Books: Jewish Will Rogers

FOR 2¢ PLAIN (313 pp.)—Harry Golden—World ($4).

It is an absurd thing to be pelted with matzoth balls, and for some years now, the South's more sensitive segregationists have been feeling absurd. The barrage of wet kosher dumplings comes from an overweight (198½ Ibs.) leprecohen named Harry Golden, who lives in Charlotte, N.C. and publishes an eccentric (no news, all editorials) newspaper called The Carolina Israelite (TIME, April 1, 1957). When he is not waging his blintzkrieg against the racists, Golden may be tweaking some fellow Jews by the short hair of their mink stoles, sentimentalizing about his boyhood in Manhattan's Lower East Side, or solemnly addressing the young ladies of a Presbyterian college on "Contributions of Calvinism to American Democracy." The combination is engaging and makes sense; Only in America, Golden's book of clippings from the Israelite, sold 270,000 hard-cover copies, is still going strong, and is being fashioned into a musical by Meredith (The Music Man) Willson.

For 2¢ Plain is more of the same, although here and there the pickle-barrel philosopher scrapes bottom. The new book offers nothing as trenchant as Only in America's "Vertical Negro Plan," which solves the problem of painless school integration by removing seats from classroom desks—on the theory that white Southerners think nothing of associating with Negroes when they are standing in elevators, supermarket queues, and the like. In the second collection, there is more blandness than bite, although Golden does return to the subject of segregation: "Free of charge, I offered the $64,000 people an idea to help get an additional ten million viewers in the South: Ask the questions they ask Negroes in Mississippi to qualify them as voters. They're interesting questions, like, How many bubbles in a pound of soap."

Wasted Whiskers. There is again much of the old nostalgia. Back on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Golden recalls, the old folks would mutter, "A klug zu Columbus'n" whenever a boy got a bloody nose or the steam was not hot enough in the Turkish baths. Rough translation: "Columbus should have broken his head before he discovered America." But there were consolations. "For 2^ plain" a lad could buy a large glass of clear Seltzer. Flavoring cost a penny more, but sometimes he could persuade the counterman to "put a little on the top" for nothing. Jewish boys seldom learned to swim, says Golden, because the waterfront lay deep in Irish territory. The immigrants had an enormous respect for learning, and in every photography studio, the appropriate props were on hand. "When the fellow posed you he said, 'How about a pair of eyeglasses?' You acted a bit coy, but you were very grateful to the man, especially when he also put a pencil in your hand."

Golden's friend Carl Sandburg, about whom he is writing a book, has called him the Jewish Will Rogers. He might be called the Jewish Edgar Guest, too, but at his best, the cigar-chewing editor does evoke the old Rogers twang. Golden on the U.S. Astronauts: "Having found the perfect man, it seems the last place they should send him is to the moon. They ought to shoot off the least qualified man, because we need the best man like we never needed him before."