The Life of Saul Bellow by Zachary Leader

Author:Zachary Leader [Leader, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-87467-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

THAT AUGIE IS JEWISH and speaks an English in which Yiddish inflections, constructions, and expressions are heard, is part of what makes him a Columbus. In recounting his adventures, he discovers an American speech largely absent from high culture.32 The guardians of this culture, Bellow told Philip Roth, were “our own WASP establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors.” “These guys infuriated him,” Roth later commented. “It may well have been the precious gift of an appropriate fury that launched him into beginning his third book not with the words ‘I am a Jew, the son of immigrants,’ but rather by warranting that son of Jewish immigrants who is Augie March to break the ice with Harvard-trained professors (as well as everybody else) by flatly decreeing, without apology or hyphenation, ‘I am an American, Chicago born.’ ” Roth calls Augie’s decree “precisely the bold stroke required to abolish anyone’s doubts about the American credentials of an immigrant son like Saul Bellow.” At the end of the novel when Augie says “Look at me, going everywhere!” Roth describes him as “going where his pedigreed betters wouldn’t have believed he had any right to go with the American language.”33

The influence of Yiddish on Augie March is more than a matter of phrases or of familiar character types. In “Laughter in the Ghetto,” a review of Sholom Aleichem’s last novel, The Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son (Saturday Review, May 30, 1953), Bellow notes how “the most ordinary Yiddish conversation is full of the grandest historical, mythological and religious allusions. The Creation, the Fall, the Flood, Egypt, Alexander, Titus, Napoleon, the Rothschilds, the sages, the Laws may get into the discussion of an egg, a clothes-line, or a pair of pants. This manner of living on terms with all times and all greatness contributed, because of the powerlessness of the Chosen, to the ghetto’s sense of the ridiculous.” It seems likely also to have contributed to Bellow’s depiction of Einhorn as Caesar. Then there’s the hardness or harshness of Yiddish. “You may have heard charming, appealing, sentimental things about Yiddish,” Herschel Shawmut writes in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” “but Yiddish is a hard language, Miss Rose. Yiddish is severe and bears down without mercy. Yes, it is often delicate, lovely, but it can be explosive as well. ‘A face like a slop jar,’ ‘a face like a bucket of swill.’ (pig connotations give special force to Yiddish epithets.) If there is a demiurge who inspires me to speak wildly, he may have been attracted to me by this violent unsparing language.”34 The force or bite of Bellow’s depictions of street types and Machiavels owes something to the example of Yiddish, as does the freedom with which he mixes idioms. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg describe Yiddish as “always in rapid process of growth and dissolution … a language drenched in idiom, and therefore a resourceful term in a dialectic or tension in which the thesis was Hebrew and the synthesis a

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