October 7, 2019
Bellow Between Hebraism and Hellenism
By Hillel HalkinBellow's whole career as a writer was devoted to this dichotomy, sometimes veering toward one pole, sometimes toward the other, but never losing sight of both.
Once, if asked to respond to Ruth Wisse’s fine and penetrating essay on Saul Bellow’s Jewishness, I would have made a point of re-reading each of the novels discussed by her. Having become stingier with my time, however, I decided to make do with re-reading just Ravelstein—and, even then, three surprises awaited me.
The first surprise was that, opening the 2001 paperback edition of Ravelstein that I took from its shelf, I found the inscription: “For Hillel and Marcia with best wishes, Saul Bellow.” Although I remembered the occasion (the only one) on which my wife and I met Bellow, which was at a dinner at Ruth Wisse’s home in Cambridge a year or two before his death, I had forgotten being given the book.
The second surprise, tucked as a bookmark into the novel’s first pages, was a card from a glatt-kosher catering company in New York informing me that the meal served on my El Al flight back to Israel had been prepared under the strictest rabbinical supervision. Glatt kosher? Me? I can’t imagine what I might have done to deserve it.
