Tyke or kike: Censorship in the Great Gatsbty

Tyke or kike: Censorship in the Great Gatsbty

I have recently found out that in certain versions of The Great Gatsby the word "kike" is edited to read "tyke". Well, according with the Oxford (or Oggsford) Dictionary:


kike: informal offensive a Jewish person.


tyke:  informal a small child

 Why did the original word was replaced? The following extract from Professor James L. W. West III's book "Making the Archives Talk" explains the motivations for this act of political correctness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings offer some examples of nervous editing. In one of the most memorable scenes in The Great Gatsby, for example, Nick Carraway is at a party in the apartment on West 158th Street that Tom Buchanan maintains for his trysts with Myrtle Wilson. Tom and Myrtle have invited some friends to come in for drinks. Nick finds himself talking with Myrtle’s sister, whose name is Catherine. This is a coarse crowd, not squeamish about what they say in conversation. Catherine brings up the liaison between Myrtle and Tom: “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to,” she says in a loud voice. Mrs McKee, a neighbour from elsewhere in the building, overhears the remark and, in the 1925 Scribners first edition, reveals how she might herself have fallen into a bad marriage: "“I almost made a mistake, too,’ she declared vigorously. ‘I almost married a little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: “Lucille, that mans ’way below you!” But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure’” (41).

Most editions of The Great Gatsby since 1925 print either “kyke,” Fitzgerald’s spelling from the manuscript, or the more commonly found “kike.” But within the first American paperback edition (published initially by Bantam Books in November 1945, five years after Fitzgerald’s death), one finds a plate variant on page 42. The variant occurs between the third impression of March 1946 and the fourth of March 1951. The word “kyke” becomes “guy.” As with Mencken’s revisions for the 1946 Treatise on the Gods, one notes the date and wonders whether the revelations about the Nazi death camps and, more generally, public awareness of the suffering of European Jews during World War II might have prompted the change. There is a further twist: in the 1974 Penguin Books edition of The Great Gatsby, timed to appear with the premiere of the Paramount movie version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, “kyke” becomes “tyke” (40). This alteration was carried forward into an undated Penguin Modern Classics resetting that is still for sale in the United Kingdom today.

Neither Bantam printing of The Great Gatsby includes a true textual note. The Bantam fourth impression of 1951, in which “kyke” becomes “guy,” carries the following statement on the final page of the text: “This Bantam book contains the complete text of the original edition. Not one word has been changed or omitted” (191). Neither of the two Penguin editions (with “tyke”) says anything about its text. The sentence does not offend as it should when “kyke” becomes "guy” or “tyke.” Of course it is the vulgar Mrs McKee who uses the word, not Fitzgerald or Nick, but for safety “kyke” was changed in both of these texts.

Source:
Making the Archives Talk: New and Selected Essays in Bibliography, Editing, and Book History.  University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011.  x, 150 pp.  Twelve essays, ten previously published, two new.