A Balanced View
After the Tradition.
by Robert Alter.
Dutton. 256 pp. $5.95.
By taking as his major theme modern Jewish writing—and in this context modern also generally implies, to use his own term, “post-traditional”—Robert Alter has staked out a difficult course for himself. All the anomalies and ambiguities of contemporary Jewish life, all the ragged edges and disputed definitions, become that much more problematic when they are translated into the realm of imaginative literature, where good intentions are not enough and where individual gifts are scattered too arbitrarily to fall into neat sociological patterns. Under the circumstances, a critic, over and above the ordinary skills of his craft, needs to be able to draw on exceptional reserves of cultural tact and cultural agility. There is very little he can take for granted, either about the boundaries of his subject, or the nature of his audience, or the whole propriety of discussing authors in terms of their racial and religious origins. And if he is an American, especially, there is the added complication of Jewishness, in one shape or another, as part of the current Zeitgeist—of having to contend with Fiddler on the Roof and Fiedler on the raft and a whole elaborate range of neo-Jewish artifacts, some genuine and valuable, many spurious. It's a complex fate, being an American Jewish literary critic, and one which can hardly be said to have grown any less complex in recent years.
All the more reason, then, for welcoming Mr. Alter's essays, which are distinguished by their clarity, sober intelligence, and sureness of touch. It is a relief, for a start, to find a critic dealing so firmly with the fashion for sentimental misrepresentations of Jewish experience (though I wish he would say something more about the kind of ignorant satire which is the other side of the coin). Without losing his temper or jeering at honest confusion, Mr. Alter makes short work of what he calls the “tacit conspiracy afoot in recent years to foist on the American public as peculiarly Jewish various admired characteristics which in fact belong to the common humanity of us all.” You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy an option on pathos, compassion, moral fervor, and so forth, any more than you do in order to qualify as a picaresque buffoon or an eternal outsider. Mr. Alter is rewarding, too, on the subject of critics who talk gaily about the “talmudic” qualities of Kafka's prose without giving any sign that they know the difference between an aleph and a bet, and on novelists whose acquaintance with classical Jewish tradition bears about as much relation to the real thing as “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” does to the collected poems of W. B. Yeats, but whose books are nevertheless somehow supposed to be replete with ancestral Jewish wisdom.
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All this is simply by way of useful preliminary housecleaning, however. Its real importance is that it leads to a number of penetrating and closely-argued attempts to ascertain how far it is profitable to look for a specifically Jewish element in the work of various well-known “post-traditional” Jewish authors, and what exactly in each case such an element signifies. As far as American literature goes that means, fairly predictably, essays on Bellow and Malamud. (Who was it who first said that by the time the critics have finished bundling these two together they will start sounding as much of a literary pantomime-horse as the Chesterbelloc?) Be that as it may, Mr. Alter's observations are fresh and to the point. They also show how hard it is to reduce Jewishness (of the serious variety) to any clear-cut formula. The Jewish aspects of Herzog, for instance, are chiefly associated by Mr. Alter with that novel's exuberant reassertion of faith in life's possibilities, with the author's “dissent from modernism” and more specifically from “the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation.” By contrast Malamud's Jews are seen as characteristically hemmed in or imprisoned; as much embodied metaphors as genre studies, they symbolize the confining conditions of life in general, and beyond that the inescapable necessity of moral involvement. In both cases Mr. Alter takes care not to equate the use of distinctively Jewish idiom, social setting, and decor with the presence of moral and psychological qualities which may—on occasion—be heightened by Jewish historical experience. He proves equally scrupulous and tentative in his treatment of Kafka, while even in the case of those modern Hebrew writers like Bialik and Agnon who obviously derive a great deal of their imaginative strength from the world of traditional Judaism, he makes clear how much ambivalence there can be toward the orthodoxies of the past.
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At the same time there is very little to be gained in discussing the aftermath of a tradition unless you have some idea of what that tradition was in the first place, and one of the impressive things about Mr. Alter is that he clearly writes out of a deep and intimate sense of Jewish history. Too deep and intimate, in fact, to allow him to speak of a single monolithic tradition where in reality there were a cluster of traditions, interrelated but often antagonistic and varying in relative importance from place to place and from period to period. Yet while he takes due account of the mystical, apocalyptic, and Dionysian elements in Judaism, in his own way he registers a dissent from the modernism which treats those cross-currents as the mainstream; and although he rejects the idea of a straightforward normative Judaism as an invention of the apologists, he constantly implies that there is a mainstream—the one which sets law above lore, and this-worldly conduct above other-worldly speculation. Having barely trailed my toes in the sea of the Talmud, if that, I am perhaps in no position to speak, but on the strength of hearsay, at least, it seems to me that he is right, and that in particular his two fine essays on Sabbatai Zevi and on “the apocalyptic temper” ought to act as a powerful corrective to some current misconceptions. To put the matter at its simplest, one can see readily enough why movements like Sabbatianism and Hasidism should exercise more fascination than rabbinic scholarship over a modern intellectual reared on Blake and Dostoevsky, but there is something askew about a version of Jewish history which places Sabbatai Zevi and the Baal Shem Tov closer to the center than, shall we say, the Vilna Gaon.
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Roughly Half the pieces in After the Tradition deal with aspects of Israeli literature, ranging from the reverberations of the Nazi catastrophe in recent Israeli fiction to the quasi-official “kidnapping” of Bialik and Tchernichovsky in the interests of one-track patriotic mythology. Here Mr. Alter shows himself adept at what he once described in an article on Maurice Samuel (unfortunately not included in this collection) as “the difficult art of cultural transcription”—a necessary art, too, since however deep the emotional involvement of Western Jews with Israel, it is no use pretending that they don't often find Israeli culture remote and not immediately congenial. Possibly Mr. Alter is a little too enthusiastic about wishing “a wide range of alert critical activity” upon the Israelis; it may be that any gains in this direction would be offset by a diminution of the widespread popular interest in poetry in Israel which he rightly finds so remarkable. But every shoemaker knows there's nothing like leather, and critics tend to feel the same way about criticism.
If I have a complaint against After the Tradition it is that all too often, working within the confines of a single essay, Mr. Alter lacks elbowroom. He needs more space to develop his ideas, and I hope that he decides to devote a full-length book to some of the themes which he can do little more than glance at here. Above all, he possesses, as far as I can judge, the first requisite of a good critic: he gets things right. And that, in a field and at a time in which there are so many ways of getting things wrong, is something for which to feel especially grateful.
