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Critical Survey of Short Fiction: American Writers

Jerome Weidman

by Clarence O. Johnson, Richard Tuerk

Other literary forms

The published works of Jerome Weidman (WID-muhn) include plays, essays, travelogues, more than twenty novels, autobiographical sketches, an autobiographical volume, and numerous short-story collections and uncollected short stories. He is probably best known for his dramatic scripts, including the musicals Fiorello! (pr. 1959, pb. 1960) and Tenderloin (pr. 1960, pb. 1961), written in collaboration with George Abbott, and a musical version of his first novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937), produced and published in 1962.

Achievements

As a fiction writer, Jerome Weidman is known best for his unpleasant, sometimes brutal, portrayal of Jewish characters in novels such as I Can Get It for You Wholesale and What’s in It for Me? (1938), and in short stories such as “The Kinnehórrah,” “Chutzbah,” and “The Horse That Could Whistle ‘Dixie.’” He portrays characters more sensitively in his novels Fourth Street East: A Novel of the Way It Was (1970) and The Enemy Camp (1958) and in his stories “My Father Sits in the Dark” and “Movable Feast.” Many of the settings in his novels and short stories are drawn from the areas in which he grew up, New York’s Lower East Side and the Bronx, and many of the activities his characters pursue are drawn from his own experiences as a child growing up in the slums and as an office boy, an accountant, a law student, and a writer. Weidman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his collaboration on Fiorello!

Biography

Educated in stints at City College, New York, 1931-1933; Washington Square College, 1933-1934; and New York University Law School, 1934-1937, Jerome Weidman married Elizabeth Ann Payne and had three children. He was cowinner of the Pulitzer Prize in drama and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Antionette Perry (“Tony”) Award, all for Fiorello! in 1960. He was a member of the Authors Guild and Dramatists Guild of Authors League of America, of which he served as president from 1969 to 1974, and the Writers Guild of America West. Settling in the San Francisco area in the early 1990’s, Weidman’s work on a second autobiographical volume and short stories and sketches were also drawn from his Lower East Side childhood and his young adulthood living in the Bronx. Weidman died in 1998 at the age of eighty-five.

Analysis

While Jerome Weidman’s novels, I Can Get It for You Wholesale and What’s in It for Me?, are often neglected because of his brutally realistic treatment of unsavory Jewish characters, his short stories are frequently humorous, good-natured jabs at not only the Jewish community but also the world as a whole. His early stories, particularly those in The Horse That Could Whistle “Dixie,” and Other Stories are remarkably well constructed and display the work of a writer who has a clear conception of what he portrays. His later work, often marred by hasty writing and commercialism, retains the same sense of humor, but it often lapses into the maudlin and into fits of bathos. Such flaws should be no surprise in the stories of a man who freely admits that his primary aim in writing is to make money.

Weidman draws extensively on his life as a child and young man trying to survive in the slums of New York, first on Fourth Street East and later in the Bronx. In fact, he claims that all of his short stories, even those with female protagonists, are more or less autobiographical. The people of Weidman’s stories are almost universally playing the game of life, and Weidman’s stories reflect the gamesmanship of their situations. The puzzles to be pieced together and the games to be played by Weidman’s characters are the puzzles and games that all people have played at one time or another and, as such, Weidman’s stories become something of a mirror of life. However, the mirror is faceted and reflects many pieces of a whole, and it is making those pieces reflect a steady image that is the challenge for the reader and for the characters alike.

Jerome Weidman

10-R3_Weidman_Jerome.jpg

(Library of Congress)

“My Father Sits in the Dark”

It is the task, set for himself, of the youngster in “My Father Sits in the Dark” to “figure out” why his father, night after night, sits quietly alone in his darkened house. None of the conventional answers the young man sorts out seems to fit. The family is poor, but his father would not worry about money; he would not worry about the family’s health, either. It is not until the young man confronts his father in the dark kitchen of the house that the situation begins to make sense. His father is an immigrant. His home in Austria did not have electricity, which made him familiar with the dark, so dark now provides for him a comfortable, nostalgic feeling. When the son asks the father why he sits in the dark, his father replies that it helps him think. When asked what he thinks about, he replies, “Nothing.” The implication is that the old man does not have to have a more rational reason to sit in the dark and that the son, with his rationalized, fabricated understanding of the situation, has come to an incomplete understanding, but an understanding nevertheless. The fact that Weidman is playing the conflicts of modern society against the idyllic Old World is evident, but he does not belabor the point; he only reveals the exultant son going back to bed after he finally accepts his father’s explanation for sitting in the dark. The outcome makes both happy, but there is no real resolution for the reader.

“Three-Two Pitch”

The same sort of puzzle appears in “Three-Two Pitch.” Harry Powell is a bright young graduate on a three-month internship with the office of the best public relations specialist in New York. Powell, from Cleveland, is considered a “hick,” but he takes his father’s advice to ingratiate himself with the secretary of the office so that he can succeed. His success is such that he is prepared to marry the secretary before the action begins. D. J., Powell’s employer, has a yearly commitment to have lunch with his Cleveland high school teacher, Doc Hapfel, but this year, after making the arrangements, he gets “tied up” and tells Harry to meet Hapfel and begin without him. In the course of the lunch, during which Doc becomes drunker and drunker, a series of calls from D. J.’s office (from the secretary Powell is thinking of marrying) relate that D. J. will be later and later, and after every call, Doc seems to know, intuitively, what has been said—as if he were going through a familiar ritual. When Doc finally collapses and Powell is forced to cope with the situation, he begins to put the pieces together. The lunch happens every year; D. J. always sends his intern to lunch with Doc; D. J. is always tied up; he will always come later. Doc finally admits he has not seen D. J. for years, and when Powell discovers, fortuitously, that D. J. has not been in town all day, but is in Detroit, he realizes that he has been duped and used to pacify the expectations of an old man.

Weidman stresses the conflict between “hick” Cleveland and sophisticated New York, but the principal theme is the puzzle which Powell must put together. The pieces are the secretary, D. J., Doc Hapfel, and Harry Powell himself. Before Harry can solve the puzzle, he must assimilate all of the pieces and come to an understanding of the situation and of himself. When he does solve the puzzle, the solution is devastating. He understands he has no place in New York, that he has been used, and that his self-esteem has blinded him to all of these realities. Only by returning to Cleveland and entering law school, as his father counseled him to do at the start of the story, can Powell provide a definitive, if somewhat unsatisfactory, solution to the whole puzzle.

“I Knew What I Was Doing”

“I Knew What I Was Doing” presents life as more of a game than a puzzle, but the same unsavory undertone attaches itself to the outcome. Throughout the story, Myra, a fashion model, plays one potential escort against another until she works herself up from a mere stock clerk to a wealthy clothing buyer. By portraying her game of enticement and entrapment, Weidman shows her as a cold, calculating woman who succeeds at the game because she knows the rules so well. The irony of her role is that her chumps, the men in her life, fall so predictably within the rules of the game. One of them, however, nearly upsets the game plan when he falls in love with Myra and proposes marriage almost simultaneously with her conquest of the rich clothing buyer. She retains her composure, however, and tells this, the most ensnared chump, to “paste it [a marriage license] in your hat.” Weidman’s characters in this story are little more than pawns being played by the queen. Weidman is not particularly interested in character here but rather in the progress of the match. The story is, perhaps, the epitome of Weidman’s depiction of game playing.

“The Horse That Could Whistle ‘Dixie’”

At the other end of the spectrum is “The Horse That Could Whistle ‘Dixie.’” Rather than flat, featureless characters, Weidman gives readers a thoroughly reprehensible father playing the age-old game of growing up with his unwilling son. After watching many children ride the ponies at the zoo pony ride and sneering fatuously at those who only ride in the horse cart and not astride the beasts, the father drags the son to the ponies and forces him to ride. Despite the child’s tearful entreaties and the sensible suggestions of the attendant, who can see that the child is terrified, the father forces the child to ride not once, but four times. At the end, the child is a “whipped, silent mass of tear-stained quivering fright” who has finally satisfied his father’s sense of propriety. Here the game has no winner, no ending, and no understanding. The son does not understand the father’s motives, the father does not understand the son’s reluctance, and the crowd watching the events does not want to understand. This is the most undesirable of Weidman’s games, in which a person is forced to play by someone else’s rules.

From the gentle “My Father Sits in the Dark,” to the savage “The Horse That Could Whistle ‘Dixie,’” Weidman portrays, fabricates, and manipulates the games people play and the puzzles that they are. If readers are to understand the games and puzzles, they must abandon credulity and prepare themselves for the inconsistencies that the games-master builds into the game.

Bibliography

1 

Bannon, Barbara A. “Authors and Editors.” Publishers Weekly 196 (July 28, 1969): 13-15. Uses the publication of Weidman’s novel The Center of the Action as a starting point for a treatment of his literary career. Discusses aspects of the relationship between Weidman’s fiction and his life. Accompanied by a photograph of Weidman.

2 

Barkham, John. “The Author.” Saturday Review 45 (July 28, 1962): 38-39. This interview, concerning Weidman’s fiction and theater work, accompanies a review of Weidman’s novel The Sound of Bow Bells. Barkham’s essay examines some of Weidman’s ideas about the way stories should be written and discusses Weidman’s daily schedule as a writer. A photograph of Weidman accompanies the review.

3 

Hawtree, Christopher. “Chronicles of the Lower East Side.” The Guardian, October 20, 1998, p. 22. A brief sketch of Weidman’s life and literary career. Concludes with a comment on his story “Monsoon,” which is compared to a story by Eudora Welty in its treatment of racism.

4 

Liptzin, Sol. The Jew in American Literature. New York: Bloch, 1966. Discusses Weidman in the context of American literature. Liptzin briefly compares Weidman to Budd Schulberg in their treatment of “the Jewish go-getter” and of “unpleasant Jewish money-grubbers.”

5 

Sherman, Bernard. The Invention of the Jew: Jewish-American Education Novels, 1916-1964. New York: Yoseloff, 1969. Treats Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale as a rogue-hero novel. Sherman places the work in a tradition beginning with The Rise of David Levinsky, by Abraham Cahan, and running through Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl, by Samuel Ornitz, and What Makes Sammy Run, by Budd Schulberg.

6 

Weidman, Jerome. Interview by Lisa See. Publishers Weekly 230 (September 12, 1986): 72-73. Uses the publication of Weidman’s autobiographical volume, Praying for Rain, as a point of departure for surveying his literary career. Weidman also discusses some of his ideas about composition. Includes a photograph of Weidman.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Johnson, Clarence O., and Richard Tuerk. "Jerome Weidman." Critical Survey of Short Fiction: American Writers, edited by Charles E. May, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSSFAM_13340120000557.
APA 7th
Johnson, C. O., & Tuerk, R. (2012). Jerome Weidman. In C. E. May (Ed.), Critical Survey of Short Fiction: American Writers. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Johnson, Clarence O. and Tuerk, Richard. "Jerome Weidman." Edited by Charles E. May. Critical Survey of Short Fiction: American Writers. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.