As Told to

Fifty years ago today, Jack Kerouac published On the Road, a drug and jazz-fueled novel chronicling what came to be known as the Rucksack Revolution. In artistic terms, of course, it inspired the Beat movement, whose resonances (coffeehouses, Greenwich Village, Ethan Hawke) are still very much with us. Fortunately, some of the old Beats are, too.

Throughout his career, Herbert Gold has taken a slightly different road by defending tradition while promoting rebellion. He believes in family, literacy, and moral decency, but also free love, midnight tokes, and madman writing binges. Like Whitman, Gold contradicts himself and contains multitudes: he's the missing link between your grandparents’ dry-goods store and your painter uncle's third floor walk-up on Delancey Street.

As one of the first Jews to bypass Columbia University's notorious quota system, Gold befriended that other Beat icon Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to Kerouac, then a young football recruit. Ginsberg wanted his new friends to hit it off, but as Gold recalls, Keruoac dismissed him almost immediately as a "smart kike." Gold earned a reputation for calling Kerouac out on his anti-Semitic and increasingly right-wing attitudes, and he was one of the first critics to lament Ginsberg's later work, which he felt was unbecoming of the poet's early, more focused promise.

As a critic, Gold would also spot the unmistakably Jewish resonance of the wild new style of 50's storytelling, practically writing the stage entrance for Norman Mailer: "The hipster-writer is a perennially perverse bar mitzvah boy, proudly announcing, 'Today I am a madman. Now give me the fountain pen.'"

Gold's own moment of fortune and fame came with the publication of his fourth novel, Fathers, which explores the relationship between his early bohemianism and his immigrant father's life in America. Part hipster diatribe, part coming-of-age autobiography, it became a bestseller and for a while made Gold a household name.

Now, at 83, Gold is as candid as ever. From Cleveland and New York to San Francisco and Haiti, he's kept his rucksack at the ready, remembering his Pentateuch and youthful madness while frantically waving his pen in the air.

Angel-headed hipster: Miles DavisON BEING NORMAN MAILER'S WHITE NEGRO (SORT OF):

Well, I describe myself as an old beatnik. I live less elegantly than my kids do. That's kind of my style—the sort of postwar graduate-student style. But I always liked a lot of stuff about the Beat period and the Beat people. I enjoyed the sexual freedom. I wasn't interested in being gay or bisexual, but I enjoyed the sense that you knew you could go ahead and do it. I didn't take a lot of drugs, but I was happy to smoke a joint now and then. I liked the music. You know, this sounds like a white guy talking about how he likes Miles Davis.

ON BREAKING THE COLOR LINE AT HARPER'S:

My first published story was plucked out of the slush pile at Harper's Bazaar. At that period, they didn't publish people like me. The editor, Mary Louise Aswell, asked me to change my name. I was a student at Columbia at the time, and you know what a thrill to get a story in a national magazine! She suggested that I add a u—that I call myself Herbert Gould, which didn't sound so explicitly Jewish. You know, there are Goulds who are not actually Jewish. Anyway, I agreed to do that because I was young and ambitious. But I came back to my dorm at Columbia feeling incredibly guilty and horrible. I called her the next morning and said I wanted my real name used. And she said, "We don't publish Jewish names in Harper's Bazaar." It wasn't her prejudice; it was company policy. But she was sympathetic with me and said OK. And the story was published in Harper's Bazaar under my real name, in the Christmas issue, which had 400 pages. But it was left out of the table of contents.

The obligatory visionary artist cigarette photo: GinsbergON DRINKING, FUCKING, AND DYING WITH ALLEN GINSBERG:

Once, at a restaurant in Paris, I saw Allen take out and play this funny little instrument. He sang this Buddhist country-rock song that went, "Eat when you eat, drink when you drink, fuck when you fuck, die when you die." There was something comical about his take on life. In fact, I think parts of his poetry that people take seriously are meant as comedy. Of course, he was also very much in earnest about his love life and about his various passions. When Sonny Barger, who was head of the Hell's Angels, sent a telegram to Nixon offering the services of the Angels as guerillas in Vietnam, Allen said he was gonna organize—and this is the phrase he used; I want to quote it exactly—“a disciplined corps of trained fairies to unzip the flies of the Hell’s Angels and blow them into peacefulness.” Well, it was very funny. And at the same time, there was a certain element of seriousness because he thought that if the Hell’s Angels only got good sex, they would relax—it was that kind of humor, what the carnies called “kidding on the square.”

ON TACKLING THE BEAT GENERATION'S DUMB JOCK:

I knew Kerouac through Ginsberg at Columbia when I was a student. When I first saw him, he was just a jock. He was given a football scholarship to Columbia. I don't remember how I first met him, but I know that Allen kept wanting me to be friends with him. Allen was like a mother hen; he wanted all his friends to be friends and he was trying to make us a Kerouac clique. He and I argued about only three things: We argued about his sexuality (not that I objected to his being gay, it was just that he wanted to convert me at that time); we argued about Saint Theresa, whom he followed; and we argued about Kerouac. Kerouac was a creep from the beginning, but I think his antisemitism didn't come out then because he was self-serving. He accepted all the help from Allen that he could. And he and Allen were briefly lovers. Poor guy died at, what was it, 47 or 48, and he was an old man when he died. And his becoming antisemitic developed along with his obesity and his alcoholism and his general falling apart, along with his becoming a right-winger. Remember, he supported the war in Vietnam. And he supported Nixon. I think his mind was pretty much gone.

On the road...to anti-semitism! (Sorry): KerouacON BECOMING A CHOSEN (AKA NICE JEWISH) WRITER:

The ethical standing of being Jewish appeals to me. I think Jews have something special to give. I do accept the idea, not that we're chosen by God to be wonderful, but that Jews have a mission to do certain things which are of virtue in the world and of help in the world. I think it comes down to the fact that heaven is very weak in the Jewish tradition. What happens when we die is we're buried and then when the Messiah comes we all come back to life. But we have to make it on Earth as it is; that's where our work should be done and where we're to enjoy life and where we're to make our memories and experience. It's one of the reasons so many Jews—all over the world but particularly in America—have become novelists. Because what the word novel means is new; a novel is news of the world. And we've had this traditional need to see the world as it is, and to do good for the world.

4'11" Fury: Not actually Edwards' grandmother, but how cute are those horses on her hat?THE AXIS OF CABBAGE

I’m a Korean-Irish Jew. My mom was born in North Korea and adopted at eight months by a Reform Jewish family. She was converted, went to Hebrew school, had a Bat Mitzvah and rebelled at 12 against everything, including Judaism. She didn’t raise me Jewish.

My grandmother was the one who was always pushing it. She gave me the history, taught me what Shabbat was. When I was 13, I accidentally started dating a Jewish guy. My grandmother was ready to marry us off the next day. He wanted to be a doctor. I ended up breaking up with him because, you know, I was 13, and she didn’t talk to me for two months. I call her the 4-foot-11 Yiddish Fury.

Eternal flame: Edwards as a rookie (the black hat means she's in training) BANGKOK'S THATAWAY
I originally came to Israel on Birthright—this was in 2004. I was a poor college student looking for something to do for winter break. Late one night I went onto Google and typed “free travel.” Birthright came up, so I applied. My grandmother was delighted to pay the deposit and next thing I knew I was on a plane to Israel. I was looking at Thailand originally. I’d never heard of Birthright.

I started dating one of the soldiers while I was there. (Birthright may be responsible for helping half of the IDF get laid.) It was really nice because I extended the trip and got to stay with his family. He was killed in the Netanya mall bombing in 2005. Just a few days ago, the IDF arrested the driver who took the suicide bomber to the mall. It’s still painful to read this stuff, but it doesn’t make me love Israel any less.

I’m not at all worried about war or terrorism. I feel safer here than I do alone on the streets in New York City. Even when the rockets landed in Kiryat Shmona two months ago, you don’t realize it. People wrote me frantic emails, and I wrote back: “I just got back from the bar, what are you talking about?” Israelis don’t live in fear at all.

One of the guys: Edwards with her Stroudsburg, PA "brothers"BROS BEFORE HOSE

In the States, I was in a rut. I originally went to school to be a marine biologist, and then I went premed. I transferred schools and ran out of money. Then I found the fire department and fell in love. I was a firefighter in the States for four years, in the Poconos. There weren’t that many Jews in my area, and the one that I did find turned out to be gay and left me for my landlord, who lived upstairs.

The fire academy training lasted eight months. I still find it kind of challenging being a woman in a male-dominated field. A woman coming into a fire department is looking for a boyfriend or husband—or so goes the conventional wisdom. And I’m only 5’6”, I’m blonde, I’m not an Amazon. I had to prove myself.

I ended up graduating close to the top of my class. The guys in the States were like my family. Here, I’m working in the Kfar Saba station and I’m still feeling it out. Everybody’s really nice but I have to start all over again. Israel tends to be kind of chauvinistic sometimes. Although there are five female firefighters here, I’m the only paid one. The biggest professional difference between here and the States is the way firefighters in Israel respond when a call comes through. In the States, it’s immediate. It’s much more lax in Israel.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire: Edwards is the one on the leftANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

Every Israeli always asks, “Why did you move here?” They’re either happy, or they think you’re really confused, or they think you’re dumb.

Why did I move here? On the first day of my Birthright Trip, we went to the Wailing Wall. I didn’t know the protocol for approaching the Wall, but they told me to write a note and slip it into the cracks, so I wrote something about a close relative who had died. I went up and just started crying. It’s a very profound experience even if you’re not religious. This little old lady standing next to me grabbed my hand and whispered, “It’ll be okay.” That’s when I realized this was really going to mean something to me.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY

Not everyone finds the Holy Land so hospitable: Jeff Koyen explores why Israelis are pricks. In fact, fewer and fewer young American Jews think Zionism is relevant to their lives, says David Shneer, and maybe that's not the end of the world. (Stefan Kanfer disagrees.) Religious conservative David Klinghoffer thinks God would be OK with this development. But how can everyone ignore a country where the people, as Miriam Libicki ably documents, are so incredibly hot?