THE INTROIT JEWISH NEWS 48—Friday, December 22, 1967 Israel's Trade Gap Narrows; Prices Hold JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel's merchants did not raise prices on trade gap has narrowed appreci- imported goods in stock. ably while prices, in the wake of Israel's trade gap for the period the devaluation of the pound, rose January to Nov ember 1967 by .5 per cent in November ac- amounted to $201,000,000 COM- cording to a report Monday by the pared to $314,000,000 excess of Central Bureau of Statistics. The imports over exports in the same price rise on imported goods has period last year. In 1967, exports been absorbed by some importers, increased by $30,000,000 and im- the announcement said, and local ports declined by $83,000,000 as a result of the government's "go slow" economic policy, the bu- Hanuka Greetings reaus announcement said. 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That's the case with "Saul Bellow and the Critics , " edited by Irving Malin, participated in by eminent authors, published by New York University Press (32 Washington Pl., NY3). "Herzog" gets a lot of attention and so do other Bellow novels. Eminent critics who diagnose Bellow's works include Maxwell Geismar, LeSlie A. Fiedler, J. C. Levenson, Marcus Klein, Daniel Hughes, Richard Chase, Ralph Freedman, Forrest Read, John W. Aldridge, Daniel Weiss, Earl Rovit and the editor of the book, Irving Malin. Adding to the importance of the discussions of modern liter- ary values is the concluding es- say, by Bellow himself, on the topic "Where Do We Go From Here: The Future of Fiction." He warns about deciding "that any art is dead" when the future of the novel is concerned. "The novel," he declares, "to recover and to flourish, requires new ideas about human kind ... They must be discovered and not in- vented. We must see them in flesh and blood .. ." The Jewish characters in Bel- low's writings are under scrutiny and especially interesting in the analyses in "Saul Bellow and the Critics" are those of Leslie A. Fiedler and Maxwell Geismar. Fiedler states that "Bellow's own story is like the Archetypal Jew- ish dream a success story .. . for he emerges at the moment when the Jews for the first time move into the center of American cul- ture, and he must be seen in the larger context . . ." In this con- text he sees "the need of the Jew in America to make clear his re- lationship to that country in terms of belonging or protest—and a language: a speech enriched by the dialectic and joyful intellectual play of Jewish conversation." Fiedler believes that "the Jew is in the process of being mythic- ized into the representative America" and he states: "It is to Bellow's credit that he has at once accepted the full chal- lenge implicit in the identifica- tion of Jew with America, and yet has not succumbed to the temptation; that he has been willing to accept the burden of success without which he might have been cut off from the cen- tral subject of his time; and that he has accomplished this with- out essential compromise." Like Fiedler, Geismar comments on Bellow's treatment of the Jew- anti-Semite theme. He devotes him- self to analysis of Asa Leventhal in Bellow's "The Victims:" of All- bee who lost his job through Leven- thal's fit of anger and who has "a morbid curiosity about the Jews which he is at no pains to con- ceal" and who "taunts Leventhal whom he is slowly destroying." Geismar deals with "the spiritual agony in The Victim" and the enemies involved, giving Leventhal "pain to think about his father's sense of these things," and he con- tinues with this illustrative com- ment: "Ruf mfr Yoshke, ruf mir Moshwe, Aber gib mir die gro- schke" "His father had cried—`Call me rimy, call me Moe, but give me the dough.' No wonder the son had rejected and recoiled from his father's vision of tyings, just as he had repudiated, as Bellow himself does, the whole ethic of American success, power and money: the fear of lagging, the Happy Hanuka To Our Friends and Patrons Hanuka Greetings DELITE CLEANERS and LAUNDRY BLUESTEIN BROS. IRVING WEISS AND FAMILY UN 4-8722 12931 W. Seven Mile Rd. UN 1-3024 10006 W. Seven Mile Rd. Dealers in Scrap Materials dark climate within. Yet the father's generation had had its own form of defense, if only through hatred, arrogance and cunning, against the evil world, and those 'imaginary' enemies who were often actual enough." Viewing Allbee as more Jewish than Leventhal himself, Geismar says Allbee "taunts this sweating hero with perverted references to Jewish folklore and history that Leventhal is ignorant of; he is al- most the symbol of the cultural heritage that the Bellow spokesman has cast aside unconsciously, and that now returns to strangle him in twisted and evil form." Geismar makes another interest- ing observation: "Is New York a 'Jewish' city in his (Leventhal's) fevered imagination? But then it is a city in which, like olden Babel, no man can any longer speak to or understand another. And in- deed the whole 'Jewish' concept in this hero (and in the author?) is so close to paranoia and mad- ness, so fraught with guilt, anxiety and fear, so lacking in warmth, humor and joy, that it is no longer, in the historic sense, Jewish. There is all the Jewish guilt without the Jewish pride, there is all the agony of life but no enjoyment, there is the heavy vestigial morality with none of the deep or wild human impulses which necessitated this morality." We owe to Geismar's interesting analysis of Bellow's work also this most valuable observation: "Just as Bellow himself has always stressed the narrowest part of the Orthodox Jewish reli- gious tradition—rather than the flowering of secular Jewish cul- ture and art in the New World —so, too, all his heroes continue to be ashamed of and to repudi- ate their true religious heritage. Judaism in Bellow's work is a source of nostalgia, but also of guilt and anxiety rather than of pride and pleasure. It is a con- structive and disturbing, rather than an enlarging and emancipat- ing force." Geismar also states: "There is something in Bellow's accent that may remind us of the innocent and childlike spirit of a Stephen Crane, consumed as the earlier writer was also by the flames of his own oedi- pal and religious conflict. If I have already made the comparison with another Jewish writer in the popu- lar field, it should be clear, too, that Saul Bellow is genuinely con- cerned with, and even oppressed by, the moral values of his heritage —that he suffers from them—while Herman Wouk has cashed in on them." Here is a volume that is devoted to Bellow, yet is a valuable collec- tive commentary by noted critics on modern literature in general, with emphasis in some respects on the Jewishness of Bellow and his heroes. "Saul Bellow and the Critics" is a most impressive and valuable collection of essays, ably edited by Malin. The earliest dam ever built was the Sadd el-Kafara, seven miles southwest of Helwan, UAR. 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