Marjorie Morningstar, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the Law & Order Dance

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel reminds me so much of Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar that I can’t help wondering whether the homage was conscious on Amy Sherman-Palladino’s part. There’s the MM naming convention – Midge Maisel, Marjorie Morganstern. There’s the fact that both heroines are Jewish girls from the Upper West Side, hoping to make it big in show biz. There’s even some congruency in the time periods: Marjorie Morningstar – set in the 1930s – was a runaway bestseller in 1955, a mere three years before The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel takes place.

Nobody reads Marjorie Morningstar anymore. At best, it’s considered a period piece; at worst, it’s propaganda that argues – not very compellingly – that a woman’s true destiny is the home she creates for her family.

Marjorie Morningstar is a negligible novel, but nevertheless, it’s a novel I’m very fond of.

Part of that is the landscape, which is the Manhattan I remember growing up in and which has changed so dramatically over the past 50 years that much of the time, I can’t recognize it. The Morgansterns live in the twin-towered Eldorado on Central Park West and West 90th, a duplicate of the twin-towered San Remo on the corner of West 74th Street where I lived. Marjorie attended Hunter College; I attended Hunter High School. There were still automats when I was a kid. I rode horses in Central Park.

Then there’s the upwardly mobile Jew thing.

Marjorie Morningstar may have been the very first novel to make the American Jewish experience a normative experience. As such, it was a precursor to the works of writers like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Wouk’s portrayals of Marjorie’s extended family still living in shabby apartment buildings in the Bronx are very fine, deeply hilarious and sharply observed, particularly his characterization of Uncle Sampson, the desperate, demeaned human garbage pail, and his descriptions of the various family celebrations, the bar mitzvahs, the weddings, the Seders, the hideously behaved children with their stridently non-Jewish names (Neville!).

If there’s one great flaw in Marjorie Morningstar - besides its reactionary conclusion, I mean - it’s the overwhelming blandness of the titular character. She’s just not terribly interesting.

Another problem – from my point of view – is the relationship that upwardly mobile Jews had with their religion during the 1930s.

Noel Airman née Saul Ermann – a literal luftmentsh! – turns his back on Judaism, but we’re led to believe that’s because he’s an unstable personality.

In point of fact, lots of upwardly mobile Jews were turning their back on the religion during the 1930s because it mostly seemed like a repository of superstition and weird food choices and because it limited the opportunities for assimilation into the prevailing culture. My own great-grandfather Abe Vogel – a Harvard-educated attorney raised by a Yiddish-speaking Polish rabbi named Chaskel Pitashnikoff – had his three sons bar mitzvahed, but I don’t think my grandfather Alfred Tennyson Vogel set foot in a synagogue again for the subsequent 70 years of his life. And so far as I know, my mother and her two sisters never set foot inside a synagogue.

I’m inclined to think of that abandonment, that secularization, as the definitive Jewish experience, so the temple scenes in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel struck a jarring note, one of the things that Sherman-Palladino – despite her fabulous set designs – gets wrong.

In every other way, though, the miniseries gets five stars from me. Rachel Brosnahan as Midge is a particular joy to watch. She brings the vivacity, energy and oomph of a Broadway production to the two-dimensional screen but never goes over the top. Unlike Marjorie Morganstern, Midge Maisel is a fully developed character.

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In other news, I slept 12 hours last night. And I feel as though I could easily sleep another five hours.

Not sure why I’m so exhausted.

Friday night, Max’s GSPP application was due, and he asked me to edit his admission essays, so I guess that was part of it. The essays had to be submitted by midnight my time, and we worked straight down to the wire on them. When I flip into Edit mode, my mind starts to race, so it was 3am before I drifted off to sleep.

For his personal statement, Max actually wrote an essay citing the Law & Order dance!

I’m a big Law & Order fan! So big that when the kids were little, I actually choreographed a dance to the opening theme. Any time we heard that theme, that was our cue to get up off our chairs and start busting out the disco moves, and as Law & Order had a billion spinoffs in perpetual rerun, we got lots of practice.

Anyway, Max wrote an essay in which he credited the Law & Order dance as one of his primary motivations for deciding to go to law school!

“This is heartwarming,” I told him. “But it will not work in an admissions essay.”

He had exactly two hours at that point to write a replacement essay.

So we spent that time in mind meld. He texting me, Fuck this shit; me texting him back, Now, now – it’s easy to write 500 words! You can do this! Rah, rah, rah!

The final essay was actually very good and nearly 800 words long. A meditation on one of Max’s earliest intern experiences writing a sentencing brief on behalf of a man who’d been convicted of heinous sex crimes involving underage victims; his discovery that the man himself had been the victim of heinous acts when that man was a child; and his determination that one of the aims of the criminal justice system had to be mercy because only compassion can break these types of cycles.

He got the essay in at precisely one minute to midnight (my time.)

Go team, go!