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"Born in 1915 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow was raised in the small town - "a medieval" shtetl he called it - of Lachine, Quebec, and then in a predominantly Jewish section of Montreal until the age of nine. He had a trilingual childhood which included Yiddish as well as English and French. In an insightful new look at Bellow's life and career, Gerald Sorin argues that Bellow's immersion in Yiddish and childhood memories of the vibrant Jewish life on Montreal's Napoleon and Dominique streets continued to echo in his adult inner ear and permeated almost all of his writing. Much of Bellow's creative power, including the dynamic, comic, and lusty language that became his literary signature, was shaped and informed by the fact that he was Jewish"--
List of contents
Acknowledgments
List of Transliterations
Introduction
1. In the Beginning
2. Adapting to America
3. The Education of Saul Bellow
4. Dangling Men
5. In the Shadow of the Holocaust
6. In the Land of the Holocaust
7. The Adventures of Saul Bellow
8. Fathers and Sons
9. Husbands and Wives
10. Friendships and Betrayals
11. Wealth, Fame, and Jewish Identity in 1960s America
12. Love and Death
13. Bellow's Gift, Israel, and the Nobel Prize
14. Bellow's December
15. A Whole New Life
16. Bellow Banished and Bruised
17. Life and Death
Appendix: Saul Bellow's First Published Piece
Notes
Sources and Bibliography
Index
About the author
Gerald Sorin is Distinguished Professor of American and Jewish Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His works have won multiple National Jewish Book Awards, and he is author of
Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent and
Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane.
