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The Jewish Writer in America

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2008.0025

1934-421X

Eugene Goodheart,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

The Jewish Writer in America Eugene Goodheart (bio) The year 1953 was an extraordinary one in the history of American literature. With the publication of Saul Bellow's third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, American-Jewish writing entered and took center stage. His first two novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, had been critical successes; but Augie March was at once a critical success and a best seller, winning the National Book Award. "I am an American, Chicago born," the hero declares in the opening sentence of the novel. That he is Jewish is not mentioned, though there is no doubting Augie's identity as the novel unfolds. The focus on his Americanness and his birth in Chicago dispels any expectation that this may be another novel of a Jewish hero enclosed in a claustral shtetl psychology. The echo of Mark Twain's great novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the title suggests that Bellow sees himself in the great tradition of American writing. In considering William Einhorn, wealthy and crippled but politically powerful, one of Bellow's larger-than-life characters, Augie enters him on his "eminent list" of world-historical figures. He imagines one of Einhorn's disciples having to make an important decision and asking himself: "What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?" Against the philistine democratic view that the human "race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names," Augie insists on his "right to praise Einhorn," an epic character of his time. At the end of the chapter devoted to this "superior man," Augie finds himself "not in the center of the labyrinth but on a wide boulevard." There are, of course, no boulevards in the shtetl. Isn't this the achievement of Bellow—to take the Jew off the side streets and put him on the boulevard of the imagination? The titles of his first two novels are a measure of the imaginative leap he made in writing Augie March. No longer dangling man or victim, Augie in his swagger displays a confidence in his place in American life that verges on bravado. "[I] go at things as [End Page 93] 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." Even anti-Semitism fails to faze the youthful Augie, whose take on it is peculiarly American: "And sometimes we were chased, stoned, bitten, and beat up for Christ-killers. . . . But I never had any special grief from it, or brooded, being by and large too larky and boisterous to take it to heart, and looked at it as needing no more special explanation than the stone-and-bat wars of the street gangs or the swarming on a full evening of parish punks to rip up fences, screech and bawl at girls, and beat up strangers." How did Bellow manage the leap? Well, there is the matter of genius and temperament that goes beyond explanation. But genius and temperament alone do not guarantee recognition, let alone success. There is also the matter of the historical moment, the post–World War ii period. It is one of the most extraordinary facts of our democracy that the military may be in the social sense its most democratic institution. It is the place where men and women of different religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds mix in a condition of equality, sometimes under fire, despite the hierarchical structure of the military. Moreover World War ii was a war against the most pernicious racism and anti-Semitism in history. During the postwar period America became increasingly hospitable, though not without resistance, to the claims of its minorities to full cultural, social, and political enfranchisement. The war served as a rite of passage for Jews as well as for other ethnic groups. Bellow was a pioneer in literature; Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and others would soon follow. According to an anthology of American-Jewish writing published in the 1960s, the "breakthrough" meant not that "the Jew has caught up with America...