At the start of my 44-year career at the Jewish Light, one of my heroes was always on my short list of those I hoped to interview: Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning playwright and essayist. His works include “Death of a Salesman,” “The Crucible,” “The Price,” and “All My Sons,” among many others.

I was only 10 years old when “Death of a Salesman” had its Broadway debut, starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, the hapless salesman who wanted not merely to be “liked,” but “well-liked,” with his version of fulfilling the American dream of material success always beyond his grasp.

My late father, Harold Cohn, was a veteran shirt salesman, and when the film version came out in 1951, our entire family was captivated. Loman, who sold women’s hosiery for decades, was near the end of his rope. He was obsessed with achieving great prestige among his fellow salesmen so that scores of them would honor him at his funeral. He was intensely jealous of his neighbor Charley whose nerdy kid Bernard was achieving the academic and professional success that Willy’s sons, Biff and Happy could not. Willy’s patient and long-suffering wife, Linda, demanded that her ungrateful sons treat their Pop with respect. 

Needless to say, the black-and-white film version of “Death of a Salesman” had a deep impact on me, then only 12, one of two brothers, the son of a career salesman who was moved to tears watching the film. Years later, at Washington University, my drama teacher, the late and beloved Herb Metz, shared with his students the raging controversy among the East Coast the ater crowd. Miller, the son of Orthodox Jewish parents from Brooklyn was Jewish, but the religion or ethnicity of the Loman family in “Death of a Salesman” is never mentioned in the script. 

Yet critics and friends of Miller saw what they took to be Jewish elements in the play. Mary McCarthy chided her friend Miller by accusing him of writing a play about a Jewish family, disguised as a “universal family,” who could just as convincingly been portrayed by her own Irish-American family as by Jews. In a newspaper column she queried, “Why the disguise?” 

The controversy about the Jewishness of the Loman family raged on for decades more until Miller finally addressed the issue n his autobiography “Timebends.” He said Willy was based largely on his own Uncle Manny, who was Jewish and who, like Willy, took his own life when he realized he would never achieve his dreams.

I had two opportunities to ask Miller about the controversy, and just the anticipation of meeting him caused me to tremble as I tried to steadily hold on to my tape recorder. He came to St. Louis in 1980 to accept that year’s prestigious Roswell and Wilma Messing Award from the Associates of St. Louis University.

After Miller’s talk, I greeted him near the buffet table, and sheepishly said he had been one of my childhood heroes, and that my family loved the film version of “Death of a Salesman” starring Frederic March. “Well, I really did not like that version,” Miller said with a reassuring smile. “The director tried to make Willy seem crazy, instead of being at the end of his rope, and there is a difference.”

Trying to recover, I then asked Miller, “In your mind, did you identify Willy Loman as a specifically Jewish character, or did you intend Willy to be a ‘universal’ character?”

Miller responded very directly, “Yes, he was a Jewish character in my mind. But he is a lot of other things. In some ways he is. In some ways he isn’t. But in my mind, he was exactly what I said to you.” He noted that the play was popular all over the world, including Beijing, China. “From the particular, one can get to the universal. People draw universal application from the particular.”

I next had the opportunity to do a more extensive interview by phone with Miller in 2000, during the period when “Death of a Salesman” was marking its 50^th year since its Broadway debut.

Miller was relaxed and friendly during the interview. The one issue that he politely declined to discuss was his ill-fated marriage to Marilyn Monroe, who herself had converted to Judaism. “Bob, all of that (about Monroe) is in my book ‘Timebends,’ and there is nothing more that I wish to add about that part of my life.”