Saul Austerlitz
PBS, Dec. 13, 2022
“Bellow was a cultural conservative at heart, decrying what he saw as the excesses of a society spiraling out of control, but his critique is laced with deep sympathy for the rejects and failures of American life.”
It is only too easy to see Saul Bellow as one of the paladins of a bygone era of American literature, paler and maler than the writers that followed in his wake.
But prior to Bellow and the novelists who emerged alongside him—Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth—there was a profound hesitance at the idea of letting anything as precious as American letters fall into the hands of Jewish artists.
“In my position,” Bellow told the Paris Review in a 1966 interview, “there were social inhibitions too. I had good reason to fear that I would be put down as a foreigner, an interloper. It was made clear to me when I studied literature in the university that as a Jew and the son of Russian Jews, I would probably never have the right feeling for Anglo-Saxon traditions, for English words.”
“I am an American, Chicago-born,” Bellow famously began “The Adventures of Augie March,” his breakthrough 1953 novel, and it is in the missing term— “I am a Jew”—that the novel finds its relentless energy. Alongside Roth, Zadie Smith argues in a perceptive essay, Bellow “utterly dissolved the impossible identity of the Jewish-hyphen-American-hyphen-novelist, until the idea of a Jewish man being a great American novelist seems as natural and obvious to us now as a California redwood rising up out of the soil.”
In “Augie March,” Yiddish and the multilingual demotic of the streets sit pressed up next to elegant French phrases, in much the same way that Augie makes his way sidelong through a city and country equal parts rich and poor, native-born and immigrant, Jew and gentile, law-abiding and criminal, Anglo-Saxon and interloper. …source
