What About Bagels?

Lign in drerd un bakn baygl!

There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. —Hilaire Belloc, The Jews (1922), 91

I had a wonderful dinner tonight with a Gene Wolfe person who, as I understand it, purchased the original manuscript of Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer with someone else. Over the course of the conversation, I learned that this person bounces off Lafferty hard, and at one point the conversation turned to difficult topics about Wolfe and Lafferty. It made me think about how Lafferty’s readers overlook things in plain sight. To see this, let’s take a hard look at bagels.

I myself love bagels. The bagel is one of the great contributions of Jewish culture, coming from Jewish baking traditions in Poland, though no one really knows its deep origins. What we do know is that bagels appear in Kraków records in 1610 and belong to an older family of boiled ring breads that includes the Polish obwarzanek. There is a story here. A baker is said to have invented it to celebrate King John Sobieski’s victory at Vienna in 1683, but that has more than a few problems. Shaped by hand, boiled, and baked, the bagel, though, is a Jewish icon. Dig into its history, and you learn it has a place in customs surrounding childbirth and mourning.

How did the bagel become a part of American life? Eastern European Jewish immigrants brought them to the United States in the late nineteenth century. In New York, making them became a closely guarded trade. Bagel-making techniques were top secret. Bagel bakers became part of labor history by organizing in 1907 against long hours, low wages, and filthy working conditions; their union later wielded considerable power over the baking business. Enter the storied history of American Jewish delis. They supplied the now-familiar lox and cream cheese. For a long time, however, the bagel was just a Jewish neighborhood food, made by skilled workers for nearby customers.

That changed with modern food technology, especially the breakthroughs in freezing. In the 1960s, the Lender family’s Connecticut business adopted bagel-making machinery and expanded the market for presliced, frozen bagels. Supermarket distribution and energetic advertising broke through the cultural wall. American households far beyond the Jewish community started eating bagels. Mass production did affect the bread: many commercial bagels became larger and softer. Some manufacturers replaced boiling with steaming. And that is what a lot of us eat. I eat one every morning: the small, dense bagel, an American breakfast staple.

So what does any of this have to do with R. A. Lafferty? Well, a lot, if you stop to think for a minute about one of his best-known stories, “Slow Tuesday Night.” Has anyone registered the Jewish elements in this story?

One of its main characters is Basil Bagelbaker. Now, Bagelbaker is never identified as Jewish, but his surname gives it away. Lafferty introduces him this way:

The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

So we see Lafferty’s virtuous antisemitism in action. Once the historical and textual dots are connected, the Jewish coding is impossible to unsee, yet it seems to have completely evaded critical notice.

Now consider how Bagelbaker makes it big:

Basil acquired title to the Trend Indication Complex and had certain falsifications set into it. He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage.

His last fortune brings other people down with it:

His fourth fortune of the night was a paper pyramid that had risen to incredible heights; but Basil laughed to himself as he savored the manipulation it was founded on. . . . “All gone?” Basil asked. “I gave it another five minutes.” “All gone,” said a messenger from Money Market. “Nine billion gone in five minutes, and it really pulled some others down with it.”

Here is the image of the Jewish financier whose mastery depends on deception and whose profits come from destroying other people’s enterprises. Basil doesn’t just understand the market better than everyone else. Basil controls information that others depend on and exploits it.

Rather than go through the rest of the story, I am going to point out the obvious. Lafferty plainly likes Basil. He likes Bagelbaker’s good humor. He likes his affection and extravagance:

Basil Bagelbaker enjoyed making money, and it was a pleasure to watch him work as he dominated the floor of the Market and assembled runners and a competent staff out of the corner of his mouth. Helpers stripped the panhandler rags off him and wrapped him in a tycoon toga. He sent one runner to pay back twentyfold the young couple who had advanced him a thousand dollars. He sent another with a more substantial gift to Ildefonsa Impala, for Basil cherished their relationship.

It all makes him appealing in a Willy McGilly sort of way. All this coexists with the financial stereotyping. Yet it is not the kind of thing that anyone has ever pointed out as being an essential feature of one of Lafferty’s most beloved stories.