RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/arts-culture/2019/10/what-saul-bellow-saw/

In May 1949, a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, the American Jewish literary critic Leslie Fiedler published in Commentary an essay about the fundamental challenge facing American Jewish writers: that is, novelists, poets, and intellectuals like Fiedler himself.

Entitled “What Can We Do About Fagin?”—Fagin being the Jewish villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist—the essay shows that the modern Jew who adopts English as his language is joining a culture riddled with negative stereotypes of . . . himself. These demonic images figure in some of the best works of some of the best writers, and form an indelible part of the English literary tradition—not just in the earlier form of Dickens’ Fagin, or still earlier of Shakespeare’s Shylock, but in, to mention only two famous modern poets, Ezra Pound’s wartime broadcasts inveighing against “Jew slime” or such memorable lines by T.S. Eliot as “The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot” and the same venerated poet’s 1933 admonition that, in any well-ordered society, “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

How should Jewish writers proceed on this inhospitable ground?

There was a paradox in the timing of Fiedler’s essay, since this was actually the postwar moment when Jews were themselves beginning to move into the forefront of Anglo-American culture. The “New York Intellectuals”—the first European-style intelligentsia on American soil, clustered around several magazines and publishing houses—were beginning to gain prominence as writers, thinkers, critics, and professors. Fiedler was thus not a petitioner requesting permission to enter American letters but someone already in place and intending to stay. Indeed, by the end of his essay, after laying out the problem, he proposes an answer:

[We] can begin to build rival myths of our meaning for the Western world, other images of the Jew to dispossess the ancient images of terror. Several, of varying dignity and depth, are already in existence: the happy Hebrew peasant of the new Israel; the alienated Jew as artist (Kafka’s protagonist Josef K.) or dilettante (Proust’s Charles Swann) or citizen (Joyce’s Leopold Bloom); the sensitive young victim of the recent crop of American war novels; the ambiguous figure of Saul Bellow’s novel [The Victim], both victim and oppressor.

According to Fiedler, the response to existing negative stereotypes was to create autonomous new representations. For him, as for others at the time, the modern Jew could possibly even become a literary archetype: the new Everyman of a society in which many felt somewhat alienated, or marginal. In charting this proposed new path of Jewish fiction, Fiedler singles out such forerunners as Kafka and Proust and then, as a contemporary exemplar, Saul Bellow, whose second novel, The Victim, about a New York Jew who is being stalked by an anti-Semite, had been published two years earlier.

It was an auspicious choice of writer and book.

https://quillette.com/2019/10/02/gilead-resembles-

Margaret Atwood, whose work I have long admired, is now being hailed as a prophet. It is quite the phenomenon. According to the pundits, Atwood’s 1985 work, The Handmaid’s Tale, which Mary McCarthy once savaged, and the recently-published 2019 sequel, The Testaments, are dystopias which aptly describe the contemporary climate change crisis, toxic environments, the rise in infertility, and the enslavement of women in Trump’s America.

Is this all Atwood is writing about? Do the increasing restrictions on abortion in America parallel the extreme misogyny of Gilead, the theocratic state in Atwood’s saga? Is the unjust separation of mothers and children, a la Trump on the southern border, what Atwood has foretold? Every review and interview with Atwood that I could find strongly insists that this is the case.

Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, attributes the current popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale to Trump’s ascendancy. She writes: “It’s hardly surprising that in 2016 the book resonated—particularly women—stunned that a brazen misogynist, given to fascist rhetoric and backed by religious fundamentalists was taking power.”

Michiko Kakutani recently reviewed The Testaments for the New York Times. She writes:

Atwood understands that the fascist crimes of Gilead speak for themselves…just as their relevance to our own times does not need to be put in boldface. Many American readers and viewers of The Handmaid’s Tale are already heavily invested with the story of Gilead because we’ve come to identify with the Handmaids’ hopes that the nightmare will end and the United States—with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees—will soon be restored. We identify because the events in Atwood’s novel…now feel frighteningly real. Because news segments on television in 2019 are filled with images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred and reports of accelerating climate change jeopardizing life as we know it on the planet.

At the anti-Trump pro-women’s rights marches around the country, some feminist protesters dressed like Handmaids in billowing, shapeless red dresses, their facial identities obscured by large, white Victorian-era bonnets, carrying signs that read: “Make Margaret Atwood fiction again” and “The Handmaid’s Tale is not an instruction manual.”

They have a point. Abortion rights are being steadily challenged and nearly eviscerated in the formerly slave-owning American states. Right-to-life lawyers insist that the protection of unborn children without any gestational markers is the law of the land. We now have free states and slave states in terms of access to high quality, insurance-funded abortions. Pregnant, drug-addicted women are being jailed for child abuse.

However, Atwood’s Gilead reflects and foretells two other profoundly devastating realities, which neither the critics nor Atwood dwell upon.