‘The Warriors’ Has a Radical Jewish History – The Forward

Sol Yurick, who wrote The warriors, was a New York native and son of immigrants such as Lin-Manuel Miranda. Photo illustration by Canva/© Nancy Crampton/Corey Nickols/Getty Images for IMDb

By PJ Grisar
August 23, 2024

Among the colorful names in The warriorsSol Yurick’s 1965 novel about a gang’s nocturnal odyssey through New York stands out.

Hinton, The Junior, Lunkface and Bimbo may not seem much alike, but Mannie Bernstein really stands out.

Bernstein is a minor player in Yurick’s saga, based on the homecoming epic Anabase by the Greek soldier Xenophon. He is a social worker, assigned to supervise a group of juvenile delinquents. He also appears, like Yurick himself, to be Jewish and a close observer of the underprivileged who are repeatedly let down by the system.

Those most familiar with The warriors from Walter Hill’s 1979 cult classic, or heard about Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis’ new concept album based on the material, you may not know that Yurick’s original story is based on his own experiences as a researcher for the New York City Department of Welfare, where he encountered families with children in “fighting gangs.”

“I came into contact, as it were, with the lower social and economic depths,” Yurick, who died in 2013 at age 87, wrote in an afterword to a 2003 edition of the book. “I went through a kind of social shock.” But it was far from the first.

Yurick was born on January 18, 1925, the son of Sam, a fashion designer from outside Kiev, and Florence, who came from Lithuania and grew up in Co-op City in the Bronx. Sam and Florence were communists, though they were card-less, and during the Depression they were among the first to receive welfare.

“They used to come and look at your cupboards and say, ‘You have food in your fridge. I don’t think you need us anymore,’” Yurick’s widow, Adrienne, a potter and ceramics teacher, told me. “Sol was the exact opposite with his customers.”

Yurick’s first language was Yiddish, but when he started kindergarten, he told his mother that he would not respond if she spoke Yiddish to him.

From the beginning, Yurick’s interests were broad. One day in elementary school at PS 76, he secretly read Darwin behind his geography book. When his teacher saw what he was doing, she said, “Of all the monumental audacity,” which would later become an inside joke for Yurick and his wife. He was always tall for his age, Adrienne Yurick said, had few friends but was a voracious reader, who was allowed to use the adult section of the library.

While communism and world revolution were the topics of conversation in the Yurick family, Sol severed ties with his parents in 1939 over the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which forged an alliance between the Nazis and the Soviet Union. remembering in a New York Magain interview that his “feelings as a Jew were more important than my feelings as a communist.”

“He thought he “was apolitical for a long time, but he never really was,” Adrienne Yurick said. “Everything he did had a political component.”

Yurick enlisted in the Army in 1944 after high school. Yurick’s family friend, the writer Samuel Fromartz, told me over the phone that it was while in the service that he may have first felt a “sense of otherness” as a Jewish boy from New York, a feeling that resonates throughout his work.

Yurick attended New York University on his GI Bill, studied literature (after false starts in science, psychology, and philosophy), and lived in a cold-water apartment on Morton Street.

He could never say for sure when he came up with the idea to translate contemporary gangs into Xenophon’s classic about mercenary youth, but it had been on his mind for years before he wrote it, in three weeks, while dealing with 27 rejections for his first novel. fertile.

fertileabout a man whose child dies due to the negligence of the American medical system and who takes revenge, was written for Yurick’s master’s thesis at Brooklyn College. The warriorswho Yurick called his potboiler, was the first to come out.

If you only know the film, you might be surprised by the extreme, unflinching, even casual violence in Yurick’s book.

His main warriors, the Coney Island Dominators, who are black and Latino, reflect not only territorial divisions but also ethnic ones. They come from dysfunctional households and therefore find surrogate families within their hierarchy. They murder a bystander, commit two gang rapes and visit sex workers in the bathrooms of Times Square. Yurick manages to make these criminal youths somewhat sympathetic by presenting a city whose legal side is no better and whose racist cops are only too happy to abuse them.

“My communist background and my Jewishness contributed to my sense of alienation from American life,” Yurick wrote. “These social and economic traumas had become part of my subconscious. For me, being a writer was like being a rebel. I’ll show you what your world is really like, I must have thought. And what about the gangs? Theirs was a form of rebellion, too. Some gangs take to the streets; some gangs form in October 1917.”

The author said this “revolutionary content was missing” from Hill’s film, which he publicly viewed with disdain.

“I looked for my novel on the screen; I found its skeleton intact,” he wrote. (His daughter, Susanna, then about 11, assured him that children would love it — and they did, perhaps too much so, since several cities feared the film’s influence on youth.)

In 1979, when Hill’s novel prompted a reissue of The warriorsYurick had gone beyond the Anabasepublish The baga biting tale featuring a slum landlord who survived the Holocaust and a novelist who earns his living by working for the social services, as well as the collection of short stories Someone like you. The works were rightly angry, prompting one critic to write that “there is more cruelty in his tale of abuse than the abused feels.”

But at home in Park Slope, holding court, slim and with an almost rabbinical beard, rolling his own cigarettes and drinking coffee, with a beloved cat or three nearby, Yurick was funny, and people came to listen as he moved from one topic to another.

Fromartz, whose mother worked with Adrienne at the Woodward School in Clinton Hill, spent many days as a teenager at Yurick’s kitchen table. He said that Yurick seemed to embrace “radical ideas” but was not an ideologue. He would say something provocative but build on it, connecting metaphysics and information technology to the ancients. His last novel, before he moved on to long, tangential, but deeply learned essays, was Richard A. who made daring predictions about humanity’s relationship with technology.

Adrienne Yurick found the book cold but undeniably prophetic. “We’ll see if people have sex with their machines and don’t need people at all,” she said.

The track record of Yurick adaptations — or at least faithful ones — isn’t great. Hill’s film airbrushes the plot of The warriors with a low camp and strips it of much of its social commentary. The Alec Baldwin vehicle The Confessionbased on fertileturns the novel’s tortured revenge into a morality play. But what would Yurick make of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s concept album, which the family was told would be based on the book, not the film?

Fromartz said it’s possible that Yurick, who mixed comic books and sociology with the history of the ancient Greeks, would appreciate it Hamiltonwho remixes the founding fathers with hip hop and R&B.

“He would probably have a problem with the political side of it, which he often had with everything in popular culture,” Fromartz said.

Adrienne Yurick says she doesn’t think he’d be a big fan of HamiltonBut can’t say for sure how he would feel about Miranda adapting The warriorsotherwise he probably would have agreed. “I think he would have been very skeptical,” she said.

But it’s no wonder Miranda is drawn to the building. Yurick thought musicals like West Side Story and later that of Paul Simon The Capeman took liberties with the realities of gang dynamics, but Bernstein’s play proved to be a huge success. Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican descent, has a personal connection to West Side Storyand provided Spanish lyrics and dialogue for a 2009 Broadway revival and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation.

Miranda, a New York native whose distinctive style blended several musical genres, might have seen the theatrical potential in Yurick’s book, whose ethnic gangs could each provide their own multilingual soundtrack, from the Nuyoricans of the Boogie Down Bronx to the carnival atmosphere of Coney Island, home of the Dominators. “There was something subversive about the gangs,” Yurick wrote, “especially about the music they loved,” rock ‘n’ roll.

But when you hear Yurick talk about his work, you see that there is a subtler dimension at play that may have piqued Miranda’s interest.

In a 1979 radio interview for WNYC, discussing the xenophobia and territoriality featured in his story, Yurick said that when he researched these gangs, he found that “every device you see in international diplomacy and in military strategy is used by the kids.”

Miranda, who brought rap battles to George Washington’s cabinet meetings, likely found an affinity there. But Miranda, whose greatest protagonist “wrote himself out of trouble” and used Hamilton’s biography to advocate for immigrants and the displaced, may also have found something in Yurick, the son of politically active immigrants, and his approach to advocacy.

“His work was what he contributed. He wasn’t an activist, you know,” Adrienne Yurick said. “But he wrote.”