The write stuff: Obama’s a Roth man, shown top and bottom left, but McCain leans toward Victor Frankl, top and bottom right.
by Jonathan Mark
First the candidates squared off over Iraq — stay in or get out? Then their preachers — both get out! And now the campaign is getting down to what America wants to know: Who’s your favorite Jewish writer?
In a pair of recent interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg at Atlantic online, both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain diverge more radically on Yid lit than they do on global warming.
Barack Obama says, “I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris.”
Obama didn’t specify whether his sensibility
was better shaped by “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “The Plot Against America,” nor does he say whether he preferred Uris’ “Exodus” or “Mila 18,” differing books and sensibilities that might shift a vote, or two.
John McCain reaches for a different shelf.
“There’s Elie Wiesel and Victor Frankl,” says McCain. “I think about Frankl,” a psychiatrist who, while in Theresienstadt, assisted fellow prisoners through their trauma. McCain says Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” is “one of the most profound things I’ve ever read in my life. And maybe on a little lighter note, ‘War and Remembrance‚’ and ‘Winds of War’ are my two absolute favorite books. I can tell you that one of my life’s ambitions is to meet Herman Wouk.”
No, he’s not big on Roth.
“No, I’m not,” says McCain. “Leon Uris I enjoyed. Victor Frankl, that’s important. I read it before my captivity. It made me feel a lot less sorry for myself, my friend. A fundamental difference between my experience and the Holocaust was that the Vietnamese didn’t want us to die. They viewed us as a very valuable asset at the bargaining table. It was the opposite in the Holocaust, because they wanted to exterminate you. Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself, which was very frequently, I thought, ‘This is nothing compared to what Victor Frankl experienced.’”
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