https://www.momentmag.com/book-review
Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
by Adina Hoffman
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard called Ben Hecht a “genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood today.” Israeli leader Menachem Begin, speaking at Hecht’s packed funeral in Manhattan in 1964, said Hecht not only “wrote stories…he made history.” Yet most modern American Jews have likely never heard of Hecht, despite his eminence as a playwright, best-selling novelist and screenwriter of a host of Hollywood film classics, including Scarface, Twentieth Century, The Front Page, Gunga Din and Notorious.
Hecht was also a pivotal figure in American Jewish history—in bringing the Holocaust to the attention of the American public in real time during the height of World War II, and in aiding one of the most extreme of Zionist underground groups in its violent campaign against British forces in Palestine, thus helping create the conditions for the birth of Israel.
Adina Hoffman’s richly informative new biography is part of the Yale University Press’s acclaimed Jewish Lives series of short interpretative biographies covering a wide range of Jewish figures, from authors to philosophers to politicians to entertainers. Her book is a fine introduction to a seminal figure in American Jewish culture and Hollywood’s first century. But like a large and powerful man crammed into a suit three sizes too small, Ben Hecht’s life is simply too robust and complicated to be shoehorned into 220 pages of text. It’s not Hoffman’s fault: She was commissioned to write, in effect, a one-act play about a life that merits a four-hour opera and a six-part HBO series.
Hecht grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, where his parents, who had arrived from Belarus as teenagers, moved from the sweatshops of New York. After graduating from high school and lasting just three days at the University of Wisconsin, he escaped to Chicago, where he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago Daily News, wrote short stories and novels and hobnobbed with literary figures such as Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. He acquired the sandpaper lingo, flexible ethics and hard-liquor habits of the city newsrooms, learned how to write fast and facile prose, spent six months reporting on the toxic chaos of post-World War I Berlin and dumped his young, well-off, non-Jewish first wife for Rose Caylor, a novelist who stuck with him for the rest of his life despite his self-confessed tendency to sleep with every attractive woman he met.
