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Turow's Law
David B. Green
Scott Turow is hardly renowned as a `Jewish' author, yet his new book, and his previous legal bestsellers, are crowded with Jewish characters. They are people, like the author himself, who are proud of their heritage but wish American Jews were a little more compassionate and a little less materialistic.
Scott Turow admits he doesn't know for sure why there are so many Jewish lawyers. "I puzzle on it all the time," says the creator and arguably most skillful practitioner of the literary legal thriller, a high-powered attorney himself. But he hazards an answer: "We come from a cultural tradition that's extremely legalistic. And you could probably argue that this tradition tends to select those who are better at manipulating rules."
Turow's name may not be the first that comes to mind when Jewish writers are discussed, but his books not only feature several central characters who are Jewish, but also grapple to superior effect with themes - guilt, social justice, parent-child relations - that have occupied the greatest Jewish novelists. And they also include a lot of manipulation of the rules.
In extensive phone interviews with The Jerusalem Report, Turow makes clear that he is proud of his heritage, but he's got a few gripes about some of the tendencies of contemporary Jews. He wouldn't have got where he is without a strong dose of ambition, but he has pursued a lifelong struggle to keep the demons of materialism and pushiness - which he associates with the American Jewish immigrant experience - under check. He identifies deeply with the suffering of the Holocaust, but believes that experience has not left Jews nearly sensitive enough to the suffering of others - in Southeast Asia 30 years ago, in America's inner cities today.
Nowhere do Turow's musings on these concerns come out so explicitly as in his new novel, "The Laws of Our Fathers" (see Alan Dershowitz's review, page 50). In it, a group of friends and lovers who passed through the anti-war movement together in 1969-70 are reunited 25 years later as they play nearly all the parts in a bizarre murder trial. Two of them, Judge Sonny Klonsky and columnist Seth Weissman, spend most of the book circling each other in a mating ritual, while they come to terms with what they really want from life and where their responsibilities lie. In both cases (Seth is the son of Holocaust survivors, Sonny's been told her late father was Jewish), their journey together includes examining what Judaism has to offer.
Turow's journey to literary success has been phenomenal. Starting with "Presumed Innocent" (1987), about an assistant district attorney (played in the screen version by Harrison Ford) on trial for the murder of a colleague with whom he'd had a scorching extramarital affair, Turow has turned out three best-selling legal thrillers. Confident that his new book is bound for bestsellerdom too, his publisher has ordered a hardcover first printing of 650,000.
Though there is a murder in the new book, and a trial, both of these traditional thriller ingredients take a back seat to Turow's description of the changes his characters undergo as they pass from the naive idealism of the 60s to the challenges a mature adult must confront in the terrifying 90s. He says he wrote it "utterly convinced" that it would never be a movie, but put it on the market nonetheless, after prodding from his agent. Within six hours, two studios came in with offers. Turow sold the rights to Universal Pictures, which together with Danny DeVito's Jersey Films, has hired Jon ("Fried Green Tomatoes") Avnet to direct.
What John le Carre did for the spy novel - introducing to the genre moral ambiguity, political complexity and characters who didn't have the one-dimensional charm and exaggerated professional prowess of James Bond - Turow did for the courtroom drama. He's worked hard to write books that are not only entertaining, but that also challenge their readers' conceptions of right and wrong.
In his last book, "Pleading Guilty," Turow allowed his anti-hero Mack Malloy, a down-and-out, much abused lawyer, to finally say "Screw you" to the powers that be. This may have been an extreme case, but his characters always have to improvise with morality, confronting not only a system that doesn't encourage goodness, but also internal impulses they didn't know existed, and the messes their loved ones have left for them to clean up.
Scott Frederick Turow is an "inside-outside" man. Born 47 years ago in Chicago, he was raised in a middle-class Jewish family, first in West Rogers Park, which is still a Jewish enclave, and later in the North Shore suburb of Winnetka. Scott's father, David Turow, was a gynecologist who had served as a medic in the war, and returned "a bit of a war hero. He parachuted into the Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, even though he'd had no parachute training - basically, he was pushed out of the plane. He went into Bergen-Belsen and other camps, and came back gravely affected by the experience." Both David and Scott's mother, the former Rita Pastron, a teacher who introduced her son to literature and writing, still live in the Winnetka house to which the family moved when Scott was 13.
West Rogers Park, he says, speaking to The Report from his suburban Chicago home, "was a wonderful place to grow up." The neighborhood was mixed - Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews - and there were many Holocaust survivors. He notes, though, that the "Holocaust was never much mentioned publicly. My mother raised me with an enormous sense of grief for the 6 million, though I discovered that among friends one or two of whose parents were survivors, it wasn't discussed. Political correctness presents them as noble survivors, but my observation was that a lot of these homes were suffering, because the parents were still suffering."
Religious practice in Turow's family was "basically nil," he says, but at the same time, "I've always known myself as a Jew, from the fabric of life in the Jewish neighborhood, the Yiddish I spoke with my grandfather and now can barely recall - all this was incredibly rich to me."
Thirty-odd years later, Scott still talks ruefully about his family's move to the suburbs. "It's clear that my mother was hellbent on assimilating. She wanted me to know the gentile world," he says. It was in Winnetka, attending New Trier high school, that he had his first brush with anti-Semitism. "My high school had a substantial population who lived in `restricted' areas. I conveniently forgot this. But when I came back in 1976 for my reunion, I found myself saying to people in my head: `Yeah, you once said "kike"'; `Yeah, you didn't like being around Jews.'"
In the new book, seth, a journalist about Turow's age, is in a state of lifelong revolt against his survivor father, Bernhard, who lost a son and his first wife at Buchenwald. Bernhard is not a pleasant man: He is suspicious, awe-inspiringly cheap (after one hard winter, he sprays the dead evergreen trees in his front yard with green paint rather than replace them), ungiving on every level. By the book's end, it is too late for Seth to salvage his relationship with Bernhard, but not too late for him to finally comprehend that he need not reject all "the laws of our fathers." Seth comes to terms with his late father when he recognizes that no "human being could be subjected on a prolonged basis to such confinement, such humiliation, such intense and repeated brutality, such incessant privation, fear, and constant deprivation, and emerge with their humanity fully intact."
It is clear that the Holocaust is one of the pillars of Turow's Jewish identity. But though he sees it as humankind's low point, he's also critical of the many Jews for whom, he says, the "particular Jewish anguish" is not reason to speak out against "the tireless way that humanity competes in anti-human behavior."
Like his creator, Seth is ambivalent about his Judaism - never denying it, but not particularly knowledgeable about it either. Seth is bemused but proud when his college-age daughter Sarah takes up Jewish studies. And by the end of the long book, he has taken a first, but critical move to more intimately identify himself with his heritage.
Says Turow, about being Jewish: "You ask me what I know most deeply about myself - it is that." At the same time, he acknowledges that it is his wife, Annette, who is the observant parent in the household, and that "there is almost tireless argument in this house about what's right for us, and the kids." (There are three.) "That's part of what stimulates my own reflections on this," in the book. He notes that "I am not seen in synagogue very often," but is reluctant to go into details about the rest of the family's precise practices for fear of invading their privacy. His problems with religion stem from "the self-deprecating quality of the liturgy" and "this business of being a chosen people (which) has gotten us in trouble for 5,000 years." But he still feels it's a privilege to be a Jew, "because you know better than most people what some of the concerns were of the people who preceded you on the planet, and have a better sense of what your DNA is than most of the American polyglot."
"Laws of Our Fathers" opens up at a high-rise slum complex in Kindle County. Longtime fans of Turow may find themselves a little put out by the writing in the initial pages, for the first chapter is written from the point of view of gang leader Ordell "Hardcore" Trent, and his English is far from normative. "That beginning's there for a reason," says the author. "I felt that I could not flinch on the issue of race." His compassion finds expression too in the musings of Judge Klonsky, who is struck by the youthfulness of so many of the defendants who are paraded before her bench: "Most of these kids grow up feeling utterly disregarded - by fathers who departed, by mothers who are overwhelmed, by teachers with unmanageable classrooms, by a world in which they learn, from the TV set and the rap of the street, they do not count for much."
As a teenager, Turow was active in the Evanston, Illinois, Urban League and NAACP; when he got to college at Amherst, he requested a black roommate. ("I got one," he wrote recently in The Washington Post, "but he was a prep-school graduate and the child of two PhDs, and we did not really get along.") When it became clear to him that whites were no longer welcome in the black-liberation movements, "I felt snubbed, but I also understood." Besides, by the late 60s, he had become involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement.
While at college, he made his first and only visit to Israel, together with his parents. "It was right after the 67 war. Acres of Soviet tanks that had just been captured were lined up around the country. My experience of Israel was shocking to me." His association of Judaism with the neighborhood he'd grown up in was so strong, that "I got to Israel and in point of fact, expected West Rogers Park. It seemed astonishingly foreign to me." The visit did serve to inspire a piece of writing, "Omelette Arthur" - "one of my better faltering efforts at a short story" - about a Jewish businessman from Chicago who came to Israel expecting it to be "one big delicatessen." Because it's not, and the food is so, well, un-Jewish, he finds himself ordering omelettes at every stop. Turow explains that Arthur and his wife have made the trip "largely to reconcile themselves to the fact they won't be able to have children, and they won't be able to pass on their Jewish legacy," but Israel has really thrown Arthur for a loop. Though it's been nearly three decades since his visit here, when asked if he expects to return, Turow says unequivocally: "Yes. Absolutely. Definitely. I have to take my children."
At Amherst, he came under the wing of short-story writer Tillie Olsen, a visiting teacher, and became accomplished enough as a writer to be offered a fellowship by Stanford University to study creative writing. By then he had met Annette Weisberg, a fellow Chicagoan and aspiring painter; she accompanied him to California, and the two were married in 1971.
After completing his master's, Turow stayed at Stanford to teach writing, but became is illusioned - by the atmosphere in the academy ("People screamed about everything"); by a realization that he would never win the Nobel Prize for literature, and by his and Annette's relative penury. Almost impulsively, he took the LSAT, the law school admissions exam, and by the fall of 1975 was enrolled at Harvard Law School.
Turow showed up at law school with a $4,000 contract to keep a diary throughout his grueling first year, which came out in book form just before he started his final year. Still in print, "One L" (the term for first-year students) is at once an indictment of what seemed to him to be the gratuitous cruelty and self-perpetuating irrelevance of the methods used at Harvard to educate legal novices, an admirably candid revelation of some of the less pleasant things Turow learned about himself during that year, and a truly convincing account of the exhilaration Turow felt as he encountered the intellectual sweep of the law. Today, he is working closely with NBC-TV in developing an "E.R."-style show based on the book.
All through that first year in law school, Turow was an unabashedly competitive student, but one who happily cooperated with other classmates. By the end of One L, though, with its pressure-cooker atmosphere and absurd emphasis on grades, he found himself telling other members of his study group, who were considering sharing their class notes with another classmate: "I don't give a damn about anybody else. I want to do better than them." Later, he wrote, "I knew that if I gave in again to that welling, frightened avarice as I had this afternoon, I would pay for a long time in the way I thought about myself."
Some years later, Turow would tell Time magazine that he "finally got over the 60s" in law school. "I discovered that raging inside of me was a competitive, acquisitive little Jewish boy from Chicago."
Was that same "Jewish boy" the "greedy little monster" that made its way out at Harvard? Turow answers carefully, but without lawyerly obfuscation: "I used `Jewish' in that quote in that I was raised in an upper middle-class household, where parents wanted their children to do well. I grew up in a nouveau riche community, full of a lot of acquisitive instinct. The immigrant passion to make a place was best represented with material success. I've never been smitten with that aspect of the community. But it's also characteristic of Italians, and, quite amusingly to me, the middle-class black class."
After school, Turow took a job with the Suffolk County District Attorney's office in Boston. By then he had started work on what was to become "Presumed Innocent." The following year, he took a job as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago. "It took me eight years to write `Presumed Innocent.' The more I lived in Chicago," he says, "the more the city that started as Boston became Chicago. It was too big for Boston, but still a small place." The result was Kindle County.
In order to finally finish the book, Scott, at Annette's urging, quit his U.S. Attorney's job. When he returned to legal practice, it was on the other side, as a criminal defense attorney, working for the large Chicago firm of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, where he is now a partner.
Asked if he ever had an inkling while writing "Presumed Innocent" that it would be the phenomenon that it was, he recalls: "One afternoon, I came downstairs. I was very caught up in writing trial scenes. I said, this is great, this is going to change my life. At that point, my great ambition was to be a judge. If all those things happen, I thought, you won't be able to go ahead with that plan." He realized that didn't faze him, and says, "I always wonder if I didn't make a deal with the devil at that moment - but there're no hoofprints outside my door yet."
"Presumed Innocent" was followed by "The Burden of Proof," in 1990, and "Pleading Guilty," in 1993. All the while Turow continued to pursue his legal practice, though there have been times when his writing led him to limit his time at the office to one day a week. He's very comfortable representing criminal defendants. He tells how his son Gabriel, who turned 14 in early October, "was asking me `How can you defend people who are guilty?' How could my own son be asking me this?" He insists he's never been responsible for "putting a violent criminal back on the street," and that "I steadfastly refuse to work for crime syndicate people," though he doesn't mind representing dope peddlers: "I guess I have my own scruples." He explains: "I don't lie and cheat for my clients. I advocate for them, I shape things as the law allows. I tend to emphasize what's true, and give it more weight than the prosecution thinks it deserves. It's enormously satisfying."
Recently, his lawyering even gained Turow some headlines, when five years of pro-bono work helped a clearly innocent client, on death row for the rape-murder of a young girl, gain freedom after 12 years in prison. Says Turow: "I doubt I'll have another experience that rivals that."
He and Annette, and Rachel, 17, Gabriel and Eve, 9, are still in the same four-bedroom house the family lived in before "Presumed Innocent" was published ("Nobody has to feel sorry for me; it's a nice house"). Annette is still painting, principally abstract, and "she makes money at it." Right now she has a show at a gallery in suburban Glencoe.
Turow is with the same publisher - Farrar, Straus & Giroux - he's worked with since his first legal thriller. He's not yet begun his next work, but says that the book, which "I think of as an homage to Graham Greene" will be about "a man who gets forced to work undercover for the government."
When asked if he's driving the same car he had in 1987, an Acura, he says the family still owns it, but adds, as if it proves his extravagance, that they have two other autos. What becomes apparent is that Turow has expended enormous effort in not letting his material gains turn him into the type of Jew he was surrounded by while growing up. So if the question, Has success spoiled Scott Turow?, need be asked, the answer is that he must be presumed innocent.
1996
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