Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs: The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman (Folklore Studies in Multicultural World)

Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs: The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman (Folklore Studies in Multicultural World)

Collector of sexual folklore. Cataloger of erotica. Tireless social critic. Gershon Legman's singular, disreputable resume made him a counter-cultural touchstone during his forty-year exile in France. Despite his obscurity today, Legman’s prescient work and passion for the prurient laid the groundwork for our contemporary study of the forbidden.Susan G. Davis follows the life and times of the figure driven to share what he found in civilization's secret libraries. Self-taught and fiercely unaffiliated, Legman collected the risqué on street corners and in theaters and dug it out of little-known archives. If the sexual humor he uncovered often used laughter to disguise hostility and fear, he still believed it indispensable to the human experience. Davis reveals Legman in all his prickly, provocative complexity as an outrageous nonconformist thundering at a wrong-headed world while reveling in conflict, violating laws and boundaries with equal abandon, and pursuing love and improbable adventures. Through it all, he maintained a kaleidoscopic network of friends, fellow intellectuals, celebrity admirers, and like-minded obsessives. "A more difficult subject is hard to imagine—a self-taught, little-known, irascible scholar who with little support and great opposition delved into some of the darkest corners of culture. Yet this remarkable and utterly engaging biography is the epic story of an unlikely hero as well as a lesson in just how much one person can accomplish in one lifetime. It also evokes an era, one uncomfortably like our own, in which scholars, theologians, politicians, and police wrestle with the unresolved issues of love and death."--John Szwed, author of Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth   "A vigorous. . . intellectual biography of [Legman's] peculiar, relentless career." -- Times Literary Supplement Susan G. Davis is professor emerita of Communication and Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia and Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience . Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman By Susan G. Davis UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Copyright © 2019 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-252-08444-7 Contents Preface, ix, Acknowledgments, xiii, Introduction, 1, 1 The Stranger, 11, 2 Sex Researcher, 37, 3 Kinsey's Bibliographer, 65, 4 Love & Death, 87, 5 Neurotica, 112, 6 Advanced Studies in Folklore, 141, 7 "The Ballad" and The Horn Book, 161, 8 The Key to the Fields, 174, 9 The Hell Drawer, 194, 10 Under Mt. Cheiron, 223, Notes, 243, Works Consulted, 295, Index, 297, CHAPTER 1 THE STRANGER Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow? — Grace Paley, "The Immigrant Story," in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories (1974) Gershon Legman's parents were immigrants, part of the mass migration of poor Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States in the early twentieth century. His mother and father came to the United States from small towns, as Legman recounted, "in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania," on the shifting border "between Romania and Hungary." Emil Mendel Legman was from Retteag, Hungary, now Cluj, Romania, near the city of Dej. According to Gershon's genealogical research, the Legman ancestors had been in Hungary from at least the late sixteenth century, but the name Legman is Jewish, not Hungarian, he points out, and this indicates that his forebears probably migrated east from Germany. Gershon wrote that his grandfather Yomtov Legman was a butcher from a long line of butchers, who were also horse traders "selling to the various landowners and small nobility" for centuries. As will become clear, Gershon had reason to tell people his father had been a butcher, but Emil failed in his ambition to be a kosher butcher. Emil told different versions of his immigration story. As the account came down in the family, he landed at Ellis Island in New York in 1907 and like so many greenhorns was immediately hustled out of all his money by immigrant swindlers protected by the Tammany machine. His last resort was a Jewish immigrant aid society that pinned a ticket to his jacket and put him on a train to Scranton, Pennsylvania, near the booming coalfields and factories. A friend of his family gave him work in a butcher shop, and in Scranton he settled and stayed. In another version of events given to a Scranton newspaper, Emil said he worked in New York for a year after arriving, painting the Brooklyn Bridge. Then he was recruited to teach at a new heder, a Hebrew elementary school, in Scranton. The new immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe tended to be Orthodox and more devout than earlier generations from Germany, and they were busy designing religious education for their childre