American Literature draws from the diverse cultures of all immigrants, ethnic and religious groups in the country. Jewish Literature is a unique part of American Literature. It refers to the published writings by American Jews about their American experiences, which were described from a Jewish perspective self consciously.

The Jews originally lived in the Middle East in ancient times. Around 44B.C.the were driven out of their homeland by the Roman Empire. As a result they became homeless and had to wander around, some of whom settled down in many countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. They suffered from racial discrimination and persecution all the time until the 19th century when Jews, through hard working, became successful in society.

1881-1924 was the years of the great immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to America. Unlike other immigrants from countries like Germany, Ireland etc, Jewish people tended to live in the cities and mainly in the Northeast. That is why Jewish literature always reveals a crowded urban background around the turn of 20th century, Jews came to America with a desire for learning. They were fascinated and enchanted by the new world, where their life changed from a Middle-Age sort, close-knit traditional community into an open and liberal world of modernity. Another wave of immigration occurred on the eve of World War Ⅱ due to Nazi persecution of Jews. And their situation in America was changed by two historical events, the holocaust during the war and the founding of Israel in 1948. Since then they won sympathy and acceptance. They have gradually assimilated themselves into American culture.

The true arrival of competent mature Jewish literature appeared by the end of World War Ⅱ, when many talented Jewish writers have been in the spotlight of American literature. Since Saul Bellow (1915-) and Isaac Bolshevik Singer (1904-) received Nobel Prizes in 1976 and 1978 respectively, the status of Jewish literature as an important part of America literature has been firmly established. Their common attitude derives from their common cultural background, a common history of being persecuted and discriminated as people rather than individuals.

Ⅱ. Saul Bellow (1915-)

1. Life and literary career
Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada on June 10, two years after his parents had emigrated from Russia. He grew up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal. Under the influence of his mother, he learned Hebrew, Yiddish, French and English. In 1924 he moved to Chicago with his family and later in 1933 he attended the University of Chicago. In 1935 he studied at the Northwestern University and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology and sociology two years after.
Being a thorough intellectual, he read widely in many subjects. During World War Ⅱ he served in the Merchant Marine and settled down to teach and write.

Bellow’s first book, Dangling Man, came out in 1944. Then in the following four decades, a good number of novels, short stories and plays were published and won him awards. After The Victim (1947), he published The Adventures of Augie March(1953), which won the first of his three National Book Awards. In 1956 Bellow’s another book, Seize the Day came out, to be followed by  Henderson the Rain King(1959). In 1960 he won the Friends of Literature Fiction Award. His next book, Herzog (1964), received four awards: the James L. Dow Award, the National Literature Prize (1965). His collection of short stories, Mosby’s Memoirs (1968) was awarded the French Croix de Chevalier des Arts et letters, and Mr. Sammler’s Planed (1970) won his third National Book Award (1971). His Humboldt’s Gift appeared in print in 1975, then The Dean’s December in 1982. His career reaches its climax in 1976, in which year he was a warded the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature.

2. Comment
Bellow’s works are in essence affirmatively humanistic. In his eyes, modern man has suffered frustration and defeat. Managing to get rid of pressures, man strives for truth, freedom and wisdom. So most of Saul Bellow’s heroes are Jewish intellectuals, who try to discover the queerness of existence and over come it. It is easy for us to see a typical Bellovian protagonist in his works, Tommy Wilhelm (Seize the Day), Asa Leventhal(The Victim),or Herzog (Herzog),who is usually in a suffering situation and behaves in an impotent, tragic-comic way . Despite the wretchedness and absurdity of man’s existence, Bellow has a faith in his power and ability. Thus his novels usually end on an affirmative note.

Bellow is famous for depicting and interpreting the struggle of city dwellers to define their roles and responsibilities in the modern world. His themes are displacement, alienation and searching for identity. He follows the realistic tradition in literature and stresses the truthful representation of life as it is. At the same time he is influenced by modernistic literature and thus realism, romanticism and existentialism as well have all left their imprint on his works.

Selected Work:
[Introduction]
Herzog (1964) is Saul Bellow’s masterpiece, which won him the National Book Award and three other awards. It depicts a 47- year-old, sort of neurotic, alienated professor of literature who experiences an emotional, intellectual and moral crisis. He suffers the lonely feeling of estrangement from his two ex-wives, his Japanese mistress, his current lover, and his children as well. He is in a terrible condition where he has difficulty in dealing with women on the one hand, yet cannot live without them. He tries to recover his stability by analyzing his own false illusions and pretensions. His mentality is revealed in the form of brilliant and funny letters either in his head or on paper, to friends, relatives, politicians, philosophers, psychiatrists, the public and even God. These letters are actually an important way of expressing Professor Herzog’s desire for communication with others and his failure to establish any real contact with outside world. Herzog’s story also suggests the futility of attempts to establish one’s identity through sex.

Bellow’s fiction is dominated by the marginal man, an alienated and absurd character caught between his own disability and the pressure imposed by his friends and society Bellow’s protagonists are often uncommon thinkers who long for transcendental existence as they are estranged from the world. They laugh at their deficiency with bitter irony for it relieves despair. They hunger for communication, yet they hold back lest that would but betray the sanctity of their private self. Therefore, they are driven even deeper into their inner recesses. Bellow, however, is by on means pessimistic because he firmly believes in human reason. A man cannot shape his own destiny, but he can control the manner in which he faces it and denies absurdity by his efforts.

Herzog
  If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me , thought Moses Herzog.
  Some people thought he was cracked and for a time he himself had doubted that he was all there. But now, though he still behaved oddly, he self confident, cheerful, clairvoyant, and strong. He had fallen under a spell and was writing letters to everyone under the sun. He was so place with a valise full of papers. He had carried this valise from New York to Martha’s Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately; two days later he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts. Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.
  It was the peak of summer in theBerkshires..Herzog was alone in the big old house. Normally particular about food, He now ate Silver Cup bread from the paper package, beans from the can, andAmerican Cheese..Now and then he picked raspberries in the overgrown garden, lifting up the thorny canes with absent-minded caution. As for sleep, he slept on a mattress without sheets—it was his abandoned marriage bed—or in the hammock, covered by his coat. Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him in the yard. When he opened his eyes in the night, the starts were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.
  When some new thought gripped his heart he went to the kitchen, his headquarters, to write it down. The white paint was scaling from the table with his sleeve, calmly wondering why field mice should have such a passion for wax and paraffin. They made holes in paraffin-sealed preserves; they gnawed birthday candles down to the wicks. A rat chewed into a package of bread, leaving the shape of its body in the layers of slices. Herzog ate the other half of the loaf spread with jam. He could share with rats too.
  All the while, one corner of his mind remained open to the external world. He heard the crows in the morning. Their harsh call was delicious. He heard the thrushes at dusk. At night there was a barn owl. When he walked in the garden, excited bya mental letter,he saw roses winding about the rain spout; or mulberries—birds gorging in the mulberry tree. The days were hot, the evenings flushed and dusty. He looked keenly at everything but he self half blind.
  His friend, his former friend, Valentine, and his wife, his ex-wife of his face in a gray, webby window, He looked weirdly tranquil. A radiant line went from mid-forehead over his straight nose and full, silent lips.
  Late in spring Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.
  At that time he had been giving adult-education lectures in a New York night school. He was clear enough in April but by the end of May he began to ramble. It became apparent to his students that they would never learn much about the roots of Romanticism but that they would see and hear odd things. One after another, the academic formalities dropped away. Professor Herzog had the unconscious frankness of a man deeply preoccupied. And toward the end of the term there were long pauses in his lectures. He would stop, muttering, “Excuse me,” reaching inside his pen. The table creaking, he wrote on scraps of paper with a great pressure of eagerness in his hands; he was absorbed, his eyes darkly circled. His white face showed everything—everything. He was reasoning, arguing, he was suffering, he had thought of a brilliant alternative—he was wide-open, he was narrow; his eyes, his mouth made everything silently clear—longing, bigotry, bitter anger. One could see it all. The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent.
  At first there was no pattern to the notes he made. They were fragments—nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations of, in the Yiddish of his long-dead mother, Trepverter—retorts that came too late, when you were already on your way down the stairs.

Topic discussion:What is the theme of the novel?
Answer

Reference book:
1.李宜燮,常耀信:<<美国文学选读>>, 南开大学出版社,2002年.
2.林缃华:<<西方现代派文学评论>>,上海人民出版社,1987年.
3.常耀信:<<美国文学简史>>,南开大学出版社,1998年.
4.吴定柏:<<美国文学大纲>>,上海外语教育出版社,1998年.