David Herman
Jewish Writers and the Holocaust: ‘60s and '70s

David Herman | Jewish Writers and the Holocaust: ‘60s and '70s | 03.23.24

- Hello, my name is David Herman. Welcome back. I’m going to be talking again about Jewish American writers. This is my last talk in the series about Jewish American writers. And today I’m going to be talking about Jewish American writers and the Holocaust, why they took so long to engage with the Holocaust, how they did engage with the Holocaust when they did, and how that changed over the years with different generations. Let me start with Saul Bellow’s letters, which started in 1932. They came out a few years ago, beautifully edited by Benjamin Taylor. And they’re fascinating for a number of reasons. One, there is nothing about Hitler and the Jews during the 1930s and '40s. That’s a curious kind of gap. According to the admittedly unreliable index, there are just two references to the Holocaust in the entire book, and it’s a big book.

In James Atlas’s biography, one of a number of biographies and one of the best, he quotes Saul Bellow’s response to a visit to the Polish death camps. “I can’t tell you,” he wrote to his agent, “what an impression Poland makes on me. It’s too deep, as deep as death, and more familiar than I can admit at the top of my mind. It’s family history.” For the first time, he wrote to his close friend, Keith Botsford, in 1960, “I’m trying to ascertain what my Jewish parentage and upbringing really signify.” These are interesting words, family history and Jewish parentage, and they come at the beginning of the 1960s. However, only once in this very long book does Bellow seriously address these issues in a long letter to the great Jewish American writer, Cynthia Ozick, in July, 1987, almost 30 years after this visit to Poland. “It’s perfectly true,” he writes, “that Jewish writers in America,” a repulsive category, he adds, “missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry. We,” I speak of Jews now and not merely of writers, “should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with it.”

The timing is really interesting, 1987. Bear in mind, 1960, he goes to visit Poland and visits the death camps. And nearly 30 years later, Cynthia Ozick writes to him. And bear in mind, she’s one of the leading Jewish American writers to have engaged with the Holocaust in a number of her works, which we shall come to shortly. And she says, “What were you doing, Saul? Why were you not engaging with this huge subject which really you should have engaged with?” And Bellow’s a tough cookie, he was a tough cookie. And he might have responded quite aggressively, which would not have been out of character at all when he faced criticism. But he doesn’t, he takes it on the chin, which is interesting. “Nobody in America seriously took this on,” he writes. “And only a few Jews elsewhere like Primo Levi were able to comprehend it all.” Then he moves onto his own response or lack of it. “I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the '40s. I was involved with literature,” inverted commas, “and given over to preoccupations with art, with language, with my struggle on the American scene, with claims for recognition of my talent, all like my pals of the Partisan Review, with modernism, Marxism, new criticism, with Eliot, Yeats, Proust, et cetera, with anything except the terrible events in Poland.

Growing slowly aware of this unspeakable evasion,” this unspeakable evasion, he calls it, “I didn’t even know how to begin to admit it into my inner life. Not a particle of this can be denied.” So he absolutely takes Ozik’s charge face on and he pleads guilty. Bellow never seriously returns to these questions in his letters, either to the Holocaust or to his complicated response to it or to the impact of his visit to Poland in 1960, nor did he discuss the larger question of why other Jewish American writers had steered clear of these issues or came late to them like Arthur Miller with “Incident at Vichy” in 1964 and “Broken Glass” in 1994. He admires Roth hugely, but doesn’t address Roth’s courage in writing “Eli, the Fanatic,” which again we’ll come to shortly, an extraordinary short story published in the collection “Goodbye Columbus” in 1959, or ask what he thought Roth was doing with Anne Frank in “The Ghost Writer” 20 years later in 1979.

Even when Bellow refers to Roth’s essay, “Imagining Jews,” he just writes, “I was highly entertained by your piece in the New York Review of Books. I didn’t quite agree, that’s too much to expect, but I shall slowly think over what you said. My anaconda method, I go into a long digestive stupor.” He didn’t quite agree? Why slowly, why stupor? Even in the letter to Ozick, he doesn’t stop and wonder whether there’s something a little predictable about the reference to Primo Levi or to ask himself what he means when he writes, “I was too busy becoming a novelist.” Like so many other American writers and thinkers, he steered clear of the Holocaust in the late 1940s and early 1950s and came to it later in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” in 1970. This most well-read and thoughtful of writers doesn’t stop to dwell on these issues. And it wasn’t just Bellow, of course, this is the point. The critic Mark Shechner wrote in 1990, “The Shoah was a hidden wound, shrouded in darkness and suffered in silence, felt everywhere, but confronted virtually nowhere.” And he’s talking about writers and critics, but writers mainly.

But of course, one should also remember there are the stories of Malamud, like “The Lady of the Lake” and “The Last Mohican.” There’s Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story, “The Seance,” published in 1968, set in 1946. There’s Chaim Grade’s “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” written in 1954. There are passing references also by Malamud in the first seven years, “The Mourners,” “The Last Mohican,” and “Take Pity.” And what really starts to happen is actually outside of literature. In 1959, we get the film of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” In 1960, we get the translation of Elie Wiesel’s “Night” and Andre Schwarz-Bart’s “The Last of the Just.” And this is when Bellow visits the Polish death camps. In 1961, we get the film “Judgement at Nuremberg,” and the translation of Primo Levi’s “If This is a Man,” translated as “Survival in Auschwitz.” And we get the Eichmann trial, of course. And in '62, we get Hannah Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial, “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

And then in 1964, we get Sidney Lumet’s film, “The Pawnbroker.” And in 1965, Jerzy Kosinski’s fraudulent, as it turns out, memoir of his childhood experiences in the Holocaust, “The Painted Bird.” But perhaps the first really great engagement with the Holocaust as a subject is by Philip Roth in 1959, “Eli, the Fanatic.” It is set in May, 1948. Interesting that like with Bashevis Singer’s story, it’s set straight after the war and straight after the Holocaust. And it’s set in a town called Woodington, 30 miles from New York in the suburbs. And the key characters are Leo Tzuref, who’s a DP and is the director of Woodington Yeshiva, and Eli Peck, a young Jewish suburban lawyer and neurotic. The figure of young, neurotic, unmoored men, Jewish men, is a big feature of 1950s and '60s Jewish-American writing. They’re not authentic enough. They don’t engage with Jewish religion, with Yiddish culture, with the Holocaust. And now in this story, he is going to encounter the Holocaust big time.

There is a contrast in the imagery between the dark Yeshiva and the lights of Woodington, and between the past and the modern. His friends and neighbours say to Eli, “This is a modern community.” “Eli, this is a modern community,” someone says later. “This is the 20th century,” one of them says. “This is, after all, the 20th century.” “This is the 20th century,” somebody else says. “A guy dressed like a thousand B.C.,” one of them says about Leo Tzuref. “This is an age of science, Eli,” one of the neighbours says. “It’s modern Jews and Protestants.” “They,” this is the people in the Yeshiva, “live in the mediaeval ages, Eli.” Contrasted with the peace and safety of the suburbs. There is something from very early on, right through the story, which is felt to be threatening, disturbing about the Yeshiva and about the Orthodox Jews and Hasidim who have moved into the neighbourhood. And the question of language is interesting. Leo Tzuref has only just recently arrived in America. His English is not great.

He says, “You have that word in English,” he says to Eli Peck. “You have the word suffer in English,” he says. “But studying a language no one understood?” And then Eli Peck says to him at one point, “Say something, speak English,” he pleaded. What happens and what emerges as the story unfolds is that Surah touches a nerve, not just with the community, but in particular with Eli Peck. If Eli Peck is kind of neurotic and unmoored and doesn’t really have a sense of identity and is unsure about where his Jewishness lies, this encounter with Surah about trying to get him to close down the Yeshiva touches an extremely sore point with Eli Peck. But as the story unfolds, what emerges is the reality of experience of loss by Surah and the Jews and the Yeshiva and the ignorance of Eli Peck. Perhaps if such conditions had existed in pre-war Europe, he says. Surah has this killer line when he says, “No news reached Woodington.”

It’s an extraordinary moment in the story. Surah can’t believe that the people in this suburban village in New York State, 30 miles from New York City, simply didn’t register the existence of the Holocaust. So this is just after the war, but of course it was published in 1959. The same was true in 1959 as it would have been in the 1940s. And what happens, I’m reluctant to give away the story, the key moment of the plot, but it is important. There’s a moment when Eli looked at himself in the full length mirror. And then Eli had the strange notion that he was two people or that he was one person wearing two suits. And one suit of course is his business suit as a lawyer. And the other suit is a suit, a black suit as a Hassid. In 1964, five years later, Arthur Miller wrote “Incident of Vichy.” He was still at the height of his reputation, which had really taken off in the late 40s and 1950s. As I said last time, I spoke with you. He had just visited Mauthausen. And covered the Nazi trials in Frankfurt for the New York Times. And “Incident of Vichy” is performed as one of two plays performed together.

The other one is called “After the Fall.” And it’s a series of recollections from a character played by Jason Robards, an attorney facing the consequences of his actions for the first time, a classic Arthur Miller theme. And he’s going through three crises at the same time. The encounter with the Nazi death camps, the suicide of his beautiful but neurotic wife, Maggie, based of course on Marilyn Monroe, and his confrontation with the anti-communist House Committee on Un-American Activities, just like Arthur Miller. So except for the first issue of the Nazi death camps, the other two are key autobiographical moments. And it’s his first play after nine years. “Incident of Vichy” is also about Nazism. And the main question of the play is how the Nazis were able to perpetrate the Holocaust to answer the question that has haunted people since the war. Why did the Jews walk to their deaths? Why was there so little resistance?

Then in 1968, we get Bashevis Singer’s story, “The Sales,” and we get Bellows’ “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” one of his best novels. He was on a roll during the 1960s and ‘70s. You get Herzog, you get “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” you get his brilliant book of short stories, “Mosby’s Memoirs,” and then through the 1970s, you get another series of novels. Another writer who was on a roll was Bellows’ friend and rival, Philip Roth. In 1974, Roth began editing a series of paperbacks for Penguin Books called “Writers from the Other Europe,” which was a book of translations of great writers from Central and Eastern Europe, who was at this point, because of the Iron Curtain, relatively unknown in Britain and in America, and that’s a crucial factor. They’re now many of them household names, but at this time in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s interesting that the series stopped in 1989 when the Iron Curtain came down.

Anyway, Roth was an outstanding writer, obviously, but he was also, and this often gets neglected, an outstanding reader and critic. He learned much from Bellow and Malamud, of course, but more surprisingly, he learned a lot, far more than is often acknowledged by critics, from East European, Central European, and Israeli writers, like Aharon Appelfeld and Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera, and Norman Manea, the Romanian writer. They gave Roth something very different. Roth was one of the few American writers to immerse himself in the writers from the other Europe, and that series introduced a whole generation to East European writers like Bruno Schulz and Milan Kundera. When Roth first met Appelfeld in 1984, “Badenheim 1939,” Appelfeld’s first great novel, and “The Age of Wonders,” his second great novel, had only just been translated. Klima and Manea are not that well-known to English-speaking readers even now.

We so associate Roth with America that we forget how interested he was in writers from Bukovina and Czernowitz. There is something else about this group. They can be divided into Holocaust writers on the one hand and dissidents from behind the Iron Curtain on the other. Like Anne Frank, they had no trouble in finding a subject. In the opening sentence of Roth’s interview with Klima, Roth writes, “Born in Prague in 1931, Ivan Klima has undergone what Jan Kott calls a European education.” It’s a great phrase. Kundera, to whom the ghostwriter was dedicated, Klima, Appelfeld, and Manea were all born within a few years of Roth, but by the time Roth started high school in Newark, New Jersey, Appelfeld had lost his mother and grandmother shot by the Nazis, and he’d escaped from a ghetto and spent years hiding in the woods. Klima and Manea had been transported with their parents to concentration camps, or as Roth puts it in “Operation Shylock,” his novel in 1993, where Appelfeld makes an appearance, “Hiding as a child from his murderers in the Ukrainian woods, while I was still on a Newark playground playing fly catchers up.”

That’s what Roth means by European education. That’s what drew him to these writers. Bellow and Malamud showed the younger writer that there was a Jewish-American subject and a Jewish-American voice, or two different kinds of Jewish-American voices. The Europeans showed him there was another kind of Jewish subject and very different ways of writing about it. It’s easy to forget, in other words, that the all-American Roth, author of a novel about baseball and another about Nixon, and a third about Clinton, had carefully read and thought about his European-Jewish contemporaries. Of course, his best work is full of literary references to Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Sherwood Anderson, but there’s also another question. What if he’d been born in Europe, not in Newark, in 1933? When we think of “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969, we think of Roth and sex, especially that scene. What we don’t think of is the scene between Portnoy and his older sister, Hannah. Do you know, she asks, where you would be now if you’d been born in Europe instead of America?

He doesn’t have an answer, so she tells him. Dead, gassed, or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive. The key phrase here is if you’d been born in Europe instead of America. Or, as in some of his other writings, what if some of the great European figures, Kafka and Anne Frank, for example, had come to America, subjects of one short story and two novels? Roth plays with this idea. He was, of course, a playful writer, imagining alter egos and counterfactual histories. But what’s interesting is the kinds of counterfactual histories he imagines. European history coming to America, not just any European history. He’s not interested in Louis XIV. It’s that European history, the Holocaust. In 1978, the TV series “Holocaust” appeared in America. And in the UK, it had an extraordinary impact in America, in particular, with the young Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken and various others. And then in 1979, Roth published “The Ghostwriter,” which includes the appearance of Anne Frank, as well as two other, three other novels, one based on Malamud, one based on Bellow, and one, Nathan Zuckerman, based on Roth himself.

And then in 1980, appears a short story in The New Yorker by Cynthia Ozick, known as “The Shawl.” And it was later published with another story, “Rosa.” So “The Shawl” is set during the Second World War. “Rosa” is set in 1977. Both were written in ‘77, but first published in The New Yorker in the early '80s. In “The Shawl,” Rosa, her infant daughter, Magda, and her 14-year-old niece, Stella, are Polish Jews in a concentration camp during World War II. Miraculously, the infant Magda has survived with her mother hidden and protected in a shawl. If the Nazis ever learn of her presence, she’s certain to be killed. Sharing food, of which, of course, is never enough, sucking on the shawl, Magda survives for a while. Eventually, the inevitable happens. It is brutal, horrible, and sad. “Rosa” continues the story more than 30 years later.

Rosa Lublin and Stella live in America, with Rosa just having moved to Florida after demolishing her used furniture store in Brooklyn. Rosa still suffers from the trauma of the loss of her daughter, and she continues to write letters to Magda, imagining her to be a great success now, a professor of Greek philosophy at Columbia University in New York City. Ozick describes Rosa’s aimless life in Florida, doing laundry, getting her mail. Significant events happen. She’s picked up by a man. She receives a package from her niece containing the shawl. She finds herself behind some barbed wire, and she receives a mail from an academic working on survivor syndroming and repressed animation. Rosa feels she does not have a life. Thieves took it, she repeats frequently, and she falls back upon her treasured shawl.

A few years later, in 1985, Ozick publishes “The Messiah of Stockholm.” The key figure in the novel is the Polish writer, then almost completely unknown, Bruno Schulz, whose last work, unpublished, undiscovered, is called “The Messiah,” was called “The Messiah.” Schulz was killed during the war by an SS officer, leaving behind only a few works introduced, first introduced to a larger American public in Roth’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series, and Ozick interestingly dedicates the book to Roth. The main character is 40-something and not much of a success in life, twice married. He’s a very minor figure in the literary world, a book reviewer for a Swedish newspaper, and he’s a war refugee, raised by a Swedish couple convinced his father was Bruno Schulz. Schulz allegedly wrote this novel, “The Messiah.” I say allegedly because nobody knows of its whereabouts, if indeed it has any whereabouts, but the manuscript is lost.

One of Lars’ acquaintances is a bookstore owner, and she one day brings the news that someone has approached her with the original manuscript of Schulz’s “The Messiah,” and the owner of the manuscript claims also to be Schulz’s child. Lars gets his hand on the manuscript and commits an unspeakable act. Is the manuscript a forgery? Who is the mysterious woman? And why does she look so much like the bookstore owner? A book about identity and literature, obsession and the mundane, about how to find one’s place in life and how one might live that life, and a book about the Holocaust and literature. And then in the mid 1980s, things start to change in America and in Jewish American literature. You get in rapid succession, Art Spiegelman’s famous cartoon book, “Maus, A Survivor’s Tale,” and then “Maus II” in 1991.

You get Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” in 1993. And in the same year, you get the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. And the first major literary work, I don’t wish to be unkind to Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” but I’m not sure it would count in quite the same category, was Arthur Miller’s next take on the Holocaust, “Broken Glass” in 1994, about a couple, a Jewish married couple called the Gelbergs who live in Brooklyn in the last days of November, 1938. “Broken Glass,” 1938. Sylvia, the wife, becomes partially paralysed from the waist down after reading about the events of Kristallnacht in the newspaper. Philip contacts her husband, contacts a psychiatrist who believes her paralysis is psychosomatic. And though he’s not a psychiatrist, he begins to treat her according to his diagnosis. And throughout the play, Dr. Hyman learns more about the problems she’s having in her personal life, particularly in her marriage.

After an argument with his boss, Philip suffers a heart attack and begins dying at his home. He and Sylvia confront each other about their feelings. Before Philip dies, although his death is never fully confirmed, his final words are, “Sylvia, forgive me.” Upon his death, Sylvia is cured of her paralysis. It’s quite an extraordinary play and probably Miller’s best play in something like 40 years after his great plays of the 1950s. And it was helped by the fact, at least in the UK, that the main part of Philip was performed by two great actors, Henry Goodman and Anthony Sher in different productions. And the assumption is running through the play that Philip is driven out of his job by the antisemitism in his mortgage bank where he works, and that he is simply not faced up to the reality of the antisemitism of working in an American bank in the 1930s. And that it’s his wife who is the one who confronts the reality of what’s happening to Jews.

First of all, with Kristallnacht, but also a sense that this is a reality in America too, antisemitism, and he denies it. And in the end, as in all of Miller’s great plays, lies, denial, secrets, dishonesty are at the heart of the play and the relationship between the husband and the wife. And the husband, as always in Miller, is the one who is guilty of dishonesty, of not facing reality. Then through the 1990s, this explosion of novels and short stories continues. Alan Isler’s great novel, “The Prince of West End Avenue.” Anne Michael’s great novel, “Fugitive Pieces,” 1996. Thane Rosenbaum’s “Elijah Visible,” 1996. Melvin Jewell’s “Buckets After,” 1996. Aryeh Lev Stollman’s, “The Far East Euphrates,” 1997. Allen Hoffman’s “Two for the Devil,” in 1998, which alternates between a interrogation cell in 1930s Stalinist Russia and a cattle car to Treblinka in 1942. And in 1999, Thane Rosenbaum’s “Secondhand Smoke.” And then in 1999, Nathan Englander makes his debut with a fantastic book of short stories, which includes a story called “The Tumblers.”

In fact, includes two stories, one about the murder of the Yiddish poets by Stalin after the war and “The Tumblers.” And just when some of us thought the golden age of Jewish American writing was coming to an end, along came an extraordinary group of exciting new writers. Some of the names I’ve just mentioned, I admit, are not terribly well-known, nearly 30 years on. But first comes Nathan Englander’s book of short stories for the relief of unbearable urges. Then Jonathan Safran Foer’s prize-winning first novel, “Everything is Illuminated,” 2002. Then “The History of Love” by his later wife, Nicole Krauss, her second novel, but the first to be published in Britain. And what is interesting is not just the appearance of these three talented young writers, but the emergence of a distinctive new voice. One of the big issues between this generation and their previous generation, the previous generation, Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Miller, and so forth, Heller, Mayler, is a kind of Oedipal reaction to that older generation, a sense that they weren’t proper Jews. It’s rather like the sort of Eli Peck thing in reverse.

So Eli Peck, young man who’s assimilated, doesn’t really acknowledge his Jewish identity. What happens with this generation of Foer, Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander is, boy, do they acknowledge their Jewish identity, and boy, do they give the older writers, the older generation a tough time about their lack of Jewish identity. So “The History of Love” by Nicole Krauss, a fantastic book, possibly the best written by that generation, possibly the best novel written by a Jewish American writer after Roth’s famous American turn. “The History of Love” is driven by a search for the real identity of the character in a novel called “The History of Love,” written by two different characters and translated by a third at the request of a fourth, bear with me, who happens to be the son of one of the first two, who also happens to be a writer who has created a character who has asked the mother of the teenage girl to translate the novel. I hope you’re with me.

There is a brief summary of all this on page 196, but you may want to take an aspirin first. There is no doubt that what has happened to Leo, Bruno, and Sfi, three of the key characters, is tragic. All are writers, all Jews from East Europe, who got away but left much behind and never recovered. And yet these tragic lives also become, at times, ridiculous and funny. Bruno and Leo in particular. They are true suffering jokers like Herzog, Nathan Zuckerman, and Portnoy with their heads in books and their bowels in disarray. What is going on here? I think this is an attempt to answer a very different kind of question. How do you write Jewish-American novels after Bellow and Roth? Much of the best of their writing was, and judging by Roth’s novel, “The Plot Against America,” still were, animated by coming to terms with the immigrant experience of their parents and grandparents. Immigrant experience, not Holocaust experience.

Their writing has one foot in the old country, and by the old country, they mean Russia, and another in the immigrant neighbourhoods, and later the suburbs of East Coast America, Newark, New Jersey; Woodington, New York. New York City, the Upper West Side, in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” Their writing, Foer and Krauss, however, belong to a different, younger generation. They have no direct relationship with the traumas and experiences of writers born in the early 20th century, like Bellow and Roth and Melamed, and Miller, and Heller, and Mahler. At the same time, they don’t want to go down the dead ends of a later literary generation finding authentic kinds of Jewish identity in Israel, Judaism, and so on. What they want to do, I think, is to bring together two very different stories and voices, that of mid-20th century Central European Jewry, which has come to America, and of young New York Jews today, or at least at the time when these novels were written and published.

And it’s no coincidence that the great characters of these three novels, the two by Foer and “The History of Love” by Krauss, are either very young or very old. Those in between, parents in their 30s and 40s, are either dead and interesting or alive and uninteresting. The dead parents, Oscar’s father in Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” or Alma’s father in “The History of Love,” are interesting because Foer and Krauss are on a search for literary fathers. That’s their project. In “Everything is Illuminated,” Foer’s most famous novel still, the character Jonathan Safran Foer, clever bookish stuff, tells Alex, the narrator, “I’m looking for my voice, sure.” The same is true of Nicole Krauss. They’re both young writers starting out. They don’t want to do what Bellow and Roth did or what a more recent generation in between Bellow and Roth and their generation, Krauss and Englander and Foer. They want to try something different. Hence, all the games, all the cute experiments. However, underneath all that is a search for a new kind of Jewish literary voice with roots in Europe, Isaac Barbel and Bruno Schultz, as well as the Holocaust in Ukraine and the Shtetl.

At the same time, they want to connect that to a very different experience of young Americans looking for an identity, putting on school productions of “Hamlet,” trying to find out about palaeontology, raising money to help them get to Israel, mourning for dead fathers, hating their mother’s new boyfriend. And because these are smart young writers who have done their literary modernism 101, they want to put both of these things together with a new kind of clever writing, playful, funny, sad, set in the present, but also in the past, told by different narrators at different times. If the golden age of Jewish American writing was written by sons about their experience as children of immigrants, Foer and Krauss were producing the literature of the grandchildren. They’re trying to deal with big issues about history, identity, and writing, including the Holocaust.

Sometimes they get it wrong, they strain too hard for effect, but they often get it right with funny and moving books full of verbal inventiveness and ideas. This is just the beginning, but rather than just put them down for their ambition, we should reach for our seat belts. Then the next group of this, the next member of this group, Michael Chabon, perhaps the best known of all, with “The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay,” his third novel in 2000, and best known of all in 2007, “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,” which like Philip Roth’s, “The Plot Against America,” plays with history. Imagine that America saved 2 million East European Jews from the Holocaust, but part of the deal was that they had to live in a remote corner of Alaska. Furthermore, imagine that Israel didn’t win the 1948 war, but was completely destroyed. Sitka, Alaska has become the centre of the Jewish diaspora. I won’t give away any more. It’s a great, great novel, and I cannot recommend it too highly.

And then Roth has a final engagement with the Holocaust and with one of his famous characters, Anne Frank, in 2007, his novel, “Exit Ghost.” And then comes Nicole Krauss’ “The Great House,” which again returns to the subject of the Holocaust in 2010. And Nathan Englander, the following year, publishes a novel, well, sorry, he publishes a short story in “The New Yorker” called, “What We Talk About "When We Talk About Anne Frank.” It’s a fantastic short story, published in The New Yorker in December, 2011. And that becomes the title story of his new collection of stories in 2012, “What We Talk About "When We Talk About Anne Frank.” Somehow, Nathan Englander got left behind by Jonathan Safran Foer Nicole Krauss and Michael Chabon. But perhaps it’s because he hasn’t written that many really good works since the story about Anne Frank. And his second book of short stories is like the first, a masterpiece. There is a moment in his first book, “The Relief of Unbearable Urges,” when a character thinks a rabbi he’s gone to see looks like a real Jew.

And the question of who is or who isn’t a real Jew, an authentic Jew, runs through all of Englander’s best stories. Is it someone who’s Orthodox? What about someone who is not Orthodox? What about a Jew who breaks all the rules of Judaism? And the first story in England is, “What We Talk About "When We Talk About Anne Frank,” brings together two couples. Lauren and Debbie were best friends at high school in New York. Debbie married a secular Jew, moved to Florida, lives an assimilated life, not dissimilar to Eli Peck, you may think. Lauren married Mark, now Yerusham, the son of Holocaust survivors who had moved to Israel, became ultra Orthodox and has 10 children. They have now come to visit Lauren’s old friend Debbie for the first time in Yonks. What will they make of each other’s new lives? How, in fact, it’s very similar to Eli Peck meeting Leo Tzuref. How does Debbie’s sense of her own Jewishness stand up against Lauren and Mark’s apparently stronger form of Jewishness, rooted in religion, Israel and the Holocaust?

This theme seems straightforward, but then the story starts twisting and turning, leading to a surprising revelation at the end. And this is typical of the conflicts in these stories. They’re never simple. They become more and more complicated. Sometimes they’re about straightforward, conflicts between Jews and their enemies, the Nazis, Arabs or American anti-Semites. But the most fascinating conflicts are always those between Jews and other Jews, between the ultra Orthodox and the assimilated, between two West Bank settlers, between two Israeli soldiers during the Suez War. Each of these conflicts turns on a question of justice. What is the right thing to do? And that takes us again back to “Eli, the Fanatic.” And the most astonishing of these stories by England, Edgar says survival, that’s what matters. This sounds reasonable. After all, he’s talking about a Holocaust survivor, but survival at what cost? What about when survival becomes obsession, madness or murder?

England’s first collection of stories was a gem. This one was darker, more complex, sort of anticipates Dara Horne’s more recent book, “People Like Dead Jews.” Englander once wrote of a Yiddish poet killed by Stalin. He tested his characters with moral dilemmas and tragedies. And that’s what he does in this later book of stories. And you could say that is what Fouet and Krauss at their best also do. So it has been a fascinating journey between silence in the 1940s and 50s and ‘60s to a large extent. And then two different explosions, the discovery by the older generation of the Holocaust, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” “Eli, the Fanatic,” “The Plot Against America,” you could say. And then a younger generation, Fouet, Chabon, Englander and Nicole Krauss, all great writers who I thoroughly recommend. And let me finally get round to your questions. Maren Friedman, what is the name of the book with the character Eli Peck? Well, the short story is called “Eli, the Fanatic.” And without giving too much away, the question is, will the incredibly reasonable and easygoing Eli Peck become a fanatic?

And it’s in Roth’s great breakthrough book of short stories, “Goodbye Columbus.” The title story, of course, is the most famous and was made into a film and a very successful film. And it kind of made his name. But “Eli, the Fanatic” is really a much better story, I would say. And it’s one of the great American, Jewish American stories. Please can, Linda Walpert, please can you provide a list of books discussed? Thanks. I will send a list to the Lockdown University and I hope they can find a way of putting that online somewhere on their website.

Q&A and Comments

Joel Glazer, thank you very much for your kind words. I much appreciate it.

Q: Rona Arato, what about Leon Uris’ “Exodus” and “Milo 18” and John Hersey’s “The Wolf?” A: Yes, this happens every time I speak to the Lockdown University about Jewish American writing. I talk about some writers who I consider great writers or more famous writers. And somebody will always say, what about these other writers? Either Canadian writers or writers like Leon Uris and John Hersey, who are perfectly good. And yes, indeed, they did tackle the Holocaust. My defence would be, they’re not Saul Bellow. They’re not Arthur Miller. They’re not Philip Roth. They’re not Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, or Nicole Krauss. And when time is short, I’m afraid, and I’m limited to 45 minutes for each talk I give, I try and focus on the people I believe are the truly great writers and those who I would passionately recommend to you all with great sincerity.

Q: Rona then asks, “There has been an amazing growth of Holocaust novels for young people. Will you speak about that?” A: Well, you’re absolutely right. There has been. This is a really controversial subject. And one reason it’s a controversial subject is because of John Boyle’s “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.” “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.” And then there was a sequel more recently, last year or two years ago. I can’t remember. Anyway, the book is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many Holocaust historians and people who write about the Holocaust, Holocaust literature, disgusting. I’m not going to beat around the bush. I think it’s an absolute… I know it sold huge numbers. I know it got made into a film. I don’t care. It is a disgusting book. So was the sequel. And it is disgusting because it tries to present the Nazi family. I don’t wish to give away too much of the plot for those of you who may wish to still to read it, despite my discouragement. It tries to make them into somehow the victims in a way that I think is really unacceptable. And I think this sort of… People kind of accepted that more with the first book. I think the second book really tilted the balance away from John Boyle. John Boyle or John Boyne? Anyway, and it really got hammered by a lot of the critics.

Barry Kester, Herman Wouk’s two great novels of World War II. Yep. Well, this is where we’re going to part company, Barry. I’m afraid because I don’t consider them great novels. I consider them incredibly popular novels made even more popular by a very successful American TV series. So, but again, I’m sorry there isn’t really time with 10 minutes to go to go into the details of what makes Roth or Bellow or Malamud or any of these writers I’ve been talking about, Cynthia Ozick, great writers of great novels and great short stories and great plays. But that is what I’ve been trying to argue, that they offer a kind of complexity, a kind of turn of phrase, a kind of literary playfulness that I think puts them in a league of their own in terms of Jewish American writers. That’s why they are the canon. And so perhaps another time there will be time to talk about what makes some novels greater than other novels or some writers greater than other writers. I know I sound like a snob when I say this, but I do passionately believe that these are the greatest Jewish American writers of the post-war period. And that’s why I’m trying to either introduce you to them, reintroduce you to them, or just say, perhaps here’s an aspect of them that you might find interesting.

Q: David Sefton, what about young Jewish writers dealing with their early life in communist Russia? A: David, that’s a very interesting point. And this is a kind of mini genre. Well, there’s too many genres, both related to people who either grew up in communist Russia or their parents grew up in communist Russia and their children grew up in America. Like, for example, Keith Gessen and his sister, Masha Gessen, the journalist who writes a lot for The New Yorker. And there are some really, really interesting books in this genre. And that’s a very good question. And you’re right, maybe that would be worth turning to another time for another series on Jewish American writers, because there was such an exodus after 1991, after the fall of the Soviet regime, when it became easier for Jewish families to leave the Soviet Union, come to America, particularly a lot settled in Brooklyn. And it’s, yeah, and many of their children became very interesting writers, critics, journalists. And you’re absolutely right to raise that. And I will try and come to that in some separate course. Thank you for mentioning that.

Q: Mirna’s iPad. “Everything Is Illuminated,” a great underrated movie, riveting, right? A: I think the book’s even better. And it really introduced Foer. It really made his name. An extraordinary family. His mother wrote a very powerful book about her experiences in the Holocaust. His brother, Franklin Foer, is a well-known journalist, wrote quite a controversial piece recently about the state of American Zionism. Anyway, yeah. Carol Stock, thank you very much for your kind words.

Q: Mirna’s iPad. Where Do You Put “Zone of Interest?” A: Well, I haven’t, I confess, I have, this is a novel by Martin Amis that was recently turned into a much acclaimed film until its director, who was giving his acceptance speech of an Oscar at the Academy Awards, put his foot in it big time by saying, excuse me, by saying that he felt ashamed as a Jew by what Israel was doing in Gaza. And that led, as you may already know, or if you don’t already know, as you can imagine, to the mother of all uproars. Martin Amis, sorry, let me go back to your question. I’m assuming you’re asking about the novel rather than the film, or the controversy about the film. And there isn’t time really to cover all three. So let me focus on the novel. And, or rather, let me focus on Martin Amis. One of the interesting things about Martin Amis was that he was one of the most philo-Semitic Anglo-British writers of his, not only of his generation, of any generation, that he was very drawn to Jewish writers, in particular, his very close friend and lifelong father figure, not lifelong, but long time father figure, Saul Bellow. They became very, very close friends. And I guess Amis was the most influenced by Bellow of all the British writers, and along perhaps with Rushdie, but Amis more so. And he wrote quite a lot about the Holocaust as well as Jewish subjects, other Jewish subjects. And he wrote a book of stories called “Einstein’s Monsters,” which includes a very interesting story about a Polish character and his reflections on what happened in Poland during the Holocaust.

And then “Time’s Arrow,” which came out in 1991, which extraordinarily is Amis’ only novel to have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He never actually won it. It tells you more about the Booker Prize than it does about Martin Amis. And then he wrote this novel, “Zone of Interest,” that was filmed last year and won an Academy Award and leading to this big controversy. And the film, in fairness, I should say, David Aaronovitch, the journalist, called it the best Holocaust movie ever. And other reviewers have praised it to the skies. The novel did not do so well, and it was quite surprising in terms of critical acclaim or sales or anything else. It was part of that moment of Amis’ career where he kind of went into decline after these incredibly successful years of the 1980s with “London Fields” and “Money” and his memoirs and this book of short stories, “Einstein’s Monsters.” And so it’s many years since I’ve read it, and I don’t really have very clear memories of it. I’m sorry, I will have to reread it. And I’m sorry to let you down, Mirna’s iPad, I should say.

Beverly Price, Rosa’s loss of identity, Cynthia Ozick through loss of the use of her first language is tragic as she attempts to negotiate her feelings in American English to have a new boyfriend and companion in Miami. Must’ve been for so many, must’ve been so for many adult survivors. Beverly, that’s a really, really interesting point that you make and of course it was, and that’s why already in 1959 when Roth is writing about this Yiddish-speaking survivor of the Holocaust and his encounter with Eli Peck and Eli Peck says, “Speak English.” And, Leo Tzuref is struggling to find the right words and keeps asking Eli Peck, “Is this the right word in English?” And yes, it’s very interesting. Not something that Bellow or Miller really engaged with. Mr. Tzuref is after all, a very educated figure, a sort of intellectual figure. So he seems to have no problems with English. Yeah, it’s a really, it’s a really interesting question that you raise. How hard it must’ve been for people to struggle with English, but a twofold struggle. They’re struggling with a new language, but they’re also struggling with a way of translating and articulating their terrible experiences of the war and the Holocaust in a language they find very difficult to deal with and express themselves in. And that is truly a tragic situation. And so thank you very much, Beverly, for raising it. And I don’t think it was sufficiently raised and articulated either by the older generation of writers, of Jewish American writers that I was talking about at the beginning of my talk, or the younger generation later on, because they all grew up as English-speaking sons of immigrants or grandsons of immigrants.

Joan Kalk, Kalk, “All the Broken Places” by John Boyne. Thank you very much. It’s not Boyle, of course, it’s John Boyne. That was the sequel to “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.” Even worse than the original, I would say. But thank you, Joan, for reminding me of the title and the correct spelling of his surname. Yolanda Baldachin, I’m sorry if I mispronounced your name. I do apologise. Also disgusting was the film “Life is Beautiful.” Was that possibly based on a disgusting book? I don’t know if it’s based on a book, but it was, I think, a very questionable film also. I do agree with you.

Rona Arato, “You can’t dismiss all youth books "because of one bad one. "There are many very good books "that introduce kids to the Holocaust.” Thank you, Rona. I’m afraid I’ve not come across any, but I’m very happy to take your word for it. Well, I’ll be very interested. I’m sure one day with my grandchildren, now, rather than my children, I will, I’m sure, come across some, and I look forward to that. Abigail Hirsch, “There are some wonderful memoirs "of survivors by survivors themselves, "and some written by their children.” This, Abigail, I absolutely agree with you. You’re absolutely right. There are both great memoirs by survivors, obviously, Levy, Elie Wiesel, but also, as you say, some written by their children. And there’s a whole really good genre which started to take off, I would say, in the 1990s, and so that’s the 20, nearly 30 years ago, written by their children, second-generation memoirs by Lisa Appignanesi, by Louise Kehoe, “In This Dark Place,” and Eva Hoffman’s account, “Lost in Translation.” Plenty, plenty, plenty, and I couldn’t agree with you more.

Q: “What about Vasily Grossman?” says Lawrence Ratner, and this will, I’m afraid, have to be the last question, and therefore the last answer. A: Well, what about Vasily Grossman? A great, great writer, not Jewish-American, obviously, but a Jewish-Ukrainian writer, or at least born in Ukraine, in Berdachev, but in the days of the Soviet Union, so he’s regarded for many years as a Soviet writer, and then more recently, after the independence of Ukraine, Ukrainians started to reclaim a number of formerly Soviet, described as Soviet writers, who were born in Ukraine, Isaac Barbel in Odessa, Vasily Grossman in Berdachev, and others, and Vasily Grossman is, indeed, a very great writer about Soviet anti-Semitism, and wrote a wonderful short story about the Holocaust, and I cannot recommend him too highly. His book of short stories and essays, including, arriving at Treblinka with the Red Army towards the end of the war, it’s called “The Road,” the book is called “The Road,” and it’s available in paperback. It’s just a masterpiece, and his two most famous novels, “Life and Fate” and “Stalingrad,” also both masterpieces, so I cannot recommend him too highly. And one last question.

Q: Hilal Shinka, “Why contrast religious or orthodox Jews with assimilated Jews? Why not with secular Jews who believe in tikkun olam?” A: Well, now there’s a question, because I guess this is a reference back to “Eli, the Fanatic,” and that’s what the contrast is, between assimilated suburban New York Jews who are living in the New York suburbs, like Eli Peck, a local attorney, and his friends and neighbours, and then these East European refugee/immigrant religious Jews. And who are preoccupied, understandably, with the Holocaust, because they’ve lived through it. And that is the issue. And bear in mind, this was written around 1959, published, certainly, in 1959, that story. And therefore, these kinds of quite careful distinctions were not at the centre of Philip Roth’s literary imagination. They become more important to the intermediate generation, between Bellow and Roth, and Krauss, Foer, Englander, and so on, Chabon. But that did not, interestingly, produce the kind of great writing of either the first generation, who, frankly, didn’t care about these kind of distinctions, or the later generation, which also didn’t much care about them. There was a generation in between, which, unfortunately, there wasn’t time to address and deal with in this talk. I’m sorry to end on a bit of a downbeat note, but Vasily Grossman, just to repeat, Lawrence, what a fantastic writer. I cannot recommend him too highly. And his translators, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, have done an amazing job, I am told, by Russian speakers.

Thank you. This is the end of this series of talks. I will be back later in the spring, or the early summer. I haven’t yet got my dates. I look forward to seeing you again. Thank you for joining me for these talks. Thank you for your patience. Thank you also for all your fascinating questions. I’m really enormously grateful to you. And I look forward to seeing you again a little bit later in the year. Thank you.