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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3443/bellow-broadway-billy-and-american-jewry/