You Can Lead a Class to Jewish Fiction… Or Can You?

By MARK OPPENHEIMER

 

Last spring I was named the first Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes, an award cleverly named, I figured, not to limit its applicant pool to Jewish writers; in principle, a Gentile writer who writes “on Jewish themes” could win the award. In fact, I later learned that my friend Lauren Winner, who has written a memoir about her conversion from Orthodox Judaism to evangelical Christianity, applied for the award, which seems a rather stellar definition of chutzpah. The award will, I imagine, almost always go to a Jewish writer on Jewish themes, but the Koret Foundation’s decision to consider applications from Gentiles who write about Judaism is a provocative one, one that raises a number of questions that Jewish philanthropies like Koret must deal with all the time.

What, for example, is a Jewish cause? When is money going to “Jewish” activities? Is a Jewish community center whose budget goes largely to social events with little religious component, and which Gentiles may freely participate in, Jewish in the right sense? What is Jewish cultural production--cultural production by Jews? Or is Lauren’s book, which involves a rejection of Judaism but which also contains extraordinarily vivid and smart descriptions of Jewish practice, a Jewish book, making her career worthy of Jewish philanthropic support? And what about specifically Christian or Islamic writers who may be superb, thoughtful conversation partners? Might it be smarter to spend money to fly them in than to fund another night of Jewish singles’ water aerobics?

When I accepted the fellowship, which gave me a substantial stipend, a one-term teaching appointment at Stanford, and much free time to work on my book about bar and bat mitzvahs in American society, I cared not a whit about any of these questions. I was just happy to get the money and a vacation in northern California. I was looking forward to seeing if the rumors were true. Was it true that couples in Berkeley broke up over disagreements about which food co-op to join? Was it true that in the Castro people would talk about “the gay Laundromat” and “the straight Laundromat”? Was it true that NPR was considered right-wing by Pacifica listeners? That people in San Fran would drive 30 miles in order to jog five, then talk about how much they loved the outdoors? (All true, I discovered.) The other questions, the more abstract ones about how we define Jewish culture, did not seem to apply to me, because my project studying b’nai mitzvah was so obviously Jewish.

As a freebie for Stanford, my salary being paid by Koret, I was allowed to teach any class I liked. Having just spent six years in graduate school studying American religious history, and in thrall to Camille Paglia’s idea that the best courses are those somewhat outside the professor’s area of expertise, I proposed a course on American Jewish fiction writers. Spending a term reading Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and Isaac Bashevis Singer would allow me to try teaching a different discipline, literature; fill some small gaps in my own education; and fill some large gaps in my students’ educations, all while honoring my benefactor Koret’s commitment to Jewish cultural life.

In the abstract, a syllabus of American Jewish writers sounds terrifically coherent: who better to yoke together than the writers who are always yoked together, by critics and readers, as belonging to a particular tradition? Saul Bellow once joked that he, Roth, and Malamud were in danger of becoming “the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of our time.” In the 1950s, the decade of The Adventures of Augie March, The Magic Barrel, and Goodbye, Columbus, it seemed that American literature was living in the midst of a Jewish moment. The extraordinary accomplishments of Christian writers like Evan Connell and Richard Yates were not seen as constituting a movement of any sort, even if in retrospect their critique of suburban placidity, later adumbrated by the somewhat younger John Updike, was clearly more of a piece than Malamud and Roth, two writers with almost nothing in common save their Jewish heritage. So powerful was the sense that Jews dominated American letters that the Protestant Edward Hoagland wrote a plaintive essay called “On Not Being a Jew.”

But reading through these books, my students and I wondered what, if anything, they had in common; like Jewish philanthropies, we immediately had to ask what constituted Jewish culture. Anzia Yezierska’s clumsy social realism in Bread Givers; Malamud’s magical realism; Bellow’s grandiose sweep; Roth’s Freudian angst in Portnoy’s Complaint and his bitter racial commentary in The Human Stain—not only did these books not seem a product of the same Jewish mind, they sometimes did not seem Jewish at all.

As one of my bright charges pointed out, of all the books we read only Bread Givers and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story contain meaningful descriptions of Jewish ritual practice. One searches in vain for davening, leyning, or even common Saturday shul-going in the works of Bellow or Roth. Occasionally a mourner says kaddish in Malamud’s short stories; his most direct descendant, the young contemporary writer Nathan Englander, draws on his Orthodox upbringing to write characters who live existences fairly saturated by Jewish observance. But the story of Jewish literature in America might, for the most part, be seen as the escape of Jewish authors from their observant childhoods.

That conflict, of course, is at the center of novels like Portnoy’s Complaint and Bellow’s Herzog. When at the end of the term we asked ourselves if there were any common threads through these books, if we could discern any common themes of a Jewish American canon (or an American Jewish canon), the conflict with Judaism itself was the most prominent. Others included the lure of the Gentile lover, the rejection of the parent, and a hyperactive introspection, a kind of self-consciousness according to which the Jew lives his life as a perpetual session on the analyst’s couch. This trope is nowhere to be found in Malamud, but it is central to Roth, whose Portnoy delivers his whole book as a narrative to his psychiatrist, and it is present as early as Yezierska’s 1925 novel Bread Givers, whose narrator Sara Smolinsky finds liberation in college psychology classes, which give her the intellectual ammunition to blast away the chains of patriarchal tradition and create her life anew.

Still, none of these traits impressed my students as common enough, or important enough, to constitute a tradition. Having heard so many tales of how ethnic differences obsess today’s undergraduates, I was pleasantly surprised by how reluctant they were to discuss literature in terms of ethnic essentialism, how stubbornly they insisted on the autonomy of the individual artist. Roth and Ozick, it seemed to them, spoke for Roth and Ozick, not for Am Yisrael. Yes, we all agreed, literary influence does exist, but in the United States, it seems that all artists are American first. Bellow once wrote, of his childhood, “I did not go to the public library to read Talmud, but the novels and poems of Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay.” It is nice to know, as an officially denominated Young Writer on Jewish Themes, teaching even younger writers on Jewish themes, that an Old Writer on Jewish Themes was vexed by the same questions.