Word: bellowing
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John Goldstein, dean of the Brandeis faculty, said yesterday that Bellow visited the university last spring, "and I guess that he liked what he saw at that time...
...Saul Bellow, novelist and Nobel laureate, has accepted an invitation to teach at Brandeis University as the Hiatt Visiting Professor of English for the fall semester next year...
Work and Mozart. On the voyage out, Bellow finds himself surrounded by Hasidim, Jews in outmoded black attire, long earlocks and beards. One of them asks Bellow what his wife does for a living. She is a mathematician, the author explains. The Hasid has no idea what the occupation is. "Do you recognize the name of Einstein?" "Never. Who is he?" In me, reflects Bellow, "he sees what deformities the modern age can produce in the seed of Abraham. In him I see a piece of history, an antiquity...
Once he sets foot on Jerusalem soil, contradictions pursue Bellow like a shadow in the pitiless sun. The city itself is "the only ancient place I've ever seen whose antiquities are not on display as relics but are in daily use." People he meets on a nearby kibbutz work in the fields until the afternoon, then listen to Mozart and discuss nuances of Goethe. An Arab who is mildly sym pathetic to Israel has his car blown apart by terrorists; Israelis confide pro-Palestinian sympathies. The nation, demoralized by the Yom Kippur War, is also torn-and sometimes...
Rather surprisingly, Bellow also proves himself adept at political analysis and brisk invective. His view of the U.S. Secretary of State is swiftly conveyed: "Kissinger was deep in conversation with Danny Kaye . . . One of Kissinger's assistants earnestly said, 'That is an old relationship and a very meaningful one.' " His perceptive summa tions of Islamic tradition or Zionist his tory are comparable to the great riffs and turbulences of his novels. But the Middle East, no matter how bizarre, is not fictive, and in the end its complex ity forces Bellow to quote the urgent pas sage...