The Image of the Black in American-Jewish Fiction: The Other Tradition

36 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 THE IMAGE OF THE BlACK IN AMERICAN-JEWISH FICTION: THE OTHER TRADITION} by Lewis Fried Lewis Fried is a professor of American literature at Kent State University. This year he is a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Tromso in Norway. What is the meaning of the historically recent appearance of the black in American-Jewish fiction? The significance ofwhat Louis Harap and Ellen Schiff have called this "dramatic encounter" has its origins, I want to suggest, in the setting of post-Holocaust American Jewish letters.2 The works I want to discuss, specifically Norman Mailer's foray into social psychology, "The White Negro" (1957), Saul Bellow'sepicalHenderson the Rain King (1959), Bernard Malamud's "Angel Levine" (1955), and Jay Neugeboren's Sam's Legacy (1974), are not analyses of American political institutions or strategies to achieve the democratic society. They were not primarily funded by the then immediate civic politics of racial tension found, for instance, in Podhoretz's "My Negro Problem-and Ours" (1963), Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) and The Dean's December (1982), Malamud's The Tenants (1971), and Doctorow's Ragtime (1975). While it is commonplace to argue that the literary figure of the black is shaped by white America's national guilt and sexual prurience, the novelistic portrayal of the black that I want to examine is anthropological: an encounter not between two sub-cultures (as Cuddihy argues), or between stereotypes 'This paper grew out of discussions with my colleagues and friends, notably Professors Moshe Berger and Roger Klein of the Cleveland College for Jewish Studies, and Sanford Marovitz of Kent State University. Ellen Schiff, as usual, made invaluable suggestions, and Professor Carol Kessner of Stony Brook gave me the opportunity to begin writing this. I am grateful for their encouragement. 2See Louis Harap's Drarnatic Encounters (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987); Ellen Schiff suggested the title of Harap's magisterial work. The Image of the Black in American-Jewish Fiction 37 reflecting the American psyche (as Fiedler asserts), but rather an engagement of and by individuals.3 The tradition that I want to explore has at its heart a discussion of what is authentic human nature, what is human' by nature. This literature eradicates the depersonalizing "otherness" from encounters so that a persona is transformed into a person. Is it possible, such a literature asks, to speak of humanization transcending the "thingness" conferred upon individuals by the absolutization of society? Certainly, both the question and the tradition are complex and are obviously simplified as a mere list. On the one hand, this tradition of humanizing engagement between literary blacks and Jews has as its physical background the extermination of European Jewry and the black struggle for a democratic life. On the other hand, we have debates about the nature of the true self and its capacity for engagement-with both the divine and the human. Witness the discovery of Buber and Rosenzweig in America, the influence of Niebuhr upon modern Jewish thought, the theologies of Heschel and Herberg, the meditations of Paul Goodman, and the impact of Wilhelm Reich. They helped transform the deportment of a religion at ease with the politics of social liberalism to one based on the situation of faith: the nakedness of encounter. This setting is a revelation of our sense of finitude and our need for engagement. For the sharing of one's being is a risky passage: from the realm of human incompleteness into a self-being that is reflective and reflexive. "Through the Thou," as Buber puts it, "a man becomes 1.,,4 3See John Murray Cuddihy's The Ordeal ofCivility (New York: Basic Books, 1974), esp. pp. 203-222; Leslie"Fiedler's "Race-The Dream and the Nightmare," Commentary, v. 36 (Oct. 1963), pp. 297-304; his contribution to Negro andjew: An Encounter in America, ed. Shlomo Katz (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 29-40; and his The Last jew in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1966). 'See, for example, Arnold Eisen's The Chosen People in America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1983); Robert Goldy's The Emergence of jewish Theology in...