PARTISAN REVIEW
53
and psychological habits. Wisse suggests that the most famous
schlemiel story in Yiddish literature, Y. L. Peretz's "Bontshe the
Silent," which is "now widely regarded as a study of sainthood, is
actually a socialist's exposure of the grotesquerie of suffering
silence; Chaim Nachman Bialik's response to the infamous
Kishinev pogrom was outrage against the
victims
who flee or hide,
pretending that vengeance will come from God." The controversy
that has flared repeatedly over Jewish behavior under Nazi oc–
cupation and in the death-camps is an extension of the same
quarrel, the same anguish, on an immensely more terrible scale.
In its own way then, Bernard Malamud's work can be seen as
one kind of response to the frozen and quietly fear-ridden
political atmosphere of the McCarthy and Eisenhower years. This
is not to say that it's not deeply imagined, with profound roots in
the Jewish psyche and the Jewish moral tradition. Yet that tradi–
tion has many branches -- not simply its line of Jacob, sensitive,
wily, domestic, passive, fed by mother love, but also its thwarted
line of Esau, hairy hunter, "activist," doomed favorite of the
father. The Jewish novel of the 1950s is a reversion to the line of
Jacob,
an atonement for J ewish radicalism
that is also perfectly in
tune with the wider currents of the age: ruminative, private,
morally austere and self-conscious, apolitical.
Finally, the literature and politics of the period are one.
There is no special "key" to the sensibility of the age: almost
anything works if we tum it right and press it hard. But the Jewish
novel works especially well. The fifties were a great period for
home and family, for getting and spending, for cultivating one's
garden. All that is reflected in its writing. But its spokesmen also
call it an Age of Anxiety; behind its material growth hovers a quiet
despair, whose symbols are the Bomb and the still-vivid death–
camps and a fear of Armageddon that rings true even in the
monstrous phrases of a Judge Kaufman. But this anxiety is meta–
physical and hermetic, closed in upon itself: the Bomb evokes
despair rather than anger or opposition. The Jewish novel reflects
this spirit and ministers to it, for it is literally overwrought -–
anguish hemmed in by form -- offering finally the uneasy ab–
solution of art for a torment whose origin it cannot know and
whose course it cannot alter.
