Review: The Minuteman

The Minuteman by Greg Donahue
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is so up my alley (or, as the case may be, down my dark alley) that I can’t be neutral about it.

In this case, that’s a good thing. I could easily get irritated with someone who didn’t know what he was doing in narrating a history of a Jewish boxer/gangster who set out to attack Nazi Bundists in the 1930s. Instead, Greg Donahue does this with a real flair for narrative and without the can-you-believe-there-were-tough-Jews tone that many lesser writers might have brought.

The result here is the riveting story of Nat Arno, a Longy Zwillman tough guy charged with leading the Minutemen, a group of Jewish shtarkers who broke up Bund meetings throughout Newark, NJ and greater New York City area.

The idea of such characters isn’t new – Robert Rockaway wrote about many of them from across the country in his But – He was Good to His Mother years ago. But this book (or long booklet) is a valuable addition to that history. I knew that Zwillman contributed a lot to anti-Bundist work, but I’d never heard of Arno, and I’d certainly never seen his story so focused.

In addition to recounting a battle after battle chronicle of Arno’s life, Donahue raises some intriguing questions about the nature of Jewish self-defense. The nature of the story inclines him to see it as a good thing – he appreciatively quotes Jewish gangster authority Myron Sugarman saying that, if Jews had always defended themselves in such a way there’d be no anti-Semitism – but Donahue does raise the opposite perspective. There are many in the Jewish community who continue to believe that anti-anti-Semitic violence does more harm than good.

In a compelling wrap-up, Donahue reflects on how long it took for the Jewish community to acknowledge Arno’s accomplishments, and he sees it as a reflection of the deep ambivalence about his approach.

This one is short, probably too short to raise those larger questions in full, but it’s perhaps the finest I have read of the free books Audible gives out each month for members. An impressive job, and a good way to glimpse a larger history that I’ve worked to tell myself.


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