Modern Man as Jew
The Victim
by Saul bellow.
New York, Vanguard, 1947. 294 pp. $2.75.

In most American fiction concerned with Jews in more than an incidental way, Jewishness has been looked on as constituting a kind of world, and Jews as people who inhabit this world. This Jewish world had a distinct and recognizable geographical location—the East Side, the Bronx, Williamsburg, Coney Island, to name a few of the places—and spoke a distinct and recognizable idiom. Like Yiddish literature, it was a literature of idiom, and no small part of the achievement of such writers as Daniel Fuchs and Clifford Odets was their ability to re-create this Jewish world, to render its idiom. Compared to Kasrilevke, this world was not a very stable one, its Jewish quality not very pure; but stable or unstable, pure or impure, to be a Jew meant to inhabit it. Even in Delmore Schwartz’s obsessive stories of childhood, where the Jewish quality has lost almost all its graces, being generalized into the gray horror of petty-bourgeois existence, and the Jewish idiom has lost all its vigor, lingering on as a faint, dispirited echo, Jewishness is seen as the constituent element of, if not a world, at least a milieu, a family.

This type of literature was written by Jews. Where Jews have been portrayed outside a Jewish world—here we have to reckon with Jewish and Gentile writers both—they have been viewed either as detached fragments of such a world; or as human beings who happen to be Jewish—that is, their Jewishness in some sense or another has been dissociated from their human essence and relegated to a secondary place (however important the secondary place is conceded to be); or they have been reduced to represent some single thing or principle, good or bad. Saul Bellow’s The Victim is, as far as I know, the first attempt in American literature to consider Jewishness not in its singularity, not as constitutive of a special world of experience, but as a quality that informs all of modem life, as the quality of modernity itself.

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Everything that stamps Asa Leventhal, the hero of this novel, as a Jew, stamps him at the same time as a representative homo urbis. Take his speech, for example. Though there is little or nothing in it that is specifically Jewish, it has an indefinable Jewish quality. Though this is a Jew talking, we know at the same time that it is the general accent of the metropolis which we hear, the harsh, fragmentary, exhausted language of the street, department store, subway, and apartment house. (“‘Wait a minute, what’s your idea of who runs things?’ said Leventhal.”)

But Leventhal is most a Jew, and most a man of the modem city, in the guilt and loneliness of his sense of having presumed on the world, of having “got away with it,” as he expresses it.

His relative good fortune as an editor of a New York trade magazine he enjoys uneasily, as somehow not his due. It is an act of presumption on his part, an “infringement,” narrowly to have escaped the ranks of “the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined” and to have established himself in the world. He possesses nothing with perfect certainty: neither his wife, who once loved another man; nor his brother, married to an Italian woman and now a workingman wearing the kind of clothes his father used to sell in his store; nor his job.

His feeling of having trespassed, of presuming, of not belonging, of not possessing, is plainly Jewish, of course—it is the psychology of the modem galut. But it is plainly something else too. It is an essential part of the sense of the city that is captured so well in this novel, it is the malaise of the megalopolis, it is the discomfiture and dispossession of everything human in face of the colossal indifference of modem metropolises. Not only the Jews are in galut.

Allbee, the decayed anti-Semite who suddenly emerges out of the feverish heat of a New York summer to challenge Leventhal, as if conjured up out of his own guilty feelings, though real enough, is also Leventhal’s alter ego. He charges Leventhal explicitly with what Leventhal has already charged himself with obscurely: that Leventhal is indeed guilty—of Allbee’s ruin, by having usurped a place in the world which a superior right would assign to Allbee; that their positions are inverted—the one belongs where the other is. Leventhal, self-convicted, his habitual anxious impassivity pierced, is unable properly to defend himself. Allbee gradually violates—and so attempts to dispossess Leventhal of—the most intimate center of his personal security: first his apartment, which Allbee moves into and makes foul; next his wife’s love letters; then, when Allbee brings in a woman from the street, his bed; finally Allbee turns on the gas and by his own attempted suicide attempts to deprive Leventhal even of his life.

The anti-Semite is both a materialization of the real threats that surround Leventhal, and a negative, extreme inversion of himself. The relationship of both to each other has a kind of lopsided symmetry and ingenious duality. If Allbee is a paranoiac, Leventhal is at least an extremely suspicious person; if Allbee, because he knows Leventhal is a Jew, presumes to know him absolutely, in a way that only God can know a person, Leventhal at least presumes to explain Allbee by his being a drunkard; if Allbee, though claiming to be Leventhal’s victim, really victimizes Leventhal, Leventhal is at least in some degree responsible for Allbee’s having lost his job. Insofar as Allbee is Leventhal’s negative self, Leventhal is his own victim; insofar as Allbee exists independently, Leventhal is the victim of another.

Threatened from within and from without—what is this if not the Jewish situation? if not the general situation?

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If Leventhal were not a Jew, were neutral, The Victim would be simply one of many bleak accounts of a modern life in the thin manner of American naturalism. The fact that he is a Jew gives the story its radical depth. What would otherwise tend to be a sociological description of one man’s lot, now acquires a certain metaphysical quality, a quality of fate. For a Jew is inescapably and utterly committed to the present; there is no retreat, retreat would only lead him to the ghetto (as Leventhal realizes, when he rejects his father’s proud ghetto disdain of everything except the groschen of the world).

One of the reasons why Jews have figured so prominently as characters in modem literature is just this, their radical involvement in the modem world. This involvement has been seen invidiously by reactionary critics of modem society, for whom the omnipresent Jew is only the sign and symbol of the falling-off of contemporary life from some more splendid earlier state. But it has also been viewed under another aspect, as the human situation, as modern fate (Ulysses, for example).

The Victim, then, is concerned with one of the great themes of European literature. Knowing this, one feels the disparity between the largeness of its theme and the modest, narrow, bare, abrupt American genre of writing in which it is realized. But this is perhaps unfair to the author. He is not after all seeking to emulate European examples; he is writing an American novel, and the American accent is inevitably a modest one.

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