Everyone is talking about Michael Chabon’s new novel, and good for him, he’s good. But let’s be clear, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a fantasy set in Alaska. It’s not about the here and now. Chabon began in a different place years ago, doing more realistic work, now he’s dreamin’ stuff up. Compare his work to the classic work of Bellow and Roth, when they were actively picturing Jewish life in American cities, grasping and daring, and you have to wonder what has happened to the realistic Jewish novel.
My answer is sociological. Jews have gained so much status in present-day America that it makes the Jewish scribe squeamish. How do you write about great success in a direct manner? My wife once said of one of her literary WASP friends that he couldn’t write a novel because it’s impossible to write a novel about entitlement, he would have no sympathy. I think something of the same problem is afflicting the realistic Jewish novel.
A few weeks back I heard the novelist Richard Price, who is Jewish, telling Terry Gross that he had written about Italian-Americans in the Bronx in his early work for a couple of reasons.One of Price’s reasons was brilliant and literary, and worth passing along in any case. When he went on from the Bronx to Cornell and Stanford, Price said, he had put the Bronx behind, and when you put something behind, it becomes available to you as material. (A very wise statement, thank you Richard Price.) The other reason Price mentioned was that he wasn’t going to take on Philip Roth and Michael Gold in writing about the urban Jewish experience. So he would use Italian-Americans.
That struck me as a self-deluded dodge. Michael Gold wrote the classic Jews Without Money, in 1930. We all read it in college, to inspire us, and it was about just that; it described turmoil on the Lower East Side. Richard Price may have come from a humble background, but my sense is that it would be an imposture for him to write such a book. He went to Cornell and Stanford. A standard Jewish experience in his generation, and mine, too. Standard in America, yes; but unique in Jewish history. And where is it consecrated and understood in literature? It isn’t.
