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picked up his father's storytelling gifts, if
not his business instincts.
Abram Bellow went from bakery
work to bootlegging, without much
success, before they left for Chicago in
1924. Liza Bellow was an educated
and religious woman who felt that her
move to Canada was a step down in
the world from cosmopolitan St.
Petersburg. She wanted her youngest
son to become a rabbi or a concert
violinist.
An avid reader, Bellow had literary
aspirations from a young age. In school
in Chicago, he met people who would
become lifelong friends, including the
writer Isaac Rosenfeld, whose life was cut
short. During his last year of high
school, Bellow's mother died of cancer,
and throughout his life he would talk
about this loss.
The Depression years were the begin-
ning of what Bellow called his "mental
life." Atlas chronicles his years of educa-
tion, traveling, teaching and his pub-
lishing history: In 1941, he published
his first story in Partisan Review, "Two
Morning Monologues"; in 1944, his
first book, Dangling Man, was pub-
lished and his first son was born.
Nov, many years and books —
The Bellows in Montreal, circa 1920.
Left to right: Sol (later Saul), Liza,
Jane, Abram, Morris and Samuel. Only
Sol was born in the New World (1915).
including The Adventures of Augie
March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, To
Jerusalem and Back and, most recently,
Ravelstein -- later, Bellow is 85, mar-
ried for the fifth time and the father of
a baby daughter born last year.
Although Abram Bellow didn't live
to see his son win the Nobel Prize, he
did witness the success of many of his
books.
Throughout the biography, Atlas
quotes from Bellow's letters, and his
lengthy "Acknowledgments" section
indicates that the material was
obtained from many sources. Included
are excerpts of Bellow's letters to his
editors and Chicago friends, and also
to Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever,
Ralph Ellison and others.
"Bellow's caustic wit spilled forth in
his letters," Atlas writes. "He was an
assiduous correspondent, producing
over the course of half a century per-
haps the last significant archive of lit-
erary letters."
He says that the letters reveal
Bellow's genius as much as his work
does. "They reveal his habit of expres-
sivity — his experience of life was to
write it down."
Bellow has long repudiated the
notion of being a Jewish writer. He
likes to say, as Atlas points out, that
he's a writer, then an American, then a
Jew. But it's an issue of some complex-
ity.
"On the one hand," Atlas writes, "he
longed desperately for assimilation — to
be, unambiguously, an American; on the
other, he found in his ethnic past an
anchor, a story, a mental homeland. To
be labeled was to be tied down; yet to
deny or play down his origins was to
forfeit a rich potential for belonging."
Atlas points out that Bellow's
work is steeped in Judaism, in
Jewish literature, the tradition of
storytelling, the cultural and lin-
guistic traditions and the history
and experience of statelessness.
Bellow,1,vho is said to speak Yiddish
phenomenally well, told an inter-
viewer that the power of Judaism
comes "simply from the fact that at
a most susceptible time of my life I
was wholly Jewish. That was a gift,
a piece of good fortune with which
one doesn't quarrel."
About Bellow's sense of spiritual-
ity, Atlas says, "it's hard to sort
out." He's often flippant in his
comments and, at the same rime,
seems to be "grappling with mysteries
of mortality and the disappearance of
all things," particularly as he's getting
older and called upon with greater fre-
quency to deliver eulogies for friends.
Atlas, a longtime contributor to the
New York Times Magazine and The
New Yorker, is a biographer and fnuse
to biographers. He is the founding
editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin
Lives Series, which matches noted
writers and subjects. In addition, he is
now working on a book, My Life in
the Middle Ages, a collection of linked
essays — "nor my memoir, but the
story of being this age." I]
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