How important are Bob Dylan's Jewish roots? Entertaining bio doesn't really answer the question

The connection “probably” gets a large workout successful “Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil,” Harry Freedman’s caller publication made of adjacent parts passionateness and conjecture. The book’s cardinal premise, oregon 1 of them, sounds juicy: The antheral calved Robert Zimmerman, and raised by a middle-class Jewish household successful small-town Minnesota, worked hard to crook his backmost connected his Jewish roots, adopting an anglicized sanction and spinning a drawstring of gangly tales astir his inheritance and upbringing. And yet, arsenic Freedman implies throughout, elements of Dylan’s Jewishness remained cardinal to his creation and identity, from his committedness to societal justness to his imaginative enactment of a caller persona.

(Bloomsbury Continuum)

It’s an intriguing idea, but 1 that Freedman, billed by his steadfast arsenic “Britain’s starring writer of fashionable works of Jewish civilization and history,” ne'er truly pins down. He does, however, person amusive trying. Even arsenic helium wanders distant from his thesis for pages and pages astatine a time, Freedman provides a lively gloss connected Dylan’s emergence from chartless people beacon to counterculture superstar and, to some, plugged-in traitor to the people cause. This period, of course, is besides the taxable of the caller movie “A Complete Unknown,” which was based connected Elijah Wald’s superb publication “Dylan Goes Electric.” There volition ne'er beryllium a shortage of Dylan movies — oregon books.

So what makes this 1 worthy reading? For 1 thing, it’s a small strange. Freedman, whose erstwhile books see “Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius,” writes successful a benignant of modified hipster patter that fits successful good with the Beat poets Dylan erstwhile idolized, and whom the writer cites arsenic different large power connected the young singer-songwriter. The writer has a funny narration with commas; his sentences often tally connected to the constituent wherever you mightiness find yourself looking for periods without uncovering them. Sentence operation sometimes ends up blowin’ successful the wind: “Coming connected astatine midnight to execute conscionable 2 numbers, the assemblage went wild.” Yes, I accidental the assemblage would spell chaotic if it went onstage astatine midnight, oregon immoderate different clip really.

Devoting generous abstraction to the civilian rights movement, the Red Scare, stone ’n’ rotation and different sociopolitical foment of the ’50 and ’60s, Freedman tin follow the code of an earnest YA author: “The kids were looking for fun, astatine this signifier successful their lives they weren’t looking to alteration the world. But alteration the satellite they would. There was nary colour barroom to their emotion of music.” But helium tin besides astonishment with sudden, mischievous wit. On the protesters confronted by constabulary astatine the Washington Square Park “Beatnik riot” of 1961: “A fewer sat successful the fountain and sang ‘We Shall Not beryllium Moved.’ They were.”

And present helium is connected the antipathy that Mary Rotolo, parent of the young Dylan’s woman Suze, had for Dylan: “She didn’t person the aforesaid maternal feelings towards him arsenic the different older women who had mothered Bob erstwhile helium archetypal arrived successful New York, but that was bound to beryllium so; helium wasn’t shtupping their 17-year-old daughters.” “Jewish Roots” has what a publication with a shaky premise needs to inactive beryllium readable: a dependable that ne'er truly gets dry.

Author Harry Freedman.

(Bloomsbury Continuum)

But past there’s the “probably” problem, which represents a larger contented of floating ideas that don’t person the backing of fact. “Bob Dylan was astir apt successful the parkland that April time successful 1961.” And this astir manager Albert Grossman: “The information that some Dylan and Grossman were each blessed with temperamental Jewish volatility would teardrop their narration isolated successful owed course. But astatine this signifier their taste inheritance astir apt helped to make a chemistry, a shared ambition for success.” This illustration underscores a abstracted contented that defines the book. Eager to service his premise regarding Dylan’s Jewishness, Freedman sometimes turns it into a flimsy fallback device. “Blessed with temperamental Jewish volatility”? Sure. Maybe. Probably? It’s beauteous bladed stuff, and it’s indicative of an statement that ne'er truly coheres.

In different places, however, Freedman tin beryllium rather crisp astir the matter. Here helium is describing Dylan’s absorption to discovering that his person and chap instrumentalist Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was besides Jewish: “Dylan had discovered helium wasn’t alone, and the suspicions of his friends had been confirmed; Bob Dylan was Jewish. And, of course, it didn’t substance a bit. That’s the comic happening astir being Jewish. The antisemites hatred you, the philosemites privation to beryllium similar you, and cipher other gives a damn. It’s a acquisition that each Jew with a situation of individuality learns eventually. To halt being truthful self-conscious and judge the world of who you are.”

Of course, if cipher other gives a damn, 1 mightiness wonderment astir the intent of this book. As it is, “Jewish Roots, American Soil” makes for amusive speechmaking adjacent erstwhile it doesn’t rather look to cognize what dots it wants to connect. This would hardly beryllium the archetypal container that the famously elusive, self-mythologizing Dylan doesn’t rather fit.

Vognar is simply a freelance civilization writer.