Babel and Shapiro

An interesting comparison, relating Russian Jews, gentiles, and war time. So basically: chaos and anti-Semitism. Both men write haunting stories. Not for kids.

Saul Bellow

Found an awesome site today. From a piece ol' Saul wrote a couple years before his death:

"The question whether they had a right to this language and to this literature was a lively question. In their own eyes they sometimes felt that they didn’t have the right because they weren’t born to the manner, and American society—at least its elite Anglo-Saxon elements—told them that they didn’t come by it naturally and that it didn’t really belong to them. But the evidence of the streets was different, because a new life was forming in American society which belonged to nobody, and therefore there was no reason why an American writer should accept the words of Henry James in his book The American Scene, for instance, in which he was so distressed by the Jewish East Side of New York and by what was happening to the English language on the East Side."

I like that claim - English doesn't belong to anyone. In H. Roth's Call It Sleep this is evidenced by all the accents that accompany English and make it truly American, because it is being modified by immigrants. We never hear "proper English" and indeed it doesn't exist.

Holocaust Imbued Consciousness

One way to read IB Singer's The Slave is to consider it thus: it was written by an American after the Second World War, by someone who did not survive the Shoah, and even though the novel's events take place during the 1600s, the fact that they focus on crimes perpetuated against Jews makes the book a piece of Holocaust Literature. This means that the memory of the gas chambers are forever stamped in the brains of all Jews of all future time; it is a universally Jewish event that binds us together through suffering and the remembrance thereof (as have many events throughout our long, horrible history). Writing about the pogroms in Poland in the 17th century was Singer's way of experiencing the Holocaust, and he had to grapple with its effects in order to write the novel; this entails the classic plot of man's search for meaning in the wake of disaster.

To think that Singer's link to the Holocaust is disingenuous would be unfair; he was born in Poland and lost family in the war. But these ties do not account for the high percentage of Jewish fiction writers who focus on the Holocaust: Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Foer being several among many. Critics say the Shoah is an event with which every Jew (and especially the literary ones, as we can see) must grapple and make sense of, if possible.

America

Art thou not Orc, who serpent-form'd
Stands at the gate of Enitharmon to devour her children;
Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities;

Lover of wild rebellion, and transgresser of Gods Law;
Why dost thou come to Angels eyes in this terrific form?

...

The terror answerd: I am Orc, wreath'd round the accursed tree:
The times are ended; shadows pass the morning gins to break;
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro' the wide wilderness:
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps;
To make the desarts blossom, & the deeps shrink to their fountains,
And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof.
That pale religious letchery, seeking Virginity,
May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty
The undefil'd tho' ravish'd in her cradle night and morn:
For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.
Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumd;
Amidst the lustful fires he walks: his feet become like brass,
His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold.

-William Blake