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By Maximillien de Lafayette Novelist and playwright Gary Morgenstein has published two novels: Take Me Out to the Ballgame (St. Martin’s Press), a thriller about a psychotic baseball fan who plots to murder a star player, and The Man Who Wanted to Play Center Field for the New York Yankees (Atheneum), a baseball ‘Rocky’ about a middle-aged man who confronts a crumbling marriage, career and life by fulfilling a boyhood fantasy. He is currently completing his third novel, Loving Rabbi Kleinman. Mr. Morgenstein’s play, Ponzi Man, about the devastating impact of a white collar crime committed by a fair-haired son on his own family’s business, premiered during the 9th Annual New York International Fringe Festival in August with nearly five sold-out performances. His other play, You Can’t Grow Tomatoes in the Bronx, a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family in the Bronx, circa 1964, was workshopped at The Rattlestick Theatre. Along with more than 20 years as a media relations executive, Mr. Morgenstein has worked as a journalist for newspapers such as the Cincinnati Post and Newsday, and magazines including TV Guide. Presently he is Director, Corporate Communications, for Lifetime Television. And today, Morgenstein surprised his fans with a press release announcing the completion of a new novel "Loving Rabbi Kleinman ". Already glowing reviews of his new novel appeared in the national and international media. Read the review of "Loving Rabbi Kleinman", by Ilil Arbel, PH.D. Morgenstein is a most unusual writer. For, he blends human drama, ethnic comedia at La Dante with a Jewish flair, and in-depth psychological caricature of the ups and downs in relationships between men and women in turbulent, competitive and perplex world. Once you get to know the man, you will never forget him again. His charisma, warmth, intelligence, humor and style will ride with you on a very long journey. The ride could be bumpy for his thoughts -sometimes- are controversial, yet entertaining and imbibed with truthful inner feelings and daring fragrance. He is a deep thinker with a New York twist blended with Bernard Shaw, Marquis de La Rochefoucauld, and a steamy martini. He is fun, lots of fun. To know the man and the writer, enter the complex and colorful cosmos of Morgenstein from a large window garnished with candid and sometimes delightfully intoxicating answers...Here is Morgenstein, the thinker, the writer, the lover and the man...
Morgenstein: "What would happen when a horny middle aged man who’s just had his chest ripped out by a failed marriage looks for love again?" Q: In your new novel " Loving Rabbi Kleinman ", amid online dating, career disappointments and the terror of sex with a strange woman, Joss, your book story hero falls madly in love with a beautiful 40ish female rabbi, herself undergoing a crisis of faith. You as a writer, how did you experience this? Fiction, imagination of reality? Morgenstein: About two years ago, I attended a bat mitzvah of a friend’s girl. Now growing up, I was used to the rabbis of the reeking-of-gefilte-fish- and-untrimmed-nose-hair variety. But in this shul, I look up and see this absolutely gorgeous beautiful rabbi. I figure, what would happen if a man like me, should fall in love with a beautiful rabbi, apart from the uneasiness of how God would react to my having carnal thoughts in His House. What would happen when a horny middle aged man who’s just had his chest ripped out by a failed marriage looks for love again? Is he a cynic, a romantic, some combination, and add to that the emotional cocktail of the challenges of loving a rabbi, who has her own issues…A relationship with a beautiful rabbi never happened to me, some 95% of the novel is fiction, though I’ve certainly imagined at some point all of the many sex scenes in the novel happening to me. One of the benefits of being a writer, you might sleep alone, but you can have amazing sex through your characters. Though it is a work of fiction, I use what I call ‘emotional footprints’ for the foundational elements. What I mean, is when you have a life experience, you don’t write about that experience as it happened per se, as if you’re a memoirist – though nowadays that doesn’t seem to matter either -- but you retain the emotions to build new people and new worlds. So I took heartbreak and disappointment and reprocessed it all through the magical mishegas of a writer’s deranged mind, transforming all that angst into these people and their intertwining love stories.
Q: Joss’s odyssey hinges around his chaotic relationship with Rabbi Thalia Kleinman, while he is still unable to let go emotionally of his ex-wife Ellen; a bewildering friendship with an enigmatic Jewish separatist named Meir Schlom, and the deepest relationship, with his former college roommate Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum has abandoned the idea of ever finding love and forms a new organization of disgruntled guys called “Straight and Happy Without Them.” This is a turbulent emotional world you describes......and women play a major role on the canvas of your visions. What is your message? Do you envisage any exit to these troubled relationships?
"We go through the torture of relationships because we need the eggs..."
Morgenstein: At the end of ‘Annie Hall,’ Woody Allen’s character explains we go through the torture of relationships because we need the eggs. When you hit middle age, you don’t have all your eggs in your basket, anymore, so you’re driven by loneliness or the need to make good where you’ve failed before or you just want good sex. Unfortunately, we’ve all got this extraordinary baggage at a certain point in life to deal with. By middle age, men and women are like two beasts in the jungle, warily circling each other, ready to tear each other’s eyeballs out. Is love really worth it? Is sex worth it? Maybe with Rachel Weisz or Keira Knightley, but otherwise, I don’t know. Like my alter ego Joss Katz, I’m a hopeless romantic who dreams of hot sex with a young woman but knows he is more compatible with someone his own age, only that didn’t work in his marriage, so where does that leave him? Depressed. Mandy, who in the novel creates this new organization ‘Straight and Happy Without Them,’ does so because he fundamentally believes that men and women can’t have healthy relationships, there is too much friction and where there’s no friction, the potential is right around the next clump of jagged rocks ready to gauge a hole in the hull and drown the crew. So Mandy believes, why not have the sexes separate, an emotional apartheid without oppression? We can be friends, siblings, an avuncular relative, doting daughter, but believing that for fifty years you won’t want to pull out your wife’s brain through her left nostril is not credible. We can date, we can surely have sex because both sides in the struggle want it, even if women publicly insist, to maintain this Mother Superior purity and ensure men grovel, that they are somehow above a good orgasm, but forget marriage or any long-term relationships, it simply doesn’t work in the preponderance of cases. How many good marriages do you know? Even if you list some, are you positive these people are happy and they’re not buying a gun in a pawnshop? Too many casualties. There must be an alternative, hence Mandy’s organization of SHWT. Nothing else has worked since time immemorial, why not try something different?
Q: In your opinion, what is the major crisis or social discomfort, men over fifty face nowadays in their daily life and relationships with women? And particularly financially successful women in big cities? Morgenstein: Sex, as always. Once a woman gets past fifty, and I’m probably going to get into big trouble over this one, they have different perceptions of men. They anticipate that all we are thinking about is, boy, I wish her tuchas was twenty-five years old. Now, we are, of course, thinking just that, for most of our waking hours, men think of nothing but young tuchas and young breasts, we can’t help ourselves, it’s in our DNA, as long as we don’t commit any serious social crimes because of this, have pity on us. Unfortunately, the women we are most compatible with, right around our age, sense that we aren’t too hot about their tuchas or breasts anymore and their resentment kicks in. So we have to lie and say, no darling, I love the way your tuchas falls out of your panties. Now the flip side of this is that few twenty-five year old women with that kind of tuchas want a man over fifty with his kind of tuchas unless he’s rich or Jack Nicholson, one of my personal heroes. Stay with me. Now we’re resentful that our only connection with a tight tuchas is through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. You see what kind of train wreck this is about to become? Men want what we can’t get and the women know we don’t want what they have but here we are, left with each other, as if the bedroom is some sort of Gilligan’s Island without Mary Ann or Ginger. More like Mrs. Howell. Disappointment, deep disappointment made bearable only by incessant fantasizing and the promise of senility around the corner when you hope you won’t think about sex anymore but, actually, you’ll think of it even more, only you won’t realize that and you’ll end up arrested at 85 for fondling for a parking meter. It’s all a complete prescription for disaster, unless you’re some sort of emotional heroin addict who thinks people after fifty have great sex, Viagra aside.
"Men are impossible, we’re basically shallow and thoughtless, except when motivated by our own needs, like sex and a clean bathroom..."
Q: And for women? Morgenstein: Well of course, men are impossible, we’re basically shallow and thoughtless, except when motivated by our own needs, like sex and a clean bathroom, and then we’re briefly Sir Galahad. I’m amazed any women would put up with a man, the preponderance of us being emotionally damaged, unable to deal with problems, communicate properly and plus, always thinking about that twenty-five year old tuchas. I don’t blame women for being angry at guys. I’d be angry, too, if I was confronted with the constant knowledge that the woman I’m with would prefer a younger guy. Now that said, of course, most middle aged women would slice and dice their husband for an hour with the pool boy, but women have the common decency not to flaunt it. But men deserve more understanding and sympathy. Society loves to talk about all that a woman juggles, and rightly so, but what about the guys? We are constantly set up for failure, exacerbated by a popular culture which depicts us as addle-headed sex fiends. No wonder we are the way we are bouncing back and forth between role model choices such as Dagwood and James Bond.
Q: What did you mean by " A beautiful 40ish female rabbi, herself undergoing a crisis of faith."? Morgenstein: Scarred by the experience of her parents dying in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem when she was a teenager, Rabbi Kleinman has struggled for years over what she’s brought to the rabbinate. As a woman, she’s unfairly held to higher standards, the guys in the congregation want to hit on her, the women are jealous, she’s burdened by a troubled younger brother, Bobby, and she has this peculiar bond with Meir Schlom, who is head of a separatist group called Torah Knights. Is she serving God best as a rabbi? Is the rabbinate the best place to serve God? Then she finds herself in love with this neurotic middle-aged man, staggering under the weight of his own past. Like most of us, Thalia has only illusions about what she wants. Q: Are Jewish women different from non-Jewish women, when it comes to love, affection, age crisis, dating and sex? Morgenstein: The only difference is with a Jewish woman there’s less to explain because of the common ties. But it’s as easy to screw up a relationship with a Gentile woman as with a Jewish woman, trust me, I’ve done both.
"You can’t censor your thoughts and think..." Q: What is the most pleasant sound to your ears? Morgenstein: The sound of my son’s voice, he’s fifteen.
Q: And the most beautiful sight to your eyes? Morgenstein: Well, I do have a crush on Rachel Weisz so I guess seeing her when she’s coming out of the shower. And if she happened to be sharing a shower with Keira Knightley and they’re toweling each other off, all the better.
Q: Does your story hero echoe this in his relationship with women? Could I say "Jewish Women"? Morgenstein: Oh, poor Joss is so consumed with Her, that mythical woman who can do no wrong, who will salve the heart broken by his ex-wife, who he still loves even though he won’t admit that to himself, that it discolors all his relationships. But of the trio of love stories in the book – Joss with Rabbi Kleinman, Joss with his ex-wife Ellen – the most powerful is the non-sexual one, with his best friend, his old college roommate Mandy. They are, forgive the cliché, night and day, Joss the romantic, Mandy the cynic. Yet they have a bond of love and loyalty which no love for a woman could ever match. Q: What do you fear most in life? Morgenstein: Not being taken seriously. Q: As a novelist and tragicomic playwright, do you write about your personal fears in your plays and novels or do you hide your feelings from your readers? Morgenstein: As Hemingway said, write what you know. Now you could be writing science fiction in the 35th Century, but you still must write about people and feelings that you identity with. Writing’s like therapy for me. I’ve had some extraordinary revelations about myself while being my character, though sometimes I wonder if it’s really myself or my character. Which is why so many writers are a little insane. So no, I don’t censor. In ‘Loving Rabbi Kleinman,’ Joss, who is me really, more or less, though with different experiences, more or less, is totally flawed, makes mistakes, lies, connives, is not always as noble as he should be -- kind of like the excessive candor Jews bring to our own stories, look at the Bible, who tells a story of their own people with such warts and all -- yet he’s just struggling to find his way out, as most of us do. We go from one situation to the next, slowly adding weight into our pockets. No wonder we wobble as the years go by. "A rabbi having sex, it’s a troubling image." Q: How do you do that? Morgenstein: As the late sportswriter Red Smith said, I just cut open my wrists and bleed into the typewriter. An artist must be honest with himself. You can’t censor your thoughts and think, well, how is that going to sound when someone reads this and thinks, what a nut this writer is. But I draw the line at hurting other people. Writers are parasitic, we snoop and overhear and borrow and steal other people’s lives, and I’d never betray a secret from someone if I thought it would come out and hurt them. I might, however, dress it up, use that emotional footprint, and repackage it. I loved something Gore Vidal, whose politics make me want to retch blood, once said about writing. He explained that all writers are born with a stock company of characters in their head. Shakespeare had what, 20; we mortals much less. But the trick is running them in and out of wardrobe with each literary adventure. Q: What is so special about a beautiful woman rabbi falling in love? Morgenstein: There’s a dichotomy, a woman devoted to her God and her faith and her people, who lives a life of relative purity, yet wants to date, to fall in love. A rabbi having sex, it’s a troubling image. And what does poor Thalia do? Most people have a pool of prospective mates in their work life to choose from. But a rabbi can’t exactly hit on a member of her congregation. So many women rabbis’ social lives suffer, they, too, want a husband and children, but they are as often as not held to a higher standard. Say you’re on a first date with a rabbi, are you going to tell a dirty joke about a rabbi and the farmer’s daughter? I don’t think so. But maybe a rabbi like Thalia would want you to say something like that. To be treated like any other woman, shamefully, etcetera, etcetera. Q: You wrote extensively about Jewish families and colorful Jewish characters. Your play "Ponzi Man" illustrated this. Why only Jewish people? Are you books and plays an echo of "JEWISH LIFE"? Morgenstein: One of the themes of ‘Loving Rabbi Kleinman’ is being Jewish in the 21st Century. I’m reminded of the old joke. A Jew’s been sitting for hours on a train in Czarist Russia. A Cossack officer across the aisle rants and raves how it’s the fault of the Jews the train is stuck. The Jew goes over to the man and asks politely, ‘Excuse me, sir, but do you have any evidence that Jews are responsible for our train not moving?’ The Cossack snaps, ‘No.’ The Jew frowns and asks, ‘Then why blame the Jews?’ The Cossack responded, ‘Why not?’ With the onslaught of vicious anti-Semitism around the world, with the Arabs hurling venal propaganda that would make Herr Goebbels proud and with the finger of blame pointing, as always, at the Jews through Israel, I wanted to explore the schism between assimilationist-liberal American Jews/Gentile left-wing intelligentsia and excesses of their moral equivalency, and the impact on the rest of us, so to speak. In the novel, there’s a former Israeli rabble-rousing politician and flim-flam artist, Meir Schlom, who believes that as long as Israel exists, the world will have a locus point of hatred. He says the only way for the anti-Semitism to dissipate is to remove Israel as a Jewish state, re-embrace the Diaspora and build separatist Jewish communities. As Meir says in my book,“To the goyim, all Jews are Israelis, a race united by blood. Religion, ethnicity, no, Jew blood. They think we all act in concert, share common values. In a sense, we do, for all of us are protected by the guilt the Gentile world feels over the Shoah. That was going too far, even for Christ-killers. Slaughter a few hundred thousand, but six million? And then leave details so we must read about it and be forced into action? Even then, it took the trial of Eichmann to concentrate their minds. It happened, that’s sufficient, it’s unfortunate, don’t push our faces in it. But as the memory of the Shoah fades, the guilt dissipates, and we are like everyone else, except different. What to do with the Jews? This stiff-necked people, who are still here, still denying the Messiah. That is not true justice, how are they paying for this horrible crime? Paying? Indeed, they have been rewarded with fruits from our tax dollars, with protection by the world’s mightiest power. They are getting away with it. “With what?” Joss trembled. “With everything because we are so handy, our evil like clay, adaptable to all times, periods, circumstances. We can be anything they require us to be, Joss. Poisoner of wells or controller of capital. However, now, we have lost our moral piety. You are not victims anymore, but oppressors, they can say. Success has a price. Devilish Jews, become what you fought and insist that excuses you. Jew as Nazi. What an ironic ring. You do unto the Arabs as we did unto you. We paid the price. Where is your punishment? The bond is broken, their guilt assuaged, we are not deserving of their pitying protection. Sufferance takes on new meaning, Joss. “A Jew overcharges you, that’s business. Killing a teenager, now we’re talking. Our forefathers warned us of a Jewish nation. The Jews of old, the ruthless, brutal, duplicitous Jews now emanating from Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem, from Haifa, the new epicenter of the Jewish conspiracy. The little nation that flaunts nuclear weapons when the rest of the world must obey non-proliferation pacts. The little nation which whispers in the ears of Presidents and sends American boys to die for their Jew interests. The left wing of the Democratic Party believes that or, at the least, will tolerate it. I didn’t shop at the Jew store, but I never hurt them. The Christian Right waits for our appointed role in their eschatology of Resurrection, but, if need be, they can work around it. They have before. Yes, the Jew of the ancient libel still lives, in Israel.” “Did the Holocaust really happen and who stands to benefit by believing such a fact? Israel, Israel, Israel, provoking the world. Eliminate that land and so you banish the provocations, the excuses. Anti-Semitism will be as it once was, a spasm of anger, a pogrom here, a blood libel trial there, a Mick beating up a Yid, but the spectre of the all-powerful Jew with an army will be gone. Otherwise there will be another Shoah, and Israel will take all of us with them.” Q: Do you think your work appeals to non-Jewish readers? What makes you think so? Morgenstein: There’s no religious or racial or ethnic hold on loneliness and the basic human need to want to love and to be loved. My novel is about people fumbling about, trying to find themselves and each other without doing too much damage. Q: How do you summarize the message of your new book: Loving Rabbi Kleinman ? Morgenstein: It’s a trio of love stories, ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ meets ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’ In other words, what happens when you’re a guy hitting 50 and nothing’s turned out the way you wanted?
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__________________ ABOUT THIS INTERVIEW: As soon as we published this interview with Gary Morgenstein, letters began to pour over our desks. Here are some of the most revealing ones" "This is a wonderful interview! Max, don't you just see the controversy sizzling and making wonderful trouble? Gary, this is the end of your hopes for future relationship with any female (other than with the printed cover of Sports Illustrated, which is always an option, I hear) but that is the price one pays for successful publishing..." _______________________ "Morgenstein is either a women connoisseur or a sahara prophet. I always liked predications but Morgenstein's conception of women exceeded all the prophecies of the bible..." ______________________ "Funny and choking. But I enjoyed it. How many women Morgenstein is dating now, besides the woman Rabbi? Does he go out with Atheists?" ______________________ "Where and how can I get copy of LOVING RABBI KNLEINMAN?" Is this man for real? _______________________ "Oh yes, once you are famous and wealthy, hoards of twenty-five years olds will come, wiggling their perfect bodies and searching for your wallet, but none of them will own a brain, which you also want, you poor thing... The Sports Illustrated is out already, I saw my son's copy. Incidentally, LOTS of older women these days date younger men. I keep hearing about it, so maybe the problem is not entirely male."____________________ |
