Dec 31, 2009

A Silver Dish | Introduction

Saul Bellow’s story “A Silver Dish” illustrates the skill of one of the greatest American authors of the twentieth century. The story spans a period from the middle of the Great Depression to the mid-1980s, showing the changes that time renders in both society and in one man’s life. The main character, Woody Selbst, is one of Bellow’s finest creations. A lonesome, successful businessman, Woody reminisces about the circumstances under which his father, a con man and thief, caused him to lose his scholarship to a seminary school, an act that redirected his entire life.

Bellow, the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, fills this long tale with acutely observed details and characters who are so unusual that they feel like they could only come from real life. Woven throughout the story are meditations about religion, death, and responsibility that one expects in Bellow’s fiction. Long for a short story, “A Silver Dish” holds as much insight, humor, and wisdom as one may hope to find in a novel.

This story was first published in the New Yorker in 1978 and was subsequently published in Bellow’s 1984 collection Him with His Foot in His Mouth, which as of 2006 is in print.

A Silver Dish Summary

Saul Bellow begins “A Silver Dish” by focusing on Woody Selbst, the protagonist, at age sixty. He is a successful businessman, the owner of a tile distribution company, living alone in an apartment on the top floor of his company warehouse. It is Sunday morning, and the bells are ringing in churches all around the South Chicago neighborhood where he lives. Woody reflects on the death of his father, Morris “Pop” Selbst, earlier in the week. He thinks of other people in his life: his mother, whose conversion to Catholicism hastened her husband’s abandonment; his two weak-willed sisters, who are in their fifties and still living with their mother; his wife, from whom he has been separated for fifteen years, and Helen, his mistress; and Halina, the woman for whom his father left the family when Woody was fourteen and with whom his father lived for over forty years. He has a particular time of the week allotted for each of them. Sunday has always been his day to spend with Pop.

The church bells and thoughts of his father lead Woody to recall an incident that happened during the Great Depression, when Woody was seventeen. He was attending a seminary, with his tuition paid for by a rich patron, Mrs. Skoglund, a friend of his aunt and uncle. They all took an interest in him because he was Jewish and had converted to Christianity. One day, his father came to him and said that Halina had stolen money from her... » Complete A Silver Dish Summary