The mid-20th century is remembered as a golden age of American Jewish fiction. But were any of its leading lights content to be described as Jewish writers? “I am often described as a Jewish writer,” Saul Bellow observes coolly in a 1974 essay, “Starting Out in Chicago,” which serves as the prologue to There Is Simply Too Much To Think About, a new edition of his collected nonfiction edited by Benjamin Taylor. “In much the same way, one might be called a Samoan astronomer or an Eskimo cellist or a Zulu Gainsborough expert. There is some oddity about it. I am a Jew, and I have written some books. I have tried to fit my soul into the Jewish-writer category, but it does not feel comfortably accommodated there.”
Bellow’s analogies draw a sharp distinction between origin and achievement, what you are born as and what you make yourself into. Of course, this is itself a highly American way of looking at things—the natural attitude in a country where people of all backgrounds come to make themselves anew. “I am an American, Chicago born,” boasts Augie March, the hero of a novel whose title, The Adventures of Augie March, deliberately draws a connection between this 20th-century son of Jewish immigrants and the archetypal American adventurers, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Much of the detail of Augie’s life and surroundings is drawn directly from Bellow’s own childhood, and it is natural to think of Augie as a version of Bellow himself, much as the heroes of later novels—Moses Herzog in Herzog, Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift—are clearly the writer’s surrogates. Yet as has often been observed, Bellow was actually born Canadian, in the Montreal suburb of Lachine in 1915. Not until he was 9 years old did his family move to Chicago (illegally, it is worth noting). Augie the American is not what Bellow was but what he labored to become.
From Tablet Magazine
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