Saul Bellow: Literary Genius & Jew

Saul Bellow is gone. Herzog was my bathroom novel, I read it and reread it, as an adolescent, trying to make sense of torments I could not comprehend, at the same time finding myself profoundly drawn to the pathetic character of Moses Herzog who perhaps epitomizes the neurotic, obsessive-compulsive Jew, thrust, unaware, into the drama and hype that is American academia. Somehow this psychotic but likeable man represents so much of everything that is wrong, or right, or simply that which is. Cruelly abandoned by his second wife, weighed down by guilt feelings over the failure of his first marriage and his inattentiveness to his children, Herzog communicates with the dead and people from his past: relatives, women, colleagues, ancient philosophers, biblical heroes and villains. Bellow's characters, from Moses Herzog to Ravelstein , create a sad but compelling testament to what it means to live surrounded by hostilities, both perceived and actual, confused by the vastness and indifference of a world one enters unknowingly and becomes inextricably, yet essentially bound to. This what Bellow communicates so well, and perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in his eloquent preface to Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind