For years I lived with a mystery I couldn’t solve. Just out of reach there was a scrap of a memory of a book my class read in 10th or 11th grade, a political novel that I did not like. I didn’t remember the name of the book or its author. No one I asked could recall them either, or even confirm that there was a book. Online searches proved fruitless.
The scrap I’d carried with me since the 1970s said that the story was set in the White House. And that the secretary of defense, whose name was Karper, was a Jew.
That’s it. That’s all I remembered.
Why was this character Jewish? I couldn’t figure that out. The book was filled to the brim with white guys. We used to call them WASPs. They were the default characters. So what was a Jew doing there?
In class I asked.
The teacher, who like me was Jewish, didn’t seem to understand the question.
I tried to explain, but I wasn’t even sure what I was asking.
“He doesn’t seem Jewish,” I said. “He doesn’t do anything Jewish.” And: “So why not make him like everybody else if he is like everybody else?”
The teacher was amused and the class was restless. No one was inclined to help me out by completing my thought.
So I tried again to explain that there was nothing about Karper that set him apart as a Jew. I knew this in my gut. Designating him as a Jew should mean that he does or says something Jewish. I had no idea what that could be, but even the name Karper didn’t sound Jewish.
“Go ahead,” the teacher grinned. “Keep digging yourself deeper.”
Although that day I had been voted most likely to be wrong, it didn’t take too many years for me to understand what I had been trying to articulate but couldn’t.
The book, like my teacher, like my classmates, saw nothing wrong with labeling a character Jewish and then leaving it at that. But if you place a perfectly healthy bird in a story, it’s going to need to fly at some point. Introduce a pistol in the first act and it should go off by the third.
Did the author, like my teacher, have no sense that being Jewish confirms an otherness on a person that gets played out even in calm times? Today, as in the novel, Jews in Washington, D.C., are Jewish. They think like Jews. They socialize with Jews, celebrate Jewish holidays, worship in synagogues. They form communities within a community.
Even if Karper didn’t wear his Judaism on his sleeve, surely he was influenced by his family’s immigrant experience, the Holocaust, the birth of Israel. A fictional Jewish secretary of defense circa 1970 would certainly have enough Jewish traits and traumas to make him, at worst, a suit full of stereotypes and, at best, a complex character capable of surprises.
Coding
Karper is the opposite of the characters on “Seinfeld,” who are Jewish, regardless of whether they are identified as such and no matter what you say.
“The show is double coded,” history professor Jarrod Tanny writes in “Decoding ‘Seinfeld’s’ Jewishness,” “written and performed in a way that could be read as Jewish by those who recognize the signposts and idioms.”
I’ve learned lately that in autism circles they feel the same way about Sheldon Cooper of “Big Bang Theory” and Sherlock Holmes (although the focus seems to be on the 21st century versions of the famous fictional consulting detective, rather than the 20th century’s Jeremy Brett). Although they’re never identified as such, both Sheldon and Sherlock are undoubtedly on the autism spectrum, fans say.
All we know is “this character is different,” says prolific YouTuber and disability educator Sydney Zarlengo in one of her videos about autism. “All the breadcrumbs are there. But the explicit language informs you that a character is autistic is not present.”
Autistic coding allows creators to explore the experience of being autistic, without making autism the focus of the character,
“This approach allows creators to explore the complexities of neurodiversity while avoiding potential stereotypes or misrepresentations that might arise from direct labeling,” write the editors of Neurolaunch.com.
A problem, Zarlengo says, is that when the character isn’t labeled, someone will go ahead and label them for themselves. Suddenly everyone is autistic.
Or as a comedy album from the 1960s put it, “When you’re in love, the whole world is Jewish.”
Finders Karpers
A few days ago, I tried to find Karper again. I fed a new combination of keywords into the search engine and there was the book, as if it had been there the whole time: “The Night of Camp David,” by Fletcher Knebel, a journalist turned political thriller novelist, was published in 1965.
The plot turned on the question: What do you do if the president, until now a judicious man of integrity, goes crazy? The 25th amendment, which deals with presidential succession and disability, was moving toward adoption in 1967.
As the secretary of defense, Karper was in the middle of that emergency. But would he have been just as effective as an Episcopalian? Was he a Jew because, as Susan Page wrote in 2018 in a USA Today review marking the book’s rerelease, that Defense Secretary Sidney Karper was the novel's “most admirable character”?
In that philo-semitic minute between the Holocaust and the Six Day War, did Karper’s inclusion telegraph the point that he was impeccable and incorruptible, like Atticus Finch or Eleanor Roosevelt, or someone who makes compost from kitchen scraps?
Word has been out for several years that “Night of Camp David” may be made into a movie. A president’s madness is a good engine to drive a plot. But the novel is an ethnic desert. Will the filmmakers make the movie look more like America? If so, I hope they solve their Karper problem.
For starters, they could make him a partial to new dills and cheese cake. Just not together.