Hecht lasted three days at the University of Wisconsin before boarding a train to Chicago in 1910. At his death Hecht was absorbed with “Shylock, My Brother,” an unfinished treatise/memoir that makes the case that the Bard’s moneylender was “one of the few heroic Jews in classical literature.”

The Bar Mitzvah gift he received from his parents was four crates of “grown-up” books - including Dickens, Shakespeare, and Twain, in which he immersed himself as if in a warm bath. The book begins with his Bar Mitzvah and ends at his dotage, with Shakespeare as a decisive figure. Hoffman allows that “Jewish politics, too, also played a part in the current amnesia surrounding Hecht,“who accused America’s most powerful Jews and FDR of gross dereliction during World War II and championed the Irgun in its fight for a Jewish state.Īs Hoffman tells it, whatever his contradictions as an artist and shortcomings as a man, Hecht is exciting company. Mencken, his occasional editor and admirer, delivered a cruel verdict on his skills when he said Hecht “had a considerable talent, but there was always something cheap and flashy about him, so I was not surprised when he gravitated to the movies.” Then again, Mencken was not what one would call a philo-Semite. She thinks it likely that his “discipline-jumping between art and entertainment, highbrow and low, made him suspect in literary quarters, and that suspicion followed him past death.” In her opening chapter, Hoffman mulls over the present-day invisibility of the journalist’s journalist and novelist’s novelist of the 1920s, the screenwriter’s screenwriter of the 1930s and 1940s and the propagandist of 1939-1948. “Here the question of what makes a ‘Jewish life’ seems especially fraught, since he insisted on defining his Jewishness in the narrowest terms…as if Germany’s invasion of Poland had somehow altered his DNA.” For the author, “Being Jewish was fundamental to being Ben Hecht.”

“Hecht made a point of grandly asserting that he ‘became a Jew in 1939’, when he began to ‘look on the world with Jewish eyes,” writes Hoffman, who then proceeds to call him out on this concoction. “He invented 80 per cent of what is used in Hollywood today,” said Jean-Luc Godard, the French filmmaker quoted in the first paragraph of Adina Hoffman’s splendid monograph, “Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures,” the latest title in Yale’s “Jewish Lives” series.Īt 232 pages, it is a trim book, a fraction the size of Hecht’s autobiography, “A Child of the Century.” As Norman Mailer cracked, Hecht was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.” Hoffman brings objectivity and an amused skepticism to her subject. The son of immigrants from Belarus and the Ukraine, he was born in New York, self-made in Chicago and minted in Hollywood where he won one original screenplay Oscar for “Underworld” (1927) and another for “Notorious” (1946).

Notorious screenwriter ben