The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Scandals as a Northern Virginia Jewish novel

Jonathan Stone as an Afro-American? Because Jew­ish pro­tag­o­nists are such old hat? So sug­gested a buddy of mine—not an anti-semite or self-hating Jew­ish, but an intel­li­gent man of the obser­vant, prac­tic­ing vari­ety. May I respect­fully dis­agree? In fact, The Solomon Scan­dals in some respects is as much a North­ern Vir­ginia Jew­ish novel as a news­pa­per one. I can­not imag­ine Scan­dals any other way.

What’s more, I can’t even see it as a purely Wash­ing­ton novel, since there is so much Vir­ginia in it.

North­ern Vir­ginia is just across the Potomac from sub­ur­ban Mary­land, where far more of the D.C. area’s Jews live. Mary­land has the National Insti­tutes of Health. Vir­ginia has the Pen­ta­gon and CIA. Jews work and excel at all the agen­cies men­tioned here, as well as the related con­sult­ing firms, aka Belt­way Ban­dits (no insult—that’s just the jar­gon these days). But the dif­fer­ences between Mary­land and Vir­ginia  are stark. Vir­ginia is far more con­ser­v­a­tive. Even today a Con­fed­er­ate statue stands in the mid­dle of Wash­ing­ton Street, the main drag in Alexan­dria, despite the elec­tion of an Afro-American mayor.

The fic­ti­tious Jonathan Stone has grown up near by in McLean, Vir­ginia, among the more Waspy parts of the Wash­ing­ton area. While he lives in D.C. now, he is very much a son of McLean, where he still has friends and fam­ily. Jews were but a speck of the stu­dent body at Lan­g­ley High School, his old school shown here.

For jour­nal­is­tic rea­sons, noth­ing more, Stone inves­ti­gates Sey­mour Solomon, the lead­ing Jew­ish phil­an­thropist in the D.C. area and a major pres­i­den­tial con­trib­u­tor. Stone him­self, like me, is not reli­gious. But he faces and cares about a clas­sic dilemma. Will he hurt the Jew­ish com­mu­nity, at the local and even national lev­els, if he comes out with a neg­a­tive story on one of its pil­lars? Or will he actu­ally help it if he belies the old canards about Zion­ist con­spir­a­cies in the press?

An “Afro-American con­spir­acy,” by con­trast, doesn’t quite res­onate among big­ots. What’s more, in con­sid­er­ing my friend’s idea, keep in mind that I’m not steeped in Afro-American cul­ture. How long would it take for me to learn the nuances well enough for Stone to be black? And could I ever? Even a mas­ter like William Sty­ron, in writ­ing The Con­fes­sions of Nat Turner, unwit­tingly enraged some Afo-Americans.

Of equal impor­tance, we’re not just talk­ing about the generic issues of liv­ing within an eth­nic group. Although Stone isn’t an obser­vant Jew or a scholar, reli­gious or sec­u­lar, he is influ­enced by Spin­oza’s “faith of facts and  syl­lo­gisms. I’d pledged a far more demand­ing fra­ter­nity than ZBT, the broth­er­hood of Aris­totelians and Spin­ozians. I was no philoso­pher, but The Ethics fit, and not just the logic of it all. ‘Good and evil for­tunes,’ I remem­bered from my col­lege days, ‘fall to the lot of pious and impi­ous alike.’” The Ethics is online, and I’d wel­come read­ers’ inter­pre­ta­tions of the work as applied to the plot and peo­ple in The Solomon Scan­dals. Edu­cate us by express­ing your own views backed by facts, in the Spin­ozan tra­di­tion. Be clear, and write for lay peo­ple, not just experts. Use the com­ment area of this post.

In mak­ing my case for Scan­dals as a North­ern Vir­ginia Jew­ish novel, I’d also point out that Jews in some sit­u­a­tions don’t have any choice but to regard them­selves as Jews. North­ern Vir­ginia in the 1960s and 1970s was rather dif­fer­ent from Wash­ing­ton, D.C., or Mont­gomery County, Mary­land, loca­tion of a large Jew­ish com­mu­nity. I can recall sit­ting next to a high school stu­dent in study hall who, far more sym­pa­thet­i­cally than I’d have wanted, talked about the Nazis in Arling­ton, near by. The photo to the right is of the Hiter­lites’  leader, George Lin­coln Rock­well, later gunned down by a dis­grun­tled fol­lower. I can also remem­ber a teacher at my high school who was said to keep a gun in his desk, and who hated my guts with­out quite artic­u­lat­ing why. Was anti­semitism behind the hate? I don’t know. But the times were such that I could eas­ily sus­pect it. I trans­ferred to a class taught by a Jew­ish teacher, one of the few at my school.

Overt anti­semitism was rare—in fact, the near-by city of Alexan­dria elected a Jew­ish mayor years before the Afro-American one—but the excep­tions could be unnerv­ing. My family’s syn­a­gogue was the tar­get of bomb threats in 1958 as a result of the rabbi’s civil rights stands moti­vated by tra­di­tional Jew­ish love of social jus­tice. Rabbi Emmett A. Frank took on Harry Byrd’s leg­endary polit­i­cal machine, a pro­moter of racial seg­re­ga­tion. He actu­ally had the nerve to ques­tion the belief that “Byrd­li­ness is syn­ony­mous with Godliness.”

Most of the con­gre­gants in Tem­ple Beth El almost surely agreed with Rabbi Frank on the above. But as a small minor­ity, Vir­ginia Jews had to fit in, and liv­ing there was rather dif­fer­ent from life in Mary­land, where sub­dued reli­gious big­otry and other kinds were not quite so much in vogue. “Is it good for the Jews?” was a far more rel­e­vant ques­tion on the Vir­ginia side of the Potomac. Mary­land Jews could hide among their own. We couldn’t. Rabbi Frank him­self infu­ri­ated many a Beth El mem­ber with a let­ter to the Wash­ing­ton Post where he approved of Christ­mas and Hanukkah cel­e­bra­tions in pub­lic schools. Was that really the best way to coex­ist with Bap­tists and Methodists? Dozens of enraged fam­i­lies left the con­gre­ga­tion and formed another (mem­bers of the two tem­ples are now back on friendly terms).

Per­haps sim­i­lar fit-in con­cerns would have lin­gered in the minds of Her­bert and Lydia Stone, Jon’s par­ents in McLean, as they pon­dered what effects Jon’s sto­ries about Solomon might have. So might other his­tory even if it wasn’t Virginia-specific. In Chap­ter 16 the younger Stone reflects on the orig­i­nal ver­sion of his fam­ily name, Faber­stein. “Given the prej­u­dices against Jews in the upper reaches of the public-relations indus­try in the early fifties, the change to ‘Stone’ was hardly hap­pen­stance.’”  This was the era, after all, of gentleman’s agree­ments against Jews or African-Americans buy­ing houses in cer­tain upscale neigh­bor­hoods. At any rate, noth­ing is bet­ter at bring­ing out your Jew­ish­ness than anti­semitism. The ‘50s must have pro­vided Her­bert and Lydia with plenty of chances to feel Jewish.

Yet another reli­gious issue in The Solomon Scan­dals would be the Jew­ish aspects of Sey­mour Solomon’s own life—all the para­doxes. On one hand, Solomon shows fil­ial loy­alty, wor­ship­ping his father to the extent of nam­ing the Abra­ham Solomon Build­ing after him. And always, always, he gives to char­i­ties, Jew­ish and even Chris­t­ian, not just sec­u­lar. But just how would Spin­oza’s state­ment in The Ethics apply: “‘Good and evil for­tunes fall to the lot of pious and impi­ous alike”? Ques­tions abound as to whether Solomon has fairly won his mil­lions in leas­ing busi­ness from the gov­ern­ment, or whether he stinted on con­struc­tion mate­ri­als for the huge com­plex he has built for the IRS—and CIA, it turns out—south of Alexan­dria in an area that in real life is park­land. No, Solomon’s reli­gion is not to blame, and, in fact, he is in cahoots with pure­bred Wasp scoundrels, hav­ing found he needed their con­nec­tions.  But his Judaism is a fac­tor in the sense that anti­semites might falsely link his per­sonal fail­ings to the sup­posed flaws of Jews as a whole (smears of the same kind that the Bernard Mad­off scan­dal may help spread).

Finally there is the clas­sic issue of inter­mar­riage. “The truth,” Jon writes, “is that I’d fallen in love with Margo in spite of her being gen­tile, not because of it—a nat­ural enough feel­ing from some­one whose Ger­man rel­a­tives on his father’s side had most likely died in a con­cen­tra­tion camp. Prop­a­gat­ing well was the best revenge.” Such mat­ters count in North­ern Vir­ginia where Jews are a small minor­ity, and where so many are mar­ried to gen­tiles, prob­a­bly a higher per­cent­age than in Maryland.

In some, not all, cases, we are talk­ing about peo­ple on the edges of Jew­ish life. While cer­tain of the issues in Scan­dals are rem­i­nis­cent of those in the title story of Good­bye Colum­bus—for exam­ple, middle-class hap­pi­ness vs. social consciousness—the North­ern Vir­ginia Jews in the book are a dif­fer­ent tribe from Philip Roth’s char­ac­ters. Mary­land Jews in the 1970s were closer to New York not just in geog­ra­phy but in Jews’ adher­ence to old ways. This may have changed some­what, with the move­ment of more Jews from the North­east into Vir­ginia, help­ing to make it so dif­fer­ent nowa­days from the rest of the state. Fair­fax County, where I grew up, is now notable for its large immi­grant pop­u­la­tion; and my old high school build­ing actu­ally houses, of all things, the Islamic Saudi Acad­emy.

I’ll close with an impor­tant caveat. In my imme­di­ate neigh­bor­hood, anti­semitism just didn’t exist, even covertly. I can recall describ­ing the Taux­e­mont–Welling­ton area to a Jew­ish New York edi­tor who had trou­ble believ­ing in the har­mony within this small town—for that’s what the neigh­bor­hood was, in effect, com­plete with Dutch sup­pers and a Com­mu­nity House. We had more gen­tile friends than Jew­ish friends, and they were and are good peo­ple. I often thought of reli­gious dif­fer­ences when around the worst of the red­necky ele­ments at high school. I sel­dom did, except on Jew­ish hol­i­days, when around imme­di­ate neigh­bors. A bunch of them came to a remem­brance for my mother, who had died at age 94 on March 31, 2008. Imag­ine: 94, and still a lit­tle crowd to say good-bye. That spoke vol­umes not just about my mother—older than most of them—but also about our for­mer neigh­bors with whom she had so often traded her desserts.

Those are just a few thoughts of mine. What are yours? Am I right or wrong about Jews and North­ern Vir­ginia? I regard this page as a liv­ing doc­u­ment and may be quot­ing insights from readers.

Image credit: The photo of the Con­fed­er­ate statue is CC-licensed from the National Cen­ter for Miss­ing and Exploited Chil­dren. Fol­low Wikipedia links for other credits.

You might also like:

• Robert H. Smith dead: Son of the builder who helped inspire the Solomon character
• Bio
• Budd Schulberg, ‘What Makes Sammy Run?’ and ‘The Solomon Scandals’
• Crooked politicians mean tumbling buildings—in countries from Egypt to China, not just U.S.
• The Jewish grocers of D.C. (and suburbs)