A Quintessential Dickensian Character Who Fled the Nazis To Live the American Dream

‘Half-Jew — Full Life: The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream’By Georgette BennettHeresy Press, 360 pages“Hitler made me a Jew,” said Gary “Pips” Phillips, born Gerd Philipsohn. His claim reminds me of my Polish friend, who liked to be called Max. I was teaching at the University of Gdańsk in 1979 and had just visited a vandalized Jewish graveyard in Brodwino, a residential neighborhood of Sopot, where I lived. My Polish colleagues refused to comment on what I had witnessed, but Max said: “When there are no more Jews in Poland, I will be the last Jew.”Pips, as he is called throughout Georgette Bennett’s extraordinary biography of a Dickensian character right out of “Great Expectations,” had an affectionate Jewish father and a rather cold German gentile mother. At 13, to her dismay, Pips declared his attachment to his father’s people, around whom he had always felt at home.Pips escaped four times from the Nazis and certain doom: Auschwitz, which he barely avoided by coming under the protection of a Nazi official. Pips promised after his final recapture not to escape again. He was bold to the point of recklessness, but he was also a charmer — not only seducing his way to safety with women, especially nurses, but even with Nazi officers. Unlike many Jews who Pips said would not look Nazis in the eye, he gazed at them, and his directness was interpreted as a forthright recognition of their authority.Georgette Bennett grew up with Pips as a mentor and acts as his Boswell, showing how this flexible and resilient man did what was required to survive. In one case, that meant informing on a fellow Jew. Not to do so would have meant that Pips too would have been on the way to the gas chamber. Although he felt guilty, he believed that to do otherwise would simply have sent two Jews to their deaths.Pips’s story reveals the contradictions in the Nazi regime—how Nazis officials could be brutal but also corrupt and craven, employing him on projects that fortified their own authority and prosperity. The adaptable Pips performed a range of jobs, becoming a glazier, for instance, that presaged his knack for thriving in postwar America. In the Bronx, the Pips saga continued as he worked for a photo agency and eventually became a co-owner; driven to compete, no matter what the obstacles.The through-line in this biography is Pips’s stubborn adherence to a Jewish identity. He was outraged when a rabbi endorsed the view that the Holocaust had a silver lining, resulting in over 50 museums dedicated to honoring the Jewish experience. Pips denounced a Jewish friend who married into the family of Nazi general Erwin Rommel.Ms. Bennett shows that Pips did not think of himself as a hero and did not deny his survivor guilt, and yet persevered, adopting a self-destructive young gay man, whose life ended in suicide, as did the lives of many Jews in Berlin after the war when peace brought with it the realization of how much they had lost. Ms. Bennett does not make an equation between a persecuted American homosexual and Pips’s own trauma. She does not have to, wisely allowing the story of that relationship to evolve naturally without undue commentary.Though Pips remained married to Olga, Ms Bennett acknowledges the strains in what became a tragic marriage. Pips remained an extrovert with an extraordinary sense of humor, saying that Paul Newman should play him in a movie, although Newman was not handsome enough. Pips habitually kissed virtually every woman in sight while prospering in a new land, becoming a materialistic American, owner of a much prized Cadillac. After selling his share in the photo agency he became an expert witness, paid to testify in copyright cases involving disputes between photographers and the magazines that published their work.Even into his 90s, Pips retained his wry sense of humor and a penchant for visiting strip clubs. Ms. Bennett understands how she became a component, so to speak, in the story only he could tell, and which he bestowed on her in the form of recordings about his life. His voice is clearly present throughout this biography, coming through in the sounding board of Ms. Bennett’s subtle sensibility. Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography.”

A Quintessential Dickensian Character Who Fled the Nazis To Live the American Dream

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