Book review

Estrin explores the rub between insider and outsider in new novel

The Education of Arnold Hitler; by Marc Estrin; published by Unbridled Books in 2005.

Reviewed by Sylvia Cannizzaro

 What happens when innocence encounters evil?  What’s in a name?  What does it mean to be Jewish?  These questions are at the heart of Burlington author Marc Estrin’s most recent novel, The Education of Arnold Hitler.

Those who remember their high school literature classes will remember the importance of that first question in Herman Melville’s story “Billy Budd.”  Those who don’t will be introduced to a modern Billy Budd, who encounters his own series of Claggarts.  Arnold Hitler is a golden boy who grows up in Mansfield, Texas.  He has everything:  beauty, brains, football talent.  What more could one want?  But Arnold is troubled by much of what he sees around him.

Like the character Gregor Samsa in Estrin’s Insect Dreams, Arnold witnesses many important events of his time.  At age five, just before entering first grade, he is present at an early failed attempt to integrate an elementary school; in fourth grade it is the cowardly intimidation of John Howard Griffin, the journalist who wrote the memoir Black Like Me; at age 12, while on a school field trip he witnesses the assassination of JFK.  The son of an Italian Jewish woman and an American GI whose initial meeting hints at trouble, Arnold has a unique point of view that lends events a unique, often refreshing interpretation to these and other events.

Beginning with his earliest memories, Arnold is repeatedly disappointed by the adults around him, especially with their inability or unwillingness to explain anything that really matters.  This weakness on the part of adults is balanced in part by peers whom he meets at school.  Indeed, Mr. Estrin’s frank look at the ugliness and violence with which Americans meet the other is countered by the sensitivity and intelligence that he allows the other to voice in this novel.  When Mansfield, Texas, is finally forced to integrate its schools, the football team benefits from the addition of black athletes to its team.  Arnold, the quarterback, and BJ Frame, the black receiving end, “were not only a phenomenal team on the field over the year but they also became fast friends, the only real black-white combo at the school.” Like Arnold, BJ Frame has an astute view of his position, a view he willingly shares at lasagna night at the Hitlers’ house:

“You know, Mr. Hitler, there’s integration and there’s integration.  We fit as athletes, but we’re separate, still separate.  Once we get off the field again?  After the game?  It’s like some magic change happens on Friday nights and we’re not just dumb niggers anymore. And then — back to reality.”

There was an embarrassed stillness in the room as several people silently agreed.

“If you’re strong and fast and black in Mansfield,” BJ continued, “you’re expected to do one thing and one thing only — play football.”

“Well, you people are good at that.”  Joe Bob was trying to ease the subject with a compliment.

“Yup.  We simple children of nature are good, unsoiled by civilization, uncompromised, uninhibited, instinctual, filled with compensatory graces — simplicity, naturalness, spontaneity, and high-grade sex.”

Arnold thought of Rousseau.  The others simply thought it scary.

“You know, America may be the melting pot, but some of us got no intention to be melted.”

Through BJ, Arnold gains access to the other side of the racial divide.  Through another peer he gains access to the other side of the cultural divide. Billie Jo is a transplant from Dallas, and maintains connections to that city, where she introduces Arnold to the world of art, music, and cinema.  Still, for all her worldliness, Arnold is amazed at her naïveté when it comes to history and politics:

Arnold realized the extent of her ignorance during an Inwood screening of Pabst’s Der letzte Akt, a recreation of the final days of Hitler.  During the first ten minutes of the film, Billie Jo leaned over to him three times to whisper, “Is that Hitler?”  Though he whispered back, “No, not yet,” he was astounded, and then astounded again, and then again that she didn’t know what that Hitler looked like. When he appeared on the screen, he poked her.

“That’s him.”

“Ah,” she said.

In Mansfield, Arnold Hitler remained popular in spite of his openly declared liberal politics.  When Arnold enters Harvard on scholarship in 1969, his liberal politics are no match for the power of his name.  A student of linguistics, Arnold is well aware that the signifier bears only an arbitrary relationship to the signified, and he struggles with the constant rejection he faces as a direct consequence of bearing the name Hitler.  Roommates move out, women refuse to see him after they learn his name, and, in spite of his liberal politics, his participation is not welcome when students attempt to take over the university.  When he approaches Noam Chomsky over at MIT for advice, Chomsky tells him to change his name.  But, while he is willing to change his name for the program of theater productions, Arnold Hitler cannot give up his name completely.

Nor is the reaction to his name only what might be called politically correct.  At Harvard he encounters his first true Claggart, a character called Rick Mather, who invites Arnold to join the National Youth Alliance Committee of Public Safety, “founded to reassert the political functioning of the White majority within our United States of America.”  When Arnold refuses further contact, Mather stalks him and exposes his stage name and his liaison with a professor, who is eventually pressured to leave.

What happens when innocence encounters evil?  What’s in a name?  The encounter with evil of an innocent named Hitler provides Estrin with an interesting insider-outsider position from which to view the political upheaval of the times.  Innocence is forced to make choices, resulting in unintended consequences. While Mather’s harrassment has negative consequences for Arnold’s personal life and the professional life of the professor Judy Jepperson, it also leads Arnold to study Edmond Jabès’s Book of Questions, and to view the condition of the Jew as essentially one of perpetual exile, of continuous wandering and questioning, in short, as the other.  Once Arnold understands his position as a perpetual outsider by virtue of his name, he decides to become Jewish.  His meditations on his newly adopted role, juxtaposed with numerous quotations from Jabès, are fascinating, highlighting the ambiguity inherent in words, in relationships, in existence.

Following graduation, Arnold heads for New York City, where he hopes to attend graduate school.  Jobless and virtually friendless, he ends up exploring the dark underbelly of the city with a chess master and hustler.  When his story and name are exposed in a newspaper story, he is kicked out of the filthy Sunshine Hotel, but he is also contacted by Evelyn Brown, an artist whose studio is full of depictions of her in Nazi regalia.

“What’s with all this Nazi stuff?” Arnold asked.

“I’m a skinhead chick,” Evelyn replied nonchalantly.  “Didn’t you notice?”  She flicked her short front hair at him, then shot her hand up in salute.  “Sieg heil!  Heil Hitler!  Hey, this is great.  I’ve never had a real Hitler to heil to.”

“Cut it out.”

“I’m not kidding.”

Well, you’ve got the wrong Hitler here. I’m…”

“I’ve got exactly the right Hitler.  I’ve got a Hitler in tension with his role, as I am in tension with my own.  Being Hitler is forcing you to explore some deep places, nicht wahr?  Being a skinhead likewise.  Evie the Nazi — it’s a shot of history directly into the vein of my life.”

“But you’re not a Nazi!” He hesitated.  “Are you?”

“Sticks and stones may hurt old crone’s butt.  Hey, how will I ever understand human evil unless I live it?  Read about it in books?  This is a religious act, my inquiry into Supreme Being and the possibility of redemption.”

Arnold was stunned.

Mr. Estrin makes some pretty interesting moves with this character, who introduces Arnold to another Claggart, a Nazi with the interesting name Keith Kenneth Klawans, and who, after helping Arnold build a bunker under the on-ramp to an expressway, undergoes a pretty stunning transformation herself.

After the Mansfield, Texas, public schools and Harvard University, Arnold’s New York education is surprising and funny in many ways. Again, the insider-outsider position gives Mr. Estrin a lot of play.  In one chapter Arnold meets the Mole People, “outcasts in the world of outcasts,” who live deeper underground than the Track People; in the next chapter he dines at the home of Ariel Bernstein and her father, Leonard, who makes his own interesting moves.

There’s a lot to think about and to enjoy in this novel. For all the darkness of his themes, Mr. Estrin takes a comical view of human frailty.  And, while Arnold asks the same question as the tragic figure Juliette — that is, “What’s in a name?”— in the end this work is a comedy in the Shakespearean sense.