Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

In Empire of Their Own, a worthy, scrupulous and curiously dull account of how immigrant Jews founded the state of mind known as ‘Hollywood’— first in America, then latterly throughout the wider world — its author, Neal Gabler, glosses their Diaspora from the European ghettoes and shtetls, thus: Carl Laemmle, born 1867 in Laupheim, a small village in south-western Germany, ‘…prevailed upon his father, a penurious land speculator, to let him come to America to seek his fortune. He would eventually found Universal Pictures.’ Adolph Zukor, who was born in the Tokay region of Hungary and orphaned as a child, ‘…was bundled off to an uncle nearby, a steely, bloodless rabbinical scholar. Lonely, independent and unloved, Zukor, like Laemmle, petitioned to leave for America and a new life. He would later build Paramount Pictures.’ Then there was William Fox, also from Hungary, whose parents were the émigrés, but whose experiences of ‘hawking soda pop, sandwiches and chimney black he would… parlay into the Fox Film Corporation’.

And of course there was Louis B. Mayer, who ‘had forgotten exactly where in Russia he had been born and on what day,’ and whose voortrek took him to Canada, then to Boston where he made money in the salvage business, before heading west to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin Warner left his wife and children in Poland, worked as a cobbler in Baltimore, brought his family over to the new world, then ‘…For years, he roamed the East and Canada, peddling notions from a wagon before finally settling in Youngstown, Ohio.’ Here Warner raised the four sons whose purchase of a broken film projector set them on the road to become the eponymous Warner Brothers.

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