Measure of a Man: Auschwitz to the White House by Martin Greenfield

There can never be too many books about the holocaust.

Each one is a document and a testament, and another (to use anti-semite Roger Waters' term) "brick in the wall" to block out the deniers.

Documenting atrocities isn't the point of these books. It's the survival. It's the morality.

This is very well illustrated in one story Martin Greenfield tells. Martin who?

Greenfield's enough of a celebrity to get a book deal, that's who. Born in Pavlovo (once part of Czechoslovakia, now part of the Ukraine), he was 19 when he came to Brooklyn, having survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald (unlike the rest of his family). A master tailor, he would not only dress up President Eisenhower (whom he'd originally met during the liberation), but other politicians and celebrities including Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Patrick Ewing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others. His vintage designs were also used in the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire."

Naturally the most gripping part of the book involves his teen years imprisoned by the Nazis. He was not exactly wearing the heigh of couture when he was 16 and a prisoner in Buchenwald. Assigned to a work detail outside Weimar, the brutal hard work was sometimes rewarded when he could find a potato or some other edible in a field, or some discarded item he might bring back to the camp and trade for food. Repairing a building, he wandered into the cellar where he found a cage that contained some pet rabbits:

"Inside the cage were the remains of the rabbits’ dinner. I unlatched the cage and pulled out a wilted leaf and carrot nub. The lettuce was browning and slimy, the carrot still moist from the rabbits’ gnawing. Excited, I wolfed down the lettuce and tried to crack the chunk of carrot in half with my teeth. My luck was short-lived. “What are you doing?” a voice yelled."

An irate blonde, who turned out to be the mayor's wife, quickly summoned an SS soldier to punish the prisoner:

"'Down on the ground, you dog! Fast!' yelled the German. He gripped his baton and bludgeoned my back. I do not know whether the mayor’s wife watched the beating. Given her cruelty, why would she want to miss it? On the hike back to Buchenwald, I replayed the scene over and over in my mind. How could a woman carrying her own child find a walking skeleton...and have him beaten for nibbling on rotten animal food? I thought...Then and there I made a vow to myself: If I survived Buchenwald, I would return and kill the mayor’s wife."

When Buchenwald was liberated, Greenfield made his way back to the home of the mayor.

"“Remember me?!” I yelled. “Do you?!” Her blond tresses shook violently. She hid her face behind her upraised hand as if shielding herself from the sun. “You had me beaten because of the rabbits. I’m here to shoot you!” I said, sounding like an SS. “No! Please!” she quavered. “The baby, please!” I aimed the machine gun at her chest. The baby wailed. My finger hovered above the trigger."

I think the reader knows the end of this anecdote. These days, it says a lot about the Jewish concepts of mercy, compared to, say, the beheadings and beatings that are such a part of "radical" Islam.

"Never again" is a slogan that must be affirmed, and anecdotes such as Greenfield's tell us why...because we can't forget that basic goodness is foremost in our hearts. One must never forget that it takes two words, combined, to create "mankind."

The Lives of CHANG and ENG : Siam's Twins (Siamese Twins)

Looking for a freak show? This isn't it. As you might tell from the publisher (University of North Carolina) and the corrected subtitle ("Siam's Twins" not "Siamese twins"), Joseph Andrew Orser's book is a serious undertaking.

It has to be; there's usually no intimate revelations from hidden diaries or outrageously erotic love-letters when it comes to famous figures of the 18th or 19th century. A letter to the wife of Chang or Eng asking for "how is it done...does the brother close his eyes...") would not likely get a detailed reply.

Instead, author Orser fills his 280 pages with rich detail on the obvious (the origins of Chang and Eng and the sideshow career that gave them the money to settle down and raise families) and the uproar (just how do freaks from Siam fit into white rural North Carolina?)

Most books on sideshows, freaks, or "very special people" simply devote a few pages to a photo of the twins and the amusing details of births (between them, they had 21 children) and death ("Then I am going," Eng logically said, after his brother's heart stopped beating).

Orser's book studies the sociology of the times. When Adelaide and Sarah Yates married Chang and Eng in 1843, the girls' neighbors "threatened to burn down [their father's] crops if he did not promise to control his daughters." Cries of bestiality went up, and the town was labeled "a community sunk below the very Sodomites in lasciviousness." It was well enough for people to gawk at the twins up on a stage as freaks of nature...but the idea that they could marry...raise families...come and live among ordinary people? They were, after all, "monsters!"

Much of what went on inside the households remains private, although we do know some of the logistics, for example, that Chang and Eng alternated and stayed with one wife and family for half the week, and then the other wife and family. There are also some details on the nature of their physical connection (and how if Chang was tickled, Eng would also react). The fascination here is how the strangest couple of all time, from the other side of the world, came to adjust to North Carolina living. Freaks? Well, they considered themselves higher up the social ladder than that, and even owned slaves.

In handling the story of the twins, Orser strikes a necessary balance between the curiosity factor of their physical existence and the reality of their daily lives in North Carolina.

New BOB HOPE bio: Thanks for the Re-Hash of the Memories

"Hope: Entertainer of the Century" has arrived...but the question is this: does anyone still care about the memories?

Apparently on a slow news day, the N.Y. Post does. It's almost quaint that in this era of Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian, viral leaks of dirty movie star photos and the sordid world of reality shows...there's this headline:

"Bob Hope, sex machine, 'often cheated' during his 69-year marriage."

This is news? We're 14 years into the 21st Century, most people barely know the man who died in 2003, and his better films are from the 30's and 40's, which are in black and white and therefore unwatched by anyone under 50.

The Post breathlessly offers a quote in the book from Sherwood Schwartz (yes, the "Gilligan's Island" producer) saying of Hope, "We'd go to a hotel, I swear to you, outside his room were three, four, five young, beautiful girls waiting to be picked by him to come in...He was a star enjoying his stardom."

Let me now quote from page 170 of "The Secret Life of Bob Hope," written by Arthur Marx and published in 1993:

"'I remember,' says Sherwood Schwartz, 'there were always five or six pretty young girls hanging around in the corridors outside Hope's room - sort of like today's groupies. Since I was a virgin, I was pretty envious of all the action he seemed to be getting.'"

Yes, over 20 years ago, a book was published detailing Hope's well-known wolfish behavior. In Marx's book, Hope was not only open about all this, but comical, too. That same page, 170, has an anecdote from Gene Lester, a photographer. Gene was covering a celebrity junket and "While we were playing Dallas, Hope had two girls flown in from Houston...these two good-looking young chicks arrived." Hope dead-panned: "These are my cousins from Houston."

In 1993, Bob Hope was not welcome as a TV talk show guest. Johnny Carson had already retired. The best Hope could do was get some tribute or other for his movie work, with Woody Allen telling the world how good those films were. It was the small, maverick Barricade book publisher (run by the legendary Lyle Stuart) that offered Marx's bio of Hope. One of the vague selling points, beside the usual list of Hope conquests, and a very strong helping of Bob's ad-libs and comedy, was that Arthur dug up the marriage license for Bob and his vaudeville partner Grace Troxell. In case anyone cared. Yeah, Bob married someone, briefly, before Dolores.

The application for the marriage license is printed, in full, in the photo section that begins after page 160. The NY Post in reviewing this new tome:

"...Hope's 1933-34 marriage to former vaudeville partner Grace Troxell, which Hope's publicists denied ever took place...was revealed in a 1993 biography." Yes, by Arthur Marx. Which you can buy on Ebay or Amazon for a fraction of what the Richard Zoglin book is selling for.

Another "blockbuster" bit of news in this new book? "No marriage license for Bob and Dolores Hope has ever turned up.The lack of any record of the Hopes' marriage (not even a wedding photo) led some Hope family members to speculate over the years that a wedding may never have taken place."

Oooh. How exciting. We're supposed to be shocked or excited by something that happened about 80 years ago? And that was already mentioned in the Arthur Marx biography:

"There no record of the Hopes getting married." Marx did add that "there's no denying that Hope and Dolores are actually married. And if they're not they've been getting away with murder on their joint tax returns for years."

I recall speaking with Marc Eliot, who knew Phil Ochs and was able gather enough of Phil's "small circle of friends" to write a very vivid bio of him. He then parlayed this into some kind of career as a celebrity biographer. I asked him why, after there had been so many bios already, he had just knocked off a new one on Cary Grant. The answer was pretty much...it was something to do. The older ones were out of print.

So it is, that there have been film buffs, fan boys and publish-or-perish college professors, who scan a list of celebrities and biographies and see if they can come up with a match. As in: oh, it's been a while since a W.C. Fields book came out, or Groucho, or...Bob Hope? Unfortunately in most cases, these new bios don't have exceptional new information to offer, and there are no "juicy" anecdotes because everybody who knew the dead star is either also dead or quite senile. Who, in Bob Hope's inner circle, is still alive and was hanging around the bedroom door when he had an affair with Barbara Payton? A paragraph about this is supposed to interest people who aren't even re-playing the Tommy Lee and Pam Anderson video?

Next up from Richard Zoglin? Maybe an expose of how nasty Arthur Godfrey was? No...a little too obscure. How about how nasty Bing Crosby was? Some people might've forgotten about Gary Crosby's book, or Zog can convince a publisher that old people go to bookstores beause they don't know how to buy a used copy of a better bio on Amazon. But I wanna tell ya...