Harry Kemelman

• Born: November 24, 1908
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: December 15, 1996
• Place of death: Marblehead, Massachusetts

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Nicky Welt, 1947-1970; Rabbi David Small, 1964-1996

Contribution

Harry Kemelman’s Nicky Welt stories represent a revival of the intellectual armchair detective, who solves crimes much as he solves chess problems, through the use of his superior logic and for his own entertainment. Welt is not interested in morality or justice but in demonstrating his mental superiority, especially his superiority over his closest friend, chess partner, and faithful “Watson,” the nameless narrator, who identifies himself as the Fairfield County attorney and a former law-school faculty member at Nicky’s university.

Although the Nicky Welt stories are clever and entertaining, their chief significance lies in the fact that they are the forerunners to the Rabbi David Small series. As Kemelman himself wrote, “Rabbi David Small can be said to be the son of Professor Nicholas Welt.” Like Nicky Welt, David Small solves cases through logical analysis. The rabbi’s logic is derived not from chess but from pilpul, the traditional, hairsplitting analysis used in yeshivas (rabbinical schools) to study the Talmud, the Judaic oral law that interprets the Torah (the Pentateuch). By using a rabbi as his detective, Kemelman turned his mysteries into a series of lessons in ancient Judaic tradition and modern Jewish sociology—“a primer to instruct the Gentiles,” according to Anthony Boucher. Rabbi Small becomes involved in sleuthing to help those who have been unjustly accused and to restore moral order to his corner of the universe. Although Nicky Welt arrogantly demonstrates his own superiority over lesser mortals, Rabbi David Small gently discourses on Judaism’s ethical superiority over Christianity.

Critic Diana Arbin Ben-Merre has pointed out that Kemelman’s most significant achievement was in expanding the cultural horizons of American and British detective and mystery fiction. Until the 1960’s, with the emerging popularity of Rabbi Small, no significant Jewish characters existed in detective fiction without the onus of lingering stereotypes and anti-Semitism. In creating a space for Jewish issues within the detective milieu, Kemelman built on the success of Jewish-American postwar novelists such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, who helped establish the value and interest of Jewish culture.

Biography

Harry Kemelman was born on November 24, 1908, in Boston, the son of Dora Prizer Kemelman and Isaac Kemelman, a diamond merchant and talmudic scholar. Kemelman attended Boston Latin School from 1920 to 1926. From the age of eleven to fourteen, he also attended Hebrew classes after school from four to six p.m. at his father’s request and a Talmud class from six to seven p.m. for his own enjoyment. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, he went to Hebrew and Talmud evening classes at the Hebrew Teachers College, which he describes as the hardest school he ever attended. Despite his academic achievements, Harvard University rejected Kemelman’s applications for undergraduate admission, probably because of a problematic high-school discipline record, although “there were also rumors that some colleges had set a percentage limit on Jewish students.” From 1926 to 1930, Kemelman attended Boston University and received his bachelor of arts degree in English. He was then admitted to Harvard for postgraduate studies, receiving his master of arts degree in English in 1931.

Kemelman became a teacher over his father’s objections that teaching violated the talmudic principle that one should not use knowledge “as a spade to dig with.” Kemelman taught on a substitute teacher’s license from 1935 to 1941, traveling to four different Boston area schools “to put together one poor salary.” He also taught literature and composition in the evening division of Northeastern University from 1938 to 1941. On March 29, 1936, Kemelman married Anne Kessin, a medical secretary-technician whom he met at a party. The couple had three children: Ruth, Arthur Frederick, and Diane. From the 1940’s, Kemelman lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where he loved to take seaside strolls.

From 1942 to 1949, Kemelman worked as the chief civilian wage administrator for the American Army Transportation Corps in Boston and as chief job and wage administrator for the New England Division of the War Assets Administration.

After the war ended, Kemelman tried to set up his own employment agency for people leaving war-related industries, but the enterprise failed. Kemelman then became a successful real-estate agent, selling housing to young postwar families. Teaching remained his first love, however, and he accepted an assistant professorship in English at Franklin Technical Institute in 1963. In 1964, Kemelman became associate professor of English at Boston State College. Around 1970, he retired from teaching gradually, going on a leave of absence to Israel for several semesters and finally writing a letter of resignation.

Kemelman published his first Nicky Welt story in 1947. Between 1964 and 1988, Kemelman published ten novels featuring Rabbi David Small, one collection of Nicky Welt short stories, and one critique of post-World War II college education, Common Sense in Education (1970). After Kemelman’s retirement from teaching, he and his wife, Anne, divided their time between summers in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and winters in Israel. His annual visits to Israel provided inspiration and an ability to write free of distractions. Kemelman died on December 15, 1996, at the age of eighty-eight.

Analysis

“Nicky Welt was born in the classroom,” says Harry Kemelman, describing the start of his career as a mystery writer. Trying to show a composition class that “words do not exist in vacuo but have meanings that transcend their casual connotations,” he noticed a newspaper headline about a Boy Scout hike and created the sentence, “A nine-mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain.” Fearing some sort of pedagogical trap, the class was unresponsive, but the sentence and its varying possible implications gave Kemelman the idea for his first Nicky Welt story, a story that he tried to write on and off for fourteen years. When it finally did jell it was like copying it down rather than writing it, according to Kemelman. Except for a few spelling changes, it needed no revision. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine accepted it at once and offered Kemelman twenty-five-dollar increases in pay for each subsequent Nicky Welt story. It took Kemelman a year to write the second story, but after that, they flowed at the rate of one a month.

Nicky Welt

In the finest Sherlock Holmes tradition, Nicky solves crimes that are presented to him by baffled minions of the law, who possess all the clues but lack intellect to interpret what they know. Like Holmes, Nicky is a cold-natured, solitary figure whose few human contacts include a dedicated landlady who caters to his eccentricities and one devoted male friend who shares Nicky’s interests and chronicles his triumphs.

Rabbi David Small

Soon publishers were clamoring for a full-length Nicky Welt novel, but Kemelman had no interest in writing one. Although these stories were amusing, Kemelman believed that a longer work should say something more meaningful to the reader. Having just moved to the suburbs of Boston, he found himself, at the age of forty, the oldest member of a struggling new congregation. The young, suburban Jewish parents wanted to pass their religious traditions on to their children, but having been brought up at a time when religion had generally lost significance, they themselves had no such knowledge. What would happen to future generations of Jews reared in ignorance of their history? Kemelman wondered. Out of these experiences and questions came his first, never-to-be-published novel, “The Building of a Temple.” The editors whom Kemelman approached found the book pleasant but too low-keyed and lacking in excitement.

One of the editors, Arthur Fields, “jokingly suggested that maybe the book would be more interesting if it were written in the style of a detective story.” Driving home from Fields’s office, Kemelman passed the grounds of his suburban temple and was struck by the thought that its parking lot, a deserted spot on the edge of town, was a good place to hide a body. It also occurred to him that a rabbi’s traditional role in Europe had not been that of a religious leader hired by a congregation but rather that of a judge hired by the Jewish community to settle civil disputes. In that capacity, the rabbi had always acted as a detective, questioning witnesses and laying traps for liars. Rabbi David Small had just been born.

Like his literary father, Nicholas Welt, David Small is prickly, pedantic, and unprepossessing at first acquaintance. Unlike Nicky Welt, however, he becomes very lovable as the reader gets to know him better. More important, unlike Nicky Welt, who was created for the reader’s amusement, the rabbi is Kemelman’s spokesperson for his deepest concerns about the ancient Judaic tradition and its place in the modern world. Indeed, Kemelman has said,

The purpose of the books is to teach and explain Judaism to Jews and Gentiles. The fact that the books, particularly Conversations with Rabbi Small are used in theology schools, seminaries, and conversion classes, indicates, I think, that they appear to serve their purpose.

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late

In his Edgar-winning first novel, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late (1964), Kemelman sets the stylistic and thematic pattern for the entire series. The rabbi is introduced in his habitual setting—at the temple and in trouble with his congregation. With the very first paragraph, the reader learns that Jewish morning prayers require the attendance of ten men and that phylacteries, small black boxes containing a passage taken from the Scriptures, are worn on the foreheads and upper arms of the congregants. The scene is thus set, and a Jewish custom is described and explained. Speaking among themselves, several of the men reveal that they find their young rabbi too traditional, too dogmatic, and too pale and rumpled looking to lead their progressive, assimilationist, and image-conscious temple. They want his contract terminated as soon as possible so they can bring in a rabbi more to their liking—a well-groomed, fund-raising organizer with the deep, resonant voice of an Episcopal bishop, a progressive ecumenicist who will let their wives serve shrimp cocktails at sisterhood suppers. In brief, they want a Gentile rabbi and a synagogue that is indistinguishable from any of the Christian churches.

Although the temple board members are united in their opposition to the rabbi, some of them are in conflict over a car that one member borrowed and returned with a damaged engine. Unaware of their machinations against him, the rabbi offers to serve in his traditional European capacity as a civil judge; he settles the case to everyone’s satisfaction, winning a few admirers in the process.

The scene then shifts to a seemingly unrelated plot. Elspeth Bleech, the unmarried nursemaid to the Serafino family, is seen suffering from morning sickness and preparing to visit a doctor. The narrative cuts back and forth from the board’s plans to oust the rabbi to Elspeth’s problematic pregnancy. The two stories seem totally unconnected until Elspeth, vainly awaiting her unnamed lover in a restaurant, meets Mel Bronstein, the business partner of Al Becker, the board’s most outspoken opponent to the rabbi. Mel invites the obviously jilted and distraught young woman to his table, and they spend a pleasant, chaste evening together. The next day, Elspeth’s corpse, dressed only in a slip and a raincoat, is discovered in the parking lot of the temple. She has been strangled in the backseat of the rabbi’s car, and David Small thus becomes the prime suspect in the case.

Hugh Lanigan, the Catholic police chief of Barnard’s Crossing, finds it difficult to suspect a man of the cloth in a sex-related slaying. He could never bring himself to accuse a priest of such a thing, he tells David. Blissfully unaware that he is thrusting his own neck deeper into the noose, David tells Lanigan, “I presumably differ from the average member of my congregation only in that I am supposed to have a greater knowledge of the Law and of our tradition. That is all.”

The rabbi’s naïveté and candor convince Lanigan that he is innocent, and Mel Bronstein is arrested for Elspeth’s murder. With the tacit consent of his paralyzed wife, Mel has been having an affair with a woman whose name he will not reveal. Elspeth’s pregnancy convinces the police that she had become burdensome to her married lover. By use of talmudic logic, however, the rabbi clears Mel of suspicion and wins the gratitude and loyalty of Mel’s partner, the obstreperous Al Becker.

Kemelman’s technique is cinematographic, employing rapid jump cuts from one scene to the next. The characters are revealed through their own words and actions, and the subplots shift and intertwine to baffle and delight the reader. The rabbi is the one who finally ties all the mysterious events together. Watching his wife, Miriam, undress to go to bed, he suddenly realizes why Elspeth was seminude at the time of her murder. By applying pilpul, talmudic “hair-splitting distinctions and twists of logic,” the rabbi demonstrates to Lanigan the logical identity of the killer. Because the rabbi is now the hero of the Gentile community, the board is appeased and votes to extend David’s contract.

Other Rabbi Small Books

The rest of the books follow the same pattern. The rabbi ages, his family grows, the board members are voted in and out of office, but David Small’s basic conflict with his congregation remains the same. Refusing a lifetime contract as too restrictive, the rabbi prefers to fight for his job year by year, as he strives to keep his Conservative flock from straying too far into assimilation or into ultra-Orthodoxy.

Murder continues to dog the rabbi’s footsteps, much to his consternation and the reader’s delight. Along with each crime, David Small also investigates and explains a different problem or issue of Judaism and modern society. In Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry (1966), an apparent suicide who should not be buried in consecrated ground proves to be a murder victim. In Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home (1969), an integrated beach party attended by members of the rabbi’s teen fellowship turns into tragedy. In Monday the Rabbi Took Off (1972), a vacation in Israel finds David Small enmeshed in Arab terrorism and a murder whose roots lie in World War II and a Russian gulag. In Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red (1973), a brief teaching stint at Windemere Christian College involves the rabbi with campus radicals and a bombing that results in a professor’s death. In Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (1976), an encounter with Jewish mysticism (a doctrine of despair that arises when reality is extremely difficult, according to Kemelman’s own words) leads to a fatal pharmaceutical mix-up. In Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out (1978), a volatile mixture of women’s liberation and anti-Semitism explodes into homicide. In Someday the Rabbi Will Leave (1985), corrupt politics combine with a hit-and-run killing.

In One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross (1987), David and Miriam return to Israel and encounter religious fanatics, both Jewish and Muslim, bent on mutual destruction. In The Day the Rabbi Resigned (1992), Rabbi Small aids Police Chief Hugh Lanigan once again in solving a murder framed as a drunk-driving accident. He finally resolves the long tension with his congregation by retiring from Barnard’s Crossing. In Kemelman’s final book, The Day the Rabbi Left Town (1996), Rabbi Small has accepted the position of professor of Judaic studies at Windermere College in Boston. Soon enough, a professor’s body is discovered under circumstances that would seem to incriminate the temple’s new rabbi. Though Small has left the temple, this novel continues his—and Kemelman’s—focus on the history, laws, and culture of Judaism.

Conversations with Rabbi Small

Conversations with Rabbi Small (1981) is the only Kemelman novel in which David Small gains respite from both his congregation and his detective labors. The plot of this book is slender, almost nonexistent. The rabbi finds himself vacationing alone at Hotel Placid while his wife Miriam is in New York visiting her parents. He meets Joan Abernathy, a Christian resident of Barnard’s Crossing, who is staying at the same hotel with her Jewish fiancé, Aaron Freed. Although Aaron is totally nonobservant, his parents would prefer a Jewish daughter-in-law, and Joan is willing to convert. The rabbi tries to discourage her from an insincere conversion for love but becomes intrigued by the possibility of winning Aaron back to Judaism. The young couple and the rabbi begin a series of nightly conversations that cover all aspects of Judaism quite literally from A to Z—from abortion to the return to Zion. This book, a pocket encyclopedia Judaica complete with index, encapsulates and encompasses the true purpose of the entire “Rabbi” series.

The murders the rabbi solves are intrinsically fascinating to mystery buffs, but Kemelman uses them as a vehicle for involving the readers, both Gentile and Jewish, in the history, tradition, ethics, and sociology of Judaism. David Small’s conversations with Hugh Lanigan are not really comparisons of clues but contrasts in theology. Lanigan’s statements of the Catholic position on various issues give David a springboard from which to launch his lessons in Judaism. The role of the priest, the ultimate spiritual authority to his congregation, is contrasted with the role of the rabbi, a purely secular figure with legal and academic, not spiritual, authority. The nature of faith in God, central to all Christian beliefs, but not required of Jews, is discussed. Lanigan is amazed to learn that mainstream Judaism has no concept of heaven or hell and that to a Jew virtue must be its own reward and vice its own punishment.

The members of the temple congregation, too, provide the rabbi with opportunities to teach Judaic tradition and ethics. A young woman who wants a nonkosher wedding reception is sharply reminded of Mosaic law. On the other hand, a stubborn, ailing old man who insists on fasting on Yom Kippur to the detriment of his health is told that refusal to take medicine could be considered suicide rather than religious observance.

Above all else, the rabbi sees Judaism as a rational faith rather than one of credo quia absurdum est. (Kemelman himself has described aspects of Christianity as “expecting you to believe what you know ain’t so.”) Therefore, just as he opposes too much liberalization and modernization of tradition, so too does he oppose ostentatious religiosity and an exaggerated reverence for form. His moderation earns for him enemies in both the liberal and the ultra-Orthodox factions of his congregation.

The disgruntled factions’ repeated machinations to get rid of the rabbi provide Kemelman with the opportunity to demonstrate the day-to-day working of temple life and modern Jewish values, both noble and crass. The reader is shown the politics and economics of temple governance and fund-raising. The rabbi’s vacation in Israel becomes a forum on the Jews’ spiritual ties to that land. An encounter with a Hasidic yeshiva student leads to a consideration of the fate of various other now-dead branches of Judaism. The rabbi thus finds an opportunity to discuss every aspect of Judaism, from its most abstruse theology to its most common daily habits.

There is, in fact, only one central Judaic concern that Kemelman never approaches, and that is the Holocaust. When asked about this glaring omission, Kemelman replied, “It’s not something that is incumbent upon Jews to explain. Germany has to explain it. We don’t.”

Margaret King and Sheldon Hershinow have described the rabbi as an “outsider” figure, a minority of one within a minority group in American society: “He is set off from the Gentile community, on the one hand, by his Jewish beliefs, and from his own temple membership, on the other, because of his refusal to strive for the accommodation of his religion to the American way of life.” As an outsider, he has no partisan views to cloud his perceptions. This clarity of vision enables him to function more effectively both as religious spokesman and as detective.

In a 1975 interview with Daisy Maryles of Publishers Weekly, Kemelman said that he is surprised by the reaction of American and Israeli rabbis who have told him how much his books have affected their behavior. Kemelman’s own creation, Nicky Welt, however, would not be at all surprised. In a story entitled “The Bread and Butter Case,” Ellis Johnston, the Suffolk County district attorney, is cynically surprised at the decent behavior of Terry Jordan, a not overly intelligent young thug whom Nicky has exonerated of a murder charge.

“Like the hero in a soap opera or a TV western,” Johnston sneered.

“Precisely,” said Nicky. “People like Terry get their ideas of morality and ethics, as do the rest of us, from the books they read and the plays they see.”

Apparently so do rabbis. Except for the rabbis of the Talmud, they could not find a better role model than David Small.

Principal Series Characters:

• Nicky Welt , the Snowden professor of English language and literature at an unnamed New England university, is a perennial bachelor. In his late forties throughout the series of short stories, Welt is white-haired, gnomelike, cold-natured, and condescending. He solves cases for his friend and chronicler, the nameless Fairfield County attorney and a former university colleague, for the same reason that he plays chess with him—to prove his own intellectual superiority.
• Rabbi David Small , the rabbi of the Barnard’s Crossing Conservative Temple, is married to Miriam and is the father of Jonathan and Hepsibah. Just under thirty in the first novel, he ages to his mid-forties and fathers two children as the series progresses. Mild-mannered, scholarly, rumpled, and shy, he is a devout man of inflexible principles when it comes to Judaic tradition and ethics. Never popular with his congregation, he precariously clings to his job by solving crimes that involve the temple members.

Bibliography

Breen, Jon L., and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Synod of Sleuths: Essays on Judeo-Christian Detective Fiction. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Discusses Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small and other Jewish and Christian religious figures in detective fiction.

Freese, Peter. The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman. Essen, Germany: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 1992. Study of the representation of ethnicity in the detective genre, focused on Himes, Kemelman, and Hillerman’s portrayals of African Americans, Jews, and Native Americans, respectively.

Hershinow, Sheldon, and Margaret King. “Judaism for the Millions: Harry Kemelman’s ’Rabbi Books.’” MELUS 5 (Winter, 1978): 83-93. Brief discussion of Kemelmans’s Rabbi Small series as mass entertainment and the process of representing Jewish culture and ethics to a non-Jewish audience.

Lachman, Marvin. “Religion and Detection: Sunday the Rabbi Met Father Brown.” The Armchair Detective 1 (October, 1967): 19-24. Comparison of Rabbi Small to G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and the uses to which religion is put in each character’s stories.

Long, Tom. “Harry Kemelman, Mastermind of Rabbi Small Mysteries, at Eighty-eight.” Boston Globe, December 17, 1996, p. C17. Obituary of Kemelman notes that his first book was published at the age of fifty-five. The Boston native mixed Jewish elements with small-town images in his works.

Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander. Unshtetling Narratives: Depictions of Jewish Identities in British and American Literature and Film. Salzburg, Austria: Poetry Salzburg, 2006. Study of the representation of Jewishness and Judaism; places Kemelman’s Rabbi Small in a broader literary and cultural context. Bibliographic references and index.

Maryles, Daisy. “PW Interviews: Harry Kemelman.” Publishers Weekly 207 (April 28, 1975): 8-9. Interview with the author in a professional trade publication, pitched toward an insider audience.

Roth, Laurence. Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Detailed examination of the figure of the Jewish American detective and of the Jewish American authors who write about him. Puts Kemelman’s work in perspective.

Sipe, A. W. Richard, and B. C. Lamb. “Divine Justice: William F. Love’s Bishop Regan and Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small.” The Armchair Detective 27, no.1 (Winter, 1994): 58-61. Another comparison between fictional Christian and Jewish clerical sleuths.