Revisiting Literary Blacks and Jews
2003; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish Identity and Society
ResumoONE NEED ONLY dip a toe into the sea of Jewish-American literature recognize that African-Americans have long preoccupied the Jewish-American imagination. Indeed, making my way as an undergraduate through my Jewish-American Literature reading list, I can still remember wondering what so many African-American characters were doing between the covers of books written by authors with last names like Roth, Malamud, and Bellow. What was that dapper pickpocket doing in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)? Why was that little colored kid liked Gauguin such a powerful presence in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (1959) (47)? And what could Bernard Malamud have had in mind when he fashioned such contrastive African-American characters as Alexander a Jewish angel, Willie Spearmint, a militant writer, and the lovely, poignantly drawn Ornita Harris of Black Is My Favorite Color? didn't take a Ph.D., as they say, figure out that African-Americans played some significant role in the artistic vision of the most esteemed Jewish-American writers, and I hoped explore exactly what that role was in some Jewish writing of my own (i.e., an article). Before I could put pen paper, however, before the seed of a respectable thesis could even germinate in my mind, I suffered a lamentable fate common writers, I now know. I was pre-empted, robbed, silenced. A writer named Cynthia Ozick, turned out, had already had the temerity write an essay on literary Blacks and Jews--an essay titled, in fact, Literary Blacks and Jews. All took was one reading of the essay. wasn't so much what Ozick said about the subject that silenced me (I can even remember not particularly liking what she had say), but the way that she said it. A redoubtable, nearly Solomonic intelligence seemed burst forth from every sentence. Put simply, Ozick had (and has, must be said) a voice. It was as improbable for the Jew, Ozick wrote of the 1950s, to imagine himself in the role of persecutor--or even indifferent bystander--as was for him imagine the man in that same role. Yet by the late sixties Jews and Blacks were recognizable, for and by one another, in no other guise (46-47). This seemed be Ozick's overarching point. And what could a pisher like me, hadn't even lived through the fifties or sixties, say that! To support her thesis, Ozick limns the contrasts between Malamud's depiction of Black-Jewish relations in his 1958 story, Angel Levine, and his 1971 novel, The Tenants. In Angel Levine, one may recall, Malamud creates a Jewish angel in Alexander magically heals Manischevitz's ailing wife; only 13 years later, Malamud was compelled depict a fiercely hostile relationship between a and Jew in The Tenants, which revolves around the intensifying enmity between two writers, one Jewish and one Black. It took the narrowest blink in time, Ozick marvels, for Malamud, who more than any other American writer seeks make a noble literature founded on personal compassion, eschew the sunny optimism of Angel Levine for the gritty realism of The Tenants (44). Ozick, then, offers these two Malamud works as an analogue of Black-Jewish relations and, more precisely, of the deterioration of this relationship by the late 1960s. But not quite. By the end of the essay, Ozick suggests that the affinity between Blacks and Jews during the hey-day of the Civil Rights movement--and Malamud's Angel Levine insofar as embodies this supposed affinity-was always more myth than reality. `Angel Levine' is not merely out of date, Ozick concludes, it is illusion (65). For Blacks, Ozick argues, had always distrusted the Jewish identification with suffering. That Jews continued prosper in America while the condition of Blacks scarcely seemed improve only reaffirmed for most Blacks that ostensible Jewish support for causes always lay rooted, primarily, in Jewish self-interest. …
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