King of the Jews

I found this book in the "Judaica" section of a large urban bookstore, and was surprised it had not been filed under "true crime." Once I began reading, however, the extent of Tosches' research into Semitic languages and ancient religion greatly impressed and pleased me. He imaginatively interweaves the story of an American-Jewish gangster with that of Rothstein's cultural heritage. The writing style is eclectic, daring and masterful. Recommended for anyone interested in crime (truth or fiction), the early 20th century US, and/or Jewish studies.

Nick Tosches is a great writer. KING OF THE JEWS is well researched, informative, and uncompromisingly gutsy. Like Paul Sann's equally brilliant KILL THE DUTCHMAN, Tosches gives us a wild, wicked, topsy turvy lesson on the Jewish gangster from ancient times up through and into the American Experience. It's revists heartily HERBERT ASBURY'S THE GANGS OF NEW YORK; but as seen through the prism of the Jewish-American Experience in early N.Y.C. The Jewish Gangs of New York would be a more appropriate title. The original court transcripts following Mr. A.R.'s killing, the autopsy report, the clothes he wore, his family tree, his associates who were questioned in court, and the police reports are reprinted here, plus more than you could ever ask for in a gangster novel. Remember: this is a GANGSTER NOVEL. It's not necessarily all truth. In fact, the author gleefully invites the reader to join him along in speculating the apocrypha of myth, legends and lore all the way back to Bible times, and into the American Experience with the enigma of Arnold Rothstein as it's central figure. I was amused and delighted the author finally wrote a book for nuts like me. I have been to the Holy Land, so the experience of reading this book re-enforced my interest in the subject. I wish the book had been longer.

I do not usually write book reviews because digesting books is such a personal experience, but I was surprised that none of the reviewers of Tosches's latest book got it, or him, at all. Tosches is definitely an idiosyncratic, splenetic writer who is not for everyone, but presumably that is exactly what his readers most value. The point of Tosches's book isn't to create a "real" biography of Rothstein, but to question the very nature of what is "real," what is "history," and what are the actual underpinnings of our beliefs. By refusing to artificially connect-the-dots of what little is "known" about Rothstein (or anyone/anything else), Tosches underscores the point that what most of us take as "history" is nothing but imaginative narrative that reveals more about the narrator than the putative subject matter. This is much the same point as Simon Schama made in Dead Certainties. Tosches's comments on the old testament, the devolution from gods to God, and the concoction of the christ figure are not random digressions, but further examples of the same point (the substantive questionability of received truth) writ large. Check out Umberto Eco's Serendipities for another exposition of how powerful myths (like christ or rothstein) sometimes start from nothing and are based on nothing. "In Russia, the past is unpredictable." "History" is an ever-growing cotton-candy meta-narrative spun from other people's equally baseless subjective narratives. Tosches book is, however, much more interesting that those other para-academic books. Dontcha get it?

The dark specter of the private mind has often pervaded Nick Tosches' writing, as in his critically acclaimed biographies on Dean Martin (Dino) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Hellfire). Recently, however, the focal psyche examined by the author has been his own, as he scrutinizes and disparages at the behest of his various moods. His novel In the Hand of Dante confronts the writing racket. The Last Opium Den grieves the passing of old ways. With King of the Jews, Tosches, a bit honked off that he can no longer light up in his favorite bars, has finally detonated a literary bomb over the whole of Western civilization, from the "confectionery lies called history" to contemporary culture's "mall of mortuary mediocrity." The text alleges to be a biography on Arnold Rothstein, yet history has buried the legendary gambler in a swathe of secrecy that even Tosches' exhaustive research fails to breach. Instead the author uses Rothstein as a window through which we can peer irreverently upon the hollow husk of history, "the snake-oil pitchman's forgery of yore" that becomes "inspirational gospel." While he shatters one Rothstein myth after another, he manages to dispense plenty of other snippets upon the reader with savage eloquence, theorizing, for instance, that early Hebraism was polytheistic, and comparing former Mayor Giuliani to the Nazis. What saves this text from being a self-indulgent fit is that most of the author's arguments are compelling and persuasive, and apparently connected. At least for Tosches, who also undertakes a textually self-aware examination that begs such questions as "why am I writing this, and why are you reading it?" This is a thriving mausoleum of a biography; essentially dead as regards Rothstein's story, yet intricate and forebodingly poetic in its contemplation of everything else.