was Keitel, with all the raging hormones and sexually charged thoughts of a normal teenage boy in the Elvis era, when his peers were rocking and rolling, affecting the hairstyles and attitudes of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One – none of which had penetrated the world of Keitel’s parents.
Undoubtedly the lectures were long and stern: about the forbidden nature of sex and everything else young Harvey deemed most interesting, on the need to remember and honor the old way and resist the temptation of this godless new popular culture. Not to do so was not just wrong – it was punishable. But Harvey found himself irresistibly drawn to what he could see of the outside world and suffered the wrath and disappointment of his parents as a result.
Which may have led to the stuttering, he decided:
Guilt can be insidious, which helps to repress thoughts. You pick it up quickly – in your home, in your neighborhood. Once children are taught guilt, they will stutter in one way or another. If you’re ashamed of one feeling, you’re going to be ashamed of all your feelings. That’s the basis for neurosis. Unfortunately, as a youngster I learned that certain feelings and thoughts were bad. You learn it’s wrong to have a certain thought. As a young man, there were thoughts I had and propensities to do certain things, which I was very ashamed of. So if you have that thought, you say, ‘I’m bad. I must get rid of that thought.’ But how do you get rid of a thought? What do you do as a child? You choke yourself.
A doctor I know said to me, ‘You are allowed any thought. Every thought is a worthwhile thought.’ You are not responsible for your thoughts. One is only responsible for what he does. It took me a long time to learn what that doctor expressed to me.
Self-satisfaction was unknown to me as a young man. That came late in my life. The pain of my journey led me to satisfaction. Avoiding the pain led to strangulation, to self-loathing. By descending into the pain, I learned satisfaction.
Without that kind of repression and longing Keitel might not be the actor he eventually became: ‘I’ve learned over the course of my life,’ he said, ‘that memories I once considered painful have been the greatest source of revelation in my life, so it’s too simple to say they’re positive or negative.’
Obviously, he wasn’t the only Jewish kid from Brighton Beach who argued with his parents about dressing like a hood. Indeed, at Keitel’s bar mitzvah, the rabbi performing the Jewish coming-of-age ritual booted one of Keitel’s young pals out of the synagogue. His crime? Wearing such incipient hipster garb as a checkered cabana-style jacket, peg pants and pointy-toed shoes.
The conflict between Keitel’s need to conform to his parents’ wishes and his urge to create an identity of his own didn’t really come to a head until after his bar mitzvah.
It was a Kosher household, which meant that they followed the Jewish dietary laws prohibiting, among other things, the eating of any pork or shellfish products as well as proscribing milk and meat products at the same meal. Though he moved away from Judaism, the habits of keeping Kosher stuck with Keitel, at least through his stint in the Marines. There, his friends would battle to sit next to him in the mess hall, because he would give away the milk that was invariably served with the meat of the day.
Keitel went to Hebrew school and studied at home with his grandfather, a man whose imposing strictness daunted him: ‘I remember my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, making me read from my Hebrew book,’ he recalled. ‘My brother, who is five years older, stuck his head in the kitchen and said, “Aleph bais, gimme a raise, ches tes, kiss mein ess.” Then he ran out, with my grandfather hollering at him. I couldn’t believe my brother had done that. I was scared to death.’
Once the bar mitzvah was past, however, Keitel began to re-evaluate Judaism, losing faith as he looked at the problems that seemed to threaten the world’s very existence in those days of Cold War panic. What kind of God would allow such things to go on?
In his crowd Keitel became known as someone who was willing to put his life on the line and confront God himself: as an act of rebellion, he started spitting on mezuzahs, the little metal sacraments containing a small piece of parchment with writings from the Torah that some Jews attach to the front doorpost. Observant Jews kiss their fingers and touch the mezuzah as they enter and leave their homes.
And Keitel was spitting on them:
I was literally spitting. My friends would say, with great fear, ‘Don’t do that, Harvey!, don’t do that!’ I said, ‘Why? What’s going to happen? Here I am, God – do something!’ I wasn’t ashamed of being a Jew – I had just lost faith. There was so much misery and so much deprivation. I didn’t understand how God fit into that. I thought God was responsible.
Religion meant nothing to me when I was growing up because it was never made clear to me how the stories and myths in the Bible were relevant to my life. We were simply taught to be fearful. It’s a sin religion isn’t taught with more feeling for the beauty of the stories.
Back then, someone said to me, ‘It’s people like you who are the true believers.’ I spat on the mezuzah again. That person was right, though. It’s been a long journey but I’ve come back. I would now say that I am a devout believer in the divinity but for a long time I just adopted Thomas Paine’s credo, that my religion was to do what is right.
His rebellion extended beyond attempts at blasphemy into his efforts to attain juvenile-delinquency status: the duck’s-ass hairstyle, the leather jacket, the peg pants set off by pointy shoes with metal cleats to announce his arrival from a block away. He wanted to be a tough guy because that’s the way the guys were.
Not out-and-out gangsters, of course: just wiseguys who caused a little commotion now and then. According to one classmate of Keitel’s at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach,
We were what was called trumbnicks, troublemakers. We were tough but we weren’t bad. By today’s standards, we were angels. We got into fights, local things. We would go to a dance and end up in a brawl. We’d go to the old Manhattan-Brooklyn Jewish Center. We were Ashkenazi Jews and we’d get into fights with the Syrian Jews. We’d talk to their girls or they’d talk to ours and the next thing you know, you’d have fifty guys fighting in the street. But not with guns or knives – just with fists.
As Keitel recalled it, ‘You had to be tough, otherwise you were considered a fag, a sissy. We used to have rock fights with black people. I had some black friends and we’d kid one another. The divisiveness and the rock fights always seemed absurd to us. I threw rocks at them and they threw rocks at me.’
Being tough meant doing things that scared you, things you knew could get you in trouble with the police or worse. Being tough meant never copping to that fear, no matter how overpowering it might become. For Keitel, being tough meant hiding his fear along with all the other unwanted, unwelcome emotions swirling around in his adolescent mind:
I remember being scared to rob pigeon coops, but you couldn’t admit that. There was nothing to be but tough. Now the other kids who were going to school and studying to be something – a doctor, lawyer, an Indian chief – they had a different identity. But the tough guys, their identity was to be tough. It was as if you were living in Africa and you had a tribe. You had to go out and kill animals to survive. Well, in this particular environment, to survive, you had to steal a car, tap a pigeon coop, steal things, wear certain clothing, put on the whole show. Otherwise you would be an outcast.
Which was already an identity Keitel was dealing with in everyday life. As the son of immigrants who resented his ever-more-Americanized worldview, he dealt every day with being an outsider in his own home; outside the house, on the other hand, he knew he would never be the all-American kid. As a Jew, he had grown up with the idea of anti-Semitism, its specter emanating from Europe during the war against Germany. As a teenager, he coped with the mercurial nature of social standing in the ever-shifting world of high school. And the only place he seemed to fit was with the tough guys.
Mark Reiner, a high-school friend, said, ‘Harvey was streetwise and tough, but he was never mean. He knew how to handle himself and while he wouldn’t back off from a fight,