Saul Bellow’s Literary Response to American Jewish Passivity during the Holocaust

Pick
Oct. 8 2018
About Ruth

Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.

In his 1989 novella The Bellarosa Connection, Saul Bellow tells the story of the (fictional) protagonist Fonstein, who escaped Hitler’s Europe with the help of the (entirely nonfictional) Jewish impresario “Broadway Billy” Rose. The novella focuses not so much on the escape itself as on the vain efforts of Fonstein and his wife to connect with, and thank, his seemingly indifferent savior. The true story of Rose, his rise to fame, and his vigorous efforts to rescue Jews from the Holocaust is the subject of Mark Cohen’s recent biography, Not Bad for Delancey Street. Reflecting on both books, Ruth R. Wisse addresses what may be the most troubling question in 20th-century American Jewish history:

In the late 1980s, I had dinner with Saul Bellow, his wife Janis, and my son Jacob at the Café des Artistes [in Manhattan] and finally got up the nerve to ask Saul a question that had troubled me for years. How could he have ignored what was happening to the Jews in Europe and Palestine in the late 1930s and most of the 1940s? I said I was asking as well about his whole cohort of Jewish intellectuals, who, in truth, had reacted nothing like Billy Rose, let alone [the intrepid playwright and Zionist agitator] Ben Hecht. Saul said “America was not a country to us. It was the world.” I might have wished for more, but this book, written a few years later, amplifies his answer.

The message of the book’s final third, writes Wisse, can indeed be summed up in the comments of the “Bellovian” narrator about a secondary character: “The only life he cared to lead was that of an American. So absorbing, that. So absorbing that one existence was too little for it. It could drink up a hundred existences, if you had them to offer, and reach out for more.” Wisse continues:

Mark Cohen believes that his biography shares the upbeat judgment that is implicit in the title of Bellow’s book. “Billy Rose, with all his flaws and pettiness and occasional brutality, is [Fonstein’s mangling of the name]: a bella rosa, a ‘beautiful rose.’” [Cohen] is not mistaken . . . in sensing that Bellow found some virtue in both the man and his type. Tough guys who could get things done like Billy often complemented the introspective narrators of Bellow’s fiction, and he appreciated Billy’s Jewish fellow feeling and actions. . . .

Yet, for Bellow, Rose’s refusal to meet with the man he had saved is just as important. It is an augury of forgetting on the part of a people once renowned for its memory.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: American Jewish History, Broadway, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Saul Bellow

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society