I have read quite a bit of John Steinbeck. I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was pretty young and thought it was the best novel I had ever read. I really liked the stories in Cannery Row. I like Of Mice and Men and Tortilla Flat. I liked everything by him that I read with the exception of Travels with Charley (but maybe I should try that again). But I never read East of Eden. And I never saw the James Dean film, which came out when I was in junior high school.
But we did watch the 7 episode Netflix series that was released this month, and recommend it very highly. You know the story? Adam and Charles Trask are half-brothers, and could not be more different. Their father, a high ranking government official during the Civil War, is a crook, and left his sons with millions of dollars (today’s money) when he died unexpectedly. The brothers try a life together on the family farm in Connecticut. A young, battered woman, half-dead, appears at the farm. They take her in while she heels. Adam falls in love with her, Charles says “watch out, she is only going to be trouble”.
Adam and Kathy marry. He has no idea of her back story, which involves unspeakable acts. He takes her to California and buys a ranch in the virtually empty Salinas Valley. She has twins. She abandons the family, moves to the city of Salinas, changes her name, and works as a prostitute, eventually taking control of the brothel. It is not her first time in this line of business.
Adam, beset with grief, raises the twins with the assistance of his Chinese (but American born) aide Lee. (That isn’t accurate. It is Lee who raises the twins, with the occasional assistance of Adam). The twins, Caleb and Aron, are as different as Charles and Adam. They know nothing about their mother; they have been told that she died. But they find out the truth, and everything changes.
The series was co-written by Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 James Dean version. That’s an interesting tidbit, but perhaps only a tidbit. The credit for the story goes to Steinbeck. And what I noted about it, is that it is a Story (with a capital S). Not a plot, not a story-line, but a real story, an epic story. What makes it that, other than Steinbeck’s genius, I don’t know. But it’s a character study of many characters, it is the story of Civil War America and post-Civil War America, about moving West and creating the country’s agricultural breadbasket, about the growth of national commerce, about the difficulties of change. It is also a biblical story – Caleb and Aron, Cain and Abel, brothers who love each other, can not get along, and destroy each other. One generation after another. It is the story of unchangeable fate, or maybe of free will, focusing on one word in Genesis, a word translated differently from the Hebrew in various English language bibles. The word, according to Eden is tamshel, and does it mean “thou shall” or “thou mayest”? Fate or free will.
In Steinbeck’s story, the word means “thou mayest” – this is because Adam’s Chinese aide (who is clearly a Renaissance man if there is ever was such a thing) studied Hebrew and figured it out. Well, obviously that is fiction, but how did Steinbeck know to write any of this, other than he probably stumbled upon the different translations? Luckily, and only by chance, I stumbled on an article in the Jewish Review of Books from 2022, by Sheila Tuller Keiter, a Los Angeles Jewish High School teacher, who tells of Steinbeck having asked his editor Viking Press, who was Jewish, who in turn asked Prof. Louis Ginzberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary, a very well respected authority (to put it mildly). Ginzberg provided his opinion, but, according to Keiter, Steinbeck was not satisfied, and wrote back to his editor that everything depended on the tense of this particular verb: “I will have to have the whole verb before I finish, from infinitive on through past, subjunctives, and compounds and futures. But we will get it. We may have to go outside of rabbinical thought to pure scholarship which may be non-Jewish….Dr. Ginzberg, dealing in theology, may have a slightly different attitude from that of a pure etymologist.” So, there….. (Keiter, by the way, thinks that Steinbeck got it wrong, with all of his searching and analysis.)
At any rate, you should watch the series, and I should read the book.
I was impressed by this story as a real Story when compared to a play we saw yesterday afternoon at the Studio Theatre (where daughter Hannah works, by the way), Wish You Could Be Here. I liked the play and am glad we saw it, but there is such a difference between the strength of Steinbeck’s epic story line, and Sanaz Toossi’s much looser plot line.
The scene is Iran, and the cast consists of five young Iranian women (they look and dress like they could be in Europe or America), the first of whom is about to be married. It is 1978, there are protests in the streets, but the Shah is still in control. The one-act, many scene plays moves on through the years. The Shah leaves (the thinking is he will be back), the rioting continues (the thinking is it will stop), the universities close (the thinking is they will reopen), and time goes on. One of the five friends is Jewish, the other four are Muslim. That clearly makes no difference…..until it does, and the Jewish friend and her entire family disappear. No sign of struggle; no word of them. A second of the five who wants to be a doctor gets a fellowship to study in (of all places) Indiana. She leaves Iran.
Two of the others marry. One, vacationing at a beach resort with her husband, goes swimming covered from head to toe in now appropriate and required clothing. She drowns.
The fifth, a woman who claims she never will marry, marries and has a child. She had been studying civil engineering before the revolution; she has become a seamstress.
It’s a powerful play. How the lives of these five young women, whose futures had all been planned out for them in a modernizing society, have been affected by unforeseeable and unimaginable changes. The one freedom that they retain is the freedom to leave Iran. But even with such tumult in the country, that is a difficult freedom to navigate.
A couple of things. For reasons not clear to me, the conversations that these women have are overly scatalogical, with continual references to obvious body parts. Why Toossi decided on this, I am not sure; I don’t think that in real life the conversation of five women like this would be so extreme, but how am I to know? (As an aside, I thought it a bit weird for these five young actresses on stage to be engaged in these over the top sexualized conversations before a full audience whose average age was probably 70 to 75.)
The other thing is, yes, three of these five young women were married (four if you include the Jewish woman who disappeared but resurfaced years later in California). Yet you hear nothing about their husbands, or anything about their marriages or family life (except that one has a child), of really whether they ever talk to anyone other than each other. I assume that too was purposeful – their husbands (and other family members and friends) don’t matter, they could be anybody, it would be the same. I guess.
It’s a good play. It provides a perspective that otherwise is not typically seen. But it isn’t John Steinbeck.
