SOURCE: "Understanding Fathers in American Jewish Fiction," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, Summer, 1974, pp. 273-87.

[In the following essay, Gollin argues that "the Jewish father remains at the moral center of Jewish fiction" even if he is not typically at its narrative center.]

A widespread misapprehension about fathers and mothers in American Jewish fiction hides from us some profound truths about their roles as apprehended by that fiction. Harold Fish's recent statement in Midstream is representative: he speaks of "the rejection of the father," and says that his replacement "by the Jewish mother is in a way the most important event in twentieth century Jewish life and letters." But the truth is much more complicated than Fish's statement implies. Fathers in recent American Jewish fiction are never finally rejected, and Jewish mothers do not replace them. Whether the father plays a major or a minor role, whether he earns respect or ridicule, his role as a father makes him the transmitter of a moral tradition he can teach even when he has failed to master it himself. The lesson is rarely formal, and rarely involves formal Jewish laws or traditions; nor is it a pragmatic lesson in social utility and material reward. It is concerned with compassion and comprehension of human limits; and whether or not he is at the center of the narrative, the Jewish father remains at the moral center of Jewish fiction.

The two examples Fish cites from recent American Jewish fiction, Call it Sleep and Portnoy's Complaint, may at first seem to support his hypotheses about parents' roles, since in these novels the fathers are indeed weaker than the mothers. As he puts it,

With the rejection of the father the Jewish mother has now come into her own. At the close of the novel [Call it Sleep] when David has achieved his final epiphany and is slumbering in the arms of his mother, the father, Albert, is seen skulking off, after having been thoroughly chastised and humiliated. His symbolic departure from the household marks the virtual disappearance of the Jewish father from modern literature. In Portnoy's Complaint father Portnoy has become a totally ineffective and tangential figure.… Portnoy senior is nothing but a victim, and not even a victim of infidelity which might have lent him a touch of the heroic, but a victim of constipation.

Yet even for these novels such statements do not stand up; the situations are more intricate. Henry Roth's Call it Sleep does not reject Albert Schearl as a father but as a man of violent rage, whether directed against his son, against his own father, or against an employer. At the end of the novel, Albert is not "skulking off"; rather, he is going to buy medicine to ease David's burnt foot, for the first time confronting his own responsibility for David's distress. Albert is "chastised" only tentatively by himself, and he is making no "symbolic departure." He will return: "I'll go get it" are his last words in the novel. Equally important is David's response to his father's change: for the first time he feels for his father "a vague, remote pity."

Genya Schearl cannot guide David through the alien world of the street. David necessarily moves away from her as he ventures beyond home and family—playing with other boys; encountering gentiles; startled by power he cannot yet understand, whether the mystery latent in the Hebrew words of Isaiah, or the electricity of the third rail. Nor is he "slumbering in the arms of his mother" at the end of the novel. She is indeed sitting on his bed, speaking words of comfort. But her final question, "Sleepy, beloved?" moves David into the transcendent vision of life which concludes the novel and provides its title. He has grown past her; his mind ranges over the stream of city life, pondering questions beyond his mother's reach. His father may not be an adequate guide either, but Albert is no longer a source of terror, and David's ability to pity him attests to the growth of both father and son.

Fish's interpretation of Jack Portnoy must also be challenged. Certainly he is ridiculously ineffective—as an insurance salesman, as the husband of Sophie, as a strong male model for his son, even in dealing with his own constipation. But he is not altogether "ineffective and tangential." Alex identifies with him: "I wear his hair," he says; and he remembers his boyish pride in his father's nakedness at the Turkish baths. His own humanitarian profession as "Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York" echoes his father's dedicated job selling ghetto blacks life insurance from the Boston and Northeastern Insurance Company, a company that bills itself as "the most benevolent financial institution in America." Alex knows that the company exploited his father, and he describes his affair with Sarah Abbot Maulsby, paragon of New England's aristocracy, as an act of vengeance: "it was something nice a son once did for his dad." Alexander Portnoy is always aware of his father's love, and in devious ways, he returns it. Further, as he is about to visit Israel, he realizes that in one sense, all he ever wanted to be was a grown-up Jewish man. His grownup father, Jack Portnoy, is indeed a victim (and of much more than constipation), but he is not merely a victim: he is a continuing influence on his son's development.

Sophie Portnoy is indeed the dominant parent in this novel. She is a vintage version of that stereotyped mother who recurs in Jewish humor, clearly similar to strong Jewish mothers such as Bessie in Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing," or the engulfing mother of Bruce Jay Friedman's A Mother's Kisses. Smothering mothers, of course, occur in the literature of other religious and ethnic groups, but the figure of Sophie, urging her son to eat with loving concern and uplifted knife, seems recognizably Jewish.

Yet this kind of domineering mother has rarely interested the major American Jewish writers. In the most important American Jewish fiction, that of Malamud, Bellow, Philip Roth, and I. B. Singer, the father poses the most serious and moral problems for his child. The child may refuse to follow his father's footsteps, but he is profoundly ambivalent about his refusal; and usually by the end of the narrative, he reaches a new level of acceptance of his father and himself. The father is not rejected, not replaced. It is the mother who seems increasingly irrelevant.

The gulf between father and child is caused not only by archetypal rivalries between them, but also by the cultural distance between most first generation American Jewish parents and their children. Yet deep within the Jewish tradition is a double standard of respect that often helps to bridge the gulf. From Biblical times to our own, the Jewish man who achieves wealth or social power wins society's respect, but the man of piety and learning commands even greater respect. On the basis of this value system, shtetl fathers are proud to support sons-in-law who studied Talmud; thus an immigrant pants-cutter would be honored for Talmudic learning by more affluent landsleit. Accommodation to American experience in recent American Jewish fiction has produced secular variants of this dual standard. A father who has not succeeded in business, even one who has relaxed or relinquished formal religious practices, may still merit respect as moral guide for his more Americanized child.

Such guidance of a son by a father is never simple and rarely direct. One group of fathers, like Jack Portnoy, like other fathers in the fiction of Philip Roth, Herbert Gold, and most important, Bernard Malamud, is a schlemiel, a comic but lovable bungler; but he nevertheless conveys through his behavior the important lessons of parental love. A second group of fathers, such as Albert Schearl, command and expect obedience. Like the more traditional and more admirable patriarchs of Chaim Potok, I. B. Singer, and Saul Bellow, Schearl provokes his son to reach on his own a new level of understanding and self-reliance. Each kind of father exerts vastly different emotional pressure, but the end result, surprisingly, is almost the same.

Before writing Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth had already explored problems of inadequate fathers in three short stories of Goodbye, Columbus as well as in the novel Letting Go. Superficially, no two of his fathers are alike; yet however shallow or emotionally undeveloped, each reveals a capacity for love and anguish that his wife fails to demonstrate. Mr. Patimkin of "Goodbye, Columbus" is vulgar and insensitive, yet his love for his daughter Brenda remains generous and solicitous, especially by contrast with his wife's rigidity and recriminations. The father in "Epstein" is more pathetic: he is unsuccessful in business; his only son died years ago; and his wife and daughter give him neither love nor respect. He has become an adulterer, but only because he needs love. The young lawyer in "Eli the Fanatic" is even more anguished, overwhelmed by the Jewish heritage of suffering he apprehends through a group of refugee children and their surrogate fathers; and this heritage Eli plans to transmit to his newborn son. Eli may be deranged, but his empathetic anxiety reveals a moral awareness his wife will never achieve through her psychological theories.

The emotional interdependence of fathers and children Roth developed more fully in Letting Go, commencing with an epigraph from Wallace Stevens: "The son/and the father alike and equally are spent." Both Paul Herz and Gabe Wallach are sons who have wounded their fathers through inadequate understanding and love; they move through this knowledge toward the ability to themselves assume roles as fathers. None of the fathers or sons in Roth's fiction is complete or well-balanced, yet like the Portnoys, each seems admirable to the extent that he feels and offers compassionate love.

As a bizarre example of this mutual compassion, the narrator of Roth's The Breast praises his father's heroic effort to communicate compassion and affection for his horribly metamorphized son without indicating distress. His father talks of people both used to know, sustaining a semblance of their former relationship. "My father's bravery has been staggering," Kepesh says, praising "this self-possession in the face of horror." His mother is dead: "if she wasn't, this would have killed her." Realizing that his father's composure is a kind of performance, Kepesh concludes that he is a "great and novel man."

The same lesson is taught with more affection and less mockery in the avowedly autobiographical fiction of Herbert Gold. The son in "The Heart of the Artichoke" and the novel-memoir, Fathers, resents working in his immigrant father's grocery store when he might be reading or taking trips with school friends. The story's climax is a fierce fight between father and son which both lose: the father pins down his son but relaxes his guard just long enough for the son to throw him. From the vantage point of maturity, the son regrets his victory: his father permitted too much; "to fight back was all I needed." Despite his antagonism, he feels physical pride in his father, clearly asserted as in Portnoy's Complaint in the all-male world of the Turkish baths. By the end of Fathers, the son has come to admire his father for more important attributes, despite his increasingly separate cultural identity. Fathers ends with Gold's praise for his father's courage and integrity on the way "to the common end, carving his will out of the dreadful void, and may I and other fathers do as much." This the grocer taught the writer, by the example of his life.

Malamud's fiction contains the widest range of such fathers, low on the social scale but elevated by devoted love for their children. "Idiots First" is an especially poignant statement about a father's love for his vulnerable child: Mendel desperately tries to put off an emissary of death only long enough to arrange to send his idiot son to the protection of a California relative. The fathers in "The Lady of the Lake," "The Magic Barrel," and "The First Seven Years" also put their children's welfare ahead of their own. If a mother appears in these stories, she is practical but ineffective; and there is no mother at all in "Idiots First" or "The Lady of the Lake." Each father is essentially a good man; but frequently during the course of the story, he becomes more aware of his child's needs. The shoemaker father of "The First Seven Years" finally accepts his ugly assistant as a prospective son-in-law not only because he wants help in the store, but more important, because he becomes aware of his daughter's response to Sobel's devoted love. In a more ambiguous narrative of a father's change, the marriage broker of "The Magic Barrel" at first refuses to introduce his wayward daughter to the rabbi who has fallen in love with her picture. Yet in the end Salzman arranges the meeting; perhaps marriage can effect a rebirth for the daughter he mourns as dead.

The central figures of Malamud's novels, The Fixer and A New Life, are also essentially good men who grow until they modify or reject their own prior standards for better ones. Yakov Bok in The Fixer is moved by his father-in-law's compassion to perform a compassionate act for his estranged wife and her illegitimate child: he formally announces the child is his. S. Levin in A New Life forfeits his role as bachelor and college teacher and acquires two children by accepting responsibility for their mother and thus for them. Levin's reward for shouldering this burden is the novel's final surprise, that Pauline is pregnant with his child. Both Bok and Levin learn to act selflessly, becoming fathers in the process.

Of these schlemiel fathers who are also moral heroes, Morris Bober of Malamud's The Assistant is the most fully developed. He is a poor grocer, a man still mourning his long-dead son (like Roth's Epstein), a man longing for "the best" for his daughter Helen. He is finally able to give her (and Frankie Alpine, the Italian drifter who adopts him as a surrogate father) only the example of his own selfless humanity; yet that example is crucial. Morris, who does not feel bound by orthodox Jewish laws, firmly adheres to the fundamental Jewish law as he interprets it: "to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means to other people. Our life is hard enough. Why should we hurt somebody else?" This is the Jewish "law" that governs even those Jewish fathers in recent fiction who do not adhere to it; and the law is taught by the fathers rather than the mothers. Although Morris' wife Ida also wants "the best" for her family, her approach is narrowly practical and self-oriented; and she has little influence on Helen's attitudes or actions. Helen learns in the end to value her father's morality. Her willingness to accept Frankie's help for her college education proves both of them are conforming to Morris's example.

The second group of fathers differs from the first in their direct exertion of parental authority; a child's challenge of that authority brings distress to both. These fathers are more emotionally dominant than the first group, more conscious of the respect they should command.

The fathers in Chaim Potok's novels, The Chosen, The Promise, and My Name is Asher Lev, are the clearest exponents of parental authority, and further, they are dedicated to the patriarchal activities traditionally accorded the highest respect: one is a Hasidic rabbi, one a teacher of Talmud, one a philosopher, one a religious administrator. The sons' most painful problems of identity center on the father, even when as in My Name is Asher Lev, the mother is important to the narrative. But only the scholar's son (in The Chosen and The Promise) is from the start bound to his father by mutual understanding and sympathy, and only he will follow his father's professional path. His friend Danny Saunders is the brilliant son of a Hasidic rabbi who has raised his son in a discipline of silence except during religious study. Eventually Danny understands and condones his father's educational method, but he will never succeed him as leader of their Hasidic sect: Danny will become a psychologist. The central figure of My Name is Asher Lev is even more separated from his father. Asher is a talented artist whose father rejects his paintings as violations of orthodox Jewish tradition. Eventually Asher comes to respect his father's career—establishing yeshivas, helping Jewish refugees; but like Danny Saunders, he feels bound to a completely different way of life. Through understanding their fathers, the sons win the possibility of self-respect without expending themselves in rage and rebellion. Finally, each comes to realize that despite their differences, father and son are bound by love and mutual concern.

To the extent that I. B. Singer affirms the traditional values of the shtetl, he affirms its ideal of the father as the patriarch who teaches his children practical and spiritual wisdom, and of the mother as wholly submissive and subordinate to her husband. This ideal is fully realized in "The Little Shoemakers," which crosses from the shtetl to America and from before to after World War II, ending as the old shoemaker's financially successful Americanized sons rediscover from him the joys of working together, singing traditional songs of praise. Singer's most famous story, "Gimpel the Fool," affirms the patriarchal ideal even though Gimpel's wife betrays and insults her husband: the story condemns her even if Gimpel will not.

Singer's stories set outside the shtetl and in our own time suggest that violations of patriarchal tradition are bound to bring distress. Friedl in "The Mentor" is a neurologist whose husband and daughter live apart from her on an Israeli Kibbutz. She has not replaced the Jewish father, although in a way he has replaced her. She has rejected life with her husband as stultifying; but she cannot accept her daughter's hostility. As a mother, she is bereft of love; having denied it to her daughter, her daughter denies it to her. The daughter has learned from her mother a lesson of constriction rather than growth. But in a recent (apparently autobiographical) story called "The Son," Singer affirms that the strong bond between parent and child can survive long separation. After twenty years, the narrator is visited by the son he last saw at the age of five. With wondering surprise, the two leap to recognition and intuitive understanding. The story suggests such gratification is available to any parent and child, to any father and son: any abyss between them can be bridged by affection and sympathy.

Most of these stories of conflict between father and son end in some measure of compassionate recognition and understanding, even if at the minimal level of Henry Roth's recent short story, "The Final Dwarf." Roth recounts the petty hostilities of a man past middle age on a shopping trip with his bigoted old father. After Kestler collects his mail-order eyeglasses from Sears, proud of his bargain, he grudgingly chauffeurs his old father on a round of penny-saving errands. Kestler is scornful of Pop's economies and of his social prejudices. Pop resents the resentment. Yet in the end, driving home, Pop fastens his seat belt though he had previously refused to do so, subtly acknowledging mutual concern beneath the hostility. Such concern does not deny or erase ambivalence, nor the cultural gap between father and son; and there is no pretense that father or son is perfect, infallible, or even necessarily admirable. But the strong bond between father and son generates strong emotion that can lead to mutual understanding, even if not always love.

Such problems of understanding are most fully explored in the fiction of Saul Bellow. From his earliest novels to his most recent, Bellow has scrutinized relationships between fathers and children, questioning what each should give and expect from the other. In Seize the Day, The Victim, Herzog, and Mr. SammIer's Planet, the children are adults who feel their fathers have denied them understanding and love. Their fathers may speak from positions of social respect the children may never attain, and they may offer good advice but nonetheless prove inadequate parents. Conversely, a son may learn to be a good father without—or even despite—the example of his own father. By the endings of all four novels, the central characters begin to practice the selfless compassion required of effectual fathers. The values are the same as Malamud's, though Bellow usually projects them on loftier intellectual and social planes. As in most American Jewish fiction, the mothers in these novels are either minor figures or else long since dead: the father bears a parent's moral burdens alone.

Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day is a fat, middle-aged man without a job; he is separated from his wife and children; his mother is dead. Self-pityingly, he seeks assistance from his proud and proper father. But Dr. Adler condemns Tommy's sloppy behavior; he refuses not only money but understanding, sympathy, and love. The novel's other wisdom figure, Dr. Tamkin, offers the good advice which provides the book's title; but he advises badly on the stock market and may in fact be a self-seeking cheat. These "fathers" are not wholly admirable or trustworthy; the son must learn not to depend on them. Throughout his day of emotional catastrophes, Tommy moves toward emotional independence from these fathers through an increasing ability to feel pity for other people; and thus he moves toward the possibility of becoming more adequate as a human being himself.

Asa Leventhal in The Victim is another man who must learn to be a father unlike his own. He remembers his father as an angry, self-centered man, and many of Asa's problems can be attributed to his own anger and self-centeredness. His mother he recalls only as a passive woman who presumably died insane. Like Tommy, Asa moves to maturity through compassion. He learns to control his resentments, and he is willing to assume responsibility for his young nephews until his brother returns to his proper role. On the novel's last page we learn that Asa is about to become a father.

An old man named Schlossberg has a minor role in the narrative which looks back to Tamkin and forward to Sammler: he speaks the novel's central advice to be "exactly human" and to "choose dignity"; yet his own son is "good-for-nothing." Thus, through Schlossberg, Bellow again questions what is necessary and what is sufficient to a good father.

In Herzog, the central figure is a father who learns to fulfill that role more adequately. The novel begins and ends with Moses Herzog, a twice-divorced philosopher, in the Berkshires house bought with his "heritage"—the hard-earned money of his immigrant father who "the year before his death, had threatened to shoot him" for making such a mess of his life. In the course of the novel, Herzog comes to appreciate his father as a courageous man whose primary concern was for his family, whether he was an unsuccessful bootlegger or a successful businessman. This understanding also becomes part of the Herzog heritage. Finally, Herzog is able to move beyond confusion and rage and act like a man of courage. He plans to share his life with his children: he will write a book for his daughter, and he is painting a piano for her; he will invite his son for a month's visit. He may yet become a father who deserves respect.

Bellow's most recent novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet, focuses more sharply on the problem of men who have earned society's respect yet fail as fathers. Mr. Sammler is one such man; his dying nephew, Dr. Gruner, is another. Both are honorable men; both have lost their wives. Although Mr. Sammler, the novel's central wisdom figure, is past seventy, he still has lessons to learn. He must recognize the full human value of Dr. Gruner, yet acknowledge Gruner's failure as father of two grown, self-indulgent children. Then Mr. Sammler can confront his own failings as a father. By the novel's end, he is able to offer his middle-aged daughter the words of love and praise she has long required. Even a middle-aged child needs a father's tenderness; unless he has learned this, even a good and wise man cannot be a good father.

In these American Jewish novels, not the mother but the father is ultimately the dominant parent, teaching values of the heart and spirit even when he does not directly embody them. Rare is the mother who is tender and generous like Genya Scheral of Call it Sleep, or the mother Moses Herzog lovingly recalls pulling him on a sled. More frequently she is ambitious, hard-headed, and demanding. This Jewish mother may be explained as a complement to her more idealistic mate. In a way a Sancho Panza to his Quixote, she desires the immediate goods of this world, at least nominally for the sake of her children. But most surprising is how frequently the mother is simply eliminated from the fictional picture. American Jewish authors have been most concerned about the relations of father to child, and especially of the father to the son who is—or will become—a father himself.

The father-son relationship has of course interested other writers, but not in the same way. The southern fathers of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and Tate's The Fathers, for example, try to adhere to a rigid code of honor and a precise code of manners as the only means to get across life's abysses, including those that separate them from their sons. The Jewish fathers, by contrast, rarely worry about honor or codes of manners. If they do manage to pass over the gulfs between them and their sons, it is usually by some more intuitive route based on the love latent in relations between parents and children, and based on mutual awareness of human fallibility.

Few of these Jewish fathers (except for Potok's and some of Singer's) have retained firm ties to Jewish ritual or orthodox belief. And whether they are immigrants or simply residents of urban America, few have roots in a particular place. Questions of political affiliation or sexual appetite are irrelevant. It does not seem especially important whether a father makes his living as a doctor or a storekeeper, whether he is better educated than his son or not, whether he has clearer career goals or not. Even if a father's problems are initially practical, like these of making a living, their resolution always has to do with the larger problem of making a life. Repeatedly, the father moves to a moral arena where value is measured in terms of integrity, dignity, responsibility, and compassion.

The fathers tend to play three kinds of roles in the fiction, whether they are schlemiels or patriarchs, and whether major or minor characters. The roles are not mutually exclusive. First, the father remains essentially the same throughout the story, but his child must learn to value him. He may be ineffectual, or even worse, tyrannical; yet the child learns to accept, to pity, and sometimes to love. Thus the children of Albert Schearl, of Jack Portnoy, of Morris Bober. Sometimes the father teaches a lesson the child prefers not to learn: Dr. Adler in Seize the Day and Jonah Herzog in Herzog are enraged by their sons' requests for money; but the novels' endings suggest the sons are beginning to understand the value of independence. Sometimes, as at the endings of Malamud's The Assistant and Gold's Fathers, a skeptical child comes to praise the father's moral heroism.

Second, the father may learn to play the role of father more properly by learning to accept responsibility and express compassion. This applies to Albert Schearl, to Eli the fanatic, to the father of Singer's "The Son," to many of Malamud's fathers, to Asa Leventhal, Herzog, and most especially Artur Sammler. By breaking out of their selfish constraints, they free themselves to express the concerned love their children require. Thus, Mr. Sammler expresses pity and contempt for his daughter Shula throughout Mr. Sammler's Planet, but by the end he acknowledges her devotion and rewards it by praising her as a good daughter, none better.

As a third variant, a son who is also a father may learn to understand his own father, and become a better father himself. This is true of Tommy Wilhelm, of Moses Herzog, and of Asa Leventhal. The father is traditionally a conveyor of moral wisdom; sometimes he must also become wise.

Father and children are both fallible: such is the human condition. Both must learn to accept willingly the tie that binds them, to praise and so foster in each other whatever seems to merit praise. Ambivalent feeling about the father is to be expected: Alex Portnoy scorns his father's ineffectuality as Helen regrets Morris Bober's impracticality; they learn in time to acknowledge the love offered them. Repeatedly in American Jewish fiction, affection for a father is initially mixed with contempt, but develops into a deeper affection and often into admiration. Finally, the child accepts the father not only as a single individual but as a representative of the human condition in all its absurdity yet with all its possibilities for dignity and growth.