The Jewish American Novel

Conclusion

249 Conclusion I have demonstrated the extent to which four closely related cultural movements (four repertoric shifts in adjacent systems) interacted in the immediate postwar period in the United States. The outcome of this interaction I have chosen to dub the Jewish American existentialist novel, whose literary repertoire unites each of the elements that shaped the respective systems. As the Holocaust became an increasingly important repertoric element in the political system after the mass-mediatized Eichmann trial, the US-American religious system incorporated the Holocaust into its theological repertoire, compelled by the peripheral but influential phenomenon of radical death-of-God theology. Both elements—the Holocaust and a God-forsaken universe—were integral parts of the French existentialist repertoire that, not coincidentally , held sway in the US, striking a resonant chord in the postwar Jewish community. In turn, the Jewish American novel, whose repertoire was—amongst other—built on the basis of those same repertoric elements, moved to the center of the literary system and became the predominant voice in US-American literature shortly after the war. While prewar French existentialism was still characterized by an all-pervasive indifference that prevented the protagonists from undertaking (or completing) their quests for a new pertinence, postwar existentialism became increasingly ideological and—in its attempt to counter the sociolect of fascism—created committed, authentic characters who discovered and embraced the value of human fellowship. The same movement, from indifference to commitment, characterizes the postwar Jewish American novel. The transfer of the French existentialist repertoire into the US-American literary system originated in the works of Saul Bellow, who is perhaps the most characteristic and successful (as to institutional recognition) postwar Jewish American novelist. Fluent in French, Bellow had direct access to the French originals well before other Americans could savor the English translations. Bellow’s work is so characteristic, not only because its evolution from indifference to commitment foreshadows the evolution of the Jewish American novel at large, but also because the very movement characterizes most of his individual novels (think of his alienated, indifferent protagonists who try—sometimes successfully—to discover or create an authentic Jewish identity and a set of values worthy of their commitment). Whereas the prewar model of indifference still characterizes his two earliest novels, and Augie March and Seize the Day were straddled across both categories, Henderson the 250 Conclusion Rain King heralded the postwar, affirmative variant of the existentialist model in Jewish American literature. Although it took some time in its preparation, once the second model was created, it was embraced by a number of authors who continued in the affirmative vein. I have illustrated this in my discussion of novels by Bernard Malamud and Edward Lewis Wallant, whose Jewish protagonists set out successfully on their quests for a new pertinence, finally to discover that their heart’s ultimate need resides in a human community. Bellow’s primary model found favor in the 1940s with a novelist who can be credited with the model’s co-creation: Written almost simultaneously with Dangling Man, Isaac Rosenfeld’s Passage from Home is the epitome of alienation and it presents as bleak a conclusion as Bellow’s debut novel. Owing to both a writer’s block and his untimely death, Bellow’s erstwhile prime literary competitor never outgrew his status of merely a promising talent. It would have been interesting to see, however, where Rosenfeld could have taken the Jewish existentialist novel if only his health and his muse had permitted it. Nearly as tragic is the critical neglect—through no failure of his own—of the novels by Daniel Stern, perhaps the first Jewish American author who incorporated explicitly the Holocaust, death-of-God theology, and French existentialism as important thematic issues into his novels. While his debut novel still despairs about the feasibility of human fellowship, After the War leaves its protagonist more promisingly poised on the brink of commitment and community—a clear rapprochement to the French postwar model. Yet, as the USA, having survived the terrors of the Cold War, became increasingly involved in the Vietnam war, novelists newly discovering the formal techniques of postmodernism reverted to Camus’s prewar model of indifference and negativity. This has been illustrated by two novels of Jonathan Baumbach and Norma Rosen, which quite explicitly harked back to L’Etranger and to Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Does this conclude, then, the story of French existentialism in the Jewish American novel? Well, not quite. Although hardly made in...