The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (41 page)

Although Steinitz seemed to enjoy being personally revolting, he made it a rule to play “against the board,” not the player. Chess was an abstract science. The feelings and motivations of one’s opponent, Steinitz urged, were unimportant. What occurred on the chessboard however, was paramount.

Opponents came to fear not just his explosive temper, but even more his relentless defense and inevitable attack. For over two decades, most players could not fathom what he was doing. Steinitz threw out the romantic notion that being inventive was what counted most. He lay in ambush for the fashionably swift, king-sided invasions of his competitors. Steinitz developed highly influential defense strategies, accumulating tiny advantages to prepare for a final, brutal onslaught. In many ways Steinitz symbolized the end of chess as chivalrous sport, much as Ulysses S. Grant had shown that modern warfare would not permit gallants such as J.E.B. Stuart to survive. Steinitz proved that success could only follow from sure advantage. For him, every piece assumed importance. Every unit could kill. His theories of close, defensible positions profoundly changed the game.

Steinitz popularized his methods by writing an influential chess treatise and by editing and contributing to an internationally distributed chess magazine (Lasker would follow Steinitz’s example and write the standard book on the game). After dominating British chess for almost twenty years, in 1883, Steinitz ventured to the United States, sure he would become rich. However, Americans had little interest in playing chess (Harold C. Schonberg in his informative
Grandmasters of Chess
recounts that in all of Wyoming of the day there was only “one Chessist” to be found), and Steinitz could barely make a living. Yet he was able to drum up interest in 1886 in a championship rematch against Zukertort. The match was played over several weeks in three cities, and even more than the exploits of New Orleans-born Paul Morphy (the greatest American chess player of the generation before Steinitz), aroused intense American interest in chess (Steinitz’s later match against Chigorin did much the same for the Russians). Steinitz, of course, humiliated Zukertort (leading, some would say, to Zukertort’s rapid deterioration thereafter and then death two years later).

In 1894, the twenty-five-year-old Emmanuel Lasker, the son of a German Jewish cantor, trounced Steinitz, then fifty-eight, and captured his title. Steinitz continued to play, however, contributing gems to the chess literature. By 1899, he had lost his edge in the game and gone mad, was cloistered in an insane asylum on Ward’s Island in New York City, and died broke in 1900. Lasker, fearful that he too could die penniless like Steinitz, made it a point never to defend his championship except for the highest possible stakes. The huge fees paid chess masters to this day stem from Steinitz’s sorry checkmate.

T
heater is a form of entertainment designed to bring people together into a public place for a common experience. The ancient Greeks used theater as a forum for deeply felt sadness and laughter. Gods and the noble rulers of the earth were portrayed in epic tragedies and hysterical comedies, catharsis achieved through crying and giggling. Over the centuries, theater has meant different things to succeeding generations, from a casual passing of time to a religious happening. Some of Shakespeare, and later, much of Ibsen and Strindberg, was preoccupied with social issues, man’s relationship to others in his society, to those he loves, to himself.

Arthur Miller, born in New York City in 1915, was the most prominent proponent in the twentieth century of a theater of the concerned. In realistic plays that artfully toyed with time with often fantastic effect, Miller strove to create what he called a “drama of the whole man.”

How do any of us stay true to ourselves and good to the ones we love, faced with the hopeless daily grind of making a living in the world? How does our work life work on our life? Why do people suddenly go mad, reveling in hate and oppression? When must the victim stand up to the victimizer? Can we repair the damage we do to each other and ourselves?

All of these (and many more) questions were asked by Miller. His plays often answered with unbearable but true-to-life gloom. That Miller demanded our response makes his work influential, for his theater was never a passing fancy (perverting Ira Gershwin’s words, if Gibraltar tumbles, it will fall on us). There is nothing easy about Miller’s work, except for the exceptionally accessible way his words fall on our ears. He said that to be a good playwright one must write hearing people speaking. Miller’s characters mostly seem to be real people revealing their thoughts to us through their words and actions. The drama is in their predicament, revealed by themselves or by what they do.

Willy Loman, protagonist of the masterpiece
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem,
is Miller’s greatest, and most representative, character. First produced in 1949 to great acclaim with an exciting cast (Lee J. Cobb, Mildred Dunnock, and Arthur Kennedy) directed by Elia Kazan,
Salesman
won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards. The play has been produced in countless languages and countries, including a highly regarded production in Chinese directed by the author. It is surely the best-known and most influential play yet written by a Jewish playwright.

Willy Loman is a universal symbol and one of the greatest figures in the history of tragedy. He is important not only for the pity we feel for him but also for what his story reveals about our capitalist society. Willy believes deeply in the American dream. If you work hard, play by the rules, keep up your friendly contacts, you will succeed. But Miller showed how Loman’s life has been a tragic farce. Willy does not even know he is lying to himself (that is, until his suicide at the play’s end). His outgoing nature turns people off, he cannot sell much anymore, and he keeps a woman other than his faithful wife stashed away for his business trips. Only by destroying himself for life insurance money can he beat the system that owned him and repair the damage done to his family.

In
Salesman,
Miller freed drama from the restrictions of convention and reality. The time values and psychological emphases of the drama of Ibsen and Strindberg are extended and refashioned in Miller’s play. We are drawn into Willy’s mind and world by brilliantly shaped structure and poignant language.

Before
Salesman,
Miller wrote plays while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, then for the Federal Theatre project, and on CBS and NBC radio workshops. His first successful Broadway play,
All My Sons
(like
Salesman
also about a father and two sons), is a raw, imperfect, yet stirring prelude to his greatest work. Miller used many of the techniques learned in radio in
Salesman
and later plays to alter audiences’ expectations and perceptions of time.

The Crucible,
first produced in 1953 in New York, was Miller’s response to the McCarthy era. Saddened by the naming of names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) by his friend and colleague Kazan and by the atrocities committed in the name of freedom by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Miller wrote a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692. When one thinks about those dark years, Miller was extraordinarily courageous and squarely in the best American tradition of resistance to tyranny. Miller points out in his excellent autobiography,
Timebends,
that the HUAC hearings were designed as a peculiar, almost religious, rite. The accused was expected to name comrades in the Communist party and then, after the accusations were made, the committee would absolve the witness of all sins, freeing the accuser to return to Main Street America.
The Crucible
reminds us that personal dignity and fighting against those who would degrade us are essential if we are to retain our humanity.

Miller’s other plays, such as
A Memory of Two Mondays, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, The Price,
and
The American Clock,
and the screenplays
The Misfits
and
Playing for Time,
examine many of the themes first explored in
Salesman
and
The Crucible.
The two works most famously identified with his second wife, Marilyn Monroe, are
The Misfits
and
After the Fall. The Misfits
starred Monroe with Clark Gable (in his last film), Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter, and directed by John Huston. A critical and box office failure when it opened,
The Misfits
is now considered a powerful film for its unyielding examination of desperation, unfulfilled dreams, and the need for love.
After the Fall
remains controversial (largely because of the immense affection audiences still have for Marilyn), but it is a model of technical brilliance, the action taking place “in the mind, thought, and memory” of Quentin, the lead character many think is Arthur Miller.
After the Fall
is not conventional theater and its examination of Quentin’s relationship with Maggie (Marilyn?) and himself is troubling and relentless.

Miller’s work will continue far into the future to guide playwrights in the emotional and formal ways Ibsen and Strindberg moved him. His probing identification of mankind’s most troubling aspects must remain with us to warn of what we can do to each other and then finally to ourselves.

D
aniel Mendoza, a British Jew of Portuguese origin, was the first great Jewish sports champion and a seminal figure in the development of scientific boxing. Holding the undefeated British boxing crown from 1789 until 1795, Mendoza was feared as much for his fast hands as for his remarkable use of the entire boxing ring.

Prior to Mendoza, prizefights were won by the biggest and the strongest. Huge louts would pummel each other with bare knuckles round after round until only the most powerful, with the longest wind and the heaviest jaw, remained standing.

Mendoza was a small man by boxing standards, weighing 160 pounds with a height of five foot seven inches. To compensate for his size, he developed a system of guarding his face and body, stepping from side to side and using his innovative straight left hand to expert advantage. Mendoza’s pugilistic skills were so impressive and consistent that despite his weight and height disadvantage, he cut a bloody swath for many years through his less intelligent and clumsier opponents.

Dubbed the “Light of Israel” by his contemporaries, Mendoza reinvented boxing as a sport in which strategy, not slugging, would rule. Like every other smart boxer since, Mendoza was soundly criticized by some as being cowardly, unable to trade punch for punch with other fighters. His attention to the manner of holding one’s hands and the artful direction of punches would influence another Jewish boxer, Dutch Sam, at the turn of the nineteenth century, to develop the uppercut. After a successful boxing tour of Ireland, Mendoza founded a school for boxers, which would serve as the foundation for the development of many great Irish champions.