David Denby took on fairly a job of labor when he determined to depict the lives of 4 well-known Twentieth-Century Individuals: Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer in Eminent Jews (Henry Holt and Co.; April 2025).

Pretty presenting the event-laden, controversy-crammed lives of this gifted quartet, all of whom have been the kids of immigrants from Jap Europe or Russia, in 350 pages is a job that might intimidate, if not discourage completely any wise biographer. The problem he took on required the fragile balancing of celebration and criticism, scene and abstract, drama and truth within the lives of those 4 Ashkenazi Jews, all born after WWI, all gaining fame after WWII, all dwelling primarily in New York Metropolis.

Presenting dramatically the important thing disasters and victories—the operatic moments—of their lives might have simply crippled the presentation of a second sine qua non: the factual trusswork undergirding any worthy biography. Or the opposing pitfall: stuffing in too many names, dates, accounts of events, meals, journeys, liaisons and so forth. As a biographer who has struggled with a surfeit of fabric, I can testify to the lure of this slippery slope. Biographers all the time run the danger of letting their narratives run degree to their sources, destroying an excellent story with marginally essential info.

Denby introduced 4 belongings to the duty: 1) he likes and admires his 4  giants; 2) he by no means sidesteps the furry, controversial facets of their lives: the promiscuity of Bernstein, who was sexually ambidextrous; Mailer’s fascination with violence and the near-fatal stabbing of his second spouse; the aggressive hogging of the highlight by Friedan and Brooks; 3) he’s additionally a New York Jew and his social and creative life overlaps these of his topics; 4) he writes a fluid, fluent prose and is grasp of the narrative essay (he reviewed movies for New York and New Yorker for many years), in addition to full-length nonfiction books, most notably, Nice Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Different Indestructible Writers of the Western World (1996), an engrossing account of how he repeated the Nice Books course at Columbia College that he’d not absolutely appreciated in his undergraduate days 30 years earlier.

All 4 have been fast to understand the chances of rising media: tv (Mailer greater than the others, however Bernstein’s “Live shows for Younger Individuals” ran on CBS for 13 years); the long-playing document (Bernstein was additionally prolific right here, and Brooks’ and Carl Reiner’s “The 2000-Yr Outdated Man” sketches are deathless); and the paperback (Friedan’s 1963 magnum opus, The Feminist Mystique, offered hundreds of thousands, as did Mailer’s 1948 novel, The Bare and the Useless). Brooks and Bernstein additionally had a couple of Broadway musical triumph. Denby offers shut consideration to Brooks’ The Producers (2001), and Bernstein’s West Facet Story (1958), each of which have been blockbuster hits, and are revived repeatedly. Brooks is the one one of many 4 to not seem on the quilt of Time, however he was simply as a lot a darling of the media because the others. A New York Occasions reporter as soon as stated to me, “We love Norman Mailer on the Occasions.” The identical is true of the opposite three, all “good copy.” Denby is adroit in his explanations of how every in her/his personal approach was delicate to the wants and alternatives of the brand new media. As he places it, “being outsiders solely sharpened private habits of risk-taking and entrepreneurship.” One other issue was the fast shriveling (however not the disappearance) of anti-Semitism after WWII. Because it light, “Jewish reticence light as properly.”

Not one of the 4 (Bernstein probably excepted) have been in any respect observant, however none of them ever pretended to be apart from Jewish, though Friedan’s household dropped the “m” from Friedman as a result of it sounded much less Jewish. Additionally, as Denby makes clear, all 4 have been Ashkenazi Jews, and subsequently significantly extra unbuttoned and outrageous than German Jews, and never affected by what he calls “that lingering illness, Jewish self-hatred.” Brooks, he famous, was at one level, “the noisiest man in New York (which is saying one thing)” given the boisterous loquacity of the opposite three.

“In numerous methods, they liberated the Jewish physique, releasing the unconscious of the Jewish center class, ending the restrictions and avoidances that the immigrants and their kids, so keen to achieve America, imposed on themselves. Individuals didn’t go to Betty’s exhortations, Norman’s books, Mel’s films, and Bernstein’s live shows and West Facet Story for shows of rectitude and good style . . . The weather in these 4 of wildness, anger, public exaltation, gross burlesque are an excellent a part of what audiences wished from them.”

Denby gives quite a few anecdotes concerning the early years of his characters (and they’re all actual characters), which can’t be retailed right here. However I need to embrace one, regarding Brooks, which is just too scrumptious to depart out. When he was 5, he noticed the 1931 unique Frankenstein, with the unforgettable Boris Karloff within the lead function. He was frightened, nervous that monster would get him when he was asleep.

“On a sizzling summer season night time, he closed the window close to his mattress. However Kitty [his mother] wished some air within the fifth-floor house, and, in response to Mel, held forth as follows: “To ensure that Frankenstein to chew you, he’s obtained to depart Russia, Transylvania, wherever he’s from. First, he has to catch a practice to a seaport. Then he’s obtained to have cash to get on a ship, a ship, to go all the best way from Romania to America. Then when he lands in America, in New York, he’s obtained to know which subway to take to get to Williamsburg. Then he’s obtained to know which house to go to. If he climbs up the fireplace escape, any of the home windows  . . . he’ll eat somebody on the primary flooring, why would he climb to the fifth flooring?”

Reassured, younger Mel went to sleep, however he by no means forgot the story. Over forty years later, in 1974, he made Younger Frankenstein, starring Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, and Peter Boyle, indisputably, his movie masterpiece.