Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys by Jessica R. Feldman;

Author:Jessica R. Feldman; [Feldman, Jessica R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT020000 Literary Criticism / Comparative Literature, ART015000 Art / History / General
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Fig. 48. Untitled, 1971. Pencil, marker, crayon, gold and silver markers, and colored pencil on paper, 10½ × 107/8 in. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

But it is perhaps the very ambiguity of Bloom’s Jewishness that most reminds one of Steinberg’s sense of himself as a Jew. Steinberg takes his Judaism as a fact, but his responses to it range from superficial acknowledgment to painful remembrance. He may be a “member of the tribe,” but he values his isolation from it. Across the years of his correspondence with Buzzi he mentions, for example, that the Jewish New Year falls in autumn, that Cervantes “came from a family of conversos (Jews),” that he has called out to approaching Mormon missionaries, “You haven’t got a chance, we are Jewish” (LAB, August 29, 1971; September 9, 1986; June 3, 1995). From 1985 onward, his comments on Judaism darken, and he writes more often of his childhood in Romania. His diploma from architecture school, the Regio Politecnico in Milan, includes the anti-Semitic phrase “of the Hebrew race,” and he sent it to Primo Levi, mentioning that its elegant typeface “rendered it even more sinister” (LAB, August 12, 1985). He fasts on Yom Kippur, he explains, because it is “my way of showing respect for my tribe, but it’s for me alone, I never go to temple, in fact I’m glad to be able to avoid it. Yet I haven’t made peace with the memory of my childhood. During that period I witnessed not only national horrors but Jewish superstitions, the temple, still painful to recall. What a burden, this childhood” (LAB, September 29, 1990). The anti-Semites are to blame for the horrors of his early years, but Judaism also created its own troubling experiences. In the last decade of his life he’s still hoping to make peace with it. He notices that, of late, “[t]here’s a constant exchange of insults between women, Christians, allegri (gay), Arabs, Jews, liberals etc. There’s a sense of rage in the air, as there was during the days of fascism, in 36 37 38, rage that wants to prove its virility. . . . The Romanians, too, always offended, low foreheads, beady little eyes gazing out beneath their eyebrows, tiny, lipless mouths” (LAB, March 12, 1994).

Reading a book by Alexander Stille (son of his friend Ugo Stille) entitled Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism brings back “the Italian Jews, the war, the intensity of those days, tragic but with the consoling happiness of being young” (LAB, June 19, 1995). A week later, he returns to the subject, the book eliciting detailed memories of his flight from Italy:

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