The Old Religion: A Novel [Hardcover]

David Mamet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1997

In 1914 Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner in Georgia, was wrongfully accused of the rape and murder of a white Southern girl. He was tried, convicted, and lynched by an angry mob. In this searing narrative, David Mamet reconstructs the inner consciousness of this doomed hero, and in the process, powerfully challenges the assimilated American Jews of today by dramatizing the disastrous consequences of Frank's attachment to secular society.

Based on extensive historical research, The Old Religion is artistically compelling and intellectually disturbing. Mamet has written a novel that is partly a work of moral philosophy, focusing on the theme of Jewish insecurity in a Christian society and exploring the psychology of assimilation as he seeks to expose the misplaced trust of Jews in a system of secular laws that, he seems to say, is designed not to protect the weak, but to mask our shared impulses toward tribalistic human cruelty.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For his second novel, playwright David Mamet chose as a subject the 1914 trial of Leo Frank, a Jew living in Georgia who was falsely accused of the rape and murder of a young girl at the factory he managed. Convicted on the perjurious testimony of the actual killer and several of his coworkers, Frank was later abducted from prison by a mob and lynched. "They covered his head, and they ripped his pants off and castrated him and hung him from the tree. A photographer took a picture showing the mob, one boy grinning at the camera, the body hanging, the legs covered by a blanket tied around the waist. The photo, reproduced as a postcard, was sold for many years in stores throughout the South."

The events are straightforward, and Mamet leaves no doubt over the course of the story as to the final outcome. But he does not portray the events so much as he probes the state of mind of Leo Frank, never relenting from the terse, stylized language familiar to fans of his plays. At the beginning of The Old Religion, despite his awareness of the growing anti-Semitism in the South (or perhaps because of it), Frank suppresses his heritage as much as possible. Even at a seder, "he pronounced the word kosher gingerly, as if to say, I don't disclaim that I have heard it, but I do not wish to say it freely, as to arrogate it to myself on the mere precedent of blood." But as the trial goes on, we are shown Frank's growing realization that, although he has embraced the American way of life, it will not embrace him in return.

From Library Journal

In this historical novel, playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Mamet presents disturbing cameos of Jewish uncertainty in a Christian world. In 1914, Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner in Georgia, was wrongfully accused of the rape and murder of a white Southern girl. After a trial filled with anti-Semitic venom spewed forth by the prosecutor and vapid statements by a weak defense attorney?as Mamet says, "The attorney had no desire to see Frank acquitted. An acquittal would subject him to the rage of the city"?Frank was castrated and hanged by an angry mob. The first half of the book contains small incidents in Frank's daily life?mainly concerning his desire to be part of the larger secular society?told in the first person with foreshadowing of what is to come. A most disturbing story, told in short, staccato sentences, that would probably have worked better as a play.?Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 194 pages
• Publisher: Free Pr; 1ST edition (October 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684841193
• ISBN-13: 978-0684841199
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,283,673 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Disturbing, but worthwhile, June 11, 1999

By 

Lauren ([e-mail]) (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Old Religion: A Novel (Hardcover)

Being very familiar with the Leo Frank case and the various forms of media that have evolved concerning it (novels, plays, movies, musicals...etc.) I was anxious to see what slant Mamet would take on this most intriguing true story. As usual, Mamet offers a bizarre, disturbing and profoundly intellectual work that provides a whole new look at Leo Frank. Instead of focusing in on the trial or events surrounding it...Mamet takes us on a journey inside Frank's head...we see the mind of a man displaced; trying to make peace with himself, his world and his God. The result is not a page-turner, not a heartfelt and moving account of a man accused, but rather a facsinating examination of the human brain and it's inexplicable way of relating ideas. A worthwhile read for anyone familiar with the Frank case...but a little too heavy and vague for those who are not.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mamet Combines It All, September 9, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Old Religion: A Novel (Hardcover)

Mamet's prose is never easy, but always rewarding.
In his second novel, Mamet takes as into the mind
of Leo Frank, a New York Jew, wrongly accused of
murdering an employee of his.

As the reader learns about Leo Frank's background and of his trial and eventual unjust conviction, (s)he also gets a piece of Frank's mind pondering the big philosphical and social questions: What does it mean to be a Jew in America? What does it mean to be an American? What is the role of justice, wealth and hard-work? Yet, he also asks himself questions that are both personal and universal: What if he had not come to work on that day? He wonders whether he shouldn't have foreseen the future, and he asks himself as we often do, whether there were any signs he ignored or misread that could have saved him.

In a way, it's a novel about the small and unsovable questions each and everyone of us faces in one's life. And Mamet's depiction of these ponderings are not only brilliant in its clear-ness, but his answers and insights into these questions are also enlighting.

As when he says that when one looks back on one's past and doesn't feel pride but sadness. That's wisdom. Or when he discredits the typical Jewish response to anti-smitism, which is a reference to the contribution of the Jews to society, by claiming that contribution in itself is despicable as it means nothing but 'what have you done for me'.

This is not a melodrama, although the book ends dramatically. Neither is it Hemingway-esque, as the story's emphasis is not on action or plot, it is rather a beautiful account of a man trying to find sense in a senseless situation, by trying to find the answers to his existence. The questions he asks and the answers he gives are often familair, but have never been put so beautifully and with so much insight.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Old Soft Shoe, August 14, 2002

By 

Atar Hadari (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Old Religion: A Novel (Hardcover)

In The Old Religion, historical figure Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner in the old American South falsely accused of rape and murder, then imprisoned and eventually lynched by an organised mob, is turned by Mamet into a religious philosopher, an all but obssessive turner over of truths and half truths, propositions and the voices within voices of a disputatious mind from a disputatious people. But the heart of it is still the same: "To be a man," the Rabbi said, was to behave as a man in that situation where there were neither the trappings nor the rewards of manhood: scorned, reviled, abandoned, humiliated, powerless, terrified, mocked. "Now be a man..." the Rabbi said."

And in The Edge, a movie by Mamet, the millionaire played by Anthony Hopkins is an obssessive learner and compiler of facts, a man detached from his emotions, who through the forces of a melodrama plot, (a plane goes down stranding him in the wilderness with his wife's lover, the fashion photographer Alec Baldwin who wants him dead) is forced to confront himself and, stripped to his essentials, survive. In a sense, The Edge is the opposite story to The Old Religion in that the former has as its central motif a canoe paddle on whose two sides a rabbit and a ravenous beast, I cannot quite recall what, co-exist. Why is the rabbit not afraid? "Because he knows he's smarter then the.." Fox, I believe the beast is. It is significant that the line, among the best in the film, is not quite memorable enough to hold the mind. And the central, memorable sequence of the film is millionaire and adulterous rival being forced to collaborate in killing a bear. That bear was more memorable than the characters or the dialogue. In The Old Religion the opposite moral is operative, Frank is in no useable way smarter than his employee Jim, who uses the white Southern mob's unwillingness to believe in the intelligence of a "nigro" to fool them and gets away with murder, dooming the outsider Jew. You cannot be smarter than the fox and disruptive nature, chaos; the forces of darkness cannot be conquered - you must only stand and face them as you may, that is the true heart of Mamet's reveries.

The trouble is that this does not always amount to a compelling fulcrum, in and of itself, it must accompany colour or is bland, a blank stare in the face of onrushing doom - Mamet's stoic glance in the face of the cancer look.

In The Old Religion, Frank's habits of dissecting, homelitically commenting on and generally discoursing throughout and over every event of his downward course lend the book the air of a series of absent minded sermons, underpinned with occasional colourful clues as to motive, projection through space and narrative to fate, the taste of life. As Mamet points out somewhere in his book of actors' sermons "True or False"- intentions are not interesting, a person's qualities are not interesting, only actions are interesting. Hence the only memorable thing about the Rabbi, a key figure of the last third of the book, is the way he lights a match, his way with a cigarette. This is actual character. Mamet doesn't give either Frank or the Rabbi or any of the other characters quite enough internal colour, a personal smell or feeling, to make them anything - an actor could not successfully play them without addition and a reader cannot happily create them in the mind's eye because aside from the endless discourses- as Mamet's Frank asks himself at one point "what part of reason is not simply the recoil of fear?" - there is nothing much going on. The only thing which defines Frank's response in the face of the onrushing catastrophe is his reversion to the "Old Religion" of Judaism away from the "Old Religion" of the South, of America, of the belief in progress. This is not really, in itself, much that you can play. As Mamet the actor would put it: What's the objective? And it cannot really be said that Mamet the novelist has given the actor or reader much in the way of lines on a page to sustain the illusion of character.

At the novel's early parts, before chaos unfolds, one feels a little like the inhabitant of a Aharon Appelfeld novel, where bitter laughter and irony is beneath every casual detail of the lives of comfortable Jews on the lip on an abyss. And Mamet's skill is always wordily present - for probably two thirds of the novel he manages to keep you reading, keep you turning the pages, despite very little meat between his odd moments of concrete detail. This is no small skill. But his aesthetic position about acting is disproved in his own work, in this particular book. Not enough blood in these characters to sustain the book.