TELEGRAM FROM HEAVEN
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The ground covered in Telegram From Heaven–the travails of a Jewish family in New York during World War II–has by now been trod into tiny clumps, in works from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to more recent fare like Woody Allen’s Radio Days and Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. The elements seem to form a cultural family album: love furtively snatched before war can kill it off; women finding new power in their first jobs; constant scraping, and the urge to spend since tomorrow is so uncertain; and near nostalgia for the poverty of that time. In adapting her father Arnold Manoff’s 1942 novel, actress Dinah Manoff and coadapter Dennis Bailey have had to be true to the ethos of half a century ago and come to grips with our expectations of memory plays–a familiarity that breeds, if not contempt, at least lots of comparisons.
Sylvia’s boyfriend Paul is a feckless drifter who works for the WPA; Sylvia’s attempts to meet wilder guys founder on their sheer obnoxiousness. Her resentful mother Rose is rooted in a deep funk, dreaming only of setting up an illegal gambling parlor. Sylvia’s smart-aleck younger brother Alex is intent on becoming either a gambling shark or jazz saxophonist. Her girlfriend Francey pretends to be fast, but this mantrap turns out to be just as ignorant about sex and men as many other girls in this unschooled era. All too certainly, Sylvia and Paul finally find common cause, not just in their easily predicted love but in their will to destroy the Nazis. Here the novel’s wooden propagandistic side shows through all too clearly. The “telegram from heaven” comes from, of all creatures, Adolf Hitler. (Sounds more like a telegram from hell.)
