“and then a nice police dog chained to a parking meter, wearing a cast on his broken leg and barking. He may have been asking to see the humanity in relation to which he was supposed to be a dog.”

I quoted the line in my review in the Forward.

Listen to Goldstein here.

Read about it here.

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.

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.

Very near the end of the novel the Invisible Man says,

“Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.”

Invisible Man appeared in 1952. The next year Saul Bellow published his Augie March, which ended with a similar American-style affirmation about Columbus’s failure at the end of his life, which “didn’t prove there was no America.”

Ellison and Bellow were friends and even roommates in the 1950s, and their great novels both seek to create a new America for themselves. But Ellison was ahead of Bellow in his understanding that America had to accept the black man as a black man, not just another vaguely identified American.

“Whence all the passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity is the word,” he says.

Augie felt the same way, but his Jewish identity is skirted in a way impossible for Ellison’s story about a black man. Augie’s first words are the novel’s first words, “I am an American.”

But is Augie March a Jewish-American?

Krim developed an essay-writing persona—neurotic, ambitious, angry, and self-mocking—through which he made an identity out of his breakdowns, his hungers, his envy of those who had achieved worldly success: very much in the style of the great nineteenth-century English eccentrics (Lamb, Hazlitt, etc.), who also developed savage, ailing, self-involved voices that speak to us at vivid and voluble length.

That’s Krim, alright.

On other scores, Gornick is less forgiving of Krim than I am. But when reading the work of any writer — and this goes double for Krim — you have to decide how much junk you’re going to put up with to get the good stuff.

I always think of literary critic Robert Alter’s defense of Saul Bellow’s Augie March against charges that it is flawed. He pointed out that great novels are often “magnificent edifices with many splendid rooms piled high with junk.” You put up with the junk because you get “so much life with such extraordinary penetration.”

Now the problem here is obvious. Krim was no novelist. His canvas was infinitely smaller, and so he can’t afford a junk room. A junk drawer is about all that will fit. But he offers a slice of life in catchy jazzy New York sidewalk language and with high energy and true suffering that makes it precious.

I’m with Bellow’s Charlie Citrine when he told Renata that Humboldt was worth remembering even if his poetic output was wasn’t large or magnificent. Some of it was beautiful. “Even one is a lot, for certain things,” said Citrine.

I’ve put in a lot of time thinking about Greenberg-type characters — from Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day to self-declared failure Nicolas Slonimsky to Seymour Krim — and I’ve got a dose of the syndrome Greenberg is supposed to have, and which the others named above do have, which is a love of an ideal that makes ordinary life seem insipid.

And that’s where Baumbach got it all wrong.

He said on Charlie Rose that he was partly inspired by Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who writes unsent letters to various people in his private life and world history. Through the letters, Herzog unstuffs his mind of the half-understood ideas his education has left him. And through the letters Herzog also reveals himself to himself, writing letters even to God, in whom he still believes. And the letters inform him and us that there is still some good in Herzog.

But Greenberg writes letters to Starbucks and the Pet-Taxi company. His letters reveal his meanness. He has no longing for something better, no fineness of feeling or taste or ability to love or create. There is no evidence of his earlier love of music. Where is that?  (Playing “Duran Duran” because it is “good coke music” doesn’t count.) That doesn’t just die. That’s what the movie does not understand. Deeply rooted yearnings always find a way to express themselves.

Greenberg lacks the yearnings for something finer but nevertheless finds the world insufferable.

That’s not interesting. Especially when the filmmaker doesn’t realize that’s what he’d doing.

Baumbach offers a completely condescending view of people who don’t lead lives in the arts. If you are not a working musician then you live in a mental desert. In Greenberg, people don’t discuss books, write songs, write articles, talk about movies, play music. They just mentally wither.

That’s not what happens. Something much more interesting happens. They continue reading and talking and thinking and writing and playing. And they sometimes become admirable people.

p.s. The laziest thing about Greenberg is how it pirates interest by tapping into Jewish American archetypes, which it turns into stereotypes. Greenberg is a triumph of Jewish marketing savvy over Jewish creative powers. Without Baumbach and Stiller pushing it, it would have died the death it deserved. I guess there are still some people who think that anything Jewish is smart and cool. Greenberg should end that.

Patriotic tableau, Jewish Community Center, 1940

David Brooks yesterday found a way to proclaim his love for America that in its heartbreak and longing adds a page to an American Jewish literature of patriotism.

The news hook for his New York Times op-ed column was the healthcare reform bill and the Democrats. But he soon got emotional, and it wasn’t the bill’s extension of benefits that got him choked-up. Brooks got scared. Like any partner to a love affair, he is afraid his beloved is changing, and in changing, leaving him.

Yet I confess, watching all this, I feel again why I’m no longer spiritually attached to the Democratic Party. The essence of America is energy — the vibrancy of the market, the mobility of the people and the disruptive creativity of the entrepreneurs. This vibrancy grew up accidentally, out of a cocktail of religious fervor and material abundance, but it was nurtured by choice. It was nurtured by our founders, who created national capital markets to disrupt the ossifying grip of the agricultural landholders. It was nurtured by 19th-century Republicans who built the railroads and the land-grant colleges to weave free markets across great distances. It was nurtured by Progressives who broke the stultifying grip of the trusts.

Brooks goes on to say that the country’s energy is in danger of fading and “The task ahead is to save this country from stagnation and fiscal ruin.”

You may laugh but I find this combination of gee-whiz excitement and love and hand-wringing very moving. It is part of me and a large part of what attracted me to Jewish American literature, which brims with puppy-love eagerness for the America that offered the Jews so much.

There are no shortage of examples, but for convenience I’ll stick to my obsessions.

Seymour Krim was both thrilled and aghast at America’s energy, titillated even as he held his nose. “I was consumed by the voice and landscape and (be truthful!) romance of roaring-drunk modern America,” he wrote in his essay about poet Milton Klonsky.

The same could be said of the Saul Bellow who wrote Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, but late in his career Bellow saw that the patriotism of his generation was an artifact of another time.

In “Cousins,” the character Scholem is described as “a patriotic American (a terribly antiquated affect).” And the dilemma faced by Cousin Mendy and the story’s narrator is also Brooks’ dilemma and my dilemma and one faced by many American Jews.

“Jews who had grown up on the sidewalks of America, we were in no sense foreigners, and we had brought so much enthusiasm, verve, love to this American life that we had become it. Odd that it should begin to roll towards oblivion just as we were perfecting ourselves in this admirable democracy.”

Anyway, this Daily Beast article on the danger of pit bulls is obviously right. What’s frightening is the irrational and confused responses posted by scores of people who are stupid and/or nuts.

Bellow picked up on Americans’ bizarre love for these dangerous animals more than 20 years ago in “Him With His Foot in His Mouth.” And the obviously Bellovian narrator considers what it all means.

“But as a reverberator, which it is my nature to be, I tried to connect the breeding of these terrible dogs with the mood of the country. The pros and cons of the matter add some curious lines to the spiritual profile of the U.S.A. . . . The first connection to come to mind was that egalitarianism was now being extended to cats and dogs. But it’s not simple egalitarianism, it’s a merging of different species: the line between man and other animals is becoming blurred. . . . At this rate, a dog in the White House becomes a real possibility. Not a pit bulldog, certainly, but a nice golden retriever whose veterinarian would become Secretary of State.”