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.”

God, I love having read Seymour Krim. He was a damned American Geiger counter who 40 years ago detected the deep underground tremors that are shaking Shirky.

I don’t even want to address the issue of whether women should adopt this male tactic because first things first: what is the effect of this behavior with only half the population engaging in it?  Why, the topic is huge. I can feel Saul Bellow lines tumbling out of my mind like the crowd in the cabin scene in A Night at the Opera. Shirky is telling us all to go out and become Herzogian Reality Instructors. Is there no room left in America, even in the liberal arts universities, for anything but the most mercenary if-you’re-so-smart-how-come-you’re not rich approach to life?

“Who was that non-fool?” Herzog asked himself, considering alternatives to the type he realizes himself to be in the eyes of the Shirkys of the world. “Was it the power-lover, who bent the public to his will?” Yeah, that’s about right, Shirky seems to say. Well, Herzog can see the attraction. “Now wouldn’t it be nice to be one” he wonders to himself.

Yes, wouldn’t it? But there’s the rub, and it won’t go away no matter how many clear-eyed, hard-headed Shirkys rant that we must turn ourselves into self-promoting Sammy Glicks. This one-size-fits-all doesn’t fit us all. This personality regimentation is a straitjacket for too many. And in the middle of a massive recession, what some are calling a controlled depression, instead of a call for reflection on this mad American life we all lead Shirky is echoing celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse and shouting BAM! Kick it Up a Notch!

Somewhere I read that for Alfred Kazin the Depression was a blessing in disguise because he could spend his days in the library without fear of rebuke or censure. There was freedom in America for the likes of him, when there frequently is little, to feel that his approach was not idiocy.

But there’s no time to think like that today. There’s no countervailing force against this overwhelming “making it” philosophy. Bohemianism is dead, man.

Did I say Krim was onto this 40 years ago? Make it more than 50.

I was going to start with his 1969 “Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head,” Krim’s terrific but shamefully buried essay on just this topic of the allure and rewards of self-aggrandizing jerkdom and how it taunts those who just can’t be that kind of jerk. (I’m not claiming sainthood here for myself or my dead Jews club of Bellow and Krim. They were jerks. It’s been documented. And so am I. Take my word for it. But we’re focusing on just one expression of that rich characteristic for the moment.)

Yes, I was going to start with the “Norman Mailer” essay, which from what I understand was left out of the 1991 posthumous Best of Seymour Krim collection to mollify Mailer — the prototype of the self-aggrandizing jerk that anyone hoping to be a self-aggrandizing jerk should study closely before he or she goes for it to make sure they’ve got the stomach for it — and so the piece has not appeared in print in 40 years.

But let’s kick things off instead with Krim’s aptly titled 1959 essay “Making It!” Shirky, you’re gonna love this. Or at least one-half of it. Because Krim picked up on the new go-getter vibes shaking New York like sandpapered fingertips do tumblers. And he dug it. Because he got it. And he anticipated your call for women to get going. But he didn’t call for it, beseech it. It was already happening:

“Middle-class ideals of success once curled the lip of the intellectual; today he grins not, neither does he snide. Columbia professor, poet, painter, ex-Trotskyite, Partisan Review editor, G.E. engineer, Schenley salesman—they all live in the same world for a change and that world says, go! The Marxist, neo-Christian, romantic, humanitarian values of 20 years ago are great for the mind’s library and its nighttime prayer mat; but will they fill the cancerous hunger in the soul for getting what you want today? Softies become tough, toughies get harder, men dig that they’d rather be women, women say to hell with lilacs and become men, the road gets rougher (as Frankie lays his smart-money message on us) and you’ve got to move, hustle, go for the ultimate broke or you’ll be left with a handful of nothing, Jack and Jill!”

Did Krim leave anything out? No, that covers it, doesn’t it. At least, it covers Shirky’s side of the argument. But there is something more to be said. There’s got to be something more than that or let’s just end the pretense and fire all the poetry and literature and philosophy professors and kick all the namby-pamby Emily Dickinson-lovers onto the street where they can beg for their supper, which is all they deserve, right? Or as Krim’s brilliantly devised Reality Instructor (Bellow published Krim’s work in 1961 and it seems the master picked up a trick for his 1964 Herzog from this very talented flake) puts it:

“Values? Purpose? Selectivity? Principles? For the birds, Charley! I want to make it and nothing’s going to stand in my way because everything is crap, except making it! I want my ego to ride high, my heart to bank the loot of life, my apartment to swing, my MG to snarl down the highway, my pennant to wave above the scattered turds of broken dreams for a better world! Why don’t you level and say you want the same, you hypocrite? Be honest for Chrissakes!”

OK, you’ve got the drift. Krim channels the voice of Shirky’s jerky hero but he doesn’t come off very well. Still, it’s not a set-up, not a fix. The writing is so damn exciting that the “gunner and gunnerette in the turret of the aircraft that is Self” who watches out “for number one with a hundred new-born eyes” almost wins us over in spite of Krim’s intentions. It’s a Milton’s Satan situation.

But what’s the likely outcome of this approach? Krim foresaw a bad trip.

“. . . while down below the lusting average man and woman sweats in jealousy at the sight of these Dexedrine angels, the very inspiration of what he and she can become if only they too can put that last shred of shame behind them and swing.”

And now I can get to the “Norman Mailer” piece. In it Krim weaves in and out of the madness lanes because the Making It! mating call of American life is here driving him crazy. Yes, in this article Krim is the lusting average man or woman sweating in jealousy at the sight of Norman. Norman, Earl of Aggrandizement, ruler of the Duchy of Jerky.

And a fucking monster talent. Oh, yes. Mailer was born to be a jerk. He had the real stuff. He didn’t need a call to arms from a Shirky. Like Bellow’s Humboldt he was “Orpheus, the Son of Greenhorn, turned up in Greenwich Village.” But unlike Humboldt, who complained in his downfall that his friend had turned up on his doorstep to say he was going to going to be a consciousness-shifting writer and he wasn’t, Mailer was. Mailer could be the demanding jerk that Shirky is encouraging women to become — forget other human qualities such as charm, wit, flirtatiousness, empathy, humor, generosity that both men and women have used for centuries to advance themselves and their careers. It’s life during wartime. Ain’t got time for that now! — because Mailer had the talent required to back it up.

But the vast majority of those who will heed Shirky and wear this new effrontery with pride will not be able to pull it off. They will oversell themselves and people will inspect the goods and see that they are fools. And if Shirky’s jerks don’t understand the difference between their mostly average selves and the Mailers of this world, in whatever field, then they will suffer the agony that Krim confesses in his essay on Mailer but without the understanding that at the last minute preserves a bit of Krim’s sanity.

Early in the essay Krim realizes that “as a writer ages he has to come to terms with the actuality of the landscape he exists on or he will be driven mad with envy and frustration.” But as the essay progresses Krim begins to lose it. The envy and frustration are too much. Mailer’s “imperialistic personality” has made it impossible for Krim to be happy with himself.

“Did Mailer ever stop to think that his gigantic personal needs for being indiscriminately admired would help smear up a standardless period, seed an unbidden resentment and defensiveness and equal yen for the most whorish showbiz lights in others who once thought they were content to work in the stacks all their lives and wear the good odor of library must like Spinoza and (N.M.’s beloved) Marx and Joyce before them?”

“In other words, did Mailer ever see the implications of being Norman, which reach far beyond himself?”

No, he didn’t, Krim concludes, and he didn’t have to, because Mailer’s celebrity fallout would poison others, not himself. But Krim realizes he’s been poisoned, that he caught the self-aggrandizing bug that Shirky is now spreading like Typhoid Mary. And Krim realizes that it is bad for him and for those around him.

“But even as I know that I now mean to have my share of the most striking notoriety, money, pussy, fun English shoes, TV interviews, the entire swinging menu . . . I know that what Mailer has done to me I WILL DO TO OTHERS whom I have never seen or heard of. If I succeed in becoming the public force that I must now become to protect myself from the Mailers of my time, what insane itch for the new name-fame powerplay will I implant in others, what jealousies and outraged thinskinned needs for capping me will I arouse in their all too human beings?

“To tell the truth, as I see it, the best thing that could happen to me would be if I FAIL to make that booming public impact.”

Now there’s more than a teaspoon of sanctimony there. Yes, I hear it. What Krim should have written and is clearly there between the lines is that he was not cut out for the “the entire swinging menu.” That no matter how loudly he banged on the table he was not going to get all those goodies but was going to fail because he was not Norman Mailer.

And neither are the overwhelming majority of Shirky’s readers. It is beyond them to be truly great. But they can become jerks.

Really, he was talking to me.

Okay, Touré, okay. I got the hint. I’ve got the Jewish angle on the topic right here. I’ll get to it in a minute.

First, I agree with you that blacks who cross the color line are “on the lam from themselves and their histories, cut off from their families.”

That’s well put. And while it’s obviously derived from Saul Bellow’s formulation of the price paid for Jewish assimilation — “If we dismiss the life that is waiting for us at birth, we will find ourselves in a void.” — you’ve changed it around enough so that it barely rings a bell. Nice job.

And that was a good overview of the unhappy fates that befell the real and fictional characters who did cross over to pass as white. But don’t even try to convince me you weren’t thinking of our conversations about Jews of that same ilk in Geoffrey Wolff’s Duke of Deception, Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Catcher Was a Spy, Masson’s My Father’s Guru, Tom Reiss’ The Orientalist, Harriet Murav’s Identity Theft, and Saul Bellow’s fascination with Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen and Yellow Kid Weil. I saw you taking notes!

Granted, I couldn’t stop talking that day. But it’s clear now that you were egging me on, flattering me, just to get me to spill the beans.

Anyway, you obviously weren’t paying close enough attention.

How could you be so glib about how much you “love blackness” and then go on and prove with historical and literary examples that racism did in fact make it a great burden for so many? You could have been a little more modest, a bit more grateful for living in a time that eased the burden, instead of giving yourself all the credit.

I confessed to you that I might have opted for Bellow’s void in another time and place that made Jewishness much less tolerable. Bellow himself recognized the pressure to take that path. “Many have tried to rid themselves in one way or another of this dreadful historic load by assimilation or other means.” And while he said he wasn’t tempted to do the same, he made it clear that he had the great good luck to find himself in America.

In other words, history did some of the heavy lifting for him. And me. And you.

And I thought we talked about this Afrocentric stuff? “Jesus (another black man who became white, but that’s a different story).”

I’m almost done, I’m almost done. All of a sudden you’re in a hurry?

You closed your essay by asking, “Why aren’t more white people trying to pass as black?” given that whites are “entranced by blackness and drool over how exciting and dangerous and sexy blacks seem.”

I thought you said you read those Seymour Krim articles I sent you. Caught you, didn’t I? Well go home and read them now. No, they’re not going to be easy. They’re rough. Krim doesn’t pull any punches about his take on the Harlem he knew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But that’s why James Baldwin’s 1961 review said Krim was “almost the only writer of my generation who has managed to release himself from the necessity of being either romantic or defensive about Negroes.”

Anyway, Krim in 1957 recorded the phenomena that had apparently only recently begun and still hasn’t stopped: whites trying to pass as black. “But think now, if you will, of the many white people one knows who use Negro expressions, talk the language of jazz.” That’s from “Anti-Jazz,” by the way, so you don’t have to go madly looking all over for it. (I know how you get.)

The piece is practically a tutorial in whites passing as blacks. Krim even mentions Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiographical Really the Blues, which ends with the Jewish Mezzrow defiantly declaring that he is black. The prison guards look him over. Jewfro? Check. Olive complexion? Check. Alright. Fine. You’re black. And when he gets out he moves to Harlem, marries a black woman and lives as a black man.

Anyway, you didn’t need to read Krim on this. We discussed Norman Mailer’s The White Negro many times. Having selective amnesia? No, you can’t blame it on that fly ball that landed on your head when you were in grade school. And I remember you giggling when we saw the first Blues Brothers movie. “They’ll never make it, but oh my how they try,” was how you put it. Do I even have to mention all the white kids buying hip hop, dressing hip hop? (That’s alright. You can laugh at my clumsy deployment of slang. I’m getting old, I admit it.)

Okay, that’s it. Be well. Cool web site, by the way.