Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

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СКАЧАТЬ him if he’d be able to help that day.

      ‘Oh, man,’ Keitel said loudly, upset at being pressed into service.

      Before he knew it, he had been swatted across the back of the head by one of the more imposing Avenue X boys, who now loomed over Keitel. ‘Don’t talk that way to your mother,’ he told Keitel, who could only rub his head and nod mutely.

      Home life was something else: ‘I’ve had many problems in my life that I’ve had to get through, beginning with being a little boy,’ Keitel observed.

      Such as the fact that he began stuttering at the age of six or seven, a problem that carried on into his teens. What is a painful and emotionally challenging period in anyone’s life became excruciating for a young man who stuttered:

      It was a huge, huge, deep, deep embarrassment, the object of humiliation by other children. It took years to go away. I still stutter at times. The stutter is something that occurs as the result of something else. It’s sort of a road to your identity. It’s a clue about something, it’s a clue about disturbance.

      It was very painful because I was shy to begin with. Confrontation means asserting yourself. Stuttering is an attempt to stop the assertion of the self. I can’t think of anything more frustrating or more detrimental to evolving than not allowing yourself whatever thought comes to mind.

      What kind of thoughts? Ones that went against the rigid interpretation of life practiced by his parents, Orthodox Jews in the middle of a secular world exploding with the expanding and engulfing youth culture of movies and rock ‘n’ roll.

      It’s not hard to imagine the lectures Keitel must have received from his parents, strict Eastern European people who had escaped annihilation in Europe only to be forced to start all over again – and in a new language. Nor is it difficult to conjure up the grinding combination of Orthodox Judaism and Depression-era economic pressures – which squeezed the neighborhood long after World War II had ended, well into the 1950s, even as the rest of America seemed to be enjoying a much-vaunted post-war prosperity.

      ‘My mother worked at a luncheonette and my father worked at a factory as a sewing-machine operator and they could barely read or write,’ Keitel recalled. ‘Life demanded of them that they work hard for their family and they did so and I admire them deeply for that.’

      Here, however, was Keitel, with all the raging hormones and sexually charged thoughts of a normal teenage boy in the Elvis era, when his peers were rocking and rolling, affecting the hairstyles and attitudes of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One – none of which had penetrated the world of Keitel’s parents.

      Undoubtedly the lectures were long and stern: about the forbidden nature of sex and everything else young Harvey deemed most interesting, on the need to remember and honor the old way and resist the temptation of this godless new popular culture. Not to do so was not just wrong – it was punishable. But Harvey found himself irresistibly drawn to what he could see of the outside world and suffered the wrath and disappointment of his parents as a result.

      Which may have led to the stuttering, he decided:

      Guilt can be insidious, which helps to repress thoughts. You pick it up quickly – in your home, in your neighborhood. Once children are taught guilt, they will stutter in one way or another. If you’re ashamed of one feeling, you’re going to be ashamed of all your feelings. That’s the basis for neurosis. Unfortunately, as a youngster I learned that certain feelings and thoughts were bad. You learn it’s wrong to have a certain thought. As a young man, there were thoughts I had and propensities to do certain things, which I was very ashamed of. So if you have that thought, you say, ‘I’m bad. I must get rid of that thought.’ But how do you get rid of a thought? What do you do as a child? You choke yourself.

      A doctor I know said to me, ‘You are allowed any thought. Every thought is a worthwhile thought.’ You are not responsible for your thoughts. One is only responsible for what he does. It took me a long time to learn what that doctor expressed to me.

      Self-satisfaction was unknown to me as a young man. That came late in my life. The pain of my journey led me to satisfaction. Avoiding the pain led to strangulation, to self-loathing. By descending into the pain, I learned satisfaction.

      Without that kind of repression and longing Keitel might not be the actor he eventually became: ‘I’ve learned over the course of my life,’ he said, ‘that memories I once considered painful have been the greatest source of revelation in my life, so it’s too simple to say they’re positive or negative.’

      Obviously, he wasn’t the only Jewish kid from Brighton Beach who argued with his parents about dressing like a hood. Indeed, at Keitel’s bar mitzvah, the rabbi performing the Jewish coming-of-age ritual booted one of Keitel’s young pals out of the synagogue. His crime? Wearing such incipient hipster garb as a checkered cabana-style jacket, peg pants and pointy-toed shoes.

      The conflict between Keitel’s need to conform to his parents’ wishes and his urge to create an identity of his own didn’t really come to a head until after his bar mitzvah.

      It was a Kosher household, which meant that they followed the Jewish dietary laws prohibiting, among other things, the eating of any pork or shellfish products as well as proscribing milk and meat products at the same meal. Though he moved away from Judaism, the habits of keeping Kosher stuck with Keitel, at least through his stint in the Marines. There, his friends would battle to sit next to him in the mess hall, because he would give away the milk that was invariably served with the meat of the day.

      Keitel went to Hebrew school and studied at home with his grandfather, a man whose imposing strictness daunted him: ‘I remember my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, making me read from my Hebrew book,’ he recalled. ‘My brother, who is five years older, stuck his head in the kitchen and said, “Aleph bais, gimme a raise, ches tes, kiss mein ess.” Then he ran out, with my grandfather hollering at him. I couldn’t believe my brother had done that. I was scared to death.’

      Once the bar mitzvah was past, however, Keitel began to re-evaluate Judaism, losing faith as he looked at the problems that seemed to threaten the world’s very existence in those days of Cold War panic. What kind of God would allow such things to go on?

      In his crowd Keitel became known as someone who was willing to put his life on the line and confront God himself: as an act of rebellion, he started spitting on mezuzahs, the little metal sacraments containing a small piece of parchment with writings from the Torah that some Jews attach to the front doorpost. Observant Jews kiss their fingers and touch the mezuzah as they enter and leave their homes.

      And Keitel was spitting on them:

      I was literally spitting. My friends would say, with great fear, ‘Don’t do that, Harvey!, don’t do that!’ I said, ‘Why? What’s going to happen? Here I am, God – do something!’ I wasn’t ashamed of being a Jew – I had just lost faith. There was so much misery and so much deprivation. I didn’t understand how God fit into that. I thought God was responsible.

      Religion meant nothing to me when I was growing up because it was never made clear to me how the stories and myths in the Bible were relevant to my life. We were simply taught to be fearful. It’s a sin religion isn’t taught with more feeling for the beauty of the stories.

      Back then, someone said to me, ‘It’s people like you who are the true believers.’ I spat on the mezuzah again. That person was right, though. It’s been a long journey but I’ve come back. I would now say that I am a devout believer in the divinity but for a long time I just СКАЧАТЬ