Jewish Rage! Using Words As Potent Weapons.

In childhood I had a sense of impotence in the face of my father's disparagement. I was small; he was big. I did not fight back. I was filled with a child's rage at what I perceived as my father's cruelty. A part of me developed a lingering hatred of, a grudge against, my father. Part of me wanted to destroy him, as well as the menace he posed.

It would take many years before I would find, joining with brothers-in-art, that under certain conditions I was not "afraid to fight." But my fight would be against the "bitterness of injustice," not in physical combat.

True to the best in Jewish tradition, the conscious acceptable "enemy" for me has become an impersonal set of unjust and corrupt societal conditions, and the means of battle would be waged largely in words within the controllable arena of social conscience within a work of art.

This is a paraphrase of Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 at 37 and n. 2.7 at 625 (New York: Atheneum, 1982). Albert Rothenberg, M.D. was a colleague of the late Dr. Brenman-Gibson; they worked together at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts.