Never at Home: Jewish Writers and the Sense of Place

By Morris Dickstein

“From Lisbon to Los Angeles, Jewish writers have been able to examine their surroundings with an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s wisdom. Their factual and fictional dispatches from the places to which they felt deeply connected often became the defining literary visions of those far-flung places — it’s impossible to envision Odessa, for example, without seeing the world Isaac Babel sketched.”

I quote this striking remark from the valuable website about Jewish books and writers, Nextbook.org. It helps explain the rich variety of Jewish writing, which reflects the many places Jews have lived and languages in which they’ve written. But how true is it? How strong a sense of place do we find in modern Jewish literature, and especially among American Jewish writers? Can it be that Isaac Babel was one of the exceptions, that he gave us such a vivid sense of Odessa not because he was Jewish but because he was so thoroughly assimilated?

On June 16 the literary world celebrated the centenary of Bloomsday, the date in 1904 when the meandering action of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place. Though Joyce wrote the novel as an exile living on the Continent and chose a Jew for his unassuming hero, it has been said that if Dublin were wiped out by an earthquake, it could be reconstructed from the novel’s wealth of ordinary detail. The same fast bond between a writer and his city can be found not only in Isaac Babel’s Odessa but in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin, Alberto Moravia’s Rome, Günter Grass’s Danzig, Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, perhaps even Kafka’s Prague. Could this be said of any Jewish writers in America, though Jews have enjoyed unprecedented comfort and freedom in the United States?

Perhaps a high comfort level is not essential for great writing. Nathanael West conjured up the grungy side of Los Angeles and Hollywood with such power in The Day of the Locust because, as an Easterner and an artist, he found it so alien, just as Kafka had created a hallucinatory version of Prague because he felt perpetually ill at ease as a German-speaking Jew – part of a minority within a minority. Thanks to the fantastic mobility of American life as well as the social mobility enjoyed by Jews, it is much harder to identify our own writers with particular scenes and places.

When I try to do so, only a handful of books come to mind: the Chicago of Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man, The Adventures of Augie March, and The Dean’s December; the Lower East Side of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, and Anzia Yezerska’s Bread Givers; the Brownsville of Alfred Kazin’s lyrical memoir A Walker in the City; perhaps, if we stretch it, the Newark and its environs of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Patrimony, and American Pastoral.

There is one link among these books: they reach back into the worlds where their authors grew up, places they were often desperate to leave behind. With his cry of “Beyond! Beyond!” Kazin expresses his youthful longing to escape the poverty of Brownsville, yet the book also captures the rush of emotion he feels whenever he returns. Though it incubated a rich hybrid culture of its own, the Lower East Side was really a way station for immigrant Jews, whose children fled for greener pastures as soon as they could.

The power of these scenes from early life is fueled by nostalgia for a world that no longer exists, by feelings directed more towards their own childhood, home, and family than towards city or neighborhood. These novels are part of an intimate archaeology exploring the buried layers of the writer’s self. Their landscape is internal, not topographic: they worry the question of Who I Am rather than Where I Am. They are less about location than about dislocation, as if America had given the wandering Jew a new meaning.

Bellow is a partial exception, for although his late stories return poignantly to his early years and his colorful extended family, his novels display an genius for grappling with different scenes and settings. He is as fully alive to the grim New York milieu of The Victim, Seize the Day, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet as he is to the cast of small-time gangsters, lawyers, hustlers, and dreamers who give rude energy to his picture of Chicago. Yet Bellow, like a kid from the provinces adrift in the big city, never felt fully at home in New York. The people in his New York novels invariably feel beleaguered, depressed, overwhelmed: they give us Bellow at his most Kafkaesque.

But he was also an admirer of the great realists, from Balzac and Flaubert to Theodore Dreiser, writers who built up an amazingly concrete sense of their characters’ milieu and social aspirations. If Joyce’s Ulysses recreated the mundane details of daily life in Dublin, Dreiser’s great novel Sister Carrie did something similar for both Chicago and New York. Faced by the pitiless scale and anonymity of New York, where he knows no one, the once-prosperous Hurstwood inexorably goes downhill and takes his own life. Bellow’s New York, with its accent on failure and blockage, offers some uncanny echoes of Dreiser’s novel.

But very few other Jewish American writers took this path of social realism. Bernard Malamud’s best novel, The Assistant, and most of the short stories in The Magic Barrel unfold in a more mythic, less familiar New York. I had read the novel several times before being sure of what borough it was set in (Brooklyn) or what decade (the 1930s). The sparse, almost spectral world surrounding Morris Bober’s failing grocery is confined to a few other stores and a dwindling handful of regular customers. Like Malamud’s fine stories, The Assistant could almost take place on the far side of the moon, for it has been pared down to a moral fable about struggle and redemption.

Such a stark tale reminds us not only of Kafka but of classic American writers like Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, whose work, despite an abundance of detail, shows us characters wrestling nakedly with their souls, their fears, their ambitions, or their obsessions. This has sometimes been attributed to the heritage of Puritanism but also to the novelty and fluidity of American life. Always moving on in search of a better life, cherishing traditions that transcend time and place, Americans, like Jews, have rarely put down deep roots.

Younger Jewish writers, who never knew the constraints of the shtetl or the ghetto, have located their fiction in a range of settings reflecting their own social mobility. Allegra Goodman placed her characters in Oxford and Hawaii, where she grew up, and in the Catskills, which provided a home away from home for many Jews. Thane Rosenbaum explored communities of Holocaust survivors in Miami, where another tight-knit shtetl was created. Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar have given a graphic sense of what it was like for young Russian Jews to be catapulted onto American shores.

But all their books give less a sense of place than one of feeling out of place, a sense of strangeness and transition we encounter in almost all immigrant literature. Like so much earlier Jewish writing, the new arrivals offer us stories of displaced persons, glad to be here but hardly at home, living as much in their heads as in any corner of town, never sure of being fully accepted or feeling at ease.

These books resound with the jangle of cultural dissonance, the unsettling comedy of the misfit. And, paradoxically, this Jewish discomfort, the alert self-consciousness of the outsider, is what makes this restless, hyphenated literature feel so American.