A Jewish Writer in America

The New York Review of Books recently ran the first part of a previously unpublished essay written by Saul Bellow in l988 entitled “A Jewish Writer in America.” In the first section of the essay which appeared in the October 27th issue of TNYRB, Bellow recounts how he incurred the wrath of the great Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem when he described himself as an American writer then a Jew. “Scholem immediately placed me among those German Jews who had done everything possible to assimilate themselves…” Bellow recounts another discussion with the Israel novelist S.Y. Agnon who insisted “that the proper language for a Jewish writer was Hebrew” and paraphrasing Agnon remarks that “One’s language is a spiritual location, it houses your soul… And when the door of the gas chamber was shut many of the German Jews who called upon God for the last time inevitably used the language of their murderers, for they had no other.” Bellow quotes the first line of The Adventures of Augie March in the essay, "I am an American…." And then later on goes on to expound on the subject of the outsider, “meteque” in French, quoting Anthony Burgess who says, “If we are to regard Poles and Irishmen as meteques, there are grounds for supposing that the meteques have done more for English in the twentieth century…than any of the pure-blooded men of letters who stick to the finer rules.” Bellow points out that Burgess is talking about Joyce and Conrad and then goes on to enumerate, Babel, Mandelstam, Apollinaire, Kafka, Svevo, Naipaul, Pasternak and Nabokov as examples of outsiders who have shaped “modern literature.” The essay is wonderfully simple and complex at the same time, simple in the introduction of concept of the “American writer and a Jew” which got Bellow into so much trouble about with the venerable Scholem (whose letters to Walter Benjamin, with their dichotomization of Zionism and socialism, iterate a variation on a similar theme) and complex in the way he spins the tale of his own artistic development. Rather than either immigrating to Israel or returning to the World of Our Fathers, he chose to remain an outsider in an adopted culture. An outsider can be a victim, either through circumstances beyond his or her control (genocide) or through collaboration, in which he or she hides his identity for survival (assimilation). Bellow chose another path allowing himself to be swept along by the tide of great polymathic modernists, who exulted in their metic or outsider status.



Like Clockwork

There has been much talk about the huge disparities of wealth that emerged in the years leading up to the most recent stock market collapse. Professionals who had spent years of study to obtain degrees in law or medicine found themselves economically marginal in cities like New York, where hedge fund managers put even relatively unremarkable dwellings out of a the reach of a once affluent class. The collapse of the stock market has not improved matters appreciably, since now the glut of available apartments is rendered inaccessible by the insecurities of the job market.

Educational disparities are an even more dispiriting prospect. There are two societies emerging in America. One is developing exponentially higher levels of educational sophistication, while the other is moving in the exact opposite direction. If Anthony Burgess were alive, he would have been the writer to distill the predicament of a culture in which educational anorexia leads to disenfranchisement. The same competitive parents who bought up all the desirable apartments were at the same time fighting to get their children into the best high schools and colleges. When the race is fixed, it’s hard to compete, and there are whole segments of American society that simply refuse to nourish their children on the educational fast-food served up by woefully under subsidized public schools.

Like super rats whose survival skills have been honed in subway tunnels, dead eyed, pistol-packing third graders are the stuff of contemporary urban legend. There are also super rats graduating from Ivy League institutions, the supreme products of our culture of consumption. Whatever the residual truth about the existence of these different species of miscreant, they constitute the cast of a sequel to A Clockwork Orange that has yet to be written. Brutal and self-seeking, speaking languages they barely understand, the super rats that emerge from our institutions of higher learning, or alternatively our prisons, populate a new Inferno. “What doesn’t kill you will make your stronger,” quoth Nietzsche. But certain strengths are adaptable only in the context of pathology, and at what cost?