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

In April, Goldstone essentially disowned the so-called Goldstone Report, which was the result of the U.N. Human Rights Council investigation into the 2008-9 Israel-Hamas conflict, and its finding that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Today, in the New York Times, he rejects the allegation, prominent in “assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize” Israel, that there is apartheid either in Israel proper or the Palestinian territories.

Goldstone in fact is an eminent South African jurist who would be considered an authority on what is and isn’t “apartheid,” and in that sense his essay isn’t unimportant. It clears Israel of apartheid in Israel, where Arab citizens vote and for the most part participate equally with Jews in civil society. And even in the territories, Goldstone argues, quoting an international treaty, “there is no intent to maintain ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group’” (a conclusion he reaches partly under the assumption that Israel eagerly wants a Palestinian state, and soon, which one could quibble with). If the distinction seems semantic, the reason it’s not, Goldstone implicitly argues, is that “apartheid” is an unusually inflammatory term, and is therefore especially dangerous when inaccurately deployed. He concludes: “The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.”

The ostensible occasion for the op-ed is an NGO “hearing” in Cape Town, South Africa, next weekend over whether Israel is “apartheid.” But Goldstone’s not fooling anyone. The man whom many would finger as most responsible for the international campaign to “isolate, demonize and delegitimize” Israel now fights that campaign. The latest in a line of Jewish outcasts that stretches back to Spinoza (or to Moses?), he wants back in to the fold. And here is where the psychodrama goes mass-scale: Can we forgive him?

Israel and the Apartheid Slander [NYT]
Earlier: Goldstone Retracts Israeli War Crimes Claim

• The Kol Nidre service tonight at Occupy Wall Street will be across Broadway from Zuccotti Park, in an deliberate effort to expand the Occupation. (If you go, try to find me and say hi.) [Forward]

• Why Occupy Wall Street is taken most seriously in the Middle East. [NYT]

• Washington Capitals forward Jeff Halpern will Koufax tonight; Coach Bruce Boudreau won’t. [WP D.C. Sports Bog]

• Nor will the Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun; the Times’ Richard Sandomir explores further. [NYT]

• It’s kind of adorable how our basic Ashkenazic break-fast foods are seen as exotic in Israel. [Ynet]

• It may be a travesty of democracy, but Russia’s Jews are pretty okay with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s imminent return to the presidency. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• Calvin Trillin has a tale to tell from Toronto’s diamond district. [The New Yorker]

• Left-wing Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk set an important precedent, getting a court to allow him to register his official religious status as “without religion.” [Haaretz]

• Nukes or no nukes, Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel insists Iran will not surpass Israel’s qualitative military edge. [The Daily Beast]

• Saul Bellow on being “a Jewish writer in America.” [NYRB]

• Columbia Professor Bruce Robbins is making a movie called Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. [Kickstarter]

• For only the second time ever, centuries-old Bible manuscripts from Damascus were displayed, in Jeruslaem. [AP/WP]

Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the LORD? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? -Isaiah

It is tempting to say that Judaism has always been a religion of stories. After all, what stories are more familiar or beloved than the ones in the Hebrew Bible: Adam and Eve, the binding of Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, Daniel in the lion’s den? These stories are certainly Judaism’s greatest legacy to the world; adopted by Christianity, they have been told in every language, not to mention painted, acted, and set to music. Even in a post-biblical culture like our own, they remain the closest things we have to universal myths.

Yet the truth is that for most of the history of Judaism it would have been an insult to reduce the religion to its narratives. Until the destruction of the Second Temple, in the first century C.E., cultic worship and sacrifice were the heart of Judaism. After that trauma, for the next 1,800 years, it was the interpretation and practice of law that defined a Jewish life. It is only in the modern, secular world that narrative, the simple fact of storytelling, could be considered the supreme human method for making meaning, including Jewish meaning.

That is because, for modern people of all faiths, stories are often the only part of religious heritage that still seems valid. We no longer believe in laws dictated from heaven, or even in heaven itself; but we allow ourselves to feel that ancient religious stories have a numinous power, if only as a residue of the faith that so many generations invested in them. For many Jews today, reading biblical stories, or retelling them on Passover or Hanukkah, is the only part of Jewish tradition that still seems available, or necessary.

This new focus on story as the heart of Jewish experience can be dated to the beginning of the 20th century. Chaim Nachman Bialik mined the Talmud for its legends and tales and published them as Sefer Ha-Aggadah in 1911; Louis Ginzberg’s even more broadly based collection of midrashic tales, The Legends of the Jews, began to appear in 1909; Martin Buber performed a similar task for Hasidic stories, publishing Legend of the Baal-Shem in 1908. All these works reflected a growing tendency to divorce law from literature, halakhah from aggadah, in keeping with the positivist spirit of the 20th century.

Despite his contribution to this movement, Bialik, in a landmark essay called “Halakhah and Aggadah in Jewish History,” expressed a fear that aggadah—the inner, spiritual, narrative legacy of Judaism—could not survive in the world without halakhah—the outer, material, legal practice of Judaism. Depending on how you look at it, this fear has either been justified or refuted by the course of Jewish life in the post-Holocaust world. There’s no denying that rabbinic Judaism as it was lived for 18 centuries is no longer part of the lives of the large majority of Jews. Yet this secularizing process is not peculiar to Judaism: The vast majority of Western Christians, too, no longer lead lives as defined by ritual practice as they were two or 10 centuries ago.

To the extent that there is a Jewish culture or identity that cuts across national boundaries, it is defined largely by storytelling. Just as many Jews now consider scripture to be what Wallace Stevens called a “supreme fiction,” so fiction has become our contemporary scripture—a body of texts that creates Jewishness in a post-religious age. When we read the major Jewish writers of the last 60 years, we inevitably think about what they have in common and what we have in common with them, as Jews and interpreters of Jewish experience.

These are the questions I will explore in this space over the next year, in a monthly series on postwar Jewish fiction. Some of the writers I will discuss are well-known to American Jewish readers—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick—while others may be new discoveries—France’s Romain Gary (born Roman Katsav), Brazil’s Moacyr Scliar. They write in a half a dozen languages (though I am reading them in English), and they occupy every point on the spectrum of Jewish identification. By reading them together, it may be possible to get a new sense—less authoritative but more intimate than those offered by politics and religion—of what it means to belong to the Jewish people today.

***

In the postwar world, it has hardly been possible to think about that question without thinking about Zionism and the State of Israel. In fact, if you wanted to name the most influential Jewish novel of the last 65 years, a good case could be made for picking Leon Uris’ pulp epic about the founding of the Jewish State, Exodus. Published in 1958, it has sold 7 million copies in the United States alone, and the movie version has reached millions more around the world. Samizdat copies of Exodus helped inspire the first refuseniks with the dream of going to Israel. That was exactly the kind of reaction Uris must have hoped for. As David Ben-Gurion put it when the book came out, “As a literary work it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.”

Uris engineers the book according to familiar Hollywood formulas, in particular the formula of the Western. Ari Ben Canaan, the novel’s hero, is a classic cowboy—ultra-masculine, brave, and taciturn, he defends civilization without quite joining it. To be complete he needs the love of a good woman—in this case, Kitty Fremont, an American Gentile who gets caught up in the Zionist movement largely out of unadmitted love (and lust) for Ari. And of course in a Western there must be Indians, the savage enemies of civilization. This role is played in Exodus by the Arabs, and the novel is never more propagandistic than in its unapologetically hostile caricature of “the Arab world”: “unspeakable disease, illiteracy, and poverty were universal. There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. It was a constant struggle to survive. In this atmosphere cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.” The message Uris wanted the American reader to take from the book is unmistakable. Kitty Fremont states it on the last page: “Israel stands with its back to the wall. It has always stood that way and it always will … with savages trying to destroy you.”

But it would be too easy to say that the message, or the battles and love scenes, is what explains the success of Exodus. In fact, Uris, like Dan Brown today, is so popular because he delivers something like an education—or at least, great heaps of more or less accurate historical information. In Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s the history of Christianity and the Catholic Church; in Exodus, it’s the history of Eastern European Jewry, from the rise of Zionism in the 1880s through the Holocaust and the birth of Israel in the 1940s. And reading Exodus is not the worst way to get an introduction to this period. It teaches the reader about Bilu and Hovevei Zion and kibbutzim and the Haganah—and about the Nuremberg Laws and the Warsaw Ghetto and the postwar DP camps. This is one of the most fascinating and tragic periods in modern history, and millions of people, including many Jews, got their first introduction to it from Leon Uris.

The problem with Uris’ history is not inaccuracy, though of course there are errors. It is that he can find in all of it only a single meaning: the importance of Jewish toughness. This is not a value to be scorned, and it is true that it inspired much of the urgency and success of the Zionist movement. But with Uris, it becomes something monomaniacal and amoral—an obsession with proving that Jews can and will use violence. Take the scene where the young Ari, having been robbed by Arabs, is instructed by his father Barak in the use of a bull whip, Indiana Jones-style. “The son of Barak Ben Canaan is a free man! He shall never be a ghetto Jew,” he bellows.

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]

To drive home this commitment they assembled an impressive cast of older and younger writers for their first issue. It included poems by Wallace Stevens and James Agee, essays by Edmund Wilson and Lionel Abel, reviews by Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling. But at the head of the issue, surprisingly, was a story by a young, largely unpublished poet, Delmore Schwartz. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” would become perhaps the most beloved piece of fiction ever to appear in the magazine.

Schwartz was born in 1913 to parents, Harry and Rose Schwartz, who were mismatched immigrant Jews. After innumerable quarrels, they would separate when he was 7 and his younger brother was 4. Their unfortunate marriage and its impact on his life would obsess Schwartz for many years. Harry’s real-estate dealings made him wealthy, but he was a chronically unfaithful husband. Full of recrimination, Rose was nonetheless proud of her husband’s success, driving him away yet unwilling to concede the end of their marriage. Delmore attributed his later unhappiness to his parents’ bitter alienation, punctuated by melodramatic demands that he choose between them.

After their divorce, Harry moved to Chicago, where his business prospered and he quietly remarried. Delmore spent summers with his father but grew up with his mother and brother in the lower-middle-class world of New York’s Washington Heights. There they were enmeshed in her extended family, whose lives he chronicled in a long story, “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life,” that provides rich background for “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” When Harry died in 1930, it was found that his fortune had evaporated, thanks in part to the onset of the Depression. As a result, Delmore, like so many writers who came of age in the 1930s, would always be hungry for work and short of money.

Though Schwartz studied philosophy with Sidney Hook at New York University and did graduate work with Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard from 1935 to 1937, his inner bent was toward poetry. He was also a brilliant talker and a restless, omnivorous reader. According to William Phillips, who met him in the 1930s, “one felt immediately one was in the presence of a strange and possessed being, endowed with some extraordinary nervous and intellectual energy.” Schwartz developed a prodigious mastery of poetic forms and a remarkable fluency at deploying them, but the influence of modern masters, especially Yeats and Eliot, kept him from becoming a genuinely original poet. His real breakthrough as a writer came one hot July weekend in 1935 when, at the age of 21, he wrote “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” its title borrowed from Yeats. The story was rooted in his own life, but its nightmarish quality, its brevity and ingenuity, its manipulation of time and place, linked it to the modernist writing of the 1920s. For the editors of the new Partisan Review, the story was a gauntlet laid down to the social muse, an implicit challenge to the naturalism and political engagement imposed on many writers during the Depression. It was at once personal and quietly experimental. The following year, it would serve as the title piece of a collection of poetry and prose that would make Delmore Schwartz the most celebrated young writer of the moment, acclaimed by poets as different as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, and Allen Tate, and by the most promising of his contemporaries, including Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who became his close friends.

Schwartz also became a central figure in the emerging group of New York intellectuals who would come into their own in the 1940s, but his writing was palpably different from theirs. Most of them were Jewish, but they showed little interest in their Jewishness, except for their urge to leave it behind. Marxist theory and the appeal of Western culture helped make them universalists, quickening their flight from their immigrant beginnings. Their facility with ideas typically made them critics rather than poets or novelists. Personal writing held little appeal for them, at least until they began to look back years later. During the Depression it seemed an indulgence, even an embarrassment. It could only drag them back to the poverty and, as they saw it, the cultural poverty of their family backgrounds.

For Delmore Schwartz, what lay behind him was everything. His family history, and especially his Jewishness, was the medium that would help him fathom the enigma of who he was. His most ambitious work was a failed book-length autobiographical poem called Genesis. No writer believed less in the Emersonian vision of personal freedom, with its faith in the individual’s power of self-making. In one of his short plays, titled Shenandoah, Schwartz derided the notion that “a man/ Creates his life ex nihilo.” Instead, he took up Freud’s exploration of the family romance, which fed his own bleak sense that family was destiny. He never tired of musing on the cultural contradictions of his own name and the burden it placed on him. In Shenandoah, the mock-tragic verse play, his 25-year-old alter ego, Shenandoah Fish, is transported back to the scene of his own bris, the moment when he, at eight days old, received his impossible name. He blames his parents for their eagerness to gain a foothold in the gentile world while at the same time being tone deaf to its language and culture. The incongruous name came to stand for his divided being, at once comically native and ethnic. He would use it again to join the stories collected in The World Is a Wedding (1948), his most telling book.

This sense of an overwhelming fate, rooted as much in Greek tragedy and Jewish history as in Freud, is what Schwartz means by the enigmatic title of the story “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life.” There, he compares a young man’s insight into his family’s history to a series of lights turned on in dark rooms, beams that illuminate the shadowy places in himself. Disheartened, Schwartz revises Wordsworth’s reassuring faith that “the Child is father of the Man.” His conclusion is more desolating: “What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child? This freedom seemed to [him] like the freedom, dangerous, dark, and far-off, to become the father of new children without knowing at all what would become of them, what kind of human beings they would be.” He is haunted not only by the unalterable past but by the unknowable future, the blind responsibility of one generation for another. This is the psychological drama behind “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Delmore Schwartz’s most poignant evocation of the power of the past over the mind of the present.

If Shenandoah sends Schwartz’s surrogate back to the moment in infancy when he was given his name, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” takes him back even further—to his parents’ courtship, the very day his father, with little deliberation, asked his mother to marry him. The story is cast as a dream, though we don’t learn that until the last line. These scenes from the past unfold on the screen of an old movie theater, a dream within a dream, since movies have always been seen as dreamlike. The year in the story is 1909; the medium is new and modern, its technique still primitive. The scratchy, fragmentary print, its tintype settings, reflect the unbridgeable distance in time, the awkwardness of the characters, whose unhappiness is foreshadowed at every turn. We learn all we need to know about his parents’ marriage but obliquely, by way of metaphor. Each anecdotal twist of the narrative augurs a failure to which the clueless couple remains oblivious.

The most striking of these turns comes when they stroll along the boardwalk at Coney Island, looking out at the glaring sun and the pounding sea. At first this seems harmless, yet the language resonates. “Overhead the sun’s lightning strikes and strikes, but neither of them are at all aware of it.” Gradually the sea grows more menacing, crashing ominously with irresistible force. “The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully, showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable.” The waves are beautiful yet shattering, intolerable not in themselves but in the agitated thoughts of the young observer, for whom they signal something painful and inexorable. “They finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled.” But the couple feels nothing of their son’s preternatural sense of dread. “My parents gaze absentmindedly at the ocean, scarcely interested in its harshness. The sun overhead does not disturb them. But I stare at the terrible sun which breaks up sight, and the fatal, merciless, passionate ocean.” Vladimir Nabokov cited this last phrase in a 1972 essay on inspiration to illustrate why this was one of his half a dozen favorite stories. But he was no doubt inspired just as much by the author’s way of visualizing the past, playing with time, which anticipated his own scenic technique for conjuring up his early life in Speak, Memory.

What disturbs the young man is that the past is irreversible, its actors unconscious of the upshot of their choices, the long reach of their mistakes. Looking out at the blinding sun and pounding sea, he continues, “I forget my parents. I stare fascinated and finally, shocked by the indifference of my mother and father, I burst out weeping once more.” As the movie unreels, like his own run-on sentences, he turns into the troubled voyeur of his parents’ union, feeling helpless to alter the action as it unfolds. The people on the screen remain deaf to his dire warnings. “Don’t do it,” he says, in the story’s best-known lines. “It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

The story does little to flesh out this prophecy, except to show us the anguish in which he blurts it out. Each incident that follows subtly accentuates the dissonance between his parents. They step up to have their picture taken, as if to inaugurate their coming life together, but the photographer tries and tries again, somehow unable to get it right. They argue adamantly before entering a fortune-teller’s booth, a bad omen for what their future might hold, until the father angrily stalks out, as he would later walk out of the marriage. Watching the scene, the son feels more and more imperiled, “as if I were walking a tight-rope a hundred feet over a circus-audience and suddenly the rope is showing signs of breaking.” As he grows more vulnerable, more desperate, he shifts from being part of the audience to becoming the featured act.

When the story’s narrator talks back to what he sees on the screen, the other people in the theater object to his unruly behavior. He feels utterly apart from the people in the theater for they are mere spectators, engrossed in a story, annoyed at his disruptions. An usher threatens to put him out, while others plead with him or stare him down in dismay. His outbursts continue, and the usher, as in a scene from Kafka, drags him out with a stern warning: “You can’t act like this even if other people aren’t around.” Perhaps the usher’s meaning is that our lives may not be as starkly determined as he thinks. “Why should a young man like you, with your whole life before you, get hysterical like this?” The ending that follows is ambiguous. Expelled from the theater “into the cold light,” he wakes up “into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.” A man is coming of age, a new day is dawning, but it’s a harsh, wintry beginning. The morning’s “lip of snow” seems at once chilling and inviting, a cold initiation into maturity.

The story resists explaining why the young man is in such distress, but Schwartz’s other writing fills us in. Like the work of many second-generation American Jewish authors, including Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller, Schwartz’s stories offer a tale of two generations. In his version, the older generation is emotionally confused, poorly acculturated to American life, and set mainly on material survival—making a living, creating a family, carving a place for themselves and their children in a new world. But some of their children turn out to be artists and intellectuals, doleful creatures, acutely self-conscious, alienated from both work and family, living too much in their own heads, their inactivity heightened by the harsh economics of the Depression. Schwartz’s best stories are either poker-faced satirical takes on the bohemians and outright failures of his generation, as in “The World Is a Wedding” and “New Year’s Eve,” or chronicles of the distressed lives of his parents’ generation, for whom the promise of American life has not panned out.

The later story most closely linked with “In Dreams” is “America! America!,” in which Shenandoah’s mother takes him through the history of their neighbors, the Baumanns, a gregarious, seemingly happy family whose early successes gradually peter out, like the faltering hopes of the Loman family in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Their children go nowhere while they themselves drift downward. “The expectations of these human beings who had come in their youth to the new world had not been fulfilled in the least.” But the key to the story is not so much the fate of the Baumanns as his mother’s absorbing way of telling their story, her peculiar understanding and empathy. He interrupts her account not with protests but with pained reflections, for he realizes how far he is from ordinary people and their lives, the very people who formed him and made him who he was. Compared to what he learns from these stories, his own cast of mind feels self-conscious, abstract, even solipsistic. His mother “was never deceived about any actual things by words or ideas, as he often was.” The flat, awkward solemnity and almost biblical simplicity of his style, perhaps the most striking feature of his fiction, can be seen as his way of imitating this intuitive wisdom. He often uses a tone of mock-solemnity to take down the pretensions of his contemporaries, but also to point to ultimate things.

His mother’s stories crystallize his disaffection with his life, his way of thinking as a modernist intellectual. Yet channeling those stories makes him, for the time being, a different kind of author.

He reflected upon his separation from these people, and he felt that in every sense he was removed from them by thousands of miles, or by a generation, or by the Atlantic Ocean. … Whatever he wrote as an author did not enter into the lives of these people, who should have been his genuine relatives and friends, for he had been surrounded by their lives since the day of his birth, and in an important sense, even before then. … The lower middle-class of the generation of Shenandoah’s parents had engendered perversions of its own nature, children full of contempt for every thing important to their parents.

As Shenandoah tries to imagine the experience of the older generation—their arrival in America, their early hopes and struggles, their growing disappointments—an unexpected surge of empathy overcomes his usual limitations. “And now he felt for the first time how closely bound he was to these people. … As the air was full of the radio’s unseen voices, so the life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered.” In resonant lines like these, his language seems etched in granite.

Delmore Schwartz came to consider himself a historian of the great Jewish immigration, not with multi-generational family sagas but through modernist fragments and glimpses, seeing those lives through the eyes of the next generation. The movie scenes of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” like the mother’s recollections in “America! America!,” are spots of time salvaged from oblivion. Reading “In Dreams” soon after he wrote it, Delmore’s mother testified to its uncanny accuracy. On the back of the typescript she wrote, “If there is another word besides wonderful I don’t know[.] I don’t remember telling you all these so accurate.” Achieving this uncanny insight did not make the writer happy. “What will become of me?,” Shenandoah thinks at the end of “America! America!” as he gazes at himself in a mirror. “What will I seem to my children?,” he wonders. “What is it that I do not see now in myself?”

As people in the past could not imagine our present, we can scarcely envision the future. This leap of time, the projection forward that so exhilarated Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” weighed heavily on Delmore Schwartz. In (hopeful) dreams begin (awesome) responsibilities, not thanks to some iron law of fate but because our actions, our character, our choices are fraught with incalculable consequences. We can never know their ultimate impact. This would be a heavy realization at any age, but especially for a young man just turning 21. Amid his short-lived early triumphs and subsequent trials, including mental illness, addiction, and the loss of fluency as a writer, this comfortless knowledge would press on Delmore Schwartz’s mind for many years to come, turning his meteoric rise and fall into a cautionary legend, dimming our sense of his bright beginnings.

Morris Dickstein, professor of English and theater at the Graduate Center of the City University in New York, is the author, most recently, of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. This essay will be published later this year as the afterword to a new edition of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” from Shackman Press.

With its dreamy exploration of family, memory, destiny, and free will, the story made Schwartz famous. He was celebrated by the greatest writers of his time, edited the most revered magazines, and was fictionalized by Saul Bellow and lionized by Lou Reed. But all that fame and passion was too much for Schwartz to take—depressive and drunk, he sank into an oblivion of minor works and receding glory. By the time he died, at 52, alone in a hotel room, he was largely forgotten.

It was a spectacular downfall, and one, sadly, that overshadows Schwartz’s talent and achievements. Morris Dickstein, professor of English and theater at the Graduate Center of the City University in New York, joined Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz to talk about Schwartz and his renewed relevance to American readers.

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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.

Jamie Schiff, Jason Sperling [NYT]

• 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

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.

• The six best Jewish cookbooks. [Saveur]

• Ruth Franklin weighs what it means to consider Anne Frank’s story a universal one, as opposed to a particularly Jewish one. [TNR]

• At a memorial for former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—the first Likud PM—Benjamin Netanyahu chastised West Bank settlers that harass Palestinians. [Haaretz]

• The latest This American Life, whose theme is gifts, has much of interest to Tablet Magazine readers, from the reading of an Etgar Keret short story to a tale of an Israeli marijuana sting. [TAL]

• Thirty Jewish Studies faculty members in the University of California system urged the Orange County prosecutor to drop charges against 11 Muslim students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Irvine last year. [JTA]

It occurred to me that two of the three Jewish intellectuals contributing editor Ruth R. Wisse wrote about this week are also two of the three Jewish intellectuals in Zelig’s opening.

I eventually found him—though he did not, at first, meet my expectations.

***

From my early teens, discussions around our family table took off from articles in Commentary, the only publication read in common by my father, my brother Ben, and me, five years Ben’s junior. These discussions continued once Ben and I formed our own families and became independent subscribers.

In all that time, few essays ever got us more riled up than “My Negro Problem and Ours,” written in 1963, at the height of the American civil rights movement, and almost certainly intended to provoke the hundreds of letters it generated. In it, Commentary’s legendary editor-in-chief, Norman Podhoretz, pitted his experiences as a poor kid in Brooklyn who was stalked and bullied by bigger black boys against the prevalent notion that Jews were rich and Negroes persecuted. He unearthed in himself emotions like envy and hate and examined them in light of what increasingly militant blacks were saying about their treatment in America. Far from minimizing their grievances, Norman concluded that the tortured relations between blacks and whites should be dissolved. “I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.” Intermarriage was the desired resolution. Were he asked whether he would like one of his daughters to “marry one,” he wrote, he would have to answer, no, he would not like it at all, but he would accept it as the man he had “a duty to be.” There was real import to this statement by a man with three daughters.

“Politically incorrect” hardly suffices to describe the tenor and substance of this article, which retains every iota of its disturbing power to this day. Norman’s mercilessly rational analysis falls like a searchlight on thoughts and feelings that might have benefited from softer illumination. But what troubled us in Montreal was less the treatment of race, which hardly resonated north of the border, than the author’s indifference to whether his daughter’s hypothetical black suitor was Jewish. So the boy was black—big deal. But how could the editor of a Jewish magazine so casually treat his daughter’s marriage to a gentile?

And then, almost as an aside, came this reflection: “In thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant,” Podhoretz wrote. “Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction.”

Was the question terrible or simply off-key? Striving for ultimate honesty, it betrayed moral innocence without registering what Judaism had come to accomplish. Jews had forsworn human sacrifice. The Germans murdered because they were not Jews and did not follow God’s law. The genocide of the Jews was the consequence not of Jewish survival but of Nazism’s perverted search for the “fittest.” Surely the unspeakable crimes by enemies of the Jews ought to have prompted questions about the value of their existence.

***

It wasn’t until several months later that Norman received redemption in our family, which came as a result of his response to Hannah Arendt’s coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had been captured and brought by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, from his hiding in Argentina to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people. This was the first such reckoning, as earlier trials of Nazi war criminals had charged them with crimes against humanity or against other nationals. Israeli leaders felt duty bound to try one of the chief organizers of the Final Solution for the genocide that had inspired the jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin that term. Arendt, by contrast, was bothered by what she considered legal gerrymandering in trying the SS officer in the court of a country that had not existed at the time of the massacres, by the prosecution’s emphasis on the national catastrophe rather than the narrow specifics of the case, and by its inadequate understanding of the Nazi mind. Author of a major study of totalitarianism, Arendt was convinced that the modern technocrat—Nazi or Soviet—was so regimented and brainwashed that he was not intellectually agile enough to try to save himself in a court of law. Eichmann was dull-witted, a pencil pusher: It was ridiculous to cast an efficient bureaucrat as arch-villain in so large a drama.

Of all the prominent European Jews who found refuge in America during the war, Arendt had, before this, been singled out for homage by the New York intellectuals, who were just coming to terms with the Jewish national experience they had until then mostly ignored. They had not realized that she was moving in the opposite direction, distancing herself from her earlier Zionist and Jewish sympathies. Although no one at the time suspected her liaison with her teacher Martin Heidegger, or the resumption of her correspondence with him despite his wartime association with the Nazi regime, the Americans felt betrayed by her account of the trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Saul Bellow ascribed his dislike to one of his characters, the Holocaust survivor Arthur Sammler, who protests that the Germans’ idea of making the century’s great crime look dull was not banal but an idea of genius: “Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abandon conscience. Is such a project trivial? Only if human life is trivial. This woman professor’s enemy is modern civilization itself.” The historian Jacob Robinson exposed Arendt’s many factual errors in a study called, after Isaiah, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, and Arendt’s German-Jewish landsman Gershom Scholem called her tone “heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious.” Citing Scholem, Irving Howe recalled that what struck them both—“struck like a blow—was the surging contempt with which she treated almost everyone and everything connected with the trial, the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down upon those coarse Israelis.”

The debate over Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial affected the American Jewish intelligentsia almost as powerfully as the trial shook Israelis.

Norman’s contribution telegraphed its verdict in the subtitle: “Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance.” As if taking up her challenge to look at the universal aspects of what might otherwise seem merely a Jewish quarrel, he examined the symptomatic qualities of her reportage: Eichmann may or may not be a new type of modern man, but Arendt represented a new style of modern thinker. What she did, he noted incisively, was to “translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to a sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim. It has all the appearance of ‘ruthless honesty,’ and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?”

Norman identified the technique of postmodern inversion that destabilizes the moral order: preferring flawed originality to mere accuracy. Resentful of being a “young fogey,” he was by this point publishing articles as subversive as the work he was dissecting here. But the venerable Arendt was turning frivolous, and so he took on the task of undoing her mischief—a task that required a more patient pen and disciplined mind than the mischief-maker’s own. Distortion is to accuracy as snorting is to sobriety, but unlike the private vices that harm only their practitioner, the intellectual follies—to use Lionel Abel’s term—infect the body politic.

Let me quote Norman again: “The brilliance of Miss Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann could hardly be disputed by any disinterested reader. But at the same time, there could hardly be a more telling example … of the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generating dazzle.” He was speaking here for almost all the New York Intellectuals, who had painfully outgrown their own misguided enthusiasms. One can hardly exaggerate how genuinely thinkers like Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Irving Howe had come to value lucidity and intelligibility over other literary virtues. But attaining that clarity required filtering out pollutants, not once but repeatedly, in a society that embraced Arendt’s “perversity” as eagerly as France sanctified the criminal Jean Genet.

What no one foresaw, of course, was how quickly postmodern frivolity would engulf the elites and flood the humanities. Bellow would soon be savaged by the counterculture, and Howe by the New Left, the latter winning his way back into its good graces only once it had passed its faux-revolutionary phase. As for Norman, he cleaned the stables, earning the Homeric adjective that accompanied these labors.

Continue reading: Zionism, “our love for the State of Israel,” and being a soldier. Or view as a single page.

Irving came to me out of need, which put us on an even footing. This was unexpected, since I owed him a considerable professional debt: In 1969, when I was completing my doctorate at McGill University and teaching sections of the English literature survey course, I petitioned the English Department for permission to introduce courses on Yiddish literature under its aegis. When my colleagues asked how they could justify the inclusion of a subject with no obvious connection to theirs, I pointed out that not a single course in the university dealt with any aspect of Jewish history or culture. Jewish studies would have to start somehow and somewhere: Did they think I’d do better in the German Department? Invited to supply a syllabus, I proposed a course on the Yiddish short story that was based largely on Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s Treasury of Yiddish Stories; almost entirely on its own, it won over my department.

Howe describes in his memoirs the emotional-political pressures of the early 1950s that prompted him to seek refuge in this project of Yiddish translation. Because he read his native language only haltingly, he partnered with a Yiddish poet called “Leyzer” Greenberg, who selected the authors and read his choice of stories aloud until Irving hit on the ones that he liked. In this way, he later quipped, he got to know the lesser Yiddish writers much better than the great ones. As the “outside man” on the project, he conscripted translators from among fellow writers who still knew some Yiddish from home. When Saul Bellow agreed to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” Leyzer likewise read the story aloud to him, and Saul sat at the typewriter, translating it sentence by sentence as if taking dictation. The result was so good (if slightly bowdlerized) that Bashevis Singer never allowed Bellow to translate another story, lest Saul be credited for any share of his achievement.

But I digress: I was making the point that Howe and Greenberg’s anthology allowed me to introduce Yiddish literature at McGill. The two men published several more anthologies of Yiddish poetry, essays and stories, until Leyzer’s death in 1977 left Irving without a partner on a project he had come to depend on as the link to his Jewishness.

The most ideologically rigid of the New York Intellectuals, Irving did not change his affiliation over a lifetime. As his fellow leftists turned neo-conservative and their publications edged rightward, he alone remained a socialist, conflating his socialism with what he called Yiddishkayt (Jewishness), so that he could not abandon one without appearing to betray the other. When Jewishness began to matter more to him, he looked for ways to become part of it without compromising his socialist faith, and he’d found a highly creative avenue for this linkage in the transposition of Yiddish literary treasures into English. Leyzer’s death forced him to find a new collaborator on the Yiddish projects that constituted the Jewish portion of his life, and that was how he came to me.

Our first joint venture, The Best of Sholem Aleichem, was conceived when Marty Peretz approached Irving with the idea for this collection to be published by New Republic Books, and Irving—the one with experience—got us to sign away all the rights for $2,000. Irving had composed the introductions to the books he co-edited with Leyzer, but he and I decided to do ours in the form of letters, which we sent back and forth in the days when mail took several days for delivery. Leon Wieseltier, who saw the proofs of the book, asked me whether I noticed that whereas my letters responded to Irving’s by incorporating his comments, his never referred to anything I said. I had noticed it, but it was beneath my pride to show Irving that I cared. And I felt beholden to him. It was his reputation, not mine and not Sholem Aleichem’s, that got our book frontpage coverage in the New York Times Book Review.

We began work on the Sholem Aleichem anthology just as Irving’s most ambitious book, World of Our Fathers, was about to appear. Irving worried that the Times would assign the review of it to Harry Golden, whose work he had panned. Instead, he won the National Book Award, made the best-seller list, and got to tour the country for respectable fees. But fate seemed to conspire against his triumph. His marriage to Ariel Mack, to whom he dedicated this book, was then coming apart. When we started working on the book, he lived with her in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive; by the time we began our second project, he was in a smaller apartment on the Upper East Side.

Domestic matters apart, I was under the impression that Irving felt more comfortable in smaller spaces. He seemed attracted to socialism because he considered it a losing cause in America, and to Yiddish for the same reason, interpreting it as the culture of what he called the “little man.” When he toured to promote his book, he complained that the well-heeled audiences at synagogues and Jewish community centers were nothing like the garment workers and union organizers whom he had so lovingly portrayed in his book. I pointed out that he had memorialized only those parts of the Lower East Side that had not endured in America. His audiences were made up of the synagogue-goers, Zionists, and immigrants who had made good. The ironies of this ought to have been cause for celebration, but, for Irving, they were instigators of regret.

***

I don’t think Irving would have dignified me as a “political adversary” in the first years that we worked together. Feminists may snigger, but I sensed that he felt protective toward me, trying to shield me from the battles he had been fighting since his teens and to which he now seemed condemned. He obviously enjoyed writing and teaching about literature more than duking it out politically, and he may have wanted to grant me the respite he could not allow himself. “Try to understand that I genuinely did not wish to get into a fight with you,” he wrote after he had treated me to a public putdown at a nasty conference on Jewish literature we had both attended in Berkeley, Calif.:

[This] was not because I dismissed you. It was … in part because I know that polemics exact a heavy price from you in pain and suffering, and I keep saying to myself that it would be best to avoid them. But also, to be honest, I don’t think you’re very good at political polemics, certainly not as good as you are in literary discussions; I feel it’s not your métier, that you force yourself to do it out of a sense of obligation (with attendant anxiety). But I don’t want [to] make it seem that it has been only my goodness of heart—though it’s there—which prompted me to refrain from public argument with you. I think you have no idea how aggressive and combative and provoking you can be, indeed were in San Francisco, and that this elicits strong responses in turn.

Admitting to “contradictory feelings in the matter,” he expressed satisfaction in our ability to remain collaborators and friends, “perhaps the best that can be done under the circumstances.” This was seductive. But though I shared some of his contradictory feelings, he did not have my number. His description of the anxious polemicist, including of her abrasiveness, seemed (then and now) truer of him than of me. In wanting to attain for the Jews the political unexceptionalism to which they were entitled, I was anxious about the outcome, not the process. As between the two of us, he was the one more often accused of harshness, while people were always saying (to my irritation) how nice I was despite my out-of-favor views.

Indeed, Irving and I drew very different conclusions from the Yiddish culture with which we were engaged together. Yiddish wit once observed that Jews had turned links (left) because they were denied their recht (rights). Irving saw some such connection between political weakness and moral strength. I, who was spared the fate of European Jewry by parents who brought me to Canada in 1940, could not romanticize the politics that had allowed my cohort to be turned into fertilizer. While I would not have chosen to be anything but a Jew, it was precisely the study of Yiddish that had taught me not only the dangers but also the corrupting potential of powerlessness. Whereas Sholem Aleichem fully recognized the deformities that poverty bred, and loved Jews despite the humiliation to which they were subject, some of his contemporaries considered weakness a sign of distinction and decried achievement and prosperity as such. I was also aware, from studying Yiddish, that prolonged repression had produced a rash of informers and converts to other faiths, who often outdid gentiles in malignity. Although Irving and I both admired Jewish resiliency, I had come to recognize Jewish political dependency—a corollary of exile—as a deeply flawed political ideal.

***

On November 10, 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, defining Zionism as a form of racism. I was convinced that this charge, lifted straight from the Communist playbook of the 1930s, would greatly advance the Arab war against Israel. By transposing their rhetoric from “We will crush the Jewish State” to “The imperialist Jews are despoiling us,” Arab rulers had forged an anti-liberal alliance among despotisms, autocracies, and dictatorial regimes across the political spectrum. European anti-Semitism in the 1870s had cast the Jews, the beneficiaries of liberal democracy, as its conspiratorial exploiters, so that destroying them became a necessary defense against their alleged domination. By adding the trendy indictment of “racism” to the toxicology of anti-Jewishness, Arabs and Muslims would henceforth rally to their cause Marxists who picked up Stalin’s charge of Zionist-imperialism, internationalists who insisted that Jews should transcend their particularism, and rightists who could now turn the Holocaust indictment of racism against its victims. Talk about a big tent.

Continue reading: an editorial spat, anti-Jewish ammunition, and Robert Frost. Or view as a single page.

There followed a second message, this one from Janis Bellow, explaining that Saul had insisted on phoning us that morning. He was feeling a little better, as we could judge for ourselves if we wanted to come over to pay them a visit. When Len, my husband, and I stopped by later that week, we found Saul uncommonly serene. He sat in the hospital bed that had been set up for him, stroking Moosie the family cat and letting the conversation flow around him rather than through him (as had always been the case before). He was slow to respond when Len tried to engage him on familiar topics, like their native Montreal and family members whom we knew in common. As his message had signaled, Saul was now hors de combat. I realized that Janis was about to lose a husband, their daughter a father, and I—with humble respect for the differences—a comrade-in-arms.

Though Saul was disoriented during those last weeks of his life, his telephone message followed logically from conversations we had been having as long as we had known each other. Like most people, I had first gotten to know him as a reader, but thanks to his extended family in Montreal, he came often to the city where I grew up, and the brief contacts I had with him over the years allowed me to feel I knew him far better than I did. He was my favorite novelist, which meant that I occasionally sparred with him mentally the way his character Moses Herzog does in the letters he writes to Nietzsche and Heidegger. The sparring continued when we became friends, but by that time we were on the same side of every struggle that mattered. It was not surprising that he should have called to tell me he was about to exit the field of battle.

***

At the start of our friendship, I challenged Saul’s soldierly commitment. The first time was during a spectacular weekend in the spring of 1984 that was orchestrated by Guy Descary, the mayor of Lachine, a small city near Montreal, who had happened upon “Lachine” in a roster of Nobel Prize winners, and decided to name the new library of his suburb after its most famous native son. In a bid to attract full press coverage—he was considering a run for the Montreal mayoralty—Descary arranged a formal dedication of the Saul Bellow Library, to be followed by a celebratory luncheon at the Lachine waterfront. Montreal and its suburbs remain divided into fairly separate ethnic blocs, so that a special excitement accompanies events that draw its various communities together. Here was a French mayor honoring an English writer who made a point of staying in touch with his local Jewish family. Saul invoked Yiddish, English, and French during the ceremonies, demonstrating the mayor’s contention that “Saul Bellow never forgot his roots.”

I was one of many speakers at the luncheon in Saul’s honor, of which I best remember Elizabeth Spencer’s reminiscences about the time she met Saul in Paris in 1949, when he was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The breezy young man she described was still recognizably there as the guest of honor, enjoying the array of local notables, literati, and members of family paying tribute to his talent and charm. More than on the talks, however, my mind was fixed anxiously on the note I had slipped to Saul before we sat down to the meal, whose contents were quite at odds with the reverential tone of my public remarks. Although I knew he did not take kindly to criticism and feared that I might blow my chance of ever getting to know him better, I had felt compelled to share with him my disappointment about something he had recently done—or rather, undone.

My remonstrance had to do with his resignation from the Committee for the Free World—an organization Midge Decter had founded several years earlier “to conduct a battle of ideas in defense of Western values and institutions” by taking public positions for American victory against Soviet influence in the Cold War. To this end, she drew together thinkers from Europe and North America who recognized the danger of Communism, some because they had once been forcibly subject to Communist rule and others because they had at one time “said the blessing over poison”—the Canadian poet A. M. Klein’s description of those who had voluntarily joined the Party. Midge deemed that no less threatening to our democratic societies than Soviet missiles or OPEC cartels were the compatriots among our academic and cultural elites who “blamed America first,” to use the phrase made famous by Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican National Convention. The Committee’s monthly bulletin Contentions drew a bead on writers and columnists who argued that our political system was founded on oppression, that its freedoms were a sham, and that our prosperity depended on the exploitation of poorer nations. Saul Bellow was a charter member of the Committee’s international board, which also included Raymond Aron, William Barrett, Paul Johnson, Leszek Kolakowski, Tom Stoppard, and George Will.

Rather, Saul had been a member. I had just heard that he resigned from the board in protest against an issue of Contentions criticizing certain of that year’s literary prizes for honoring the political rather than literary merits of the winners—two of whom were Bellow’s friends. Contentions called their work “snooty, mindless, and altogether conventional attitudinizing” (Gore Vidal) and evidence of the “exhaustion of serious fiction as a vehicle for significant comment about human affairs” (Stanley Elkin). As we now know from his published letters, Saul asked that his name be removed from the masthead not because he disagreed with these judgments but because the “reviews were in such bad taste that it depressed me to be associated with them.” He continued:

I have for some time been struggling with the growing realization that a problem exists: About Nicaragua we can agree well enough but as soon as you begin to speak of culture you give me the willies…. [Where] there are politics there are bedfellows, and where there are bedfellows there are likely to be fleas, so I scratched my bites in silence. Your Special Issue, however, is different. I can’t allow the editors of Confrontations (sic) to speak in my name, or with my tacit consent as board-member, about writers and literature. When there are enemies to be made I prefer to make them myself, on my own grounds and in my own language. Le mauvais gout mène aux crimes, said Stendhal, who was right of course but who didn’t realize how many criminals history was about to turn loose.

Had I seen the letter, its wit would not have charmed me. So he had “scratched his bites in silence” instead of appreciating the political energy Midge was organizing on our behalf! Weren’t those many criminals that history was about to turn loose reason enough to support the Committee’s work? Given that he understood what was at stake in the Cold War, I was dismayed that he quit the battlefield for what I considered a slight to his vanity.

***

If you are amused by this account of internecine conflict among intellectuals determined to bring down the Soviet Empire, don’t expect a self-mocking disclaimer from me in this quarrel long since resolved. Since I don’t write for The New Yorker, I don’t feel obliged to be ironic when speaking of the free world. Which is not to say that I fail to appreciate some ironies of this little episode: Saul was valuable to the Committee precisely because he insisted on the preeminence of the writer over the warrior. His idealization of the writer’s task was the bedrock of his literary ambition, and that ambition, fully realized in his work, made him far more precious to the Committee than lesser writers (like me) who soldiered better. Those most valuable to a cause may be least willing to submit to its discipline. On the other hand, Contentions had set out to depoliticize literature by highlighting political considerations that had determined literary awards. If the editors were right, Saul would have forfeited his chance of ever winning one of those prizes had he remained on the Contentions masthead. Thus, his political calculations may have run up against their commitment to purer aesthetic and literary judgment. Irony indeed.

Saul and I never did thrash this out. When Len and I joined him for dinner the following evening with the poet Louis Dudek, we talked for hours without mentioning my note. I sensed that Saul did not want to discuss it, and that our acquaintanceship would flourish on his terms or not at all. In agreeing to subordinate public to private objectives, I was making the same kind of calculation of which I was accusing him in quitting the Committee, but I hoped that it would someday allow me to take up the subject with him again.

There was only intermittent contact between Saul and me in the years that followed. That changed when he married Janis Freedman in 1989 and when they moved to Boston soon after Len and I did, in 1993. Their marriage, which was treated as a May-December curiosity—31-year-old student-assistant marries famous novelist-professor—seemed instead to be something entirely different to me: Saul’s homecoming, after a lifetime of search. To be sure, he had found in Janis a lovely young wife, but she also gave him the unconditional love of the mother he had never ceased to mourn. A fellow Canadian, Janis shared his passion for literature, his comfort in being Jewish, and his concern for Israel at a time when that was becoming more important to him. For these and many other reasons there was no couple in Boston with whom Len and I felt more at home. Often Saul and I slipped into Yiddish, which he could no longer speak with his brothers, by then deceased. We were all landsleit, a term I had always associated with immigrants from Europe, but one equally suited to the reunion of us Canadian Jews on American soil.

One of the few subjects Saul and I continued to disagree on was anti-Semitism. As a teenager in Chicago he had heard the anti-Jewish diatribes of Father Coughlan, also a former Canadian, and Saul was convinced that the same hostility still festered in America under a civil surface. I was confident that American democracy was by now too substantial to allow any politician to win office on a platform of anti-Semitism—which was my criterion for code red. My apprehension was trained wholly on the threat from Arab and Muslim aggressors and secondarily on their deputies among our academic elites. In worrying about America, I thought, Saul was mistaking prejudice, which was nasty but not necessarily lethal, for the murderous politics of Jew-blame that leaders used to manipulate restive populations. He, in turn, thought me naïve to discount the potential of plain old Jew-hatred in our midst.

Saul’s political hard-headedness on these issues made me wonder how, during World War II and into the 1950s, he could have ignored the Jewish struggle for survival in Europe and Palestine. When I put the question to him in 1991, he said, “America was not a country to us. It was the world.” I took this to mean that while he and his friends were being drafted into the army, becoming writers, getting married, and trying to earn a living in the throes of the Depression, they were fully absorbed with the challenges of their lives, not with the lives and deaths of co-religionists overseas. I could not imagine this kind of detachment until it occurred to me that his Jewish counterparts in pre-war Europe—say, at the Lublin Yeshiva (founded in 1930) or Vilna’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (founded in 1929)—likewise felt that “Poland is not a country to us. It is the world.” And Jewish Trotskyists, of whom he had been one, were probably equally delusional on both continents.

Ruth Wisse with Saul Bellow at Bellow’s home, 2001.

Janis Bellow

But why belabor this? By the time he moved to Boston Saul had long since made up for the lapses of his youth. He grasped political realities as clearly as anyone I knew, even as he did not care to be a political player. Blessed with genius that came from beyond the summons of the will, he trusted the realm of the spirit more than us plodders who make do with what wisdom and knowledge we wring from mere experience. I once told him that he was the only adult I knew who spoke seriously about the “soul.” This seemed to surprise him coming from someone who kept a kosher home and blessed the Sabbath, but it is possible to obey God and thank God without hankering for the afterlife—as Saul did—and without leaving politics to an unseen agency. I think that Saul held with his eponymous Mr. Sammler that a good man meets the terms of his contract, “terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As we all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.” I happen to love that homespun kaddish at the conclusion of one of my favorite novels, but its sentiment is not mine. My view is rather that in their hearts most people don’t know, and because we don’t know, the Torah was given, reportedly, through Moses at Sinai, so that we may learn good from evil from a legal tradition scrupulously studied and painstakingly transmitted.

***

Though I am tracking here only the part of our friendship that prompted Saul’s parting message to me, I can’t leave out the joy of most of our time together. Every time I taught his work, I invited him to be a guest of the class, and he always came—even when he eventually needed an aide to help him into the building. The students were curious and deferential. He flinched only from questions that pried into the mysteries of composition, but otherwise enjoyed telling about himself, people he knew, and books he liked. He loved to recall his childhood in Lachine, where the kids spoke French, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and the English they were beginning to pick up in the street. His protestations about being called an American Jewish writer seemed irrelevant when he described putting on the ritual fringes that were part of his childhood morning routine or studying parts of Genesis he learned in cheder. “What else but a Jew could I be?” he would say to students who asked about being a Jewish writer. It was the impulse to classify rather than the label itself that bothered him. He didn’t fit any classification.

I had no trouble imagining the fun he and Isaac Rosenfeld had in their teens doing translations of T.S. Eliot and Milton, singing macaronic Yiddish and English songs, and playing verbal chess. Sometimes at the dinner table he would ask Janis to join him in a raunchy Yiddish ditty he had taught her. In Saul’s rendition of “Der Rebbe Elimelekh” (itself the Yiddish adaptation of “Old King Cole”), the merry rabbi at the conclusion of the Sabbath sends not for the fiddlers and drummers with whom he fiddles and drums, but for the shikselekh with whom he shiksels. He had the rabbi frolicking with gentile girls in a verbal construction of his own making. When he’d finish the song, Saul would throw back his head and have us all laughing with him.

Ruth R. Wisse, the author of the Nextbook Press book Jews and Power, is Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and a professor of comparative literature at Harvard.

The evening was sponsored by Penguin Classics and emceed by Nina Baym Beena Kamlani, who was Bellow’s editor for his last few books (he died in 2005). It was the typical crowd: Girls who probably work in publishing stood in a corner sipping red wine and acting like they belonged, which they did; two people sitting next to me discussed grad school admissions. Most were probably Bellow fans, making me the odd man out: I’ve never got Bellow (and yes, since you were about to ask, I have read Herzog, as well as several others). His rhythm hasn’t flowed for me as it has for some; his genius hasn’t appeared before me as it has for others.

And on its face, it was five typical readers, four novelists and Kamlani: Gary Shteyngart (a contributing editor); Francine Prose (a contributor); Joshua Furst; and Joseph O’Neill. But though all read the same author, they read him in five different ways, almost as five different characters: The neophyte, the socialite, the admirer, the lecturer, and the sentimentalist. I’ll explain this, I swear.

First, after Kamlani’s introduction, was Shteyngart, the diminuitive, jester-like, calmly wise Russian Jewish novelist. He played the neophyte. “Since Valentine’s Day is coming up, I’m reading a dating scene from Herzog,” he announced. And he proceeded to read a rather funny, at times risqué exchange between Moses Herzog and a woman, Ramona, whom, let’s just say, Herzog knows to be wearing black lace underwear. As Shteyngart articulated Herzog’s fascination with the fact of his own erection—“good currency anywhere, accepted by the Bank of England”—Shteyngart did the opposite of become the character: He almost sounded like one coming across the character, or the writer, or even the English language, for the first time. Here he was helped by his faint accent, which was compounded by his exaggeratedly Slavic take on the pronounciation of “Ramona,” which was compounded further still by the exoticism of Ramona’s “French-Russian-Argentine-Jewish ways.” Shteyngart is of course no naif, even if he plays one on YouTube. Rather, he was bringing the listeners along with him in a rediscovery, and I heard a music in Bellow I had never perceived before.

Next was Francine Prose, who I am pretty sure was the tallest of the five readers, even if you spotted Joshua Furst his cowboy boots. She sounded savvy and looked statuesque, like a sophisticated Parisian. She played the socialite. In what initially seemed like a daring gesture, she chose to read from Bellow’s essays on other authors: An excerpt from one on the poet John Berryman, and then one he wrote when his friend John Cheever died. The match was perfect: Prose tossed off the proper nouns in top cocktail-party form, and Bellow’s, well, prose assumed the most poetry it would that night.

Francine Prose.

Next was Furst, playing the admirer, who announced he would be reading from Henderson The Rain King, the weird 1959 book with crude African stereotypes and a famous Counting Crows song loosely based on it. Why this one? “Because it’s his problem book,” Furst explained, to which Prose, from her seat, scarcely more than muttered, “They’re all problem books.” In many ways Bellow’s most exotic book, it sounded downright simple in Furst’s earnest reading. He seemed almost in awe of the words, so impressed and so careful not to step on them; it seemed to me that this was the reading Kamlani, sitting in the front row, looking up, enjoyed the most.

Joshua Furst

Then came O’Neill, who played (and who was the lecturer), who I expected to have an Irish accent but really had more of an English one (the narrator was the “nuh-RAY-tur”). He read from one of Bellow’s last novels, More Die of Heartbreak, and he was the only reader who interrupted himself, which he did periodically: “Classic Bellovian … anyway”; a laugh, and then, “sorry.” It was a mistake, but it was a mistake that O’Neill learned with the rest of us, and during the second half of his reading, he didn’t stop himself, and just let Bellow speak for himself, or through his nuh-RAY-tur: “I could adore long-legged girls, but they aren’t my real preference”; “Edgar Allen Poe and the retarded girl he married.” We learned, with O’Neill, that Bellow, like Hemingway, has to just come out, and you have to just take it as it is. The lecturer is the only character unfit to read Bellow, but to this lecturer’s credit, he realized the error of his ways well before it was too late.

Joseph O'Neill

Finally, Kamlani closed things out by reading the conclusion of a story, “Something To Remember Me By.” Her reading of a tale all about nostalgia was itself nostalgic, almost whimsical: A lullaby. The sentimentalist may be my favorite reader of Bellow. It is possible I will have to give him a second chance. Trying Bellow out merely as myself—as only one reader—is really not the way to do him justice.

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.

Saul Bellow’s letters, the last reproduced in the newly-released Saul Bellow: Letters written in February 2004, a year before his death, already have an antique flavor. They are beautifully wrought dusty figures in the carpet before the avalanche of emails and tweets that await us. Which is not to say that the letters aren’t vital and combative, no punches pulled from beginning to end. He starts early on in adult life bashing Mary McCarthy, and at 83 he’s still got the balls to let Philip Roth know what’s wrong with I Married a Communist. But honesty for Bellow is almost always a measure of friendship. And if you dish it out you have to be ready to take it; and take it he does. Sadly, we can’t get his correspondents’ p.o.v., but we deduce from Bellow’s replies who’s swinging for him and who isn’t.

The correspondence he seems to enjoy best is with familiars attuned to the old neighborhood, whether in Montreal or Chicago, like the Trotsky scholar Albert Glotzer. Here he can reach back, as Moses Herzog does in some of the most haunting passages in Herzog, to evoke bitter winters “the zero teeth of Chicago eating at my toes” and skating on Humboldt Park lagoon, “One pair of skates had to do for all three boys.” Something more than nostalgia is on the table here: “I wonder what it is that so fascinates us about the old city. I suppose we had instinctively understood that it filled our need for poetry.” That’s a Bellovian moment, the swerve into an understanding of how intrusions of beauty arise in unlikely places.

Glotzer was a Trotsky scholar, but it was Bellow who was among the first people to see the great revolutionary dead “with a bloody turban of bandages and his face streaked with iridescent iodine.” That remarkable flash of history arrived while Bellow, posing for the moment as a newspaperman, was visiting Mexico in the summer of 1940. His description is dropped laconically into a letter in a manner that is of a piece with a number of “wow” moments in this collection: dinner with Marilyn Monroe, “I have yet to see anything in Marilyn that isn’t genuine. Surrounded by thousands she conducts herself like a philosopher.” An audience at Downing Street with the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, “American friends have asked me for my impressions: ‘Well you’re cruising on an interstate highway and a few hundred feet ahead you see a perfectly ordinary automobile … and then suddenly it turns on its dangerous blue police lights and you realize that what you took for a perfectly ordinary vehicle is packed with power.’ ” It’s not the celebrity brush that matters, Bellow’s a celebrity himself, but the refined consciousness brought to bear on the person or place under scrutiny.

Time passes, and the letters only get feistier. The by-now-infamous dinner with Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis in which swords were crossed over an Edward Said article in Critical Inquiry is reprised and rehearsed in a letter to Cynthia Ozick, and it is one of the late, high directional markers on the long Jewish trail that meanders throughout this collection. For Bellow, Hitchens is a “Fourth Estate playboy thriving on agitation, and Jews are so easy to agitate.” It is clear from the letters, especially those written to his friend the novelist John Auerbach, a survivor of Stutthoff concentration camp who lived on Kibbutz S’dot Yam, that Bellow loved Israel, warts and all, and also that he felt a certain anguish that he had largely elided the Holocaust in his work until Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Is he more heart-on-his-sleeve Jewish in his letters than in his novels? Yes. The letters are flecked with snowflakes of Yiddish, and he even confesses that at one point, early in his life, he “had to decide … whether to write in English or in Yiddish, and when I opted for English the Yiddish began to wither.” But Bellow’s Jewishness, like the character of many of his protagonists, is frequently defined in opposition or quirkily outside the mainstream. There’s an extraordinary letter to Stephen Mitchell, written after Bellow had read Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus: A New Translation and Guide to His Essential Teachings for Believers and Unbelievers, which records Bellow’s hospitalization in Montreal as an 8-year-old during which he nearly died and how he came to be “overwhelmed” by Jesus while reading the New Testament. “Jesus moved me beyond all bounds by his deeds and his words. His death was a horror to me. And I had to face the charges made in the gospels against the Jews, my people. Pharisees and Sadducees. In the wards, too, Jews were hated. My thought was (I tell it as it came to me then): How could it be my fault? I am in the hospital.”

Bellow, as evidenced in the letters, doesn’t have much time for Freud, a “nudnik” who “subjugated us with powerful metaphors.” (What would Freud, one wonders, have done with Bellow’s dream, recorded in a letter to Martin Amis, in which a secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese on his penis?) But nonetheless, after all the high thought, wonderfully acerbic judgments, antic letters to poets and fellow novelists, generous pleas to find grant money for other writers, poems to lovers (not so good), and lyrical evocations of place, particularly Vermont, it is childhood scenes and their psychological residue that affect this collection with most force. Hence, the poignant letter to his friend the Chicago writer Eugene Kennedy, the last collected in this book, which returns to that place where all the ladders start: “My parents wanted me to grow up in a hurry and that I resisted, dragging my feet. … We often stopped before a display of children’s shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an elegantissimo strap. I finally got them—I rubbed them with butter to preserve the leather. This is when I was six or seven years old, a little older than Rosie [Bellow’s daughter] is now. Amazing how it all boils down to a pair of patent leather sandals.”

The legacy and fate of the 20th century’s great white male novelists is not yet clear to us. D.H. Lawrence’s party, for example, has become a distinctly ill-attended affair. Benjamin Taylor has done a superb job in both his selection and his introduction to these salient letters from a gone world when literature was all the rage.

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.

The Nobel Committee’s official biography of Singer, who won the literature prize in 1978, sums up this view perfectly: He wrote about “the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition.” One commenter recommending Singer’s stories in a web forum puts the basic idea more naively: “If I could have chosen a grandfather, I would have chosen this man for the stories alone.”

Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that Singer, far from being gentle and grandfatherly, was as shockingly modern a writer as Dostoevsky. He is a chronicler of spiritual disintegration, exploring the devastating effects of appetite and passion—even of thought itself—on souls unprotected by faith. When devils appear in his work—as in the great story “The Gentleman From Cracow”—they are not quaint folk-devils, but figures of genuine, terrifying evil. And in his post-Holocaust ghost stories, like “A Wedding in Brownsville” and “The Cafeteria,” he seems to transcend parable, as if only the literally incredible—a party full of murdered Jews who don’t know they are dead, the appearance of Hitler in a Broadway café—could be adequate to the unbelievable truth.

The Magician of Lublin may not exactly be “a lost classic,” as the cover of the new paperback claims—it went through several editions in the 1960s and 1970s and was even made into a movie in 1979, starring Alan Arkin. But its republication is still very welcome, because the novel is one of the clearest examples of the ways this urban, intellectual, 20th-century writer makes use of the materials of the Jewish past. Take the title, which sounds like it could be a Hasidic folk tale about a wonder-working rabbi. In fact, Yasha Mazur, the title character, is a magician in the sense that Harry Houdini was a magician; he is an acrobat, contortionist, and escape artist, who performs at theaters around Poland while he dreams of making it big in Western Europe. Another way of putting it is that he is an impostor, using sleight-of-hand to show people the kinds of miracles they so desperately want to believe in.

In this way, Singer makes clear, the magician is a stand-in for the novelist, whose powers of imagination are also a kind of secular enchantment. And Yasha serves Singer in much the same way that Moses Herzog served Saul Bellow in Herzog, a novel published a few years later: as a surrogate self, a way of turning his own experiences and reveries into fiction. Certainly the plot of The Magician of Lublin is one that must have resonated personally for Singer, since it is substantially the same as those of Enemies: A Love Story and Shadows on the Hudson: A man suffers a spiritual crisis as he juggles love affairs with three different women.

When we first meet Yasha, he is at home with his wife, the pious Esther, who “wore the customary kerchief and kept a kosher kitchen; she observed the Sabbath and all the laws.” But, crucially, she is unable to have children, and Singer makes much of the fact that Yasha has never assumed a father’s stake in the community. He remains a kind of overgrown child himself, only dropping in on Esther for a few days between performing tours. And once he is back on the road, his assistant Magda, a Polish Gentile, doubles as a common-law wife—so much so that her mother treats Yasha as practically a son-in-law.

As the novel opens, however, we learn that this comfortable quasi-bigamy has been upset by Yasha’s love for a new woman, Emilia, a professor’s widow who lives a precariously genteel life in Warsaw. It is clear, in the way of a fairy tale, that each of these women also represents a fate: If Esther is Jewish tradition and Magda is artistic bohemia, Emilia represents bourgeois striving. Unlike Yasha’s other lovers, she will not sleep with him until they are married, and she will not marry him unless he converts to Catholicism, takes her away to Italy, and works toward becoming famous and respectable.

The plot, which unfolds over a few days, is driven by Yasha’s uncertainty about which woman, and which life, he wants. There is also the further complication that, to make Emilia’s dreams come true, he will need to get his hands on a large sum of money. For the most part, the book consists simply of Yasha’s restless roaming through the city as he tries to make up his mind. This gives Singer the chance to imagine the Polish capital in the 1870s, in the process of transforming itself into a metropolis:

In Warsaw, wooden sidewalks were ripped up, interior plumbing installed, rails for horse trolleys laid, tall buildings erected, as well as entire courtyards and markets. The theaters offered a new season of drama, comedy, operas, and concerts. … The bookstores featured newly published novels, as well as scientific works, encyclopedias, lexicons, and dictionaries.

As he goes from apartment to tavern to synagogue, Yasha also keeps up a frenetic internal debate. Like Bellow, his contemporary and sometime translator, Singer makes a middle-aged man’s joyless womanizing a symptom of a deeper spiritual crisis. In the first few pages, he contrasts Esther’s piety with her husband’s skepticism: “Yasha spent his Sabbath talking and smoking cigarettes among musicians. To the earnest moralists who attempted to get him to mend his ways, he would always answer: ‘When were you in heaven, and what did God look like?’ ” It is a mocking question, but also, as the book unfolds, a deadly serious one. For it becomes clear that Yasha’s lusts are the product of boredom and despair: “Like a drunkard who drowns his sorrow in alcohol, he thought. He could never understand how people managed to live in one place and spend their entire lives with one woman without becoming melancholy. He, Yasha, was forever at the point of depression.”

But if Yasha is unable to commit to Esther, or to his ancestors’ beliefs and way of living, he is unequally unable to commit to Emilia and break with his inherited conscience. He changes his mind about God and Judaism literally from one page to the next. When he stumbles into a prayerhouse and puts on tefillin for the first time since adolescence, he is filled with a sudden sense of God’s presence: “Yes, that there were other worlds, Yasha had always felt. He could almost see them. I must be a Jew! he said to himself. A Jew like all the others!” So ends chapter six; as chapter seven begins, he starts to wonder, “Why all the excitement? What proof is there that a God exists who hears your prayers? There are innumerable religions in the world, and each contradicts the other.”

Yasha’s ambivalence finally takes a concrete toll. In a rush of manic self-confidence, he decides to break into a miser’s apartment, where he knows there is a fortune hidden. But whether it is a sign from heaven or the revenge of his superego, all his dexterity deserts him. Not only does he fail to get the money, he breaks his leg jumping from the second-story balcony. The last part of the novel is colored by Yasha’s increasing pain, and his reckless refusal to get the leg treated—as if he is half-consciously willing himself to die, as the only possible escape from his quandary. “His fingers had become white and shrunken, the tips shriveled like those of a mortally ill person, or of a corpse. It was as if his heart were being crushed by a giant fist,” Singer writes.

As it turns out, the novel has a different ending in store for Yasha. His sins will be punished by death, but not his own; and the guilt of this culminating tragedy will drive him into an act of penitence that recalls both the legends of the Baal Shem Tov and the stories of Kafka. The dark power of The Magician of Lublin is nowhere clearer than in its concluding message—that, for a modern man, to return to God may require a decision as violent and frightening as any crime.

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]

The English settlers were Christians, of course, but it was the Old Testament, much more than the New, that spoke to them and their experience. In the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and conquest of the Promised Land, the Puritans found an obvious parallel to their own journey across the Atlantic and their struggle in the New World. (As Alter notes, Israelite place names are everywhere in the American landscape, from Salem to Shiloh.) The King James Bible, then, was not just the matrix of the American language, but the means of transmitting Jewish history, and the morality of the Hebrew Bible, to the American people.

As a leading scholar and translator of the Bible, who is also deeply knowledgeable about American literature, Robert Alter is ideally suited to study this complicated inheritance. Alter’s own translations of scripture—most recently, the Book of Psalms—have inevitably been measured against the familiar cadences of the King James Bible, and they can be seen in part as attempts to criticize or displace that standard text. But in literary terms, Alter recognizes, the King James version—though it may be “often inaccurate”—is canonical and irreplaceable. In a sense, the English Bible has ceased to be a translation and become a second original. If you were more mystically inclined than Alter, you could consider it an example of Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation, which holds that every true translation completes the meaning of a text as it appears in the mind of God.

The locutions of the King James Bible echo through our literature so pervasively that we often take them for granted. The Gettysburg Address offers a small but telling example. Why, Alter asks, did Lincoln begin by saying “Four score and seven years ago,” rather than just “eighty-seven years ago”? The answer is that he was drawing, perhaps unconsciously, on the phrase “three score and ten,” which appears 111 times in the King James Bible. By measuring time in this formal, archaic fashion, Lincoln raises American history to the same level as sacred history. At the end of the Address, Lincoln again turns to the Bible: When he promises that American democracy “shall not perish from the earth,” he is echoing a phrase from Job and Jeremiah.

At the core of Pen of Iron—the title, of course, is itself a Biblical allusion (“the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond”—Jeremiah 17:1)—is Alter’s analysis of the Bible’s influence on three great American novels: Moby-Dick; Absalom, Absalom; and Seize the Day. In discussing these books, Alter shows that that influence cannot be measured strictly in allusions or verbal echoes. Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow do not simply use biblical language, they think in biblical categories—especially, Alter argues, when they are challenging the faith and morality that the Bible teaches.

Moby-Dick is a perfect case in point. Melville’s novel is a riot of language, whose lavish rhetoric owes a great deal to Shakespeare, Milton, and other 17th-century writers. But the elemental power and metaphysical scope of the novel are rooted in its complex response to the Bible. When the Pequod sets sail, for instance, Melville writes: “ever and anon, as the old craft dived deep in the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang.” This simple form of narration, where events are connected only by “and,” is known as parataxis, and it is the Bible’s favorite technique: “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.” (As Alter points out, the parataxis is still more pronounced in the Hebrew: The King James’s “then” and “thus” actually translate the Hebrew “and.”) Biblical parallelism, too, is used to heighten Melville’s style. When he writes that the sea is “worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing now the creatures which itself hath spawned,” Alter observes that “the two long clauses … could almost be read as two lines of Biblical poetry.”

The irony is that Melville uses these biblical tropes in constructing a book that is a kind of anti-Bible—a long refutation of the existence of God and the goodness of Creation. In one of the best sections of Pen of Iron, Alter focuses on Melville’s use of Leviathan, the biblical sea-monster, as a way of turning scripture against itself. Leviathan, who is of course a prototype of Moby Dick, seems to Melville to puncture the Bible’s own chronology:

Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed blood older than Pharaoh’s. Methusaleh seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable horrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.

Leviathan, as the principle of brute violence and evil, is older than the biblical dispensation (“antemosaic”) and will survive it. As Alter writes, the whale “drops the bottom out of history, leaving man as an inconsequential and transient mote in a play of cosmic energies that vastly antedates him and that will no doubt outlast him.” In this way, Melville uses the Bible to herald a new, post-biblical worldview—which is one reason why his echoes of the King James text are so starkly powerful.

Alter’s other subjects, Faulkner and Bellow, are also powerful prose stylists, but they are less directly indebted to the English Bible. The style of Absalom, Absalom, with its nonce words, Latinisms, involved syntax, and general fanciness, is as unlike the plainness of the Authorized Version as English can well be. Yet as Faulkner’s title announces, the novel’s plot is based on events from the life of King David—the rape of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, and the rebellion of Absalom. More, Alter writes, Faulkner builds the book around certain primal words that come straight from the King James Bible: “birthright, curse, land or earth, name and lineage … seed, birthplace, inheritance, house, flesh and blood … dust and clay.”

Pen of Iron makes a convincing case that it is impossible to fully appreciate American literature without knowing the King James Bible—indeed, without knowing it almost instinctively, the way generations of Americans used to know it. The problem is that, over the course of the last century, biblical literacy has plummeted, even as translations and editions of the Bible have proliferated. (Several free apps can put the whole King James Bible, along with many other versions, on your iPhone.) It would be interesting to try to read more recent American fiction through Alter’s lens: Can you hear the Bible in David Foster Wallace’s prose, or Lydia Davis’? “The essential point for the history of our literature,” Alter writes at the end of Pen of Iron, “is that the resonant language and the arresting vision of the canonical text, however oldentime they may be, continue to ring in cultural memory.” I wonder how faint the ring can grow before we stop hearing it completely.

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.

Jewish or no, reviews pretty overwhelmingly suggest that it’s a recommended weekend activity.

• A.O. Scott of The New York Times calls it “the funniest and saddest movie Mr. Baumbach has made so far, and also the riskiest.”

• In the line that most makes me want to see it, the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman raves, “This is Stiller’s juiciest role since he cast himself as Zoolander, and here, he’s even more comically self-absorbed.”

• The Los Angeles Times’s Betsy Sharkey is one of the few unenthusiastic voices: “It’s sometimes difficult to figure out whether it’s [Stiller’s character] Roger or Baumbach who has lost his way.”

• “Greenberg pulls you in,” says Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers. “Even when you laugh, like in the climactic party scene, it hurts.”

• David Denby, of The New Yorker, concludes, “Honorably, the movie is not the usual rigid-arc fable of redemption. It insists that screwed-up people have a right to their oddities, but it also holds out the hope that they will learn a little bit about life and move on.”

Related: Look Out! [Tablet Magazine]

The scene, which takes up almost a quarter of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, is classic American Jewish comedy, but it’s just as notable for the joke it doesn’t make: the obvious one about emasculating mothers who hang out in the bathroom with their grown sons. When the mother, Bessie Glass, touches her son Zooey’s bare back as he shaves and compliments how “broad and lovely” he’s gotten, he recoils—not because she’s broken an Oedipal taboo, but because he’s afraid that too much reflection on the beauty of his physical form will corrupt him spiritually. Zooey has plenty of complaints, but Portnoy’s is not one of them.

What do we do with J.D. Salinger, the midcentury American Jewish anomaly who wrote the episode above (which the writer Janet Malcolm has called “one of the most remarkable mother-and-son scenes in literature”) and many like it? As the writers who’ve eulogized him in the past week have demonstrated, we can love him with a slightly defensive fervor, as though a superior critic might at any moment squash his literary reputation forever; or look beyond his small oeuvre to the subcultures of fans it has spawned; or use the strange path of his career to think through larger questions of what we want from our authors. But how do we do with Salinger what we do with most famous writers when they die—that is, figure out where they fit into our individual and collective literary canons?

One potential place to “put” Salinger would be with the other American Jewish male writers who came to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s—authors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, who’ve come to define an era in American Jewish literature. Up to a point, this makes sense: like various among them, Salinger served in and wrote about World War II and critiqued the culture of the American boom times that followed. Like them, he masterfully combined elements of high and low art, a practice that since then has become almost synonymous with the American aesthetic. And like them, his work was frequently animated by a quarrel with the religious affiliation of his youth. But—and this slight distinction makes all the difference—he was picking a different fight with Jewishness. It had nothing to do with the strangulations of insular community life, or the struggle to move beyond immigrant parents and become American, or to move beyond a castrating old-world mother and become a man. Salinger’s assimilated, upper-middle-class characters don’t have to worry about these things; in fact, Franny and Zooey Glass and their five siblings—his most Jewishly identified characters—are, like Salinger himself, technically only half-Jewish. The specter of intermarriage (or, to put it in more Rothian terms, the possibility of banging shiksas) isn’t a taboo-smashing fantasy, here; it’s a very comfortable fact.

Salinger’s quarrel with Jewishness was about structures of thought that are much less visible and less risible than the clannishness of immigrants: he objects to the premiums placed on education, analysis, intelligence itself. The Glass family stories concern the attempt of seven brilliant siblings to escape from brilliance—and, in particular, from the psychoanalytic thought that permeated Jewish intellectual life at the time. If Alex Portnoy visits his Dr. Spielvogel in an attempt to cure himself of the strangulating effects of parochial Jewish community, the Glass children turn to eastern religion to escape the limitations of a world where everyone sees an analyst.

In a well-meaning educational experiment that forms the background of Franny and Zooey, the eldest and brainiest of the siblings, Seymour and Buddy, force-feed the youngest, Zooey and Franny, on a steady diet of Buddhist and Christian mysticism from the time they’re small children. Their syllabus includes “the Upanishads and the Diamond Sutra and Eckhart,” “Jesus and Gautama and Lao-tse and Shankarachya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna.” (Moses, for his part, comes up exactly once, marshaled by Zooey as an example of a prophet who “was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that,” but was no Jesus.)

The plan backfires: like many graduates of progressive schools, Franny and Zooey grow up to feel that their idealistic education has rendered them even less capable of interacting with the outside world than they would be otherwise. Each twist of the knot makes the siblings more dependent on each other, trapped in a dialectic of knowledge and “no-knowledge” that no one else understands. They spend the duration of the book sitting around their messy Upper West Side apartment (“Bessie’s kibbutz,” Buddy calls it) stroking their cat, Bloomberg, and arguing about how to get out of the metaphysical mess they’ve gotten themselves into. Other than in relation to their heritage, no one ever explicitly mentions Jewishness, but the whole thing is so Jewish it makes you wonder if, by contrast, Alex Portnoy could just as well have been Armenian.

The tragedy of Salinger’s career, as many critics have noted, is that he seems to have been, ultimately, unable to get out of the intellectual trap he so brilliantly described his characters being stuck in. It’s hard not to wonder whether they—and he—might have been able to pry themselves loose if they had had a slightly less dismal view of sex. There’s virtually no sex, at least in any conventional sense of the word, in any of the Glass family stories. (There’s an implication in “Franny” that the young woman and her boyfriend have slept together, and some even read the story as implying that she’s pregnant.) The only way it even comes up, for the most part, is in abstracted form as “desire” or “attachment,” which the Buddhist-influenced siblings believe ought to be avoided; or, even more abstractly, as the cure for malaise recommended by psychoanalysis, for which they have unanimous contempt. This is, in fact, where Salinger diverges most sharply from Bellow, Mailer, and Roth, all of whom were profoundly influenced by psychoanalytic thought and whose explicit writing about sex changed the way sex was written about—and perhaps even how it was performed.

It’s quite possible that Salinger would have had a longer career if he had allowed his characters more plot-motivating desires (carnal or otherwise), but it’s just as likely that the very good work of his that we do have has been underappreciated because we just don’t know what to do with his lack of what, in Franny and Zooey, he derisively calls “testicularity.” Or, to be more precise, critics don’t know what to do with him. Fiction writers seem to, though. Mailer, Bellow, and company are hardly dusty, and Roth, for all we know, may have his best years still ahead of him—but it’s Salinger’s presence, more than any of theirs, that can be seen in much of the fiction currently being produced by young writers, including his lack of engagement with sex. Last month, cultural critic Katie Roiphe lamented in a New York Times Book Review essay that “young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent” to Roth, Mailer, Bellow, and Updike, have “repudiated the virility of their predecessors.” She blames a censorious brand of feminism for the alleged generational shift toward “passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite.” To whatever extent she’s right about the phenomenon, she’s wrong about the cause. Possibly one or two of the young male writers she accuses of prudery have read Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. Every one of them has read Salinger.

Until close to the end of the book that bears her name, Franny remains inconsolable, reciting the Jesus Prayer and refusing to eat. Finally, through a theatrical bit of trickery, Zooey gets her attention. “How in hell,” he asks her, “are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don’t even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it’s right in front of your nose?” Compared with what Alex Portnoy might do with a cup of chicken soup, there’s nothing remotely shocking about this moment. But on its own terms, it’s radical. Chicken soup and the mothers who proffer it, here, have lost the power they have elsewhere to keep a young American in a Jewish ghetto. Instead, in this brief moment when Buddhist thought and Jewish family life are reconciled, chicken soup becomes an object of transcendence, a communion wafer or an om—and the mother who bears it just might be Buddha, or Christ, in disguise.

If Williams comes out of a David Lodge novel, however, Greenberg undoubtedly belongs in a book by Saul Bellow. “As I saw it, the real sacrifice was on the part of those who had to toe the line and forswear a free-style existence,” Greenberg writes of his adolescent self, cleverly alluding both to the title of his column and to that famous freelance, Augie March: “’First to knock, first admitted,’ in Saul Bellow’s words. ‘Sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.’” Following this creed, Greenberg never went to college, choosing instead to run away from home as a teenager, then prowl New York and the world in search of the writer’s elixir, experience. Yet in Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life—the terrific new collection of Greenberg’s “Freelance” columns, just published by Other Press—he is mainly concerned to show the downside of experience. The book is a chronicle, not of failure exactly, but of constant struggle—against the slipperiness of the writer’s vocation, against the psychological burdens of family and Jewishness, but most straightforwardly, as the title suggests, the struggle just to earn a living.

In other words, Greenberg is engaged with the very subjects that made the first generation of American Jewish writers so elementally vigorous. That is why this slender book makes such a strong impression: it is as though Bellow or Alfred Kazin were transported to post-millennial New York, bringing their toughness and romanticism to bear on our softer and more familiar world. Greenberg himself hints at this quality of his writing in a typically self-deprecatory piece about his early struggles to publish a novel. In the early 1980s, Greenberg writes, he sent his manuscript to the influential editor Ted Solotaroff, who returned it with a note: “This manuscript represents everything I hate in fiction.” Greenberg was devastated, of course; but years later, when he read Solotaroff’s memoir Truth Comes in Blows, he realized that his novel must have struck all too close to home. “With its complicated, immigrant-minded fathers and their sons,” Greenberg now sees, “my novel must have seemed old hat to him, a story of Jewish marginality that, in America at least, was passé.”

In a certain sense, the style of Jewish marginality that Greenberg writes about Beg, Borrow, Steal does seem passé, or at least to belong to the past, if only for socioeconomic reasons. We are accustomed to reading about Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, and their struggling intellectual sons in the 1930s. Follow that lineage down to the present, and the great-grandson who becomes a writer is likely to have an MFA from Iowa and a tenured teaching job; if he writes about Jewishness, it will be in a nostalgic, quasi-magical-realist style.

In Beg, Borrow, Steal, however, the familiar timeline of assimilation and upward mobility has been discarded. Instead of his grandfather, we find Greenberg himself working as a peddler (the time appears to be the early 1970s), selling knockoff cosmetics on Fordham Road in the Bronx. Greenberg befriends a Chilean food-vendor named Lucho, who teaches him the tricks of the trade—above all, which security guard to bribe to avoid being rousted. But this gesture of friendship, like most such gestures in Greenberg’s world, turns out to have been a con. The day before Easter, when Greenberg has done great business and is carrying a lot of cash, Lucho doesn’t show up to work; instead, three teenagers come and rob him, presumably on his friend’s instructions.

The moral is one Bellow would have approved: the life of the mind is okay for idealists, but real life is dog-eat-dog. This was also the creed of Greenberg’s own father: “To get by in my father’s world, you had to be tough, like he was. He didn’t have colleagues, only enemies. Every dollar, he taught us, had to be pried away from men who would just as soon see us starve.” No wonder Greenberg’s book is full of crooks and operators—from Henry, the young coffee-shop barista who expects Greenberg to look on approvingly as he robs the till, to Hugh, a junkie who feeds Greenberg’s curiosity with stories about thieving techniques before burglarizing his apartment. There is something of Rinaldo Cantabile, the gangster pal of Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift, in such figures, and in Greenberg’s suspicious-but-amused relationships with them.

The central irony of Greenberg’s memoir—for that is what Beg, Borrow, Steal amounts to—is that it was his literary idealism, in rebellion against his brutal father, that landed Greenberg in such brutal and unideal places. Greenberg’s war with his father begins, appropriately, in the book’s very first sentence: “My old man was like Zeus’s father Cronos: he couldn’t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him.” The literary son fighting the businessman father is the oldest of modern Jewish tropes, going back to Kafka and Freud, but we seldom see it in such vigor in late 20th-century America. Greenberg’s fight was literal: he writes of the moment his father “took a wild swing at me. I dodged it easily, hearing the crush of bone as his fist hit the wall. I fled the apartment, and when I returned, three days later, his hand was in a cast.”

No wonder Greenberg is so conflicted about the burdens of family, and of Jewishness. In one of the book’s most charged sections, he writes about circumcision: “In ancient times, it fell to the father to do the job on his son himself, driving home the idea that masculinity belonged to God or to the priests who spoke for him. For Freud, this was proof of the violence of the father who crashes in on the paradise of mother and child.” Greenberg’s reluctance to inflict such “violence” on his son meant that he went uncircumcised, while ironically, “his Cuban and black crib mates were circumcised as a matter of course.” When, shortly afterward, the doctor informed Greenberg that the boy should be circumcised to treat a rare condition—“a one-in-a-million occurrence”—it is like a cosmic reminder that Jewishness cannot be ducked.

Greenberg’s refusal to join the family scrap-metal business was another kind of rebellion, and a more successful one, as we see from the fates of his brothers who fell in line: “For thirty years they tormented each other with accumulated rancor.” Yet Greenberg’s literary career has been anything but idyllic: he writes about his experiences ghost-writing for minor celebrities, writing narration for a golf documentary (though he doesn’t know how to play golf), and punching up Hollywood scripts. At a low moment, he compares himself to Wilky in Bellow’s Seize the Day, “who has persisted in his quest to be an actor just long enough to make himself unfit for the more lucrative professions.” But this book, with its intrepidity, humor, and dark insight, offers its own, irrefutable justification for the “writer’s life.”

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

The Escape by Adam Thirlwell [Guardian]
The Books Interview: Adam Thirlwell [New Statesman]
The Escape [FT]
The Escape [Telegraph]

You’ll be sitting in the Pain Quotidien café enjoying a cup of hot apple cider. A reporter seated across from you will consult her notepad.

“So, how does it feel to be a Jewish writer?” she’ll ask.

You’ll sip your cider, then say you’ve never thought too hard about that. You’ll offer that you were born Jewish and you’ve been a writer for eons, so sure, you’re a Jewish writer by definition, but that’s just one fact of your life. Like you’re five-foot-eight or you moved out of Chicago but still enjoy double cheese dogs from Wolfy’s Red Hots.

If you’re feeling erudite, you’ll quote Saul Bellow, an author you don’t enjoy as much as people sometimes assume: “I’m well aware of being Jewish and also of being American and of being a writer. But I’m also a hockey fan, a fact which nobody ever mentions.”

You’ll say when you were a kid, you liked hockey too.

Or you’ll crack wise about Dave Parker, the Pittsburgh Pirate who wore a Star of David because he was a star named David.

Finally you’ll admit you just don’t feel comfortable being labeled in general. And when someone calls you “Jewish writer” specifically, you sense they’re categorizing, ghettoizing, marginalizing, perhaps even circumcising. When you’re reading your favorite writers, you tend to forget they’re Jewish or gentile or anti-Semitic (though when you’re reading D.H. Lawrence or Jose Saramago, that last one’s hard to forget).

“You seem ambivalent,” the reporter will say.

Exactly, you’ll answer, because the thing is, you’re really not all that Jewish. Well, yes, when you were a child, your favorite movie was The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, about an anti-Semite who passes himself off as a Jew by answering questions with questions. And yes, during puberty, you felt betrayed by Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity. And true, you graduated from K.I.N.S. Hebrew School and won a Hebrew high school scholarship, which you passed up in favor of a public school that a rabbi said used to be good, but now there were too many schvartzes. And now you’re proud your daughter says she wants to learn how to make matzo balls when she grows up.

But are you really a Jewish writer? What does that mean to you?

Well, on the one hand, being a Jewish writer means having the same label as Mordecai Richler, S.J. Perelman, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who left you starstruck at age five when he signed your copy of When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw, “Love, I.B. Singer.”

And being a Jewish writer means Jews listen to you speak, then argue with you because Judaism is an argumentative religion, one that answers questions with questions.

And it means you’ve read at a synagogue where a familiar-looking woman told you how sorry she was you didn’t know each other better in high school. And you considered saying the reason you didn’t is because back then she was a mean girl who dated thugs who checked other kids hard in floor hockey. But instead you shut up and signed her book, briefly feeling like a Jewish Elvis.

And it means the daughter-in-law of the couple who owned Knopov’s, your favorite kosher bakery, thanked you for writing about her in-laws’ cupcakes. And that the rabbi next door to your mom’s house said he’s read only two novels lately—The DaVinci Code and yours.

And it means you asked Gary Shteyngart whether he minded the label “Jewish writer” and he said nope, being a Jewish writer meant ka-ching! at the cash register, and you knew what he meant.

But as a Jewish writer, you don’t always like the assumptions people make about you or the company you sometimes keep.

Being a Jewish writer means you’ve read at a bookstore where a woman asked how you chose your Jewish characters’ surnames. And after you said you liked unusual names with thematic resonances, she asked why you chose the name of her daughter-in-law who works at a Jewish library and certainly isn’t a slut.

Being a Jewish writer means you wrote a book about assimilated Jews that was translated into different languages, one of whose publishers commissioned a cover photo of someone with a tallis, streimel, and payes.

And it means you had lunch with Jewish studies prof at a Big 10 school who asked how religious you were, then announced he’d published an essay excoriating assimilated Jews like you.

And it means you’ve hobnobbed with other Jewish writers, such as a purportedly tender, sensitive bloke who described with lurid anatomical detail how his pal seduced a U.S. president’s daughter. And when you met another Jewish writer, she asked you to set her up with the sensitive writer who then asked you to estimate the size of the other Jewish writer’s chest.

And it means you got invited to teach at a Jewish writers’ retreat where you slept on a rubber mattress normally reserved for adolescents at sleepaway camp. And at a Q-and-A, someone asked, “What does it mean to be a Jewish writer,” and the poet beside you declared it meant nothing to him; he was only here for the money. And you wished you had the guts to say something so honest.

And it means you spoke at the Holy Grail of Jewish author venues, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. But not in the auditorium; when you arrived, the events coordinator led you to a continuing-education room where someone barged in on your reading and asked, “Is this the recovery meeting?”

And it means you appeared on a panel with a young, female Jewish writer and some geezer asked whether you were married to each other. And when you said no, he asked if at least your spouses were Jewish. And then a man who resembled your father asked, “Do you really expect to make a living from this?”

And it means you spoke at a Jewish singles’ event where a woman asked if the ferociously masturbating Zionist musician in your first novel was autobiographical.

And it means you started writing a discursive essay about being a Jewish writer, and sent a draft to your closest Jewish writer friend, Jennifer Gilmore, who advised you not to write it all in the second person, then asked if the writer who related that lurid incident about a U.S. president’s daughter was Gary Shteyngart. And you said no.

And it means you considered editing an anthology of essays about being a Jewish writer only to learn that someone had already edited Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, which you considered adding to your Amazon.com shopping cart, before deciding you’d rather buy Monkey, a Chinese folk tale, than read 29 essays about being a Jewish writer.

But as the reporter at Pain Quotidien keeps looking at you, you’ll still wonder whether you are a Jewish writer, or just a writer who happens to be Jewish. Or whether you should just be glad to have any label at all. And you’ll realize you haven’t come up with any conclusions; you’ve just answered questions with questions.

Which means, of course, that you must be a Jewish writer after all.

Adam Langer is the author of Crossing California, The Washington Story, and Ellington Boulevard. His next book, a memoir titled My Father’s Bonus March, will be published this fall by Spiegel & Grau.

But while Bellow went on to great success, Rosenfeld slipped behind. His writing life, marked by struggle, doubt, and carnal distractions, was cut short in 1956, when he died of a heart attack. He was 38 years old.

How to make sense of the success, and failure, of this writer is the focus of Steven Zipperstein’s new biography, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, out now from Yale University Press. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University, talks to Nextbook about the complicated life and work of this all but forgotten literary figure.

Not long after I moved to New York, I found myself browsing one day at the Strand. Amid the piles of remainders, I came across The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud, a hefty volume that had been released a few years earlier, in 1997. I’d heard of Malamud, of course, but for some reason hadn’t ever read him. I bought the book, though more out a sense of obligation than enthusiasm.

After spending four years in Italy, I was homesick for the melancholy yet comfortable feeling of not belonging. I wasn’t used to New York. Before too long, I opened the volume and turned to “Behold the Key,” since it was set in Rome. In the story, Carl Schneider, a graduate student in Italian at Columbia, travels to Rome with his wife and two small children to research a dissertation on the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century movement toward unification. Schneider searches in vain for suitable lodging. Finally, he finds a perfect apartment for a reasonable price. But there’s a catch: the apartment is being rented by a contessa, who has given up her lover to marry another man. The only key belongs to the lover—and he demands that Schneider pay him for it. The cash-poor graduate student refuses. Finally, he persuades the superintendent to pick open the lock. “The place was a ruin,” Malamud writes. “The furniture had been smashed with a dull axe. The slashed sofa revealed its inner springs. . . . The white walls had been splashed with red wine.” The lover, De Vecchis, arrives in the doorway. “Ecco la chiave!” he shouts, flinging the key toward Schneider. “The key,” Malamud writes, hit Carl on the forehead, “leaving a mark he could not rub out.”

Reading this story for the first time, I too was left with a mark I could not easily rub out. I’d had some dim idea of Malamud as a latter-day I.B. Singer, writing about shtetls, talking animals, and quasi-folkloric characters—a literary cousin of Marc Chagall. Yet here was someone who had captured, better than any other English-language writer since Henry James, what it was like to be an American in that impossible, glorious city. I too had spent many despair-inducing weeks seeking a place to live in Rome, only to discover, as Malamud so brilliantly captured, that when an Italian is compelled to rent out an apartment, it means something has gone terribly wrong in the family order.

I quickly read Malamud’s other Italy stories, the ones featuring Henry Fidelman, another young scholar who travels to Italy to research Giotto, but whose research, art-making, and sex life all prove equally disappointing. In “The Last Mohican,” Fidelman is endlessly pursued by a scrawny schnorrer from the Jewish ghetto who demands Fidelman give him his suit. When he doesn’t, the schnorrer steals his book manuscript and destroys it. In one of Malamud’s most haunting stories, “The Lady of the Lake,” a young American Jew named Henry Levin travels to Italy and takes to calling himself Henry Freeman to pass as a gentile. He falls in love with a beautiful woman, Isabella, on an island in Lake Como. When she asks if he’s Jewish, he scoffs and denies it, thinking she might think less of him if she knew the truth. In the unforgettable final scene, Isabella unbuttons her blouse to reveal her breasts—and a blue number tattooed on her flesh. “Buchenwald,” Isabella tells him. “I can’t marry you. We are Jews. My past is meaningful to me,” she says. “I treasure what I suffered for.”

Of course, the bulk of Malamud’s writing has nothing to do with Italy. His most celebrated novels are set in deepest Brooklyn, a Russian prison around 1913, and the baseball fields of America. There are many treasures, and there is much suffering. It’s a pity that Malamud, who died at 72 in 1986 and was relatively quiet even in his prime, isn’t read so much today. Although his writing is world class, these days Malamud is probably best known for the 1984 film adaptation of his novel The Natural, starring Robert Redford and directed by Barry Levinson. Still, though Malamud may lack Bellow’s linguistic pyrotechnics and Roth’s raw aggression, he is as central as they are to late twentieth-century American literature. His prose—spare, at once self-consciously anachronistic and timeless, rich in undertones and cast in endless shades of brown and grey—is unlike anything else in the English language. To read Malamud is to enter a strange world of hallucinations and dreams, of birds as metaphors—for liberation and degradation, sexuality and soulfulness—and birds that talk. Sometimes it takes a few pages to realize you’re reading a dream sequence. Sometimes you never know for sure. Malamud’s Yiddish-inflected dialogue cuts to the quick, as in this passage from the story “Take Pity”:

“How did he die?” Davidov spoke impatiently. “Say in one word.”
“From what he died? — he died, that’s all.”
“Answer, please, this question.”
“Broke in him something. That’s how.”
“Broke what?”
“Broke what breaks.”

What is it that can break? In Bernard Malamud, A Writer’s Life, an excellent new biography and the most comprehensive such work to appear, the British literary scholar Philip Davis uncovers just how much Malamud was up against. Malamud’s parents, Max and Bertha, were immigrants from the Kamenets-Podoloski shtetl in Ukraine. Both had a tenuous grasp on English. Bernard was born in 1914, his brother Eugene in 1917. Like Morris Bober in The Assistant, Max Malamud owned a small grocery in Brooklyn’s Gravesend—“an apt title for Max’s commercial career,” Davis notes—and was always one step away from failure. “It was not very good anywhere until the Depression,” Malamud once said in an interview. “Then it was bad.”

Max Malamud—“a loving but unimaginative husband and father,” as the novelist once described him—“thought of himself as a socialist and a free thinker,” Davis writes. “He was not a member of the synagogue, did not believe in God, but wanted his son to make up his own mind. For the young Malamud, this was not freedom, it felt more like not belonging.” Here, Davis draws on an unpublished essay called “The Lost Bar Mitzvah,” part of a memoir Malamud began writing in 1980 but never finished. Though not educated himself, Max had always encouraged his son’s education. When Malamud survived a terrible bout of pneumonia at age nine, his father gave him The Book of Knowledge, a 20-volume children’s encyclopedia. In a household with no books or magazines except the Yiddish Daily Forward, this was the novelist’s first exposure to the “English-language world of knowledge and language,” Davis writes. They were Max’s life-gift to him.”

But the biography also opens up a world of pain. Malamud’s mother, Bertha, born, yes, Fidelman, suffered from mental illness. When he was 13, Malamud found her frothing at the mouth on the kitchen floor, having swallowed disinfectant, and rushed to the drugstore to get help. It was a coming-of-age far more brutal than any bar mitzvah. Bertha survived her suicide attempt, but was institutionalized for schizophrenia and died two years later, most likely by her own hand. Malamud last saw her when she waved at him from the window of the mental hospital. Malamud’s younger brother, Eugene, also suffered from schizophrenia, and spent most of his life in and out of institutions.

In spite of this weighty family burden, Malamud proved himself a gifted student, and early on had an interest in acting. He excelled at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School, then at City College. He received an M.A. in English literature at Columbia (his thesis: “Thomas Hardy’s Reputation as a Poet in American Periodicals”). He published his first short stories in 1943 in small magazines, including Threshold and American Prefaces; by 1950, his stories were appearing in Harper’s, Commentary, and Partisan Review. Malamud knew he wanted to write, but needed to earn a living. For a time, he worked as a substitute teacher in the New York City high schools. He tutored German refugees in English. He took a civil service exam and worked for a year as a clerk at the census bureau in Washington.

Along the way, after a three-year courtship, in 1945 Malamud married Ann de Chiara, who was from a lively upper-middle-class Italian-American family. Their son, Paul, was born in 1947; daughter, Janna, in 1952. In 1949, Malamud was offered a job teaching English and freshman composition at Oregon State College, an agricultural school in Corvallis, near the Pacific coast. It was a ticket to freedom, a move away from the familiar pressures of New York, and the end of what Davis calls Malamud’s “long adolescence.” Not that the lifelong New Yorker was prepared. “Does the Corvallis climate call for any special clothing?” Malamud wrote to the chairman of the English department, who advised he purchase a gabardine overcoat.

The cross-country move was crucial for Malamud’s career, but it took a heavy psychic toll. In one of the most powerful threads in the biography, Davis quotes from the weekly letters Malamud exchanged with his brother, who was institutionalized for the first time in 1951. In those years, Malamud’s father wrote him heartbreaking letters in halting English. “Dear Bernie,” Max wrote in 1952. “I saw Eugene Sunday he told me that he received writing paper and a Pen from you. But he trough Every thing out The Window. Wen I went home he saw me Standing Waiting Outside for Taxes he said To me through the Window Pop look here maybe you will find the Pen. I was looking But I coulnt find her.”

In 1954, at age 69, Malamud’s father died of a heart attack. A month later, Malamud began to write The Assistant, which appeared to great acclaim in 1957. It centers on Morris Bober, a failing Brooklyn grocer with heart problems, and Frank Alpine, an itinerant Italian who becomes his self-appointed apprentice. Alpine steals from Bober and tries to rape his daughter, Helen, yet winds up converting to Judaism and essentially inheriting the store—and the mantle of suffering that goes with it. “Suffering,” Alpine thinks to himself, “is like a piece of goods. I bet the Jews could make a suit of cloth out of it.”

The Assistant is suffused with themes of exile and return, thefts and gifts, crime and punishment, the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and the limitations of confession. Realizing what he’s done to Helen, Frank reckons with himself: “He planned to kill himself; at the same minute had a terrifying insight: that all the while he was acting like he wasn’t, he was really a man of stern morality.” Davis cites Jay Cantor, a student of Malamud’s, who argues that through “guilt” and “the memory of regret and failure,” the novelist’s characters seek an inner “moral law.”

With its unsettling moral ambiguity and spare, mysterious writing, The Assistant is considered by many to be Malamud’s masterpiece. But after the stories, which are my favorite of his work, I find that I actually prefer The Fixer, which appeared in 1966 and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Based on the real case of Mendel Beilis, a Jew arrested in Kiev in 1911 and accused of ritual murder, the novel tells the story of an unbelieving Jewish handyman, or fixer, who is accused of murdering a Christian child. Although it is set largely in a Russian prison, The Fixer is somehow more full of life and humor than The Assistant, perhaps because its protagonist, Yakov Bok, with his philosophy that “life could be better than it is” and his insistence on being “a free thinker” even in prison, is more appealing than shifty, unpleasant Frank Alpine. “Since I can’t be a professional on account of lack of education, I wouldn’t mind being wealthy,” Bok reckons to himself as he prods his near-lame donkey and cart out of the Pale toward Moscow. Later, the Russian tribunal questions Bok’s reading habits. “Would you mind explaining what you think Spinoza’s work means?” the judge asks. “‘That’s not so easy to say,’ Bok answers. ‘The truth is I’m a half-ignorant man. The other half is half-educated. There’s a lot I miss even when I pay the strictest attention.’”

At one point, I nearly gave up on The Fixer. Pages and pages of prison degradations, of torture, of body-cavity searches, of physical pain and suffering, of rancid food and nasty guards—enough, Malamud, enough! But just when the suffering is on the verge of becoming a parody of itself, Bok begins to dream and hallucinate—and it is if the sun had emerged from behind the clouds. “A hard-boiled egg with a pinch of salt is delicious,” Bok thinks to himself. “Also some sour cream with a cut-up potato. If you dip bread into fresh milk and suck before swallowing, it tastes like a feast. And hot tea with lemon and a lump of sugar. In the evening you go across the wet grass to the edge of the wood. You stare at the moon in the milky sky. You breathe in the fresh air. An ambition teases you, there’s still the future. After all, you’re alive and free. Even if you’re not so free, you think you are.” There are unexpected phrases of startling beauty. When Bok is reunited with his estranged wife, “he felt, as he watched her, the weight of the blood in his heart.”

Malamud was not without his critics. Some argued that he elevated, and therefore “Christianized” Jewish suffering. Alfred Kazin said Malamud needed “to outwit his own sentimentality.” In her important 1971 book, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, Ruth Wisse placed Malamud’s characters—including Fidelman, Henry Freeman, Morris Bober, and Yakov Bok—in the long tradition of the schlemiel, a stock figure with “the potential for suffering, submitting to loss, pain, humiliation, for recognizing himself as, alas, only himself.” In Wisse’s view, “the character courageous enough to accept his ignominy without being crushed by it is the true hero of Malamud’s opus, while the man playing the Western hero without admitting to his real identity—Jewish, fearful, suffering, loving, unheroic—is the absolute loser.” Malamud took issue with this characterization in a Paris Review interview in 1974. “I dislike the schlemiel characterization as a taxonomical device,” he said. “It reduces to stereotypes people of complex motivations and fates. One can often behave like a schlemiel without being one.” Indeed, if Malamud’s characters are schlemiels, they’re schlemiels with some dignity, some personal agency, and no small amount of irony.

In 1958, when he won the National Book Award for his story collection The Magic Barrel, Malamud criticized the limitations of the vocabulary then in vogue to describe the human experience—“fragmented, abbreviated, other-directed, organizational.” It’s interesting to note—though hard to imagine—that Malamud’s best short stories appeared in the late 1950s, when America was preoccupied with the “other-directed” men of David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd, and the disconnected office-workers of William Whyte’s Organization Man, books that captured postwar anomie and the rootlessness of the burgeoning suburbs. In some ways, Malamud’s characters are the poor immigrant cousins—or perhaps even the grandparents—of the men in the grey flannel suits. It’s equally hard to imagine now that The Fixer appeared in 1966, at the moment of ascendancy of Bob Dylan and Antonioni, three years after the Kennedy assassination and three before Woodstock.

But Malamud’s evident moral seriousness did not make him a saint. Indeed, Davis’s biography goes into great detail about the passionate affair Malamud had with a student, Arlene Heyman, after he began teaching at Bennington College in 1961, where he spent the rest of his career. The two remained close until the novelist’s death. Even in this sensitive matter, Davis was able to interview the Malamud family, who gave him permission to quote from the author’s correspondence. (In some ways, Malamud’s daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, paved the way for Davis’s book with her loving 2006 memoir, My Father Is a Book, in which she writes with emotional candor about both her parents’ infidelities.) It shows a certain lack of imagination that Malamud’s own publisher, Roger Straus, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, had never been terribly enthusiastic about the idea of a Malamud biography. When Davis began his research, Straus, the garrulous scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family who died in 2004, called the project “ridiculous.” “Saul Bellow’s filet mignon,” he told Davis, “Bernard Malamud’s a hamburger.”

Davis’s biography also offers an intriguing perspective on the complicated rapport between Malamud and Philip Roth, who was one of Malamud’s harshest critics and deepest admirers. In a 1974 essay in the New York Review of Books, Roth wrote that in associating “the Jewish Jew with the struggles of ethical Jewhood and the non-Jewish Jew and the Gentile with the release of appetite and aggression,” Malamud’s work had “the lineaments of moral allegory.” The Assistant, Roth argued, “proposes that an entombed and impoverished grocer shall . . . by the example of his passive suffering and his goodness of heart transform a young thieving Italian drifter named Frank Alpine into another entombed, impoverished, suffering Jewish grocer, and that this shall constitute an act of assistance, and set Alpine on the road to redemption.” A “less hopeful Jewish writer than Malamud,” Roth wrote, “might not have understood Alpine’s transformation into Jewish grocer and Jewish father . . . as a sign of moral improvement, but as the cruel realization of Bober’s revenge. ‘Now suffer, you goy bastard, the way I did.’”

According to Davis, Malamud once said of Roth: “He’s always water-skiing when he should be diving, or at least swimming.” And yet, although Davis’s biography is comprehensive, rigorously researched, and written with great energy and insight, it somehow doesn’t carry as much emotional weight as Roth’s fine 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, with its fictionalized version of Malamud as the writer E.I. Lonoff. The themes are all there: the burdens of the writing life, the strong yet long-suffering gentile wife, the affair with the beautiful young student at the rural New England college where he teaches. Lonoff writes with a quotation from Henry James pinned above his desk: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

For me, it is Malamud’s stories that linger most vividly. “I like packing a self or two into a few pages, predicating lifetimes,” Malamud told The Paris Review. “There’s, among other things, a drama, a resonance, of the reconciliation of opposites: much to say, little time to say it, something like the effect of a poem.” Indeed. In “The Magic Barrel,” one of my favorite stories, an uninspired rabbinical student searching for a wife falls hard for a snapshot of a woman with eyes that suggested she “had somehow deeply suffered”—only to discover that she’s the “wild” daughter of the bedraggled matchmaker himself. “Her I can’t introduce you to,” the matchmaker cries. “This is my baby, my Stella, she should burn in hell.” Still, the two meet—Stella in a white dress and red shoes, smoking on the street—which was perhaps the matchmaker’s original intent, even though he stands around the corner, saying Kaddish.

In “The Jewbird,” a black bird alights in the East Village apartment occupied by Harry Cohen and his wife and son, demanding food. “If you can’t spare a lamb chop,” says the bird, “I’ll settle for a piece of herring with a crust of bread. You can’t live on your nerve forever.” Cohen laughs when the bird calls himself a Jewbird. But later in the story, “the bird began dovening. He prayed without book or tallith, but with passion.” “No hat, no phylacteries?” Cohen asks. “I’m an old radical,” the bird answers. In Davis’s biography, Malamud’s longtime literary agent, Tim Seldes at Russell and Volkening, tells a wonderful story. On the day Malamud died, Seldes recalls, a bird flew in through the office window. This couldn’t have come as a complete surprise. After all, as Malamud always recognized, no one can live on his nerve forever.

The later Reich requires not even that mild degree of comic exertion. By the end of his career, Reich was busy at his compound in Organon, Maine (or Rangeley, according to the post office), assembling “cloudbusters” of iron piping and rubber hoses that were intended not only to divert hurricanes but defend against alien attacks. His main terrestrial antagonist was a cabal he called Mojdu

A zinc-lined orgone box

(an amalgamation of Mocenigo, the party responsible for incriminating Giordano Bruno, and Djugashvili, Stalin’s original family name), which acted in concert with The New Republic, the FDA, and quite possibly Einstein, to persecute him. He was right about the FDA, at least: Convicted and sentenced to a prison term after violating an injunction to stop selling his orgone boxes across state lines, he died in 1957 in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

Another explanation for the perennial interest in Reichiana is that some prominent writers and artists of the 1950s—Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and William S. Burroughs among them—associated themselves with Reich’s work. But Bellow invoked Reich as more of a character type than an influence, Mailer mined Reich for rather pedestrian ideas about sexual liberation that he might have sourced elsewhere, and Burroughs’s pantheon also included Mayan codices, shamans, and Scientology.

But there have been plenty of lunatics, and plenty of writers willing to take those lunatics seriously; still, no explanation sufficiently accounts for why Reich enjoys his periodic character re-assassinations. The answer seems to have something to do with the lapsarian narrative his life has been rigged to fit. Here is Reich’s story as told in the standard fashion: Born into a middle-class secular Jewish family in Hapsburg Galicia in 1897, Reich has a sexual upbringing one might call textbook fin-de-siècle problematic. At twelve, he witnesses his beloved tutor seduce his mother. He tells his father, inadvisedly. His mother commits suicide by drinking household cleaner. His tutor is fired and Reich is packed off to boarding school. Three years later, when Reich is seventeen, his father kills himself, contracting pneumonia after standing for hours in a cold pond, pretending to fish. Reich serves as an officer in the First World War, where his politics are radicalized. He settles afterward in Vienna and begins to study medicine. He soon becomes one of the youngest members of psychoanalysis’ inner circle and gains a reputation for being one of Freud’s model pupils. He publishes an eccentric book called Die Funktion des Orgasmus in 1927, in which he claims that all neurosis is a matter of sexual blockage. Over the next few years, he develops the therapeutic technique and understanding that culminate in 1933’s Character Analysis, his great and enduring contribution to analytic theory.

Around the same time, Reich is among the first people to whom it occurs that there might be some profit in getting Freud together with Marx. He moves to Berlin and helps to open free sexual-health clinics, where he gives away contraceptives and gynecological advice. By 1934, he has been kicked out of the International Psychoanalytic Association for being a Marxist and the German Communist Party for being a Freudian. He leaves Berlin for Oslo, where he reinvents himself as an experimental scientist of the mad variety; the most notable (and, according to Reich, successful) of his Oslo experiments involved placing electrodes on his patients’ genitals in order to quantify as “bio-electric energy” what Freud metaphorically called the libido. He is, in turn, expelled from Norway, catching the last ship out of Europe before war begins.

He arrives in America in 1939, where he teaches at the New School for two years before embarking on the path that would lead to the discovery of all of the secrets of the cosmos. His research in Maine leads him to an energetico-meteorological theory that clears up humanity’s benightedness about intergalactic forces, cancer, and the aurora borealis; the gist is that everything emerges from and through a cosmic energy force called orgone, which turns out to be not only experimentally demonstrable but in fact visible. It has a bluish-green tint. A nice thing about orgone, in addition to its life-creating and sustaining properties, is that it can be handily accumulated in unassuming boxes made of layered zinc, burlap, and pine. Reich continues to market these boxes despite FDA fraud investigations, he is sentenced to two years’ time in federal prison, and he dies of a heart attack shortly before he is to be paroled. Orgone boxes can still be purchased on the Internet.

It is, obviously, a great story. It’s just that it’s only partially true. Or, rather, the parts that are too good to be true, such as the sex/death farce before 1915 and then all of the really deranged stuff after about 1934, are true, but the important and interesting parts of the story—the material that relates to Freud and the history of analytic thought—are almost always exaggerated. This is all made clear by Sex! Pol! Energy!, a current exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, whose charter presumably includes the provision that no loosely Jewish-Viennese figure is too outmoded or out of his mind to deserve three exclamation points of rediscovery. (It seems not to matter to the show’s curator, Birgit Johler, that one of Reich’s central explanations for Freud’s unresponsiveness to his earth-shattering orgasm theory of 1927 was that Freud’s vestigial obligations to Judaism left him frigid, which is to say unimaginatively monogamous.)

What distinguishes this exhibit from other examinations of Reich is its credulity. A characteristic bit of wall copy reads:

The spontaneously living bions [what Reich called the precursors of life; he discovered them in Oslo when he thought to water some old hay and examine the result under a microscope] already had their negative antagonists in the cancer-causing T-bions [that is, evil bions]. The preoccupation with DOR [Deadly Orgone Radiation] darkened Reich’s worldview. Research involving emotional pest, desert formation and defense against extraterrestrial attacks characterized the menacing climate with which the scientist, human being and citizen Wilhelm Reich seemed less and less able to cope.

One installation includes a cylindrical fish tank containing some dirty cellophane clouds floating desultorily above a small lump of plastic coral and a meager scattering of what appear to be fingerling potatoes. The cellophane clouds, the placard explains, are “moon jellyfish.” The moon jellyfish, it turns out, are meant as examples, which is to say evidence, of orgastic pulsation as nature’s most basic kinetic unit. A portable orgone box, a condom drying rack, and a go-kart-sized cloudbuster are displayed in fiberglass cases. Nearby hangs an oil painting Reich did of Jesus. Jesus looks like Neal Cassady appearing as himself in Ayn Rand’s nightmares. These fixtures are more than funny doodads; they are totemic objects of the Reichian faith. They attest to the very naivete that makes this exhibit unusually instructive.

An important part of the standard account of Reich’s life was his role as Freud’s pet disciple. The exhibit thus features photocopies of the dozen or so letters that Freud wrote to and about Reich over the course of their acquaintance. Freud certainly seems to think, intermittently, well of Reich, whom he at one point calls “one of the ablest, eagerest, and most striving” and at another “the best head” of the younger generation of analysts. Perhaps Freud’s kindest moment comes when Reich is suffering from tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Switzerland and is having trouble supporting himself there as an analyst. “I’d like to ask you,” he writes on Reich’s behalf to another analyst in Vienna, “if you happen to have the chance, to please send a neurotic to Davos.” But Freud’s tone seems more often distant. Upon receipt of Die Funktion des Orgasmus, which was dedicated to Freud on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Freud’s only response was, “So thick?”

The usual story suggests that the nuttiness (and broadly indifferent reception) of the orgasm book was redeemed, or at the very least offset, by the contemporaneous papers on technique that were eventually collected as Character Analysis. What the exhibit does not make clear is that Character Analysis was neither as original nor as important as subsequent commentators have made it out to be. That book’s insight was that, as opposed to the early Freudian preoccupation with tics and parapraxes as symptoms of neurosis, character was neurosis—that we are who we are by virtue of our repressions and defenses, and that our neuroses thus manifest themselves on not only a verbal or symptomatic level but also on a physical and gestural one. If character is sickness, then all behavior is symptomatic and ought to be interpreted as such. But this development, as the analyst Charles Rycroft pointed out in a 1969 New York Review essay about the first wave of Reich rehabilitation, was implicit in Freud’s work as early as The Ego and the Id (1923), and was farmed out for definitive formulation by Anna Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936). The examples of character formation given in Character Analysis might have been particularly astute, but the basic point was well within the boundaries of Freudian orthodoxy. What was not within the orthodox tradition was the therapeutic method Reich went on to propose: Patients were to be seen in their underwear, and physical contact between patient and analyst was required for the penetration of neurotic “muscular armor.” (On extreme but not infrequent occasions, unmetaphorical penetration proved unavoidable.)

Philip Rieff makes this point nicely in his discussion of Reich in The Triumph of the Therapeutic. “Character Analysis has been largely overpraised,” Rieff judges, “the more roughly to censure Reich’s later books. His critics resort to the old and dubious interpretative trick of dividing a writer’s earlier works from his later, so as to disparage the one or the other.” What Rieff was noticing were the first (Reich had been dead for less than ten years) attempts to draft Reich’s life story as it is currently handed down, where early brilliance gives way to apostasy and then lunacy.

The mild mockery to which Reich is usually exposed has the effect of giving him a doddering charm. (William Steig, his longtime friend and onetime illustrator, achieved this effect in interpreting Reich’s claims as blueprints for Thurberesque cartoons.) But Johler’s curatorial earnestness helps us see how truly unhinged Reich was; the Vienna Jewish Museum exhibit takes Reich seriously enough to find the sort of continuity in his work and thought that, as Rieff points out, his critics are so keen to disrupt.

In the discontinuous version of Reich’s development, Character Analysis represents the finest of Reich’s thought before his psychotic break. But if you, like this exhibit, do not believe that Reich went crazy, you have to find some way to commensurate the youthful exercises with the mature work. This commensuration, however, is as likely to diminish the earlier efforts as it is to shore up the later ones.

In this new continuous version, Character Analysis may have been an orthodox book in many respects, but it nevertheless contained the basis for Reich’s subsequent divergence from Freud. Freud maintained that the problem with the instincts (or the desires) is that they are always in conflict, both with one another and with the outside world. This condition is insoluble, though Freud’s hope was that through his talking cure we might better understand the sources of these conflicts and thus minimize our frustration. Reich broke with Freud in asserting that our instincts are in fact essentially good, and that it is only the blocking of their expression that causes unhappiness. Freud and Reich agreed on the basic point that character is neurosis. For Freud, that was okay: Character is just the name we happen to give to our strategies for achieving some satisfaction out of the mess of instinctual and social conflict. For Reich, these strategies are themselves the problem. If you believe, with Reich, that the instincts are naturally good rather than neutrally conflicting, you must conclude that character itself, how we survive despite the frustration of unfulfilled need, is a bad thing.

For the early Reich, this insight cashed out in terms of orgastic potential, since it is only during orgasm that the constraining effects of character are exploded. This had the effect of lifting the problem of neurosis from a personal level to a social one: Society’s repressive sexual mores thwart our instincts and thus make us fear and condemn our own orgastic potential. This was a political problem that could be analyzed and solved in Marxist terms. But Reich, like any figure who believes that political change might eradicate private unhappiness, was naturally disappointed by political developments; he may be known as one of the prophets of the sexual revolution, but for his part he deplored what he called the “free-for-all fucking epidemic.” (And that was in the ’50s.) For the later, antipolitical Reich, a retrograde belief in the natural goodness of the instincts meant that everything must consist of some oceanic unity that he chose to name orgone, and which had its complement in deadly intergalactic radiation. It was no longer a social problem but a cosmological one.

In trying to trace the concepts of orgone and bio-electricity to their source in Reich’s disagreement with Freud over the valence of the instincts, Reich’s career can be read as a sort of test case for one of Theodor Adorno’s more fatuous remarks, that “in psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.” The case of Dr. Reich represents psychoanalysis at its most programmatic and quackish. It is the unexaggerating Freud who tells a circumspect but unsettling story about the id as a site of unconscious contest; it is the magisterial but faded Freud who postulates the existence of things such as Eros and Thanatos. Adorno saw something of provocative value in the amplifications of that latter persona, but Reich saw a truth not taken far enough. Reich turned from Freud on exactly Freud’s most soberly threatening point: Where Freud believed that all we can really hope for are slight gains in control over internal discord, Reich went in for the overconfident elements of analytic theory that hold out some hope for the kind of instantaneous, total liberation—a final end to conflict and frustration.

Reich’s preference for the exaggerated, at least in part, led him down the orgonomic path of starry-eyed prophetic cloud-busting. Reich’s story can thus be read as kind of allegory about psychoanalytic thought itself. Reich took up the least appealing parts of Freud and pursued them to their most absurd ends. Our inclination to ridicule Reich every few years becomes a way of conducting proxy skirmishes in the perpetual debate about Freud’s legacy and relevance. When we exaggerate the discontinuity in Reich’s life, casting him in dual mythical roles as Freud’s most promising student and Freud’s most berserk deserter, we seem to be staking out our own ambivalence to Freud’s discomfiting ideas. We incarnate in one person what seems most preposterous about psychoanalysis, and then we place that person at once as close to and as far away from Freud as we can.

I was at that time writing in a tiny hotel room on Rue des Saints Pères. Across the street pneumatic drills were at work on the concrete of a hospital whose construction had been abandoned at the outbreak of the war. The noise did not disturb my thoughts; I lived in it like the salamander in the flames. The room below mine was occupied by an old Italian scholar, who was not much annoyed by it either. To protect his privacy I will call him M. Scaferlati. He had a large but frail body, an immense head of hair, feeble but severe-looking eyes, a small nervous laugh but a serious and learned mind. Most of the day he passed in bed drinking coffee and reading, favoring his left eye. M. Scarferlati was engaged in a study of heavy books at close range, the Merovingians.

While I was writing Chapter 1, M. Scaferlati had an accident as he was washing his feet in the sink. He was soaping the left foot when the bowl of the washstand broke and a chunk of it fell on the instep of the supporting right foot, inflicting a deep gash. It was a painful wound. He wrapped a large bandage around it and did not leave his bed for an entire week, a week spent in conversation. Among his acquaintances there were some who said he had wounded himself on purpose, from resentment toward a friend who had tried to get him a job. A strange theory.

When one of his American visitors remarked that I did not seem to be getting what I should out of Paris, M. Scaferlati wisely replied, “But it is only natural that while he is here he should be thinking of America most of the time.” Perhaps only a student of the Merovingians could be so discerning about the Chicagoans.

For it was Chicago before the Depression that moved my imagination as I went to my room in the morning, not misty Paris with its cold statues and its streams of water running along the curbstones.

After the theft of my typewriter from my room in the hotel I rented another place on Rue Vaneau, in the apartment of the French wife of a Swedish sea captain, a jolly woman who brought me coffee twice a day. She had once owned a bookshop, and hers was a literary house. For the fireplace she gave me, instead of ordinary wastepaper, copies of Le Rire for 1907 or thereabout.

Eventually Mme L. rented half of her apartment to me, and since I had by this time gotten used to writing away from home I found another room in the vicinity of St. Sulpice, a gloomy region of shops specializing in ecclesiastical goods. The book was writing itself very rapidly; I was coming to be strangely independent of place. Chicago itself had grown exotic to me, and I began to realize that it is characteristic of any prolonged strangeness that it gradually beings to consider itself the invariable normalcy.

A descendant of Russian-Jewish immigrants, I was writing of Chicago in odd corners of Paris and, afterward, in Austria, Italy, Long Island and New Jersey. To speak of rootless or rooted persons is all very well. No man needs to bother his head about the matter whose emotions are alive. We are called upon to preserve our humanity in circumstances of rapid change and movement. I do not see what else we can do than refuse to be condemned with a time or a place. We are not born to be condemned but to live.

In the spring of 1950 I began to travel southward with my family. One chapter of Augie—I then had the notion of calling it “Life Among the Machiavellians”—was written at Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, the late Max Reinhardt’s baroque castle, while I was teaching in the American Seminar. Another was written in Florence in May, at various café tables. The late French novelist Bernanos once said that he preferred to do his writing in cafés and restaurants; he had a dislike for solitary labor. Of course one may argue that a novelist always has the company of his characters, or ought to have, but in my opinion there is nothing to be said in favor of a severe solitude.

In Rome I wrote every morning for six weeks at the Casino Valadier in the Borghese Gardens. In this marvelous place, overlooking the city from the Pincian Rock, I happily filled several student notebooks and smoked cigars and drank coffee, unaware of the close Roman heat as long as I did not move about. A waiter later told me that the poet D’Annunzio had enjoyed working in this same place. I didn’t know whether or not he was saying this to please me but it did rather tickle me to hear it. Latterly, reading Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann, I learned that the great poet had composed one of his tragedies in the Borghese Gardens. I am glad I was not aware of this historic fact at the time.

My old Mexican briefcase was growing fat with manuscript as we traveled. I wrote in all kinds of conditions, in hotels and eating places, on a rooftop in the town of Positano, south at Sorrento; at the Crystal Palace Hotel, London; in the apartment of my friend Lidov on West Ninety-fifth Street, in Forest Hills, in a cold-water flat on Hudson Street, in the Hotel Meany in Seattle, in a motel in Portland, Oregon; at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, in the Pennsylvania Station, in a Broadway hotel, in an office at the Princeton Library. The last two paragraphs I completed on a Viking Press typewriter. Not a single word of the book was composed in Chicago.

From the point of view of a Chicagoan, I suppose all these other places are foreign countries where, in Mr. Warren’s words, “the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.”

The question whether they had a right to this language and to this literature was a lively question. In their own eyes they sometimes felt that they didn’t have the right because they weren’t born to the manner, and American society—at least its elite Anglo-Saxon elements—told them that they didn’t come by it naturally and that it didn’t really belong to them. But the evidence of the streets was different, because a new life was forming in American society which belonged to nobody, and therefore there was no reason why an American writer should accept the words of Henry James in his book The American Scene, for instance, in which he was so distressed by the Jewish East Side of New York and by what was happening to the English language on the East Side.

But taking one thing with another and feeling that everybody in America was a visitor, a tourist, a stranger, a foreigner, and that the language was there as everybody’s resource, one didn’t know what else to do except use it with a certain spirit, and in defiance of the so-called owners of the culture and of the language. And remembering, after all, that the Jews were just as able to use Greek, or Italian, or Spanish, or any number of other languages as well as Hebrew, and that they had made a not bad record in those languages, they simply decided to override local provincial prejudices of the dominant American cultural class and to go ahead. That is what I did and this is what many others like me did.

At first there was a considerable amount of curiosity about this on the part of the Anglo-Saxon elite in the universities and in the press. When I first made my appearance, the reception I got was a little bit like Dr. Johnson’s description of dogs who walked on their hind legs, or lady preachers. What was remarkable, he said, was not that they did it badly but that they could do it at all. I felt that I fitted into this Johnsonian category and that it was not a bad thing, but I foretold that this triumph would not last very long and that there would soon be a turn against it.

And, indeed, there has been a turn against it, only the turn was in a direction I hadn’t predicted, exactly. The turn is on behalf of the blacks, of black writing, and one minority driving out another. Nothing lasts very long; the public attention has a very short span. It’s of rather fragile substance and you expect a certain amount of turnover. I didn’t expect that Jewish writers would have a very long reign in the U.S. and I was quite right about that. The only thing is, first of all, that the Jewish writers are not so often—in their own minds—primarily Jewish writers; they are writers who happen to have this particular kind of experience, that is to say, the power of American society to absorb people, so enormous that you don’t have time really to think of yourself in that way.

I will say one further thing about the Jewish writer in America, and that is that the Jewish community in America was delighted when the Jewish writers appeared on the scene because they felt it would be good for the Jews in America. This put us in a rather awkward position of doing public relations, unwillingly, for the American Jews, and we were also expected to refrain from any sharp criticism of persons who were Jews.

This was extremely disagreeable, because it seemed to me to be an imposition on truth to have to make things come out nicely, as Israel Zangwill did, and give the people a pleasing impression. Other Jewish writers bent over backwards just because there was this pressure on them and decided that they would be, out of contrariness, quite nasty in their realistic portrayals of Jews. This is an accusation that has been brought against Philip Roth, who has gone much farther in this direction than I ever dreamed of going. But he went farther in that direction because he felt the provocation or the challenge, I think, whereas I always refuse to be provoked or challenged and simply went my stubborn, mulish, narrow way, without accepting either the task of making good public relations for the Jews or reacting strongly against the demand.

The question is: What part has the Jewish reading and book-buying public played in the success of American writers? Well, I should guess that it was an enormous part. I suppose that Jewish readers represent a very large part of the Jewish public—in some cities a majority. The question would end there if I didn’t add the further question: What do we owe them for this, as artists or writers? I mean, what kind of gratitude are they entitled to for being literate? It’s their blessing! And if they’re not cheated by fraudulent writers and if they don’t read too many bad books—and I’m afraid I must enter a caveat on this subject—then they’re doing very well. But the fact is that a great many frauds are practiced upon them.

The question is whether the Jewish characters in the books of American Jewish authors really represent characteristic American experience. Well, I suppose that some do.

Are the Jews somehow characteristically American? Well, they have a certain kind of feeling for the poetry of American life quite apart from Jewish life, I think. They have the eye of the foreigner for it, that is to say, everybody in the U.S. is something of a foreigner; but it’s very good to have a kind of exotic perspective on your immediate surroundings. That is to say, it’s very good for artists to have an exotic perspective on their immediate surroundings. And Americans, or Jews born in America, were really blessed with this sense of the exotic.

I don’t see how this could have been avoided. Say in my case: I was born in a French-Canadian village of Russian-Jewish parents in 1915. We had Indians, French-Canadians, Scottish and Irish, Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and so on. Every language was spoken in the streets—from Iroquois to Hebrew. How could you avoid the feeling that you were in an enchanted place?