'Fuck America'

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Back in 2011, I was on a trip to Paris—for a New York Times travel series called “Getting Lost”—when I wandered into a bookstore, probably the Librairie des Abbesses, desperate for something new to read. I couldn’t have been looking long before I spotted the book I knew I had to have: Fuck America, by the German novelist Edgar Hilsenrath. Did I even read the summary on the back cover? Maybe, maybe not. Had I ever heard of Hilsenrath? I didn’t know a thing about him. But from the moment I began it, I was in love.

Fuck America is the story of Jakob Bronsky, a German Jewish immigrant trying to survive alone in New York City in the mid-1950s. This is not, as you may have guessed from the title, a classic striving-immigrant tale. Bronsky is awful—compellingly awful, but still awful: Alexander Portnoy but grosser, Woody Allen without the wit. At 27, he looks 40. He’s lazy and dishonest, taking short-term jobs as a waiter, an overnight doorman, or a dog-walker only until he’s earned enough to goof off for a few weeks, or until he’s fired, or until he steals from his bosses and runs. When he’s down to his last dollar, he embarks on a midtown dine-and-dash binge, starting with La Coupole de Montparnasse (“Escargots?” asks the waiter. “Escargots!” says Bronsky) and winding up at Chinese joints in Hell’s Kitchen, where he climbs out bathroom windows to avoid the bill.

Bronsky’s laziness is matched only by his lust: He’s perpetually horny, reluctant (but not too reluctant) to settle for the prostitutes of Times Square and so desperate to hook up with a regular girl he hires a matchmaker, hoping to score a one-night stand. Nothing he tries can tame his erections: “I thought about Auschwitz. Useless.” Instead, he indulges in elaborate fantasies about screwing the head secretary of the publishing company Doublecrum & Company, or really just any head secretary of any company. A typical scenario:

The only thing Bronsky seems to care about is the novel he’s writing, with paper and pencil, at the all-night emigrants’ cafeteria he frequents. Unfortunately, he’s writing it in German, so it won’t really do him any good in New York, and while we never get a clear description of its plot, Bronsky does tell us one thing: It’s about life in the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. Its title is, of course, The Masturbator.

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Bronsky’s Holocaust begins when he’s 13 years old, living with his parents and his brother in Halle an der Saale, outside Leipzig. Kristallnacht has just happened, and Bronsky’s father, Nathan, has written to the U.S. Consul General to request visas for America. He is, of course, denied. ”America is a paradise whose immigration policies have stayed the same since the 1920’s,” the consul writes him, adding that the goal is to maintain “a citizenry dominated by pure white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” But not permanently denied: If the Bronskys can hold out till 1952, they will receive papers.

This is not really the news a Jewish German family wants to receive in 1939, but somehow, despite poverty, forced relocations and separations, near starvation, abuse, possible rape, and the constant specter of Auschwitz, they survive and, in 1952, receive their papers and make it to New York. Shepherded around the city by a rich relative, they ask to visit the Statue of Liberty. Gazing up at the symbol of freedom, Nathan Bronsky is startled to realize she looks just like the Consul General:

Those two words, dear reader, are: Fuck America!

I’m bringing all of this up for a bunch of reasons—one of which, obviously, is that it’s highly amusing to put “‘Fuck America’” into the subject line of an email newsletter. If this reaches even 10 percent of your inboxes, rather than landing right in the spam folder, I’ll be amazed.

But I also think it’s important to know about this book because it’s semi-invisible, despite the fact that its author, Edgar Hilsenrath, was not some Bronsky-esque nobody but rather a celebrated writer whose novel The Nazi and the Barber, about a Nazi who kills his Jewish friend then steals his identity, was praised by the Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll. (And, later, by my favorite contemporary novelist, Paul Beatty, the Booker Prize–winning author of The Sellout.) When Hilsenrath died, in 2018, at the age of 92, both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran thoughtful obituaries that noted his skill for blending the gruesome, the vulgar, and the satirical in ways few other Jewish writers dared to.

What neither obit mentioned, however, was Fuck America. I mean, I wouldn’t expect either paper to name the book, but with such an incendiary title, surely it merited a wry euphemism at least—how about “a crude expletive directed at the United States”? Moreover, I would have liked to see how each paper fit Fuck America into its appraisal of Hilsenrath’s oeuvre. Was this a significant achievement, or a silly, vulgar diversion? Me, I don’t know enough about Hilsenrath to say.

To read Fuck America right now is to be reminded once again that this country makes, and has made, a lot of promises it has no intention of keeping. This is supposed to be the land of opportunity, of freedom, of justice and fairness—a nation that welcomes those willing to work hard and play by the rules. More than ever these days, though, those sound like outright lies or, if you’re feeling charitable, outdated ad copy. We can’t accept a criminal and his oligarchs destroying what remains of a decent if flawed system, but we’re also all sick of the tepid do-gooder “opposition” that failed to fight, failed to persuade, failed to lead us toward a better present. And so we say—or some of us just think it: Fuck America!

But it’s telling that in the novel, the Bronsky family, having endured the Holocaust and found their way to America and told America to fuck itself, does not then leave and go back to Germany, or France, or Israel. They stay and they live, and Bronsky rejects the American bargain—he’s neither willing to work hard nor to play by any rules but his own—but he holds onto the dream with his grubby, sweaty hands. (Or maybe with one hand; we know where the other is.) Fuck America, he may think, for failing to allow him to escape the war, but still he wants what America promised, what he can’t get anywhere else: a nice car, a beautiful girl, a TV, fame. He’s a guy who wants to actually fuck America, to lie naked and entwined with it, to know it intimately, to be one with its illusions, to see himself in its mirages.

And so maybe that’s who we are, too, those of us who mutter “Fuck America” when things get bad (and nowadays they’re always bad). We say “Fuck America” so that we can go on living in America, loving America, wanting America to be the America it told us it was. We say “Fuck America” but we don’t leave, because this ruined land is where we truly want to be, among ruined dreamers just like us. America is the one country where you can say “Fuck America” and actually become more American when you say it, because who else but those who adore it would care enough to curse this place? So say it with me, my patriots, with all the heartfelt joy and spirit of the Founding Fathers, Mickey Mouse, and the Kansas City Chiefs Philadelphia Eagles: Fuck America! Fuck America! Fuck America! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🪨🪨🪨

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