PLAYMAKERS: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America, by Michael Kimmel
The toy story is not a goy story. If you are American, many of the things you grew up playing with were designed by Jews.
That’s the big reveal of Michael Kimmel’s “Playmakers,” an endearing if cluttered history of how childhood was defined and commodified in this country over the course of the 20th century.
The project started as “a modest family memoir.” Kimmel is a great-great-nephew of Morris Michtom, born Moshe Charmatz in a Minsk shtetl. After faking his own death to escape conscription from the Russian Army and making it to Manhattan, Michtom invented, with his wife, Rose, the American teddy bear. (“The only software that’s never going to be obsolete,” as one of many other writers Kimmel speeds by put it.)
Michtom went on to found the Ideal Toy Company, though the author saw none of its riches. “No Book-of-the-Month Club for my sister and me,” he writes a little bitterly of the perks showered on company executives. “No dogwoods. No big box of the newest toys every holiday season. And certainly no inheritance.”
Kimmel overcame these deprivations to become a sociologist specializing in gender, founding a center for the study of masculinity at SUNY Stony Brook and writing books with titles like “Guyland” and “Angry White Men.”
Gender proves rich ground in Toyland as well, from the assignment of pink to masculine and blue to feminine that prevailed a hundred years ago — soon mysteriously reversed — to the successful rebranding of Hasbro’s G.I. Joe as “action figure” rather than toy soldier or doll.
The Benjamin Spock-sanctioned power of model trains, for fathers and sons, gets a psychosexual reading worthy of a Hitchcock movie.
“The clattering sounds of the tracks, the fake smoke puffing from the engine, provided a way for them to experience that glorious freedom of the open road (before cars took over), the virilizing power of the train,” Kimmel theorizes. “All from the safely confined space of home.”
Curiously for a book that sometimes resembles a catalog, so replete are its references, there is mention of the author Charlotte Zolotow, but not her classic picture book “William’s Doll,” which inspired the “Free to Be … You and Me” song. “Playmakers” introduces us to the Toys “R” Us founder Charles Lazarus, but doesn’t consider the chain’s relatively recent move, with Target and others, away from the binary in their aisles.
As if in colorful hopscotch chalk, Kimmel traces a line from the original, somewhat sad-faced teddy, inspired by a political cartoon depicting President Theodore Roosevelt refusing to kill an injured bear, to the Care Bears of the 1980s, a late collaboration with a greeting-card company from the Bronx-born developer and marketer Bernard Loomis, a.k.a. “The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning.”
Kimmel’s tone is celebratory as much as exploratory, arguing that Jews were uniquely positioned to thrive in American toy entrepreneurship.
Why? Partly because they were excluded from more established, WASP-dominated lines of work. Partly because earlier generations sprang from economic deprivation far worse than not having a row of dogwood. Partly because they were also making inroads in complementary fields: retail, media (the founding editor of Parents magazine, George Hecht, bought and expanded F.A.O. Schwarz), developmental psychology.
And partly because the Jewish traditions of humor, education and entertainment were closely adjacent to the task of play.
Consider one daring 1930s novelty item that allowed gentiles and others to safely cosplay the big-nosed, intellectual Jew: “Groucho glasses were a kind of sartorial safe trayf,” Kimmel writes, “a cultural appropriation that was also culturally sanctioned.”
Concerned as it is with the business of fun, “Playmakers” can’t help being fun to read, in a patchwork, Raggedy Andy sort of way. It brims with remember-this and dusts off the forgotten. Beyond Barbie, that billion-dollar, overdetermined femme of franchise, we are reacquainted with Betsy Wetsy, Chatty Cathy and Flossie Flirt, Silly Putty, Tiddlywinks (né Tiddledy Winks) and the not-at-all-Chinese Chinese checkers.
But Kimmel gets easily distracted and diverted, like a kid hopped up on Pez: suggesting, for example, that those model trains might have also appealed because they were “a space of successful assimilation”; throwing down clauses like “a sea change was starting to coalesce”; and spending an awful lot of time on comic books, well thumbed by other scholars and, in fiction, Michael Chabon. You kind of want to give “Playmakers” a Vyvanse prescription.
This book explains well how children were liberated: once small adults who might be helpful on the farm or in the factory, later tabula rasas with Etch a Sketches (a French invention that does not fit into Kimmel’s scheme).
It stops short of drawing the full circle to how America’s adults became children, with stuffed animals pinned on the lapels of Olympic athletes, Labubu dolls dangling from designer handbags … and an Apple store selling iThing after iThing on the site formerly occupied by the world’s most famous toy emporium.
PLAYMAKERS: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America | By Michael Kimmel | Norton | 432 pp. | $32.99
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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