Saul Bellow
“They cannot be a light unto other nations who denigrate their own.”
“Something to Remember Me By.”
Great Jewish writers in three languages visit the Yiddishists.
It’s a cop-out to explain away a novel’s improprieties on the grounds that they are of another age.
The blessing and the curse.
Finding the thread that connects Franz Kafka, Amos Oz, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick.
The novelist in search of a literary father.
Remembrance of riots past.
Our resident scholar joins us to talk about her recent essay on the novelist Saul Bellow and to expand on her sense of him as a full-fledged Jewish intellectual.
The novelist’s sole work of nonfiction.
His reputation will fall and rise with his people’s.
The great theme of his work is resistance to spiritual constraint, the soul’s freedom as the highest value.
Bellow’s whole career as a writer was devoted to this dichotomy, sometimes veering toward one pole, sometimes toward the other, but never losing sight of both.
The Jewish writer who became America’s most decorated novelist spent his early years prodding the nation’s soul. Then, sensing danger to it, he took up the role of guardian.
