David Herman
The Great Jewish-American Writers of the 1930s: Mike Gold, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz and Nathanael West
David Herman - The Great Jewish-American Writers of the 1930s: Mike Gold, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz and Nathanael West
- Hello, good evening. My name is David Herman. Welcome back to Gallup Through Jewish American literature. You may remember those of us who’ve managed to bear with me so far that when we started with Emma Lazarus, I asked a question, when did Jewish American writing begin? And we said, with Emma Lazarus. And today, I’m going to start with a very different question and it’s an important distinction, which is when did great Jewish American writing begin? Because I’m very aware that although there have been good Jewish American writers of the late 19th century and the early 1900s, as we’ve looked at over the past few weeks, none of them I would consider great writers. And today, we’re going to start with some very, very good, if not great writers, certainly underrated writers from the 1930s. So when did Jew great Jewish American writing begin? June the 12th, 1909. In 1937, the first issue of the relaunch journal artisan review, which became one of the leading, I think, the leading American journal of opinion and letters in the post-war period. It relaunched in 1937 and it included a story by an unknown Jewish American writer called Delmore Schwartz. A story called, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” And it begins like this. I think it is the year 1909, I feel as if I were an emotion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen. This is a silent picture as if an old biograph one in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old fashioned clothes and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps. The actors too, seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots themselves are full of dots and rays as if it were raining when the picture was photographed.
The light is bad. It is Sunday afternoon, June the 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. It is one of the most astonishing debuts in modern literature. Delmore Schwartz was only 24 when his story was first published. 40 years later, the Jewish American critic, Irving Howe wrote, it was a voice that seemed our own, though it had never really existed until Schwartz invented it. And what happens in the 1930s and why I want to talk today about this group of underrated writers, is that a new voice appeared, not just a new voice in Jewish American writing, but you could argue, a new voice in American writing. Schwartz wasn’t the only writer, the only new writer in the 30s who invented this new voice. When we usually think of Jewish American writers, we think of that extraordinary post-war generation, Bellow, Roth, Heller, Mailer, Miller. But around 1930, another extraordinary group of Jewish American writers suddenly appeared as if from nowhere. In 1931, Nathanael West published his novel, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell.” And in 1933, he published his short novel, “Miss Lonelyhearts.” In 1934, Henry Roth published, “Call It Sleep.” West published “A Cool Million” and a writer called Daniel Fuchs wrote “Summer In Williamsburg,” the first part of a trilogy. In 1935, George and Ira Gershwin wrote “Porgy and Bess.” In 1937, Schwartz, as we saw, wrote “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” And in 1937, West wrote his most famous novel, “The Day of the Locust.” And what the publication of these books and these musicals in the 1930s suggest is some quite dramatic changes in Jewish American writing.
Firstly, we move from immigrants like Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska, and Mary Anton that we were talking about a few weeks ago to the sons of immigrants. And indeed, I regret to say these are all men writers. So from the 1880s to the 1920s, Jewish American writers were immigrant writers born in East Europe or in Russia. In the 1930s, they were all born in America except Henry Roth who came to America at the age of 18 months. Michael Gold was born in New York City. Edward Dahlberg was born in Boston, Nathaniel West in New York, S. J. Perelman, the great screenwriter of the famous Marx Brothers films in 1904 in New York. Henry Roth came to New York at 18 months. And Clifford Odets, as in “Waiting for the Lefty,” was born in Philadelphia. Secondly, they were all young. They were all born in the 1890s or the 1900s, except for Schwartz who was born in 1913. And they all came of age in the 1920s and especially in the 1930s. Then they all write in English, not in Yiddish. And this is a crucial distinction in terms of breaking into the mainstream because of course, they could write for mainstream, literary English speaking audiences, not just for Jewish newspapers or magazines. And this was not a simple question in their writing and we will come back to that later. But this is a question generally that hung over Jewish American writing for decades to come, because even English speaking writers in the post-war period were aware of what an issue this was, whether somebody wrote a Jewish writer wrote in English or in Yiddish. There’s the famous exchange in Malamud’s short story, “The Last Mohican” when Susskind asks Fidelman, Yiddish? And Fidelman says, I express myself best in English.
Eli Peck in Philip Roth’s great, greatest short story. Eli the fanatic says, say something, speak English. He, Eli Peck pleaded to the refugee. Alfred Kazin writes in his memoir, “The Kitchen” and “Walking in the City” in 1951, the unmarried cousin who boarded with us had English books in her room, the only English books in our house. And Edelstein, the Yiddish poet, his plaintiff, cry to Hannah in Cynthia Ozick’s wonderful story, envy or Yiddish in America, translate me, lift me out of the ghetto. It’s my life that’s hanging on you. These are not marginal pieces of writing. These are among the greatest stories published in America in the 20th century. So this question, the importance of this question, do you write in Yiddish? Do you read Yiddish? Do you speak Yiddish or English, is a massive question hanging over Jewish American writing from the late 19th century right through into the 21st century. Then there’s a question of the clash of generations in Anzia Yezierska story, “Children of Loneliness,” as we saw in 1923, there was a clash between the college educated Rachel and her immigrant parents and the world of lower Eastside tenements and traditional ways. In Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep,” there’s a clash between the son, David Shell and his father, Albert. In stories like- Well, films like “The Jazz Singer, "The Cantor’s Son,” “Immigrant” theatre and cinema are full of the issue of the generational chasm and the theme of filial return. Should the jazz singer be a jazz singer or should he be a cantor in the synagogue? If not outright war, there’s another campaign going on. The fathers are failures. Unfailingly, they are failures.
They can’t speak proper English, they can’t make a proper living. They can’t hold on to a job. So crucially, the three masterworks, masterpieces of the 1930s, “Jews Without Money,” “Call It Sleep,” and Schwartz’s story are all set in the deep pre-World War I, immigrant past. “Jews Without Money” by Mike Gold is during the narrators and Mike Gold’s childhood. “Call It Sleep,” begins in May, 1907 and finishes before World War I. And Schwartz’s story is as we’ve seen about his father’s visit to his mother on the 12th of June, 1909. The great writing of the 1930s, in other words, is about an art escape. The immigrant experience of their fathers. That is their great subject and they write about it brilliantly. Then these novels and stories are set between two worlds. Anzia Yezierska in “Children of Loneliness” wrote, I’ve broken away from the old world. I’m through with it. It’s already behind me. I must face this loneliness till I get to the new world. I’m alone. I’m alone till I get there. But am I really alone? Am I seeking? I’m one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wondering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in. Edward Dahlberg, another very underrated writer from the 30s wrote about a broken prayer, half in Hebrew and the rest in Midwestern American. Aportaciones story, “Brothers” published in 1928, is about one brother, a Rabbi, lamenting the death of Judaism in America, the other, a socialist. Ludwig Lewisohn in his memoir “Upstream” in 1922. He’s too Jewish for Columbia, too educated for the lower recent night. And then hovering over all of these writings and all of these writers, is the decline of Judaism and the traditional ways. In Joseph aportaciones story “Brothers,” he writes, the synagogue stood there, locked up dead.
The rabbi looked at the building and thought about how Judaism was declining in America. May 11 in the old bunch write, my God, the name, some people give their kids, I was to abriss down stairs of us and they’re old fashioned shoes, and they named the kit, Matashimayas or shmatanyaho or some Bible name. It certainly sounded terrible. I don’t see why people should persist in giving their children Jewish names. After all, we are Americans. Well, the old folks came from the old country and didn’t know any better. In “Jews Without Money,” you’ve got on the one hand, the old country and the world of devils and superstition of which nobody has anything positive to say. There’s nothing liberating or life-affirming about the world of religion or the world of the Hadar. And there’s a reference to a read Moishe’s “Hellhole of Jewish Piety.” And then there are the fatherless boys and the whole question of father’s sons and tradition. You may remember, when we were looking at Abraham Cahan’s story, “A Wedding In The Ghetto,” the old genteel sentimental world of tender solicitations and the starry night above, gone, dead, dead, gone. But what’s going to replace it? What tradition do the new writers born in the 1900s, born in America, publishing in the 1930s. What tradition do they belong to? So hence, the image that recurs through Jewish American fiction, not just in the 1930s, but also after the second World War. The rabbi in aportaciones “Brothers,” his father is dying. Edward, in the confessions of Edward Alberg, who is my father, was my continual liturgy. Not where or how, but who. Who begot me? Had I no progenitor? I was a dark root of nothing in my own emptiness groaned. In what city are my father’s footprints?
Does he walked, does he breathed? And is he suckled by the winds? See, I’m a shade emptied of ancestors. I stood there, filled with a fatherless emptiness. Dahlberg’s narrator has a mother. Boy, does he? But no father. Who is my father? Who begot me? Have I know progenitor? This is one of the great themes of Jewish American literature. It is not there between 1880 and 1930, and it starts with the new writers of the 1930s. Edward Dahlberg and certainly gives an interesting twist when he says, who is my father? There is a question about autobiography, his life. He’s fatherless and ends up in an orphanage, but there’s also a larger question about a whole generation. Who are our fathers? The fathers of this new generation, born in a new country and a new century as Jews? In other words, what is our relationship to immigration? What is our relationship to Yiddish, to Judaism? Finally, there’s a new kind of dirty realism in town. Dahlberg writes, in Kansas City, his mother was 50 years old now with scrawny nervous hair coloured with a cheap henna dye. My mother’s appearance humiliated me when I regarded the loose dangling throat and the skin of her face that was beginning to yellow. I thought no other son was as unfortunate as I. This is the new voice of American dirty realism. Which of the pretty young sweethearts of Abraham Cahan or the Yiddish mamas of the 1890s and 1900s, has nervous hair or a loose dangling throat?
Mike Gold when he writes about prostitutes in “Jews Without Money” in the first chapter, people stumbled over a gauntlet of whores, meaty legs. The girls winked and jeered made lascivious gestures at passing males. You don’t get many of those in earlier writing, similarly with Henry Roth. And finally, there’s modernism. Henry Roth and Nathaniel West are an interesting mix of traditional Jewish American writing and modernism. They’re knowing, they’re full of literary references to fielding, to rablay. I opened the door to the oven of the gas range and saw a copy of Fielding’s “Tom Jones” inside. It was stained with butter and pieces of bread and orange peelings lay on top of it. My mother had resolved to be educated. The thing is, before 1900, before the 1930s, you don’t get these kind of literary references in Jewish American writing. So what on Earth is a copy of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones doing inside an oven in a gas range on the Lower East side? So I’m going to focus now on three great writers, Michael Gold, who wrote one of the two great accounts of the immigrant experience and the Lower East Side. Henry Roth who wrote the other one and Delmore Schwartz. And between them, they cover interestingly, the two options available to the Jewish American writer in the 1930s, realism, Michael Gold. Moving from realism to something more complex and engaging with modernism, Henry Roth and Delmore Schwartz. And there’s a sort of third option, something altogether more strange like in the writing of Nathaniel West, which I’m afraid, we won’t have time to fit in today.
What none of them managed was what the great post-war Jewish American writers managed, a mix of accessible realism on the one hand and something more complex and a mainstream audience. So you’ll have to wait till 2024 for that. Moving on, Mike Gold’s “Jews Without Money” was published in 1930. Mike Gold was not his real name, of course, his real name was Itzok Isaac Granich. He was born in the 1890s in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants, of course, and he came to New York in the 1920s and he published “Jews Without Money,” which astonishingly is his only novel, and it was published in 1930. In the 1930s, he became something of a left wing windbag to be truthful and after the war, he disappeared and died in 1967. “Jews Without Money” is one of the two great novels about the Lower East Side, the Jewish immigrant area. It’s a world of tenements, sweatshops, low life slum landlords. And what is striking about it is the prose, the quality of the writing. It’s vitality. It’s full of fascinating, lively characters, prostitutes, small time hoods and gangsters called Harry, the pimp or Louis one eye, a bit like Isaac Babel’s “Tales in Odessa.” It’s full of short, punchy sentences and verbs, and activity, and a world of sheer variety and plenitude and particular images.
The fat old made teacher, for example, and a new fresh demotic language. The rain was warm and sticky. It spattered on the tin roofs like a gangster’s blood or my brain raced like a sewing machine. At one point, Gold writes, torque has ever been the joy of the Jewish race, Great Torrance of boundless exalted torque. And that, is what his novel is like. And the characters are called Harry the pimp, Mash of the blind prostitute, Louie one eye, Jake Wolf, the saloon owner, Jim Bush, a fiery little Irish cripple and Ganof, the horse. Reth Moisher, the teacher at Hadar. Fifka the miser, Mendel the bum, Reb Samuel, the devout Hasidic umbrella maker. The two doctors, Dr. Axel Rod and the saintly, Dr. Solof. The nigger’s father, the near blind Taylor, and nigger himself, if you’ll excuse the language. And there’s something else about the writing. He uses words like pageant, fun, and good times, and Gold brings what he calls gales of bold life into Jewish American literature. I hated to leave the funds as the narrator early on. He loved good times. There was always something for boys to see in the free enormous circus of the east side. Winter is fun too with its snowball fights, but summers are big circus. It was a splendid performance. He brought gales of bold life into the stale world. It’s full of storytellers. His father was that he describes as that marvellous storyteller. But there’s also the dark side, the world of poverty, of tenements, sweatshops, and peddlers.
Motka, the vest maker. Mr. Lipson, the tongue tied banana peddler. Fifka the miser, Lechner, the house painter, the old German scissors grinder, the mysterious lemonade man, Reb Samuel, the umbrella maker. You’re not going to get many of these in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. And of course, there’s the father of the narrator, described as a man in a trap. Swindled by his cousin, he loses his shop. He becomes a house painter, but then has an accident and breaks his feet. He ends as a banana peddler. I’m just a poor little Jew without money, he says. There’s genuine pathos in the account of the father. I met my father near Cooper Union, writes the narrator. I recognised him, a hunched frozen figure in an old overcoat standing by a banana cart. He looked so lonely. The other preoccupations are perhaps a bit more close to the immigrant writers we were looking at recently. The preoccupation with the old country, the east side, never forgot Europe, he writes. The world of Di Books, devils, Pogroms. They would tell the bad news of the old country. The news was always bad. Traditional customs like the promised bride, superstition, witch doctors. And yet, there’s also a kind of nostalgia and kind of idealisation of that world as well. And crucially, perhaps, the story is seen from a boy’s point of view. The lower East Side is seen from a boy’s point of view. These are after all, these writers, Gold and Schwartz, and so on. Henry Roth, they are the sons, not the fathers. And there’s a lot of talk of broken English interestingly. Harry the pimp says learn english.
It was Harry the pimp, who gave me my first book to read. It was a book of fairytales. The whole tenement was talking and eating at supper. The broken English came through the air shaft window. This talk of gabbling mamas, a babble of tearful voices broke out. And this brings us back again to the crucial question of the Father, the son, and the language. The father cannot speak English. The father tells stories. He loves Yiddish plays and reads newspapers, but it’s the son who reads books. He’s given a book by Harry the Pimp. He reads books about Buffalo Bill. He reads, Henty, above all at the end, there’s a crucial scene with his teacher who gives him a parting gift, a volume of Emerson’s essays. One of the great essays of the 19th century who of course, wrote in English. These are not incidental. These moments when books suddenly, apparently randomly appear. Emerson’s essays, fieldings Tom Jones in an oven. These are very telling moments worth looking out. They’re like minds in a literary minefield. This is at the centre of the Father-son relationship. On the one hand, the son is the hope in the promised land. On the other hand, the son is the American, the alien. He’s lost to his parents. He’s reading Emerson’s essays. And then of course, this brings us to the question of America as well as the old country. It’s always two-sided. There’s the father’s story about the Promised Bride and how he came to America. I’m going to America to make my fortune. When I left for America, everyone repeated my father’s words. He will eat the bread of sorrow and shame in America. He will never make his fortune.
Will he make his fortune? Will he never make his fortune? In his village, he sees two pictures of America in the window of a store that sold singer sewing machines. One is of a skyscraper, the other is of Niagara Falls. He goes to Niagara on his honeymoon and loses his shop. Later in Moscowitz, his wine cellar, there’s a scene where there are three pictures, idyllic scenes from Romanian life. Theodore Roosevelt, famous American president charging up San Juan Hill and a portrait of Herzl draped with the Jewish Zionist flag. The triangle of immigrant life, the old country, America, Zionism. And crucially, all three pictures in Moscowitz’s wine cellar are idealised and romanticised, and this is what Gold does brilliantly. He moves between sentimentality, idealisation, romanticism, and on the other hand, that unforgettable image of the father selling bananas, lonely, cold, alone. And at the end, that’s what we’re left with, that enduring image. A man in a trap, a hunched frozen figure in an old overcoat. I’m just a poor little Jew without money. His son is his one last hope and his son in the meantime, is being given a copy of Emerson’s essays. Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep,” is arguably an even greater novel. It was published in 1934. Roth was only 28 at the time.
He was born in Galicia in 1906, came to America when he was 18 months, lived in Brownsville and Brooklyn, and then the Lower East Side. And when he was eight, moved to Harlem. In 1924, he went to City College and there he met a professor of English at NYU. Early Jewish American writing is full of important teachers who either give their Jewish pupils copies of Emerson’s essays or they encourage their writing. And in this case, Eda Lou Walton encouraged him to write “Call It Sleep,” and it’s dedicated to her. And he is a member of the Communist Party, as was Mike Gold from 1933 to 56. He’s then forgotten for 30 years and then rediscovered in 1960. Irving Howe, the great Jewish American literary critic, gave its new paperback edition, an unprecedented front page review in the New York Times book review and it went on to sell a million copies. One thing to remember about Jewish American writing, is it’s never just about the writers, it’s also about a whole generation after the second World war of Jewish American literary professors like Lionel Trilling, critics like Irving Howe and publishers and agents. And that network which emerges after the Second World War, was not available to any of the previous generations, but becomes available in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s. One reason, it becomes the golden age is because, not just because of the writers who are great writers, but also, because there’s this whole network that makes them possible.
So Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep,” owes its fame now largely to Irving Howe and the New York Times book review. And again, like “Jews Without Money,” it’s told from the child’s point of view. It’s set before World War I, begins May 1907, finishes before the First World War. And it’s a world again of immigrants, tenements, the Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, poverty, and there are four key features. It’s a family at war, especially the father against the mother and the father against the son. Fathers of a problem in these great works of the 1930s, fathers of the problem and the battle is narrated by the son. That is the basic gist of it. The second key feature again is America. The third key feature is language. Yiddish, English, Hebrew, the great triangle, and then his modernism. All four features are set in place in the prologue. One of the all time great pieces of Jewish American writing. The boat arrives, there’s the Statue of Liberty, people are meeting and greeting a woman and a small child get off the boat. They’re met by a man. But these two stood silent apart, writes Roth. He describes the father. His voice was dangerous. The truth is you didn’t, he snapped turning his anger against her. They were silent. The harsh voice, the wrathful glare. Amidst all this, one detail, he asks his wife, did you bring his, meaning the trials, birth certificate. Why? She seemed confused. It may be in the trunk there on the ship. I don’t know, perhaps, I left it behind. Her hand wondered uncertainty to her lips. I don’t know. Is it important? I never thought of it, but surely father could send it.
We need only, right. This of course, is the key to the plot. The wife and the husband, each have a terrible secret from their past. That’s why they’re chained to each other. All we need to know for now is that from here on, the father hates the wife. But above all, he hates the son. From the first sentence, “Call it Sleep” is about America. The small white steamer, Peter Stuyvesant, that delivered the immigrants from the stench and throb of the steerage to the stench and throb of New York tenements. Peter Stuyvesant was the governor of New Netherlands when the first Jews came to America in the 17th century. Again, names are always important in Jewish American writing. Details, literary details. Whenever you get the name of a boat or a book in an oven, it’s always important. It matters. The first word spoken, and this is the golden land. You must have suffered in this land. They will suffer. This is a novel without illusions about America. And then there’s the Statue of Liberty. And there is no description of the Statue of Liberty like this one. I missed something out, something crucial. Not on purpose, sorry. The first words in the novel, and this is the golden land. Roth goes on, she spoke in Yiddish. The first words in the novel are in English, but they’re also in Yiddish at the same time. A novel about Jewish immigrants who speak Yiddish, but it’s more complicated. They speak Yiddish at home, Hebrew at synagogue, and especially at Hadar, English on the street and at work.
Who can speak English? Next question, father can, mother can’t, son can. There are constant references to who can and who can’t speak English. Which language matters? Hebrew and Aramaic matter because they’re the language of God in the past, but they don’t matter because they’re dead. How does a writer represent Yiddish? Sometimes they speak Yiddish. In Yiddish, crucially at the beginning and at the end of the novel. Sometimes they speak Yiddish in English. And this is the golden land. And sometimes, they speak a Yiddish inflected pigeon English on the street, and sometimes they speak English and use words that have a very different meaning. In Yiddish, “Call It Sleep” is the most ambitious attempt to depict a multilingual multicultural society in action. And it’s all about who speaks what language to whom. And then modernism. There are two clues to the modernism of all its feet. First, does writing matter? The conversation about the birth certificate, remember that? She says, we need only right, only right. This would be true in the late 19th century, early 20th century realist story. But in the 1930s, this is a whole other kettle of fish, only write. Their first exchange, you must have suffered in this land. She continued gentle despite his rebuke. You never wrote me. On the same page, he’s talking to her about the fair. She had given the wrong birth date for the child.
Didn’t I write you to say 17 months, ‘cause it would save the half fair? Their last exchange at the end of the prologue, they speak in Yiddish. Did somebody write? What did they write? What is a piece of writing? A birth certificate say, matter. These are questions at the heart of modernism. We have not seen anything like them in Jewish American writing before. A second clue to it, the modernism, the chains of images. The boy arrives wearing a blue hat, the odd outlandish blue straw hat on his head, it’s described. The father hates the boy and he hates the hat. It’s distinctly foreign aspect. Where did he find that crown? And he throws it into the ocean. Later, his mother brings home a picture of a field of corn and corn flowers. It reminds her of the old country. We later find out, it reminds her of one crucial moment in particular. There’s a blue book at Hadar. Later, he sees the familiar blue cap of his father’s milkman’s cap. This chain of images is again, something quite new in Jewish American writing. We’ve never come across it before. This happens elsewhere. White snow, there’s a reference to white snow, then there’s a reference to pearls in his grandmother’s hair. Then there’s a clear white tablecloth. The salt shaker, the sugar bowl, a cube of sugar, or again, the picture of the cornfield, mother lassie’s Ludwig in a cornfield. Father then has cornmeal for breakfast. This is what I ate. He smeared the deep red jam on the corn meal when I was a boy.
The book is made up of such threads of images. Increasingly, they start to erupt in the text like fragments, a word, an image explodes from nowhere. The Statue of Liberty is charred. It has spikes. It has a broken sword. The book becomes full of mutilated, broken fragments, actual objects sometimes, sometimes words, bits of polish and Yiddish conversation. Images that come to his mind in increasingly frantic stream of consciousness. Later, as the novel reaches its climax, we find bits of Elliot, Joyce, references to Conrad. This is a new kind of writing. It’s not just a story of a child and his immigrant parents. It’s full of realism and suffering, but it’s also about writing and language. How do you write about people who speak Yiddish? In English, how do you write about the experiences of people whose experience is broken and fragmented by being uprooted, moved from the old country to America whose hopes and dreams are smashed, broken like the Statue of Liberty sawed? These are the questions at the heart of Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep.” And that’s why it’s a masterpiece. Finally, deep breath. Here we go. Delmore Schwartz, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” 1937, the title is taken from Yates.
It’s the epigraph for his book of poems, “Responsibilities” published in 1914. 1914, incidentally, was the year Sholom Aleichem, Sholem Aleichem, and Jacob Glatstein come to the US, the year Malamud was born, the year before Bellow was born, and the year after Schwartz was born. Yates was one of the writers who fascinated the new Jewish writers in their love for modernism. Schwartz and Yates, Bellow and Joyce, Arthur Miller and Ibsen, Philip Roth and Kafka. Cynthia Ozick and temporarily forgotten his name, it’ll come back to me. Modernism. They came after modernism, but it’s also about what they do with modernism. It doesn’t inhibit them or freeze them in the way, Abraham Cahan was frozen into respectability. They add something to modernism. They add energy, they add accessibility. But there’s still the modernism. Sons and fathers again, my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. It’s a drama, of course, of a son and his parents. A son is sitting in a cinema, watching his father caught his mother in 1909. It’s not like the young couple in Abraham Cahan, a ghetto wedding. No sweatshops or lower East side. The marriage is going to be a disaster. I stood up in the theatre and shouted, don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds. Both of you, nothing good will come it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.
There’s a way to write about your parents’ wedding and courtship. It doesn’t focus on the young couple, but on the son watching his parents and grandparents. This is the three generational drama as told by the son. The story of Jewish American literature is of three generations. The immigrant fathers, Yiddish, Judaism, poverty. The sons born around World War I who write in English and are born in America. And they’re the writers, not just the writers, they’re the great writers. They produce the golden age of Jewish American writing. It’s novels short stories, screenplays, and musicals. And then there are the grandsons and granddaughters born after World War II. And by and large, except for David Mamet, Tony Kushner. They’re pretty negligible to be frank. The great golden age of Jewish American literature is the literature of sons, the sons of the immigrants, writing about their fathers from Schwartz to Augie March and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and all my sons, to El Doctor and Bernard Malamud, Irving Howe’s “World of our Father’s,” Irving Howe’s Great masterpiece. Think of these lines, I’m the father, says Eli Peck in Philip Roth’s Eli, the fanatic. In 1955, my father died. The opening words of E. L. Doctorow, is the writer in the family. The opening words of Bernard Malamud’s “the Silver Crown,” Gance, the father, laid dying on a hospital bed. And think of the violence and intensity of such moments as the end of Malamud’s story, “The Silver Crown,” Gance, the son, he hates me, the son of a bitch.
I hope he croaks or the end of bellows something to remember me by. My father rose from his chair and hurried towards me. His fist was ready. All this begins with Delmore Schwartz. Then there’s the movement through time. Schwartz’s story moves between his parents courting in 1909 and the narrator, their son now 21, writing in the 1930s. This is the dominant mode of much of the greatest Jewish American writing. It is rarely set in some simple past tense. The past constantly erupts into the present. There is a constant movement between the past and the present. The past of the fathers and the present of the sons. It gives this strange multidimensional quality to the best Jewish American writing. It also gives its characteristic nostalgia. Looking back stories from the deep past of immigrant New York and Chicago. Think of Augie March set in the 1920s, published in 1953 of “Herzog,” of Bellow’s greatest short story, “Something to Remember Me By” set in 1933, published in 1990. Alfred, the writer “In The Family,” set in 1955, published in 1984. Alfred Cain’s, the memoir, “The Kitchen” published in a walker in the city. The sense overwhelmingly of living at the end of a traditional way of life, of religion, of values, customs, and traditions of Yiddish, of working class culture, of immigrant culture, of the relationship to the old country.
And then there’s a new element, “The South.” Schwartz’s narrator is the first great Jewish American suffering joker. He cries out, screams, I burst out weeping. I stood up in the theatre and shouted, my terrible fear. The usher drags him out of the movie theatre, calling him hysterical. He’s finally thrown out into the cold light. And I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday. The window sill shining with its lip of snow and the mourning had already begun. The point is not just the emotion and sadness, it’s a sense that the real drama is inside the narrator. These are not stories of social drama. Yes, there’s poverty. Yes, there are trade unions. Yes, there’s the Lower East Side in Brooklyn. Yes, there’s anti-Semitism and immigration. But these are also stories of the self. So to conclude, more or less on time, two questions. Why did such good writers have such short careers?
Edward Dahlberg, three books. Nathanael West died young at 37 after having published four short, very strange books. Delmore Schwartz died young at 53. He wrote his most famous story when he was in his 20s. Mike Gold published only one novel. Henry Roth published one great novel and then disappeared. And then subsequently later, other works were were published, but nothing as good as “Call It Sleep.” And then on the other hand, after the War, Bellow, Roth, Heller, Mailer, Miller, Ginsburg, lived long, huge careers. 20 something novels, plays, shells sort of books. I’ve got a lot of ‘em behind me here. Secondly, why did these writers, not only have such short careers, why did they never reach a mainstream audience? Something happened between the 1930s and the 1950s, which we’ll come to in the new year in February, not in January, because I’m going to be busy with a new grandchild. But in February, I’ll be back. Something happened between the 1930s and the 1950s. What was it? And that’s what we’re going to be talking about in February. And let me see, I can see there are some questions already here.
Q&A and Comments:
Shelly Shapiro asks me, thank you, Shelly, for this.
Q: What are your criteria for great writing?
A: My goodness, Shelly, that is a question and a half. How long have we got? Well, we’ve got about 12 minutes. So let’s see. Great writing can be many things obviously. It can be a great story and a great plot. It can have great drama. And sometimes, it’s just about great images and sentences. The story may not work, the plot may not engage us. But there are particular sentences like Henry Roth’s description of the Statue of Liberty, which just stop us in our tracks and leave us gasping. So I would say, if you’ve got any of these, plus taking on great issues, Philip Roth wrote great novels full of great writing, but also about big questions.
What happened to New York, New Jersey after the Jews moved out? And why did the Jews move out and where did they move to? And who replaced them? And he writes about what happened to American politics between McCarthyism and Bill Clinton? And Saul Bellow writes about Jewish life as remembered long afterwards by narrators who are thinking back to the distant past. And they’re thinking back to characters like Grandma Lausch from Ukraine. Augie March is thinking about Grandma Lausch. What does Grandma Lausch mean to a young Chicago born guy like Augie March? So I suppose that’s what we call great writing. It takes big issues. They may be about families, which is Arthur Miller’s great subject borrowed from Ibsen or they may be about a whole society which is turning upside down. They may be about the Second World War, which will come to, in February, Joseph Heller’s, catch 22, Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead.” Some of Philip Roth’s writing about the Korean War. They may be about a society on the move from the Lower East Side and the Brooklyn and the Bronx to the suburbs, which is part of Philip Roth’s breakthrough novella, “Goodbye Columbus.” They may be about what on Earth has happened to middle-aged men, Jewish men, Jewish American men in the writing, the later writing of Joseph Heller, like “Good As Gold” or Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”.
So they take on all kinds of great issues. And I suppose one of the problems that a lot of women readers have had with some of these writers is that they’re all told from the male point of view. And do women readers really want to read about Arthur Gold and Moses Elkanah Herzog and the other things. Leaving aside the question of gender for a moment, the other thing is, is about language and it is about literature. And Moses Elkanah Herzog probably saw Bellow’s greatest character, is named after a character from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce was one of Bellow’s favourite writers. Bellow was a very well-read guy, so was Philip Roth. It so happens that Philip Roth read different kinds of stuff. Bellow was soaked in classic golden age modernism. Roth was very interested in post-war Jewish East European writers. Bruno Schultz was the writer, I was trying to remember. There we go, finally got there. He wrote about Bruno Schultz. He wrote about Primo Levy, he wrote about Aharon Appelfeld. He wrote about Kafka. So Arthur Miller had his own very particular kind of canon of writers that who influenced him Ipsen above all. So these are the sort of questions that hang around when we talk about great writing, I think.
Jill shifts as we need an annotated reading list. Well, I’ll speak to the powers that be and see if how we can arrange that.
Rita says something extremely nice, which I didn’t repeat because I will just blush, but thank you ever so much.
Monty’s iPad says Lillian Hellman. Well, Lillian Hellman really, is a later writer, and we will return to her. or we won’t return to her, because we haven’t started with her, but we will come to her. Donald Fishman will the novels of Shalam Ash who wrote in Yiddish were popular in its time in English translation survived. No. I can categorically, unfortunately, assure you that outside places like the National Yiddish Book Centre in America, it is very unlikely that Yiddish writers, I know there has been a fantastic explosion of translation of Yiddish writers, an attempt to rediscover once forgotten Yiddish writers and indeed to revisit writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer and his brother and his sister, Esther Kreitzman. But outside of a very, very small world, I think they just, the moment has passed, I’m afraid. I’m sorry to say this. My father spoke Yiddish, his family spoke Yiddish. And I wish I spoke Yiddish and read Yiddish, but no, I’m sorry, Donald. I regret to say, I hope, I’m wrong, but I really doubt it.
Sharon Fingleson also asked for a reading list. I will speak to the powers that be about this.
Q: Jack Hoffman asks, are books of the writers you’ve spoken about available?
A: Yes, they are all available and they’re all available in paperback as well as in hardback. The short stories tend to be available in anthologies, but the novels, all the novels I’ve mentioned are available Jack. So either go onto Amazon.co UK, if you like a really nice looking republished hardback, go to A Books or one of the other secondhand books providers or of course, go to your local small bookstore. And if you’re blessed with a really passionate local small bookstore owner, I hope they will be able to help you. But just give them the names, Mike Gold, Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep,” Delmar Schwartz, and all the previous writers we’ve looked at in the previous weeks. They will be able to help you and advise your nice additions. Because for example, this sound may sound silly, but I first started reading Saul Bellow back in the 1970s. Yes, I am that old, with the wonderful drawings on the cover by Ben Shan. And I will not buy any other Saul Bellow editions. Although, I do sometimes buy other additional Saul Bellow editions in addition to the ones with these covers by Ben Shan because they have good introductions. And I don’t know how many copies of the Adventures of Augie March, one of Saul Bellow’s two masterpieces. And the reason is, because one has an introduction by Salman Rushdie. Terrific. One has an introduction by Martin Amos. Terrific. One has an introduction, and it’s the best of the bunch by Christopher Hitchens. So, yeah. so sometimes, it’s worth getting an addition just for the introduction, 15, 20 pages of Genius.
Jerry Friedman, Cynthia Ozick’s influence was Henry James, I believe. You are so right, Jerry. That’s absolutely true. And I hope we will come back to, or come to Cynthia Ozick in due course. She’s somebody I’ve interviewed for Jewish Book Week here in London online. And I’m a huge admirer of Cynthia Ozick. She’s a wonderful writer, a delightful person, and a terrific essayist. She has written volumes of essays and you are absolutely right. Henry James was a huge influence on her, which raises a question how somebody as Jewish as Cynthia Ozick could be so passionate about somebody as non-Jewish and at times, openly anti-Semitic as Henry James. That’s a question for another time.
Thank you Margaret for your kind email.
Q: Jerry Friedman, can you talk about Delmore Schwartz appearing as a character in a Bello novel? Was it Humboldt’s gift?
A: It was Humboldt’s gift. Jerry, you are absolutely right. I may return to that when we come to Saul Bellow. But Bellow and Schwartz were great friends. Bellow had a number of poet Modi friends, Damned poet friends and Delmore Schwartz is one of them. And Delmore Schwartz became a very damaged person and drink and mental illness did for him, I’m sad to say. And Bellow was fascinated by Schwartz, what a talent he was, but also how he went spiralled into decline. And so Humboldt’s Gift is a great novel and it’s largely based on a character who is based on Delmore Schwartz.
And Riva Solomon says Singer. And I assume this takes us back, Riva, to the question of will Yiddish literature survive? My guess is, this is only a guess, but there is a very interesting piece by one of my favourite American literary critics, Adam Kirsch in a recent edition of The New Yorker, probably a couple of issues ago about IJ Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s older brother who made Isaac Bashevis Singer’s migration to New York Possible. And at the time, there were three talented Singer writer siblings, Isaac IJ Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Esther Kreitzman. Esther Kreitzman settled in London, the two brothers settled in New York. They were all from Poland. And at the time that he was alive, people thought that IJ Singer was the great novelist and the great writer of the family. And that Isaac Bashevis Singer would be forever in his shadow. And interestingly, what has happened obviously, is that Isaac Bashevis Singer became the famous writer, won the Nobel Prize, published in paperback around the world, translated by Saul Bellow. “Gimpel The Fool” was translated by Bellow for Partisan review in the 1950s. And now, this is the subject of Kush’s Review in the New Yorker. I. J. Singer is making a comeback and is beginning to be recognised as a writer in his own right. And so one of the things about literary reputations is we have all the time in the world, we have decades and centuries to work out who are the greater writers. And sometimes the people you think are the greater writers because they’re famous for a decade or 30 years or even a century, don’t have the legs.
And the question will be, and it’s interesting you say, Singer, you don’t say IJ Singer or IB Singer or indeed Esther Kreitzman. So we will see which of the three becomes most famous. Will Bellow and Roth, for example, survive from their views of race and gender? For my money, they’re the greatest Jewish American writers of the postwar period. But were some of their comments and some of their actions, will that destroy their legacy? I remember going to the big Bouncer Noble on the Upper West side in New York a few years ago, trying to get hold of Bellow’s letters. And I said, do you have the letters of Saul Bellow? And the young assistant looked at, blinked at me and looked at me rather askew as to, and he said, what do you mean? And I said, what do you mean? What do I mean? Do you not know letters? Do you not know Saul? Do you not know Bellow? And he didn’t have it. They didn’t have it. At Barnes and Noble, one of the biggest bookstores in New York City. Hmm. So you never know what happens to reputations.
So Riva, we may have a- I’m not sorry, I’m not quite sure whether you’re Solomon Riva or Riva Solomon, so my apologies. But it’s a bit hard to say which Singer will survive? Will they all survive? Will none of them survive? Yiddish, they will survive in translation, perhaps not.
Karen Kleeman, sorry Silman, I beg your pardon. Thank you so much for this talk. We now have our reading recommendations for the New Year. You could do a lot worse than Mike Gold’s “Jews Without Money” and Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep,” and Delmore Schwartz’s stories. I promise you, you could do a lot worse.
Q: And Merner’s iPad too. How many remained observant?
A: It seemed those in the musical field left or at least lapsed. Yeah. Apart from Cynthia, my guess is that Cynthia Ozick is observant. My guess is that none of the others we’ve talked about are or were, it is only a guess. I would be very surprised. They would’ve known the liturgy. They would’ve known most of them from the earlier part of the 20th century and certainly, Bellow knew Yiddish. But the younger they get, of course, the less they speak Yiddish and the more lapsed they become. Although, oddly, now here’s a twist. One of the things that the younger generation, the younger, very impressive generation of Jewish American writers, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, Michael Chabon, but particularly England, I think, held against writers of the Bellow-Roth generation, is that they weren’t proper Jews in their view. They didn’t write about Judaism, they didn’t write about Israel by and large, they didn’t write about the Holocaust.
And interestingly, a lot of their best books of this younger generation do engage, in particular with the Holocaust. If you think of the first breakthrough novel of Jonathan Safran Foer, everything is Illuminated or Nicole Krauss, story of Love, History of Love, or Nathan Englander in his first book of Short Stories where he writes a story about the Yiddish poet’s murder by Stalin. That is all very interesting stuff. And they really engage with the dark side of 20th century Jewish European history in a way that Bellow and Roth did much less. Although Roth, that gives it an interesting twist by thinking what would’ve happened if Kafka had come to America? What would’ve happened if Anne Frank had come to America? So those are interesting questions. And Roth, of course, edited a formidably impressive and interesting selection of books, which introduced a lot of the great East European writers of the 1960s and 70s, 50s, 60s, and 70s to British and American English speaking audiences. Prima Levy, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klima, George Conrad, the Hungarian writer and so on.
Q: Maggie Garston, is Abraham Cahan from this era? A book of his is “The Rise of David Levinsky.”
A: Maggie, no, he’s not really. He’s from the previous generation and was writing in the 1890s, 1900s, and was a literary journalist forever really. And he did write in Yiddish and did read Yiddish, but he’s not from this era. And it is worth really comparing his short story, a ghetto wedding with either the story I mentioned by Delmore Schwartz or some of the, even just the opening 20 pages of “Call it Sleep” or “Jews Without Money.” Just to give a sense of how radically different this generation from the 30s was to the generation of Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, and so on.
Mark Dolgan. A later Canadian Jewish woman writer, Adele Wiseman wrote “Crackpot” in 1974. Mark, you are absolutely right. I knew Adele Wiseman. When I was a child and a teenager when she came. She lived in London for some years and when she would return to London to see my parents, I saw her. She was a lovely, lovely woman. Her husband was a lovely, lovely man. Sadly, she’s no longer with us. She was a very fine, underrated writer and I wish she were not underrated. But thank you very much for remembering her, Mark, and for reminding us of her. Rhonda Bulge. I enjoyed this very much. Enjoy your new grandchild. Thank you. Thank you, Rhonda from Toronto. Canada, the home of Mordecai Richler and Adele Wiseman. Thank you, Rhonda, for your very kind wishes.
Q: Herbert Hess, any female writers discussing fathers hating their daughters or vice versa?
A: Wow, there is a question. Hmm. I’m not sure. I will have to give that some thought and come back to you in February. That’s a really good question. I’m honestly not sure. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but I will give that further thought.
Q: Donald Fishman, will you be including Erwin Shaw in your February talk?
A: Yes, very possibly. Although, again, I’m inclined to favour for the purposes of this set of talks, the more famous writers. So for talking about war, I think I will probably not be talking about Herman Wack or Owen Shaw, but more likely about Mailer, Heller, Roth. Forgive me.
Roger, thank you very much for your- Thank you also from Toronto. My goodness, what a wonderful contingent from Canada. Lovely. Welcome to you all.
Q: Rhoda Slam. I hope that you will speak about Nathaniel West soon. Would you also talk about SJ Perelman West Brother-in-Law who did much more than write some of the Marxist movies and is interesting in his own write?
A: You are absolutely right, Rhoda. He is much more interesting in his own write and we shouldn’t pigeonhole him as just writing for the Marx Brothers movies. Although, frankly, if any of us had written for the Marx Brothers movies, that would not be nothing as a legacy. But anyway, but you are right. He was a very fine writer. Nathaniel West. There just wasn’t room to address him as well as the three other writers today, although he belonged to the same generation. Maybe another time, I’ll do a different course with some of the writers who we’ve left out this time round. One should never say never. And it’s important to cast the net as wide as we possibly can. Leon Collins from Leads, unless you’re called Leon Collins leads, which I suppose is possible. In the week IB Singer received his Nobel Prize. I spent a morning with him in his Miami apartment. He then told me that he considered his brother a much better writer. That’s an interesting story. A lot of other people did consider his brother a better writer in at that time. And then of course, he was overtaken by Bashevis Singer. So read the Adam Kirsch piece in the New Yorker in the last two or three issues. It’s really worth a look. It’s a very interesting and thoughtful piece on reputation, the vicities of reputation and indeed weighing up the two writers. It’s a review of some new editions of IJ Singer. Also, may I recommend Clive Sinclair, an Anglo Jewish writer, sadly, also no longer with us, a dear friend who I miss always. He wrote his PhD at the University of East Anglia about the three singer writers and also worth a look. And sadly, Adam Kirsch doesn’t mention it. I’m sorry to see that.
Ruth Katz, I’ve just read a new translation of it. Itzik Manger’s “Book of Paradise.” So have I, Ruth. Itzik Manger was, for those who don’t know, a Yiddish poet Po- Well, no, not Polish, from Romania originally. And I think, if that’s right. But he made his name in Warsaw and then he fled eventually, he made it to England and he lived in England for about 15 years and had a problem with language essentially. Like so many Yiddish writers, he couldn’t get published in English, he couldn’t get anyone to translate him. And in the end, he moved to America and then he settled finally in Israel where they have the Itzik Manger Prize or used to have the Itzik Manger Prize, which was founded in his memory and was a very prestigious Israeli Literary Award, which I think is no longer run. But yes, well, I hope you enjoyed it, Ruth. I don’t think it’s his best book, but he’s a fascinating figure, it sig Manga. And I have a portrait of him in the study. So I mean a painting, not a photograph. He looked an extraordinary wild-eyed man.
Thank you, Annette Bloom for your very kind words.
Carol Black, speaking of Canadian writers, don’t forget Irving Layton. Well, I won’t forget him, 'cause I’ve never heard of him. So I must find out more about him. And thank you very much, Carol for bringing him to my attention and I will find out about him before we next meet, so thank you for the recommendation.
And Rita, healthy and happy New Year 2024 to all. Thank you, Rita and to you and yours. And iPad, Diana says, am Klein Montreal, which is a slightly nomic message, perhaps a writer for Montreal. I’m guessing. Again, my ignorance betrays me. I’m sorry. And I think that is really all we have time for.
I’m sorry not to be able to address all your questions. I do apologise. It’s not intentionally rude, it’s just that I know time moves on and you are all busy people. So thank you for such a fascinating list of questions as always. I wish you all a very happy and healthy, and fulfilling New Year, and I really look forward to meeting up with you again in February. And the dates will become available soon on the website. Thank you so much again for joining me tonight. Thank you. Bye-Bye.