If I didn't know that Arthur Miller wrote his first novel Focus in 1945, you know, I might have mistaken the work for a Rod Serling Twilight Zone screenplay! It has all of the markings of a surreal and creepy episode of that popular sci-fi 1960s television series. The book is set in New York City in the 1940s during the years of the Second Word War. Lawrence Newman is the central character of Miller's novel. He suddenly finds himself trapped in a nightmarish situation. He becomes the target of anti-Semitic discrimination and physical abuse after he buys a new pair of glasses which everyone, including his own mother, insists make him look Jewish.

How absurd a development! After all, Lawrence Newman is a polite, Episcopalian, mild-mannered, middle-aged nebish who lives with his mother, and for 16 years has held down a boring job as a personnel manager. Oh yeah, he also happens to be himself an anti-Semite. Not that Lawrence Newman would go out and join a Nazi round-up of Jews, but even while his country is waging a war against Germany over in Europe, Lawrence Newman (a wounded veteran) embraces the social anti-Semitic attitudes that were so prevalent here in America in the 1940s.

But, you see, he bought these new glasses, and overnight, his boss's attitude toward him changes. Demoted without explanation to a far less visible slot in the corporate hierarchy, Lawrence Newman resigns in bitter protest. Hadn't he always gone out of his way to screen out job candidates who might have been Jewish? The outrage of it all. He was no Jew! Though, throughout Mr. Miller's novel, Lawrence Newman will be made a Jew by everyone he meets. And the more he runs from that label, the more determined others will be to pin it on him.

So he sets out to land a new job, but is repeatedly turned away, until he runs across Gertrude who had, months earlier, been turned down for a job by none other than Lawrence Newman because he thought she had "Hebraic" features. She, too, is an Episcopalian!

Gertrude has now found a secretarial position in a Jewish-owned business. And after Newman apologizes to her for his earlier behavior, she helps him get a position at her company. They become good friends and soon decide to marry in an Episcopal church.

But the couple's life together becomes a succession of social humiliations. They take a driving trip to upper New York state where they are rudely turned away by a restricted resort that had previously accepted their reservation, and where Lawrence had stayed some years earlier. But the real problem was with their neighbors at home.

The neighborhood of Focus is a street of cookie-cutter row houses with identical porches. But for all of its comfy tidiness and the cheerful "good mornings" exchanged, the atmosphere is steeped in xenophobic paranoia, racial and religious bigotry.

Lawrence Newman had always felt superior to Fred, his next-door neighbor, until the day when he realized that this fellow had become a leading member of the increasingly powerful Union Crusaders, a band of white supremacist thugs who soon begin to intimidate Lawrence and Gertrude Newman. Their purpose? To drive them, and other targeted "Jews," from their neighborhood.

You see, under the leadership of a Jew-hating priest, patterned after the real Father Coughlin of the 1930s, the Union Crusaders blamed the Jews for causing World War II.

On two occasions Newman's garbage cans are overturned upon his postage-stamp lawn. It's such an embarrassment, but Newman gets the message, and he knows who is responsible. At Gert's insistence, Lawrence goes next door to see Fred and to plead his cause. After all, he is a WASP whose family came from Aldwich, England in 1861! He's no Jew! It's a terrible mistake. Swears Newman, "Nobody makes a Jew out of me and gets away with it."

Finkelstein, who owns the neighborhood magazine and candy shop, Finkelstein is a Jew. Hadn't Newman played ball with the Union Crusaders and, at first, even joined the boycott of his store? At one particularly telling moment, Finkelstein insists that Newman spell it out. Of what are the Jews guilty? Just what have they done and precisely what are the reasons for anti-Semitic attitudes?

Reluctantly, Newman attempts to answer:
 

"There's a lot of reasons why people don't like Jews. They have no principles, for one thing."

"No principles."

"Yes. In business you'll find them cheating and take advantage, for instance. That's something that people. . . . "

"Let me understand. You're talking about me now?"

"Well, no, not you, but. . . ."

"I ain't interested in other people, Mr. Newman. I live on this block and there ain't another Jew on this block but me and my family. Did I ever cheat you in business?"

"That's not the point. You. . ."

"I beg your pardon, sir. You don't have to explain to me that certain Jews cheat in business. There's no argument with that. Personally, I know for a fact that the telephone company is charging five cents a local call when they could make a good profit charging a penny.

"This is a fact from the utilities investigation. The phone company is run and owned by gentiles. But just because you are a gentile, I ain't mad at you when I put a nickel in to make a phone call. And still gentiles are cheating me. I am asking you why you want to get me off this block, Mr. Newman? . . . What do you see that makes you so mad when you look at me?"

But the feeling changed now. For now, Mr. Newman realized that the only answer he could give this man was that he disliked him because his face was the face of a man who should be acting in an abhorrent way.

"What do you see when you look at me, Mr. Newman?" repeated Mr. Finkelstein. Newman stared at him, troubled.

You see what Arthur Miller does in this wonderful novel? He tenaciously and patiently takes on the bigot, eyeball to eyeball, and strips away the rhetoric, the lies, and the myth until he uncovers the bare bone of baseless prejudice and unwarranted fear.

My dear friends, this is a powerful novel about perceptions, and how tragically thin the evidence we hang our perceptions on can be. In a certain surreal style, Miller presents us with a morality tale, a fable of fear and non-conformism, later, of course, to be more fully explicated in Miller's dramatic masterpiece, The Crucible.

Before its conclusion, Focus builds up a threatening suspense. It becomes a veritable "page turner." And, in the wake of the September terrorist attacks, which left this country's innocent Muslims vulnerable to violence and bigoted treatment, this novel presents us all with a message necessarily demanding repetition.

For that matter, we too-we Jews-have suffered our own bizarre attacks from hate-mongers following 9/11. Some voices within the Arab media were quick to accuse the Israelis for the World Trade Center attack. You remember hearing that? The lie was passed that thousands of Jews had been previously alerted and hence were absent from their desks on that horrid morning. The statistics prove otherwise!

Also afloat, according to Professor Paul Ginnetty, of St. Joseph's College in New York, has been the misguidedly simplistic opinion that the September atrocity was mostly a direct consequence of this country's support for the state of Israel, as if to say, "See how costly it becomes to befriend Jews!"

Any time, as Arthur Miller's novel Focus means to underscore for us, any time we strip down a fellow human soul to render a person different and "other," our insecurities (personal and collective, real or imagined) easily can move us to see "otherness" as threat. Truth is, we often feel safer blaming the victim rather than wrestling with the harder, more terrifying truth of our own vulnerabilities.

Let me end with Dr. Ginnetty's conclusion in his article, which was published in our own Times-Picayune. He writes:

From the halls of the Vatican to the current al-Qaida caves-not to mention in each of our hearts-there is a need for profound conversion, which will only come from being much more conversant with and courageous about our dark side.

The bigot, Lawrence Newman, puts on some new glasses one day, and he comes to see a whole lot more than he ever bargained for.