A Look At Jewish Literature
A Contemporary
Canon
a
hose readers interested in an overview
of the place of contemporary Jewish
writers — "the grandchildren of the
Beilow-Malamud-Singer-Roth generation"
-- in the continuum of Jewish American
literary history may wish to check out the
newly published Contemporary Jewish
American Writers and the Multicultural
Dilemma by Andrew Furman {Syracuse
University Press; $39.95 cloth/$19.95
paperback).
Furman invokes the current themes and
concerns of the newest generation of
Jewish American writers — the viability of
adopting an Orthodox or Chasidic life
amid a secular America; a renewed interest
in the vibrant Yiddish world of pre-
Holocaust Europe; Israel; Jewish femi-
nism; and the Holocaust as perceived by
the children of survivors.
These themes, says Furman, an assistant
professor of English at Florida Atlantic
University, have replaced those of alien-
ation and marginality, which preoccupied
the novelists of the golden age of Jewish
American writing.
Furman also explores the ambivalent
relationship between multiculturalists and
contemporary Jewish American literature.
"It is passing strange that the multicultural
movement in our universities pays short
shrift to contemporary- Jewish American
fiction at the precise moment that these
writers have begun to assert their Jewish
identities and values with an unprecedent-
ed intensity," writes Furman.
The book's chapters focus on the works
of contemporary Jewish writers like Melvin
Jules Bukiet and Thane Rosenbaum, who
continue to grapple with the Holocaust in
their own creative ways; Rebecca Goldstein,
who attempts to reconcile her feminism
with traditional modes of Jewish practice;
Robert Cohen, who explores the viability of
Chasidic Judaism amid a secular milieu;
Allegra Goodman, who often preoccupies
herself with Israel and Middle East matters;
Steve Stern, whose magical stories revisit a
pre-Holocaust Yiddish world; and Gerald
Shapiro, who re-creates the schlemiel tradi-
tion to explore the unique burdens of con-
temporary Jewish American existence.
This book also includes a recommended
reading list, whose authors include, among
others, Pearl Abraham, Max Apple,
Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Ehud
Havazelet, Joshua Henkin, Tova Mirvis,
Lilian Nattel, Jay Neugeboren, Eileen
Pollack, Lev Raphael, Anne Roiphe,
Jonathan Rosen, Helen Schulman, Dani
Shapiro and Aryeh Lev Stollman, most of
whom recently have been featured in the
pages of the Jewish News.
12/29
2000
58
A Star Of
A new biography of Nobel laureate
Saul Bellow details the author's
turbulent personal and
professional life against the
background of20th-century events.
SANDEE BRAWARSKY
Special to the Jewish News
y
ou write and then you erase. You call that a
profession? Was meinst du 'a writer'?" Saul
Bellow's father would ask him in the late
1930s, puzzled and angry that his youngest son
refused to join the family coal business.
His last question, about what it means to be a
writer, or more specifically, what it means to be
Bellow the writer, is answered in exquisite detail in
James Atlas' distinguished, long-awaited Bellow: A
Biography (Random House; $35).
Eleven years in the works and almost 700 pages,
this is the story of the man's life and his art and the
links between the two; Bellow's writing is very much
founded in the events and circumstances of his life.
The book also is a history of the times and of an
emerging cultural life that Bellow was part of.
Atlas, the author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an
American Poet, covers the childhood of the Nobel lau-
reate, his marriages and divorces, his friendships, his
financial struggles in the early part of his career, his
role as a father, his success and acclaim. All are inter-
twined in the compelling narrative with descriptions
and insights into his many novels, essays and stories.
Atlas' portrait of Bellow is always respectful, with
an underlying sense of awe and love, but it's not
always complimentary to the novelist.
The Bellow who emerges from this literary biogra-
phy is a self-assured and enormously talented writer
who expressed the particular experience of Jewish-
American immigrants and, as Atlas says, gave it an
American voice.
He is a man of intellect with many interests, a
lover of literature and hard-working novelist who
only thinly veils his friends and family in his fiction,
a (mostly) loyal friend.
He's also depicted as a man who repeatedly sees
himself as a blameless victim, even as he hurts others,
and who comes up short in his ability to empathize,
a husband with a history of infidelities, a man "who
vacillated between spite and sentimentality"
This is not an authorized biography, although
Bellow did meet with Atlas about 10 times and pro-
vided him access to archives, didn't discourage
friends and relatives from being interviewed and
granted permission to quote from letters, manu-
scripts and unpublished works, which he hadn't
allowed others to do.
For many years, Bellow had been dodging biogra-
phers who were, he said, "the shadow of the tomb-
stone falling across the garden."
When Atlas asked Bellow's son Dan why his father
agreed to cooperate with him, he replied, "He real-
ized that you weren't going to go away."
Atlas, like Bellow, grew up in Chicago. In an inter-
view in his Manhattan apartment overlooking the
Museum of Natural History, the 51-year-old biographer
explains that his father grew up near the Bellow family
and attended a neighboring high school. His mother
remembers seeing Bellow on the elevated platform when
they were going to Northwestern at the same time.
When asked if he thought the Chicago connection
helped him to gain access, Atlas says that there's a pow-
erful tribal feeling among Chicago Jews, and that Bellow
saw him as a member. He pulls a copy of Bellow's col-
lection of stories, Him With His Foot in his Mouth off of
his shelf and opens it to the inscription: "For James
Atlas, Good Wishes from a Fellow Chicagoan."
The biography opens in Chicago. The city's energy
was "the catalyst of Bellow's art," and Atlas writes,
the author's many books published over more than
half a century made "Bellow's Chicago" as "familiar a
locale in literature as Joyce's Dublin."
Although he came of age in Chicago, Bellow was born
in Montreal in 1915, two years after his parents and
three siblings emigrated from St. Petersburg. Named
Solomon, he was known as Shloime or Shloimke.
(When he was 21, he changed his name to Saul.)
Atlas paints their immigrant neighborhood in full
color, with people speaking Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew,
French and English, and he notes that the future author