Who Is The “Complete Unknown?” Robert Zimmerman
There were many moments in the Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” that took my breath away: the performances, the music, the memories of my youth that shook and stirred me.
But, there was one moment in “A Complete Unknown” that did something else with my breath.
It caused me to hold it — for just a few seconds.
It was the scene in which some of young Bobby’s friends find some of his letters and papers, and see that the name on those documents is “Zimmerman.”
That discovery causes them to raise a collective eyebrow. Dylan’s real identity is uncovered, but it is subsequently dropped like a hot latke.
It is not as if Dylan is the only Jewish character in this film. “A Complete Unknown” came pretty close to a minyan: Bob; his manager, Albert Grossman; the promoter, Harold Leventhal; and fellow musicians Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Peter Yarrow, and Theodore Bikel. Timothée Chalamet, as Dylan, is Jewish.
In the early 1960s, the Greenwich Village folk scene, and certainly American folk music, was very “Jewish.” Those performers would have included Oscar Brand, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Phil Ochs (whose song “There But For Fortune” makes an appearance in “A Complete Unknown”), Happy and Artie Traum, and Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary).
But, for most of them, their Jewish identity was peripheral, unstated, and even masked. That was how it was for American Jewish identity in the early 1960s. It was emerging from the 1950s, which was admittedly not the most stellar period of American Judaism. American Jewish identity was still cautious and under-stated, especially in American popular culture. In 1962, Shel Silverstein wrote “Folk Singer Blues.” He wants to “sing a song about the chain gang” and “go walkin’ up the highway.” “But wha-da-ya do if you’re young and white and Jewish.”
Precisely. What do you do?
You invent.
Decades ago, Dylan spoke of his life story: “My past is so complicated you wouldn’t believe it, man.”
Not really.
He was Robert Zimmerman. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and spent his youth in Hibbing, Minnesota. His childhood in that far-flung outpost of the Diaspora was as Jewish as it could be. The Zimmermans attended the local synagogue. His father, Abe, was the president of the local B’nai B’rith lodge. His mother, Beatty, was the president of the local Hadassah chapter. Young Bobby went to Camp Herzl. At the University of Minnesota, he was a member of Sigma Alpha Mu, a nominally Jewish fraternity.
Bobby Zimmerman might have had a Jewish education sufficient enough to have learned the history of Jewish disguises. That narrative would include: Jacob masquerading as his twin, Esau, in order to receive the blessing of his father, Isaac; Tamar disguising herself to entice her father-in-law, Judah; Joseph concealing his identity from his brothers; David feigning insanity to gain entry into the Philistine camp.
He might even have learned about the conversos, the Marranos — the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula who outwardly converted to Christianity, but who maintained their Jewish identities in secret.
Bobby Zimmerman became a master of disguise. He changed his name, his style, his voice, his music — everything was in a constant state of flux. Like the Jewish people itself, his life was a series of evolving personae. In “I’m Not There,” another cinematic interpretation of Dylan’s life, we find a series of stories about Dylan’s various personae over the years — midrashim, as it were, on Dylan — because, in fact, he really is not there. He is what we make of him — all the while, demanding the freedom to (re) create himself.
At certain points in his life, he all but denied being Jewish — saying that he had been an itinerant blues singer, or that he was from Gallup, New Mexico, or that he had been a carnival hand. He would say that he was of Native American stock.
And yet, he could not entirely erase his Jewishness.
In “Talkin’ Havah Nagilah Blues,” he claimed that it was a “foreign song I learned in Utah.”
His early song “With God on Our Side” contains a reference to the Nazis: “Though they murdered six million/In the ovens they fried/The Germans now too/Have God on their side” — one of the first (and to this day, one of the few) references to the Holocaust in American popular culture.
He recorded numerous songs with biblical motifs. In the movie, we hear the opening lines of “Highway 61 Revisited” — “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’ / Abe said, ‘Man you must be puttin’ me on.’” It is a musical reference to the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, which most Jews hear during liturgical “prime time” on Rosh HaShanah. Where is Highway 61? It is no longer Mount Moriah, no longer the ancient Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is in a place far more generic, far more American, far more open to interpretation – as Dylan himself insisted on being.
There is a famous candid photo of Dylan, adjusting his cardboard yarmulke as he walks away from the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where years later, his son Jesse would become bar mitzvah.
His “Neighborhood Bully” was perhaps the most vigorous defense of Israel ever recorded by an American singer.
As for his period of sojourn as an evangelical Christian? Another temporary disguise?
Dylan knows himself well. In his song “I Contain Multitudes,” he masquerades, once again, as Walt Whitman. He sings of all the identities that comprise him: Edgar Allan Poe, the Rolling Stones, Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones is not just a convenient rhyme; it is as if Dylan is his own archeologist, uncovering each layer and level of himself.
And then: “I’m just like Anne Frank…” Dylan sees himself as a Jewish teenage girl, hiding in an attic with her family from the Nazis. It is a profound moment of Jewish identification – in the same way as the Passover Haggadah inveighs Jews to see themselves as if they had personally come out of Egypt.
Because there has always been a piece of Dylan that is hiding in an attic of his own making.
When all is said and done (and all is probably not said and done), at the very root of his existence: Dylan was, and is, Bobby Zimmerman.
So, we return to the title of the movie — “A Complete Unknown.”
It was not simply a quote from the song “Like A Rolling Stone.”
Neither was it a reference to how young Bobby showed up with a guitar in the Village as “a complete unknown.”
Perhaps it is an assessment of Dylan himself — that he is, still, “a complete unknown.”
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin is co-founder/co-director of Wisdom Without Walls: an online salon for Jewish ideas (wisdomwithoutwalls.org) and contributing editor to Religion News Service. His most recent book is “Tikkun HaAm/Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism.”
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