Every so often my mother used to tell me the story of my birth as it occurred in the Romanian city of Czernowitz in 1936. Her account was short, immutable, and satisfying. Mother had been standing in the bedroom of our apartment at 4 Jarnik Street, watching the landlord, Mr. Vinovic, working in his garden. Suddenly he looked up and, catching sight of her, asked if he might bring her the season’s first roses. Yes, thank you, she said, and then lay down and bore me; I was already present when he arrived at the door with his bouquet. Goldene meydele, my mother would croon, my golden girl, as sunny as that day in May.

No doubt I should have asked for additional details—such as, who opened the door to let Mr. Vinovic in; was she suddenly overtaken by contractions, or had she planned to give birth at home; and, did roses really bloom so early in Romania? But my mother was a changeable woman, who in later years found fault with me more often than the evidence warranted. If occasionally she was pleased to trot out this nativity story, I was content to luxuriate in its warmth, If Saul Bellow had not agreed to celebrate his 69th birthday in Montreal, I might never have learned how I really came into the world.

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Bellow has been my favorite writer since I discovered him in the fourth issue of a 1954 paperback periodical called Discovery. My older brother Ben had shelled out 3 5 cents for this item, and I had made it my business to read everything Ben brought into the house. The book is on my shelf now, a small, slight volume with a Mondrian grid of rectangles on a bright red cover and the names of the contributors in that lower-case lettering that used to advertise modernism. In this case the advertisement turned out to be bogus. Aside from one aggressively experimental little poem, itself a parody of modernism, the contents could as easily have appeared in Collier’s or the New Yorker.

“The Gonzaga Manuscripts” was the reason I asked Ben if I could keep the book. Although I can appreciate why, given the riches to choose from, it has not made the cut into Bellow’s new Collected Stories¹ I still like it as much as I did back then. In it, a young American, Clarence Feiler, goes to Spain to look for a cache of missing love poems by the (fictitious) Spanish poet Manuel Gonzaga, whom he discovered when he was in graduate school. He has learned that the poems may have been handed over by Gonzaga’s literary executor to their addressee—a certain Countess del Camino—not long before she died. Clarence races to their rescue, hoping to bring them to an expectant world:

Buttoned to the throat in a long, soft overcoat, dark green, Clarence Feiler got off the Hendaye Express in the Madrid Station. It was late afternoon and it was raining, and the station with its throng and its dim orange lights seemed sunken under darkness and noise. The gaunt horselike Spanish locomotives screamed off their steam and the hurrying passengers struggled in the narrow gates. Porters and touts approached Clarence, obviously a foreigner, by his small blond beard, blue eyes, almost brimless hat, long coat and crepe-soled shoes. But he carried his own bag and had no need of them.

Reading this for the first time, I did not linger over the “gaunt horselike Spanish locomotives” or other verbal flarings. My eye was fixed squarely on the hero, framed by the adjectives soft and green. As soon as we catch sight of this American in the rain, despite his show of independence, we suspect that he is going to get suckered by Europe, or by whatever he imagines Europe to be.

This was fine with me. I hated Europe, and could not wait for the hero to wise up. He reminded me a little of my brother Ben, who was actually dark and heavyset and musical and studying textile engineering but whom I could well imagine debarking in some foreign port, in pursuit of a lost quartet by Béla Bartók. Ben would have led with his soft heart right into someone’s iron fist.

Clarence seemed prissier than my brother, with none of Ben’s irony, but also immediately familiar, someone about whom I knew more than the author was telling me. I felt sure, for example, that Clarence was a Jew, though probably one who did not want the fact known. I also understood that it was not sound for a young man without a girlfriend of his own to be going after another man’s love poems. Tracking Clarence in those unfriendly surroundings, I was apprehensive about him the same way I was apprehensive about Ben, but freer to enjoy the tension.

Naturally, Clarence does not find in Spain what he is looking for. What he finds are people obsessed with America. In his boarding house, an aging Englishwoman blames the United States—that is, him—for poisoning the air with carbon dioxide. When Clarence gets his audience with the executor, the latter goads him with a joke.

[There] was an American whose Spanish host could not impress him. Everything was larger in America. The skyscrapers were bigger than the palaces. The cars were bigger. The cats were bigger. At last his host placed a lobster between his sheets and when the horrified American saw it his host said, “This is one of our bedbugs. I don’t think you can beat that.”

As for the lost works of Manuel Gonzaga, the poet’s aged and ailing nephew brings Clarence’s quest to a dead end. The Countess to whom they were addressed had the poems buried with her when she died, and no copies were made. But the nephew is prepared to give Clarence some “precious papers” that he assumes the American has come looking for: deeds to stock in a Moroccan mine that might some day produce uranium for atom bombs. Clarence erupts. “What have I to do with atom bombs. What do I care about atom bombs! To hell with atom bombs!”

So much for the fate of an American quixotically trying to rescue culture from an ominous Continent. Bellow’s comic rendition of a theme by Henry James ends, like the master’s, with the American sadder and savvier, and Europe unredeemed.

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Even more than this story’s humor and hero, what drew me was the talk in it about art and life. Clarence goes to a black marketeer to exchange dollars for pesetas; two pages later, he is still explaining to the woman why Manuel Gonzaga is a great poet. My own creative-writing teacher was always warning us that ideas do not belong in imaginative fiction, yet here was Bellow suspending his story for a little essay:

To understand what [Gonzaga] did, you have to think first of modern literature as a sort of grand council considering what mankind should do next, how they should fill their mortal time, what they should feel, what they should see, where they should get their courage, how they should love, how they should be pure or great, and all the rest. This advice of literature has never done much good. But you see God doesn’t rule over men as he used to, and for a long time people haven’t been able to feel that life was firmly attached at both ends so that they could stand confidently in the middle and trust the place where they were. That kind of faith is missing, and for many years poets have tried to supply a substitute. Like [Shelley’s] “the unacknowledged legislators” or [Browning’s] “the best is yet to be,” or Walt Whitman saying that whoever touched him could be sure he was touching a man. . . . Maybe they assumed too much responsibility. They knew that if by their poems and novels they were fixing values, there must be something wrong with the values. One man can’t furnish them. Oh, he may if his inspiration is for values, but not if his inspiration is for literature. If you throw the full responsibility for meaning and for the establishment of good and evil on poets, they are doomed to go down. However, the poets reflected what was happening to everyone. As soon as people become free they feel that they are responsible for everything, and they feel it’s up to them to be in charge. Everything is in their minds, their eyes, and their bellies. Gonzaga is free from this form of despair, and that’s why he absorbs me.

If there was irony in this earnestness, it flew right by me: I had never read a passage that so surprisingly explained why I was studying literature—and explained it as if shooting the breeze. There had to be a grand council considering what mankind should do next, and if not writers, then who? On the holidays when my father, Ben, and I attended synagogue (our younger siblings usually stayed home with mother), we spent the walk home and most of lunch making fun of the rabbi’s intellectual disarray. Rabbi B. would start us off with a sentence from that morning’s Torah reading, then veer into an irrelevant commentary, and after a couple of tortured turns and anecdotal byways pull up at some profundity, like “Become your better self” or “Look to the Rock whence you came.” He didn’t even try to attach us to God.

Unfortunately, as I was learning at school, Nietzsche was not a fit guide, either. Much as I thrilled to some of Zarathustra’s precepts, I couldn’t mistake the rantings of that lunatic for a guide to the perplexed. The more genius, the less judgment. The life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, courtesy of my course in British Romanticism, likewise failed to induce any confidence in the potential of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” There was always D.H. Lawrence and his religion of sex, but the gamekeeper Mellors preaching to Lady Chatterly with a “fuck fuck” here and a “fuck fuck” there made me want to spend the rest of my life nursing her impotent husband.

So I could perfectly appreciate this Manuel Gonzaga as conceived by Saul Bellow. Though a genius, he spoke only as a human being: “A poem may outlive its subject—say, my poem about the girl who sang songs on the train—but the poet has no right to expect this. The poem has no greater privilege than the girl.” I took this to mean that though we seek inspiration from poets, they are valuable to the degree that they value our human lives. Here’s the thing: I found in Bellow what I had been looking for. The bourgeois writer had descended from the mountain to show our needy human cluster how to live, and I liked his missive because it made sense.

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By the time I met Saul Bellow in the late 1960’s, his 1964 best-seller, Herzog, had made him famous, and I was writing a chapter on it for my dissertation. Though I had not chosen my topic—the schlemiel as modern hero—because of Herzog, the novel made me confident that I had a thesis. For this I was grateful, because my academic situation was complicated.

Two years after I married, I had left Montreal to begin graduate studies at Columbia with the intention of specializing in Yiddish literature within the university’s doctoral program in English and comparative literature. I intended to complete my formal studies in the shortest possible time, and then return to Montreal to prepare for exams and write my thesis. But when, having finished my Columbia coursework, I met with the head of doctoral studies to schedule my comprehensive exams—I had split my credits evenly between English and European literature on the one hand and Yiddish literature and Jewish history on the other—he insisted that I take two major examinations in English, only a minor examination in Yiddish, and an additional minor in the Renaissance, his own area of expertise.

In all my time at Columbia, this Professor N. was the first in the English department to show an interest in my studies—alas, a keenly negative one. I was baffled by his hostility, but less than a half-hour into our unpleasant meeting I realized that he would never yield. When I later asked the department to let me explain my case, it refused to hear an appeal.

I could not stay on in New York, studying for exams so far removed from my chief area of interest. After almost two years of a commuter marriage, it was time to settle down and begin raising a family. My Yiddish adviser, Uriel Weinreich, had already discussed with me a dissertation topic—Yiddish humor after Sholem Aleichem—and the presence in Montreal of a well-stocked Jewish library made us both confident that I could work from home. N.’s ruling killed this plan. Why was he penalizing me for studying Jewish literature? Did he perceive me as a barbarian at the gates of the citadel of culture? It never occurred to me that he might be Jewish. When I learned that he was, I marveled at my innocence.

To complete the irony, I would probably have done well to accept the bad deal he offered me. After a few years, with our first child Billy already a toddler, and Jacob on the way, I had to begin my studies all over again in the department of English at McGill, whose newly inaugurated doctoral program required five written comprehensive exams and coursework in Old English, Middle English, Elizabethan and Restoration drama, and literature of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The only concession I wrung from my professors was to let me write my dissertation under the joint supervision of Louis Dudek at McGill and Uriel Weinreich at Columbia, an arrangement to which Weinreich had generously agreed. By the time I was ready to take him up on his offer, however, he had been diagnosed with cancer. His early death was a terrible blow to the field of Yiddish, and almost spelled the end of my career.

I had never considered myself tenacious, but during these years I thought more than once of how long the biblical Jacob had toiled for Leah before he could acquire his beloved Rachel. I was pursuing a doctorate in English literature so that I would have the formal credentials to persuade some department to let me teach Yiddish instead. Even to write a dissertation having anything to do with Yiddish, I had to find a topic acceptable to the McGill English department and to do the work almost entirely on my own, since Dudek was not familiar with most of the material I would be covering.

In fact, the afternoon I came in to discuss my topic with him, Dudek tried to persuade me to specialize in his field. Pointing to a small section of his library, he said, “All you have to do is read this shelf and you’ll be a specialist in Canadian literature.” I wasn’t fooled by this self-deprecation. Louis was one of Canada’s most prolific poets and a tireless promoter of other Canadian writing. This was his wry way of encouraging me to join him in the academic field that he had pioneered.

But I had my own pioneering to do. I set out for him my proposal for a thesis that would trace the comic figure of the schlemiel from a Yiddish story by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav at the beginning of the 19th century to the works of contemporary North American Jewish writers. I intended to study the techniques of inversion by means of which a fool, a cuckold, or some other kind of misfit is reinterpreted as moral victor or ironic hero, and the way that this reversal is used to different ends by Jewish fiction writers in the two languages of Yiddish and English.

To convince Louis that my scheme was viable and that he was up to the task of supervising it, I emphasized the centrality of Bellow’s Herzog, the one book on my list he was sure to have read. That Montreal, Saul Bellow’s native city, and Yiddish, Saul Bellow’s native language, figured prominently in Herzog helped me make the case for the cultural connection I was propounding, and that Bellow had also translated one of the other key works—Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story, “Gimpel the Fool”—proved that the link between the languages was substantial.

In sum, without Saul Bellow I would have had no thesis. And thanks to his unwitting assistance, my indentured servitude paid off. Once I was writing my thesis and began teaching English at McGill, I was able to persuade my department to let me introduce courses in Yiddish literature, which eventually became part of a program and, later, a department of Jewish studies. To prepare for my first classes in Yiddish, I went to the Coach House—the trendiest department in the city’s largest department store—and bought myself the best clothes I have ever owned, intending to give Yiddish the chic of affluence it seldom enjoyed in the works we would study. One of those outfits I was wearing the first time I met Saul Bellow at a reception tendered him by the Jewish Public Library. It took place on November 9, 1968.

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I remember this event with special clarity because the photographer—a Mr. Breitman of Federal Photos—later sent me a picture of the occasion. Breitman was the photographer of choice for all Jewish institutional events, and he knew me from the time right after college when I had worked as press officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress. He must have remembered me fondly enough to know I would have wanted this snapshot. In it, I am seated beside Bellow on a hard couch as he, looking very smart in dark suit and tie, balances a half-filled coffee cup on his knees. He is being interviewed by a reporter whose hand, pen, and paper are visible at the bottom right of the photo, while at the top right looms the shoulder of someone standing in front of them. I am leaning over, intent on the interview, eager to know what Bellow thinks.

The unidentified man standing with his back to the camera was in fact about to interrupt, and to say that his grandfather had been a neighbor of the Bellow family when they lived on St. Dominique Street.

This interruption annoyed me quite as much as if I had been the one conducting the interview. But Bellow’s sudden animation betrayed how bored he had been a moment earlier. “Who was your grandfather?” he wanted to know. When given the name, he began supplying a cascade of details: the exact location and appearance of the house the grandfather lived in, the elder’s cane, his walk, his attire. “You remember him much better than I do,” said the interrupter with ungrudging admiration, at which Bellow came up with another couple of items.

His memories were etched with the same precision as Herzog’s in the novel: “Elias with his earnest Americanized clean-shaven face ate hard-boiled eggs and drank prohibition beer—home-brewed Polish piva. He gave the eggs a neat rap on the rail of the porch and peeled them scrupulously.” “Like a tragic actor of the Yiddish stage, with a straight drunken nose and a bowler pressing on the veins of his forehead, Ravitch, in an apron, worked at the fruit store near Rachel Street in 1922. There at the market in zero weather he was sweeping a mixed powder of sawdust and snow. . . .” I had always assumed that fiction involved the faculty of invention, not the faculty of retention, yet here was Bellow, so much happier talking about his childhood than answering a reporter’s questions about trends in modern writing. Herzog might not fully correspond to his creator Saul Bellow, but could he have emerged as credibly had that Montreal boy not been blessed with a remarkable memory?

Listening to Bellow reminisce, I felt contradictory things. Deprived, because I remember almost nothing from before my arrival in Canada at the age of almost four and a half, and so little about the next few years that my father once suggested hypnotism as a way of unlocking my past. My so-called recollections were the few stories my mother told about me, from which it was impossible to sift my actual memories. Maybe I had begun studying Yiddish literature to substitute a collective for a personal past?

Yet if Bellow liked to shmooze about grandfathers, was he not also in some sense corroborating my decision to stay “at home” in Jewish culture? Until then, the only part of Bellow’s life that had held a real interest for me was his involvement with the New York intellectuals, that extraordinary band of brash and brilliant writers whom I had been born too late and too far away to join. I had hoped somehow to enter their arguments on literature and politics, and was eavesdropping on Bellow’s interview the way I once watched my classmates slapping rope, waiting to see how one jumped in. Now it seemed that when Bellow had gone forth to become a great American writer, he had left something precious behind—the very city that I still inhabited, the language and literature that I was studying. I didn’t have to hunt down Gonzaga manuscripts to find the moral balance that Clarence Feiler was looking for: much of Yiddish literature was modestly humanistic in just the way that Feiler admires.

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In interviews, Bellow used to make a point of saying that he wrote American literature, with no hyphens attached. By this I understood him to mean that Jewish Chicago (or Montreal) was no more exotic than Protestant Mississippi, and that it was wrong—provincial—to isolate Jewish authors when every American writer came from somewhere else. Oddly enough, though, Bellow’s success as an American writer opened for someone like me the opposite prospect of exploring the treasures of Yiddish literature, relatively neglected by him and much more so by his contemporaries. If he was right about his status as an unexceptional American writer, then Jews were as culturally secure in America as anyone else. We could now shore up our languages, and return to some of our own texts, if for no better reason than to provide our writers with something to keep leaving behind.

But there was a better reason, and it had occurred to me while reading the garden scene in Herzog, where our hero loses his temper with the herring-devouring Professor Shapiro. Herzog does not share the enthusiasm of Shapiro, his childhood playmate, for the high-brow culture of his time:

[We] mustn’t forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler’s “Prussian Socialism,” the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness. I can’t accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice—too deep, too great, Shapiro. It torments me to insanity that you should be so misled. A merely aesthetic critique of modern history! After the wars and mass killings! You are too intelligent for this. You inherited rich blood. Your father peddled apples.

What really angers Moses Herzog is his own susceptibility to an intellectualism gone awry. A similar concern had made me want to introduce Yiddish culture into the university, hoping to puncture its pretensions with the sharp edge of Yiddish wit. But I was not altogether satisfied with Herzog’s formulation. It was not the peddling of apples that had given Jews their rich blood; rather, their way of life lent dignity to apple-peddling. Jewish self-discipline derived from obedience to the halakhic laws, not from the material poverty amid which those laws were often upheld. The rabbis distinguished through behavior and habit between what is permitted and what is forbidden, supporting human potential while curbing false expectations.

Bellow seemed to know this better than I. As Herzog beds down with yet another female, he thinks, is this really possible? “Have all the traditions, passions, renunciations, virtues, gems, and masterpieces of Hebrew discipline and all the rest of it—rhetoric, a lot of it, but containing true facts—brought me to these untidy green sheets, and this rippled mattress?” The author of Herzog was himself raised on daily prayers and kosher meals. In becoming a writer, he may have hoped that literature rather than religious law could hold the moral center, but if so he was drawing on the inheritance of obligated Jews who learned from the Torah how to become a decent folk. If his Herzog was any example, merely inherited values did not translate into reliable behavior. In America, the supply lines were becoming overextended; the qualms over lost “Hebrew discipline” themselves got lost between the green sheets. Worse, Judaism without Torah would produce more Shapiros than Moses Herzogs.

Some of these scruples I included in the final pages of my dissertation about the schlemiel as modern hero. Still, on the whole, its outlook was as sunny as that day I was born. “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me,” says Herzog at the opening of his book, and at the finish, he is “pretty well satisfied to be just as it is willed.” Sitting there in 1968 beside Saul Bellow as a budding professor of Yiddish literature, in an outfit that made it clear I didn’t peddle apples, I, too, felt pretty well satisfied to be just as it is willed. The photograph shows us as two immigrant children at the crest of Jewish fortunes, enjoying greater security than modern Jews have ever known.

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Actually, our security was already no longer as great as it might have been a year earlier. In the spring of 1967, the Egyptians had blockaded the Straits of Tiran and expelled the United Nations “peacekeeping” troops from the Sinai peninsula—just as Montreal was readying its international Expo in the expectation of attracting six million visitors. All around me the city bustled in preparations for a happy gathering of the family of nations while the Jews of Israel confronted yet another destruction. Although the Six-Day war in early June brought temporary relief, it was followed immediately by the Arab war of attrition and by a liberal assault on Israeli “triumphalism” that has increased from that day to this. Israel was held responsible for the aggression against it, and the Jews were blamed for winning the war that had been launched to wipe them out.

I could not have known at the time of our meeting that Bellow was writing Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1969), unleashing the anxieties of that war. On the face of it, the novel has little to do with Israel. Artur Sammler’s main adventures over the course of two days involve his dying nephew, his wayward daughter, a black pickpocket, and an assortment of New York youths. The setting is American, and so are the social pathologies. But for the first time, in that novel, Bellow attended to Jewish history, endowing the seventy-year-old Sammler with national gravity by imagining him as a survivor of Hitler’s war against the Jews.

“Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense, and you could smell decay.” Hence, Sammler tries to remind the children of the 60’s of their duties. He reports the pickpocket to the police. He lectures students on the failings of earlier Utopian experiments. He tries to persuade a sensualist to tame her extreme appetites. He teaches his daughter not to steal. And when war erupts in Israel in June 1967, he reclaims his credentials as a journalist to go cover it—just as Bellow in real life had done for Newsweek.

At this point, neither Bellow nor his elderly fictional character seems to know what exactly an American Jew can do for Israel, but they put body and pen into the line of fire. What Bellow did know was that, along with many of his clever contemporaries, he had once ignored the Nazi threat against the Jews in Europe. He and his friends had been working so hard to root themselves in America, they had no interest to spare for their brethren overseas. He was not about to let it happen again, and his exertions eventually far exceeded those of his character Artur Sammler.

In 1976, the year after the UN passed its resolution defining Zionism as racism, Bellow published To Jerusalem and Back, a personal, non-fiction account of an extended visit to Israel that also confronts the arguments of its enemies. Here is a sample of Bellow on Jean-Paul Sartre, the mastermind of French philosophy, explaining that you cannot invite both Israelis and Arabs to the same conference “because the Arabs don’t want it”:

I sometimes wonder why it is impossible for Western intellectuals (and especially the French, who enjoy such prestige in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt and who have relations with the Arab Left in these countries) to say to the Arabs, “We have to demand also more from you. You too—the Marxists among you in particular—must try to do something for brotherhood and make peace with the Jews, for they have suffered monstrously, in Christian Europe and under Islam. Israel occupies about one-sixth of one percent of the lands you call Arab. Isn’t it possible to adjust the traditions of Islam—to reinterpret, to change emphasis, so as to accept this trifling occupancy? A great civilization should be capable of humane and generous flexibility. The destruction of Israel will do you no good. Let the Jews live, in their small state.” But it must be culturally disrespectful to ask people to change their attitudes, even slightly. In any case, Sartre has not said such things. He has had revolution—glorious, ineffable revolution—to think of. An explosion of a hundred million Arabs can tear a huge hole in the rotting bourgeois structure. After an ecstatic time of murder will come peace and justice. The fellahin, their manhood recovered, will learn to read and be citizens, et cetera. “It is shameful not to invite the representatives of the Israeli Left but if we invite them—let us not be hypocritical—that means not inviting Arabs,” said Sartre.

By imagining Sartre as a decent thinker, Bellow demolishes both targets at once—the immoralist philosopher and the intransigent Arabs. Throughout this subtle book, Bellow insists that he is “simply an interested amateur—a learner,” yet few defenders of Israel have ever done as good a job. Fighters fight and writers write, each fulfilling the terms of his contract, to use a phrase of Mr. Sammler’s. In its bid for public opinion, I thought Bellow’s book a knockout, and the view I thus came to hold of him as a champion of the Jews may explain my passing frustration with him some years later.

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One day in the spring of 1985 I received an invitation to a ceremony in the Montreal suburb of Lachine, which was naming its municipal library for Saul Bellow. Gossip had it that Mayor Guy Descary had discovered Lachine on a roster of Nobel Prize laureates and realized that he could conscript this native celebrity into promotion of his community and himself. The occasion was sure to be widely covered by both the English and French local press; the mayor would benefit from the accruing publicity, and his name would go up with Bellow’s on the cornerstone plaque.

But what difference did any of that make? The city of Montreal remains so split into separate ethnic sectors that there is a lot of excitement when any event brings its communities together. Bellow, who had been appointed Commander of the French Legion of Honor, was almost as comfortable in French as in Yiddish. An ideal Montrealer, he demonstrated the mayor’s contention that “Saul Bellow never forgot his roots.”

Only one qualm intruded on my childlike anticipation of this weekend. For the first time, I was disturbed by something that Bellow had done, and debated with myself whether to speak my mind to him, knowing that if I did, I might never become his friend, but that if I did not, I would feel like a coward and dissembler. My state of mind reflected how the world seemed altered since our encounter seventeen years earlier.

The matter concerned the Committee for the Free World—an organization founded in 1980 by Midge Decter to “conduct a battle of ideas in defense of Western values and institutions” by taking public positions against Soviet influence and for American victory in the cold war. You might say (though Bellow would not have said it) that the Committee tried to fight overtly, on the political-cultural front, the battle that he had waged through Artur Sammler.

Midge felt that material and economic threats to America (Soviet missiles, OPEC cartels, international terrorism, etc.) were not as dangerous as the influence of certain false ideas—namely, “that the political systems of the societies in which we live are founded on the oppression of their own peoples; that the freedom they claim to offer is a sham; that their prosperity depends on the exploitation and plunder of the ‘third world.’ ” The Committee’s monthly bulletin, Contentions, drew a bead on the tenured and ensconced members of the elites who promulgated these false ideas. (It so galvanized my energy that I began writing a column on politics and culture for the Montreal Gazette and the Canadian Jewish News.) Bellow was a charter member of the Committee’s board, which also included Raymond Aron, William Barrett, Paul Johnson, Leszek Kolakowski, Tom Stoppard, and George Will.

Or at least, Bellow had been a member until a few months earlier: his resignation was the point at issue. Since I was not part of the Committee’s inner circle, I did not know exactly the how or why of it, except that it related to an issue of Contentions devoted to “re-reviewing” certain prize-winning books. The Committee cared about whom the Pulitzer judges and the National Book Critics Circle chose to honor, because the prizes exemplified the tastes and predilections of those who handed them out. So Contentions published its own reviews of the winning books, highlighting their political biases and literary flaws.

Among those re-reviewed were works by Gore Vidal and Stanley Elkin, whom Bellow considered his literary colleagues. I therefore assumed at the time that, if Bellow had quit the Committee over this issue, he must have been embarrassed to see them skewered in a publication with which they knew he was associated. Or maybe he knew that the political considerations governing such prizes could tip more sharply against him the next time around. Today I no longer have to speculate about his motives. The letter of resignation, quoted in James Atlas’s recent biography, Bellow (which is less than trustworthy in other respects), leaves no doubt about his reasoning or his displeasure.

Conceding that conflicts are bound to arise among people who are trying to make common cause, he writes that these cannot be permitted to extend to his professional world, the world of fiction:

[Where] there are politics there are bedfellows, and where there are bedfellows there are likely to be fleas, so I scratched my bites in silence. Your Special Issue, however, is different. I can’t allow the editors of Contentions to speak in my name, or with my tacit consent as board-member, about writers and literature. When there are enemies to be made I prefer to make them myself, on my own grounds and in my own language. Le mauvais gout mène aux crimes [bad taste leads to crimes], said Stendhal, who was right of course but who didn’t realize how many criminals history was about to turn loose.

Though at this time I was ignorant of this letter, I was nonetheless right to sense that Saul must have favored his literary over his political priorities. But I was disappointed that he should have put friendship or any other consideration ahead of a unified battle of ideas. Of course, I appreciated the independence of art from political affiliations, and I also favored agnosticism in scholarship and formal neutrality in the classroom. But just as a teacher was free to campaign outside the classroom for a party he should not be representing within it, the artist was free to express partisanship in the public arena more openly than he might wish to do in his art. What strikes me now—in the language of the letter—is its apprehension that we were, indeed, at war, and with “criminals.”

In any event, since it pained me that Bellow should have slighted the Committee, I slipped him a note during the festivities in Lachine to say that I was sorry he had left the board, without blaming him for having done so. He suggested that we take up the conversation at dinner the following night. He would be staying on for a day to see members of his family; perhaps my husband Len and I might join him, with Louis Dudek, whom he had met on previous visits to the city.

I could hardly imagine anything more exciting than the prospect of an evening with my husband, my teacher, and my beloved writer. I chose a little Greek-Armenian restaurant on Mountain Street that was almost empty on a Monday evening, where we could sit undisturbed and take respite from the heavy-duty weekend. At dinner, uncharacteristically, I listened more than I talked. With a series of comic spins on the theme, “you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Saul answered a question by Len about what it felt like to accommodate Mayor Descary’s political ambitions, and these two political junkies then traded information about Montreal and Chicago, where Saul, when he wasn’t writing, seemed to spend the hours trying to find out what made the city tick. Maybe the talk about local politics was Saul’s indirect response to my complaint. Unlike those intellectuals who directed from the rear, he was a foot soldier in politics.

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If I didn’t resolve my differences with Saul that evening (conversation never did get around to the Committee), I learned something about my differences with Louis Dudek. Louis, who wasn’t into municipal gossip, announced with the air of someone sharing a discovery that he had figured out how Saul came to surpass so many other writers and poets of his generation. It had to do with the confident way he drew from his upbringing, as reflected in his reminiscences just yesterday about his childhood in Lachine. Saul, Louis said, was not uprooted, or alienated, like so many of his contemporaries, but grounded in his native culture like Dostoevsky or Henry James.

No great revelation, this: I had written as much in my dissertation. But as Louis spoke, I realized that he was not talking about Bellow. Though he, too, had grown up in Montreal, in an immigrant family, an immigrant neighborhood, and an immigrant language, in becoming a writer he had done everything to obscure his Polish-Catholic roots. Instead of drawing from his native culture the way Bellow mined his Yiddish and his Jewishness, Louis in his poetry modeled himself on Ezra Pound of the Cantos, a crazy-quilt of ideograms and foreign echoes. At McGill, his two-year course on Great Writings of European Literature, which I had taken when I was an undergraduate, included some 40 European novelists, poets, and playwrights. We read Manzoni and Gide and Hamsun and Rilke, but not Mickiewicz or Sienkiewicz or Slonimski or Milocz.

We also read Franz Kafka’s The Castle without being told that its author was Jewish, and Louis Ferdinand Céline without any discussion of his anti-Semitism. I once asked Louis why he hadn’t mentioned the disturbing connection between Nietzsche and the Nazis; in response, he asked if I would hold Jesus responsible for the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. I thought he was avoiding the Jewish question, but it never occurred to me to wonder about his background—which was undoubtedly his intention. How strange! Had I been a Polish Catholic and come to Louis with a proposal for a thesis on the image of national uprising in Polish literature, he might have treated me just as Professor N. did at Columbia. It was my good luck to have come up against this lapsed Polish Catholic, who considered me cosmopolitan because I was not of his tribe.

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But the greater revelation had come earlier during that weekend, and from another direction entirely. At a party in Saul’s honor on Saturday night, we enjoyed a combination of homespun comfort and lavish fare. Tables were set out in our hostess’s garden, where guests were served and could serve themselves. Seated together, Saul and I had taken to speaking Yiddish. I got up more than once to bring sweets and fruit to the table, and he said, playing on my name, “Zi heyst rut nor zi rut nisht,” her name is Ruth but she doesn’t rest. (The Talmud says, “Who is a hero? He who resists his evil urge”—meaning, according to some, his sexual urge. Yiddish speakers add, “he who resists his urge to pun,” thereby identifying a besetting temptation of their civilization.)

Since I was hardly the only person who wanted to speak with Bellow, I found myself talking also with his then-wife Alexandra, a Romanian-born mathematician of whom I knew mostly what I had read in his most recent book, The Dean’s December (1982). This novel describes a visit by an American couple to the wife’s ailing mother in Romania, and though I dared not assume that Alexandra and the fictional wife were one and the same, I felt safe talking to her about her native land, which happened also to be mine. When I asked whether she had ever visited Czernowitz, she said that she knew the city well, thanks to the presence there of her parents’ closest friends.

These friends were a couple of eminent physicians, he a Ukrainian, she a Jew. Terrible things had befallen them under the Nazi occupation. The woman and their son had managed to escape, but the husband, who had refused to divorce her, died in prison. After the war, the woman and her son settled in Israel, where she still practiced medicine, well into her eighties. Alexandra said that she frequently visited this surrogate mother, and it occurred to me that the trip described in To Jerusalem and Back must have included one such visit.

Alexandra then asked whether my parents might have known this couple, since Rosa Zalojecki was a noted obstetrician and gynecologist. The implication was that, as a Jewish woman, Rosa would have attracted Jewish patients, but I was certain that Alexandra, who was not Jewish, had drawn the wrong inference from the facts. What little I knew of my parents’ eight years in Czernowitz involved a small circle of Jewish professionals around the Zionist social club Masada. There was Dr. Engler, Dr. Scharfstein, and my pediatrician Dr. Wiesenthal, but the name Zalojecki I had never heard. In all her copious reminiscences, mother had mentioned one non-Jewish friend, a woman married to one of father’s colleagues; and her nervous memory of this woman—with her dog!—suggested that she did not readily accept mixed marriages. I told Alexandra that my father was no longer alive, but that I would ask my mother whether she knew the Zalojeckis. She wrote down their name for me on the back of one of her cards.

My relations with mother were then so strained that I had adopted a policy of “name, rank, and serial number”—that is, of never giving out unnecessary information that could, and almost certainly would, be used against me. But here was a windfall: a question of fact, and from a stranger. The next day, I told mother I had met a Romanian who wanted to know whether she had known the Zalojeckis in Czernowitz.

“Of course,” said mother, “Rosa Samet.”

“Zalojecki,” I said, “She was an obstetrician and gynecologist.”

“Zalojecki was her married name. She was married to a Ukrainian—also a doctor—but her maiden name was Samet, and she came from Poland. Of course I knew her. She gave you your name.”

My heart began to pound. “How did she give me my name?”

“When you were born,” mother continued, as though reporting on yesterday’s snowfall, “you came out so suddenly that I began to hemorrhage, and the midwife was afraid that I was done for (di okusherke hot gemeynt az ikh bin shoyn nokh alemen), so she called Rosa Samet and told her it was an emergency. She came right over, and stopped the bleeding.”

“The hemorrhage?”

“She stopped the bleeding, but she was afraid that it might start again, so she sat with me for an hour, maybe longer. The midwife washed you and put you beside me. Rosa and I talked for a while, and she asked me what I intended to name you. I told her Tamara. It was a name I had chosen many, many years earlier. When your sister Odele was born I had to name her for father’s mother, who died just before. So you see what happened. Our Odele died as well. My golden little girl expired like a candle. This time I wasn’t going to name you for any dead person, so I chose for you my favorite name.

“But Samet didn’t approve of my choice. She said, ‘Don’t do it. Tut es nisht. Itst iz nisht di sho far a yidishn nomen. Now is not the time for a Jewish name.’ She said she had a lot of trouble because her name was Rosa, and she told me to call you Rut, a good Rumanian name. I took her advice and told father to register you as Rut.”

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So there you had it. I was born not on a bed of roses but in a sea of blood, and the unease of Central Europe determined even my name! I was not to be called after a deceased relative because my parents had done this once before and their little girl—the original golden girl of whom I was just a copy—had died at age two of pneumonia or diphtheria. And I was not to be given a Jewish name because everyone was poised for flight, and it wouldn’t do to attract any more attention.

I had never really warmed to my single given name, thinking always of the woman in the Bible who seemed least like me in temperament. I would never have voluntarily followed even my own mother, let alone anyone else’s. But I ought to have realized that in ordinary circumstances my parents would not have called their child Ruth, a name frequently given to converts to Judaism. They gave me a name that to their ears sounded like Be Safe, Be Strong, Stay Alive, and then they hired a German-speaking governess to raise me: I didn’t speak the language of my parents and older brother until we fled to Canada in the summer of 1940. Even nature, as if to make up for the little girl it had stolen, obliged them: I was blond all the time we lived in and crossed Europe, turning dark only after we reached Montreal.

Mother’s revelation startled but did not surprise me. This second account of my birth was so much more fitting, it made me wonder how I could have ever trusted the first. I had always sensed how much I must have wanted to forget those childhood years. My older brother, who recalled far too much, eventually went under from the burden, somewhat like the protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift (1975), my favorite of Bellow’s novels. Ben kept hearing the reverberation of Hitler’s ranting on the radio when he was a child, and the panicked whisperings in the house when his sister Odele fell sick and died. In Canada he tried to drown out the sounds of his past by making music, but they overtook him, like a stubborn tide. My own not-remembering may have protected me from such a fate while at the same time bracing me to deal with reality, which is the only condition I can remember. The same was true of my father, a chemist by profession, who planned our escape from Romania, urging others to do the same. Not so, mother. Of course, I now thought, of course she would have tried to distort reality, to fool herself or to fool me. But then, finally, ready or not, out rushed the truth.

This revised story canceled the foolish fable of the flowers. Mine was a terrible birth in a terrible time. Germany had just promulgated the Nuremberg laws, depriving Jews of the protection of the state, and the state of the protection of law. Stalin had unleashed the Great Terror, which included a special assault on Jewish distinctiveness and from which only World War II would grant a reprieve. Along with all the other fascist parties of Europe, Romania’s Iron Guard, proclaiming Christian and racial reform, was steadily gaining popular support. My father very often spoke of Ana Pauker (née Rabinsohn), the Jewish Stalinist who was arrested in 1935 on the legitimate grounds that she had conspired to overthrow the Romanian government but whose incarceration and trial were used by anti-Semites as proof of Jewish, rather than Communist, treachery.

Pauker exemplified the dilemma of Jews like us, trapped between the Left and Right, denied our national legitimacy by those who purported to be protecting us from fascism. It came to me, all at once, how frightened my parents must have been by the added responsibility of another child. Two years later, when my mother learned that she was pregnant once again, her doctor insisted on an abortion right then and there, on the grounds that a new baby would doom the family, while a timely abortion would help it to survive. I was born when it was no time to be born.

But Saul’s celebration that weekend was a joyous event. In the midst of brooding over my newfound knowledge, I recalled another exchange from Herzog, this one between a lawyer who declares that “Facts are nasty” and his client Herzog, who qualifies this Hobbesian judgment: “You think they’re true because they’re nasty.” Like Artur Sammler discounting the opinion of his refugee friends that doom is inevitable, Herzog denies that truth must be negative. This insistence that realism acknowledge joy and sweetness is the most Jewish part of their common heritage. Surely, no less could be said of my life. The hemorrhage wasn’t necessarily any truer than Mr. Vinovic’s bouquet. Mother saw no contradiction between the two stories because she experienced each of them exactly as she told them. Her delight in her second golden girl was as fierce as in the first. Why then displace rapture with gloom? Why not credit her original version along with its supplement? And really, how many others in my cohort—Jewish, Central European, 1936—were born with so bright a fate as mine?

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In the years that followed, I have tried to see Saul whenever and wherever I can. I was in Israel during a Bellow conference in Haifa, and drove up from Jerusalem one morning to pay my respects. In his recent memoir, Experience, the British writer Martin Amis recalls that conference as the time he met, in Saul, his literary father; I remember it as the time I met the woman Saul was with, Janis Freedman. A few years later, I visited the two of them in Chicago, and got a tour of some of Saul’s old haunts. He pointed out the place where Irving Kristol and Bea (Gertrude) Himmelfarb had lived in their graduate-student days, and talked about his friend Isaac Rosenfeld, one of my favorites among his subjects. We spoke with admiration of Lucy Dawidowicz, and of her Holocaust history, The War Against the Jews. As friendship turned familial, Len and I visited the Bellows in Vermont, and I liked it even better when they came to our house in Montreal. They seemed particularly buoyed when our daughter Abby would take the floor and speak out for Israel with a passion informed by the four years she lived in that country.

Now, in Boston, we and the Bellows have landed in the same harbor, which makes the city feel marginally more like home. With Saul and Janis and their little daughter Rosie, Len and I and our visiting children are privileged to spend many Sabbaths and holidays. I betray no confidences, and I hope occasion no surprises, when I say that much of our conversation turns on Israel’s safety. We hover over the young nation from a distance the way our mothers lovingly fretted over us, and we try to take responsibility for our fellow Jews as our fathers taught us to take responsibility for one another. No one has yet been able, alas, to secure the Jewish people, but it is good to be surrounded by those who will die trying.

“For that is the truth of it,” reflects Mr. Sammler—that each man, in his innermost heart, knows the terms of his contract: “that we all know, God, that we know, we know, we know.”

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¹ Preface by Janis Bellow, introduction by James Wood. Viking, 464 pp., $30.00

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