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January 22, 2020

Saul Bellow’s Quest for Spirituality in Jerusalem

The novelist’s sole work of nonfiction.

In 1976, the great novelist Saul Bellow wrote his sole book-length nonfiction work, a travelogue called To Jerusalem and Back. Bellow’s account is informed not only by several months in Israel but also by his reading of literary antecedents, including the decidedly anti-Semitic French writer Pierre Loti, who visited Jerusalem in 1894, and the great French conservative Catholic François-René de Chateaubriand, whose 1809 travelogue displays a bit of admiration for Jews mixed in with a great deal of contempt. Considering both Bellow’s work and the works of those who influenced him, Paul Berman writes:

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