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Bella, Bella Kissed a Fella, by Arthur Kober
- Abstract
The stereotypes of Jews which I dislike the most are the ones that Jews themselves develop; and of these, I have a special distaste for Arthur Kober’s. But it’s hard to say why. On the whole it’s a rather pleasant, dreamy, and remote little mishmash that he concocts, almost idyllic in tone; it appears so, at any rate, when you consider how successfully his Jews have been spared their own history. The time—though Kober goes to some trouble to establish it as “now”—is somewhere between the onset of immigration and 1933. The Jews have settled in the Bronx, and the girls have gone to work in offices: nothing else has happened. Bella, her friends, and her family go about making bilingual puns, saying, for example, Erev Flynn for Errol Flynn, mitt for meat, udder for or, etc. Most of the discussions conducted in this vocabulary bear on Bella’s love life, which is to say her efforts to trap a husband. A subsidiary theme, given to Ma and Pa Gross, is the standard American joke that the women wear the pants, spattered with their husbands’ brains, in the American family. Every now and then Kober lays aside the dialect to say something on his own, in pure Castilian: “Her mind was a seething cauldron, stirred by the spoon of self-pity.”
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