramblin’ Jack was ill, some of his relatives came to the Village to visit him. They were Jews from Brooklyn and his friends discovered that, rather than him being, as they believed, a wandering cowboy from out west, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s real name was Elliott Adnopoz. He was the son of a Jewish doctor from Flatbush, Brooklyn.
The first that Bob Dylan heard of this was when he was sitting in a club one evening with a couple of friends. The name Adnopoz came up and Dylan asked ‘Who?’. When he was told Ramblin’ Jack’s real name, Dylan fell on the floor, rolling around with laughter. He couldn’t stop; he kept repeating the name Adnopoz, over and over.
It was a cathartic moment for Dylan. A few weeks earlier, while trying to get a gig at Gerde’s Folk City, he’d been asked to show proof of his age. He had produced a document with the name Robert Zimmerman on it. Word had got out that this was Dylan’s real name, that he hadn’t been raised in an orphanage in New Mexico, or whatever story he was peddling that week, that in fact he was a Jew named Robert Zimmerman. But nobody was really sure if the rumour was true and nobody was willing to go out on a limb and challenge his origin stories; he was still too young and appeared too vulnerable to be confronted as an imposter. As soon as he collapsed in hysterics upon hearing Jack Elliott’s real name, the game was up. It was obvious to everyone that his reaction was because he’d discovered that he and Jack had something in common. Just like him, it seemed as if Ramblin’ Jack had fantasised an origin story for himself to cover up his identity as a Jew from a middle-class home. Dylan had discovered he wasn’t alone, and the suspicions of his friends had been confirmed; Bob Dylan was Jewish. And, of course, it didn’t matter a bit. That’s the funny thing about being Jewish. The antisemites hate you, the philosemites want to be like you, and nobody else gives a damn. It’s a lesson that every Jew with a crisis of identity learns eventually. To stop being so self-conscious and accept the reality of who you are. . . .
Larger than life, Theo Bikel was arguably the most enigmatic of the Newport clique. One of the founders of the festival, his involvement in folk music was part of a long, variegated journey that had begun when he was a teenager, when his Austrian Jewish family was forced to flee from the Nazis. Coming from a passionately Zionist background (his father had named him after Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism), they managed to circumvent the British restrictions on entry into Palestine, settling on a kibbutz. Theo took up acting, appeared in a few stage roles in Tel Aviv, including the first production of the play that would evolve into Fiddler on the Roof, and in 1946 went to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He acted in several roles on the London stage, before moving to the United States where he appeared in many Hollywood movies and TV programmes. He created the role of Captain von Trapp in the original stage version of The Sound of Music and played Tevye the milkman in Fiddler on the Roof over 2,000 times in venues across America. In 1957, while working in Hollywood, he brought folk music to Los Angeles, opening the Unicorn Folk Club on Sunset Strip. He was as prolific a singer as he was an actor, making over 40 albums, mainly of Jewish and Russian folk songs. He once said that music was ‘one of the few answers to the chaos that we have’, putting the principle into practice through his involvement in the civil rights movement. It was Bikel who had first steered Bob Dylan towards practical civil rights activism by quietly paying his plane fare to travel and play at a voter-registration campaign in Mississippi.
Dylan had flown to Mississippi a few weeks before the 1963 Newport Festival, in the company of Bikel and Pete Seeger. They had gone, along with Cordell Reagon and Bernice Johnson’s Freedom Singers, to play to a small gathering of black farmers, aiming to get national publicity for the voter-registration campaign being conducted by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was not Dylan’s idea to go, indeed when Theo Bikel suggested he went, Albert Grossman told him that he wouldn’t be able to afford the plane fare. Bikel told Grossman that he would pay it, and that Dylan wasn’t to know.
Dylan took the flight and spent three days with Bikel and Seeger, playing on a makeshift stage in a cotton field in Greenwood, Mississippi, with Bob learning the practical realities of a struggle that up to now he’d only known from a distance.