A L S O_.T O D A Y

Blue Glow
Hank Hill, volunteer firefighter; mom leads a witch hunt on new "Buffy"

RECENTLY IN
ENTERTAINMENT

Married... with hit men
By Joyce Millman
HBO's wily new series "The Sopranos" depicts the midlife anxieties of a devoted husband, father and Family man
(01/11/99)

"The Thin Red Line"
Reviewed by Charles Taylor
What was supposed to be Terrence Malick's long-awaited comeback is instead a clichéd, self-indulgent throwback to the '70s
(01/08/99)

"Affliction"
Reviewed by Charles Taylor
Nick Nolte sears as a cop trying desperately not to become his father in Paul Schrader's masterful new film
(01/08/99)

On his own turf
By Cynthia Joyce
Paul Schrader talks about his new film, "Affliction," and the pleasures of working the fertile emotional territory the big studios can't touch
(01/07/99)

Sharps & Flats
Reviews of new CDs including André Previn's "Streetcar" opera and new albums by the Black Crowes and others
(01/06/99)

BROWSE THE ENTERTAINMENT ARCHIVES
FEATURES
TELEVISION
MOVIES
MUSIC

Romantic Valentines Night Overnight stays with a touch of romance...

SALON EMPORIUM
Gift Basket Diamonds are forever. But get real. It's just Valentine's Day. Give Salon's Valentine Gift Basket. It's only $30.

________. . . n e v e r   f o r g e t . . .

 
Playwrights Alfred Uhry and David Mamet revive the specter of antisemitism and tap into American Jews' nostalgia for a clear-cut enemy.

BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Near the climax of "Parade," a major new musical written by Alfred Uhry and directed by Hal Prince, a Jewish factory manager who has been convicted of murdering a Christian girl receives a prison visit from his wife. For much of the show, Leo and Lucille Frank have seemed mismatched, even estranged. In the provincial Atlanta of the 1910s, he is a fastidious and swarthy son of Eastern European immigrants who longs, at one point, to be "home again, back again in Brooklyn, with people who look like I do, talk like I do." A child of both the South and the German Jewish elite, Lucille makes watermelon pickles and disparages Yiddish.

Yet in this, the penultimate scene of "Parade," Lucille treats Leo tenderly. She brings lunch in a wicker basket, with place settings of china and crystal, and they picnic on the grounds of the prison farm where he is serving a life sentence. A guard obligingly absents himself so the couple can make love. Against the backdrop of a gnarled, knobby tree -- the tree from which a mob will lynch Leo Frank in just a moment -- they sing a duet with the refrain, "I never knew anything at all."

More than just the conventions of a love story bring Lucille and Leo Frank to that moment of communion beneath the hanging tree. Uhry and Prince evidently intend the tableau as a reminder that the hatred of antisemites is what ultimately brings and keeps Jews together. All the differences of ethnicity, region and social class that have separated Leo and Lucille vanish against the onslaught of those who call Frank "the antichrist." As Leo has sung to Lucille a bit earlier in the musical, "I was such a stupid fool to think I'd do it all without you."

"Parade" is just one example of renewed interest in the Frank case. David Mamet's novel about it, "The Old Religion," was published by Free Press last year. The Pegasus Players, a theater troupe in Chicago, are staging a drama called "The Lynching of Leo Frank." And journalist Steve Oney is completing a history of the case, which is to be published next year by Pantheon.

It is always risky to impute motives to any artist's choices. And the Frank case certainly supplies all the drama any writer or director could want: On Confederate Memorial Day, 1913, a 13-year-old girl named Mary Phagan is found strangled to death in the National Pencil Factory, where she works for pennies an hour. Frank is arrested, charged and, amid an atmosphere of antisemitism and class warfare, convicted and sentenced to death, largely on the strength of dubious testimony from a night watchman. Frank has his punishment commuted to life imprisonment by Georgia Gov. John Slaton, whose action destroys his political career. On Aug. 17, 1915, a mob carries out the original sentence. Only in 1986, after a witness has come forward to name the night watchman as Phagan's killer, does Georgia officially exonerate Frank.

Still, why should a case more than 80 years old, a case that produced several histories and films closer to its own time (including the 1937 movie "They Won't Forget," written by Robert Rossen and Aben Kandel and directed by Mervyn LeRoy), suddenly become a hot property? The answer says as much about American Jewry and its travails as it does about artistic and commercial sensibilities. Every retelling of the Frank case is bound to offer, to a greater or lesser degree, the same lesson as does the picnicking scene in "Parade": The outside world hates Jews and so Jews must cling to one another.

N E X T_P A G E _| Antisemitism as a balm for intra-Jewish tension