Being WHITE never helped. Maybe you. Not me. Never. So I don’t know what they’re talking about, since the “mostly peaceful” riots, looting and arson.
Even JEWISH privilege never helped.
I don’t remember anything like the following:
“Dear Mr. Spielberg. I’ve written a screenplay that I think would be perfect for you.”
“Not interested.”
“But I’m JEWISH.”
“Why didn’t you say so? Send it right over.”
Or this:
“Dear Publisher Bennett Cerf. I received your rejection slip for my latest novel. I forgot to tell you something. I’m WHITE.”
“Dear Mr. Engelhard. In that case, we’ll get it published right away…and will a million-dollar advance be sufficient?”
Okay? Get the picture? I got it real early. They told me that you have to know somebody. Well, I didn’t know anybody.
So it’s been a struggle. Success, I’ve had a few. Once in a while you hit it; most of the time you don’t. That’s the life of a writer. I’d say that’s life, period.
The fat years are good to have in your pocket. All right. You did something. You’re a success. But the lean years will always haunt you.
You will remember the days you starved, and the years when you were snubbed and rejected.
So why didn’t they tell me I had a leg up? I was WHITE. I was PRIVILEGED. My entire life would have been different. Like this:
“Dear Editors at Simon and Schuster: I am a WHITE writer and I believe both Simon and Schuster were also WHITE. Can you please direct me to WHITE editor?”
Zip, and you’re in.
But they don’t tell you this when you are first starting out. I’d have been spared so much grief.
They never told my father. He worked 18 hours a day. Barely made the rent, and he was WHITE.
So was the landlord when he threw us out.
You would think WHITE people would be tolerant of other WHITE people strictly on the basis of being WHITE. I have never found that to be the case.
It doesn’t work for the garage mechanic, nor for the doctor, nor the dentist, nor the plumber…same price.
Tell the bill collector you are WHITE.
This next part I am not making up. I guess I was around 20/21, and from Cincinnati to New York, I finally got an appointment with a big-time magazine editor. He had a big name. His son still does. For maybe 10 years I’d been submitting short stories to all the top magazines without success. Finally, after a 10-hour trip by Greyhound bus, I got to see the man. He rolled back casually in his chair, eyed me, and said, smirking, “You’re no A.J. Liebling.”
I never read the man. Heard of him. Never read him and never tried to write like him. Liebling?
So? “Sorry,” said the editor. “You are not quite ready.”
But, man to man, what did he think of my short stories that were intended to be my memoir?
He laughed. “I never got around to reading them.” He laughed again and 25 minutes later I was back on a Greyhound bus.
Twenty five years later those same short stories won a literary award, and the movie adaptation won top laurels at the CANNES Film Festival.
But that’s a separate story. The real story is that between skinny me and that fat man, we had everything going.
Hey…we were both WHITE…and…and…and JEWISH.
How can you lose?
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” and the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah,” for which contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
