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February 18, 2005/Adar 1 9 5765, Volume 57, No. 25
Miller's work had Jewish resonance
CHANAN TIGAY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Arthur Miller will be remembered for his deft dramatic rendering of the American everyman, yet his writing was infused with Jewish characters and themes, both explicit and implicit. Miller died Feb. 10 at age 89.
"I think he's not only one of the finest American playwrights, but I so appreciate him for his social conscience," said Janet Arnold, Arizona Jewish Theatre Company producing director. "In his works, he wrote a number of works about anti-Semitism. Also, he was brave enough to not name names in front of the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)."
The AJTC production of Miller's play "The Price" opened Feb. 12, and Arnold said the timing of the show was "eerie. We have dedicated the run of the show to his memory."
A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author, Miller reached his greatest professional fame with the creation of Willy Loman, the doomed protagonist of 1949's "Death of a Salesman."
Though Loman was not specifically identified as a Jew, heated debate ensued through the decades over whether or not he was in fact Jewish, with many insisting he was a composite of Jewish characters Miller had known as a young man.
Scholars say that in addressing American themes, Miller gave audiences occasional glimpses into his Jewish core.
"In some of his great works, he made Jewish life American life by blurring the focus," said Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Columbia University. "How many of us in high school were told that Willy Loman was everyman? What's interesting is to find how the universal can really be specific."
Miller was born on Manhattan's Upper West Side in 1915. As a young man whose family was deeply affected by the Great Depression, he worked as a clerk in an auto-parts warehouse and as a truck driver.
Miller had a bar mitzvah in 1928. After finishing high school, he left for college at the University of Michigan, where he met his first wife.
In 1944, Miller saw the first Broadway production of one of his plays, "The Man Who Had All the Luck," close after just a handful of performances.
In 1947, however, the play "All My Sons" opened on Broadway and was a great success. Two years later, "Death of a Salesman" opened, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award for best play and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Miller wrote the play in just six weeks.
"The Crucible" opened in 1953, followed by 1955's "A View From the Bridge." In 1956, Miller married actress Marilyn Monroe. The marriage to the film superstar gained him further international fame, but it was a rocky union and ended in 1961.
The next year Miller married photographer Inge Morath, who died in 2002.
The poet and writer Honor Moore, who was a friend of Miller's, told JTA that Miller viewed himself as an atheist and saw religion as "the opiate of the people."
Miller wrote from a humanist perspective born of his experience living through the Depression and a "post-war optimism about the possibilities of democracy," Moore said. "He saw his task as to write, to portray those people in real American life."
Arnold said, "He was a man who cared about the American people."
In 2002, Miller - who wrote 17 plays in all - visited a class Moore was teaching at Columbia, where a student asked him about the significance of writing.
"He said that he thought it was the most important thing these writing students could do, because art lasts," Moore recalled. "He said that there were lawyers in Aeschylus' time, but we remember Aeschylus because we have his plays.
"As temporal concerns fall away he will truly be seen as one of the very great American writers," Moore said.
Staff Writer Jennifer Goldberg contributed to this article.
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