Eddie’s repressed Jewishness is embodied by his boarder Zaretsky (David Margulies), a veteran Thespian of the Yiddish theater who tells Eddie: “You came to the melting pot and melted-melted away. " Eddie refuses to believe newspaper stories of the Nazi death camps, driving Zaretsky in a horrific scene to recall the pogroms he witnessed as a child in Russia. Gardner touches such heights without relinquishing his status as a comic writer in a class with Neil Simon. Even the wishful sentimentality of Eddie defeating a pair of mob guys can be seen as a kind of pop-modern folk tale. Pain and humor are fused by director Daniel Sullivan and a savory cast. In a career performance, Judd Hirsch makes Eddie the tragicomic exemplar of every American who fights to keep the melting pot from becoming an acid bath.
