"A Recognizable Jewish Type:" Saul Bellow's Dr Tamkin and Valentine Gersbach as Jewish Social History

There is one interpretation of Saul Bellow's enigmatic Dr Tamkin character no critic has been tempted to offer: that he is a realistic portrayal of a modern Jewish type. He has been described in nearly every other imaginable way, because Seize the Day's Tamkin is a repellent character that has attracted a lot of attention. Spouting insights and bunk, offering sympathy to the tale's hapless hero, Tommy Wilhelm, while picking his pocket, Tamkin has been an irresistible if daunting subject for literary analysis. In one noted interpretation, Gilead Morahg argues that it is the "apparent discrepancy between Tamkin's dubious and seemingly negative personality and his uncanny ability to communicate positive, healing ideas" that accounts for Tamkin's opacity.¹ Morahg resolves this discrepancy by painting Tamkin as a kind of literary artist who fails to live up to the ideals he seeks to teach. But the gap between Tamkin's words and deeds is not the most important problem he presents to the prospective critic. It is only part of a larger question that Daniel Weiss identified forty years ago and that has still not been successfully answered. That question is whether Tamkin is a credible figure in a work of realistic fiction. As Weiss put it in his early essay, "Dr Tamkin, the psychologist, is a problem" because "the realistic hyperbole that envelops him is hazardous to the realism of the novel."² In other words, the essential question about Tamkin is whether a person like him could exist.

Morahg skirts this question and the hyperbole that invites it, focusing instead on how Tamkin's vices and ideals serve Bellow's artistic aims by yielding a "compelling fictional enigma that attracts the attention and demands the consideration of both protagonist and reader."³ But this is of little help to the many critics who struggle to solve the riddle of Tamkin's nature. They are well aware that he is a "compelling fictional enigma." Anyone who considers Tamkin's claims that he was psychiatrist to the Egyptian royal family, worked in television, was in the criminal underworld, speaks Greek, made and lost a fortune in cotton exports, performed research at Eastman Kodak, directed a mental clinic, and designed an unsinkable ship must wonder, with Alfred Kazin, "who is to say what Tamkin is, where he begins, who he is, what he believes?"⁴

A popular answer is that Tamkin is not a realistic character but instead a broadly drawn caricature plucked from the traditions of Yiddish folklore. This view disregards Bellow's protest that Jewish fiction in the 1950s depended too heavily on inherited Jewish types. For Bellow, producing the schnorrer for a laugh, the rabbi when piety is required paints a picture of Jewish life that is "far less interesting of course than the real thing."⁵ Nevertheless, many critics contend that Tamkin is such a broadly drawn type. These critics have seen in Tamkin a variety of figures, including that "stock Jewish character, the schnorrer or professional beggar," the "zany luftmensch" who lives without visible means of support, the zaddik or wise sage of Hasidic thought, and also a "ludicrous imitation" of the same.⁶ But Bellow's commitment to the "real thing," the actual Jew in all his complexity, is vitally present in Tamkin in a way that undermines such interpretations. Tamkin is too calculating to pass for a zany luftmensch. He takes control of Tommy Wilhelm's money by surprising him with a power-of-attorney document to be signed. And the schnorrer is a comic character, as Bellow realized when he objected to its use to win an easy laugh. Irving Howe and others have recognized how funny and satisfying it is to watch the schnorrer extract money from and condescend to his rich but reluctant benefactors. But Tommy Wilhelm is not rich, and it is not funny when he loses his money in the market, searches for Tamkin in the men's lavatory, and is humiliated when he mistakenly badgers a stranger in the toilet.⁷

Still...