Here it is.

“To find a shoe has always been my dream,” is what Armenian doctoral student, Diana Zardaryan, told a New York Times reporter about her discovery of a 5,500-year-old leather shoe during a dig in Armenia.

How many people have their own individual dreams like Zardaryan? Too few. We dream the common dreams, leftover dreams — doggy-bag dreams — of fame and wealth, not ancient shoes or their equivalent.

We need a new movement of shoe dreamers.

The New York Times did not run the story, which is interesting, but the paper seemed to make oblique reference to the research today in a story about a Jewish men’s club on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that has been holding meetings for 70 years. Frank Levy, Robert Brustein, Bob Schwartz, Marty Brustein, and Dick Zimmern share “a lifelong affection for one another somehow inscribed in their DNA,” wrote reporter N.R. Kleinfeld.

So, Mark, I can hear some people saying, where’s the Saul Bellow angle to this post?

Easy, sweetheart. It’s in Bellow’s short story, “Cousins,” which is about the powerful ties of “Jewish cousinhood” and “Jewish consanguinity—a special phenomenon.”

Chabon’s article addresses that fractional but loud part of his and our identity, but it is so unsatisfying. What claptrap. Maybe that is why it has generated so little heat in the blogosphere. Peter Beinart’s article launched a thousand posts. Chabon’s died. And no wonder. There is something about its self-consciously high-minded tone, its heart-on-its-sleeve beseeching plea (“Let us” “Let us not”) for a more charitable view of our ragged humanity, its facile lets-face-it assertion that peoples survive thanks to dumb luck that just makes you want to say, as an older generation did, “Tell it to the Marines.”

In other words, give me a break.

After I read Chabon I was hungry for something satisfying about the chosen people idea, and I went to my bookshelf for Stephen Whitfield’s In Search of American Jewish Culture. Granted, I reach for it often. But I remembered that he actually had provocative things to say about it, that it is a great story that improves Jewish lives. The Jews’ “self-definition as participants in a majestic and eternal destiny” is a powerful force in Jewish lives and Jewish history. And Whitfield quotes Freud on the effect of that story. It makes Jews “proud and confident.”

But I’m going to give the last word to Saul Bellow, who in his introduction to Great Jewish Short Stories wrote about the enormous value of a great story.

“For there is power in a story. It testifies to the worth, the significance of an individual. For a short while all the strength and all the radiance of the world are brought to bear upon a few human figures.”

The chosen people story does the same for the Jews.

“He’s gone.”

“Whaddya mean? asks DeNiro.

“Well, you know what I mean. He’s gone.”

Well, I just got news like that about Krim. But in my case, it was good news.

Not long after my book came out I saw that a new history of the Beats was also coming out. The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation threatened my whole thesis. Certainly any book that is complete would have to mention Krim, at least as editor of the The Beats (1960).

So I kept checking Amazon, waiting for the moment the publisher allowed searches inside the book so I could check the index and figure out how much humble pie I would have to eat. Would there be just one or two mentions, that I could dismiss as insignificant, or  a handful that would force me to concede that the Beats were not literary Goodfellas? They didn’t whack Krim. He was just in witness protection.

But when the index came on line I learned that Krim is with Hoffa. Krim is swimming with the fishes alongside Luca Brasi.

Or as the voice on the phone told DeNiro, ”He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.”

I didn’t go to Buffalo. A decision that has given me endless opportunities for Krimiam regrets.

Then some weeks ago Shechner contacted me. He knew Krim and was working on a review of Missing a Beat. That review is now up at Tablet Magazine, and it is a terrific remembrance of Krim.

What’s it all mean, Mr. Natural? It means that our ability to take advantage of America’s much vaunted unlimited opportunities is in fact quite limited by our characters, which direct us in certain paths to the exclusion of all others. Following that limited path is the route to unlimited opportunities.

But today I caved. I really let loose with a doozy in response to an article about Israel in today’s Tablet. There was something about the writer’s tone that I found so distasteful, I couldn’t restrain myself. The writer is of the same Jewish American ilk that Bellow took to task in Herzog characters such as Shapiro, the bombastic historian whose understanding of life couldn’t match that of his apple-peddling father. As Bellow said of Herzog, he had to dis-educate himself to preserve his humanity. It’s a project that could help a lot of people.

“This volume brings together several highly individualistic documents of an era that is all too easily caricatured and dismissed, showing the surprising range of views that were possible (if not popular) within the bounds of 1950’s and 1960’s hipness, especially in matters of race and ethnicity.”

The review closes with this applause for Krim,

“Confessional writing as candid as this is both rare and refreshing.”

That’s what I say.

That would be nice. But it wouldn’t please Krim. If he was here the very possibility would fill him with enough conflicted sensations to furnish a library.

What got me going on the Seymour Krim kick that led to Missing a Beat was his omission from every Beat anthology since the 1992 Portable Beat Reader. That led me to wonder why, since the man edited The Beats in 1960 and was included in The Beat Scene the same year. (His name is on the cover, fourth from the top.)

I finally decided the Beat editors had a case, because in our time of multicultural tripwires everyone is on alert for signs of ethnicity to be sensitive about, and Krim’s work is full of Jewish content. So the Beat collections apparently decided to tiptoe around him. Let the Jewish editors handle him.

The Jewish editors didn’t. But they should.

It’s like John Lennon once said when threatened with deportation from his adopted New York home. New York is full of criminals, degenerates, and crazy people. I fit right in, said Lennon.

Well, Jewish literature is replete with anger, resentments, longings for beauty, intellectualism, sex, nostalgia, madness, and heavyweight bouts of nonstop talk. Krim fits right in.