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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Eric Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Jennifer Mendelsohn

the breakfast table
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from: Jennifer Mendelsohn

The Pope, The Sopranos, and Forgiveness

Posted Monday, March 13, 2000, at 2:40 PM ET

D and E,

Now the floodgates of absolution are open ... and Yom Kippur isn't for months! If given the chance, what from your past would you apologize for? I personally would like to take full responsibility for my 1976 Dorothy Hamill haircut, which I got only because Randi Joseph around the corner did it first. And I will forgive the NCAA for leaving out the University of Virginia this year.

But in all seriousness, I've long been fascinated by the concept of forgiveness, both on the personal and institutional levels: Are there acts that are truly unforgivable, or is everything, no matter how heinous, ultimately redeemable if you ask properly, so to speak? I really was thinking about it with Carmela Soprano (aka our friend Edie) last night. Here she was on her knees, asking Jesus to save the life of her nephew the murderous mobster--who once shot somebody in the foot because he was taking too long with a bakery order--and hoping Jesus would grant him the "vision" to see the error of his ways in return. (I disagree, by the way, that Carmela's language is too high-fallutin'; I think she's a good Catholic who's just been listening carefully all those years.) Are there a certain number of people you shoot in the foot after which you just don't deserve absolution, or even the chance to appreciate the error of your ways? Or is it never too late to make amends? Does a man like that deserve to be loved, much less prayed for? (Adriana's just agreed to marry Christopher, but I suspect that had a lot to do with that honker of a diamond ring he gave her; I don't think she's much of a soul-searcher, that one.)

And I've got to ask, Daniel, just what "institution" does George W. Bush represent that you can't see him asking forgiveness for? The state of Texas? The Republican Party? The small but noteworthy club of wealthy WASP sons who try to follow their fathers into the presidency?

It's very funny that you mention the New York Times story about the pope's awkward dealings with the Jewish grandson of his wartime landlord. I was up in Baltimore this weekend, where I happened to read the Baltimore Jewish Times (which, I should point out, has a not-to-be-missed feature called "Beshert" where couples talk about how they met. Beshert, for those readers not of our tribe, means something along the lines of "meant to be" or "fated" in Yiddish.) I was very struck by a huge advertisement urging Jews (I think it was placed by a law firm, but I'm not certain) to investigate whether they might have rights to unclaimed Holocaust-era insurance policies--life insurance, health insurance, even "dowry" insurance, whatever that is. Perhaps this is really a noble undertaking that I'm misconstruing, but I confess that it really rubbed me the wrong way, like one of those cheesy local commercials where some ambulance-chasing lawyer says, "Your child's birth injuries might have been caused by a doctor's mistake!" (Our brother Matt is always railing about those.) I bet we do have unclaimed insurance policies from our murdered Eastern European family. Do you really want that money? I don't think I do.

Cheers,
Jennifer, off to read Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue, which she stopped to get this very morning without even having read Daniel's e-mail. I should also point out that I recently forced myself to cancel my VF subscription because I feared I was going to end up being one of those people they find dead in their apartments under piles and piles of newspapers and magazines.

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Jennifer Mendelsohn

The Pope, The Sopranos, and Forgiveness

Posted Monday, March 13, 2000, at 2:40 PM ET
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Eric Mendelsohn is the writer/director of the film Judy Berlin, currently in theaters and starring Madeline Kahn, Edie Falco, Barbara Barrie, and Julie Kavner. Daniel Mendelsohn is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Observer, a lecturer in classics at Princeton University, and the author of The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (click here to buy it). Jennifer Mendelsohn is Slate's Washington, D.C.-based "Keeping Tabs" columnist.
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Highlights from The Fray:


Don't the Mendelsohns remind you of J.D.Salinger's Glass family of precocious children?

--Patti

(To reply, click here.)

[Eagle80 was of the opinion that the Mendelsohns were in fact The Sopranos of the literati. Stacy Grover asked How did so much cleverness end up in one family? and this brought the Missing Mendelsohn brothers to The Fray: Andrew said I often wonder that myself. And you haven't even heard from the rest of us yet!
And Matthew responded:]
I have to agree with my brother Andrew. I've been feeling like Zeppo Marx all week. I think Slate should host a Breakfast Table with the forgotten Mendelsohn brothers. Jennifer, Eric and Daniel can host a discussion about gay culture while Andrew and myself discuss biotech stocks. You'll learn more with them but you'll make more with us.

(To reply--or to follow the thread in more detail--click here.)


Thursday's entry: As for Jennifer and marriage, I believe she is the star of an upcoming Fox special called, Who wants to Marry A Mendelsohn? Should be good.

--Bill Watrous

(To reply, click here.)

[If you want to read the marriage proposal for Jennifer (and her response) click here. Yet another member of the Mendelsohn family, Jay, entered The Fray here. Marriage proposal for Dan is here. Sorry, Eric, no proposal, but lots of Fraygrants did like your film and one of them liked your photo.

But there were also Fray readers who wanted to discuss serious issues, or at least give a short, thrilling history of religion down the ages:]

Typical drivel from the pseudo-intellectual phenoms. Here's some of my drivel. Let's see: there were 12 tribes waiting for the Messiah, He comes, they kill kill him because he wanted to give Caesar what was Caesar's, they wanted power, all he wanted was your faith and devotion to a Greater Good. The various churches spring up, (no-one mentions the Orthodox Churches and the atrocities they committed), Popes are killed, moved to France, etc., they offer forgiveness of sins for money, and kill, all for power using the popular religion of the time. Then we have Protestantism, (no one mentions the 2.5 million Catholics Cromwell killed and the killing that has gone on since then in Ireland) Let's leave for the New World, Puritan brothers, so that we the church leaders can have the power over every bit of your life (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Pat Buchanan, et al) Oh yeah, you're a witch, die! (You also had a piece of land I wanted...)I am going to skip a century or two now... lets see Joseph Smith, ex-con, sees an angel called Baloney, no Maloney, no, Moroni... yeah that's the one. Yeah, Yeah, that's my wife...Morgan Fairchild...all 11 of them...God told me I could, I swear!

Well enough of this. People are the problem, not God, not Jesus, no matter what religion, faith, creed.

--St Pat

(To reply, click here.)


Is it possible that the pope's "doctrinal rigidity" and "gestures of expansive humanity" [Monday's entry] are of a piece? As I understand John Paul II's thinking, the humanity Mendelsohn admires arises almost entirely from the pope's dogmatic beliefs about God, man's nature, and the consequent requirements for living a good life. Liberals (and I don't intend that as a lazy epithet) should consider the possibility that the "humanity" they praise must rest either on certain irreducible truths or on a collection of insubstantial, albeit attractive, sentiments.

--Michael Pollard

(To reply, click here.)


Many have decried the pope's apology as a political ploy. I doubt it, if only for the reason that if it were, he would have vaguely referred to the Crusades and Inquisition as "youthful indiscretions" of a church that is now much more mature and therefore knows better as a result of the important lessons it has learned.

G Wiz

(To reply, click here.)


1. Gays (yawn). How over. How '90s.
2. Catholics. "Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual."

--P.J.O'Connell

(To reply, click here.)


To P.J.O'Connell: Let's jump back in time to 1960...
Negros (yawn). How over. How 50's.
2. Jews. "Just ignore them and they'll go away."
It ain't over by a long shot!

--Dave

(To reply, click here.)


I'm glad Eric Mendelsohn cleared up the confusion over Beauty and the Beast. But I'm still not sure which Psycho he had in mind. Perkins or Vaughn? Or Christian Bale? I hope he clears this up before the Breakfast Table is wiped clear of bagel crumbs, the dishes go in the dishwasher, and he goes off to film The Magnificent Mendelsohns.

And, by the way, the poet Catullus [see Wednesday's entry] was really the Matt Drudge --or maybe Fray contributor--of his times. How low can you get?

--Eagle80

(To reply, click here.)

[The Catulluses of the modern age also discussed dogs, names, the Oscars, The Sopranos and many other Breakfast Table topics in The Fray this week.]

(3/17)

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