This question is raised in very concrete terms by the appearance of What We Talk About When Talk About Anne Frank, the new volume of short stories by Nathan Englander, at the same time as the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, which features Englander’s translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic text. The story collection declares its quandaries in its title, an allusion to the famous Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Englander’s story of that name copies Carver’s basic situation—two couples in conversation, getting gradually more intoxicated and more dangerously honest. By putting Anne Frank in the title, Englander marks his story as Jewish, but in a particular way: The juxtaposition of Carver and the Holocaust is both a declaration of his own fictional territory and a blatantly bad joke.

The big question about Englander’s work, since his sensational debut collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges appeared in 1999, is whether his stories transcend their jokey premises to achieve some higher meaning, or simply offer a kind of Jewish minstrelsy. Englander himself is aware of this danger, as he made clear in the story “The Tumblers,” in his first book. This story imagines the fate of the holy fools of Chelm, the town celebrated in Jewish folklore, during the Holocaust. Englander has them escaping deportation to a concentration camp by boarding a train full of circus performers, then posing as a tumbling act in order to survive. The story climaxes with the Chelmites, dressed in pitiful costumes, putting on an incompetent show in front of an audience of Nazis.

The story strives to be a parable, but, as with much of Englander’s work, the more closely you read it, the less coherent the parable seems to be. After all, the crime of the Nazis was not primarily to humiliate Jews; nor can the Jews during the Holocaust be thought of as performers. And if the idea is to show what happens when folktale innocence meets human evil, that was already done supremely well by Isaac Bashevis Singer; inevitably, one reads Englander’s tale as a pale imitation of Singer.

What is distinctive about the Englander story is its sentimentality, which is another way of saying its failure to trust the subject and the reader, its insistence on underscoring the tragedy of the situation with cues and nudges. One such nudge comes when a young Jewish girl is shot by a German soldier: “The bullet left a ruby hole that resembled a charm an immodest girl might wear.” Another comes when the Holocaust is described as “unmatched feats of magic performed with the trains. They go away full … and come back empty, as if never before used.” (This kind of mock-naiveté has more in common with Roberto Benigni than with Singer.)

Where “The Tumblers” makes sense, however, is as an interrogation of Englander’s own treatment of the Holocaust and of Jews. Is writing about these things the way he does equivalent to forcing the innocent Jews of Chelm to dress up and play tricks for a hostile world? For there is indeed something potentially exploitive about the high-concept premises of Englander’s stories about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews. In “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” a moneyed WASP suddenly decides that he has a Jewish soul, and begins to live Jewishly, to the outrage of his disbelieving wife. In “Reb Kringle,” a Hasid with a big belly and beard makes his living as a department-store Santa. In the title story, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” a Hasid is told by his rebbe to go to a prostitute when his wife won’t sleep with him.

The wager of each of these stories is that the comic premise will build and topple over into liberating outrage—as Roth does in early stories like “The Defender of the Faith” or “Eli, the Fanatic”—or else deepen into a Malamud-style magical realism. But the truth is that Englander’s talent is not perfectly suited to either of these purposes, and his stories often seem to end where they begin, with the punchline of their premise. That is when the threat of minstrelsy appears—the possibility that readers will laugh at these stories only as familiar Jewish shtick.

Englander is at his best in a more familiar and old-fashioned kind of realism, in which he simply explores the common humanity behind the surface unfamiliarity of Hasidic or Orthodox life. Englander, who was raised Orthodox on Long Island, is well-situated to do this, just as Sherwood Anderson did it for the inhabitants of his invented Winesburg, Ohio; and a story like Englander’s “The Wig”—in which a Hasidic matron’s disappointed sexual feelings are sensitively imagined—puts the reader in mind of Anderson’s compassionate realism.

Thirteen years later, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, the same impulses are still at war in Englander’s fiction. Once again, he is prone to high-concept stories that trade on the obvious incongruity of Jews—especially old or Orthodox Jews—doing profane things. In the title story, two couples—one pair of assimilated American Jews, one pair of baalei tshuvah from Israel—smoke a lot of pot and get the munchies, and the sight of black hats getting high is a large part of the story’s point. In “Camp Sundown,” a group of Holocaust survivors, convinced that another elderly man is really a concentration camp guard in disguise, murder him in a bout of senile revenge.

Worst of all is “Peep Show,” a story about a former Orthodox Jew who goes into a Times Square peep show and, instead of a stripper, is greeted by his therapist, his mother, and his childhood rabbi. The book’s high-powered blurbs describe Englander as “edgy” and “audacious,” but this fantasia on Jewish guilt is like something Woody Allen would have rejected for being too broad around the year Englander was born. (There are even shrink jokes: “I think it would be best if you paid for my peep. Thus far in your therapy, we’ve constructed a relationship based partly on financial remuneration.”)

Both the shtick and the psychology here are so contrived that it brings home one of the dilemmas Englander faces as a writer: simple belatedness. To rebel against a puritanical Jewish household in the year 2012 is inevitably to repeat the gestures of those who did the same thing in 1932 and 1952 and 1972, and it would take a writer of genius to give that rebellion a genuinely new fictional form.

Even then, the rebellion itself would not speak to today’s young Jews in the way that Roth’s did a half-century ago. If postmodernism, in the 1960s and 1970s, gleefully exposed the nullity of traditional authority and the corrupt partiality of every account of the past, then the post-postmodernism of the writers who emerged in the 1990s is an attempt to rescue the concept of authority and to regain contact with an authentic past. The literary standard-bearer for this generation was, of course, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s achievement was truly dialectical: Instead of simply rejecting postmodern fictional techniques and returning to an outworn mode of realism (à la Jonathan Franzen), Wallace pushed through the artificiality and self-consciousness of postmodernism to create a new, self-critical sincerity. His achievement, one might say, was to make sentimentality legitimate again.

Continue reading: The chains of tradition

Measure patriotism however you will, but Joseph Heller—2nd Lieutenant, 340th Bombardment Group, 488th Squadron, stationed on the island of Corsica—was intimately acquainted with danger. Knowing that the average life expectancy of a bombardier in heavy combat was three minutes, he could not have been faulted for asking: Why me? And his imagined interlocutor could have logically responded, as Maj. Danby does in Heller’s Catch-22: “Suppose everybody on our side felt that way?” To which Heller, like the reflexively subversive Yossarian, his kindred spirit and most enduring literary creation, would have to answer: “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way.”

In American letters, the term “postwar” connotes a decisive, epochal rupture; it’s a time-stamped signifier of a modern sensibility buffeted by prosperity, psychoanalytic terminology, and the heady prospect of civil and sexual liberation that broke an overstuffed century in half. But the emphasis in literary histories, especially those written about Jewish American novelists, has usually fallen on the post and not the war. Approximately 550,000 American Jews fought in World War II, and their shared sacrifice, according to historian Deborah Dash Moore, made them “agents of a shift in the legitimization of American Jewish identity.” No major novel has been written about this experience.

Jews did write postwar war novels, of course, probing and essential ones. Mailer’s social-realist The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, shocked readers with its naughty language and insufficient moral clarity, questioning as it did the motives of good soldiers. Formally, though, it seems a holdover from the 1930s proletarian novel. Heller’s Catch-22, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, tipped the blasphemy scale on its side, treating the logic of war as an elaborate, absurdist con game. Though its specific brand of carnivalesque lunacy was tied to one Brooklyn Jew’s experience of World War II, the novel’s countercultural cachet soared a few years after publication, when the war in Vietnam sank into quagmire. For Alfred Kazin, Heller’s novel is “really about the Next War, and thus about a war which will be without limits and without meaning, a war that will end when no one is alive to fight it.” Catch-22 has become many things in the intervening half-century, including assigned reading for just about every high-school student, but its cumulative effect is still shocking.

For Tracy Daugherty, author of Just One Catch, the first full-length biography of Joseph Heller, published this year, the experience of combat is key not just to Heller’s most justifiably celebrated novel but to the comic mindset that would invent at least a few of the terms by which 20th-century America could begin to process and understand itself. Heller’s entire career—which, in Daugherty’s telling, began in the “womb” at the front of a B-25 bomber, moments before the plane took a deep and terrifying dive to avoid enemy flak—was a high-octane delivery system for complaint: He distilled a life’s worth of grievances about war, mortality, women, and religion into a hilarious and stylistically sophisticated form yet still couldn’t quite attain a seat at the table of recognized genius.

You would think that the lasting cultural import of his work would be enough to qualify Heller as a great American writer, or even a great Jewish writer, but Daugherty’s book makes clear that neither designation ever stuck. Born in 1923 to Russian immigrant parents in Yiddish-speaking Coney Island, and after attending NYU on the G.I. Bill, Heller began his literary career as an imitator, aping the terse, dialogue-based, and decidedly goyish rhythms of Hemingway, William Saroyan, and John O’Hara, whose collective convictions a mature Heller would later describe as “hard-nosed, sexist attitudes … embodying … implicit assessments of materialism, wealth, Babbitry, and ideals of masculinity and male decency that I … accepted as irreducibly pure.” The New Yorker rejected his early stories, telling him to write from his own experience. He took the magazine’s advice, but it never published his work.

Just One Catch unfolds as a kind of tragicomedy about a genuinely admired, widely read author who ached to be called extraordinary. Even Heller’s obnoxious bad behavior, which included rampant infidelity, arrogance, and a devilish insistence on taking the best portion of food on the table for himself, seems fairly run-of-the-mill behavior for a mid-century male novelist. A man of insatiable appetites, Heller wanted to write Great Books, but more than that—in an age of monumental literary hubris, just before postmodernism arrived to loosen the threads of historical continuity—he wanted to write outsize, indispensable books. Later in life, he would self-deprecatingly temper this disappointment, in terms that seem inarguable. He never wrote anything as good as Catch again, but as he astutely boasted to one interviewer: “Who has?”

Continue reading: A ‘profound, unstated Judaism’

Count me among those perplexed by my esteemed colleague Liel Leibovitz’s scorching evaluation last week of Philip Roth, and particularly by his bizarre decision to focus the bulk of his contrarian ire on Portnoy’s Complaint, which is quite probably the most misunderstood piece of Jewish satire since Leviticus. I am an ardent admirer—if not quite an unquestioning acolyte—of the aging monarch of Jewish-American letters, so I was intrigued to see Leibovitz expand his analysis yesterday to later works like American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, etc. (if you’re reading this, I expect you can rattle them off as facilely as I can). The sheer scope of those later novels—their difficult engagement with Big Themes promised even by the poetic muscularity of their titles—would seem at least to undermine Liel’s characterization of Roth as a myopic vulgarian incapable of seeing past the end of his decidedly Mediterranean proboscis.

But for Leibovitz, Roth’s lavishly praised later work simply proves his point. Roth’s unwillingness—or, less charitably, inability—to transcend the wee worried world of Weequahic, to successfully create a vision of “the world writ large” in the manner of a Saul Bellow (who has, Leibovitz points out, actually won the Nobel Prize, nyah nyah nyah), is indicative of an inherent weakness, even unworthiness, as a writer. I don’t take issue with Leibovitz’s finding a lack of universality in Roth’s work. I just disagree that universality was ever the point. I can’t think of what would offend Liel more than the charge of being conventional, but he is clearly subscribing to the conventional wisdom that Roth uses the Jews as a stand-in for Americans. And, as usual, the conventional wisdom is wrong: For Roth, America is the jumping-off point to explore the considerably more ancient and—dare I say it?—universal question of the Jews.

To truly understand—and thus, to properly excoriate—Roth, Leibovitz suggests that we first examine his evolution as a writer. He makes much of a quote from the introduction Roth wrote for the 30th-anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus, in which Roth expresses his youthful joy and surprise that anybody from the world-at-large would be interested in the “tribal secrets” he felt compulsively drawn to disclose.

(I recognize the feeling he describes; it is, I imagine, virtually identical to how I felt when, aged 11, I discovered Portnoy’s Complaint mistakenly placed in the children’s section at the Omaha JCC library, and was immediately overcome with violent glee at finding something so raw, so carnal, so unabashedly hilarious sharing shelf space with numbingly stentorian YA Holocaust fiction and reams of insipid three-color picture books instructing me to shape matzoh balls with my aproned mother. If such a happy accident is possible in the e-reader-driven future and the cheerfully anguished vulgarity of Alexander Portnoy liberates even one other stultified young reader from the dutiful tyranny of Shavuos With Danny and Debbie, Philip Roth will have done his duty to humanity.)

But back to the “historical” Roth’s later novels, with their flashy A-plots concerning race relations and urban decay and Vietnam and the souring of the American Dream and all the other Baby Boomer narshkeit that are apparently the critical qualifications for admittance into the realm of Great Male American Novelist. (I’ve always found it curious that what I consider to be Roth’s most dazzling strengths—his dizzyingly articulate interior conflict, finely drawn scenes of domesticity, and wrenchingly observed parent-child relationships—are so often disparagingly consigned to so-called “women’s fiction.” This is an author that, as the writer Daphne Merkin once assured me at a cocktail party, “speaks for all men”). Here, Liel accuses of Roth of slipping only further into myopia while failing to see that Roth’s work seeks primarily and spectacularly to interrogate the theme of myopia itself.

The philosopher George Steiner is about one-tenth the fiction writer Roth is, but he has a good line in his novel The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., in which a group of exhausted Israeli Nazi hunters capture an ancient Adolf Hitler from his hiding place deep in the Amazonian jungle: “There are only two kinds of Jews left [after the Holocaust]; those that are dead, and those who are a little crazy.” Roth has sought to understand the darkest recesses and labyrinthine complexities at the heart of that craziness: the huddled insularity and the worldly expansiveness; the irrational hysteria and the atavistic fear; the excessive self-loathing and excessive self-love; the coziness and the claustrophobia; the outrage and the fatalism; the guilty righteousness and the righteous guilt; the inescapable, almost pathological compulsion to relate, at least subconsciously, nearly every aspect of life back to the all-encompassing Jewish Question, an unbroken chain of doubt, faith, and self-examination reaching from an elderly Aramean in the desert hearing a mysterious voice telling him to lop off his foreskin with a bit of sharp stone, to me writing sarcastically about him on a MacBook Pro at my desk in Manhattan.

Liel quotes Alfred Kazin saying that Bellow was “too full of his being a novelist to be a human being writing.” Apt as the observation may be, it couldn’t help put me in mind of an altogether more hostile quote from George Bernard Shaw in one of his crankier moods: “[The Jews] had better stop being Jews and start being human beings.” It’s a ludicrously insulting statement—as it was no doubt intended to be—but its implicit challenge is hard to shake, and the struggle and resistance to do just that, more than any tales of knife-wielding mothers or Brenda Patimkin-esque materialism or perverse sexual fantasies about unsuspecting blondes with preternaturally tiny noses is of course the great and most enduring “tribal secret” that Roth’s work reveals.

Leibovitz is right: Philip Roth is a narcissistic writer. But it’s not his narcissism that he so subversively and brilliantly, lovingly and scathingly and loudly and above all, uncompromisingly, exposes. It’s ours.

The Grapes of Roth
Roth Redux

Last week, I wrote an unflattering column about Philip Roth. I focused most of my attention on Portnoy’s Complaint, and argued that its author was undeserving of his vaunted perch atop our collective esteem. Many of our readers were incensed, and most offered a common criticism—by ignoring Roth’s later work, went the cri de coeur, I was robbing him of his finest moments as a writer. In one variation or another, the question rang out: What about American Pastoral? Or The Plot Against America?

It’s a fair argument, and to address it we have to begin by taking stock of Roth’s evolution as a writer. Like Henry James, he has produced a body of work that is best experienced chronologically. Read your way through James from The Europeans to The Ambassadors, say, and you see a sketcher of tender, confined psychological scenes bloom into an artist capable of capturing transcendence, freedom, and others of the most elusive spirits that beat wild in human chests. What would you see if you read your way from Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis?

At first, youth, breathlessness, bravado, playfulness, glee. A child who grew up on the fault lines of modern America’s fiercest tremors—the Great Depression, World War II—Roth felt just enough of a quiver to sense the menace creeping underground but not enough of the heat to be forged, like steel, into a man whose words and deeds cut quick. Hence, the early novels. Hence, the giddy denunciations of community, of class, of expectations.

Roth himself summed it up best in an introduction he wrote for the 30th-anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus: “With clarity and with crudeness, and a great deal of exuberance, the embryonic writer who was me wrote these stories in his early 20’s. … In the beginning it simply amazed him that any truly literate audience could seriously be interested in his store of tribal secrets, in what he knew, as a child of his neighborhood, about the rites and taboos of his clan—about their aversions, their aspirations, their fears of deviance and defection, their underlying embarrassments and their ideas of success.”

His own idea of success soon led Roth away from these exuberances and toward loftier realms, the ones, possibly, he imagined more befitting of truly literate writers and their audiences. Sometime in the 1970s, Roth went meta.

There is, for example, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s famous alter ego, being born as a creation of Peter Tarnopol, another of Roth’s alter egos, in the 1974 novel My Life as a Man. And there is Zuckerman again, five years later, in the lovely The Ghost Writer, sharing a stuffy country house with E.I. Lonoff, a thinly veiled version of Bernard Malamud, maybe, or Henry Roth, as well as a mystery woman who may or may not be Anne Frank. By 1993, with the uproarious Operation Shylock, we have Roth—or someone who bears his name and his facial features, or both—twirling cloaks and daggers in Jerusalem, chasing doppelgängers and observing history unfold, as only post-modern history can, like bits of mosaic falling off an ancient wall.

This stage in Roth’s career was a bacchanal, and like all festivities it, too, had to end. When it finally did, the historical stage began.

To this period—lasting roughly from American Pastoral in 1997 to The Plot Against America in 2004—belong the works that seem to inspire the greatest awe in Roth’s readers. As is evident anywhere from newspaper columns to Tablet’s inflamed comments section, the perceived wisdom holds that Roth finally matured in this period into the sort of writer he was always meant to be, America’s finest portraitist, on whom nothing of the nation’s past and whims and ills is lost.

A close reading, however, reveals his canvass to be much smaller. Roth the historical is Roth at his most myopic, unconvincing, and insecure. Confined to Lonoff’s cottage, Roth was radiant; freed in a fictitious America where Charles Lindbergh is president and Jews are reviled, Roth is lost.

To make sense of history, he applies patterns: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Plot Against America are all told from a child’s point of view or revolve around memories constructed in childhood; all involve a once-Olympian hero falling to earth; and all are thrust into chaos by rampant, radical ideology shredding the fabric of what would have otherwise been an idyllic American society.

Continue reading: flightless narcissism

E.T.A. Hoffmann used to explain the wealth of imaginative figures that offered themselves to him for his stories by the quickly changing pictures and impressions he had received during a journey of some weeks in a post chaise, while still a babe at his mother’s breast.

What a child has experienced but not understood by the age of two he may never again recover, except in his dreams.

Many years ago I asked Aharon Appelfeld, the great Israeli novelist, why he did not write an autobiography—even though his best title, his only title, A Child of Our Time, had already been used.

“If I do,” he answered, “I will no longer be able to write my novels.”

The notion that the exploration of one’s own life, particularly one’s childhood, will drain the well of imagination is of course common enough. Call It Sleep and Midnight’s Children are among the greatest novels of the last century. That neither Henry Roth nor Salmon Rushdie, having re-experienced, having revivified, their boyhoods, could produce another work remotely as beautiful is enough to give anyone pause.

Nonetheless, the answer Appelfeld gave to my question—as he surely knows—is both true and insufficient. A more complex response lies in his small 1993 book Beyond Despair, which is as profound a meditation on the relation of memory to imagination as anything I know. Once, at Boston University, he gave a lecture based on one of its chapters. Afterward, my students stood together, not moving, not speaking, in the courtyard. “I can’t stop trembling,” said one of them, as I approached this little grove of human aspens. Holding the book now, I can’t help trembling myself.

Appelfeld, who survived a concentration camp as a child before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, begins by describing the equivocal relationship he and all survivors had with memory. The first task for all of them was not to remember. “Anyone who underwent the Holocaust will be as wary of memory as of fire. … People learned how to live without it the way one learns to live without a limb of one’s body.”

Naturally enough, among this remnant the need to think and write about what had befallen them could not be repressed. But how to do so? The disproportion between the events themselves and the means to express them was too great: “The sights were dreadful and immense, and words are frail and impotent.” The inevitable result was a kind of distortion, a falseness, a misemphasis. The testimonies and memoirs were written in haste, without skill, with no sense of proportion or introspection. In each a battle raged between revelation and concealment. Most were marked by “a search for relief” and not the search for truth. Moreover, in Israel there existed a sense of shame, a feeling of guilt, that exerted a constant pressure to celebrate brave Ghetto fighters and partisans and noble peasants who risked their lives to save Jews, rather than expose the overwhelming majority who were at best indifferent or actively tried to kill them.

But even worse than faulty or distorted recollections were those unfettered by personal experience at all. These writers of fiction were attracted to “the bizarre, to the exceptional, to the speculative and—far worse—to the perverted.” Appelfeld does not give an example, but I will: the Grand Guignol and inauthentic horror in The Painted Bird.

Do not think that Appelfeld exempts his own work from such criticism. On the one hand, “memory itself proved to be the enemy of my writing.” But when he turned to imagination, his poetry and fiction consisted mainly of sentimental excess and cries to God. Caught between a memory that failed him and an imagination he could not trust, he came to the turning point when he stopped writing about himself and instead focused on a Jewish girl with similar experiences. “Miraculously, as though with a magic wand, my compulsive memory was removed” and in its place came a redefinition of memory itself: not so much recollection, or thoughts that could be put in words, but certain sights, sounds, smells, colors, sensations, what, significantly, Hoffmann called “quickly changing pictures and impressions.”

Then, in the place of actual memory came the freedom to experience, or re-experience, what we can call privileged moments: something as simple, Appelfeld tells us, as a few twigs floating on the surface of a pond, the sun on them, the way they shiver in the wind and turn, and turn again, on the current. In such moments, and in their recollection, one may undergo a feeling of enchantment that Appelfeld calls “true memory,” or “inner memory,” or “a warm emotion.” (Here we should very much think of such moments, such recapturings—a madeleine in a teaspoon, an uneven paving stone, a few notes from a sonata—in Proust, who has been neglected as one of Appelfeld’s masters.) Once in possession of “inner memory,” Appelfeld was able to write not “what happened but what had to have happened.” That is say, his work, moved from history to art, not only to his Tzili, the Story of a Life but to all the other wonderful novels as well.

***

But we have yet to answer fully the question: why no A Child of Our Time? The answer may be in another Appelfeld book that, like Tzili, is called A Story of a Life. This is less an autobiography than what Appelfeld called it, “segments of contemplation and memory,” just as Beyond Despair is called “reflections and feelings,” or, elsewhere, “a series of sensations and images and above all emotions.” In that non-autobiography Appelfeld says what I think any sensitive reader might have deduced from his entire oeuvre: that, in fact, about those six years of war, “I don’t remember, and that’s the whole truth.”

Continue reading: Wonder

But I can’t sign on to his analysis of Philip Roth. I think he gets a few palpable hits on Portnoy’s Complaint, but I don’t know if you can extend these criticisms to the total of Roth’s ouevre. Despite its title, The Human Stain isn’t driven by cock. Well, mostly not. Somewhat not. Okay, it is a little bit. Anyway, read the essay, and get angry!

The Grapes of Roth

Philip Roth needs no introduction. Now 78, he has been awarded every major literary commendation America has to offer and is beloved by generations of readers, American Jews in particular.

But while Roth’s merit as a writer is a measure of personal taste—like all art, it makes some swoon and leaves others unmoved—his place in the American canon deserves a second look. Like most second looks, this one, too, reveals the pockmarks and blemishes that the besotted beholder might have ignored the first time around. And while Roth’s body of work is multitudinous and diverse, any discussion of his writing must begin with Portnoy’s Complaint, the book that cemented Roth’s reputation and whose lascivious ghost still haunts much of the now-elderly writer’s novels, as well as those of his young successors, the current generation of American writers.

Because Roth is fond of similes—there’s an amusing bit in Portnoy’s Complaint in which the youthful Alexander hears an elderly man say he’d slept like a log and is moved, Roth writes, by “the full force” of likening one thing to another—let us attempt to rethink him thusly: Portnoy’s Complaint, as well as most of Roth’s other novels, is like a nasty tumble down a steep slope—a throbbing rush of endorphins as it unfurls, a bit of fun for those watching from the sidelines, but, overall, little more than a mess of broken bones and long-term aches.

In keeping with the medical mindset, let us begin looking at Roth’s legacy by parsing the pseudo-clinical definition preceding the novel that catapulted him to stardom. “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he writes, is “a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.”

This quip serves as a pithy history of American letters. What, after all, was Walt Whitman if not a bard of the struggle between selfish, sexual urges and the call of society at large? What was Emily Dickinson if not a hermit cryptically communing with the culture? Or Hemingway, driven by his libido both to bedrooms and battlefields? Whether they believed in transcendence or predetermination, they shared a common, American faith in the individual and in his or her ability to emerge from the solipsistic fog that enshrouds us all and into the bright, well-lighted spaces we share with our fellow men. Put simply, while all American writers write first and foremost of the individual, the great ones are, to use a sterling phrase, large enough to contain multitudes; peek into Emerson, say, and see America in its entirety.

Do the same with Roth, and you’d be lucky to see much past New Jersey. That is because Roth’s primary preoccupation is Roth. This is most evident in Portnoy, a novel designed as a long rant on the analyst’s couch in order to permit its author the freedom to indulge in the brute vulgarities only confessions may comfortably contain. But read Roth’s subsequent novels, and you hear the same music of me: Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, Mickey Sabbath—they are all facsimiles of their creator.

That alone isn’t much reason to criticize Roth, but their recurring base obsessions are. Here, for example, is Portnoy, wailing about his former wife, whom he regretfully nicknames The Monkey. “The poetry she used to read to me at Antioch,” he writes, “the education she was giving me in literature, a whole new perspective, an understanding of art and the artistic way … oh, why did I ever let her go! I can’t believe it—because she wouldn’t be Jewish? ‘The eternal note of sadness—’ ‘The turbid ebb and flow of human misery—’ ” Roth leaves that sentence unfinished, with that bit from Sophocles standing on the precipice of a new paragraph. It’s a powerful and subtle note: Having received from his lover the gift of a literary education, he turns around and realizes that by leaving her his life has acquired much in common with Greek tragedies.

You don’t have to wait more than a line, however, before Portnoy’s mind wanders south: “Only,” he writes, “is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering—something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick. LET MY PETER GO! There, that’s Portnoy’s slogan. That’s the sotry of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words.”

It’s a perfect embodiment of Roth’s foundational move. First, set up a lofty premise, imbued with suffering and meaning and art, a furnace of emotions, every bit as universal as the great masterworks. Then, talk about your dick.

The superabundance of cock in Roth’s work is more than a stylistic choice aiming to shock and unnerve. It transcends even the fair accusations of chauvinism frequently lobbed at Roth by feminist critics and former lovers. It is his primary state of mind. Like a true artist, he feels that turbid ebb and flow very acutely; a delicate and accurate seismograph of suffering, he registers its minute tremors. But he knows no other way to deal with the burden than unzipping his fly. Whereas Whitman, most likely a closeted homosexual, tamed his libido and taught it wonderful poetic tricks, and whereas Dickinson exerted superhuman pressure and turned hers into a diamond of sublimation, Roth ejaculates. Because he is a talented writer, frequently this is pleasurable to observe. But he is never in possession of the loom—so elegantly mastered by his contemporary, Saul Bellow—that lets a writer process his or her bales of bile into beautiful fabrics that keep us warm.

None of this would have been too bad had Roth, befitting of writers of his modest ambitions and capabilities, taken his place in the second or third row of American literary lions. Instead, his intoxicating admixture of solipsism and lust made him the patron saint of a new generation of American Jewish authors, for whom writing is a torrent of self-obsessions, hang-ups, and put-ons, mitigated by nothing more than a thin veneer of intellectualism. Sam Lipsyte, for example, is Roth’s child; the angry, cynical, and foul-mouthed protagonist of his recent novel, The Ask, would have felt a shock of recognition had he run into Portnoy or Sabbath, and naming a female character Vargina is what Roth might have done had he grown up a few decades later, under the auspicious glow of Internet porn. Even Hollywood is in Roth’s debt: The creators of the eminently successful American Pie series took a page out of Roth’s book when they had their lead character masturbate by copulating with a pie, a sweeter version of Portnoy and his liver.

Roth’s appeal isn’t hard to understand. In an age when technological platforms and cultural edicts both favor a proliferation of the personal and the profane, he is the Grand Old Man, the master whose works are now gospel for anyone too lazy or selfish or dull to embark on the sort of exploration of individualism that has historically made American letters such a rich and blooming field. Those who grew up on Roth’s novels may be forgiven for believing that art entails not Dickinson’s measured sublimation but Roth’s uninhibited masturbation and were only too thrilled to follow his suit; it is, after all, much easier and, I imagine, more satisfying to crown the penis king and abandon morality, civility, responsibility, and all the other blocks with which we build, step by painstaking step, the bastions of a worthwhile society.

That must never happen. Whether we enjoy Philip Roth’s work or not, we’d do well to reconsider what he has wrought, and make sure that we fall on the right side in the eternal struggle between the heart and the groin. That, after all, is what great writing has always helped us accomplish; the rest is little more than self-gratification.

Just about everybody who has ever written about Miller’s life and work has felt it necessary to wrestle with the complexities of his feelings about Jews. The most recent example is Evan Hughes’ account in Literary Brooklyn, which dutifully describes the “obvious, if increasingly complicated, anti-Semitism” of Miller in his teen years; the anti-Jewish fervor of his early novel Moloch; and the “suspect pro-Semitism” of the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. As the Brooklyn-born son of first-generation German-American Catholics, Miller grew up in a time and place where resentment of the Jews who were overrunning the borough was typical if not ubiquitous. In his career as a writer and in his letters to friends and colleagues, Miller committed to paper plenty of awful anti-Semitic slurs. But he also doted on his Jewish wife (whom he referred to, at times, as “the Jewish cunt”), had dozens of Jewish friends (some of whom he loathed), fantasized about having unknown Jewish ancestors, and adored Yiddish literature—not only the lionized Isaac Bashevis Singer but also figures much less widely known in English, like the humorist Moyshe Nadir.

More than enough ink has been spilled, then, on the vexed question of how Miller felt about Jews, both in general and specifically—not least by the man himself, who addressed the canard of his anti-Semitism regularly not only in books but also in his correspondence. (“The big point, after my death,” he remarked to one colleague in 1971, “will be—how to explain my extraordinary predilection for the Jews!” And an assurance to Erica Jong in 1974: “You must know I am not” anti-Semitic. She affirmed as much in her meditation on Miller as an influence and friend, The Devil at Large.)

Perhaps a better way to commemorate the anniversary of Cancer’s paperback release would be to consider the less-frequently treated question of what American Jews have thought of Miller. Especially because, as it turns out, if you happen to have a battered paperback of Cancer on your bookshelf—and you do, right?—there’s a better than even chance it was one Jew or another who made that possible.

The 1961 Grove publication of Miller’s previously banned novel—in paperback, no less, a format in which it would be expected to sell in pharmacies and grocery stores, in racks in bus stations, and anywhere else cheap books could be found—was probably the single ballsiest move in modern American publishing. The law wasn’t dead-set against “dirty books” by then; Grove’s publication, led by owner Barney Rosset, of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been vindicated by the courts only a year or so earlier. But nobody knew how the law of obscenity would react to Cancer, which went far beyond Lawrence’s explicit love-making to exuberant, filthy pensées on art, death, and the distinguishing features of Parisian prostitutes.

At its outset, the book devotes a famous passage to describing what Miller’s narrator wants to do to a woman he calls Tania (based on Bertha Schrank) and whom he has already described, on the book’s third page, as “the loveliest Jew.” “O Tania,” he cries, “where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed.”

It was that sort of thing that set U.S. law enforcement into motion upon Grove’s publication of Cancer. In many U.S. cities, the paperback never made it onto shelves. The attorney general of Rhode Island told local wholesalers to return shipments to the publisher, and they all did; the same thing happened in towns like Amarillo, Texas, and Norfolk, Va. In suburban Chicago, a police chief decided he didn’t want stores in his town, Mount Prospect, to sell Miller’s book, and he got nearby suburbs—Des Plaines, Arlington Heights, Lincolnwood, Niles, Skokie—to pull all the copies from the shelves, too. The lawsuits began.

Grove had promised financial and legal support to anyone arrested for selling or distributing Cancer, and the ACLU—defending an alleged dirty book for the first time in its history—helped out, too. In the ensuing months the book was the subject of more than 60 individual trials across the country. Judges weighed in on the question of whether the First Amendment protected Miller’s writing.

Many Jews spoke up in Miller’s defense, putting their careers on the line in supporting the book.

In Chicago, for instance, the Tropic of Cancer case was heard by Judge Samuel B. Epstein. A friend of notorious Mayor Richard J. Daley, Epstein was part of a family that perfectly symbolized the career trajectories of American Jews in successive generations. His father, Ephraim, had been educated at the Slobodka yeshiva and immigrated to Chicago to lead the Orthodox Congregation Anshei Kneseth; one of the judge’s sons, David, was a screenwriter blacklisted during the McCarthy purges.

Epstein might have been thinking of David, or he might have been thinking of his father’s landsleit who had not escaped Europe—Eichmann’s trial had been broadcast here just half a year earlier—when he noted in his decision that “recent history has proven the evil of an attempt at controlling the utterances and thoughts of our population.” Whatever his inspiration, Epstein ruled in favor of Americans’ right to buy and read Miller’s novel. The First Amendment lawyer Edward De Grazia has called Epstein’s decision “one of the best examples” of how some lawyers and judges transformed a few statements from a 1957 Supreme Court obscenity decision, Roth v. United States, into a sturdy First Amendment defense of dirty books that would protect not only Lawrence and Miller but also William Burroughs, the pornographic classic Fanny Hill, and eventually books like Portnoy’s Complaint, too.

Lots of other Jews had spoken up in favor of Miller’s novel: Richard Ellman and Harry Levin were among the literary scholars who testified to Cancer’s merits, and a number of the high-profile lawyers who tried the cases were Jewish ACLU members and stalwart free-speech advocates, including Elmer Gertz and Ephraim London. Grove’s chief counsel, who coordinated all the lawyers’ activities and tried a few of the appeals himself, was Norman Mailer’s cousin and literary agent, Charles “Cy” Rembar (né Zaremba), who would detail the controversies in his own popular book The End of Obscenity. Rosset, who had started the whole mess, funded Grove with money inherited from his father, a Jewish financier, and his edition of Cancer included a preface—referring to Miller as “the greatest living writer”—by Karl Shapiro, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who just a few years earlier had published a rather unsubtly titled collection of verse, Poems of a Jew.

Bradley R. Smith, a Hollywood Boulevard bookseller who was arrested for selling Cancer (and who would go on to a career as a prominent Holocaust denier) went so far as to say that he received support, after his arrest, from “Jews from every walk of life.” Smith was defended by the great Los Angeles First Amendment advocate Stanley Fleishman, true, but his generalization is misleading—in the way anti-Semites’ generalizations tend to be. At Smith’s trial, one of the most celebrated and recognized Jews in America, Leon Uris, testified against Tropic of Cancer. “I don’t think [Miller] is a writer, and I don’t think this is a book,” the author of Exodus said on the stand. “I think it is the ramblings of a pervert. … We have a right to defend ourselves against this type of garbage the same way we would any other ordinary criminal or any pervert walking the streets of Los Angeles.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Uris, who insisted on a vision of Jews as manly conquerors and paragons of Judeo-Christian virtue, would object to Miller, who represents Jews—like everybody else—as carnal, dishonest, and debased, if also, like everyone else, possessing the potential for transcendence. The widespread support of Miller’s novel suggests, encouragingly, that at least among Jews in the literary and legal professions, it was not Uris’ but Miller’s perspective—which understood Jews to be human, fallible, neither better or worse than anybody else—that was the majority view.

With nearly half a century of fully legal Miller behind us, not everyone would agree with Shapiro that Miller was a modern “prophet.” But he was unquestionably prescient at least in knowing to whom he could appeal for sympathy. He remarked in Cancer itself, decades before any of his American trials would prove him right, that “the first people to turn to when you’re down and out are the Jews.”

When Tony Judt—NYU eminence, mordant historian of 20th-century Europe, essayist, polemicist, and bête noire of Bibi-lovers—died earlier this year, and died young at only 62, those readers anticipating the next installment of Judt’s swan song in the New York Review of Books had a right to feel a correction was in order. The Lou Gehrig’s disease that was so terribly locking Judt’s body down had also loosed from his pen the tender story of an East End Augie March, a young south London teenager whose travels though socialist Zionism and Oxbridge anti-Semitism kept unearthing ever newer and fresher troves of insight until, suddenly, they, stopped. It was an especially gutsy game of chicken with death Judt played, as he marshalled the power of his own writing to condense and sustain his life. By immersing himself, and us, in this great river of final words, Judt the polemicist and sophisticate seemed to rinse himself down to his own immaculate soul, to present himself as he really was: boy, pupil, mensch, Jew, as if the urbane New York Review of Books was his own makeshift mikveh.

There is a pattern in the way our 20th-century lions are doing their last acts, some getting a jump on death, beginning early; some doing it often, replaying death again and again. Who ever imagined when Philip Roth began killing off his alter egos around 25 years ago that he’d still be at it today? Who’d have thought Nathan Zuckerman and his compeers would still be dying in so many interesting works, and not just dying but emerging from each death refreshed and more classic of mien?

This spring at YIVO, at the Center for Jewish History in New York, I heard Roth read what he described as his favorite section from his last book, Nemesis. This is the section in which Bucky Cantor, playground cynosure and diving-board god, teaches his young admiring charges to throw the javelin. In this passage, and in the book overall, the narrative voice is cleaned of all experience, all knowingness, all irony. Bucky’s beautiful quintessentially American vitality is instead delivered through the voice of one who—even though he’s actually seen the hero brought down, shamed, crippled, and embittered—still tells Bucky’s story as if it might come out differently. In his muscled youthful beauty, in his earnestness, in his civic probity and sweet, gentlemanly sexuality, Bucky stands for that American innocence and pluck that thinks—and for no good reason—that it can beat its nemesis. The gee-whiz 1950s ingenuousness of the narrator’s voice is only, Roth demonstrates, a more extreme version of every reader’s own. An author may begin, as Roth did, as far back as the 1980s, to drop the curtain on our striving, horny, earnest Buckys and Zuckys; he may tell us in titles, in book jackets, 10 miles high and in primary colors, year after year, of the nemesis that visits every man. We are dying animals, Roth shouts: All our complaints, all our indignations are, in the end, so much diddling puppetry. Yet no matter how many times it happens, death is always a surprise ending. Whether that nemesis comes on a Korea battlefield or in a pool swimming with polio, whether it comes via heart disease or long-gone Mr. Portnoy’s crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, the only thing more immortal than death is our denial of it. Which also happens to be the grounding of all art.

Whatever one thinks of Harold Bloom’s latest book as a work of literary criticism, it is one of our most robust examples of the swan song as victory lap, high fives all around. Bloom may call The Anatomy of Influence his summa, may regard this book as his capstone address to the “loneliness, fear and dying” that comprise our human condition. But in fact, Bloom’s final address to the abyss is, like Roth’s many Zuckerman tales, the very same one he began in 1973. The Anatomy of Influence is the Anxiety of Influence—minus the anxiety part, and with all the edge filed off the old fear. Not even Bloom could be expected to muster much mortal angst amid so teeming a visionary company as his Anatomy convenes.

Back in the day, of course, the fire-eating critic of the Yale School’s heyday had been finality’s champion. Never one to settle for Keats’ easeful death, Bloom had preferred his deaths more dialectical and their results more zero sum. Bloom’s heroes were Oedipally girded literati who scorched earth, superseding forebears with their great originality and proving themselves in feats of Agon. In Bloom’s earlier work, a poet really had to fall upon the thorns of life and bleed for his immortality. And his critic too, had better come armed for bear.

Continue reading: Titanic clashes

The highest-ranked Jew is Philip Roth, at 25:1, up slightly from last year’s 33:1. But generally, the Jews face worse odds than last year: E.L. Doctorow dropped from 22:1 to 33:1; Amos Oz 25:1 to 33:1; Shlomo Kalo 45:1 to 50:1; A.B. Yehoshua 50:1 to 66:1; and Jonathan Littell 66:1 to 80:1. Only Bob Dylan, the perennial long shot, stayed steady at 100:1. The committee has been relatively kind to Jews, awarding the prize to five (Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, Elfriede Jelinek, and Harold Pinter) in the past 25 years. By contrast, only one American has been selected during that time (Toni Morrison); the committee’s head has made it explicit that he doesn’t consider American literature to be all that great.

So, probably Adonis, and probably not a Jew. Then again, last year, the talk was about how Howard Jacobson was the underdog for the Man Booker Prize, and we know what happened there.

Nobel Prize in Literature Odds [Betting Pros]
Related: Nobel Prize Judge Slams American Literature [Guardian]
Earlier: Jews Are Longshots to Win Nobel, Booker
Howard Jacobson Pulls Off Booker Upset

The Commentary archive contains correspondence and galleys related to the journal, which was for most of its life funded by the American Jewish Committee (though it no longer is), from its 1945 founding through 1995. Authors include Isaac Babel, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Mailer, Malamud, Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Philip Roth, according to the center. “Even George Orwell,” added Oram, “although he belongs to the early, pre-Norman Podhoretz era—unfortunately for that era, there’s very little or no correspondence.”

Oram said that the Ransom Center’s involvement with Jewish-American literature began in earnest with the 1993 acquisition of the Singer archive.

Last year in Tablet Magazine, Benjamin Balint, author of a history of the journal, traced how it served in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s as a crucial incubator for distinctly Jewish-American literature, publishing, among many other things, two of the stories that appeared in Roth’s seminal 1959 collection, Goodbye, Columbus.

And in 2003 in the Forward, Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse traced Commentary’s arc from cozy literary journal to major political power player to, well, cozy political journal (with, might I add, a scrappy, essential online presence!).

Related: Imaginative Assault [Tablet Magazine]
When ‘All the Rest’ Was the Rage [Forward]

Having since gotten to know us in the flesh through six years of living in New York, she now questions whether there is truly anything distinguishing about a “New York Jew”—even if she still finds among our ranks excellent boyfriends. “I’m attracted to men who have obligations to people other than me,” she writes. “A Jewish mother guarantees this.”

Counterlife

The California I come from doesn’t have many rules or much reverence for family history. It’s a moneyed Eden populated by parents who didn’t like the rules and who forsook family history for a new world order on the Pacific Rim. They colonized a paradise, and 40 years later, mental exercise isn’t nearly so popular as Pilates class. Nobody was really Jewish. Nobody was really anything.

Like most teenagers, I wanted to belong to a pre-established, recognizable category of person. The quickest shortcuts are obvious to anyone: play a sport or party. Party I did, but not hard enough or often enough to secure an identity for myself. And dribbling a ball seemed silly. I was a child who read a lot, and I became a teenager who read more. It was really just a failure of imagination: I didn’t know what else to do. The novels I read were like social field guides. They helped me to identify different species of humans and told me how to evolve into the ones I liked best.

The authors I liked most, it turned out, were Jews—the long-famous ones with universal appeal. Judy Blume gave way to Cynthia Ozick. I never latched onto Bellow, but I like Nathanael West a lot. And of course there was Philip Roth, whose slapstick raunch was good for more than just prurient nights. His virile, foul-mouthed protagonists were particular while also representing something larger about a people I wasn’t a part of. There was manageable oppression everywhere—outside the home, where they were called “kikes,” and inside the home too, where mothers forced ungodly amounts of food on them and demanded intimate knowledge of their bodily functions. Here, in Newark, N.J., was a world of expectations and obligations, of ancient traditions and urgent ambitions—a world of enough pain to motivate.

Even John Updike, literary prince of the Protestants, seemed to share my envy. I understood while reading Bech: A Book—his parodic, postmodern novel-in-stories about a washed-up novelist—why, given the choice, Updike would choose as his alter-ego an esteemed writer like himself but with an extra sprinkle of charismatic glitter: Jewishness. While the adoring, fictional critics within the book may praise Henry Bech for his “quixotic, excessively tender, strangely anti-Semitic Semitic sensibility,” Bech himself doesn’t lack intellectual insecurity or the notorious neuroses native to his race. Updike’s shticky self-reflexivity (“Bech’s weakness for Wasps was well known”) also made sense to me. It’s what gave the book not only its prankishness but its heart, too. The aching antihero that emerges in Bech: A Book has little in common with Updike’s usual protagonists. As opposed to his gin-sipping, gentile counterparts, Bech is more interested in taking women than in taking stoic swims, more invested in earning public praise than in earning a silent father’s lock-jawed approval. I mean, who wouldn’t be?

As much as I identified with Updike’s covetous gaze, like so many 14-year-olds, what I really desired, more than anything else, was honorary membership in J.D. Salinger’s Glass family. They had everything I didn’t: a private language (of spiritual crisis, Sappho, and soap shards); a chicken soup-pushing mother; and a family mythology so mentally incestuous and hermetically sealed that it suffocated their leader in suicide. I was shrewd enough to be suspicious of Salinger’s obsessive reverence for his own characters, but it didn’t prevent me from wanting to be one of them.

It’s no wonder teenagers love the Glass family, and it’s no wonder I was so keen on focusing on their Jewishness and then glamorizing it. They are a flock of loners, too sentient for the world, all but homeless outside of the family apartment, and—most crucially—empowered by their collective Otherness. Kurt Cobain would have made a good Glass.

What doubt there is among Jews about Salinger’s Jewishness should be punctured at least a little by Franny’s agonized monologue about materialism, which she moans to Zooey from her pathologized place on the living room couch: “I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?” Until Zooey responds, it’s almost irrelevant that Franny’s not alone in the room. Her monologue about the hypocrisy of intellectual aspiration verges, at times, on soliloquy, and it’s nothing if not a display of crippling Jewish guilt.

There is a lot written about Salinger’s Jewishness (his father was Jewish, his mother an Irish Catholic who passed as Jewish when she married) and how relevant it was to his work. It’s hard to deny that the basic makeup of his characters matches that of the caricatured Jew: anxious, world-weary, simultaneously proud and self-loathing, forever grappling with a neurotic sense of foreboding. The Glass family is also only half-Jewish, but growing up, they seemed fully Jewish to me—mostly, I think, because they were from New York.

Then I actually moved to New York, for college, and suddenly I found myself surrounded by real New York Jews for the first time. Initially, it was intoxicating. That what distinguished them was clearly more geographical than it was religious didn’t matter in the least. Obviously, I knew Jews in California too, but they weren’t like these Jews. The California Jews hadn’t been bar mitzvahed. And they certainly hadn’t been familiar with magazine mastheads or new Criterion Collection releases. At home—on weekends—they ate foods whose literal English translations (whitefish salad, honey cake) were almost as rapturous as the Hebrew ones I was unable to pronounce.

It’s not on purpose that I’ve never dated a non-Jew, but one’s attractions are always a bit aspirational, so it makes sense that I haven’t. Even Ben, my “fake boyfriend,” is Jewish. We met within the first week of college and still chat online almost every day. For four years, we slept in the same bed on Friday nights but never thought to touch one another. We edited each others’ papers and sought each others’ romantic counsel. Ben always made a theatrical show of fairness. He made me replace the food I ate from his cupboards and always remembered when I owed him $5. I’d roll my eyes and fork over the cash. “What?” he’d ask, “You think I’m going to let some goy waltz in here and bleed me dry?” It was all sort of a joke, but not really. I always missed him when he went home for the High Holidays. In affectionate moods, he told me I could “pass.”

Jewish boyfriends (real and fake) certainly seem to call their mothers a lot, not that I have any point of reference. The cliché feels true, though. I’m good with other peoples’ mothers: I like conspiratorial exasperation, and I enjoy eating dinner almost as much as I enjoy wrapping the leftovers in tin foil afterwards. It’s possible, easy even—especially at mealtimes—to be too solicitous a shiksa, too curious a colonizer. I’ve attended enough Seders at this point to not treat them like study-abroad programs, but still, it’s good to express genuine interest in your competition. Perhaps this will change over the years—I imagine it will—but for now, I’m attracted to men who have obligations to people other than me. A Jewish mother guarantees this.

One Jewish friend had parents who hosted a huge, buffet-style brunch each fall in their apartment overlooking Central Park. Men with advanced degrees and well-trimmed beards introduced themselves between bites of bagels. Small children scampered down hallways and played games on the Oriental carpets. My friend’s mother enjoyed herself—smiling, chatting, cooing at babies—but she remained alert the whole time, seeing to it that no coffee cup went below half-full. The idea was that everyone felt taken care of. In California, such a celebration (casual, multigenerational) usually calls for potlucks. Picnic tables are laid with wooden bowls full of ancient grains. Dessert is fresh fruit, and you drink sulfite-free Merlot. Everyone goes heavy on the goat cheese, and nobody stresses out about anything. The idea is that everyone takes care of themselves.

Even the spectacularly wealthy, spectacularly fun kids in college were saved, in some elusive, Jewish way, from appearing as gauche as they otherwise might have. Their parents might have been rock stars or media moguls, but they still collected first editions and went to publishing parties. There were breathtaking socialites who skipped class to both walk in fashion shows and host exclusive Seders. Tangled artfully in delicate gold necklaces, they wore tiny, diamond-encrusted stars of David. They made elaborate attempts at concealing new tattoos from their parents, which of course weren’t only disapproved of but also forbidden. The regard for tradition was touching, even if it was half-assed. The fact that they attended to Jewish family obligations implied that besides beauty and undeniable charm, they knew they had something bigger than themselves to be proud of and preserve.

The lesson, I guess, is that we—the goyim who aspire to some cursory definition of Jewishness—see you in a different way than you see yourselves. I say “we” because my feelings on this score are widespread enough to have become something of a literary trope. “What was Zabar’s? How did you get there? What was lox? Why was it orange? Did the Pleshettes really eat fish for breakfast? Who was Diaghilev? What was a gouache, a pentimento, a rugelach? Please tell me,” pleads Mitchell Grammaticus, one of the three main characters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot. Like Eugenides himself, Mitchell is the son of Greek immigrants from Detroit. He’s a religious-studies major at Brown in the early 1980s, and his roommate, Larry Pleshette, is from Riverdale. Larry’s parents serve on the boards of artistic nonprofits; they house ballerinas defecting from Kiev; Leonard Bernstein is known to have come over for drinks. Their house is like a shrine for Mitchell, full of totemic objects. He describes the contents of their freezer (rum raisin ice cream) with more ecstasy than he does any of his spiritual epiphanies.

For a long time, I felt as Mitchell did about the Jews I met in college—awed and finally in the presence of people, not characters, whose image I could approximate. But the longer I live in New York, the less impressed I am with the Jews, which is as it should be. Scanning the world and classifying its inhabitants might be a useful way to live when you’re very young, but at a certain point, it becomes obvious that there are more exceptions to the rules than there are rules, enough people who surprise you to realize that there aren’t any meaningful classifications at all. I think I was stunted a bit in this regard because of my exposure to the Jews I met in college, who in the beginning at least, really did seem to confirm what I had read about and romanticized in high school.

After six years in New York, I can barely count on one hand the non-Jews I know. I hear of stylish Purims and secret latke recipes; friends catch the biblical allusions I don’t and are more comfortable than I am joking about Hasids. But it’s not like Judaism is some magical charm that makes for bookish, indoor superheroes. All the things I once took to be synecdoche for Semitism are really just certain sorts of class signifier—ones made accessible by a mere college degree. It’s not that they’re superficial so much as they are shared, and therefore no longer special-seeming.

Though I’ve finally shaken the simple syllogism held in my mind all these years that conflates Jewishness with literacy with virtue, you wouldn’t guess it from looking at my life. It’s all my adolescent daydreams made manifest. If I could sit my adolescent self down for a minute, I’d commend her impulses and tell her not to worry. I’d tell her that in a few years she’d be surrounded by real-life versions of the characters she read about, but not to get too excited—that it would be exciting at first, and then annoying, and before long totally normal. I’d tell her she’d live in New York and that her mayor would share a surname with Franny’s cat. I’d tell her to keep reading Jewish books that convince teenagers that it’s cool to be smart.

Whatever jokes were once made about “the Johns” (Cheever, Updike, Knowles) are now made about “the Jonathans” (Lethem, Safran Foer, Ames). The Johns have infidelity, swimming pools, and study hall proctors; the Jonathans have Tourette, shtetls, and HBO shows filmed in Cobble Hill. We are a better-read (and -fed) elite. We still have status symbols. And though it may sound specious to some, a ruling class that reads is better than one that doesn’t.

Venerating Jewishness as a teenager was not an act of rebellion, but it was a way of questioning and ultimately rejecting a culture whose sense of purpose—to say nothing of prestige—seemed extemporaneously contrived. I spent my youth wanting to belong to a club that I thought wouldn’t have someone like me for a member. What I didn’t know then was how easily, and how soon, I would be approved.

• Among Gov. Rick Perry’s New York City fundraisers next week is one with kosher food. Trying to attract vegetarian donors, I see. [Politico]

• What lost the New York special election? The mustache! [The Brooklyn Paper/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Maccabi Tel Aviv lost in Turkey to Besiktas, 5-1. The Turkish government demanded that the score be revised to 7-1. [Arutz Sheva]

• Leon Wieseltier wins the award for best deployment of the word “cool.” [TNR]

• An uncle and his niece are reunited 65 years and the Holocaust later. [JTNews]

A student at York University accused her professor of advocating the sterilization of Jews because he cited the argument, “Jews should be sterilized,” as an example of something that is wrong. I’d say I’ve seen this movie before, but I haven’t—I’ve only read the book.

Yet the very fact that I felt a certain relief at the omission of Jews from the list, as well as a certain disappointment, forces me to acknowledge that things are not that simple when it comes to Jews and Sept. 11. We insist on separating the two terms so strictly, perhaps, because so many enemies of the Jews have insisted on linking them in false and dangerous ways. For instance, there is the notorious lie that no Jews died in the World Trade Center, because the 4,000 Jews—or, depending on how the rumor is phrased, 4,000 Israelis—who worked there were warned to stay home. (The origin of this rumor, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, seems to be a Jerusalem Post article that reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had received inquiries from the relatives of 4,000 Israelis believed to be in New York City on Sept. 11.) After the attacks, this idea gained traction on the far right and far left, with everyone from David Duke to Amiri Baraka, and it remains disturbingly current in the Muslim world. Eventually the U.S. State Department had to issue a rebuttal pointing out that, in fact, somewhere between 200 to 400 of the ground zero victims were Jewish, in keeping with the proportion of Jews in the local population.

On the one hand, this anti-Semitic rumor is meant to deny Jews a part in the national mourning over Sept. 11, to suggest that they had not suffered their share. In this sense, it is like the (false) allegations of German anti-Semites that Jews had not served in the army in World War I. On the other hand, of course, the accusation of Jewish absence is really supposed to be a proof of Jewish presence: If Jews stayed home on Sept. 11, it must be because other Jews knew what was coming and warned them.

Thus, anti-Semitic rumors suggest that the Mossad brought down the twin towers, either because the real hijackers could not have possessed the technical ability to do so, or because Israel was the real beneficiary of the War on Terror. (A strange kind of benefit, one might think, looking at the history of Israel over the last 10 years.) The power of the slander lies not in its plausibility but in the diabolical way it confounds rebuttal. If Jews are accused of staying home on Sept. 11, they can point to the State Department for a defense; but then the anti-Semite’s question becomes, why is the American government so solicitous of Jewish honor? Is it not because, in the words of one fringe anti-Semite quoted in the ADL report, “our government has for decades been used to further the interests of Israel at the expense of the interests of the American people”?

Some lowlife rabble-rouser said that, but in the years since Sept. 11, an increasing number of respectable people have been saying things close enough to it. Thanks to Stephen Walt (of Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (of the University of Chicago), the phrase “Israel Lobby,” often enough translated into “Jewish Lobby,” has become almost as commonplace in American leftist discourse as the phrase “Jewish syndicate” was among the French right during the Dreyfus Affair. Think of how common it was, five or six years ago, to hear opponents of the Iraq War reel off the names of the so-called neoconservatives whose fault it allegedly was—always Jewish names like Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith. Remember the bizarre ingenuity that traced the invasion of Iraq to the teachings of a long-dead Jewish mastermind, Leo Strauss.

In this way, the anti-neoconservative rhetoric of the post-Sept. 11 left managed to do for Osama Bin Laden what he could never have achieved on his own. It gave currency and respectability to his belief that events in general, and American policy in particular, can be explained only by reference to Jewish power. This idea is pervasive in Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, a book that is necessary to read in the same way that Mein Kampf was once necessary.

Take, for instance, Bin Laden’s statement of Oct. 6, 2002, titled “To the Americans.” “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” he begins, and the first of dozens of enumerated reasons is “You attacked us in Palestine.” In this “you,” the distinction between America, Israel, and the Jews ceases to exist, a point that becomes explicit later on: “[T]he creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals.” Later, in the course of explaining why America is “the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind,” Bin Laden explains that “the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense.”

The only proper response to this kind of evil fantasy is to ignore it; yet for American Jews, it was hard to ignore. For the insidious power of this discourse was the way it made American Jews self-conscious about something that should, by rights, have been a source of pride: the identity of American and Jewish interests and values in the post-Sept. 11 age (which is not the same thing as the identity of American and Israeli policies). One reaction, perhaps the first reaction, to hearing Bin Laden’s rhetoric—or its echoes in the words of Walt and Mearsheimer, or Helen Thomas—is to deny its poisonous premise that “the Jews” are running America or America is serving “the Jews.” That denial is true, of course. But it leaves those who insist on it looking, and feeling, scared. It places American Jews in the paradoxical position of denying their own patriotism and belittling their own power.

***

A better response emerges in one of the defining books of the post-Sept. 11 period, Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. What Berman shows, in his analysis of the intellectual genealogy of al-Qaida, is that there’s a good reason why the Jews should occupy a central position in the fight between America and what he called Islamism or Muslim totalitarianism—and not because this is a fight about or against Jewish power. Rather, as in Europe in the 1930s, the fate of the Jews is a bellwether for the fate of liberalism—a social order founded on individual rights, secularism, private property, and the rule of law. Since the first, partial emancipation of European Jews in the French Revolution, Jews have thrived in liberal societies and suffered in illiberal ones. This makes perfect sense when you consider that the Jews, as a tiny and historically persecuted minority in the Christian world, could succeed only to the extent that they were allowed to live as free individuals, in a free society.

Historically, then, the fate of the Jews is tied to the fate of liberalism; and after Sept. 11, Berman showed, the greatest threat to liberal values came from Islamic fundamentalists, who spoke about Jews in terms borrowed from European fascists. Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, blamed Islam’s problems on Marx and Freud: “[T]he atheistic, materialistic doctrine in our world was advocated by a Jew, and the permissive doctrine which is sometimes called ‘the sexual revolution’ was advocated by a Jew. Indeed, most evil theories which try to destroy all values and all that is sacred to mankind are advocated by Jews.” This, as Berman points out, is not theological anti-Judaism (though Qutb voiced that variety as well) but the kind of anti-modern anti-Semitism that identifies the Jew with social dissolution and rootless individualism. But these are the very same things that, when considered as values rather than vices, we think of as essentially American: freedom of the individual, free thought, pluralism.

Which other novels by Jews should the president read?

• Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Because Obama’s main job is to “win the future,” he should probably have a sense of what a future that he has lost looks like, and this bitter, dystopic novel will provide it. Plus, it can’t hurt Obama with the Russian vote.

• Amy Waldman’s The Submission. This hot new novel imagines that the winning design for the 9/11 memorial turns out to have been the work of a Muslim-American. So, um, it would seem relevant.

• Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Okay, so this is technically “history as a novel” and “the novel as history,” but still, Mailer’s depiction of the fully fractured society of the late ‘60s is what Obama should be shooting not to have happen on his watch.

• Franz Kafka’s Amerika. For an, er, different perspective on the country he leads.

• Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. If one of the United States is going to become the Jewish national homeland, Obama should probably be kept aware.

• Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. “I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, dadaistically draped like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”

Obama Takes Along Novel by David Grossman on Vacation [JPost]
Related: Consolation Prize [Tablet Magazine]
Pen Pals [Tablet Magazine]
Books That Have Read Me [Nextbook.org]
The Unconsoled [The New Yorker]
Earlier: The Tailor David Grossman

Weiner, Spitzer, and Strauss-Kahn are all representative of a certain type of Jewish man: what former Forward editor Seth Lipsky used to call, half-ironically, “Jewish Bigs.” Jewish Bigs are emperors without any clothes—men who believe they are important because someone else, starting around age zero, told them they were. What they are not are the people they believe themselves to be—bold, fearless, supremely intelligent, always, always in the right. It should be stressed, very high up, that this is a small subset of the Jewish community, and that this subset is probably not entirely distinct from other noxious, embarrassing, offensive, or ethically lacking subsets of other communities, religious and otherwise. But all this doesn’t make the phenomenon any less real or less troubling.

There’s more: The Jewish Big is a particularly prominent subset in today’s America. There may be clearly defined subsets of Latvian Bigs or Latino Bigs or even Zoroastrian Bigs, but none of these communities-within-communities has consumed as much airtime as the Jewish Big. Nor are any of these parallel bigs big because of their respective national, religious, or ethnic identities; they just happen to be big and, say, Latvian. Nor are any of them especially susceptible to the sensibilities of elite society, in which a hyper-sensitive and ineffectual feminism is married to a mindless Puritanism. It is the Jewish Big who is uniquely big and vulnerable to a non-Jewish world that doesn’t care for him—not simply because he’s big but because he’s big and Jewish.

The Jewish Big has not always been and will not always be. He is a function of a postwar Jewish culture that is only a few generations from the shtetl. He is the vessel into which the heavily caricatured Jewish mother funnels all her ambitions and anxieties. Usually, happily, these vessels grow up. They transcend their childhood. They become someone. But the sort who ends up as a Jewish Big is unable to transcend, as if by congenital fiat. He believes that all the wonderful things his mother told him about him are true; he never learns that almost all these things are lies or distortions that, ideally, serve to strengthen the undeveloped ego of a 5-year-old who, once grown, will achieve just a few of the things his mother told him he would. He is narcissistic and blind because he doesn’t know that he is not, as it turns out, the Messiah. What he is is a groyser tsuleyger, or big shot, with the crudeness of a bulvan, or dummy—although he knows enough to smooth over those edges when need be, to contain his many angers. He reminds us, just a bit, of Philip Roth’s father figure in Goodbye, Columbus, Ben Patimkin. But he’s nastier. Patimkin dotes on his daughter. The Jewish Big doesn’t know how to dote. Yes, he has his moments, his flashes of gratuitous warmth, but these are moments, exceptions to his personality, which is narrow and single-minded: The Jewish Big only knows how to love himself. The love he doles out to other people is part of the happy diorama he has cobbled together in the service of his success. It is contrived.

What makes the Jewish Big particularly offensive is that he was not supposed to be this way. This is not the place he comes from. Jewish civilization, it bears repeating, is a rich tapestry. That tapestry doesn’t stand apart. It is a majestic force that is very much of this world and is meant to make us more humane, wise, understanding—civilized. But the Jewish Big is less civilized. He has never gazed at one of Chagall’s floating brides or read one of Babel’s Odessa stories. He has forgotten that the synagogue is led by a teacher, whose job it is to force upon us a great, if not always welcome, introspection. This is the etiology of the Jew, and especially the Ashkenazi Jew, but it is as if the Jewish Big has been divorced from his beginnings. Where has he been, this bully, this chump, with his smirk and his sense of entitlement? Has he not been paying attention? Where is the warmth, the ironic wit, the inclination to think and argue and wonder and parse, to tread with care and a modicum of intelligence? The Jewish Big doesn’t know from this.

In Weiner, Spitzer, and Strauss-Kahn can be found all the essential ingredients of this outlier personality. It’s not simply arrogance and brazenness. (Certainly, Bill Clinton is arrogant, as are David Vitter, John Ensign, and John Edwards, and few, if any, politicians have outflanked the Kennedys in raw brazenness.) It’s the arrogance and brazenness coupled with a glaring meanness. (We see manifestations of this unhappy cocktail in other Jewish Bigs whose crimes are not sexual, starting with Bernie Madoff and Jack Abramoff.) This is why it’s so hard for the Jewish Big to apologize for his transgressions—and it’s why the public finds it impossible to accept his apology. He doesn’t believe he’s done anything wrong, and, much more important, he is offended, deeply and personally, by the suggestion that he has. When attacked, his inclination is to explode. Instead of apologizing, he snarls. When he does apologize, he doesn’t mean it, and we know it, and he knows we know it, and this compounds his rage. He is trapped in a vise that is alternately infuriating and mystifying. He does not believe, reasonably enough, that a Messiah can do any wrong. We’d rather not see things this way. It would be much simpler—it would comport with present-day practice—to view the Jewish Big as just another white male oppressing people of color, and, in fact, Strauss-Kahn’s African-born chambermaid and Weiner’s Twitter correspondents, including an African-American woman in Seattle, reaffirm this dichotomy in the public mind. But that would be a mistake. That would be an easy explanation that fits neatly into a liberal theology that views the world through a simple-minded prism of equal parts race, class, and gender.

The unfairness of it all is that the Jewish Big is, in fact, programmed to be “bad” more often than non-Jewish, and especially Gentile, Bigs. That’s because he was born into a people that has no culture of sin. This doesn’t mean he or any other Jews are unfamiliar with the idea of sin. We know all about sin. We just don’t believe that we’re born bad. We have no original sin. This seems absurd and cruel, and it makes people scared of their bodies: What will I do if left to my own devices? (It’s not an accident that it was a Viennese Jew who made the breakthrough observation that sex is an utterly ordinary and central part of the human experience.) So, the Jewish Big believes he has a license that, in fact, he does not have, that no one has. In his narcissism, he confuses an absence of sin culture and an absence of sin. He thinks that because no one ever said that sex is evil, and because everyone always said that he was wonderful and perfect, he can have what he wants. He intuits that that’s not always possible—getting ahead demands that he hew to certain standards—but he doesn’t really feel it. He doesn’t believe it. He is, you might say, less restrained.

Until recently, this lack of restraint was less problematic. That was when America was more forgiving of sexual improprieties and we didn’t learn about them via hand-held device, if at all. Now the Jewish Big’s many crimes and misdemeanors, literal and figurative, are not just unacceptable; they are broadcast everywhere instantly. The dalliance, the hotel tangle, the pathetic display of whatever it was that Weiner was up to—all these things are violations of the spirit of our time, and they cannot be so easily covered up. Even if one’s crimes have not been recorded digitally, as in the cases of Spitzer and Strauss-Kahn, the conversation about those crimes takes place in a digital arena that metastasizes like a communicable disease across multiple latitudes and time zones with a hitherto unknown velocity. The only kind of offender who can escape this sand trap is someone who already enjoys a great well of public affection.

This raises an important and related point: The Jewish Big does not enjoy a great well of public affection. This is due, mostly, to his character, which is lacking. But there’s something else: The fall of the Jewish Big is not entirely his own making. That’s because the Jewish Big is Jewish, and the Christian, non-Jewish public likes Jewish when it’s humorous, charming, wise—Talmudic. But when it’s not those things, when a Jew acts badly, the public is reminded, consciously or otherwise, of the Jew’s otherness, of all the medieval fairy tales that have been swirling through the ether for centuries, about Shylocks and perverts and cheats and spineless men and big-hipped women and bankers and communists and government-occupying Zionists, and that is when a preliminary annoyance or distraction morphs into something uglier.

When Weiner announced that he was resigning from Congress, at a press conference in Brooklyn, he was greeted with an angry round of applause and shouts of “pervert!” There was a ferociousness in that response that was deeply disproportionate. Weiner broke no laws and hadn’t even behaved that badly. His crime: acting crudely and lying about it. How strange that so many people should be so offended by his wrongdoing. Yet they were, because the Jewish Big is not just big but because he’s other. He is suggestive of an anti-Semitic cartoon. He isn’t that cartoon, of course. But he makes other people think that he might be. He reminds them that he is not from this place, even if he is.

Peter Savodnik has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Wired, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, and Commentary, among other publications.

The Jews have a hot streak at the normally cold playing Man Booker field. Most recently, Philip Roth was given the biennial International Prize. And last year’s Man Booker, of course, went to Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question.

Man Booker Prize List Ranges Far and Wide [ArtsBeat]
Q&A: Canadian Jewish Book Winner Alison Pick [The Arty Semite]
Earlier: Howard Jacobson Pulls Off Booker Upset
Roth Wins British Prize Amid Controversy
Jacobson’s Novel Longlisted

Two years later, this desperate and confused mood was given powerful literary expression in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. There had indeed been a plot against America not long before; but in Roth’s historical novel, the plot in question was not hatched by Muslim terrorists. It was the work of isolationists, right-wingers, and anti-Semites, led by Charles Lindbergh, whom Roth imagined winning the election of 1940 and launching America on a path to fascism and a domestic Holocaust. By rights, the book ought to have been called The Plot Against the Jews. But Roth, like Hentoff, had performed a strange inner displacement. The actual present threat to Jews, from Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East, had been translated into the old historic threat to Jews—the fear of Nazis and the Holocaust.

That fear was not reasoned or reasonable, and it received a timely rebuke from Leon Wieseltier, who noted in the New Republic that the only Jews actually gathered in Times Square were there to buy tickets to The Producers—that is, to laugh at farce Nazis. But the readiness of otherwise levelheaded people, in that post-9/11 world, to give in to the instinct of fear made clear just how deeply rooted that instinct remains in contemporary Jewish life.

Memories of that strange time came back recently as I read several new books dealing with the experience of “ordinary Germans” in the Holocaust. Reading about the Holocaust always involves a conscious patrolling of the inner boundary between fear and reason; that’s one reason why it is so taxing. Reading history of any kind requires a negotiation between the duty of empathy and the instinct of self-preservative withdrawal, all the more so when it is tragic history (and, as the celebrated British historian Edward Gibbon said, the history that gets written down is usually “the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”).

But when the history in question is as recent as the Holocaust, and as threatening, and as overwhelmingly, unimaginably cruel, the negotiation can turn into a panicky tug-of-war. The claim of the dead on the remembrance and grief of the living is so vast that it puts us permanently in the wrong: Not only can we never rectify the past, we can never sufficiently attend to it or atone for it. One way of dealing with this guilt is to elide the difference between the Jewish situation today and in the past: to say that Times Square is a potential Drancy or Westerbork.

Yet simply to dismiss the possibility of a “second Holocaust,” to say confidently that it can’t happen here, is to court inner doubts and reproaches. What could be more shameful than to follow in the footsteps of those German Jews we read about so often, with their super-patriotism and super-assimilation—attempts at camouflage that were doubly disgraceful for being so totally ineffective? This dialectic of fear and guilt and suspicion makes it very difficult to see the Holocaust objectively—which is one reason, perhaps, why many Jewish scholars have devoted their careers to doing exactly that.

For American Jews, the problem of the “ordinary German” is especially troubling, because it brings us directly to the darkest, most unassuageable suspicions about Jewish vulnerability. The most controversial books about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, have been the ones that try to explain how the Germans—citizens of an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews. For if this people could do it, the strong implication is that under the right (or, better, the wrong) circumstances, any people could. And the history of the world since 1945 seems to bear out this implication. Cambodians, Serbs, and Rwandans have all shown that people do not have to be Nazis, or anti-Semites, in order to slaughter their neighbors.

Yet nobody looks into his heart and sees an Eichmann lurking there. And this inability to match up our self-knowledge with our historical knowledge is the most disconcerting thing of all. Are we genuinely different from those millions of people, in the past and in other places, who did and do engage in mass murder? What justifies this moral self-confidence, and can we be sure that a majority of our fellow-citizens share it? And if not, if we are as blind to our own capabilities as any ordinary German, then might we ourselves, in the right circumstances, engage in exactly the same behaviors that we condemn in the Germans—their indifference, complicity, active participation in evil? In that case, how can any of us be guiltless, or safe?

***

The most concise and insidious way to pose this question is with a photograph. In The Druggist of Auschwitz: A Documentary Novel (Farrar Straus Giroux, $27), Dieter Schlesak reproduces a snapshot taken at a swimming pool in the Romanian city of Sighisoara in 1928. It shows a group of five people in bathing suits, including a stocky man named Victor Capesius and, sitting right next to him, a smiling, round-faced young girl named Ella Boehm, both of them there for swimming lessons. They knew each other slightly: Capesius, a pharmacist, was a sales representative for the pharmaceutical company Bayer, in which capacity he would call on Ella’s father, a doctor. Sometimes he would give the girl little presents: “Capesius was sweet to me,” she recalled later.

In May 1944, Ella and her mother Gisela were among the hundreds of thousands of Jews deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, after the previously safe country was occupied by German troops. When they reached the camp, having survived a four-day journey in a cattle car with no food or water, they saw that a group of SS officers was standing on the ramp making selections among the prisoners. Ostensibly, they were asking the prisoners “whether they could walk or not, in which case they would then go by car.” Of course, the selections were really for the gas chambers, and anyone who claimed to be too weak to walk was immediately killed. “Among the commission members,” Ella testified later, “I recognized Dr. Capesius, the pharmacist from Sighisoara, and I was so surprised to see him there.”

The Boehms were not the only ones to find their neighbor on the ramp at Auschwitz. Another prisoner, Adrienne Krausz, was another daughter of a doctor who recognized Capesius. “When my mother saw the officer carrying out the selection process,” she remembered, “she said, ‘Well, that’s Dr. Capesius … ’ I think he recognized my mother as well, because he waved at her. My mother and sister were sent to the left by him, into the gas, but I went to the right and I survived. Later I met a friend who had been with my father during the selection. He told me that father had said hello to Capesius and asked him where his own wife and 11-year-old daughter were. Capesius supposedly answered: ‘I’m sending you to the same place where your wife and daughter are, it’s a good place.’ ”

Stories like this suggest why Schlesak made a minor figure like Victor Capesius the focus of his “documentary novel” about the Holocaust. In order to be willing to send human beings to their deaths, it would seem necessary first to dehumanize them, to see them as enemies or statistics—or a problem requiring a final solution. That was the attitude of another doctor at Auschwitz, a fanatical Nazi named Fritz Klein. When asked how he could reconcile his actions at the camp with his Hippocratic oath, Klein replied, “Out of respect for human life I excise an ulcerated appendix; the Jews are the ulcerated appendix in the body of Europe.”

Continue reading: The Reluctant Accomplice. Or view as a single page.

This week’s winner is Earl Ganz, who writes, on the occasion of Rachel Shukert’s magnificent explication of Curb Your Enthusiasm:

The trouble is I keep getting mistaken for Larry David. I guess I look like him. One time someone came up to me in Walmart in Lake Charles, LA and asked me if I was him. I said if I was him would I be shopping in Walmart? They looked at me like I was crazy. I had the same problem in Iowa City when I was young and had hair and it was black. I kept being taken for Philip Roth who had been there the year before. One guy even wanted to buy me a drink so I would read his manuscript. I didn’t take the drink but I read the manuscript. It was terrible. My point is that all Jews look alike to gentiles, even to other Jews.

Wow. Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body for you, sir. Be proud. Embrace it.

Unrepentant
The Jewish Body [Nextbook Press]

At the New York Public Library 26 years ago this month, Frederick Busch received the Jewish Book Council award for best fiction for his Invisible Mending. (This past May, that prize was awarded to David Grossman for his novel To the End of the Land; Philip Roth’s Nemesis was among the finalists). Though the novel was Busch’s ninth, the 43-year-old writer sweated nervously throughout the ceremony, later writing that he worried he’d be denounced as an insufficiently Jewish imposter.

Invisible Mending was Busch’s most intimate exploration of his own Judaism, in which he examined what he viewed as the modern religious obsession with death and candidly considered the legacy of the Holocaust for American Jewry. According to Andrea Crawford, who praised it in Nextbook.org in 2008, Roger W. Straus, Jr., refused to publish the novel, then titled The Outlaw Jew, on the grounds that it was “bad for the Jews,” and the novelist Norma Rosen labeled the main character an “inauthentic Jew” in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. Busch himself compared the novel’s publication to appearing nude in public, a vulnerable yet provocative act at once deeply personal and shockingly outspoken.

Yet ultimately, Crawford argues, Invisible Mending succeeded. “That novel’s power—its irreverence, tension, humor, and inexorable confrontation with the personal and the historical—moved critics and readers, including the judges for the Jewish Book Council, precisely because it touched upon important questions about Jewish identity, not least for Busch himself,” Crawford writes. Busch later wrote of the award ceremony, “I am afraid that I assumed a pious expression, a kind of nauseous self-renunciation, in an effort to clear any hint of victory from my face—although, I have to confess, I wanted to crow and flap my arms. There were the tensions that for me are this novel’s emblems.”

Read Touchy Subject, by Andrea Crawford

Kazin set out to be an intellectual-at-large, the Jewish Wilson, and while he could never approach Wilson’s global reach or genius for languages—it was Wilson, ironically, who could read Hebrew—his voice had its own distinctive soulfulness and vibrato. Like Wilson, Kazin mastered critical prose in both long and short forms—the broad panorama and the slashing review—and both men exercised authority from positions at the New Republic, where Wilson was an editor from 1926-1931 and Kazin from 1942-1943. But like Wilson, Kazin could turn up anywhere: He was one of the go-to guys of literary thought. Both kept daily journals, and Kazin’s, just now published by Yale University Press, may well turn out to be his greatest work. And Wilson never wrote a memoir with anything like the thrilling emotional peaks and isolated beauties (Kazin’s phrases) of Kazin’s A Walker in the City or character portraits with the zest and bite of those in New York Jew. Wilson’s Upstate (1971) came late in his life and lacked both the youthful self-exaltation and the social drama, the up-from-the-ghetto adventure, of Kazin’s book. And both were four times married, as though divorce above all were the intellectual’s Purple Heart. In matters of domestic disorder and sorrow, the Jewish apprentice kept pace with the Yankee master, wife for wife.

Kazin’s memoirs have enjoyed a longer shelf life than his literary criticism. For one thing, they tell a classic novelist’s story: arrival. The young man from the provinces, in this case the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, comes to the big city to seek his fortune. Along the way, he rubs shoulders with the literary beau monde until the arriviste becomes the A-list invitee. In his memoirs, Kazin gave full rein to his talent for portraiture and low-down gossip. New York Jew in particular established him as the gossip-laureate of the New York intellectuals. With his endless parade of portraits and cameos—Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Isaac Rosenfeld, Arthur Schlesinger—Kazin had become the Ed Sullivan of the literati. But he was an Ed Sullivan with a barracuda’s nose for blood in the water.

We now know, thanks to Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook and published by Yale University Press, that Kazin had been rehearsing this role privately for years, in a journal he had been tending since he was 18, and that at a certain point the journal had become his chief care. He intended to publish it and did manage to release selections from it in 1996, two years before his death, as A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment. But to edit and publish the whole was beyond him, and even Cook, who has edited this 632-page volume, concedes that the entries here represent just one-sixth of what’s housed in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. In putting the volume together, Cook writes in his introduction, his goal was “to faithfully represent the range of Kazin’s interests and the tenor and depth of his thought. As [Kazin] readily acknowledged, he was not a systematic thinker; he was, however, capable of sustained and passionate reflection, moving from image to insight, from feeling to idea, from association to discovery, surprising himself, Emerson-like, by what he never knew he knew.” Given the dense foliage of Kazin’s reflections and the brio and velocity of his style, even one-sixth of the whole will make for a month’s reading, and then some. Cook’s own labor over this material has been all-consuming; his 2007 Kazin biography took him some 25 years to complete.

Ever the walker in the city, Kazin employed a peripatetic style of crisscrossing a section of the map and recording his encounters, like an anthropologist describing an alien culture. The journals are rambles: anecdotal, impressionistic, breathless, sharp, gossipy, diffusely spiritual, and saturated in verbal music. Lionel Trilling, the other Jew, shows up as regularly as the postman. “Trilling, the pompously respectable professor is a character in my imagination of society, not a person to argue with—the Jew’s dream of literary England, of surpassing his servile state by culture. No one was ever so much the prisoner of culture as Trilling. No one was ever so much the victim of the genteel fantasy.” T.S. Eliot makes a courtly appearance as “the high priest of this movement in criticism, [who] reviews the ‘contemporary situation’ as something frozen in its own despair, shut-in from the past, and destroyed in the supernatural disgust with [all] that is expressed in Thunder.”

Presiding over this assembly is Wilson, the master, the icon, the elder, the polymath, the stylist, the goy as rabbi, and the fellow journal keeper against whom Kazin measured himself: “I notice in all excerpts from Wilson’s famous journal that they are set pieces of literary-historical description, formal portraits, essays in miniature. How nice it would be to keep a journal like that, to leave a treasure like that. But so often I turn to this notebook as if it were my private lie detector, my confession, my way of ascertaining authenticity—and of recovering it—of making myself whole again. Talking to myself as I do here, I nevertheless find in the expression of private uncertainties a form of release, a clarity, from which I can start up again.”

Kazin’s journal was the more intimate. He scrutinized his world at close range, as if nearsighted. He had nothing of Wilson’s world-historical latitude, or Trilling’s oracular profondeur, or Hannah Arendt’s reprocessed Hegel, or Irving Howe’s doctrinal intransigence. He recorded meetings, conversations, encounters at his house, at her house, at a restaurant, at a party. He said, I said, we said, they said. Does Edmund Wilson have ideas? Kazin doesn’t tell us. But he does have a house: “Edmund W[ilson] in his wonderful ‘old’ house on Route 6 in Wellfleet. Everything in this house passed down or acquired by someone who could recognize immediately its historical application to himself.” Why should we know this? Because “By contrast virtually everything I own I have bought for myself or have had to decide its merits in relation to an entirely new situation. The crucial factor in the life of the ‘new man’ who is the Jewish writer in this country is this lack of tradition.” Brownsville might just as well have been halfway around the world from Wilson’s primary residence in Talcottville, N.Y. Everything was personal for Kazin, and the self-conscious Jew in him was at the center of it all. “I wonder if Edmund Wilson ever gets into his journals of the literary life anything as personal, harrowing, mixed as this?” he wrote after reading entries from Wilson’s journal in The New Yorker. Kazin knew the answer. He was the counter-Wilson, a Jewish spokesman for angst and confusion.

The highlights of this volume are Kazin’s portraits: tableaux vivants of actors frozen in mid-gesture and placed on public display. In Kazin’s hard-edged prose, people become more vivid. He practiced the one-liner, the punch line, a style that had more in common with the stand-up comedians of his day than with literary critics. “Dinner party at Louis and Adele Auchincloss, Louis so bright and cheery, always primed for cordial interchange and Adele with the mysteriously bad teeth for a Vanderbilt, with that extraordinary sweetness and presentability of the very, very rich.” Elsewhere, “George Kennan, noble, solemn, aggrieved; the composer Milton Babbitt writhing like a cornered boxer; Karl Shapiro very wistful and out of it.” And again, “Bellow came on with his eyes confronting you. The sense of some overall, private confidence was enormous. But his private radar never stopped studying you—and warding off anyone who might obstruct his assured progress.” This compulsive spying dismayed some of Kazin’s targets, but it also affirmed the acuity of his impressions and the penetration of his social radar. He’d gladly sacrifice a friendship to an epiphany.

Kazin himself was the common target of his own caustic pen. The journals are an odyssey of self-discovery by a man who was never entirely certain of who he was or what social mask he should wear. He called them his private lie detectors. Yes, he was a great success, but he never grew to trust it. The man who wrote was always struggling to feel identical to the man who experienced: the feeling man. The journals are filled with the pathos of the feeling man, and Kazin acknowledged more than once that he felt anguished over “the labyrinth of my own soliloquy.” He was obsessed with his own blunders and refused to make peace with his achievements. He never became the smiling public man. “When I look back at these notes from time to time, it seems to me that their main burden is passive suffering, complaint, and yearning. I feel ashamed—not because I have suffered or revealed my suffering, but because I have not sufficiently defined my suffering, or been sufficiently generous, loving, and therefore challenging toward it. The task is to use our suffering and to use it so well that we can use it up.”

Kazin fit a familiar social profile, the non-Jewish Jew, a term coined by Leon Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher. Though Kazin had written in New York Jew that he “had come to believe that Jew and my family were identical” and “the Jews are my unconscious,” his Jewishness was more a register, a mood, a poetics of being rather than a belief or practice. Yet he possessed, as many Jews do, a tuning fork inside him that vibrated powerfully to Jews around him. Kazin’s early plan for this journal was to call it just Jews, but he possessed neither Irving Howe’s grasp of Yiddishkeit nor any Hebrew, and one of the uses of the journal was to align his profound feeling of Jewishness with some durable evidence of it. Declaring himself to be an “isolato” in the manner of Melville or Hawthorne, he saw how that put him ever at the margins of Judaism. “There are public Jews and private Jews,” he wrote. “But can one really worship the Jewish God privately? There is no ‘private Jew.’ That is just genteel affectation—a social mannerism—a way of living in a society you do not trust.” And yet, was there ever a more gregarious isolato than Kazin? This was no peg-legged Ahab beating out a Morse code of rage on the deck of the Pequod. He was the most sociable loner of his generation.

The durable Jewish goods he sought turned out to be his family, his own bruised ego, and the Shoah. If he was self-exiled from the observant life of the Jews and had tenuous relations with Jewishness as community, he felt profoundly about the Shoah, and the journal is filled with horrified reflections on it. They are everywhere. “In Alexander Donat’s memories of the last days of the Warsaw ghetto, the Polish Catholics on their way from Church on Easter Sundays watched the helpless Jews flinging themselves out of the windows, and they applauded.” Or this particularly horrifying entry: “Read in Podhoretz’s selection of 20 years of Commentary and broke down in reading Sol Bloom’s old piece on the Jewish dictator of Łodz and the children being taken out of the orphanages en route to the gas chambers, crying Mir viln nisht shtarbn [I don’t want to die.], 1943, the year of agony!” One of the clichés of our time is that the postwar generation of Jewish American writers did not respond to the Shoah as profoundly as they should have. Kazin was an exception; his horror was unceasing.

Time and Kazin’s own habits of work have done much to blur his reputation as a scholar and critic of literature. After completing On Native Grounds, Kazin dove headlong into a career of reviewing, journalism, and lecturing; he did little research and did not keep up with the work of fellow scholars. Writing itself was his métier, and after the success of A Walker in the City, the career of the memoirist opened its arms to him. Indeed, in 1951, Bernard Malamud had yet to publish his first novel, The Assistant, and Saul Bellow had only two novels to his credit, Dangling Man (1942) and The Victim (1947). A Walker in the City was a pioneering instance of Jewish-American writing—a harbinger of what would soon become a flood—and in the originality of its material, the freshness of the writing, and its candor it has stood the test of time better than Kazin’s critical writing.

Kazin remains relevant as a writer, a voice, a social portraitist, and an artist who composed in words. Kazin was to my mind a hero of the English language. He was a master of the vernacular as an instrument of literary expression. He brought the cadences and resources of American colloquial speech with him miraculously from Brooklyn and a household in which ideas were nonexistent and Yiddish was spoken. Perhaps because he had a terrible stammer as a youth, the written word became his primary voice and the essay his form of conversation. The English vernacular, its rhythms, its registers, its juxtapositions, and its layers, became the key to his escape from the confines of Brooklyn, and he applied himself to it with a rare ferocity until he became one of the great phrase-makers in English critical prose. How much of this phrase-making started out in his almost-daily notes to himself we now understand. Of the major critical voices, maybe only Wilson had anything like Kazin’s facility and ease. Lionel Trilling, who wrote a generic and fussy English, never did. Some Jewish novelists also took possession of American English with similar tenacity and insistence, Saul Bellow for one and Philip Roth for another, and it is telling that Roth wound up as one of Kazin’s younger friends and was at his bedside toward the end.

Alfred Kazin comes across in these journal entries as both the Brownsville Jew and the Emersonian thinker-at-large. He saw himself as the Jewish version of the mythic American individual forging his own destiny, and doing it in the only way he knew how: by words alone. This look behind the scenes at Kazin’s act of self-creation makes for remarkable and exciting reading, and Richard Cook deserves our gratitude for the labor of bringing it to us.

Mark Shechner is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

Joanna Neborsky

We scoured Tablet Magazine’s and Nextbook.org’s archives to find books (and their writers) long forgotten. Each week we will feature one lost book and the story behind it. So blow the dust off the cover, and begin!

Hurst and Hurston: Seventy years after their road trip, the best-selling sentimental novelist has run out of gas, while Zora is still in the driver’s seat. By Kate Bolick

No Exit: Raised in the last golden days of the Hapsburgs, the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig found his world shattered by war. By Jennifer Weisberg

Restoration Project: Where have all Bernard Malamud’s readers gone? By Rachel Donadio

Back from the Shadows: Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art. By Boris Fishman

Third Look: On rereading Leonard Michaels’s I Would Have Saved Them If I Could. By Shalom Auslander

The Odd-Bod: In literary London, Elias Canetti was everybody’s favorite refugee. By Jonathan Wilson

School Ties: Jacques de Lacretelle won praise when he wrote in Dreyfus’ shadow, but today his portrait of a prep-school peer looks grotesque. By Paul LaFarge

Glamour and Peril: Tempestuous, cold, and intensely private, Elsa Morante considered herself a genius. Are others finally starting to agree? By Andrea Crawford

Melting Point: British playwright Israel Zangwill coined America’s most enduring metaphor as his reputation dissolved in controversy. By Chloe Veltman

Give ‘Em Hecht: A young Chicago newspaperman thought he was perfect for the part of his hero. By Neal Pollack

The Spy Who Loved Me: An Israeli thriller that captivated Graham Greene. By Paul LaFarge

King of the Forest: The Viennese pornographer turned critic who dreamed up Bambi. By David Rakoff

Funny Guys Finish Last: Philip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman were rising stars in the 1960s. Roth became part of the canon. Friedman became “that guy who wrote Splash.” By Meg Wolitzer

Westward Expansion: Prostitutes, Christian Scientists, cross-dressing teachers. By Margy Rochlin

A Fine Mess: How a filmmaker turned his movie flop into a groundbreaking book. By Lawrence Levi

Asch’s Passion: A popular Yiddish novelist strove for immortality by taking on Jesus, but it cost him his core audience and made him a marked man. By Ellen Umansky

So Big: Human awkwardness was at the heart of Edna Ferber’s popular novels, but she shied away from writing about the outsiders she knew best. By Mollie Wilson

Fall From Grace: In 1843, British novelist Grace Aguilar was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. So how come we’ve never heard of her? By Justin Taylor

A Woman Out of Time: In 1938, at the height of U.S. isolationism, Americans devoured Phyllis Bottome’s chronicle of a German-Jewish family’s struggle to survive under the Nazi regime. By Andrea Crawford

Regatta Land: Amid Harvard’s ivy-covered bricks, the hero of Myron Kaufmann’s Remember Me to God struggles to become part of the in crowd. By Josh Lambert

Great Pretenders: In Romain Gary’s family, invention was the necessity of mother and son. By Emma Garman

Wartime Truths: In 1945, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel of the Warsaw ghetto enraged Poles and Jews alike. How will it read to audiences today? By Andrea Crawford

Dizzy with Life: Clarice Lispector’s gorgeous, vibrant writings made one writer’s head—and heart—spin. By Anderson Tepper

Storm Warning: The surprising alliance at the heart of John Oliver Killens. By Josh Lambert

In Bloom: Pearl Buck breathes life into a disappearing Chinese community. By Jennifer Cody Epstein

Toward the Abyss: The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist. By Elizabeth Mitchell

The Student Who Wouldn’t Go Away: How a bumbling immigrant from Kiev became a literary sensation. By Jennifer Weisberg

What Happened to Mary Berg? A young girl’s account of the Warsaw Ghetto was a big success. Then the diary—and its author—disappeared. By Amy Rosenberg

The Good of ‘A Bad Man:’ How Stanley Elkin hit his stride. By Sarah Almond

The Hermit of Oliphant: After the literary pioneer Dvora Baron immigrated to Palestine, she never again ventured out. By Haim Watzman

The Road Not Taken: Decades before Herzl, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel that grappled with Zionism. By Adam Kirsch

Third Life: For Jakov Lind, reinvention was the heart of fiction. By Sasha Weiss

The Paragraph That Changed My Life: On Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous. By Todd Hask-Lowy

Baruch Obama: How a black president was imagined as a Jewish one, more or less. By Ben Greenman

Comeback Kid: Having failed to assimilate, Ludwig Lewisohn went on to write the great American Jewish novel. By Josh Lambert

Beginning of the End: Decadence and anti-Semitism in Arthur Schnitzler’s Vienna. By Wesley Yang

Touchy Subject: Frederick Busch feared his novel Invisible Mending would upset readers. He didn’t anticipate his own discomfort. By Andrea Crawford

Child’s Play: Seventy years ago, a contentious novel scrutinized Judaism through the eyes of a young boy. By Sasha Weiss

Where the Heart Is: A 1951 novel parses the meaning of home. By Elizabeth Gumport

Swallowed Whole: Réjean Ducharme’s mysterious 1966 novel. By Benjamin Nugent

Big Bang: With Lionel Trilling and Robert Giroux cheerleading, Sam Astrachan had a stellar future. Then the glimmer faded. By Josh Lambert

A Wanderer in the Desert: How a tubercular shoemaker became a great Yiddish poet. By Jacqueline Osherow

Of a Feather: Communing with Bernard Malamud’s Jewbird. By Joe Hill

Consider three: Austin Ratner, Julie Orringer, and Sara Houghteling, all of whom have recently won  awards for emerging Jewish authors. Ratner’s The Jump Artist, which will receive the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature tonight, draws from letters, local newspaper accounts, and medical reports from a 1928 trial in Innsbruck, Austria. Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge won the Edward Lewis Wallant award and was a finalist for the Rohr prize; it recreates the Munkaszolgálat newsletters produced by inmates of the Hungarian forced labor brigades in the 1940s. Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition won the Wallant and Hadassah’s Harold U. Ribalow Prize and serves up details from Rose Valland’s Le front de l’art, published in Paris in 1961.

None of these sources are available in English. The authors, or research assistants, read them in the original. So, if one wants to know about Philippe Halsman’s trial, or the comic stylings of Hungarian forced laborers, or an insider’s view of the Nazis’ looting of the Louvre, the most widely accessible resources in English are these novels, notwithstanding the fact that they’re works of fiction.

Jewish novelists have always drawn from history, whether it’s Isaac Bashevis Singer imagining the 17th century or Howard Fast’s vision of the Maccabees. Typically, though, they have availed themselves of published sources to construct their historical accounts, and they have tended to downplay the research itself, eschewing endnotes and other back matter. In a sense, Orringer’s novel—a dramatization of her grandfather’s life in the 1930s and 1940s—couldn’t be more conventional as historical fiction; but what’s unusual is the time she devoted to examining “artifacts and documents” at research institutes in D.C., Paris, and Budapest, like the National Hungarian Jewish Archives. What does it mean that this latest group of prize-winning novelists insists on doing historical research themselves, committing to more translation of foreign language texts and more digging through the archives than some of our popular historians do, and that they let their readers know about it?

In a recent essay, the three judges of the Wallant award survey the books they have considered in recent years and remark upon this phenomenon, declaring that “at no time before have Jewish writers in America turned so uniformly to history.” They suggest that this vogue for the “researched novel”—the sort of fiction written by Ratner, Orringer, and Houghteling—might be attributed to the impact of W. G. Sebald’s generically hybrid books and to a growing fascination with the construction and transmission of historical narratives among a generation of Jews with ever more attenuated connections to the events of the Holocaust.

More pessimistically, this archival work could be understood as part of a broader turn, by writers including Orringer, Nathan Englander, and Michael Chabon, from telling contemporary American stories to miring themselves in history. A cynic would say that this development reflects the feeling among young American Jews that there is nothing poignant about their lives. As William Deresiewicz phrased this in a review of Chabon and Englander in The Nation, “The most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring. What is there to say about it? Better to write about a time or place where there was more at stake.”

Both of these arguments have merits, but the specifically archival character of these most recent prize-winners suggests another vector of influence: the positioning of creative writers within the university and on academic payrolls. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, the book of the moment among scholars of contemporary American literature, points out how powerfully the situation of writers in America has changed in recent decades thanks to the explosive proliferation of MFA programs in creative writing. McGurl moves beyond potted debates as to whether working toward an MFA is an enabling aspect of a budding literary career or a homogenizing waste of money. (That’s one of those impossible questions that has as many answers as there are students and alumni of MFA programs.) Instead, he simply remarks upon how massive creative writing has become; with over 300 degree-granting programs and more than 25,000 members of the Associated Writing Programs (the organization for faculty members in the field of creative writing), creative writing in the academy, which pays full-time salaries and benefits to hundreds of novelists and poets, is “the largest system of literary patronage for living writers the world has ever seen.” Having made that point, McGurl then explores what effects this development has produced in the fiction written by the authors who operate within that system’s sphere of influence.

There can be no debate as to whether Ratner, Orringer, and Houghteling are products of McGurl’s program era. In fact, they’re products of a couple of the same individual institutions. Ratner received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, Houghteling got her MFA there, and Orringer served there as a visiting professor. Ratner and Orringer both received MFAs from Iowa, while Orringer and Houghteling have also done time at Cornell, Stanford, and Harvard.

Of course, attending a specific school, or an MFA program in general, does not dictate a novelist’s methods or subjects. And it should be noted, as McGurl does, that one of the most consistent and typical products of the MFA system has been the standard collection of contemporary, semi-autobiographical short stories, like Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, that requires very little research into anything but one’s own navel. Still, as McGurl suggests, it cannot be entirely coincidental when some contemporary creative writers begin to resemble the literary scholars with whom they share their departments. And it seems plausible to suggest that movements in literary scholarship like New Historicism and history of the book, both of which emphasize archival research and have exerted pervasive influence over the study of American literature in English departments in the past few decades, might have helped to nudge a few creative writers toward the archive.

What concrete form could this institutional influence take? Well, cash. Michigan’s MFA students apply for research grants that allow them to travel abroad or consult archives. Why wouldn’t a student like Houghteling want to write fiction set in, say, France, if a fellowship were forthcoming that would fly her to Paris gratis and cover her croissants? Joseph Skibell’s A Curable Romantic, another prize-winner—it’s tonight’s $25,000 runner-up for the Rohr Prize—mashes up historical fiction and magical realism and includes lengthy passages translated from Esperanto, as well as some snippets in untransliterated Hebrew and Yiddish. Among his other supporters, Skibell thanks “the University Research Committee of Emory University,” where he serves as associate professor of Creative Writing/English. Again, the availability of research grants does not force novelists to translate foreign languages or to compile bibliographies of over a hundred sources in three languages (as scholars of American literature now tend to do), but obviously the possibility of financial support provides a substantial incentive for undertaking such projects.

It might be objected that Ratner and Houghteling aren’t currently academics; even Orringer only teaches as an adjunct these days. But it’s not just academicians who are affected by the institutionalization of creative writing, nor, for that matter, just recently “emerging writers.” Philip Roth, perhaps the least-emerging novelist in the universe, retired from teaching Comp Lit at the University of Pennsylvania almost two decades ago. Yet his most recent novels lean more heavily on research, or at least cite sources more insistently, than he has ever before in his career: his most recent novel, Nemesis, acknowledges 12 specific books from which he has “drawn information,” and The Plot Against America has a list of sources (for its postscript, granted) almost two pages long.

Whether or not a contemporary writer is formally employed by a creative writing program, McGurl insists, she cannot entirely escape what another critic has dubbed the “culture of the school.” Obviously not all young Jewish novelists have been rushing to visit manuscript collections—prizewinners like Ratner, Orringer, Houghteling, and Skibell are by definition exceptional, to some degree, in their literary practices—but doing so has begun to seem normal. The academy asserts its influence over fiction subtly but unmistakably: We see it in the lengthening of novels’ acknowledgments, the proliferation of bibliographies for fiction, and the citations of archival and multilingual research.

The archival turn exemplified by these recent novelists may have less to do with Sebald’s influence or with the blandness of contemporary Jewish life in the United States, then, and more with the status of literature in our culture. A literary novel is much more likely to be a credential for tenure these days than a popular entertainment, and some of our novelists—whether formally employed by universities or just having been educated by them—increasingly resemble our academic scholars. Whether or not this is salutary, and whether or not we like it, the archival turn reflects how our authors get paid, and if this current crop of emerging Jewish novelists is any indication, some get paid to teach us Jewish history.

• The Triteuch

• Isaiah Thomas

• A Guide for the Clear-Minded

• Quiet Evenings of Augie March

• Civilization and Its Benefits

• The Diary of Anne Roiphe

• “Gimpel the Sage”

• Tevye the Actuary

• The Clothed and the Dead

And your special Philip Roth section:

• Portnoy’s Compliment

• Goodbye, Toledo

• A Lesser American Novel

• French Pastoral

• I Married A Liberal

• The Human Smudge

Apparently not. After the talk, at a reception on the second floor, as Roth sat at a table sipping white wine with ice, I asked him if he is working on anything new. He responded affirmatively, adding that the work is only—he paused to choose his word carefully—“inchoate.” Though he still does not look his age, he looks it more than he used to, with an ever-expanding bald spot and eyes that seem ever deeper set into his head. He is The Guy now—the generally acknowledged Great American Novelist (living category)—and so, perhaps uniquely, has no need to talk to press like me, although he was always polite. How did he feel about winning the Booker Prize? “Good.” He’s won every prize—which is his favorite? “All prizes are fine.” Any comment on the controversy stemming from the award yesterday? “No.” Okay then, any comment on one of the scholars’ assertions last night that, in Roth’s canon, there is a break that occurs with American Pastoral when Roth’s characters are no longer faced with choices but rather have their fates imposed upon them? “I dunno.” “You just write ‘em?” I suggested. “Yeah.”

The crowd skewed very old—it was hardly surprising to see Elie Wiesel slip in a few minutes late. YIVO executive director Jonathan Brent introduced the evening, which consisted of four scholars—all men—giving their takes on Nemesis prior to the reading. (There was a brief Q-and-A period, made briefer by Brent’s observation, “If you don’t ask us any questions, then the sooner Philip will be doing his reading.”) Roth sat in the front row, neck craned upwards immobilely, thumbs at times twiddling, something of a king or at least minor member of the royal family watching men of court endeavor to please him.

Not that the four scholars—Brent; Bernard Avishai; Igor Webb; and Steven J. Zipperstein—didn’t take some idiosyncratic views of Roth’s work. But all arrived with the premise, as Brent put it in his introduction, that Roth “stands alone, not just here in America but abroad, as the greatest literary mind and talent of our time” and that Nemesis is “one of his truly finest works.” The discussion had an almost academic-conference feel in the erudition that was asked of—or not even asked of, but just flat-out required—of its listeners, as well as for its frank and close dissections of Roth’s novel. This was not a place to come if you hadn’t read the novel and wanted no spoilers.

First came Avishai, a Hebrew University professor with a compulsion for pronouncing foreign-language names with the utmost correctness—“J.M. Coetzee;” “Albert Camus” and for that matter “Dr. Rieux” of Camus’s The Plague; even “Zuckerman,” the surname of Roth’s famed alter ego Nathan, was pronounced with the German (or perhaps Yiddish) long, dainty, faintly “r”-inflected “u.” Avishai focused on the sense of duty protagonist Bucky Cantor feels as his friends are off in Europe fighting the Nazis and he is stuck in Newark in the summer of 1944 as a polio epidemic rages. “Bucky is not projecting being a victim of chance,” Avishai argued, “nor is he punishing himself in order to valorize some ‘mysterious design.’ Rather, he rejects living as a victim, period. For this move you cannot simply acknowledge fate, Nemesis, the gods, God, all of which implies some kind of order behind events.” Avishai’s reading of Nemesis is a bleak one.

Next was Brent himself, and, being as he is YIVO’s executive director, he focused much of his talk on the Jewish aspects of the novel and the rest of Roth’s work (“Although he treats Jews as if they weren’t Jews most of the time—that is, as human beings—his novels are nevertheless about Jews”). Ultimately, though, he too found himself drawn to Cantor’s steely resolve in the face of the epidemic—the plague—and, comparing him with the novel’s narrator, who feels none of this requirement for self-sacrifice, insisted, “The moral choice in Nemesis is not between Arnie’s compromising normality and happiness and Mr. Cantor’s hidden rage and withered self. The novel does not present the reader with a choice at all. Rather, the novel is an awakening in the reader that the one reality is inextricably bound up with the other as Ahab was with the White Whale, as Dr. Jekyll was with Mr. Hyde.”

Igor Weiss—who came up with the American Pastoral-centric taxonomy I later presented to Roth—also found a bleak book. Indeed, a bleak series of books: For with the publication of Nemesis Roth retroactively labeled four short novels he has published in the past several years with the “Nemesis” heading, “classifying,” as Weiss put it, “his recent works under the name of the most vengeful Greek goddess, a merciless and implacable enemy.” I wished there were covers to hide under.

Zipperstein came last but not least—in fact, he was the best. (It’s worth noting, incidentally, that he said that “the very best interpretive book on [Roth’s] work” is the one by my former professor, Ross Posnock.) Zipperstein spoke in the muscular, robust tones of Roth’s prose, as though he had spent the last couple of weeks reading a very great deal of it. “In Roth’s musings time and again on community, the inability to live with it or without it,” he began, “it is here that his Jewish preoccupations are most acute and fertile.” Zipperstein came prepared for the setting: The Jewish crowd come to see the Jewish author at the Jewish institution in the Jewish city. He quoted Roth in a Paris Review interview: “It isn’t what it’s talking about that makes a book Jewish—it’s that the book won’t shut up. The book won’t leave you alone. Won’t let up.” This got a big laugh.

Zipperstein continued: “If one is to look for Roth’s Jewish preoccupations—and one need not look very far—there is nowhere better to see them than in a sense of Jewry’s overheated embraces and exclusions, both born of much the same impulses, which have provided him a splendid prism through which to probe community.” Then, Zipperstein went for the kill: “Is there another people that praises its achievers, that polices its boundaries, that punishes its miscreants with the fervor, the torrent of righteous indignation meted out at one or another time to Philip Roth or Hannah Arendt or for that matter Richard Goldstone?” Boom, as we say.

More: “Is it mere happenstance that Judaism’s entry into modernity is punctuated by the afterglow of Spinoza’s own excommunication from the community? The appearance of that solitary person, shorn of obligatory fellowship, cooly isolated, and whose identity is so indelibly marked by its being now and always communally adrift?”

I don’t mind quoting Zipperstein at length because it reads kind of like Roth (lesser Roth, to be sure, but still Roth), and as though sensing this, Zipperstein proceeded to quote from some of the best Roth there is, in Portnoy’s Complaint:

They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made! Oh, and the milchiks and flaishiks besides, all those meshuggeneh rules and regulations on top of their own private craziness! It’s a family joke that when I was a child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?” Do you get what I’m saying? I was raised by Hottentots and Zulus!

The crowd was laughing. But the joke was on them! Whom did they think poor Alexander Portnoy is referring to?

Of course Portnoy’s Complaint is a youthful and barbaric yawp if ever there was one. But the thread does run through Roth’s work, and if a break can be discerned pre- and post-American Pastoral, perhaps it is that before that mid-‘90s work, the community was stifling the Jewish individual, whereas after it the Jewish individual—the non-Jewish professor of The Human Stain, locked into the Jewish identity he has foisted upon himself; Bucky Cantor and indeed American Pastoral’s Swede Levov, with their ludicrous, self-imposed stoicism—has voluntarily accepted the community’s stifling.

But that’s just my theory. We will certainly never get a straight answer from Roth, who apparently prefers instead just to write ‘em and, I can report, keep writing ‘em.

Earlier: Roth Wins British Prize Amid Controversy

But it wouldn’t be Roth if there weren’t controversy, and, duly, the third member of the three-member panel that awarded the prize to Roth angrily withdrew from the panel, saying that Roth “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every book,” and adding, “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” Whoa there. What’s going on here?

Quite a bit. The New Yorker‘s Macy Halford does a superb job laying it out. The odd judge out, Carmen Callil, is not merely not a fan of the Zuckerberg books. She is the founder of Virago Press, a British house which is the largest publisher in the world dedicated to bringing out women’s writing. Hence, perhaps, “sitting on your face”—a freighted image that implicitly conjures charges of misogyny and/or of an overreliance of sexual scatology (both of which are charges that have been levied plentifully at Roth in the past). Moreover, Halford notes, in 1996 Virago published the English actress Claire Bloom’s memoir, which included a detailed account of her failed marriage to Roth; Roth later fictionalized the experience of having your ex-wife write a memoir about your break-up in his novel I Married A Communist (which is also the name of the ex-wife’s memoir in the book; it’s set in the 1950s, during the Red Scare). “It’s perhaps inevitable that today’s Prize announcement would have been met with drama of some sort,” Halford argues. “But it’s also ridiculous: Agreeing to serve as a judge on a panel with two other people means agreeing to respect the decision of the majority, especially if one has known for months that the decision was a possibility.” As we say on the Internet: Co-sign.

Finally, there is the controversy surrounding the Man Booker International itself, which was created last decade in response to the criticism that some of the best English-language writers—including, of course, American ones—are ineligible for the Man Booker. Being the first American to win this prize may have forced forth anxiety in Britain over whether they are still masters of the English language. Ironically, Roth has long been an outspoken defender and lover of that language, who once, upon receiving an award from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—the “Y” stands for “Yiddish”—made a point of acknowledging that he was being honored “as an English writer for his achievement in English.”

Did I mention that Roth is speaking at YIVO tonight? Oh, yes, that. Check The Scroll tomorrow morning for a report.

Philip Roth Wins Man Booker International Prize in Disputed Decision [ArtsBeat]
Philip Roth and the Booker Judge [The Book Bench]

The American release of The Mighty Walzer (Bloomsbury, $16), Jacobson’s acclaimed 1999 novel,  gives us the chance to see him in a different mode—less troubled, more nostalgic, more energetically hilarious. Writing quasi-autobiographically about his childhood in 1950s Manchester, Jacobson evokes the insularity of the Jewish community, made up of fairly recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, and their wary fascination with the “real” English. This Jewish world is doubly provincial: a generation removed from “some sucking bog outside Proskurov,” still able to feel “mud from the Bug and the Dniester” clinging to them, Manchester’s Jews regard “Shaygetsshire” with wary fascination.

At the same time, Jacobson notes, the England they are assimilating to is itself provincial, a lower-middle-class Manchester with a fatal taste for “swag”—that is, junk, kitsch, crap. The Walzers, in fact, make their living from swag; the father of the family is a peddler of knickknacks, “ornamental Dutch pee-pee boys with Chinese faces, and flowery wall plates that said ‘Too Grand Ma,’ and brass mirrors in the design of a ship’s porthole.” Oliver Walzer, Jacobson’s grubby adolescent hero, looks on with horror: “Under the influence of swag, we became confused. Aesthetically confused. Whether we also became morally confused is the big question. I believe it depressed us—I’ll go that far. I believe the ugliness of the tsatskes we sold, and then surrounded ourselves with, demoralized us.”

But then, Oliver is in no position to sneer. Egotistical, sex-obsessed, pathologically shy, he is the gauchest, grossest Walzer of them all. It seems hard on Jacobson that just about every American reviewer of his books compares him to Philip Roth—indeed, the cover of The Mighty Walzer features a quote from Janet Maslin that mentions Roth’s name three times in the space of one sentence. But it’s impossible to miss the family resemblance between Oliver Walzer and Alexander Portnoy, Roth’s horny, neurotic avatar. It may have been a desire to go Roth one better that led Jacobson to make Walzer an even more defiantly perverse masturbator than Portnoy, who famously employed a piece of liver. When Oliver locks himself in the bathroom, however, it’s to cut the heads out of photographs of his female relatives and paste them onto bodies from pornographic magazines. “And I did this even to my little Polish grandmother? Especially to my little Polish grandmother.”

This is skin-crawling, but as in Roth and Mordecai Richler—who is the Canadian member of this international brotherhood of literary tummlers—it is also psychologically revelatory. Personally, I have always found it hard to sympathize with the sexual hang-ups of that generation of Jewish male writers—especially their inability to have erotic feelings about Jewish women, their fixation on blond goddesses. But the phenomenon is so well-established that there must some sociological reason for it. Maybe the answer can be found in Isaac Rosenfeld’s 1949 essay “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” which equates kashrut with the incest taboo. If sexual desire is trayf, Rosenfeld writes, then it has to be kept outside the Jewish family, restricted to Gentiles. Walzer feels just the same way. As Jacobson writes in one of his mad riffs: “I’d been brought up, by precept and example, to believe that virginity was an exclusively Jewish property. Why would a hymen have been called a hymen if it wasn’t Jewish? I had cousins called Hymen. We all did. Becky and Shoshanna Hymen.”

If this doesn’t make you laugh, you won’t like Jacobson; if it does, you’ll feast on The Mighty Walzer. Here, as often, it’s in words themselves that the comedy of Jewishness erupts. The novel is packed with Yiddish words, which are never translated, helping to underscore the sense that Walzer and his friends literally speak a different language from their Gentile peers. The difference between unserer and anderer, us and them, is always on their minds. Even when they’re speaking English, Jacobson writes, they can’t shake “the belief that we could magic words and that none of them would hear what we were saying.”

There is just one place where Jacobson’s timid hero becomes strong, skilled, and competent, where he can be “the Mighty Walzer.” The joke is that this place is the ping-pong table: Oliver is a hero of an unheroic game, a champion of a sport no one cares about. Jacobson writes about ping-pong knowledgeably, lovingly, with Nabokovian lyricism; but the fact remains that he is writing about ping-pong, and he delights in the mock-heroic irony that results. Take his poetic little treatise on the difference between old-fashioned rubber paddles and new sponge-covered ones:

My own inclination was to leave well enough alone, not because I was a purist … but becasue I liked the control conventional rubber gave me, I liked the sound—plock plock, plock plock: like the clatter of high heels on a wet pavement—I liked its associations with my old club and team-mates, and I liked the game as I played it; I liked chopping deep, arresting the ball on my forehand, telling it who was boss, and that you could only do with pimples. No one in his right mind chopped with sponge. With sponge there was no call to chop. If you needed to chop you were using the wrong rubber. And if you were using the wrong rubber you were in the wrong game.

Surely no one has ever written, or ever will write, a better ping-pong novel than The Mighty Walzer. But Jacobson’s novelistic talent really shows in the way he makes ping-pong serve as a mirror, in which Oliver’s neuroses and appetites are ludicrously reflected. He becomes romantically obsessed with a female player, Lorna Peachley, but can only get aroused by losing to her—by being humiliated, even beaten and choked. “The last thing I wanted Lorna Peachley to do was hang me from the rafters and paddle me with her bat. Not the very last thing, but one of the last things. The point of the bat was that she should use me as she used it. I didn’t want to suffer the bat, I wanted to be the bat.”

Finally, Oliver’s perverse desire to lose at ping-pong—to surrender the game whenever he meets an opponent who seems to want to win more than he does—is shown to be his fatal flaw, bound up somehow with his Jewish alienation and family misery and sexual guilt. “Winning is a test of character, as every sporting commentator will tell you, and I didn’t have any character. Grandiosity, yes. Skills, yes. But character?” Jacobson’s verdict on his alter ego is ultimately very harsh, and the novel ends with a hurried flash-forward to the present day, allowing us to see how Oliver’s adolescent flaws have ruined his adult life. Walzer’s curse, really, is that he never learned to become a comic novelist. For as Jacobson shows, it takes a writer of genius to take all of life’s sordid humiliations and redeem them with laughter.

• Hector Timerman, the Jewish-Argentinean foreign minister accused of offering to Iran to drop the investigation of the 1994 AMIA Jewish community center bombing, is being defended by the AMIA’s current president as well as the chief prosecutor of the case—who promises that “nobody will stop me” from bringing the perpetrators to justice. [JTA]

• Philip Roth and Australian David Malouf are finalists for the Man Booker International Prize. [Man Booker]

• Over 40 Palestinians from Awarta were arrested in the wake of the murder of the Fogel family. [Haaretz]

• Jewish communities in Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt have resisted offers to help them flee their respective countries. [JPost]

• Irving Shulman, founder of the Daffy’s clothing store chain, is dead. He was 96. [NYT]

I.

On the evening of June 26, 1937, thousands of Berlin Jews packed the city’s grand Brüdervereinshaus to bid farewell to Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who had been ordered by the Gestapo to leave Germany immediately or face an almost certain death sentence for political subversion. Prinz had been the most popular, outspoken, and inspirational champion of Jewish national rights and Zionism in the dark years since the Nazis’ rise to power, preaching to overflow crowds at Berlin’s most important temples about the need to leave Germany and immigrate to Palestine. By the summer of 1937 he had already been arrested a half-dozen times by the Gestapo, but he always managed to elude deportation. This time, however, he was warned by his “friend” and informant, Gestapo Obersturmbanführer Kuchman, that his days were numbered, and he reluctantly decided to emigrate to the United States, sponsored by his friend and patron Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. Among the uninvited guests at Prinz’s farewell was a Nazi functionary, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann’s presence was to have important legal ramifications more than two decades later. In the initial discovery proceedings to establish Eichmann’s identity before his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Benno Cohen, the foremost Zionist leader in pre-war Berlin, positively identified the defendant, testifying as follows:

We held a valedictory meeting to take leave of Rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz who was leaving the country. He was one of the finest speakers, the best Zionist propagandist in those years. The large hall was packed full. The public thronged to this meeting. Suddenly, as chairman of the event, I was called to the door and my office clerk told me, “Mr Eichmann is here.” I saw this same man, for the first time in civilian clothing, and he shouted at me, “Who is responsible for order here? This is disorder of the first degree.” … I watched him the entire time from my place in the chair.

As a young rabbi in his late twenties, Prinz was already addressing congregations of thousands in Berlin’s largest temple, the magnificent Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, whose stunning façade has recently been restored. And less than two years after arriving in the United States after his expulsion from Germany by Eichmann’s goons, he was appointed rabbi of New Jersey’s largest Jewish house of worship, the magnificent Greek Revival Temple B’nai Abraham, which towered over Newark’s then-fashionable and heavily Jewish Clinton Hill section, where hundreds of young people swarmed to hear his Friday-night orations.

As Prinz so evidently delights in repeatedly recalling in his posthumously published memoir, Rebellious Rabbi, the Jews of both Berlin and Newark—especially “the younger generation” to whom he mainly dedicated his ministries—did not so much “go to shul” for an encounter with the divine as they “went to Prinz” for an encounter with the rabbi. The combination of Prinz’s charismatic personality and his distinctly un-theological and nationalistic understanding of the essence of Judaism proved as attractive to the nervously Americanizing Jews of mid-20th-century New Jersey as it had been to the deeply assimilated and newly imperiled Jews of early Nazi Germany. Prinz’s nationalist theology was first expressed in his classic work of Jewish defiance, Wir Juden, which was published in Berlin in 1934 and quickly became a best-seller among Germany’s deeply demoralized Jews. He used his experiences leading the Jews of Nazi Berlin to develop an almost metaphysical notion of Jewish national identity, which he referred to as the “doctrine of Jewish inescapability.”

Prinz’s initial, exploratory visit to the United States, in March 1937, just a half year before his final emigration from Germany, was marked by all manner of disappointments with the “Golden Land.” Prinz complained bitterly about America’s complacence in the face of the threat posed by Nazi Germany. In his first recorded impressions of the country, he found almost nothing that compared favorably with his native Germany. America’s cities are depicted as ugly and rundown, racism against blacks disturbingly pervasive, its political culture naïve and intellectual life second-rate, and its people primitive and poorly dressed.

“My first impression with America was dreadful,” he wrote. Prinz arrived in Hoboken and described the scene as “not impressive, the houses were decrepit and the streets were dirty. The richest country in the world did not present itself to me as a place of glamour and prosperity.”

But, already during this first visit, Prinz was inspired by an unexpected section of New York—Harlem. “I remember being particularly interested in Harlem,” he wrote. “It was at that time that I heard for the first time what is now commonplace, namely speeches about Black Nationalism. Upon my return to Germany I wrote an article that was entitled ‘Zionism in Black.’ ”

And in June 1937, shortly before he finally emigrated with his family to the United States, Prinz published a stinging indictment of American racism, “Ámerika, hast du es besser?” in the Berlin liberal Jewish journal Der Morgen: “When people in New York City describe a neighborhood as being nice, they are not referring to its parks, trees or wide boulevards. They are talking about the fact that there are no blacks, Italians and Jews in that ‘nice’ part of the city.”

Prinz’s brave defiance of the Nazis, and his understanding of Jewish identity in primarily national, if not quite racial, terms, emboldened him to speak his mind when he encountered all forms of racism in the United States after he immigrated in August 1937. During his first foray outside New Jersey, to Atlanta, where he had been invited to address various Jewish organizations just three months after his arrival in the country, Prinz came face-to-face with Southern Jewish racism. Before his first engagement, speaking to members of the local Zionist leadership, Prinz scheduled a morning meeting with the Bible scholar and black Methodist bishop Willis Jefferson King, at the time professor of Old Testament at Gammon Theological Seminary, a black institution. Upon arriving in Atlanta, while making his way to King’s home, Prinz noticed a huge Coca-Cola sign, which at that time constituted Atlanta’s skyline, as the beverage company was the city’s largest business. Here is Prinz’s remarkable recollection of the subsequent events of that day:

After I left the Seminary, it was time for me to go and address a luncheon given in my honor by three Zionist groups. I was greeted by the people in charge of the affair and shortly thereafter one of them said to me, “I hear that you visited that nigger at the black seminary and even invited the nigger to dine with you tonight.” I was completely speechless. But I managed to respond that it was true that I visited with a great scholar and had a very interesting time with him. But I could not help adding that I was shocked to hear such words from a Jewish group welcoming a Hitler refugee. … I asserted that what was evidently happening to the black people of America was the very same thing that was happening to the Jews of Europe. There was an embarrassed silence … after which one of the Jews asked me: “Would the rabbi care for a drink?” … I immediately responded that I would like nothing better, hoping for a stiff alcoholic drink, not merely intoxicating but anaesthetizing for a pain I can hardly describe. Someone then brought me a glass of Coca Cola. That was the first time, and the very last time in my life that I drank Coca Cola. In all the forty years that have elapsed since 1937, Coca Cola was for me a symbol of hatred and prejudice with which I did not want to be identified.

Prinz could hardly have imagined at the time that more than a quarter of a century later he was to share these very same sentiments with what was to become the largest audience he, or any other American rabbi, was ever to address—the quarter of a million people who gathered on the National Mall for the “March on Washington for Jobs” on August 28, 1963, a historic event that Prinz often referred to in subsequent speeches and writings as the “most memorable religious experience of my life,” and of which he was one the principle organizers.

Following a stirring rendition of “I’ve Been Buked and Scorned” by the so-called Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson (Prinz, clearly moved by Jackson’s performance, prefaced his speech by declaring, “I wish I could sing!”) and speaking just prior to Dr. King’s legendary “I Have a Dream” oration, Prinz mesmerized the marchers with a speech that was as bold as it was brief, and as inspiring as it was passionate. Opening with the words “I speak to you as an American Jew,” Prinz launched a powerful indictment of American silence in the wake of that era’s violent racism in the Deep South, an apathy that he controversially compared to the silence of “ordinary Germans” during the early years of the Third Reich.

(Curious about Prinz’s proud vow of cola abstinence, I’d contacted Prinz’s son, Rabbi Jonathan Prinz, who confirmed that Coca-Cola was not allowed in the Prinz family home. But he added a literally refreshing footnote. The day of the March on Washington was especially hot and humid, the younger Rabbi Prinz recalled. His father was parched after the speeches and joined other members of the roster at a VIP tent at the front of the Mall, in search of a cool beverage; to his dismay, the only drink available was Coca-Cola, which both rabbis Prinz happily consumed with great gusto.)

Continue reading: Dr. King, Zionism, and the male sexual drive. Or view as a single page.

My high-achieving, second-wave feminist mother, who made a point of tuning into the pageant every year “to remind myself how much I hate it,” had a somewhat different take. I remember asking her when I was 6 or 7 why so many of the finalists seemed to come from the South. I’m not sure I realized this at the time, but, looking back, I think it was my way of wondering why there was never a girl who seemed “like us.”

My mother replied, with a rough edge of bitterness in her voice: “Because that’s where all the blonde Barbie dolls with too many teeth live.”

It was not always thus.

In 1945, the Miss America Pageant constituted a symbolic return to normalcy for the country; a promise that a still-smoldering Europe and a Japan about to face its first devastating nuclear winter could not keep patriotic Americans from leering at a bunch of lissome young beauties parading across a stage in flattering but modest swimwear.

Its winner, however, a leggy 21-year-old brunette named Bess Myerson, was decidedly unorthodox. Myerson represented New York City, a place that many still see as somehow un-American. (There have only been two other New Yorkers named Miss America, including Vanessa Williams, famously the first black woman to win the pageant.) Myerson was a college graduate—unusual for contestants at the time—who had entered the pageant on a lark when she heard of its offer of scholarship money, hoping to win enough to buy a new piano. She was also the first and as yet only Jewish girl to win the crown.

But that could change on Saturday, when Loren Galler Rabinowitz, the reigning Miss Massachusetts, becomes the first Jew to compete for the Miss America title since Myerson. Like Myerson, Galler Rabinowitz entered the pageant for practical reasons. The Harvard graduate and two-time national ice dance champion is about to start medical school, and she hopes to take advantage of the scholarships the program offers for women going into medicine. “A lot of my friends were taking a gap year in order to make money for school—taking jobs at banks and things,” Galler Rabinowitz says. “I wanted to spend a year doing public service, which I’ve always been extremely passionate about. And this year seemed like my last opportunity before jumping on the hamster wheel of med school.”

The pageant circuit remains a pretty Christianized affair, with so many contestant espousing their faith in Jesus (not to mention “opposite marriage”) that you’d think they’re planning a run for, well, the governorship of Alaska. Feminism, an atavistic sense of ritual modesty, the sense that there were more productive ways to spend one’s time (you might think Galler Rabinowitz would belong to the latter category): All may have conspired over the years to keep Jewish girls who were more than pretty from gathering in Atlantic City. Galler Rabinowitz believes part of the problem is simply geographical: “Pageants are biggest in the South, and Jews tend to be concentrated in the Northeast,” she says. “It’s just not part of the cultural purview.”

Bess Myerson, however, isn’t sweating the reasons, and she warns against attaching an unhealthy importance to this latest milestone. “I’m very excited to have another Jewish girl in the running, but there should be another Jewish girl in the running,” the 86-year-old Myerson told me via a representative of the Anti-Defamation League, with which she has been associated since her pageant days. “I’m very proud, but it shouldn’t be a big deal.”

Fair enough. But in 1945, her selection was a big deal, for Jew and Gentile alike. Weeks before the pageant, judges received phone calls from irate pageant watchers warning them not to choose “the Jew.” Hoping to stave off trouble, pageant officials pleaded with Myerson to change her name to the deracinated “Beth Merrick.” After her win, not a single official sponsor, from the notoriously anti-Semitic Ford Motor Company to Catalina Swimwear, requested that she endorse their products; she was barred at the last minute from a scheduled appearance at a restricted country club in the South. The Daughters of the American Revolution, it seemed, did not care to share crab salad with a Daughter of Israel. (Who says she would have eaten it anyway?)

Despite this ugliness, the Jewish community was understandably jubilant over Myerson’s win. One of the less discussed aspects of the Nazi regime, in both incipience and aftermath, is its lasting imprint on many Jews’ sense of physical self-image. (Someone calling you ugly seems rather trivial when that same person is also trying to kill you.) But even relatively trivial wounds can leave lasting scars: Primo Levi hypothesized that much of his crippling shyness toward the opposite sex was caused by the Aryanization laws and ubiquitous Nazi propaganda depicting the Jew as physically and sexually repugnant. His admission is instructive; it would take a self-confidence bordering on the pathological to avoid internalizing at least some of that crap.

A beautiful Jewish girl being named Miss America—“our ideal,” as Bert Parks would remind viewers—went a long way in helping to repair some of this damage. It’s an overstatement to compare the results of a beauty pageant with the U.N. resolution recommending the creation of Jewish state in Palestine, but Myerson’s historic win was nevertheless an important step toward the reinstatement of the status of “fully human” to the devastated Jewish people. Even if much of the world was not quite ready to see it that way.

Bess Myerson could have (and perhaps should have) ushered in a worshipful golden age of Jewish femininity. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. As Jewish men began to shape American pop culture of the postwar years, they often asserted their independence from the painful (or embarrassing) history through less-than-flattering portrayals of their mothers and sisters and cousins, robbing Jewish women of their femininity and sexual power in the public imagination for generations. In the work of Woody Allen, early Philip Roth (although I believe that Portnoy’s Complaint is intended as a satire of these attitudes, not an endorsement), Paul Mazursky, Herman Wouk, and the like, male “Jewish” traits—intellectual sophistication, sensitivity, even neurosis—were portrayed as endearing and even sexually combustible to the right (Gentile) woman; Jewish women (as I scarcely have to tell you) were portrayed as loud, pushy, materialistic, emasculating, crass, and seemingly devoid of any complicated inner life. If they were at all attractive, it was in spite of their Jewishness, not because of it, or the attractiveness had come at great (often surgical) expense.

It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to uncover the seething self-hatred that is the flip side of the JAP stereotype; the furious suspicion that no matter how beautifully you dress, how vigilantly you starve yourself, how meticulously you carve up your body and your face, that you’re never going to be quite good or pretty or lovable enough. That on some level, that schlemiel you married is always going to be holding out for Mia Farrow (or, today, Leslie Mann). Even Ari Ben Canaan, the anti-Portnoy, winds up with the shiksa at the end.

I never wanted to be Miss America, even when I was 7. But I wanted to be pretty. I wanted to be loved.

It’s a feeling Galler Rabinowitz knows well. “I wish I could say it was something I’d never thought about,” she says, sighing. “I come from the world of competitive skating, which is even more aesthetically focused than pageants, and I didn’t fit the aesthetic there either. It took me some time to realize that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s about feeling comfortable and proud of who you are.”

It takes some time for all of us. Maybe it’s silly, but for the first time in years, I think I’ll be tuning into the Miss America Pageant this weekend, cheering on Miss Massachusetts in a frankly chauvinistic (and let’s face it, somewhat embarrassing) gesture of ethnic solidarity. I don’t care if she wins. I just care that she’s there. Bess Myerson is right; it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a big deal. It won’t be for my generation’s daughters. But it still is for me.

I don’t mean to oversell this: The bride and bridegroom attended Tufts and NYU, respectively; they didn’t grow up speaking Yiddish on Hester Street. But one senses that nowadays it is more the children of these sort of Jews, now safely ensconced in the upper-middle-class and more likely to be pursuing a creative-class, less remunerative type of career (like, say, blogging for an online magazine), that you tend to see in the Weddings/Celebrations pages. (The wrinkle is that Zilberman was born in Ukraine: Perhaps Soviet Jews are today’s equivalent of the “mainstream” Jews of 40 years ago?)

In the adorable accompanying video, Zilberman testifies that when he first laid eyes on his future bride—in Columbia’s library, naturally—she struck him as “This cute—very studious—but very cute girl.” Perfect. Mazel tov!

Emily Rubenstein and Igor Zilberman [NYT]

Meet Argov Barak, the man so blessed that he was photoshopped at birth. The 19 year-old surfer is leaving Hawaii for the holy land for the usual reasons: “Since I’m Jewish and the son of an ex-Israeli citizen I feel obligated to serve in the IDF. And in any case, the Israeli girls are the most beautiful girls in the world.”

Fine and noble reasons. Our loss is obviously a win for Israeli connoisseurs, but not all of Barak’s dreams can come true. “His first wish was to enlist in an elite unit; however medical problems prevent him from doing so.” My guess? Either that smile blinded his fellow troops, or this is just a cover to use his rock hard abs to deflect bullets.

Surfing His Way to Israel [YNet]

It’s worth checking out, but first, what say we make things a little more interesting? Presenting: The Philip Roth first-sentence quiz!

Below, find 10 first sentences of Roth novels (with thanks, again, to HTMLGIANT). Can you tell which books they begin? The answers are after the jump.

1. “It began oddly.”

2. “It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago—I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman—when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.”

3. “He’d lost his magic.”

4. “Dear Zuckerman, In the past, as you know, the facts have always been notebook jottings, my way of springing into fiction.”

5. “She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”

6. “The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.”

7. “When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do.”

8. “Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized—that was the dream of his life.”

9. “The Swede.”

10. “Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.”

Click below for answers.

One way to understand Obama’s presidency is as the stewardship of a leader who must subtly make his countrymen confront a fact they would prefer to avoid—namely, that the age of American prosperity is over. From that perspective, passing healthcare legislation was all-important to his presidency because without the economic boom of the post-World War II era, the state is now being forced to care for its aging population by dividing up a shrinking pie. As for Obama’s foreign policy, it is not a matter of making the United States appear to behave in a more modest and polite fashion after eight years of George W. Bush’s stubborn unilateralism. Rather, reality itself has humbled us.

But if the American century is coming to an end, it’s not just on account of Bush’s failures or the worldwide economic crisis, but because of a larger historical divide that we have barely begun to fathom—the end of the Cold War.“There was a balance of terror during the Cold War that people didn’t acknowledge,” Marc Weitzmann, a French journalist, literary critic, and novelist, told me recently in Paris. “The violence of the Cold War was sent to the Third World. These conflicts existed in faraway areas, places that we didn’t care about, like the Middle East. Now they’re fought out everywhere. As it turned out, the Berlin Wall wasn’t between East and West Germany, it was protecting the citizens of the West from violence.”

Weitzmann and I were having lunch near his apartment, at the Hotel du Nord, a quiet restaurant on the site of the 1938 Marcel Carné movie of the same name. A short, powerfully built 51-year-old man with a shock of red hair and intense blue eyes, Weitzmann speaks English with the fluid wit and mania of a New Yorker. He splits his time between Paris and New York, where he’s become close to writers like Philip Roth and Paul Berman. Weitzmann and I first met more than a decade ago, when he was still safely in the mainstream of Parisian literary culture and writing regular book reviews for Les Inrockuptibles, a leftist weekly that resembles a combination of Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books. In the aftershocks of Sept. 11, Weitzmann’s former colleagues came to consider his qualified support of Bush, the war in Iraq, and Israel heretical. His intellectual re-orientation began when Weitzmann moved to Israel to write a book about the recent massive Russian migration, the post-Cold War world, and globalization. The end of the peace process and the onset of the second intifada caught him by surprise, and he started to investigate his Jewish roots, a legacy that was largely obscured by his parents’ communist convictions. It is perhaps partly his family history that makes him especially sensitive to the significance of the Cold War, a conflict fought on four continents between two nuclear superpowers for nearly half a century.

The Cold War is again drawing attention from the French intelligentsia, with articles recently featured on the covers of news magazines and intellectual journals. This indicated that France is among the first countries to wake to the fact that it is not a post-Sept. 11 world but one still shaped by the Cold War and its conclusion, an aftermath that we have yet to account for properly. The spectacular nature of Sept. 11 and the consequences of those attacks obscured the remarkable fact that a war that had so profoundly shaped the modern world had only recently come to an end.

If Germany was the Cold War’s strategic battlefield, Weitzmann told me, then France was its “ideological battleground,” which makes his home country an ideal perch from which to understand the reality we inhabit now. A case in point is the part former President Jacques Chirac’s France played in opposing the Iraq war.

“There was anti-Americanism on top of it,” said Weitzmann, “but the French just wanted peace restored, and peace of mind. But they never understood that during the Cold War things were never that stable to begin with. The Cold War was a great time for Europe, especially France. There was stability and prosperity, and it was all protected by the Americans, and Europe didn’t even know it. This schizophrenia was possible as long as the Cold War went on, but as soon as it was over, the contradictions appeared. The French were afraid of the new context, so they hung on to what they knew in order to explain it: The U.S. was evil, and the Jews were manipulating things.”

Weitzmann’s new novel, Quand J’Etais Normal, or When I Was Normal, is about the insecure political context that has beset post-Cold War France. Set in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war, when Paris was sharply divided between pro-war and anti-war camps, it is the story of a French Jewish family—“a chaotic family,” according to Weitzmann—muddling through a landscape of political chaos, paranoia, and Jewish anxiety and insecurity.

“The anti-war demonstrations were composed of Chirac supporters, leftists, and Muslims,” Weitzmann said. “And the pro-war demonstrators were basically Jews. The Jews were scared of the climate in France, and for good reason: These anti-war demonstrators were openly anti-Semitic. Along with images of Chirac, you had Hamas songs. There are both 5 million Muslims in France and also the biggest Jewish community in Europe today.”

Weizmann says that anti-Israel rhetoric has largely disappeared from French political discourse even if anti-Israel sentiment hasn’t changed much. In contrast to the Chirac years, said Weitzmann, “with Sarkozy there is no link between popular resentment toward Israel and the official government position.” But hostility toward the United States has different roots, which the election of Obama did little to quell. “The fact that a black man is president impresses Europeans for the wrong reasons,” Weitzmann said. “They see Obama’s election as a victory for Third Worldism. In the end, his election was a message from America to Americans, not to the world.”

The United States, Weitzmann argues, are no longer capable of playing the role of world leader because the world itself has changed. “Coming out of World War II,” Weitzmann said, “the American idea was that the U.S. is the only country capable of fighting terror regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. Europe needed to be rebuilt, and the U.S. was the only free country able to lead the way. The legitimacy of that leadership depends on the fiction that there is indeed a Western world to be led.”

Weitzmann explains that by fiction he doesn’t mean that the idea is false, only that every identity is created, and this is how America’s postwar identity came about. “The idea that there is such a thing as the West is how the U.S. legitimized its leadership.”

In other words, the real challenge to American leadership is not the economy or even the desire of some U.S. policymakers to reduce our international profile but a lack of legitimacy. “World War II was the moment that the idea of what America was and the reality coincided,” Weitzmann said. “You liberated the camps, you beat the Nazis, and so on. But now the landscape is different. Now what you think you are is in conflict with what others think of you.”

The question then is not just whether the United States is capable of leading but whether anyone is interested in or capable of following. Western Europe is scaling down its global commitments. France and Britain are planning to share aircraft carriers, as their economies won’t permit them to operate independent modern navies. “Europe is trying to exist without military power,” Weitzmann said, “but there is no economic power without military grounding.” The irony is that a U.S. victory in the Cold War revealed Europe’s impotence. “Bush’s big mistake,” Weitzmann argued, “was that he did not understand that if Europe is militarily impotent, if Europe is effectively dead, then the U.S. has lost its legitimacy to lead the West.”

It’s worth remembering that French intellectuals condemned the naiveté and imperial greed of our political classes for almost 50 years after the end of World War II and, as Weitzmann said, ignored the fact that their freedoms were ensured by American economic and military might. If Weitzmann’s frightening thesis is correct that there is no longer a West for the United States to lead, it’s a concern that was shared by members of the Bush Administration. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld distinguished between Old Europe, which included France, and New Europe, the Central and Eastern European states once behind the Iron Curtain. In the wake of the Cold War, New Europe still looks to Washington for leadership. Whether we’re capable of leading there and elsewhere, like the Muslim Middle East, remains to be seen.

In the end, though, the American century was never about history, or the notion that it was simply our turn in the great historical cycle. Rather, we are self-generated, self-willed, born of the desire to recreate ourselves. We took that privilege and responsibility upon ourselves. It is difficult to imagine what the United States is without the idea that we bear a great responsibility for the fate of others and are willing to lead.

So what is The Diasporist going to be?
I’ve been writing for a long time about the intersection between religion and ideology. I also travel pretty compulsively. So I imagine the column combining those two things. It’s a chance to bring a Jewish lens to many corners of the world. The thing about the diaspora is it means that it’s possible to see the whole world through a Jewish lens.

I see The Diasporist as also being a reference to Operation Shylock. It’s one of my favorite Philip Roth novels, and it employs this really surreal device to get at what seems to be the author’s ambivalence about Zionism, and his suspicion that the best of Jewish culture really lies in the diaspora. What appeals to me about it is, inasmuch as I identify strongly as a Jew, it’s with the culture of my forefathers: Freud, Walter Benjamin, Trotsky—not politically, but as the Jewish culture that I like to claim as my heritage.

You have written on Jewish subjects in the past and are yourself Jewish, but have not been exclusively a Jewish writer. Why write a column for an explicity Jewish publication?
If there’s one thing that makes me incredibly proud to be a Jew even to the point of being a Jewish chauvinist, it’s realizing, when I’m in Israel, that there are more Jews fighting for Palestinian rights than there are, say, Chinese people fighting for Tibetan rights; or you could take any other oppressed situation. Even though I don’t write about Judaism, I write about religion, globalization, humanitarianism: And to me those are all quintessentially Jewish values.

Where are your favorite places to travel?
First of all India, which is probably the place I’ve spent more time other than the United States. I lived there in my mid-twenties.

Turkey is my favorite place. For pure holiday pleasure, there’s nowhere better.

Italy is my favorite place to go eat.

And Spain is where I’m going this afternoon.

In Treatment [Tablet Magazine]

• The Shteyngart Shandy: Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout and lemon seltzah (thanks to Bambi Shlomovich on that one).

• HTMLGIANT provides the recipe for Roth’s Gin n’ Jews (gin, orange juice, and grapefruit juice), but executive editor Jesse Oxfeld notes that his cocktail would contain liver, crushed.

• Here are Dan Klein’s “Instructions” for the Guri-tonic War: Gin, tonic and penny served in a balloon. Understand you hold a drink.

• And Dan’s Dreyfus Affair: Equal parts Champagne, Bordeux, Chartreuse, Jewish parents. Shake drink while accusing it of treachery. Let sit locked in cabinet for a decade. Unlock and serve with an olive.

• The Icy Bashevis Singer has cold slivovitz and pickled beets.

• The Eggnog Ferber is imbibed on Hanukkah, not Christmas.

• The Jonathan Saffron Foer is a Sephardic spirit, a sangria featuring Spanish wine and enticing spices.

You know what the comments are for!

Can you talk about your role with the letters during the years you were with Saul? How he composed them and so on?

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I began working for Saul as a secretary. I took over from a hard-working student named Lillian Doherty, and she had replaced a wonderful woman (now in her hundredth year) whose name was Esther Corbin. It became clear to me early on that my job was to get through the dreck as quickly as possible—handle it, manage it, sweep it off the desk, and leave him time for important personal letters. As the years went by and our connection changed, I let go of the more unpleasant end of the correspondence and hung on to the precious file which contained letters to friends, letters to writers, letters of some significance. We carried that around wherever we went, whatever we were doing. We always had a sheaf of these letters and often responses would spring into his mind as we were driving or walking, or in the middle of the night and he’d say, “Got a piece of paper”? Or, he’d hand me the back of an envelope and start talking. It would begin as my handwritten mess and then I would type it, he would mark it up, retype it. Sometimes a letter would go through two or three drafts, sometimes it would just come out clean the first time—it was irregular that way. He wrote hundreds and hundreds of letters. He felt a strong need to respond to people who wrote to him. There was never a quiet time when that letter file was empty and the work was done.

Do you think that he felt he was writing for posterity and if so do you think that influenced the way that he wrote the letters?

That’s such an interesting question and nobody’s asked me that. The answer is he didn’t give a damn about what he called “posteriority.” He just didn’t care. He never wanted to save copies of his stuff and I will confess that I sometimes fished things out of the garbage. I kept things. And it wasn’t just that I kept carbons at the beginning, and copies later on. I would keep an early draft. I didn’t like to see his handwriting in the bin. But he had less than no interest in these things and I don’t think he was kidding when he writes in one of his letters that Isaac Rosenfeld’s burning his early letters saved him from future embarrassment. He meant it when he said, “I’m glad of it.” He really didn’t have that hoarding, pack-rat tendency. I guess it’s lucky that I did. I felt that these things were precious and I didn’t feel comfortable until I had taken the letter he had written, stapled it to the letter he was answering, scribbled the correspondent’s name on the upper right hand corner, and filed it away. There were many others who continued this work, among them, [assistants] Tim Spiekerman, Chris Walsh, and Will Lautzenheiser. Eventually all the letters ended up in the [University of Chicago's] Regenstein Library. That meant a lot to me but it meant nothing to him.

So, you never felt he was crafting the letters thinking, “Oh, one day someone will read my letters to Philip Roth?” Or something like that?

No, no. Saul had no interest in that.

One of the things that struck me is that the letters get feistier in the last 15 years. Do you have a sense of why this is so? And were you involved? Did you provoke or encourage strong responses?

Well, I certainly enjoyed them and this may be connected to your other question. Saul wasn’t imagining an audience 10 or 20 years from now, but he very much paid attention to the person he was speaking to while dictating and he was always trying to amuse me. He’d look up and he’d want to see if I was smiling or laughing. If I didn’t understand a word he would translate it for me. He was educating me, and if we’d been talking about something at great length this was a further elaboration, and so with some of the letters I felt he was speaking to me, conveying something he wanted me to know. If he was very worked up and angry about something he would want me to know about that too, and to understand. Our conversation could very well ignite a roaring fire. Yes, there is definitely something to that.

Right from the beginning there are no punches pulled in letters to other writers. Saul tells Cynthia Ozick what the problems are with The Messiah of Stockholm and is very direct in a letter to Philip Roth in his criticism of I Married a Communist. This kind of exchange between writers doesn’t exist much any more. He appears to have no fear. And this begins long before he was famous. Was that your sense, and what was his sense in that regard of the writer’s responsibility to other writers?

OK. Many things I want to address because you’ve put your finger on the heart of who he was and probably the thing I miss most about him. He was direct. There was nothing he wouldn’t say and not just in a letter to another writer but in company or among colleagues, or to students. He had a clean, pure, open way of being in the world. And maybe some of that will emerge for people reading this book—his fearlessness may impress young people who are longing to be that way themselves. When you say this directness came out early, you are right. It wasn’t just the 80-year-old elder statesman who gave ‘em what for, but also the young man who didn’t hesitate to tell a publisher, “If that’s all you got from reading The Adventures of Augie March I don’t want you even looking at my next book and I’ll go elsewhere.” There might be consequences for speaking his mind, but he always said exactly what needed to be said. Then, too, there is something of the fighter in him, the scrappy kid from the Chicago streets. You call me a kike, I’m going to punch you in the face and then I’m going to get you on the ground. This when teased as a 9-year-old in the hospital. There he is lying in bed, close to death, forbidden to move, but he remembers getting up and screaming at the tormentor in the bed beside him, “I’m going to kill you stone to dead.” And he said if he hadn’t collapsed on the floor and been whisked off by the nurses, he would have done just that. It’s punch and then follow-through; he really had that kind of ferocity. When it comes to criticizing writers, let’s hope the impulse is a gentler one. But writing was the most important thing to him and this is precisely the moment where he most needed to speak his mind. He wrote freely to the writers he respected most. These are the writers whose books he loved. You could also ask the question, “Could Saul take it”? Well, he was as touchy as the next person. He knew how much criticism stung because he was often on the receiving end. If Roth criticizes The Actual, or Ravelstein, you can’t ignore that. You absorb the blow, you brood on it, and you’re the better for it. I think the willingness to take a punch is to be admired.

Let me speak my mind about another aspect of the letters. The poems, especially the love poems are terrible.

(Laughter) I don’t think so! Not to me.

OK. Not the ones to you.

There aren’t any.

True. Do you have a favorite letter?

I have several. Some of the ones that came out of things we were talking about—conversations that I can remember lasting till dawn and then furious writing the next day. I love the ones that were cooking for a long time like that one to Stephen Mitchell.

About Saul’s reading the New Testament while he was in the hospital as a child?

Yes. That’s a very pointed letter. It takes you all the way from that boy in the hospital to the fully mature man. Deep thoughts about what it means to be a Jew, and the long history of Jew-hatred that all Jews need to be aware of, and attempt to understand. And you see that too in his last letter to Owen Barfield.

What’s it like for you to read all the love letters to the former wives and girlfriends?

I went through this book many times: the manuscripts, the proofs. In the beginning it’s a little bit like a detective story and you are personally involved. I’m reading along and wondering is there going to be something in this collection that’s going to be embarrassing or heartbreaking for me? So, yes, there’s certainly that. Also there’s that backward looking feeling of distress and jealousy and unhappiness connected with some of these intimacies. Maybe you knew about them, maybe you thought you knew more than you actually did know. Then there are people you didn’t even know about. If you are with somebody for 20 years and you imagine you know about all the lovers and the friends from before you arrived on the scene, well, you don’t. It’s inevitable there are going to be surprises, but then there’s a kind of sweetness in finding parts of a person suddenly emerging that you didn’t know about. It’s like mining all this beautiful fresh material.

Will there be a Collected Letters?

Someday. I’d like to see a massive academic edition. It would also be interesting to read a volume in which there were lengthy exchanges, between Saul and Philip, say, or Saul and Cynthia Ozick and so on. But for now I think we have enough to keep readers busy. Benjamin Taylor has done a superb job editing this volume. I think it’s beautiful.

Jonathan Wilson is the director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His books include the novel A Palestine Affair, the story collection An Ambulance is On the Way, and, from Nextbook Press, the biography Marc Chagall.

Mark Alan Stamaty

Not long ago, Tablet editor Alana Newhouse asked Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic, when he would be able to travel to New York from Washington to finish a Tablet Magazine project. He hemmed and hawed; she sighed.

“Well, whenever you’re finished gallivanting around Washington, come up here so we can finish,” she said, wearily.

“ ‘Gallivanting’?” Goldberg asked. “Who says ‘gallivanting’?”

“Jews,” Newhouse responded.

“Only Jews?” Goldberg asked.

“Only Jews,” Newhouse said.

“Like ‘appetizing’ as a noun?” Goldberg said.

“Yes,” Newhouse said. “And ‘mauve.’ Or ‘sideboard.’ ”

“And ‘drapery,’ ” Goldberg added.

“We could make a list,” Newhouse said.

***

As with everything else in Jewish life, Philip Roth got here first—in this case, with Portnoy’s Complaint:

The novelist, what’s his name, Markfield, has written in a story somewhere that until he was fourteen he believed “aggravation” to be a Jewish word. Well, this was what I thought about “tumult” and “bedlam,” two favorite nouns of my mother’s. Also “spatula.” I was already the darling of the first grade, and in every schoolroom competition, expected to win hands down, when I was asked by the teacher one day to identify a picture of what I knew perfectly well my mother referred to as a “spatula.” But for the life of me I could not think of the word in English. Stammering and flushing, I sank defeated into my seat, not nearly so stunned as my teacher but badly shaken up just the same … and that’s how far back my fate goes, how early in the game it was “normal” for me to be in a state resembling torment—in this particular instance over something as monumental as a kitchen utensil.

“Spatula,” we eventually decided, didn’t actually meet the requirement of our new Jewish lexicon; the list we have in mind does not feature Yiddish words, real or faux, nor will it include words such as “spatula” that have been confused, in the past, for Yiddish. (Though “tumult” might count.) Still, in honor of Roth—whose 31st book was published last week—we decided to name this project “The Gallivanting Spatula.”

Here, then, is the beginning of the list, which we’ll update each week. We invite readers to suggest additions (phrases—for instance, “a tumor of the size of a grapefruit”—as well as individual words, are welcome.) We feel no need to ask for corrections, knowing that these will come with or without an invitation. You can email us at spatula@tabletmag.com.

Appetizing (noun only): “I have to pick up the appetizing for the Men’s Club sukkah event.”

Federation (noun): “Federation’s Peoplehood Committee is commissioning a study on unaffiliated Jews in the Greater Metro region.”

Gall stones (noun): It is a well-known medical fact that non-Jews, while not immune to gall stones, do not discuss gall stones, publicly or privately.

Livid (adjective): “Irma is livid with the caterer.”

Luncheon (noun): Not “lunch,” which is an ecumenical term. “Join us for the kick-off luncheon of the American Friends of the Weizmann Institute.”

The Arabs (noun): “There could be peace if the Arabs would stop teaching hate in their textbooks.” (“Arabs” without the article “the” is used by non-Jews.)

Traipsing (verb): Fatigued gallivanting.

I’m not exactly sure how this happened. I’ve been a book nerd all my life, having grown up in a household full of crowded shelves, where the most appropriate Shabbat afternoon ritual was a trip to the library. My grandparents’ homes were full of books by the Major Jewish Writers—Bellow, Malamud, Singer, Roth—but my parents (though they both work in the Jewish world) were less interested in them.

As I got older and started writing about books professionally, Roth’s supremacy was unavoidable: He was always collecting awards, making everyone’s top-10 lists, serving as a reference point for critics talking about sex in literature, Jewish identity, misogyny, and New Jersey—all things I ostensibly cared about. His face regularly peered out from articles in newspapers and magazines, and his unsmiling face with its graying orbit of hair was familiar in a way that made me look past it and on to articles about new writers, whose books were so often positioned as rebuttals or complements to Roth’s legacy.

Not having read any Philip Roth felt alternately reprehensible and like a point of pride. Could I actually appreciate the landscape of contemporary fiction without him? On the other hand, we all have to build our own canons, and everyone’s education has its gaps, intentionally or not. (I knew I couldn’t be alone in this aspect of my under-education; there had to be plenty of well-read people who had their own reasons for having avoided him, too.) And I’ve always been skeptical whenever a author is hailed as the savior of literature, the Great American Novelist, or the embodiment of all we could hope for in a writer—whether that writer is Philip Roth or Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith or Roberto Bolaño. Slowly, though, the fact that I didn’t know Roth’s work started to feel like an opportunity, a rare chance to approach something with relatively few preconceptions. Sure, I knew the basics: Roth was prolific, Jewish, aging, cranky, and venerated. But how did his books read? Would I like them?

With his 31st book, Nemesis, arriving this month, catching up on him completely was a daunting and not entirely pleasant prospect. And I didn’t really want to try. After all, if I wanted to fully understand Roth and his intimidating oeuvre, I would read all 31 of those books, along with critical biographies and anthologies and interviews that detailed the experience of reading him from just about every possible perspective, along with Claire Bloom’s scathing memoir of their relationship, Leaving a Doll’s House. I would read through hundreds of reviews and consult the experts at the Philip Roth Society. Instead, I just wanted to find out what it was like to persist on a Philip Roth diet for a few weeks, to see what it would feel like and if it would tell me anything about the way I read. I wanted to know if Roth was a writer it was even possible to get a general sense of, by dipping my toes into a few supposedly exemplary novels. So, I didn’t read 31 books. I read eight.

The way I chose those books was far from scientific, based on casual suggestions and availability as much as the specifics of Roth’s bibliography. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), was an obvious choice, and as the novel that made him famous (and both exalted and reviled), so was Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Someone told me they thought I’d like The Counterlife (1986), which seemed as good a tip as any, and I took home The Plot Against America (2004) both because I’d heard great things about it, and because it was already at the library instead of needing to be transferred in. I added Everyman (2006) to my pile for the same reason (and also because it was nice and slim when compared to most of the others, as well as relatively recent), and The Breast (1972) because, well, it’s about a man who turns into a giant boob. I knew I wanted to read American Pastoral (1997) because it won Roth the Pulitzer Prize, and Patrimony (1991) because I figured a memoir would offer a different angle on the author. Skipping around seemed legitimate, since I wasn’t trying to understand Roth’s evolution as a writer in any kind of comprehensive way, but to see what came of ploughing through a stack of his books in a concentrated amount of time.

Even if I wasn’t sure what I would actually find in these hundreds of pages, I knew what I was supposed to find. The promotional copy on many of the books was comically over the top: It seemed like each one was hailed as Roth’s greatest triumph, the one boasting his most indelible characters, the rawest emotion and deepest cultural relevance, and the author glared out from his photo as if daring anyone to contradict the superlatives. The aura of undisputed greatness triggered competing impulses in me: On one hand, it’s reassuring to read books that have already been vetted and generally agreed to be excellent. Another part of me, though, was annoyed that adoring Roth should be a foregone conclusion.

Portnoy’s Complaint, I realized just a few pages in, is a book you really need to immerse yourself in—it should be read in as few sittings as possible. With very few section breaks and a careening narrative (the whole thing is truly a relentless, exhausting complaint), the best strategy is to get into the groove of Alex Portnoy’s voice and let it pull you along. And with little to hang on to in the way of structure, it’s the characters and small stories that stick: Alex’s account of his young cousin’s suicide, his ambivalence about his girlfriend (whose serious sex appeal can’t make up for what he thinks of as her unrepentant stupidity), another cousin who almost married a goy and then died in the war, the horror movie (and indelible, odious archetype) that is his mother. Portnoy’s life is one long, sickening Jewish joke; Roth is trying so hard to repel and frustrate us that reading becomes a sort of test of will.

I knew the book by reputation, of course, but the repulsive, repressive Jewishness at its core was still extreme enough to be jarring. It’s certainly to Roth’s credit that the book still shocks more than 40 years after it was published, especially considering that at a certain point, its literary value became inseparable from its cultural cachet. That’s the challenge of reading a book that’s become shorthand to such an extent that The Daily Show jokingly called it “the Jewish manual” on the same night I finished it. Somehow, though, Portnoy’s Complaint still stands on its own.

After that, reading The Plot Against America was a relatively soothing experience, and something of a stylistic shock. The historically complex novel is impeccably structured and straightforwardly told and makes Portnoy look like a sheer cathartic exercise in comparison. On a basic level, The Plot Against America is just a great read: It’s accessible and vivid and suspenseful along with being a smart, sly history lesson. Reading Roth’s alternative history of the period preceding America’s intervention in World War II and knowing this is not what happened to American Jews in the 1940’s (but could have, given some choice unfortunate events) makes you want to know more about what actually did. Something about tracing the divergence of history and fiction fixes the facts in your head better than the usual accounting of them and made me think the book would be an inspired way to teach anyone from high-school students to forgetful adults about the period. In a different way, Goodbye, Columbus also felt to me like it belonged on a syllabus, so much so that I was hearing reading comprehension questions in my head as I was reading: things like, why does Neil care so much about the kid in the library? Why does he insist that Brenda get a diaphragm? What does the title actually suggest? The Breast was similarly ripe for essay questions. It also just works: It’s short, funny, and disturbing, with the blend of comedy and pathos that defines absurdity.

I found The Counterlife harder to get lost in, though I know that’s part of the point of the book’s structure—its multiple “lives” and shifts in perspective are meant to be disorienting, each chapter set in a new time and place that forces a reader to start from square one each time. That idea appeals to me, as does Roth’s fascination (very much on display in these pages) with calling his readers’ attention to the way a story is constructed. Still, there was just so much speechifying here, so much yelling about who was right and wrong, and the stakes never engaged me.

But I thought American Pastoral, which also had some meta qualities (and which I was similarly primed to think was genius), was staggeringly good. I loved how Roth built the saga of his main character, Swede Levov, out of the memories of his own alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, so that Zuckerman’s personal reflections drive nearly the whole first quarter of the book, before the character smoothly shifts his attention to imagining the Swede’s story. In these layers of authorship and invention, it’s not just Roth writing the book, but Zuckerman building it out of his own memories and feelings about the past, fiction upon fiction. There’s a lot going on here—high-school sports, family tensions, political violence, sex, cattle-breeding, embattled optimism, blackmail, urban ruin, the bizarrely fascinating specifics of how to manufacture women’s dress gloves—but the entire book is riveting and deeply sad, revolving around lost dreams and ideals and an underlying question of “why me?” that one might call biblical if it didn’t instead resonate as distinctly, terribly American. It’s that rare novel that kept me reading long past the point when I planned to go to bed, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

The day after I finished American Pastoral, I read Patrimony in three hours. Roth’s memoir of his elderly father’s decline was harrowing, lovely, and impossible to put down, its ending inevitable but the exact path to it heartbreakingly uncertain. Lucid and forlorn, he’s writing about the experience of memory here as much as he’s recounting specific ones, and they’re memories that actually belong to him, rather than ones he’s ascribing to his various fictional stand-ins. After reading so much that represented a meeting of his life and fiction, the Roth who is writing here seemed strikingly exposed. There’s nothing sexy or glorified, just shit smeared all over the walls and a son tasked with cleaning up the mess.

This felt like a reasonable, tidy way to conclude my reading spree. But Everyman—the first of Roth’s recent cycle of short novels—was still sitting at the top of the pile next to my coffee table, taunting me with its brevity.

For all its slimness, Everyman struck me as one of the bleakest books I’d ever read. It’s not merely depressing, but insistently, painfully grim. The book is a fairly concise chronicle of an aging man consumed by his mistakes, and it makes growing old sound like the hardest, loneliest, and most desperate situation a person can be in, to the point where it seems to have been written from a place of utter fear and despair. A few of the plot points were drawn directly from the pages of Patrimony: the severe heart trouble Roth recognized just in time to save his life, how he made a wrong turn on the way to visit his father and ended up at the crumbling cemetery where his mother was buried. In Patrimony, Roth writes that while that accidental detour offered him no comfort, it nonetheless left him satisfied because it felt “narratively right.” It was an apt way to describe the broader relationship between his life and work, and it was strangely gratifying to see so clearly how he’d translated that particular experience into fiction—15 years after he described it in a memoir.

Everyman left me so despondent that I worried it would color my feelings about Roth’s other books. But that might have happened had I finished with any of the others, too (albeit with a different aftertaste). And in the end, my Philip Roth binge made it hard for me to think of any one of his books as an individual work. Read together, they left behind a web of allusions and cross-references and authorial obsessions and outbursts and reflections that I’m happy to leave all tangled together in my head, letting the Nathan Zuckerman of American Pastoral touch base with his younger self from The Counterlife, having Swede Levov explain his familial knowledge of glove-making to the nameless protagonist of Everyman (who himself has some expertise in the fine jewelry trade), and letting Alex Portnoy and Goodbye, Columbus’ Neil Klugman swap stories—while all the female romantic interests get together to compare their own notes on this group of tortured Jewish men. Read on a bender like this, the connections between stories and characters and themes all but broadcast themselves, and I got a better sense of the man behind them than I would have had I read American Pastoral by itself, in installments the length of a subway ride.

We read, I think, to confirm things we assumed, as well as to be surprised by what we didn’t know. And timing matters. All of us remember books we’ve read at the wrong point in our lives—too soon, or too late—or in a moment that felt almost overwhelmingly perfect. There are books whose specifics drifted away soon after we finished the last page and others that we think about often, for reasons we don’t always understand. Maybe if I’d read different books by Roth, or the same ones in a different situation, my opinion of them would be less favorable. Maybe if I added just one more book to the stack, I would have gotten too sick of him to have anything positive to say.

Or maybe not. Discovering Philip Roth this way was totally unnatural, but it felt totally right. And, hey—now I’ve read Philip Roth.

A good definition of a major writer, in fact, is that even his bad books matter—if not for themselves, then for what they say about the mind that created them. Nemesis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), Roth’s new novel, is a case in point. For the last six years, since the publication of his last great book, The Plot Against America, Roth has been producing short novels at an accelerating pace, but with declining powers. This is quite natural for a writer in his late 70s, and the subject matter of these works—impotence, old age, and death—are equally appropriate to the closing phase of Roth’s career. In the “books by” page at the beginning of Nemesis, we find that he has now grouped four of these recent books together in a new category: Along with the Zuckerman books, Roth books, and Kepesh books, each named after their protagonist/narrator, there is now “Nemeses: Short Novels.”

The new book, then, gives a name to this sequence, which also includes Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. As the word “nemeses” suggests, each is about a man brought low, by a combination of his own flaws, bad luck, and the relentlessness of time. But since the protagonist of each book is also a shadow-version of Philip Roth, these stories have a power in excess of their slight fictional achievement. In each case, Roth seems to be imagining an alternative fate for himself, a variation on his own life that ends in failure or disaster, rather than fame and glory. In Indignation, Marcus Messner actually speaks from beyond the grave—he is a young man who, tormented by sexual guilt, drops out of college and gets killed in the Korean War. And in last year’s The Humbling, Simon Axler is an aging actor who loses his self-confidence and virility and is ruined by his attempt to regain them in a last love affair.

Nemesis, the latest installment in this sequence, is also the worst. In part this is because of the thinness of the prose, which has next to nothing of Roth’s grand style—the indignant, self-justifying rant learned from Céline, balanced between laughter and fury. There are sentences in Nemesis that, in their expository limpness and characterlessness, seem to have no authorial mind behind them at all:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, polio’s most renowned victim, had contracted the disease as a vigorous man of thirty-nine and subsequently had to be supported when he walked and, even then, had to wear heavy steel-and-leather braces from his hips to his feet to enable him to stand. The charitable institution that FDR founded while he was in the White House, the March of Dimes, raised money for research and for financial assistance to the families of the stricken.

The language gives itself away: “renowned,” “vigorous,” “charitable institution,” “the stricken,” are all clichés, and the whole thing sounds like it could come from a history book for young readers. This may be a clue to the problem: Roth seems to be writing for an audience that has never heard of the 1940s—of FDR, polio, or D-Day (later on, we hear about how soldiers “parachute into Nazi-occupied France … against the stiffest German opposition”). Of course, this describes none of the likely readers of Nemesis, and the disconnect suggests that Roth has become too isolated—by age, fame, or habit—to successfully imagine his own audience.

The story, too, has a young-adultish plainness and didacticism. Bucky Cantor, the hero, is a 23-year-old P.E. teacher in the Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey—the setting of Roth’s own childhood, which he has explored in many books. It is the summer of 1944, and Bucky is working as a playground director, running baseball games for the neighborhood kids. And it’s through the kids’ eyes that we see him: Roth chooses to narrate the story in the voice of one of Bucky’s students, despite a good deal of narrative implausibility, because it allows him to halo the young teacher in childish admiration. When Roth writes that “His was the cast-iron, wear-resistant, strikingly bold face of a sturdy young man you could rely on,” you know that, as in a movie, countenance is character.

Bucky’s heroism is tested by an outbreak of polio in Newark, which claims the lives of two boys from his playground. At first, he is as plucky as his name requires, attending the victims’ funerals and comforting their families. Even more important, he tries to stop his neighbors from working themselves into a suspicious panic. At the time, Roth reminds us, it was not known how polio was transmitted, and as in The Plague, ignorance breeds paranoia. Did the dead boys catch the virus at a hot dog stand, or from a slovenly, mentally retarded boy, or from the spit of an Italian gang that trespasses on the Jews’ turf? Bucky keeps insisting that it is wrong to give in to fear, to blame the Other—a familiar moral to a familiar story, which unspools in foursquare Hollywood fashion. There is a tearful eulogy for an angelic child; a kindly, reassuring neighborhood doctor; and even a devoted girl for Bucky—Marcia Steinberg, the doctor’s daughter, who wants nothing more than to marry him.

But it is Marcia who turns out to be the cause of his undoing. She is working at a summer camp for Jewish children, far from the polio outbreak, and she arranges for Bucky to be offered a job there. His sense of duty—heightened by his guilt at being unable to fight in World War II, thanks to his bad eyesight—tells him to stay where the trouble is, even though realistically he can do nothing to stop the children of Weequahic from getting polio. But his love for Marcia and his instinct for self-preservation lead to him to accept the camp job. What ensues is an idyll, which—again as in a movie, a horror movie this time—becomes more frightful the more perfect it appears, since the reader knows that Bucky is not going to be allowed to get away with his transgression, no matter how minor. In the end, he is punished in a terrible fashion, and a coda, set decades later, shows that the events of that summer ended up ruining his entire life.

In only two ways is this story markedly different from a Hollywood melodrama of the period in which it’s set. The first is that, because the epidemic afflicts a Jewish community in 1944, there are faint but very deliberate reminders of the destruction even then being visited on European Jews. These echoes are the more powerful because Roth seldom insists on them. When rumors surface that Weequahic is going to be quarantined, for instance, the description of the plan—“They would close it off at the Irvington line and the Hillside line and then at Hawthorne Avenue and at Elizabeth Avenue. … They even printed a map”—sounds just like the way Jewish quarters were barricaded, for very different purposes, in Vilna and Warsaw. The image of Jews as disease-carriers, too, was central to the Nazi ghettos, and when it surfaces in New Jersey, the result is a historical vertigo like the one Roth created so effectively in The Plot Against America: “The anti-Semites are saying that it’s because they’re Jews that polio spreads there. … Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it.”

The subject of Jewish suffering naturally leads to the subject of theodicy. Why, Bucky wonders, did God allow the children of Newark to be decimated? Why did He create the polio virus in the first place? This questioning is pitched at such a rudimentary level that it leaves the reader a little unsettled—surely Roth is not suggesting that taunts like Bucky’s (“Look, your God is not to my liking. … He spends too much time killing children”) are going to strike any reader with the force of a revelation. In the book’s last section, the narrator finally gets the chance to reproach Bucky in the way the reader has been doing silently all along: “this is nothing more than stupid hubris … the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation. We have heard it all before and by now we have heard enough of it, even from someone as profoundly decent as Bucky Cantor.”

But if Roth realizes how melodramatically unoriginal Bucky’s story and Bucky’s thoughts are, why write Nemesis? The answer, as with Roth’s last few books, is simple and moving. He is writing these counter-deaths in order to prepare for his own death; he is writing because writing has been his life, and each new book is an extension and assertion of life. When we do start talking about Roth in the past tense—which may not be for many years—it is in this sympathetic light that, I think, his very late work will be viewed.

Next week brings Britain’s Man Booker Prize announcement. Here we have a stronger rooting interest: Harold Jacobson, whose nominated The Finkler Question was reviewed by books critic Adam Kirsch today, is one of only six names on the shortlist. His book remains, however, the underdog at 7:1 odds; Tom McCarthy’s C is the 2:1 favorite.

UPDATE: No idea how I missed the four (4!) Jewish Nobel laureates since Brodsky, especially since I knew that three of them were Jewish (have to plead ignorance on Jelinek). But as more than one commenter pointed out, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, Elfriede Jelinek, and Harold Pinter, have won since Brodsky. Which means, of course, that five Jews have won the award since 1987. The number of Americans? One (Toni Morrison).

Nobel Literature Prize Betting Odds [Ladbrokes]
Booker Prize Betting Odds [Ladbrokes]
Related: Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]

• Today, Prime Minister Netanyahu will try to convince his cabinet to back an extra 60-day construction freeze. [Haaretz]

• But the move is placing Netanyahu’s coalition in jeopardy. [JPost]

• Oktoberfest in the West Bank. [LAT]

• Yesterday, the first Monday of October, everyone was checking out the new kid on the Court. [NYT]

• Philip Roth’s annual novel comes out today, to this lukewarm review. [NYT]

Tablet Magazine’s third team, the New England Patriots, dominated the Miami Dolphins in the second half last night with touchdowns on offense, defense, and special teams, winning 41-14.

Now, uncannily, first-time novelist Adam Levin is set to publish The Instructions, a preposterously long, immensely ambitious novel on the very same subject. And as if in response to Cohen’s challenge, The Instructions proclaims itself something like the first post-Jewish novel, one that leaves behind the modern-day Jewish literary tradition and starts over. That is to say, The Instructions purports to be a new work of scripture.

The Instructions is in fact a vital work of—no getting around it—American Jewish literature because it imagines that the genre is indeed through and asks what can be written in its place. A Nabokovian book-within-a-book, The Instructions, purports to be a divinely-inspired work by its antihero, teenage would-be messiah Gurion Maccabee. It is Gurion’s astonishing conceit that, out of boredom with the current state of Jewish fiction, he will write, and enact, the word of God instead. “I am not even remotely interested in writing a two-page short story about made-up Jewish people eating dinner,” he explains, “so instead I’ve written scripture.” This is, like most things Gurion says, at least a partial lie: An extraordinary scene in which Jewish people eat dinner begins three pages later. But we also know what he means. Most of the tropes we associate with American Jewish literature have either vanished here or been somehow reversed. The Holocaust and how we remember it get barely a mention. There is no sex, no messy family dynamics. No one is trying to assimilate, join a club that won’t have him as a member, or escape Judaism. Rather, Gurion and his followers want to intensify their Judaism. They are “Israelites”: stronger, prouder, better-armed, more God-fearing versions of the Jews, their predecessors. So what’s left to talk about when we trade the American Jewish novel for ersatz religious-Zionist scripture? Plenty, it turns out: chosenness, nationhood, violence, power, the end of the world—the most important Jewish questions, perhaps, of our day.

Over more than a thousand pages, Gurion turns four days of his childhood in Chicago’s northern suburbs into an epic journey from bondage (in a junior-high lockdown program for behavior problems) to freedom, with unmistakable echoes of the Exodus. Or at least that’s what he wants us to read: This is his Pentateuch, and he has constructed himself as a latter-day Moses. The reader may come to suspect, however, that he is merely a pint-size cult leader. Only God (and perhaps Levin) knows for sure. Gurion’s endless, and endlessly captivating, shaggy-dog story—narrated in a pidgin of invented youth lingo, untranslated bits of Yiddish and Hebrew, extended biblical commentaries, and God-speak (“and I saw that it was good”)—is set in a world just supernatural enough to keep us wondering whether our narrator might be the messiah after all.

A few years after his arrival is prophesied by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson (himself considered the messiah by some Lubavitcher Hasidim), Gurion is born with birthmarks that spell “Adonai,” a mouth full of teeth, and a genius for both leadership (assisted by his ex-IDF-sniper mother) and scholarship (refined by his attorney father, Judah Maccabee). His talent for demagoguery appears early, too. Gurion’s Jewish day school classmates revere him; they are the first to float the messiah theory. Gurion finds a textual loophole that keeps them—and himself—in a state of suspended disbelief. A popular interpretation of Maimonides holds that a potential messiah arises in every generation, though none will be actualized until the time is right. He’s probably not the messiah, but one never knows for sure.

Things begin to go downhill when Gurion, age 9, assaults a teacher who makes fun of his messianic aspirations. He is expelled and sent to another day school. After a local anti-Semitic incident, he arms his new classmates with homemade weapons (slingshots—there’s no cap on the number of biblical heroes he hopes to be identified with), and delivers the first of many sermons that seem to borrow rhetoric from extremist settler groups. “Never again will we cower amidst the masses of the Roman and Canaanite children,” he proclaims. “Blessed is Elohim, Who blesses our weapons.” He gets kicked out of that school, too.

The main action of The Instructions takes place as Gurion, now 10, organizes his fellow inmates in “the Cage” at Aptakisic Junior High, a public school, Cuckoo’s Nest-style. Meanwhile, day-school boys around the city await his instructions. As his two armies line up behind him, Gurion becomes increasingly convinced that he is the savior of the Jews. Things get very dark from there.

Gurion continually diverts us with a Torah’s-worth of memorable subplots. A day-school playground on the morning of the World Trade Center attacks is suffused with terrifying euphoria as the grade-schoolers realize they have finally “become the underdog.” A schism erupts between Jewish and non-Jewish members of the Shovers, a fratty crew at Aptakisic, when a Christian student wants to include an ichthys among the symbols on the group’s identifying scarves. And Gurion’s family is increasingly harassed by Jewish community members when (in a nod to the Skokie affair) Judah Maccabee takes on a neo-Nazi client.

These stories pile up, slowly building evidence for Gurion’s central thesis: Everyone wants, above all else, a pretext or opportunity for doing violence. This bleak view is a hallmark of the teen boy literary canon, to which The Instructions owes much. Behind the unassuming visage of the meekest band geek is a bully whose bloodthirst will be unleashed if he is simply given the chance. And beneath the responsible patter of authority figures is an unalloyed desire to monopolize the legitimate use of violence. “Fear is contempt,” as Gurion’s best friend puts it, “whether the fearful know it or not.”

Gurion believes this cycle of violence is ennobling, and that with God and himself on their side, the Jews will win. This is an easy enough belief system to pin on a Jack Tytell figure crouching with a rifle on a Hebron hilltop. But Gurion struggles to make you, the reader—or at least the Jewish reader—complicit. This is how the scriptural form produces its most unsettling effect: Scriptures directly address followers, or would-be followers, so if you are a Jew reading The Instructions, you are harangued to grab a slingshot and join up. I can only hazard a guess that as a non-Jewish reader, you would not feel so welcome. If, as Gurion likes to remind us, some nags have always considered American Jewish literature a shande far di goyim because it airs vast regions of unsightly Jewish shame, Levin has written a daunting “Israelite” novel with a big “Jews Only” sign on it, exposing vast regions of unsightly Jewish pride.

One way to read The Instructions might be as a giant postmodern gag about the impossibility of ceasing to write American Jewish novels, because wedged between the apocalyptic stuff is a gorgeous portrait of an ordinary Jewish community. Not just Levin but Gurion knows this perfectly well, and to remind us, he constantly looks over his shoulder to his idol Philip Roth. Though he insists his own project is a post-Rothian (because post-Jewish) one, he protests too much.

Ultimately, though, it’s not just the fate of the American Jewish novel, but the fate of the Jewish people—and their relationship to chosenness, nationhood, violence, power, messianism—that is at stake here. I don’t want to give away too much, but let’s just say a hostage situation arises, during which Gurion tells a hostage negotiator to get Roth on the phone. This is a pretty good joke—a young Jewish writer is so desperate for a pat on the head from his literary hero that he sets up a life-or-death situation that will force the author to talk to him.

But Levin won’t let it rest there. Roth finally does get on the phone. “So what do you want from me?” he asks.

Nothing, says Gurion. “You’re hard to get a hold of. You bought me fifty-something minutes.”

In the meantime, he has beaten a boy senseless.

How about, do you want to see Martin Amis talk about Philip Roth and how his father, the great (though not as great) novelist Kingsley, was a minor Jew-hater? English philo-Semites are great.

Related: Chosen [The Atlantic]
Albion’s Shame [The Atlantic]

• Most Anticipated: Though Jonathan Franzen isn’t Jewish, Freedom—his first novel since 2001’s massively acclaimed The Corrections—features a character who is the son of a bigwig Jewish neoconservative (September).

• The One You’re Most Likely To Read: Adam Langer’s The Thieves of Manhattan. Short, fun, and about New York’s literary scene (July).

• Most Charming: Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector. She’s a very charming writer: here, read her New Yorker stuff while you wait (July).

• Longest: Adam Levin’s two-volume debut The Instructions (sounds like this, which sounds like this) stretches the tale of a 10-year-old named Gurion Maccabee (I get it, I guess?) over 900 pages. Please allow me to be the first to call Levin “The Josh Cohen of the McSweeney’s set” (November).

• Roth: He gets his own category—a new novel from him has become as reliable as your annual Woody fix. This one’s called Nemesis, and it’s set in Idaho, Singapore, and Turkmenistan, among other exotic locales. Just kidding, it’s set in Newark (October).

• Most Tablet Magazine-y: Contributing editor Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (end of July).

• Most Israeli: To the End of the Land is the much-awaited new offering from David Grossman, one of the masters of his unusually talented generation of Israeli novelists (September).

• Most Likely To Have a Decemberists Song Written About It: False Friends, by Myla Goldberg (October).

• Most Park Slope: The Great House, by Nicole Krauss.

• Best Description: According to the publisher, Cynthia Ozick’s new novel (!), Foreign Bodies, is a retelling of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, which is one of the 27 novels he wrote about Americans abroad. The catch? “The plot is the same, the meaning is reversed.”

The plot is the same, the meaning is reversed? I’m pretty sure that’s the official motto of all Jewish-American novelists.

The Jew-as-character-of-fiction had fared not much better. American Jewish writing was a fiction of mawkish quaintness, what Irving Howe called Second Avenue tearjerkers, stuffed with sentimentalized stereotypes: the suffering schlemiel; the Lower East Side immigrant who peddles his way from rags to riches; the wise, pious patriarch struggling to accept the Americanized son; the son desperate to escape the old world who felt “too foreign in school and too American at home,” as Will Herberg put it. Even worse were Jewish characters written by non-Jews. The Jew appeared as the annoying stranger (Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises); as rebellious young radical (Ben Compton in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.); or as unscrupulous businessman (Harry Bogen in Jerome Weidman’s I Can Get It for You Wholesale). Abe Jones, in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Irving Howe complained in Commentary, is “dreary, tortured, melancholy, dully intellectual, and joylessly poetic, his spirit gloomily engulfed in a great cloud of Yiddish murk.”

This state of affairs carried over into the 1940s. Writers in the extended Commentary circle—the ‘Family’ as future paterfamilias Norman Podhoretz would retrospectively call it—found nourishment in Herman Melville or Ralph Waldo Emerson, in English poets or Russian novelists—but not in Jewish texts. The motives of Jewish writers, managing editor Robert Warshow complained in 1946, “are almost never pure: they must dignify the Jews, or plead for them, or take revenge upon them, and the picture they create is correspondingly distorted by romanticism or sentimentality or vulgarity.” One Commentary writer, seeking in 1948 to find promising Jewish contributions to contemporary American literature, could point to only three minor talents: Harriet Lane Levy, William Manners, and Charles Angoff. American Jewish writing, Commentary reported the next year, lay fallow, “steeped in apologetics and in false provincial pride.”

Commentary founder Elliot Cohen grasped that the Family’s discoveries of America could have literary reverberations, could release among the Family a great literary efflorescence that had only yesterday seemed an impossibility. By taking Jewish writing seriously, by refusing to disdain it as a parochialism, Cohen’s magazine planted the seeds of a generous literary fertility. Cohen had always demanded that Jewish writing of any kind conform to the highest standards. The future American Jewish culture “cannot be purely imitative,” he insisted. “As to Jewish culture,” he said, “the first question we should ask is not whether it is Jewish, but whether it is good. And ‘good’ means on a par with the best in the culture of society in general.” In literature as in all else, Cohen recoiled from apologetics, defensiveness, sectarianism, sentimentality, and self-congratulation. What lay fallow would grow in the 1950s into a jungled abundance that surprised even the presiding genius.

Several seasons passed before the new literary fruit showed itself. The first Commentary fiction was perfectly parochial. But very soon new Jewish writers, to borrow a phrase Philip Roth used in Commentary, launched “an imaginative assault upon the American experience.” Writing became for them a priestly calling, an instrument of upward mobility, a gateway for fighting their way into the great American beyond. It seemed to Cohen as though he were watching before his very eyes the passing of dominance from the southern school of William Faulkner to the urban Jewish school of Saul Bellow. A new kind of fiction, not intended to flatter the Jewish ego, was coaxed forth from the novelist branch of the Family, language obsessed writers seeking, in Irving Howe’s phrase, to shower the country with words. And what words! These scribes brought with them to the great culture rush the tones of Jewish speech and verbal performance: a street brashness and detached irony, an ability to careen between different registers and inflections, from high to low, from wide-ranging erudition to urban idiom.

Among the first fruits Commentary reaped was Bernard Malamud’s “The Prison,” a 1950 story that beautifully dilated upon the theme of Jewishness as confinement. The magazine would run eight more of Malamud’s stories (at $30 a page), including “Idiot’s First,” and five of the thirteen stories in The Magic Barrel, the collection that would earn Malamud a National Book Award. “Commentary gave him the perfect audience,” his friend Philip Roth said. In fact, young critic Norman Podhoretz made his Commentary debut in 1953 with a review of Malamud’s first novel, The Natural. “Well, you seem to know something about novels,” Cohen had told Podhoretz; “you know something about symbolism, you know something about Jews, and you know something about baseball. Here’s a symbolic novel by a Jewish writer about a baseball player. I guess you’re qualified to review it.”

What begins in the flat cadences of Malamud becomes visionary in Saul Bellow’s exuberance. In a review of Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, Commentary recognized with more than a little prescience what Bellow had done. That novel, Martin Greenberg (then an editor at Schocken Books) announced in the January 1948 issue, was “the first attempt in American literature to consider Jewishness not in its singularity, not as constitutive of a special world of experience, but as a quality that informs all of modern life.” Bellow animated the book’s hero, Asa Leventhal, with a feeling of somehow not belonging, a loneliness Greenberg called “the malaise of the megalopolis.” In a similar vein, Alfred Kazin hailed The Adventures of Augie March as Bellow’s “attempt to break down all possible fences between the Jew and this larger country.” The book’s famous first line announced a turn from alienation to affirmation: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.” Forging a passage from marginality to American literature writ large, Bellow’s own pieces for Commentary reprised the theme. In the February 1951 issue (a month before Cohen ran Bellow’s story “Looking for Mr. Green”), Bellow condemned the self-doubt that cramped other Jewish writers, a timidity about writing in a language their immigrant parents did not speak. “As long as American Jewish writers continue to write in this way,” Bellow said, “we will have to go elsewhere for superior being and beauty, and will thus continue to be foreigners.”

Philip Roth, to complete the triumvirate, made his Commentary debut in 1957, at age twenty-four, with a charming piece that Norman Podhoretz, then assistant editor and only three years older than the writer from Newark, had rescued from the slush pile. “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings,” included two years later in Goodbye, Columbus, was Roth’s first published story. The magazine also ran “Eli, the Fanatic,” Roth’s brilliant story about the confrontation between assimilated Jews and ultra-Orthodox Holocaust refugees intent on setting up a yeshiva in their suburb. Roth had first come across Cohen’s magazine as an undergrad in the periodical room in the Bucknell University library in the early 1950s. “I was stunned,” he said. “So this is what it’s like to be Jewish.” By offering a sophisticated Jewishness, free of parochialism and apologetics, Commentary did for Roth what the Menorah Journal had done for Lionel Trilling three decades before. “Commentary furnished a whole education, a way of being Jewish and intelligent and American—all at once.”

By now Commentary fiction was consistently first rate. Cohen ran two parables by Henry Roth, his first publications since Call It Sleep in 1935, as well as stories by Delmore Schwartz, Nelson Algren, and Alison Lurie, who published her earliest story in Commentary when she was all of twenty. Cohen fertilized all of this with translations of Yiddish literature: stories by I. J. Singer, Zalman Shneour, Y.L. Peretz, and David Bergelson, and Chaim Grade’s first published story, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” a powerful meditation on faith after the Holocaust. Most spectacularly, Commentary published Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” (translated by Marion Magid and Delmore Schwartz’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Pollet), first appeared there in English in September 1962, as did some of the vignettes that would make up In My Father’s Court (1966). “Commentary is one of the rare magazines in America which takes seriously both the writer and the reader,” the future Nobel laureate said. “I also have a personal feeling about Commentary: it was the first magazine which published me in English.”

Jewish writers, ex-alienated men, were in vogue. Norman Podhoretz used to joke about the Jewish writer who took the name Nathanael West that had he arrived in the 1950s rather than the 1930s, he would have changed his name back to Nathan Weinstein. After the American Jewish literary profusion had peaked, Edward Hoagland, the essayist married to Marion Magid, was grumbling (in Commentary itself ) that the Family’s writers had all but forged a new establishment, making it difficult for a WASP like him, who “could field no ancestor who had hawked tin pots in a Polish shtetl.”

In later years, some of these plaints would turn uglier. Gore Vidal complained that Jewish writers like Bellow, Roth, and Malamud “comprise a new, not quite American class, more closely connected with ideological, argumentative Europe (and talmudic studies) than with those of us whose ancestors killed Indians.” Truman Capote bitched in a 1968 Playboy interview about a Jewish literary cabal: “a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines. All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention. . . . Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer are all fine writers, but they’re not the only writers in the country, as the Jewish mafia would have us believe.” (Perhaps Capote’s line would have been softer had the Commentary review of his bestselling In Cold Blood not dissented so vigorously from the notion that the “competently though too mechanically told” book represented some kind of literary breakthrough.) But as boosters and detractors could agree, America’s new Jewish writers had come into their own.

Even as Cohen’s magazine helped forge a new literary temper, Commentary acted as a greenhouse for a new style of literary criticism, too, incubating the first generation of critics to grow from America’s working class. Before World War II, the upper reaches of American life had excluded Jews as much from the study of literature as from the creation of it. No matter how assiduously the Family’s critics may have schooled themselves in Walt Whitman’s 1871 Democratic Vistas or Van Wyck Brooks’s 1915 America’s Coming of Age, they were disqualified by heredity from the Republic of Letters. “Jews, it was often suggested, could not register the finer shadings of the Anglo-Saxon spirit as it shone through the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton,” Irving Howe recalled. “I wouldn’t recommend that you study English,” the head of Northwestern’s English Department had told Saul Bellow. “You weren’t born to it.” The Family could not help but notice that currents of anti-Semitism ran deep within the Anglo-American literary tradition itself—from William Shakespeare’s Shylock, to Charles Dickens’s Fagin, to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim. “We reexamine our literary heritage as Jewish writers and readers of English—and we wince!” Leslie Fiedler wrote in Commentary. “We enter into our supposed inheritance, only to find we are specifically excluded.”

The attraction to fascism exhibited by poets W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot didn’t help matters. The Library of Congress’s decision in 1948 to award the Bollingen Prize to Pound’s The Pisan Cantos vaulted Cohen into high indignation, and he dedicated Commentary’s first symposium to the question of literary anti-Semitism. The responses he received bespoke a newfound literary self-confidence. Some advocated a separation of wheat from chaff. Alfred Kazin replied, “If we were to read only those who love us, even among ourselves, our intellectual diet would be thin indeed.” Lionel Trilling commented, “Anti-Semitism is, as Nietzsche said, a vulgarity; it is indeed remarkable how often notable minds of our day can support their quanta of vulgarity; but it would be foolish not to take from them what they have to give.” Saul Bellow suggested that the direction of judgment had reversed: “Modern reality, with the gases of Auschwitz still circulating in the air of Europe, gives us an excellent opportunity to judge whether they [modern Jew-despising writers] are right or wrong.” So long to inferiority.

In the beginning, Commentary critics aimed at Jewish writers. Irving Howe, born and bred in the Bronx, would write for the magazine on, say, Daniel Fuchs, who had authored several novels about Jews in Williamsburg. Tellingly, the magazine’s first critical essay on a goyish writer was called “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism.” When the magazine examined Pearl Buck—as in a 1948 review of Peony—it was for her description of Judaism. But the more Family critics assimilated—and assimilated into—American literature, the more confidently did they put Jewish writers in the highest fraternity of Gentile company. Both outside the magazine and inside its pages, Jews began to write about American fiction under the assumption that it was their inheritance, too.34 And they wrote not just about fiction. The magazine’s poetry criticism included John Berryman on W. H. Auden and a consideration of Sylvia Plath, who had studied with Alfred Kazin at Smith.

Commentary critics, never afraid to contradict the prevailing estimate of a reputation, shared a contempt for middlebrow mushiness. James Gould Cozzens, Arthur Miller, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk—these were almost too gauche to bother with. The result was an urgent style that combined scholarly rigor with journalistic flair. The urgency came from the way the Family’s strenuous strivers took literature as a matter of high gravity, as a secular scripture, as if it should yield to moral, and not just aesthetic, judgments. Writing, as vocation and avocation both, became in their hands a kind of emancipation, a gesture of self-fashioning; it was everything. The Family’s rhapsodists of American literature met America through its writers, the highest manifestations of national feeling.

Alfred Kazin, who would write some twenty pieces for Commentary, was a case in point. Born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a son of immigrants, Kazin came to City College at age sixteen. In 1942, at twenty-seven, he published On Native Grounds, a tellingly titled history of American prose from the 1890s through the 1930s. Like Philip Roth, Kazin acknowledged that his view of the possibilities of Jewish writing was indebted to Commentary:

I remember that as the first issues began to appear at the end of that pivotal year of 1945, I was vaguely surprised that it dealt with so many general issues in so subtly critical and detached a fashion, regularly gave a forum to non-Jewish writers as well as to Jewish ones. Like many Jewish intellectuals of my time and place, brought up to revere the universalism of the socialist ideal and of modern culture, I had equated “Jewish” magazines with a certain insularity of tone, subject matter, writers’ names—with mediocrity. To be a “Jewish” writer . . . was somehow to regress, to strike attitudes, to thwart the natural complexities of truth. . . . “Jewish” magazines were not where literature could be found, and certainly not the great world. “Jewish” magazines worried over the writer’s “negative” attitude toward his “Jewishness,” nagged you like an old immigrant uncle who did not know how much resentment lay behind his “Jewishness.” But Commentary, to the grief of many intellectual guardians of the “Jewish” world, marked an end to that.

For Kazin, literary criticism was “the great American lay philosophy.” He and the other Family generalists who came to command the literary heights—Trilling, Rosenfeld, Howe—wrote not to advance an academic point, not to advise the author, guide the book buyer, or impress the professional specialist, but to assess the larger meaning of a work. (The adjective “academic” was for them always a pejorative, a synonym of “pedantic” and antonym of intellectual audacity.) They considered criticism a branch of literature itself, a rival form of imagination. Unlike the New Critics who treated literature as something hermetically self-contained, the Family critics believed that writing was a political act; they read a work with an eye for what it said about its cultural environment. They practiced literary criticism as social criticism. These inebriates of literature wrote in a way, Kazin said, “that pure logic would never approve and pure scholarship would never understand.”

Before too long, by pursuing things unattempted yet in the precincts of American Jewish writing, Elliot Cohen was beginning to feel that his magazine was changing the world. Before Commentary (to paraphrase Leon Trotsky on Russian writer Nikolay Gogol), American Jewish literature in English, stuck in imitation, merely tried to exist. After Commentary, it existed.

Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem and fellow at the Hudson Institute. The preceding is excerpted from Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative Right.

To William Faulkner, responding to a defense of Ezra Pound: “What staggers me is that you and Mr. Steinbeck, who have dealt for so many years in words, should fail to understand the import of Ezra Pound’s plain and brutal statements about the ‘kikes’ leading the ‘goys’ to slaughter. Is this—from the ‘Pisan Cantos’—the stuff of poetry? It is a call to murder.”

To Philip Roth, in apology for some perceived slight from a People magazine interview: “If I had been interviewed by an angel for the Seraphim and Cherubim Weekly I’d have said, as I actually did say to the crooked little slut, that you were one of our very best and most interesting writers.”

And to Cynthia Ozick, a high compliment: “[A]lthough we have never discussed the Jewish question (or any other), and we would be bound to disagree (as Jewish discussants invariably do), it is certain that we would, at any rate, find each other Jewish enough.”

We also highly recommend the accompanying podcast, featuring Nextbook alum Blake Eskin interviewing Bellow’s wife Janis, who is responsible for having saved the letters—her husband, she says, would just as soon have “used them to make paper airplanes with.” Janis offers some insight into the mindset that led Saul to correspond extensively with those who found fault with his work: “He was never under the misapprehension that anything he wrote was finished.”

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The Great Dictator [New Yorker]

For one thing, the novel is a carnival of allusions, silently incorporating phrases and situations from a whole roster of other writers and challenging the reader to pick up on them. (Thirlwell offers a list of his sources in a postscript, as a kind of scorecard—it runs from Auden to Virgil and includes opera, jazz, and rap music as well as works of history, fiction, and poetry.) This is the technique of a writer who is not merely well-read—though Thirlwell is that, ostentatiously so—but who takes pleasure in the fictionality, the madeness, of fiction and wants the reader to share that pleasure.

It is not just its allusions that give The Escape this sense of being an experiment or essay in fiction. More important is the way that Thirlwell seems to be performing an inquest into a once-vital genre that is now rapidly passing into literary history: the Jewish American novel, Bellow-Roth division. Raphael Haffner, Thirlwell’s protagonist, is a cousin to Moses Herzog and Charlie Citrine, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh—the sublime, foolish, voracious alter egos that populate Roth’s and Bellow’s books. Haffner, like his predecessors, is not just an inveterate womanizer—he is a philosophical sensualist, who thinks about sex even more than he has it, which is really saying something. The novel’s very first sentence—“And so the century ended: with Haffner watching a man caress a woman’s breasts”—serves almost as a bow of acknowledgment to Bellow and Roth, to their habit of always situating the comedy of sex within the tragedy of history.

Yet Thirlwell, inevitably, stands at a critical distance from his great predecessors. He is not American but British and two generations younger—biographical facts that necessarily mean different ways of thinking about both history and sex. (Thirlwell is Jewish, I believe, but it would not be terribly surprising to learn that he was not—that Jewishness, too, was simply a convention of the Bellow-Roth novel that he wanted to experiment with.) What this means is that, in creating the 78-year-old Haffner, the 32-year-old Thirlwell is not simply imagining an alter ego, as Roth and Bellow so transparently do in their novels. Indeed, to underscore his distance from his hero, Thirlwell occasionally drops an “I” into the narrative, though we learn next to nothing about this “I”: “And me? I was born sixty years after Haffner. I was just a friend.”

The result is that Haffner does not engross the reader’s experience of The Escape the way that, say, Zuckerman monopolizes our attention in The Anatomy Lesson. We are not asked to submit to his egotism, but to observe it and if possible to sympathize with it. “So, ladies and gentleman, maybe Haffner was grand, in a way,” Thirlwell writes very early in the novel. “Maybe Haffner was an epic hero.” It is a thesis, a proposition, and the novel is a kind of experiment designed to prove or disprove it.

Certainly the predicaments Haffner finds himself in do not appear very epic, or very heroic. On the first page, we find him hiding in a wardrobe in a hotel room, watching a much younger woman, Zinka, have sex with her boyfriend, Niko. Zinka knows that Haffner is there, though Niko does not: This voyeurism is part of the escalating erotic game that she is playing with her aged, submissive admirer. It is hardly to Haffner’s credit, moreover, that he has gotten involved with Zinka when he is supposedly on a mission on behalf of his late wife, Livia. Livia’s family once owned a villa in the Central European spa town—unnamed, it seems to be located in the former Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia—that Haffner is visiting. The house was confiscated by the Nazis, then taken over by the Communists, and finally sold off to a corporation, its history an index to the history of Eastern Europe since World War II. In trying to reclaim it, Haffner is paying homage to his wife’s memory—and offering a kind a reparation to his children and grandchildren, who resent him for his infidelity and selfishness.

As the novel progresses, we learn only a few sketchy details about Haffner’s past. Born in Britain, he served in the British Army during the Second World War, had a successful career as a banker, lived for a while in New York, and went through a succession of mistresses before Livia finally left him. Thirlwell is more interested in Haffner’s present, which shows how incorrigible he remains: In addition to Zinka, he is sleeping with a married middle-aged woman, Frau Tummler, who believes that Haffner truly loves her. Meanwhile, he is unable to make headway with the post-Communist bureaucrats in charge of his villa and decides to try the black market instead—using Niko, of all people, as an intermediary. Thirlwell skillfully heightens the farce elements of the book, placing Haffner in a series of unlikely situations—skinny dipping, getting an all-too-personal massage, engaging in serious S&M—that leave the reader uncertain whether to laugh or wince.

But the comic plot is only a screen, or accompaniment, to the real action of the novel, which is located in Haffner’s mind and in the narrator’s attempts to make sense of that mind. For Haffner, like his predecessors in Bellow and Roth, insists that there is a metaphysical dimension to his passions and foibles. He is fond of comparing himself to the Roman emperors, especially the bad ones—Tiberius and Caligula, with their insatiable wills and depraved appetites. “No one understood the emperors. No one saw how humble they were—free from the deeper vanity of concealing one’s own vanity—like Haffner before his family, refusing the illusion of maturity.” In this highly self-flattering view, Haffner is to be admired for his committed refusal of commitment, for acknowledging the eternal incorrigibility of desire.

In one of the most interesting and ambiguous developments in The Escape, Thirlwell explores this transgressive logic as it plays out in the sphere of Jewishness. The real estate Haffner is trying to reclaim can be seen as a symbol of his and Livia’s Jewish inheritance, and their lives are determined in many ways by the conflicting imperatives of their Jewish identities. Livia, we learn, was raised in Italy by a proudly Fascist father, who thought that supporting Mussolini was an expression of Jewish-Italian patriotism—until Mussolini passed anti-Semitic laws modeled on Hitler’s. Haffner too, in a less fraught way, always placed Britishness above Jewishness. (“What is the definition of a British Jew?” goes one of Haffner’s jokes. “A person who instead of no longer going to church, no longer goes to synagogue.”) Stationed in Palestine during World War II, he was outraged when Jews in the British Army were ordered out of the country, for fear that they would have dual loyalties.

In Thirlwell’s hands, Haffner’s refusal to be determined by his Jewishness becomes the central test case for his refusal of any limits on his autonomy. “He was just a Haffner, not a Jewish Haffner,” he protests at one point—just as he would protest that he is not a married Haffner or an aging Haffner, but simply himself, with all that self’s unassuageable needs and desires. “Let me be my own author! This was Haffner’s cry,” Thirlwell sums up, knowing that no man can be his own author—least of all a character in a novel, whose author is always looking over his shoulder, determining his next move. By the end of The Escape, Jewishness, sexuality, and fictionality, the book’s three great subjects, have converged in a single pattern. Thirlwell leaves it to the reader to decide whether Haffner’s pursuit of total freedom, in all these realms, is glorious or abject—or maybe both.