Tablet Magazine -- Heym on the Range

Here's my recently story for Tablet Magazine about David Dortort, the creator of the iconic TV western Bonanza, who died Sept. 5. I had the pleasure and privilege of spending an afternoon with Dortort and his wife when I was the Visiting Scholar at the Autry National Center in December 2004, working on my continuing and ongoing project on the American West in the European Imagination.

Heym on the Range


By Ruth Ellen Gruber (Nov. 4, 2010)


Some years ago, when I first visited Sikluv Mlyn, a Wild West theme park in the Czech Republic, I was startled by the music piped in to the lobby of my hotel. It was the unmistakable theme song from the iconic TV show Bonanza–sung in Czech. 

Bonanza, which ran from 1959 to 1973, recounted the adventures of the tight-knit Cartwright clan—the patriarch Ben, his three sons Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe—and the goings-on at their sprawling Ponderosa ranch. Syndicated to dozens of countries and dubbed into languages ranging from German to Japanese, it was one of the most popular and widely watched television shows of all time and has had a tremendous impact in honing the image of the American West around the world.

But few viewers realize how deeply rooted the show was in, well, Yiddishkeit (and not just because two of the stars—Lorne Greene as Ben and Michael Landon as Little Joe—were Jewish). 

Bonanza was the brainchild of David Dortort, a pioneering television writer and producer who died in September at the age of 93. The Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Dortort had a lifelong commitment to Jewish causes; among other things, he and his wife Rose, who died in 2007, endowed cultural programs at the American Jewish University and Hillel at UCLA.

I discussed the Jewish underpinnings of Bonanza with Dortort during a lengthy interview at his home in Los Angeles in December 2004, as part of my ongoing research on the American West in the European imagination.

Bonanza’s story lines, he told me, centered on relationships rather than good guy-bad guy gunplay and stressed the values of love, respect, and family ties. He had employed these values, he said, to create a mythic world along the lines of the Arthurian legends, with the Ponderosa a sort of American Camelot and Ben Cartwright a King Arthur figure.

He named the Cartwright patriarch Ben after his own father, a yeshiva bokher who immigrated to the United States at 15 and became an insurance broker in Brooklyn. It wasn’t just a name that the two shared. “Essentially the values that I put into Bonanza are Jewish values that I learned in my home, from my father,” he told me. “One of the great things about the United States is that it’s probably the only country in the history of the world that can be described as a Judaic-Christian civilization. Where else did the Jewish people have the freedom they have in this country and enjoy the opportunities?”

Toward the end of our talk, Dortort shifted the conversation away from Bonanza. He told me a family story that shed light on how his own relationship to myth—and to the West—may have been shaped in part by the exploits of his Uncle Harry, a ne’er-do-well in the Old Country who wound up fighting alongside Pancho Villa in Mexico and battling anti-Semites on a California ranch.

In Dortort’s telling, Harry, his father’s younger brother, left Galicia in about 1916; he made his way to Hamburg and got a job on a ship. Soon, Dortort said, “he finds himself off the coast of Mexico and at a port called Tampico, on the Caribbean, and he hears about a fantastic guy in the interior, deep in the Sierra Madre, called Pancho Villa.”
Harry “jumps ship and makes his way into the Sierra Madre somehow to join Pancho Villa. He fights with Villa against the government of Mexico, and they became very close.” Harry, Dortort said, “was a tough little character. He was known as Pancho Villa’s Jew.”

According to Dortort, Harry was with Pancho Villa in March 1916 when Villa carried out a bloody raid on a U.S. Army garrison at Columbus, New Mexico. Soon after, Harry followed Villa’s advice and fled to Texas—specifically to San Antonio, where there was a Jewish community. There, Dortort recounted, Harry spied a woman on the porch of a house, brushing her long, black hair. “He knows this is a Jewish section of town, so he calls up to her in Yiddish, ‘Are you a Jew?’ And she looks down and says, ‘Yes, but who are you and what do you want to know for?’ He looks up and says, ‘Do you want to get married?’ And she hesitated a moment and said, ‘OK!’ ”

Harry and his bride headed west to California, where they operated a citrus ranch near Pomona. By 1920 or 1921, Harry had become so successful that he arranged for his brother Ben to bring his family out to California from Brooklyn.
Dortort was only 4 or 5 years old. “It was beautiful,” he recalled. “No smog in those days, the mountains were clear, and there was snow on them; southern California was like paradise.”

Nearly 40 years later, he created Bonanza.

 Read story at Tablet Magazine HERE

Tablet Magazine -- (Candle)sticks on Stone

Radauti. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Tablet Magazine has published my article on my project, (Candle)sticks on Stone, exploring the representation of women in Jewish tombstone art through the depiction of candles. There is a photo slide show with the article.

STICKS AND STONES

BY RUTH ELLEN GRUBER, September 30, 2009

It was the first week in September, and in cowboy boots and jeans, camera slung over my shoulder, I crunched through the springy thick tangle of undergrowth that carpets the old Jewish cemetery in Radauti, a market town in the far north of Romania, near the Ukrainian border. Around me stretched the crowded, ragged rows of tilted tombstones: gray and mossy green, some still bearing remnants of the blue and black and red painted decoration that once adorned the exquisite, ornate carving on their faces.

Radauti is the town from which my father’s parents emigrated to the United States before World War I, but this, for me, was not supposed to be a roots trip. Nor was I consciously fulfilling the tradition of visiting the tombs of my ancestors around the time of the High Holidays.

I was here this time to work on a project called (Candle)sticks on Stone, an exploration of the varied and evocative ways that women are represented in Jewish tombstone art through depictions of Shabbat candles, which I hope eventually to turn into a book.

The project, which is supported in part by a Jewish women’s studies grant from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, includes making a photographic documentation of Jewish women’s tombstones in Radauti and in several other nearby towns, including Siret, Botosani, and Gura Humorului. The older tombstones in these and other Jewish cemeteries in parts of today’s Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and Poland form an astonishing collection of ornate sculptural design. Many cemeteries have disappeared; in many others the stones are eroded and crumbling. But those that remain comprise wonderful examples of vivid local stone-carving that fuse local folk art and Jewish iconography.

The wide range of carved symbols represent names, professions, personal attributes, or family lineage. There are lions, birds, stags, bears, snakes, and imaginary beasts; there are flowers, grapevines, garlands, and geometric patterns; there are the pitchers of the Levites, the crown of the Torah, and the hands of the Cohanim raised in blessing; and there are powerful symbols of death: the hand of God plucking a flower or breaking off a branch from the Tree of Life.

Here and elsewhere, candles and candlesticks are common symbols on Jewish women’s tombs, because lighting the Sabbath candles is one of the three so-called “women’s commandments” carried out by female Jews—and the only one easily represented in visual terms. (The others include observing the laws of menstrual purity, or Niddah, and that of Challah, or burning a piece of dough when making bread.)

Many are simple, schematic silhouettes, but here in the heart of Eastern Europe they also take on extravagant, elegant forms: carved candlesticks braided like loaves of challah; candlesticks that look like leafy plants, candlesticks flanked by grapevines and griffins, candlesticks that look like flowers, candles that are broken to symbolize death. Above them, on many of the tombstones, are the carved hands of women, held up in a pious gesture to bless the flames.

A primary aim of my (Candle)sticks on Stone project is simply to present these carvings as examples of art. The older stones, from the 18th and early 19th century in particular, are unique examples of sculptural skill and imaginative design: it is often possible to discern the hand of individual, if now anonymous, Jewish stone masons or their workshops. And while later stones, often carved according to stenciled templates, present a more uniform appearance, their style and format still varies greatly from town to town.

Another aim is more reflective. As a Jewish woman who has almost never lit the Shabbat candles in my home, I also cannot fail to consider what this representation means. Candlesticks on stone are a formalized shorthand for “Jewishness” and “gender.” But they also spell tradition.

Read Full Article and See Slideshow