Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

What Fiddler on the Roof is for most American Jews — an emotional bull’s-eye on any family’s saga that began in a shtetl and wound up in the United States — The Lehman Trilogy is for me. My family, like the Lehmans, came here from Germany in the early nineteenth century. Both families left the old country as Lehmanns; we lost an “h” at the dock in New Orleans in 1836, they lost an “n” at the dock in New York in 1844. In both cases, the family saga began with a young single man from a small town — Rimpar, Bavaria in their case, Essenheim, Hesse-Darmstadt in ours — coming to America alone, starting out as a backpack peddler in the slaveholding antebellum South, and establishing a dry goods store. Theirs was in Montgomery, Alabama; ours was in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and still exists there in altered form as Lemann’s Farm Supply, where I hope you’ll buy your next tractor. Distinctive German-Jewish culture, which is now as completely vanished as Lehman Brothers, had a triumphant and controversial reign for a century or so in the United States, between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. German Jews, often with the same oddly specific Southern-peddler American beginnings, started many of the leading Wall Street financial firms. They developed and ran grand, and now disappearing, department stores — Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Neiman Marcus, and so on. They were book, magazine, and newspaper publishers — Viking, Knopf, Farrar Straus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker all have a German-Jewish origin story. The German Jews built palatial houses of worship, such as Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in New York. They married within their tribe. They lived in distinct neighborhoods. They practiced their own religion, American Reform Judaism. They maintained business networks. It was a small world. My own family, back in the late nineteenth century, had multiple connections to the Lehmans, who maintained a branch of Lehman Brothers in New Orleans. They occasionally took out loans there; the local partner’s daughter was married to one of my relatives; another relative married a Lehman descendant. And then the German Jews disappeared — in Germany for obvious reasons, in America for less obvious ones. We know what happened there. What happened here? The reason that Stefano Massini did not choose to write a play called The Seligman Trilogy or The Guggenheim Trilogy is that it was Lehman Brothers that collapsed in the fall of 2008 — and this was, if not the cause of, at least the narrative hook for the immensely consequential financial crisis that followed. Even though Lehman Brothers hadn’t been run by the Lehman family for the forty years preceding the crisis, in The Lehman Trilogy, which ran for a few weeks on Broadway last fall, the family’s American saga is meant to function as a crisis origin story. From the moment Henry Lehman first steps onto American soil, the audience knows that things are headed inexorably in the direction of disaster. Massini, a Catholic from Milan, has said that his philo-Semitic father arranged for him to have a Jewish education, in addition to a Christian one, as a child; before The Lehman Trilogy, he directed a production of The Diary of Anne Frank and wrote a play called The End of Shavuot, which is about the friendship between Franz Kafka and the Yiddish theater star Yitzhak Lowy. He has a certain expertise in Jewish subjects, though of a kind that evinces book learning rather than lived experience. The Lehman Trilogy has been produced in Europe, England, and the United States in various versions at various lengths (up to five hours!) since 2013. There is also a seven-hundred-page hardcover version of the play, rendered in free verse, called The Lehman Trilogy: A Novel, which ends with a characteristically earnest and at the same time clueless ten-page “Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Words” in alphabetical order (Schmaltz, Schmuck, Schnorrer, Shabbat….). I saw the first New York production of The Lehman Trilogy at the Park Avenue Armory in 2019, but here I will be quoting from The Lehman Trilogy: A Novel. If you are in a mood to count your blessings,