Leo Rosten and Deng Xiaoping died last Wednesday. Rosten as four years younger than Deng, and a lot funnier.
He was famous for The Joys of Yiddish, and well known for several other works of fiction and nonfiction. But for me, Leo Rosten will always be the creator of Hyman Kaplan — that is, of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Kaplan was a Depression-era immigrant, a night-school student who mangled the English language and chose to sign his name in capital letters separated by asterisks.
Rosten’s Kaplan first appeared in the pages of the New Yorker in 1935. I came across him as a teenager in the 1960s because my parents happened to have around the house a couple of collections of the stories — The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (published in 1937) and The Return of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1959).
The Kaplan books were favorites of my early adolescence. (I had graduated from Clair Bee’s terrific Chip Hilton sports series, and had not yet embraced Allen Drury’s gripping political novels.) I reread the stories this week after learning of Rosten’s death, and found myself laughing out loud 30 years later.
Admittedly, I’m an easy touch for a certain kind of comic writing (I tend to believe that Donald E. Westlake is America’s greatest living novelist). And to enjoy the Kaplan stories, it probably helps to have had immigrant grandparents, and to have been raised in New York. But I’ve got to think that any American who shares my somewhat juvenile sense of humor — and, after all, many Americans do — would love to meet Hyman Kaplan.
Here’s a sample from one story, “The Death of Julius Caesar.” The long- suffering teacher of Kaplan’s night-school class, Mr. Parkhill (known to Kaplan as “Mr. Pockheel”), decides to introduce his students to “the greatest master English has ever known,” William Shakespeare. Kaplan is thrilled: ” Must be some progriss ve makink! . . . Imachine! . . . Villiam Jakesbeer!”
After (yet again) correcting Kaplan’s pronunciation, Mr. Parkhill writes on the board the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” passage from Macbeth. He asks the students to recite the poem and explain it. Miss Caravello goes first:
“‘Da poem isa gooda! . . . Itsa have beautiful wordsa, bella, lak great musica anda deepa, deepa philosophy. Shakespeare isa lak Alighieri Dante, da greatest Italiano — ‘
“‘Vhat?!’ bristled Mr. Kaplan. ‘Shakesbeer you compare mit Dante? Shakesbeer?! Ha!'”
Mr. Parkhill defends Miss Caravello’s right to her opinion. But Kaplan retorts: “How ken she compare a ginius like Shakesbeer mit a dantist like Dante?!”
After further heated exchanges between other students and Kaplan, who has made himself Shakespeare’s great defender, Mr. Parkhill feels increasingly dizzy and despairing. Then Kaplan finally gets to declaim:
“‘Fallow lovers of fine literature. Edmirers of immortable poyetry.’
“‘Immortal,’ Mr. Parkhill put in.”
After various corrections and diversions, Kaplan gets to the point, with an interpretation of “dose marvelous words” of “Julius Scissor.” He explains that in this monologue an anxious Caesar is thinking: “‘Oh, how de time goes slow, fromm day to day, like leetle tsyllables on phonograph racords of time. ‘”
Overriding Mr. Parkhill’s objections, Kaplan continues his gripping explication de texte of the monologue: “‘Life is like a bum actor, strottink an’ holierink arond de stage for vun hour bafore he’s kicked ot! Life? Ha! It’s a pail full of idjots.’
“‘No, no! A “tale” not a “pail” — ‘
“‘ — full of funny sonds an’ phooey!’
“‘Sound and fury!’ cried the frantic tutor.
“‘Life is monkey business! It don’t minn a t’ing! It singleflies nottink!’ . . . Den Julius closes his ice fest’ — Mr. Kaplan demonstrated Caesar’s exact ocular process by closing his own ‘ice’ — ‘an’ drops dad!'”
Of course, Mr. Parkhill has to tell Kaplan that the monologue isn’t from Julius Caesar. But like Mr. Parkhill, I’ve never been able to read Act V of Macbeth without for a moment imagining myself in a tent outside Rome, ” where ‘Julius Scissor,’ cursed with insomnia, had pondered time and life, and philosophized himself to a strange and sudden death.”
Leo Rosten loved Hyman Kaplan and his fellow Americanizing immigrants. He loved America. He would have cheered David Brooks’s call in this issue for a return to national greatness.
And he knew that American humor is part of American greatness. For he saw that there should be something peculiarly cheerful and upbeat about American patriotism, about the spirit of a nation of immigrants, founded in liberty. Deng Xiaoping wouldn’t have understood.
WILLIAM KRISTOL
