The Jonathan Stone-David Rothman Q. & A.
Jonathan Stone, the reporter in The Solomon Scandals, grilled me for this Q. & A.—uncut. – David Rothman
STONE: Why’s Scandals copyrighted in your name? Those are my newspaper memoirs.
ROTHMAN: Er, faux memoirs. Without me, you wouldn’t even have been born…or have worked for the Washington Telegram…or have struggled to avert an IRS-CIA building collapse…or lived through those quirky sex scandals…or the corruption and blackmail from the Oval Office…or the gossip columnist’s suicide…or the death of the sharklike editor in a car bombing…or your Hollywood directing career or—
STONE: Thanks, but I’ve already read my book. Now what about the talking Afghan Hound at the Cosmos Club? Sure it doesn’t detract from my dignity?
ROTHMAN: But you’ve been dead for decades. Scandals is set mainly in the 1970s, but looks far beyond—via reflections from your great-grand niece at the Institute for Previrtual Studies. Besides, Afghans are dignified. I didn’t put this detail in the book, but Thackeray II speaks in a wonderful baritone with a mid-Atlantic accent. I wish he could do my radio interviews for me.
STONE: For latecomers, who’s this guy Solomon? And what’s he doing on my book cover with a building in his hand?
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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?
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