Word: bellowings
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...SAUL BELLOW 182 pages. Viking...
...pulled in the same direction" says the Yiddish proverb, "the whole world would topple over." Nowhere is that folk wisdom more apparent than on the acreage of Israel or in the first work of nonfiction by Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Saul Bellow. Late in 1975, when the author was a youthful 60 and the country was a ravaged 27, Bellow visited the Holy Land-his first trip since...
Despite its geopolitical subject, the result is a typical Bellow production: part meditation, part crank letter, tinged with the doubt of Ecclesiastes and the faith of Moses, full of quicksilver insights and deep Talmudic scholarship. It is as if the Messrs. Sammler, Humboldt and Herzog collaborated on a travel-cum-history book, pulling in several directions to keep it aloft...
...surprisingly, Bellow himself is the literal heir to two cultures. He was born in a suburb of Montreal in 1915, the fourth and last child of Russian Jews who had just emigrated from St. Petersburg. His father, an educated man, became a small-time trader and, in Bellow's phrase, "a sharpie circa 1905 in Russia." In 1924 the family settled on Division Street in Chicago; Bellow thus grew up speaking English, Hebrew, Yiddish and French. Twice-removed from the land of his parents-and a Jew in the predominantly Protestant Midwest -Bellow had good reason to wonder where...
...would have hoped that one could discuss the scientific or artistic accomplishments of a person without reference to his political views. One can admire Solzhenitsyn's or Bellow's novels without embracing the Slavonophilic views of the first or the pro-Israeli view of the second. Nor should Friedman's views on Rhodesia (mistaken in my opinion) stand in the way of recognizing his scientific contributions to economics. That the latter have been extensive and significant is not really disputable (cf. Samuelson's column in the current issue of Newsweek...