A Jewish Writer in America

Bellow e la moglie Janis fotagrafati da Judith Aronson nel 1994

Lo scrittore ebreo in America è Saul Bellow, e questo è il titolo di una conferenza che ha tenuto nel 1998 e che viene ora pubblicata per la prima volta sul New York Review of Books. "So, in my first consciousness, I was, among other things, a Jew, the child of Jewish immigrants. At home our parents spoke Russian to each other, we children spoke Yiddish with them, and we spoke English with one another. At the age of four we began to read the Old Testament in Hebrew, we observed Jewish customs, some of them superstitions, and we recited prayers and blessings all day long. Because I had to memorize most of Genesis, my first consciousness was that of a cosmos, and in that cosmos I was a Jew. I suppose it would be proper to apply the word 'archaic' to such a representation of the world as I had - archaic, prehistoric. This was my 'given' and it would be idle to quarrel with it, to try to revise or efface it". nyrb.