King of the Jews

King of the Jews by Nick Tosches. Uhh.....wow. I'm still not sure what to make of this book. It was billed as a biography of Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was pretty much the prototype Jewish gambler/gangster in early 20th century New York. Although he was murdered young, he had time to be the mentor to future stars like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. He was also the model for fictional Jewish gangsters like Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls. With that basis, I was expecting a good story about murders and gambling and the fixing of the 1919 World Series.

All of that was there, but so was a lot of unexpected stuff. First of all, this is the first biography I've read where the author is a visible character. Constantly making personal comments and heading off in to rants about the war in Iraq and the terrible things corporate America has done to the world. Its pretty disconcerting.

The gangster theme comes out most clearly in the fact that the author's writing seems like bullets flying around your head in all directions. In the first half of the book, I'd say less that 10-15% of the writing is about Rothstein. We get a whole lot about the origin of religion; etymology of all kinds of words and names; even an involved pitch about how the bible pre-dated monotheism based mainly on the fact that the Hebrew word for god -- elohim -- is actually plural, not singular. There's also, strangely, three or four very brief (one paraphaph) chapters that are extremely obscene and, as far as I've been able to figure, have absolutely nothing to do with anything anywhere else in the book!

When it comes to Rothstein's life, we do get a lot of detail. His family (and his wife's family, his girlfriend's family and some associates' families) are detailed back three and four generations. There is a lot about the battles over Rothstein's will -- he apparently signed an "X" on a revised will while comatose after being shot that cut his current girlfriend in for a piece. We see this mostly through actual testimony transcripts from the various civil lawsuits that sprang up between him family and his girlfriend. (Eventually, the lawyers got most everything as always).

Tosches says repeatedly that, essentially, history is hard to believe. He says any number of times that lies, repeatedly enough times, become truth. He gives a number of examples where he'll give multi-page quotes from reports or other authors that describe details of Rothstein's life and then proceed to use actual contemporary records to show that what is described can't possibly be true even though its universally accepted.

All in all, I'm glad I read this one. I don't know that I know much more about Rothstein than I did to start with, but with Tosches's head-rattling writing style, I at least feel like my brain was excercised.