Orson-WellesUnlike the author of War of the Worlds, Orson Welles apparently had a real soft spot for us, and considered himself to possibly have Jewish blood.

According to the Hollywood Jew blog:

That may explain why Jaglom possesses a little known secret: Welles had a special fondness for Jews. Jaglom explained that Welles felt estranged from his “drunk, absent” father. And he suspected that his mother Beatrice, a concert pianist “and a society lady” had had several affairs. In the midst of this, Welles cultivated a relationship with a guardian of sorts by the name of Dr. Bernstein, whom he felt very close to.

“Orson believed his father wasn’t his father,” Jaglom said. “Dr. Bernstein might have been his father — he had definitely had an affair with Orson’s mother.” But Welles also suspected that she’d had an affair with a Russian opera singer. Welles could never confirm, since his mother died when he was 9, and his father followed, when he was a tender 13.

Since Jaglom is Jewish, “the subject was of considerable interest [to me].” One day, Welles turned to him and said, “I know what you want to know, Henry: Am I Jewish?”

Welles answered: “Fifty-fifty.”

Jaglom added that whenever they would travel together, Welles would take him to Jewish delis — Bloom’s in London, Goldenberg’s in Paris: “He was very connected to his sense of what was Jewish,” Jaglom said.

They also had conversations about the Holocaust. “It made him so cynical about men,” Jaglom said. “How low men truly are if they are led that way.”

Shortly after the war, Welles was invited as the guest of honor to a celebrity dinner in Vienna. The post-war mood among the guests was somber. According to Jaglom, one guest reportedly said, “Vienna is not what it used to be! Something has gone out of Vienna.”

Welles tartly replied, “Yes. The Jews.”

Jaglom said the remark made the morning headlines.

Welle’s sympathy for, and fascination with, Jews, is also described here

The creation of Hollywood by Jewish studio moguls has been amply documented by film historians, but Jewish characters were rarely portrayed onscreen when Welles started his career. Intentionally or otherwise, the inclusion of Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane was a political act.

Bernstein is the most sympathetic character in the film. Expertly played by Everett Sloane, Bernstein (whose first name is never mentioned) remains loyal to his boss despite Kane’s deep character flaws and through his tragic fall. Bernstein is, at times, playful, avuncular, philosophical, rabbinical (without ever becoming stereotypical), and romantic. He is also accorded some of the best lines in film history. (“It’s no trick to make an awful lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money.”) His famously nostalgic speech about seeing a girl in a white dress on the Jersey Ferry for a moment in 1896—“I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl”—encapsulates the film’s major theme of loss and longing. He’s a one-man Greek chorus and Horatio to Kane’s Hamlet, the trusted friend whose loyalty spans, as he says, from “before the beginning” to “after the end,” and who lives on to tell the tale.

Welles, who was 24 when he made Citizen Kane, arrived in Hollywood with a track record of staging plays that subverted expectations around race and intolerance. His revolutionary all-black production of Macbeth in 1936, known as Voodoo Macbeth, was set in 19th-century Haiti and staged through the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem. The next year, Welles staged a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar set in contemporary fascist Europe, giving fresh poignancy to the scene in which Cinna the poet is attacked by an angry mob. Shortly after the play opened, Welles said in a New York Times interview: “It’s the same mob that hangs and burns Negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats the Jews in Germany. It’s the Nazi mob anywhere.”

While investigating the evolution of the character of Bernstein in Citizen Kane, I reached out to the legendary film director Peter Bogdanovich, a close friend and confidant of Welles’ whose conversations with the director were recorded and published in 1992 as This Is Orson Welles. Bogdanovich is not surprised that Welles was moved to include a sympathetic Jewish character in his first film: “Orson was very fascinated and crazy about all things Jewish,” he said. “He was a big fan of the Yiddish art theater.” When asked where Welles’ empathy for Jewish culture originated, he talked about Maurice Bernstein, a doctor who was a close friend of the Welles family: “Bernstein, who was [Orson’s] legal guardian after his father died, was a very, very important figure in his life. He named Bernstein in the movie as a gesture toward his guardian … because he loved him dearly. Don’t forget, he lost his mother when he was 8 and his father when he was 15, so Dr.  Bernstein was a huge influence in his life.” Asked if he thought Welles was moved to create a sympathetic Jewish character in Citizen Kane because Europe’s Jews were under fire, Bogdanovich said, “it was very much on his mind.”

Welles described the evolution of Mr. Bernstein to Bogdanovich in 1969, noting that he “sketched out the character in preliminary sessions,” but that Welles’ co-writer, Herman Mankiewicz “did all the best writing for Bernstein.” Mankiewicz was a frequent guest at the parties of William Randolph Hearst, the media giant on whom Charles Foster Kane was modeled.

Despite the collaborative writing of Citizen Kane, there’s evidence that Mankiewicz was considerably less comfortable than Welles in having a major Jewish character in the film. Bogdanovich has unearthed an August 1940 memo written by Mankiewicz after he’d seen Bernstein’s first major scene in the film: “In Bernstein’s office with Bill Alland [the actor who played the reporter Thompson]: Everett Sloane is an unsympathetic looking man, and anyways you shouldn’t have two Jews in one scene.” Mankiewicz was clearly uneasy about transgressing unspoken Hollywood rules concerning Jews on screen (whether as characters or actors), and Welles would have been well aware of this resistance. Asked if Welles, a Hollywood neophyte at the time, may have been unaware of such rules when he developed the Bernstein character, Bogdanovich replied that Welles “knew what he was doing there.”

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Welles’ later work continued to reflect his fascination with Jews and Jewish concerns. His 1946 film The Stranger, which depicts a Nazi-hunter’s search for a war criminal hiding in the United States, is said to be the first postwar film to include footage from a concentration camp. In 1962, Welles made a film version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, altering the novel’s ending in which Josef K. is executed without resistance because, he said, the original “seems very Pre-Auschwitz.” He worked unsuccessfully for many years to complete a film version of The Merchant of Venice; a clip of Welles performing Shylock’s soliloquy, and moving himself to tears, appears in the 1995 film Orson Welles: One Man Band.

In his book Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles, Frank Brady writes:

In early 1985, Orson then narrated a film called Almonds and Raisins. It was a documentary about the history of the Yiddish cinema that flourished during the Depression, and it gave millions of Jews the opportunity of reliving and understanding their immigrant experience in their own language. Most of the footage came from the archives of Brandeis University’s National Center for Jewish Film.

Orson loved working with director Russ Kavel and especially enjoyed learning about an area of cinema that he knew little about, one filled with music, humor, folklore, and tears. (For example, he noted with pleasure that in a Yiddish remake of The Jazz Singer, when the cantor’s son returns from a triumphant singing tour–as in the original–in this version he maries the shtetl girl [i.e., a girl from a small Jewish community] who lives next door.)

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