47. The remarks of Sam Bellows are recounted in an email from his daughter, Lesha Bellows Greengus, 3 March 2010. As for the fate of relatives, according to SB, his uncle Aron Gordin, Lescha’s brother, was forced to dig his own grave in Dagda and then murdered by his neighbors. Aron’s son, Nota, who had fled Russia with the partisans and eventually served in the Russian army, later found one of the neighbors and had to be restrained from beating him to death by his fellow soldiers. According to SB (as recalled in an email from Janis Bellow, 4 July 2009), three of Abraham’s sisters (Brochka, Hassya, and Pesse) also perished in the Holocaust.
48. See Nathans, Beyond the Pale, pp. 86ff, for the literature of Jewish criminality in St. Petersburg in the last third of the nineteenth century. Among the works discussed are Gershon Lifshits’s autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Criminal (1881), Lev Levanda’s Confessions of a Wheeler Dealer (1880), Victor Nikitin’s story “Seeker of Happiness” (1875), and Sholem Asch’s novel Petersburg (1929), set in the decade before the Russian Revolution.
49. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), p. 48.
50. SB, ed., Great Jewish Short Stories, p. 16. The Sholom Aleichem story SB translated was “Eternal Life,” in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1953; New York: Viking, 1959).
51. Email from Lesha Bellows Greengus, 7 March 2010.
52. SB, The Bellarosa Connection, published in 1979 as a Penguin paperback original, reprinted in SB, CS, p. 39 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
53. The details of Harry Fonstein’s escape fit accounts of the arrest and rescue of Jews in Genoa in 1943–44, in the first three chapters of Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian-Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York: Summit, 1991). Stille’s account of how documents were forged, arrests avoided, and escapes engineered shows how ingenious, resourceful, and entrepreneurial, as well as brave, participants were: “Teglio [the heroic head of DELASEM, an underground assistance group for Jews in Genoa] obtained copies of official letterhead from various southern Italian towns. Through friends he found an engraver who would make rubber and metal stamps he could use to prepare documents with official-looking markings. The Archbishop’s Office produced stamps for the corresponding church parishes, thus enabling Teglio to create baptismal certificates to go along with the identity cards. Before long he assembled a whole workshop for manufacturing false documents; he kept the various tools hidden in different apartments to minimize chances of betrayal” (p. 250). The opportunities for bribery and inadvertent disclosure in this sort of operation are clear, and as likely to have operated in St. Petersburg in 1913 as in Genoa in 1943.
54. From Janis Bellow’s Preface to SB, CS, p. vii. See also her journal entry of 24 May 1989, recording a second dinner with the Vermont neighbors: “We had dinner with the Hillmans the night before last. B. told them about Bellarosa and Herb told us so many more details about the real man’s life. His name was Karl Schwarz (no ‘t’). He had 2 children—a son and a daughter. His wife was a teacher—nothing like Sorella in looks: smallish, plain. He did meet her in Cuba. They did live in New Jersey. While in Italy, Schwarz worked his way up to chief clerk in one of Rome’s largest hotels. He did meet Hitler. He was arrested first by the Italians, and released. They had done terrible things to him.… When released, he was told by an Italian girlfriend to contact Billy Rose by telegram. She had heard that he had an underground and was helping people. Schwarz did send a telegram. When he was arrested a second time, by the Germans, Rose arranged his release: in the middle of the night someone will come to your cell door. It will be open, keep going. He stayed in Genoa. In two weeks another of Rose’s agents contacted him, gave him money and passage.… B. wished he had more of the details, but said they weren’t important. Wld. have cluttered up the story. You don’t want to be forced to follow the facts.”
55. “You write, and then you erase,” Abraham is reported to have said to his son, early in SB’s career as an author: “You call that a profession? Was meinst du? ‘A writer’?” (Atlas, Biography, p. 60). As Joel Bellows remembers: “My grandfather had a wicked, demeaning tongue.”
56. This latter interpretation is bolstered, on the one hand, by the description of Father Herzog as not serving his sentence, “Because he was nervy, hasty. Obstinate, rebellious.” On the other hand, later in the novel, we are told, “He had a fool’s paradise in Petersburg for ten years, on forged papers. Then he sat in prison with common prisoners” (p. 565), though this may refer only to an initial few days after arrest, from which he would be released during the period of his trial.
57. Janis Bellow, email, 6 June 2009.
58. The manifest or passenger list of the Ascania can be found in Canadian Passenger Lists, 1865–1935 (Roll T-4751), available from Ancestry.ca, the self-described “largest online collection of genealogical documents anywhere in the world.” The names of the Belos and of “Rafael Gordin” are listed on p. 2 of the manifest. The destination listed there is Montreal, but immigrants were required to list their ultimate destination rather than their point of disembarkation. Most got off at Halifax, the main point of entry to Canada. In Herzog, Moses Herzog’s family is met in Montreal by Pa Herzog’s Canadian relatives. Having arrived in Halifax, as the manifest states, they traveled to Montreal by train, which is likely the route traveled by the Bellow family. Details of the crossing, from SB’s sister, Jane, were recalled by her niece Lesha Bellows Greengus, email 3 March 2010. The Belos were part of the enormous immigration of Russian and Polish Jews to the United States and Canada at the turn of the century. According to Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, p. 16, between 1891 and 1910, “nearly one million Jews fled the Russian Empire for the United States,” almost a fifth of the number of Jews in the 1897 census. “The anti-Semitic wave of the 1880s and thereafter, coming from both the peasantry ‘below’ as well as from the tsar and the aristocracy ‘above,’ engulfed Jews of all political and cultural persuasions.”
59. The essay of 1993 was “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence,” originally published in The National Interest, Spring 1993, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 99. The quote about the Heimat comes from Manea, “Conversation,” p. 3. The name Russian Literary Society at Tuley High School comes from Atlas, Biography, p. 260.
60. SB, “Zetland: By a Character Witness,” reprinted in SB, CS, p. 245.
61. For the V. S. Pritchett quote, see Daniel Fuchs, Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 29; for “Flaubertian standard,” see Gordon Lloyd Harper’s Paris Review interview with SB, “The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow” 9, no. 36 (1966): 48–73, reprinted in Gloria L. Cronin and Ben Siegel, eds., Conversations with Saul Bellow (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. 63 (henceforth cited as Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB).
62. The remark to Herbert Gold is quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 260; the letter mentioning his and Tolstoy’s “method” was to Anita Shreve, 25 March 1980.
63. In addition to other great Russian writers—Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov—SB was influenced, later in life in particular, by Russian thinkers or philosophers, including Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903), Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), and Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919).
64. Kazin’s remark is quoted in Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992; London: Secker & Warburg, 1993), p. 317. Later in the same passage Kazin explains: “One way or another people like [Philip] Rahv, like Mary [McCarthy], people that age, Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren’s wife, they’re all communists, but the ones who felt it most deeply were Rahv and the others [of Russian Jewish background].” Among other joke salutations between SB and Kazin were “Much-esteemed Damyon Mikarkovitch,” “Much-esteemed Ippolit Paschunyakovitch.”
65. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), p. 61.
&n
bsp; 66. The correspondent is addressed only as “Mr. Levinson” and no place of residence is included or alluded to in the letter, which is among SB’s papers in the Regenstein. The envelope is missing as well. But there are letters from an Alex Levinson of Moscow, written in 1991; presumably they are the same Levinson.
67. In 1912, sixteen-year-old Louis Dworkin traveled from Druya to Dvinsk, where he spent the night in the house of his great-aunt and -uncle, Berel and Shulamith Belo. For an account of his journey, see Chapter 3.
68. From Manea, “Conversation,” p. 9. On p. 3 of the same interview, SB mentions his paternal grandfather’s taking refuge in the Winter Palace.
69. Ibid., p. 5; “Literary Notes on Khrushchev,” Esquire, March 1961, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 36.
70. See, for example, Prince Myshkin, in Dostoyevsky’s, The Idiot, tr. Henry and Olga Carlisle (New York: Signet, 1969), pp. 562–63, responding to accusations of “overardency”: “It is not just we who are surprised by our strange Russian intensity in such cases, but all Europe. If one of us becomes a Catholic, he is bound to become a Jesuit, and one of the most subterranean. If one of us becomes an atheist he is bound to demand the uprooting of faith in God by force, that is, of course, by the sword.” In the introduction to this edition of the novel, SB’s friend Harold Rosenberg describes Dostoyevsky’s “identification with Russian extremism as both a dangerous weakness and a sacred gift,” and also as “the basis of his emotional nationalism. ‘Everywhere and in everything,’ he wrote to Maikov [the Russian poet], ‘I go to the ultimate limit, all my life I have crossed over the frontier’ ” (p. x).
71. Saul Bellow: Novels 1944–1953 (New York: Library of America, 2003), p. 3.
72. See Ronald Hingley, The Russian Mind (New York: Scribner, 1977), p. 13.
73. In the Khrushchev profile, reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 37, SB calls Father Karamazov “that corrupt and deep old man” and likens Khrushchev’s outbursts at the United Nations to those of Karamazov, calling them “corrupt and hypocritical,” “he feigns simplicity.”
74. Reprinted in SB, Novels, 1944–1953, p. 163 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
75. Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern American Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 6. See also Julian Behrstock to SB, 23 February 1995, in the Regenstein. Behrstock was a friend of SB’s from university in the 1930s:
Somehow your letter triggered reminiscence about episodes and snatches of conversation together.
I say to you: “A curious thing happens whenever something causes me to hit the depths of despondency. I suddenly and inexplicably find myself observing my dilemma—despair gives way to a surge of laughter.”
Your comment: “That’s Russian. It’s the reversal factor that enabled the Jews to survive.”
76. SB to Melvin Tumin, 21 April 1948.
77. Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 49.
78. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, p. 338.
79. Ibid., p. 339.
80. Atlas, Biography, p. 516.
81. The quotation about parents and heroic ancestors comes from the first of the two interviews with Keith Botsford, “A Half Life” (1990), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 287; the preceding quotation comes from the second interview, “A Second Half Life” (1991), ibid., p. 321; the quotation from “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?,” originally published in Vanity Fair, February 1984, comes from SB, CS, p. 322 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers). See also Ravelstein, p. 96: “God appeared very early to me. His hair was parted down the middle. I understood that we were related because he had made Adam in his own image, breathed life into him. My eldest brother also combed his hair in the same style.”
82. Samuel Greengus reports that “malachi,” in Wulpy’s quote, should be “malechei” (see Genesis 28:12) (email, 14 January 2011).
83. “Something to Remember Me By” was first published in Esquire, July 1990, reprinted in SB, CS, p. 437 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
84. Janis Bellow, email, 4 July 2009.
85. In Herzog, Nahum’s fictional alter ego, Mikhail, dies of typhus.
86. In SB, “Memoirs,” the Robert figure is called Mordecai. Pa Lurie sees his son Joshua as similar in character: “He had run away to Africa and made a fortune among the Kaffirs and later he sold cattle to the Russians during the Japanese war. When they lost they didn’t settle their debt, but he made a fortune nevertheless. He came back to Russia after this, and until the War led the life of a rich man. According to Ma, he was princely, dashing, brave and open-handed. By Pa’s account, he drank too much and spent his money on women and neglected his respectable wife. Pa would sometimes frown at me and say that I reminded him of Mordecai” (p. 34).
87. Abraham Bellow’s letter is among SB’s papers in the Regenstein.
2. CANADA/LIZA
1. Quoted in an edited and rewritten interview between SB and Philip Roth, “ ‘I Got a Scheme!’: The Words of Saul Bellow,” New Yorker (25 April 2005), p. 77.
2. See SB, “By the St. Lawrence,” SB, CS, p. 3.
3. Two-flats are residential buildings containing two apartments, one on top of the other, with separate entrances. The term is used in Buffalo and Detroit as well as by Chicagoans.
4. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 3.
5. From p. 2 of a draft of SB’s speech at the ceremony renaming the Lachine Library. The speech was never published but a draft is preserved in the Regenstein. Henceforth cited as Lachine speech.
6. Wordsworth, “The Two-Part Prelude” (1799), ll. 1.12.
7. Women from the Caughnawaga reservation worked in Lachine selling baskets or, like SB’s nurse, as domestics. Many Caughnawaga men worked at Dominion Bridge. To return to the reservation they crossed the St. Lawrence over the unprotected Canadian Pacific Bridge; if a train appeared, they had to jump into the river, which was very swift. Many men drowned, “because they got drunk in Lachine, tried to get back to the reservation, and then jumped in the river when they were overtaken by a train.” This information and the quotation come from an eight-hour interview SB gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, a “University Professor” (as SB himself would become) at Boston University. Koch, a psychologist, had been funded by the Ford Foundation to conduct a series of videotaped interviews with artists and authors. Between 1983 and 1988, as part of the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project, he conducted seventeen eight- to ten-hour interviews with, among others, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, and Richard Wilbur, as well as SB. Ruth Miller, a friend and former student of SB’s, who was at work on a book about him, also took part in the Koch interviews. The videotapes of the interviews are held at Boston University. All subsequent quotations from them in this chapter are taken from the first of four two-hour videotapes.
8. For the mother “mute with love,” see SB, “By the St. Lawrence,” CS, p. 2, a memory recounted by SB on several occasions; the other female protectors and Lachine as paradise come from the Lachine speech, p. 5.
9. See Herzog, p. 559.
10. Quoted in Atlas, Biography, p. 9.
11. There is a discrepancy here between the ship docking at Halifax, according to Library and Archives Canada, which has all ship manifests on microfilm (available on Ancestry.ca), and the Herzog family being described as “getting off the train.”
12. According to Atlas, Biography, p. 8, this account was questioned by Ruth Gameroff, wife of Sam (Shmuel David) Gameroff, the cousin who was sent to fetch the doctor. She claimed the doctor’s name was Dixon and that he was “not a drinking man.” The episode took place when Sam was seventeen, though, well before he married Ruth (née Clark), an American from Connecticut. When SB was sent a draft of Ruth Miller’s Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, he wrote “wrong” in the margin next to a passage in which he is said to describe the doctor as “the drunken goy�
� (Regenstein).
13. This letter is in the Regenstein.
14. Maurice Bellows was born on 27 December 1907; Sam Bellows was born on 17 April 1911.
15. This quotation comes from an eight-hour interview SB gave in 1987 to Sigmund Koch, a “University Professor” (as SB himself would become) at Boston University. Koch, a psychologist, had been funded by the Ford Foundation to conduct a series of videotaped interviews with artists and authors. Between 1983 and 1988, as part of the Boston University Aesthetics Research Project, he conducted seventeen eight- to ten-hour interviews with, among other authors, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, and Richard Wilbur, as well as SB. Ruth Miller, a friend and former student of SB’s, who was at work on a book about him, also took part in the Koch interviews. The videotapes of the interviews are held at Boston University. All subsequent quotations from them in this chapter are taken from the first of four two-hour videotapes (henceforth cited as Koch interview). The detailed memories that follow come from the Lachine speech, p. 5, and the Koch interview.
16. Koch interview. In a letter of 27 March 1987 to Fred Mancuso, son of the landlady at 130 Eighth Avenue, SB remembers the tomatoes that were put out to dry at the end of summer, “upstairs and all around the house,” also the cow Aunt Rosa bought for fresh milk. But these memories of Lachine may be from visits after the family had moved to Montreal.
17. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” ll. 2–4. The “Chicago Book” (henceforth cited as SB, “CB”) was intended as a work of reportage and reminisences, along the lines of To Jerusalem and Back. It exists in several parts: a manuscript of eighty-four pages, many autobiographical (the “Wordsworthian linkage” comes from this section, on p. 36); shorter sections, often just notes, on such topics as “American Materialism” or “A Visit to County Jail,” numbered separately or not numbered; and sixteen background files or folders containing clippings, notes, ephemeral publications, and correspondence on a range of Chicago topics and personalities. All these materials can be found in the Regenstein. The title “Chicago Book” comes from the heading of a section dated 5 April 1979: “Notes for Chicago Book.”
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 89
