Christmas Morning! “The Tenants of Moonbloom” by Edward Lewis Wallant

It’s an apparent law of social life: nearly everybody hates their landlord. Even those of us whose lords of the land are numbered companies in a bunker somewhere, have the same gripes about rent (ever rising!) and utilities (never fixed!), and so it goes. After a certain point, one gets rather indifferent about it all. But, you don’t have to be a total landlord-hater (like, say, Adam Smith!) to wonder what sort of person actually wants that job.

As a partial answer, Norman Moonbloom, the protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant’s recently rediscovered 1962 novel The Tenants of Moonbloom is, well, a schmuck, basically. Norman has spent his thirties bouncing from one university to another as a “perpetual student,” and now found the one thing he’s able to do in collecting rent for his landlord brother Irwin from a group of run-down tenements in New York City’s Lower East Side, a place now populated primarily by perpetual students. Norman is one of those dreamy sorts who’d be accused of being “in his own little world” by more concrete thinkers.

To digress for a second, I’ve been accused of being “in my own little world” my whole life due to my general air of aloof absentmindedness. My parents saw it as a sort of hazardous mental illness and my ex-wife saw it as a deal-breaker. But, honestly, when consensus reality improves greatly, maybe I’ll move there. Until then, my own little world will suffice, thanks.

At any rate, Norman’s got a worse job than landlord; he’s a property manager, and his aloofness is ideal for the position. It doesn’t hurt either that his tenants are a grab bag of weirdoes: a hundred-year-old Jewish giant who lives in a filthy apartment, a Black gay author who’s a barely-disguised James Baldwin, two lonely spinster sisters who dote on their stunted nephew, a sex-obsessed Chinese immigrant getting back at his parents, a boxer who aspires to be a thespian, an Italian too terrified of the swelling in his bathroom wall to use the toilet, a German anti-Semite who’s converted to Judaism nonetheless, various gripers, and a pseudo femme fatale who once wanted to be Shirley Temple. Schmucks, basically.

But, the strangest thing happens over the course of this strange little novel: Norman Moonbloom becomes a sort of priest confessor to these schmucks and begins to care deeply about flesh and blood people, for all of their flaws and annoying habits. After undergoing a bout of fever and sickness, he returns improved, driven to improve their lives, fix the unfixable problems with their apartments, and actually be a good person. Because the novel seems a parable, we wonder if he’s going to survive to the end doing these good works.

In other words, am I my brother’s keeper? Yes. Even if my brother is extremely fishing annoying? Yes, then too.

Mott Street has changed a bit since the 1960s.

And that’s probably not a bad summary of Jewish humor in general- an awareness that all of our moral responsibilities on earth are to each other, and we’re all sort of ridiculous losers, which tends to complicate things quite a bit. What actually saves Moonbloom’s soul- and, yes, I think this is a story about that- is he realizes that laughter need not be wounding; the very qualities that force him to laugh at these absurd characters in his life are also what endears him to them. We all know unholy laughter from experience, but is there holy laughter? If there is, it’s likely Jewish in origin.

Yet, one struggles to find a single joke in the Bible.

It’d be nice to have Edward Lewis Wallant explain the jokes in this surreal little parable, but he died before it was published. An art director at an advertising firm, Wallant wrote by night until his novel The Pawnbroker won him acclaim and a Guggenheim Award and he retired to write. In a punchline worthy of the Old Testament, however, Wallant died of an aneurism before the year was out.

Wallant is often compared to those two touchstones of post-war Jewish-American writing, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and there is a similar exuberance in the writing, and in the blending of pathos and hilarity. I actually thought of a later group of touchstones. t’s hard not to “see” novels as films in your head while reading, and I could only imagine this movie being made by the Coen brothers, who are also accused of depicting nearly all of their characters as kind of pathetic, which is not untrue, but also totally misses the point.

Look, in the interest of full disclosure: I am a goy (although I share my life with a very nice Jewish girl). But, the “point” to a novel like The Tenants of Moonbloom seems to me to be one that is absolutely uniquely Jewish-American. To wit: Yes, everybody is kind of a jerk! But we’re required to love them anyway. And, isn’t that kind of funny?

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, playing, pondering, creating, or trying to repair this holiday Sunday morning?