Played by William Forsythe (whose accent is of the fresh-off-the-boat variety), Horvitz is a burly, silver-eyed butcher who, after surviving a shotgun blast from a would-be assassin, kills the intruder with a cleaver to the skull. A linguist might be able to rate Yusef’s accuracy, but otherwise, he resembles the ye olde New York accents we all take on when imitating our elderly grandparents.įor a study in contrasts in Jewish power, you couldn’t ask for a better pair than Agent Eric Sebso and Manny Horvitz. It’s a sign of how parody can come to replace the real thing. Yusef’s Lansky is streetwise and good at talking himself out of squirrely situations, but his voice-all rounded vowels and Yiddish street theater, it overflows with “oy veys”-can grate. The real-life Lansky didn’t even crack five feet, and his HBO incarnation isn’t much taller. His deputies are Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the latter played by Anatol Yusef. Michael Stuhlberg-who starred as the sad sack Larry Gopnik in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man-plays Arnold Rothstein as a courtly but dangerous powerbroker, an inveterate gambler but a deeply cerebral and successful one, with a sociopath’s dead-eyed smile. Jewish gangsters were big machers in the bootlegging era, and chief among them in the HBO series is Arnold Rothstein, who was also known for fixing the 1919 World Series. I haven’t found tidy answers to these questions, but I’ve enjoyed watching the Jews of Boardwalk blast their away across the screen, even as I sometimes wince at their hackneyed Yiddish accents. When the Jews of Boardwalk Empire are called Christ killers and other epithets, do we call it a nod to historical accuracy, or is it something more pernicious, a way of vicariously enjoying bygone racism? But there are times when historical verisimilitude can be unsettling. (Season 3 of the show premieres September 16.) A friend recently suggested to me that TV writers might lean heavily on history in order to make viewers feel intellectually engaged while they sit glued to their flatscreens. I’ve been thinking about these questions while watching Boardwalk Empire, HBO’s crime drama about bootleggers, gangsters, and corrupt politicians, centered in 1920s Atlantic City. Nearly any show set in England in this period should acknowledge these events, but when is it a narrative necessary, and when is it a crutch? And when are scriptwriters just trying to make their audiences feel smart for recognizing historical Easter eggs? Downton Abbey especially relies on historical tragedies to set its plot in motion: the show begins with the sinking of the Titanic and continues, in the second season, with World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. References to famous historical events can seem quaint or like a substitute for originality. Television writers face a quandary when writing historical fiction.
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