To the Editor:
I should like to object strongly to Mr. Benjamin DeMott’s exercise in baffletalk, “Jewish Writers in America: A Place in the Establishment,” in your February issue. According to him, the tone of Jewish fiction seems “to imply that the role of the masterful man aloft in the world of ideas, the stance of positive control, is actually one that no Jew could ever bring off with total success, without winking reductively at himself in the process.” Later he says, “In most of his work the Jewish fictionist in America seems strongly to respond [to the idea that] the key situation of life is one of personal humiliation and the dominant emotion of human experience is one of self-pity.”
A few exceptions to DeMott’s first quoted statement: Al Manheim in Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, Morris Seidman in Elick Moll’s Seidman & Son, Augie March in Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Shimon Susskind in Bernard Malamud’s “The Last Mohican,” Werner Samuelson in Philip Roth’s “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” Eli Peck in Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic,” Solomon the supply sergeant in Leo Litwak’s “The Solitary Life of Man,” and the existentialist professor-narrator in Yoram Kaniuk’s The Acrophile. Without a reductive winking at the self, each of these individuals vindicates his own existence at personal cost; one or two are even quite believable heroes (Litwak’s Solomon, for example) .
As for DeMott’s second statement, the “key situation” so often encountered in American Jewish fiction is actually the aftermath to the humiliation and self-pity that he stresses. The individual strives toward a goal, falls on his face or is kicked from behind, but ultimately he asserts himself and thereby redeems himself. The Bar Mitzvah initiation, the coming into manhood, is simply pushed forward a number of years beyond the thirteenth birthday. Examples of this triumphant coming of age? Leo Litwak’s “The Making of a Clerk,” Herbert Gold’s “Aristotle and the Hired Thugs,” Irwin Shaw’s “Noah Ackerman” section of The Young Lions, Sam Astrachan’s An End to Dying, and many of the stories I’ve mentioned earlier. To overlook entirely, as DeMott seems to do, the clarion call to endure, to survive, to prevail—in American Jewish literature—is indeed to be in a position to misread it as a series of sob stories and whining complaints. . . .
Perhaps DeMott is most vague and misleading when he deals with the matter of increasing one’s degree of assimilation and broadening one’s too-Jewishly-limited horizons. He says, in effect, the Jewish novelist’s only considerable advantage as a writer (as the non-Jew sees him) is that he may be believed to be a comprehensive man. No matter how assimilated the age, one associates with him impersonality and detachment from private circumstance as a difficult achievement involving some serious inner struggle and genuine victory over private pain. Well! If the Jewish writer is genuinely assimilated (Simone Weil?), what Jewish turn of mind or what advantage as a writer does he or she have? . . . Moreover, in the face of assimilation for the Jewish writer, of what possible meaning for anyone are such ideas as impersonality and detachment from private circumstance through inner struggle and victory over private pain?
The whole point is that there does exist in American Jewish fiction a significant range of tones beyond the humiliation-and-self-pity tone, even beyond such related tones as self-hatred-and-rebellion and triumph-through-adversity. A few of these tones? Self-purification through a kind of sanctified partnership (Montague Glass, Moll, Malamud, P. Roth); the picaresque soul journey (Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, Bellow, Malamud); an alchemical dialectic in which the Jewish group is transmuted through alembics of love, hate, reverence, and contempt (Glass, Cahan, Myron Kaufmann, H. Gold, P. Roth); a transcendent irony toward the Jewish group, rendering pointless any vested-interest value judgment (Fiedler, Litwak, P. Roth, Kaniuk); a transcending of personal experience itself, through expressionistic obliquities (H. Roth, Kaniuk, Delmore Schwartz, Fiedler). . . .
In summation, a resounding No! in thunder to DeMott’s blind-maze jargon about the Jewish fictionist’s failure to reach beyond the self.
Samuel I. Bellman
Pomona, California
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To the Editor:
There is something touching about Benjamin DeMott’s vision of the critic, aloof and masterful, concerned with art and excellence, while writers drag him back to the kitchen and the grocery. He ignores, however, problems that may be more important to the Jewish writer than the embarrassment of critics caught in a literary world devoid of grace and elegance. His honesty in stating his weariness with the preoccupation with weakness and humiliation found in Jewish writing might profitably be matched by an effort to see whether it is precisely the quality which is “Jewish” that is antagonistic to art—and consequently to the critic sitting in judgment and looking for the command and control that can neither be imposed from without nor willed from within. . . .
The writer who has roots in Jewish as well as American culture may suspect, to some degree, that grace and elegance are snares; that beauty, morality, and truth are inextricably bound to each other. He may have inherited the notion that landscape is unimportant; that the word is “holy” and not to be used frivolously; or that the poet has some obligation to improve the world. . . .
At this moment, however, many Jewish writers, like other Jews, carry in themselves only echoes and vestiges of Jewish feeling and understanding. Their attachment to these vestiges may . . . make it possible for them to challenge the traditional views of American reality with the belligerent and embarrassing truths of Brownsville and Chicago and may even influence the more “impersonal” revelations of Lionel Trilling, Paul Goodman, Leslie Fiedler, and others who have earned their eminent reputations outside of Jewish life. . . . Benjamin DeMott may see this impersonality as evidence of control and self-command, but it may also be seen as a way of evading and repudiating the problems of Jewish consciousness.
The control and command of a writer such as Bashevis Singer is completely different. In many ways it is closer to that of the classical Yiddishists than to any modern writers. His ability to write without humiliation of human frailty, depravity, foolishness, and superstition, may have some connection to the fact that he grew up in a world in which Jews felt superior to non-Jews—in their capacity for compassion, in their horror of inhumanity, and in their hatred of violence. Peretz, Mendele, and Sholom Aleichem, who preceded Singer, wrote with conviction that the mature man, the complete man, was inevitably a Jew. Not only could he not be a cossack, he couldn’t even wish to be one. Out of this certainty came much of the self-command that Mr. DeMott admires in “Gimpel the Fool.” By comparison, the stories of Malamud, or Roth, are expressions of guilt and uneasiness. It is as if the writers were hovering over their subjects, like the shreds of Peretz’s Kolboynik, victims of their inability to know who they are and where they belong. The traditional compassion has curdled into self-pity; the horror at inhumanity has narrowed into private humiliation; and the hatred for violence has become the fear of cowardice. . . .
There is no longer an opportunity to explore Jewish values as a source of understanding and vitality. These values can be observed only as they linger, marrano-like, distorted. Increasingly, Jewish life is American life. “Goodbye, Columbus” could have been written without Jewish characters and not lost its point. Even a story such as “The Conversion of the Jews” is more an example of uncertainty than of anything else. Benjamin DeMott finds in it the assumption that “all Jews are vicious in defense of their religion.” What is more curious, however, is that Philip Roth has twisted the historical fact. Who has been hit because of God? Such distortions occur when pieties are worn, and one is eager for something new and startling.
Benjamin DeMott urges writers to free themselves of old material and attitudes. Their contribution, as Jewish writers, however, will have no significance unless they can, at the same time, repair their connections to the past. If lack of interest or amnesia continues to keep young writers unaware of the Jewish life that existed before Hitler and Israel, there will be no point in understanding why there were writers with command over themselves and their subjects during periods of real humiliation, and why there are now so few of them when Jews are prosperous and powerful in so many areas of American life.
Sylvia Rothchild
Sharon, Massachusetts
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Mr. DeMott writes:
People who in 1961 regard an objective and impersonal Jew as a figure of special courage are doubtless generalizing some experience of their own with anti-Semitism in an improper fashion; there are many roads to impersonality, and it is a mistake to assume that anyone who arrives must have had extraordinary encounters with stupidity on the way. The mistake is common, though, partly because of awareness that anti-Semitism has not yet disappeared, partly because meetings are not infrequent with men and women whose lives are known to have been scarred by the anti-Semitism of the past. I allowed in my piece for the possibility that belief in the Jew as a comprehensive man is sentimental or superstitious, but I admit to an uneasy sympathy with the belief. Prejudice against men who are sorry for themselves without apparent cause is normal; a disposition to admire men who are not sorry for themselves, even though ground for such feeling can readily be imagined, is also normal; and on balance the latter disposition—even if it has about it hints of unconscious condescension—is not as cruel as obliviousness. Whether simple or complicated, these are awkward matters for expression, at least for a commentator inexperienced in moral analysis; I understood that it would be difficult to make my language or my jargon, as Mr. Bellman calls it, adequate to them, but I did not seek to fail. The problem was: how to acknowledge the existence of an audience that gives instantaneous respect to Jewish writers who turn outward from themselves, without suggesting that the gift is of absolutely unambiguous value?
As for Mr. Bellman’s lists, only fatuity would address itself in a letter to all the items on them. I can say in fatuous shorthand that I share his enthusiasm for the work of Leo Litwak, about which I’ve written briefly elsewhere (Hudson Review, Spring 1960), but that to my knowledge there is not enough of it in print to support a critical argument; that I do not agree that the best of Shaw and Schulberg lies outside the classifications I offered, and that their worst is too insubstantial to count in the case at hand; that I admit that the language I used in describing The Victim and Seize the Day is not adequate for Augie March; and, finally, that Mr. Bellman’s readings of the stories of Malamud and Roth that he mentions are indefensibly tendentious. (The registering consciousness in “The Last Mohican,” for example, is not Shimon Susskind but Fidelman, the student; the story is not about the way in which Susskind “vindicates his own existence at personal cost,” but about the way in which Fidelman, the American Jew, is brought to a less abstract understanding of the humiliations suffered by American Jews.) These snippets of unexplained judgment constitute no impressive counterattack, as is obvious; nothing could persuade Mr. Bellman to a favorable view of my characterization of recent Jewish fiction except a defense of the view in specific relation to the works he cites. But that this enterprise can’t be conducted under the present circumstances does not mean that it could not be conducted; neither does it mean that in making my original case I urged that the case had complete validity. I described, for a purpose I reassert below, an impression; Mr. Bellman’s account of his impression is valuable, but it does not quite cancel mine.
Nor would it perhaps cancel that of Sylvia Rothchild, who argues that contemporary Jewish fiction is marked by “self-pity,” “private humiliation,” and “fear of cowardice,” and advances an explanation for their presence that differs from mine, namely that American Jews have lost touch with the Jewish life that existed before Hitler and Israel. She holds that if the writers in question could connect themselves with traditions that find expression in Bashevis Singer, Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem, they might again speak strongly. The point is interesting, but no more so than indications (see the recent COMMENTARY symposium on “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals”) that the possibility of establishing such connections is, for the new generation, almost nonexistent. Keening for the values of the old culture brought here by immigrant Jews is understandable; but there are American resources which if recovered would provide alternatives of a kind to what has been lost. If the gates of the local past are rusty, they nevertheless swing wide on beings of invigorating idealistic force, Emerson for one, and upon actions that, when brought alive in the imagination, are enough in themselves to put shoulders on writers and blades in brains. Are these beings impossible to reach? The self-control and self-command of Jewish critics and social observers (described by Sylvia Rothchild as men who are “evading and repudiating the problems of Jewish consciousness”) are easy to read as signs of a determination to find a way through the muck of the present to the rich radical vein of the American past. And it is partly for that reason that I think of the “repudiation” as admirable, and regard the outward-reaching books that issue from it—Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd is the latest—as works with a piece to speak to imaginative writers.
I may add that the subject of my article was more limited than the foregoing letters and this generalizing answer imply. I addressed myself to the tone taken by Jewish critics toward Jewish writers, and explained its bearings as I understood them. My purpose was to suggest that embarrassment about or condescension toward the successes of recent Jewish fictionists is no substitute for assessment, and that avoidance of assessment does no service to the writers and encourages disrespect for the men who comment on their work. I do not claim that my explanation of the evasiveness was richly informed or at all points sound; I do claim merit for the assertion that more rigorous critical self-scrutiny is a serious need.
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