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PARTISAN REVIEW
past. It was no trouble at all to imagine a more desirable one, less
ragged, haphazard, hybrid. There was no end to the better alternatives,
but not a single of them was for me. The only truly interesting life was
the one I had lived; a mixed life, to say the least. Suppose that Agnon
was inviting me to become a traditional Jew, like himself; he might as
well advise me to go for assimilation. I was about as likely to turn into
an Episcopalian with an invented WASP pedigree as to chronicle the
stockyards of Chicago in the language of the Talmud.
I was aware that Agnon was directing my attention to certain
chapters of Jewish history. How did I propose to deal with those? He
was gently putting it to me. To write in English, French, Russian, or
German was to assimilate; and assimilation in Germany had failed
hideously.
I am tempted to send Agnon a letter in the
Herzog
style to say that I
cannot imagine any circumstances in which it should be necessary here in
America to repudiate my Jewishness. Among other things I might men–
tion that the Weimar Republic was never much of a democracy, whereas
Jews in America
could
rely on a legal equality guaranteed by a powerful
Constitution. Government cannot come into the private sphere where
Jew-hatred exists, as it exists in all more or less Christian countries, but it
is unlikely that our liberal democracy will ever be overthrown to be suc–
ceeded by a regime founded on Jew-hatred. Hitler offered the German
people very little else. The German people, however, accepted his offer.
Now I am a novelist, not a political theorist, and I am not on firm
ground when I speculate amateurishly. But I do understand that Jews,
when they look at Jewish history, can't avoid thinking along these lines.
Valery, the great French poet and critic, said somewhere that a great
opportunity awaited some modern novelist, that of writing the
Divine
Comedy
of intellectual life. I never got around to this, and at my age I
never shall. But I have made mental sketches for an intellectual
Inferno.
It
contains quite a group of characters. The
Paradiso ,
by contrast, is rela–
tively empty. Only a handful of thinkers make it. What I am hinting at,
none too subtly, is that novelists cannot rely on intellectuals to take
charge of the Jewish question for them.
I never felt that it would profit me to make too close a study of the
outlook of German Jewry. Busy with novels, I have never been free for
scholarship and the close reading of history, but I am aware of the view
widely held in Germany and elsewhere that European Jews attached
themselves to German, French, English, or Russian culture and that
lacking a taproot, their achievements were unfortunately limited. This is
certainly the argument made by Jung. As I understand him, the European
Jews unluckily lacked the indispensable chthonic connection without
