November 16, 2007
Friday open thread: Wiesel, Roth, more Mailer
Here are a few items from around the Web this week:
• The New Jersey man accused of attacking Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel has been ordered to stand trial.
• Sarah Kerr gives her take on Philip Roth‘s “Exit Ghost
• There were two pieces published this week that looked at Norman Mailer’s life and career from the Jewish perspective. Ezra Cappell, the author of “American Talmud: The Cultural Work of Jewish American Fiction
As a scholar of Jewish American writing, I have always been fascinated by the ways in which Mailer is able to bring Jewish themes into writing that often seems very different from Jewish work. When I mentioned to a group of scholars at a conference last year at the Harry Ransom Center (occasioned by Mailer’s selling his papers to the University of Texas at Austin; he was the latest in a long line of Jewish writers to do so) that I thought Mailer was a deeply Jewish writer, my claim was met with a good deal of skepticism.
Mashey Bernstein has probably encountered that same skepticism. On the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Web site this week, he argued that it would be a mistake for the Jewish community not to count Mailer among its own, just as we do Bellow, Malamud, Roth and even Woody Allen:
Mailer was a deeply religious writer. Like Hawthorne and Faulkner, he was concerned with God and the Devil, Good and Evil. While not particularly concerned with Jewish matters in general — he never visited Israel — he obsessed over the implications of the Holocaust.
While I can appreciate Mailer’s Jewish side, I just don’t think he’ll ever be put in the same category of Jewish writers such Malamud, Bellow and Roth. Although he was certainly a writer of extraordinary talent, his work never really touched on the Jewish American experience.
• Lastly, my old boss at the Baltimore Jewish Times, managing editor Alan H. Feiler, wrote an article about an attorney-turned-farmer-turned-author named Rich Ossias. Mr. Ossias’ new book is aptly titled, “E-I-E-I-OY! How I Became A Jewish Farmer In Middletown, America
Well, I guess that’s all the moos that’s fit to blog for this week. Have a good Shabbos!