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A review by lpm100
Murder in the Synagogue by T.V. LoCicero
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
"Murder in the Synagogue"
T.V. LoCicero
5/5 stars
"The Coming Out Story that wasn't; James Holmes of 1966"
*******
Of the book:
-381 pages of prose
Structure:
(I)Early Life {71 pps};
(II)Undergraduate / philosophical formation {82 pps};
(III) Beginning of Mental Breakdown {102 pps};
(IV) Involuntary mental hospitalization, final descent, shooting and aftermath {110 pps}.
(V) Epilogue {16 pps}
-Each part is broken into chapters that are, on average, about 9 pages each
-Medium paced read, fairly easy.
*******
QUOTE (Eric Hoffer): "The Orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North..... within a minority bent on assimilation, the least and most successful (economically and culturally) are likely to be more frustrated than those in between. "
QUOTE (Arthur Golden): "Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us"
In that way, in addition to being one of the most thorough books that I've ever read (as a portrait of somebody who has non-Hollywood type mental illness), it's a stellar example of investigative journalism--although it has no references.
This book is ostensibly about the murder of A Rabbi by one of his parishioners, but by now is serves best as a snapshot of a time that is long past. (The 1950ish-1966 Jewish Detroit.)
What a quaint little world it was!
Secondarily, it can serve as the characterization of a frustrated individual (in the Hofferian sense) and someone dealing with psychiatric issues-- and that is time-independent. Essentially, this shooter was the James Holmes (2012 Aurora, Colorado shooter) of 1966: James Holmes attempted graduate school and found that he was a legend only in his own mind; Richard Wishnetsky submitted a pretentious honors thesis and was promptly "put in his place" (p. 143) and (p.194) "after continuing success throughout his academic career, he suddenly found himself in a situation where he was no longer the best, no longer clearly superior to the others in the group at the University of Detroit."
And that seems to be what precipitated both of their downward spirals. (It's just that James Holmes didn't do the taxpayers the favor of eating a bullet.)
Wishnetsky also appears to have been sexually frustrated: (p.98)- "....he had asked the girl to go to bed with him. The girl had replied very firmly that she would rather he kill her first."
Similarly: After all the smoke and dust cleared, it turned out that James Holmes was a prolific whoremonger--going through all the trouble of posting reviews about his "encounters." And that would not have been the case if he was skilled enough to convince women to share their Tender Bits with him.
What do we learn?
1. Most of the Detroit Jewish people were secular / Eastern European. And this has been the case for a very long time.
2. There has been grade inflation at universities, but the caliber of scholarship in those times was inconceivable compared to today. 50 and 60 hours of study time allotted weekly. Senior theses all over the place. Oral exams of senior theses, etc ...
3. Shaarey Tzedek (Conservative) of Detroit once upon a Time had 1,300 children just between the age of 6 to 13. And, it was once upon a time a member of the Detroit Council of Orthodox Rabbis.
It's long forgotten, but at one time Masorti Judaism was thought to be the wave of the future.
4. There were a lot more mental hospitals then than now: after 1991, John Engler shut all the mental hospitals.
Second order thoughts:
1.What I see in the very long characterization of this young man who ultimately did what he did: he didn't realize that he was frustrated until he went off to University to be with academic idiots and then they pointed out to him that he was.
This story has been told a million times before...... How many black people have I met before that grew up in mixed neighborhoods and lived with/dated white people that didn't discover that they were "angry" and "depressed" until some idiot academic pointed out to him that he was?
So, we have the combustible mixture that turned out to be the subject of this book, and but for academia it could well have been otherwise.
2. In some ways, this is a book about medical/psychiatric technology.
As I read in the past, it is amazing how many psychiatric disorders have just ceased to exist. There is lots of Freudian psychology quoted in here (p.274) where diagnoses rely on defense mechanisms.
And just "latent homosexuality" all over the place.
Schizophrenia used to be the catch all diagnosis for everything that was not otherwise specified (p.272). Then, there is the term "borderline schizophrenia," and a quick search shows the most recently published paper on this topic to be in 1979.
3. The cautious assertion is that: Wishnetsky may have been dealing with sexual orientation issues.
The first reason is that there was all of this emotional anguish and hesitation about his going out and getting laid. Meanwhile, the men who really want women will go out and find what they can get in a matter of fact way.
The second reason is that: the tropes about the behavior of people who are "latently homosexual" are too obvious to need elaboration. Wishnetsky had some complaints about Berkeley-SanFrancisco. (p.102) "Mental disturbance, rampant homosexuality, and the carelessness of people living only for the moment."
But, why would that bother someone anymore than some guy who preferred brunettes over blondes?
The less cautious assertion is that: Little Rich was GGGAAAYYY.
And this topic came up OVER AND OVER in the course of the book.
His mentoring professor (p.168): "Mr Wishnetsky, you wouldn't know the first thing about masculinity."
Friend Marty Sharpe (p.209) "Though they never talked directly about the possibilities of homosexuality, Marty thought that Richard was "coming close to the classical Greek conception of bisexuality.'"
But for an environment for him to explore his sexuality (let's say some bath houses in California or DC or some number of cruisy parks/ gay bars away from his family), all of this could have been otherwise.
Steven Lewis (p.310): ".... yet the conversations suggested to Bill that Richard was frightened of homosexual tendencies in himself. He had been down to a gay bar on Woodward a number of times he said, 'just to observe of course."" (Um, ok...)
Harv Steiner (p.313): "He boasted on occasion that he had 'screwed' this or that girl, but was entirely unconvincing. "In fact, I thought he might be a virgin," says Harv. "I also thought he had homosexual tendencies: Richard always wanted to get real close to you and even speak softly in your ear and had his arm around you at times. And he could show a venomous hatred of women."
(p.341): "He mentioned that he had no likelihood of going into the draft since he qualified for exemptions on a number of counts - - including having been in a mental institution and something about homosexuality."
(p.344): "Tina finally handled the matter with Richard herself, calling him a 'fa**ot' and a 'queer' and accusing him of trying to destroy her marriage with his homosexual designs on Steven."
3. "Mr. Wishnetsky" was obviously also dealing with mental issues, and that is because:
-To a (wo)man I have NEVER seen a Jewish person who considered converting to ANY type of Christianity absent severe mental problems. (And, the subject of this biography was considering that- p.114.)
-The "love of his life" (p.114) was a girl who was frankly psychotic, and she had to be institutionalized and dropped out of school after they broke up. (She was in therapy before she met him and in therapy after he was done with her.) Like attracts like.
-Later (p.147, 293) he decided that he was a prophet
-(p.167) "When a male in the class referred to him casually as 'Rich,' he interrupted to explain sternly, 'It's "Mr. Wishnetsky" to you.'"
-(p.173) Constantly writing notes and letters to HIMSELF, talking about the generation and breakdown of modern society and the necessity for a complete revamping.
And these are just some of the earlier highlights, given that the last half of the book was his slow motion complete breakdown.
4. Could anyone have expected that the situation would have ended well?
a. His experience at University would have been bad enough, but: We have a young man with no direction moving back and forth between Conservative Judaism (and Haredism, which /attracts/ creates an even higher fraction of nutballs).
5. I think this is also a story of parents not knowing when to let a child go. They could have put him in a psychiatric hospital and left him there (remember that this was way back in the '60s when people could live full-time in mental health facilities); They had two other daughters and they could have mentally buried him and focused on the other children. But, they did not, and the situation was what it was.
6. Mordecai Richer has written (in his book "Barney's Version") that "life is absurd and nobody truly ever understands anybody."
And I would have to second the motion after reading through all of the accounts of these many many people that saw Wishnetsky in a different way from one another. (Forgive me for not including page numbers, but the characterization changed so much throughout the book that I would not have known that I was looking for Jekyll and Hyde from the beginning.)
-Elementary school teachers said that he was not particularly bright.
-College instructors said that he was brilliant.
-Interviews from when he was a camp counselor said that he was well received by his charges and conscientious.
-Roommates said that he was well exercised and muscular. (In spite of this, he couldn't get laid at a women's prison with a stack of pardons.)
-All of the academics in his later life said that he was pretentious. Most of the other people in his life saw him as unstable.
*******
Minor quibbles:
1. There's not one single picture of any person in this book, North such things as would have been interesting. Such as an autopsy report, or police reports/notes.
2. The book could have been finished in 250 pages. As it was, this went on for 381, and it was really overwrought with detail.
Brilliant quotes:
(p.128): ".. civilizations move in cycles of growth and decline; there appears to be no sociospiritual progress from civilization to civilization. The human condition must always remain the human condition..... When a civilization reaches a crisis it is because a theological point has been openly disputed; there's always a religious crisis first, followed by an institutional crisis and eventually the internal destruction of the civilization by its own members."
(p.206): "....neurotic states often arise from existential frustration, a conflict of values, or the lack of a sense of meaning, purpose, and freedom in one's life........ One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment."
Other tidbits:
1. The penname of Joyce Smith is Joyce Carol Oates.
2. "The Pawnbroker," 1965 film
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
praecox (=early onset)
Letter of transmittal
lambretta (car)
"Murder in the Synagogue"
T.V. LoCicero
5/5 stars
"The Coming Out Story that wasn't; James Holmes of 1966"
*******
Of the book:
-381 pages of prose
Structure:
(I)Early Life {71 pps};
(II)Undergraduate / philosophical formation {82 pps};
(III) Beginning of Mental Breakdown {102 pps};
(IV) Involuntary mental hospitalization, final descent, shooting and aftermath {110 pps}.
(V) Epilogue {16 pps}
-Each part is broken into chapters that are, on average, about 9 pages each
-Medium paced read, fairly easy.
*******
QUOTE (Eric Hoffer): "The Orthodox Jew is less frustrated than the emancipated Jew. The segregated Negro in the South is less frustrated than the nonsegregated Negro in the North..... within a minority bent on assimilation, the least and most successful (economically and culturally) are likely to be more frustrated than those in between. "
QUOTE (Arthur Golden): "Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us"
In that way, in addition to being one of the most thorough books that I've ever read (as a portrait of somebody who has non-Hollywood type mental illness), it's a stellar example of investigative journalism--although it has no references.
This book is ostensibly about the murder of A Rabbi by one of his parishioners, but by now is serves best as a snapshot of a time that is long past. (The 1950ish-1966 Jewish Detroit.)
What a quaint little world it was!
Secondarily, it can serve as the characterization of a frustrated individual (in the Hofferian sense) and someone dealing with psychiatric issues-- and that is time-independent. Essentially, this shooter was the James Holmes (2012 Aurora, Colorado shooter) of 1966: James Holmes attempted graduate school and found that he was a legend only in his own mind; Richard Wishnetsky submitted a pretentious honors thesis and was promptly "put in his place" (p. 143) and (p.194) "after continuing success throughout his academic career, he suddenly found himself in a situation where he was no longer the best, no longer clearly superior to the others in the group at the University of Detroit."
And that seems to be what precipitated both of their downward spirals. (It's just that James Holmes didn't do the taxpayers the favor of eating a bullet.)
Wishnetsky also appears to have been sexually frustrated: (p.98)- "....he had asked the girl to go to bed with him. The girl had replied very firmly that she would rather he kill her first."
Similarly: After all the smoke and dust cleared, it turned out that James Holmes was a prolific whoremonger--going through all the trouble of posting reviews about his "encounters." And that would not have been the case if he was skilled enough to convince women to share their Tender Bits with him.
What do we learn?
1. Most of the Detroit Jewish people were secular / Eastern European. And this has been the case for a very long time.
2. There has been grade inflation at universities, but the caliber of scholarship in those times was inconceivable compared to today. 50 and 60 hours of study time allotted weekly. Senior theses all over the place. Oral exams of senior theses, etc ...
3. Shaarey Tzedek (Conservative) of Detroit once upon a Time had 1,300 children just between the age of 6 to 13. And, it was once upon a time a member of the Detroit Council of Orthodox Rabbis.
It's long forgotten, but at one time Masorti Judaism was thought to be the wave of the future.
4. There were a lot more mental hospitals then than now: after 1991, John Engler shut all the mental hospitals.
Second order thoughts:
1.What I see in the very long characterization of this young man who ultimately did what he did: he didn't realize that he was frustrated until he went off to University to be with academic idiots and then they pointed out to him that he was.
This story has been told a million times before...... How many black people have I met before that grew up in mixed neighborhoods and lived with/dated white people that didn't discover that they were "angry" and "depressed" until some idiot academic pointed out to him that he was?
So, we have the combustible mixture that turned out to be the subject of this book, and but for academia it could well have been otherwise.
2. In some ways, this is a book about medical/psychiatric technology.
As I read in the past, it is amazing how many psychiatric disorders have just ceased to exist. There is lots of Freudian psychology quoted in here (p.274) where diagnoses rely on defense mechanisms.
And just "latent homosexuality" all over the place.
Schizophrenia used to be the catch all diagnosis for everything that was not otherwise specified (p.272). Then, there is the term "borderline schizophrenia," and a quick search shows the most recently published paper on this topic to be in 1979.
3. The cautious assertion is that: Wishnetsky may have been dealing with sexual orientation issues.
The first reason is that there was all of this emotional anguish and hesitation about his going out and getting laid. Meanwhile, the men who really want women will go out and find what they can get in a matter of fact way.
The second reason is that: the tropes about the behavior of people who are "latently homosexual" are too obvious to need elaboration. Wishnetsky had some complaints about Berkeley-SanFrancisco. (p.102) "Mental disturbance, rampant homosexuality, and the carelessness of people living only for the moment."
But, why would that bother someone anymore than some guy who preferred brunettes over blondes?
The less cautious assertion is that: Little Rich was GGGAAAYYY.
And this topic came up OVER AND OVER in the course of the book.
His mentoring professor (p.168): "Mr Wishnetsky, you wouldn't know the first thing about masculinity."
Friend Marty Sharpe (p.209) "Though they never talked directly about the possibilities of homosexuality, Marty thought that Richard was "coming close to the classical Greek conception of bisexuality.'"
But for an environment for him to explore his sexuality (let's say some bath houses in California or DC or some number of cruisy parks/ gay bars away from his family), all of this could have been otherwise.
Steven Lewis (p.310): ".... yet the conversations suggested to Bill that Richard was frightened of homosexual tendencies in himself. He had been down to a gay bar on Woodward a number of times he said, 'just to observe of course."" (Um, ok...)
Harv Steiner (p.313): "He boasted on occasion that he had 'screwed' this or that girl, but was entirely unconvincing. "In fact, I thought he might be a virgin," says Harv. "I also thought he had homosexual tendencies: Richard always wanted to get real close to you and even speak softly in your ear and had his arm around you at times. And he could show a venomous hatred of women."
(p.341): "He mentioned that he had no likelihood of going into the draft since he qualified for exemptions on a number of counts - - including having been in a mental institution and something about homosexuality."
(p.344): "Tina finally handled the matter with Richard herself, calling him a 'fa**ot' and a 'queer' and accusing him of trying to destroy her marriage with his homosexual designs on Steven."
3. "Mr. Wishnetsky" was obviously also dealing with mental issues, and that is because:
-To a (wo)man I have NEVER seen a Jewish person who considered converting to ANY type of Christianity absent severe mental problems. (And, the subject of this biography was considering that- p.114.)
-The "love of his life" (p.114) was a girl who was frankly psychotic, and she had to be institutionalized and dropped out of school after they broke up. (She was in therapy before she met him and in therapy after he was done with her.) Like attracts like.
-Later (p.147, 293) he decided that he was a prophet
-(p.167) "When a male in the class referred to him casually as 'Rich,' he interrupted to explain sternly, 'It's "Mr. Wishnetsky" to you.'"
-(p.173) Constantly writing notes and letters to HIMSELF, talking about the generation and breakdown of modern society and the necessity for a complete revamping.
And these are just some of the earlier highlights, given that the last half of the book was his slow motion complete breakdown.
4. Could anyone have expected that the situation would have ended well?
a. His experience at University would have been bad enough, but: We have a young man with no direction moving back and forth between Conservative Judaism (and Haredism, which /attracts/ creates an even higher fraction of nutballs).
5. I think this is also a story of parents not knowing when to let a child go. They could have put him in a psychiatric hospital and left him there (remember that this was way back in the '60s when people could live full-time in mental health facilities); They had two other daughters and they could have mentally buried him and focused on the other children. But, they did not, and the situation was what it was.
6. Mordecai Richer has written (in his book "Barney's Version") that "life is absurd and nobody truly ever understands anybody."
And I would have to second the motion after reading through all of the accounts of these many many people that saw Wishnetsky in a different way from one another. (Forgive me for not including page numbers, but the characterization changed so much throughout the book that I would not have known that I was looking for Jekyll and Hyde from the beginning.)
-Elementary school teachers said that he was not particularly bright.
-College instructors said that he was brilliant.
-Interviews from when he was a camp counselor said that he was well received by his charges and conscientious.
-Roommates said that he was well exercised and muscular. (In spite of this, he couldn't get laid at a women's prison with a stack of pardons.)
-All of the academics in his later life said that he was pretentious. Most of the other people in his life saw him as unstable.
*******
Minor quibbles:
1. There's not one single picture of any person in this book, North such things as would have been interesting. Such as an autopsy report, or police reports/notes.
2. The book could have been finished in 250 pages. As it was, this went on for 381, and it was really overwrought with detail.
Brilliant quotes:
(p.128): ".. civilizations move in cycles of growth and decline; there appears to be no sociospiritual progress from civilization to civilization. The human condition must always remain the human condition..... When a civilization reaches a crisis it is because a theological point has been openly disputed; there's always a religious crisis first, followed by an institutional crisis and eventually the internal destruction of the civilization by its own members."
(p.206): "....neurotic states often arise from existential frustration, a conflict of values, or the lack of a sense of meaning, purpose, and freedom in one's life........ One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment."
Other tidbits:
1. The penname of Joyce Smith is Joyce Carol Oates.
2. "The Pawnbroker," 1965 film
Verdict: Recommended
Vocabulary:
praecox (=early onset)
Letter of transmittal
lambretta (car)