[In the following review, Wieseltier compares Mamet's short novel Passover with his film Homicide.]

As a boy, I was pretty good with a knife. I carved wood, I cut line, I cleaned fish, I hurled my finely weighted, mother-of-pearl-handled pocketknife with cool accuracy, blade-first, usually in competition with the other nice Jewish boys who summered in the same hills and woods, and once with deadly accuracy, right between the eyes of a copperhead snake that threatened a friend who was trapped on a rock in a brackish corner of Swan Lake. I was a local hero after that exploit, but only until the sun started to set, when I put my tiny weapon tenderly away, since it was forbidden to me on the Sabbath. In the city, of course, I enjoyed no expression of my Jim Bowie fantasies. In the city, a knife was not what we carried. We were not, most of us, timid. We just didn't like violence; it was pitiable and it was goyish. Once a year I picked up a knife, a serrated one, in the happy kitchen of my parents on the eve of Passover, to slice apples and to chop walnuts, for the purpose of producing the disagreeable paste that would represent, a few hours later, the mortar that made the bricks that made the cities that the Jews built in their bondage.

Now David Mamet has written a short story about the knife and the mortar, in a little book called Passover. It is a typical Mamet contraption: banality followed by apocalypse followed by a trick. A granddaughter is slicing and chopping with a grandmother, and making Hebrew school patter about the preparation for the seder, but there is no joy in this kitchen. There is only dread. The girl is fascinated by the knife. It holds a secret.

“You said that this wasn't the same knife,” the girl said.
“No. That knife was lost.”
“Would you tell me about it?”
“… My grandmother,” the woman said, “had come back to their house on Erev Pesach, You see?”
“That's right. In the shtetl.”
“… she'd gone to the market. And she heard there was going to be an attack …”
“A pogrom,” the child said.

It was the knife that saved the family's life, the child learns. The grandmother's grandmother used the knife to destroy her own home, ripping the pillows and smashing the windows, slitting the throats of chickens and spreading the blood, and her bloody handprints, everywhere, and hiding the menfolk, in this way fooling the murderers; and so the pogrom passed over, and “her house was spared.” This is “the traditional end of the story.” But Mamet's story is a few lines longer:

They heard the sound of the key in the door. But neither moved. The old woman went to the child and pulled her head toward her, and stroked her hair once, and again, and then kissed the top of her head; and then they both turned to the sound of activity in the entranceway.

End of story. It can happen here. Have a nice holiday.

Passover may be read as the sequel to Homicide, a dead and ugly movie that Mamet wrote and directed in 1991, about a cop who discovers his Jewishness in the course of his investigation of the murder of an old Jewish woman in a candy store. “It never stops,” the murdered woman's grandaughter tells the cop. “What is it that never stops?” he demands to know. “Against the Jews,” she replies. He doesn't believe her. Then he is summoned to the grieving family's tony apartment because they say that a man on the roof shot at them. He doesn't believe them. “You're dealing with what? Hysterical Jews?” Mrs. Klein retorts. “We're making it up, right? We're always making it up!” And then Mr. Klein: “It's always a fantasy, isn't it, when someone wants to hurt the Jews?” And then Ms. Klein: “Do you hate yourself so much? Do you belong nowhere?” That does it. The cop is called to the tribe. It doesn't hurt that almost everybody he meets that day calls him a yid or a kike, or that the person with the answers is a leggy brunette dressed slickly in black. He begins to believe that the old lady was murdered because she ran guns to Palestine in 1946. He attends a secret meeting of a Jewish underground in which a crew of paunchy and balding Jewish men with heavy sighs and heavy accents mutter about guns and Hebron and loyalty. “I would do anything,” he tells them. He hears Hebrew. “Whatever you're doing,” he pleads with the woman in black, “let me help.” And so he blows up an anti-Semitic printing press in the back of a toy store.

It turns out that our hero was being used, but the foul fundamentals of Mamet's Jewishness are clearly established. The whole world wants the Jews dead. There is no difference between the paranoid view of the world and the Jewish view of the world. History has left the Jews no choice but to die or to kill. Violence is a lovely and legitimate expression of Jewish identity. A kind of secular Kahanism, pure and simple. Mamet is the latest in a long line of Jews who owe their Jewishness entirely to anti-Semitism. In Mamet's case, though, the religion of tough guys is especially virulent.

For Mamet adds a gender primitiveness to an ethnic primitiveness. “It is expected,” he once observed in the journal of Jewish thought called Penthouse,

that we and our fellows will strive and succeed in the traditional pursuits of a landless people, in the pursuits of the mind. But a Jewish football player … that person would stand as a magnificent and welcome freak. That person is an image which gets the heart beating a bit faster with pride.

And he once wrote an essay comparing his desire for Jewish authenticity to his desire for a great body. “What was so shameful about wanting a better physique?” For Mamet, Jewishness is not for sissies. It is another form of virility. He is sick and tired of intelligent Jews who don't have the kneidlakh to stand up and fight. He is a real Jew who says “fuck” a lot.

This is the sort of identification with the oppressed that is really an identification with the oppressor. In the history of the relationship between persecution and testosterone, after all, testosterone was the problem, not the solution. But the Jew-brute is ignorant of all this, and a good deal else. And so he can compose these unbelievable sentences:

God bless those in all generations who have embraced their Jewishness. We are a beautiful people and a good people, and a magnificent and ancient history lives in our literature and lives in our blood; and I am reminded of Marcus Garvey's rhetoric, in addressing the black populace: “Up you Mighty Race, you Race of kings, rise to your feet, you can accomplish what you will.”

Hey, blood boy. We are on our feet. Our fuckin' feet. And in our hands … look. Can you fuckin' see it? A book. Can you read it? Yeah, you. It. Such beauty in the brains. Happy fuckin' Pesach.