SOURCE: Krupnick, Mark. “Jewish Autobiographies and the Counter-Example of Philip Roth.” In American Literary Dimensions, edited by Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio, pp. 155-67. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Krupnick places Roth within the tradition of Jewish-American autobiographies.]

Like so many other writers in America, Jewish novelists have often derived inspiration from their own lives. Who can read about Henry Roth's David Schearl or Bellow's Herzog or Grace Paley's Faith Darwin or Philip Roth's Zuckerman or Cynthia Ozick's Puttermesser without seeing that their creators have put a lot of themselves into these fictional characters? And yet we know that Ozick is not Puttermesser, or we know at least that Puttermesser isn't all there is to Ozick. The author is able to stand apart from her creation and be funny about her—and subsume her in her own creative fantasies and artistic compositions.

Compared to these autobiographical fictions, Jewish-American autobiography—autobiography proper, the straight stuff—makes a pretty poor show. There are exceptions to that generalization, such as Alfred Kazin's memoirs and journals,¹ but most Jewish autobiography is tame or programmatic. The tame ones are written from defensive motives, to assure the majority (whether of Jews or Gentiles) that the author has hued to the straight and narrow, has been a nice Jewish boy or girl. Elements of the standard American success story, made up from Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger, appear in many Jewish variants. The programmatic autobiographies are more aggressive. They exist to promote a position or ideology; the author becomes the exemplary radical or disenchanted radical or Orthodox Jew or Zionist or spokesperson for some other conception of Jewish communal values.

It would seem that these topics ought to make for great autobiographies. But they haven't, and not in America alone. We Jews have lacked great models, such as St. Augustine's Confessions. Perhaps there are instances in the Jewish tradition of such an anguished journey of the soul, but either these have not been translated or are known in English only to a small group of scholar-pietists who aren't telling. Neither are there Jewish autobiographies written in the spirit of Rousseau's Confessions, which substitutes the “sincerity” of the modern writer for the older Christian theme of the pilgrim's progress.

Some Jewish readers might feel it's just as well that the diarist picking at his own psychological scabs is more likely to be a Frenchman, like Michel Leiris², than a Jew. In any case, the Jewish common reader has had to settle usually for dull success stories in which the author plays down the unique aspect of his life in order to emphasize his contribution to the larger Jewish community. Instead of Augustine or Rousseau, we have as a defining form the kind of boilerplate that Jewish real estate magnates present at Jewish United Fund banquets honoring them for their philanthropy.

“MACHERS” AND THEIR AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

One thinks of the excitement in African-American biographies, from Richard Wright's Black Boy to Brent Staples's Parallel Lives, and then one compares with these the edifying memoirs excerpted in Harold U. Ribalow's Autobiographies of American Jews (1965). Ribalow collected representative selections from the memoirs of Jewish public men and women—labor lawyers, rabbis, prominent Zionists, and others who, as the editor says, “participated significantly in American or Jewish life”³ in the years between 1880 and 1920. Ribalow's autobiographers were all successful and prominent people. The Jewish weekly paper, Forward, refers to such persons as “Jewish bigs,” that paper's translation of the Yiddish term machers. From such people, “doers” or “bigshots,” we don't expect intimate confessions or picaresque adventures.

Reading through this unexceptionable book, one asks, What can have motivated Ribalow, with his anxiety about demonstrating “the Jewish contribution to American life”? Ribalow's book is from the mid-1960s, only a generation removed from the present, when the greatest danger facing the Jewish community in America is the wet, warm embrace of I'm-all-right-you're-all-right pluralism. We are separated from this book by only three decades in time, yet it feels as if Ribalow belongs to an epoch before the Flood.

For whom was this book intended, with its exemplary lives and moral legacy to future Jewish generations? The stories these memoirists tell are fairy tales of adversity overcome, goodness triumphant. Perhaps Ribalow brought them together for Jewish children, who might be thought to need inspiration about the possibilities of Jewish heroism, or for Jewish grown-ups immersed in the dreary round of getting and spending, or for non-Jews, unillumined as to the dignity of Jewish life in America. Whatever its intended audience, this collection of mini-memoirs clearly has a didactic aim. The purpose is to teach the civil virtues, unlike the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, which have as their aim something far more inward and personal: in Augustine's case, the way to Christian faith, and in Rousseau, the way to be true to the god within. The “lives” in Ribalow make his book a kind of Jewish version of Plutarch's Lives.

But why in 1965 would a knowledgable editor feel it necessary to provide such evidence that Jews were dignified, respectable, and above all determined to go along and not rock the boat? One possible answer is that Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Inquisition had occurred in the early 1950s, and a Jewish spokesperson might have been concerned to clear present-day Jews of any possible association with communist subversion. Or perhaps Ribalow was prescient and had divined that Jews would figure importantly in the radical youth culture of the 1960s.

What in fact Ribalow mentions is neither the Red Scare of the early fifties nor the New Left of the later sixties. Rather, he indicates that he was worried about the new Jewish writing. All through the fifties and continuing in the early sixties, Bellow, Malamud, Mailer, Ginsberg, Roth, and dozens of less famous figures had become visible to an increasingly large and varied readership. What they were saying about their fellow Jews couldn't any longer be considered an exclusively Jewish affair. The memoirists in Ribalow's collection have in common that they all render an idealized representation of Jewish life. In contrast, the younger generation was suspected of disloyalty. And because they were suspected by middle-class fellow Jews of exposing the community's dirty linen, they were accorded a wary reception.

But in Native Son, Richard Wright had not scrupled to dramatize the degradation of Bigger Thomas, however much it might be blamed on white society. Why the seemingly excessive sensitivity to any negative portrayal of Jews on the part of machers like Ribalow and other agents of the organized Jewish community's cultural apparatus? The American Jewish community has shown a genius for organization over the years, but its Achilles heel is that it is organized around money: the collecting and dispersing of charity, mainly for distribution to Israel and to subsidize American Jewish institutions of various kinds. The emphasis on raising money to support Israel against its enemies has meant that businessmen have usually been the leaders of this community. These businessmen and other middle-class activists have often acted as if Jewish writers and intellectuals act in concert to bring shame on them. That sensitivity to criticism shows that the Jewish “community,” small as it is in absolute numbers, is divided by myriad class and cultural differences, as well as enmity among a variety of religious groups.

I won't take up the religious differences because my focus lies elsewhere, in the clash between the Jewish artist and Jews as a group. Because it will be clear that my own sympathy is with the Jew as writer, I will try first to suggest reasons for the community's distrust of its most anarchical and individualistic members. Most obviously, it worries that these free spirits may turn out, as some inevitably have, to be loose cannons. Keep in mind that most of the Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee, began as “defense” organizations and that many of these organizations continue to be “anti-defamation leagues.” Their mandate was to protect the Jews from the repetition of anything that might turn into a plague like that which had destroyed Jewish life in Europe twenty years before. There was still anxiety among American Jews that the assurance “It can't happen here,” a phrase from the 1930s, ought not to be tested twice.

Also, people like Ribalow were not being paranoid in their fear that the younger generation of Jews had no patience with the community's elders. Only a few years earlier, Commentary had published a symposium in which thirty-one younger Jewish writers and academics responded to a series of questions about their relation to “the Jewish tradition” and “the Jewish community.” That community cannot have been reassured by the responses, many of which questioned the continuing existence of such a community: “our communalism—our sense that the Jewish nation is prior to the individual Jew, who possesses, therefore, no private destiny but only the corporate destiny of the Jewish folk—this, too, has ceased to be a ground, has become a burden.”⁴ It is in the context of such symposia, involving Jewish writers with no ties to organized Jewish life, that Ribalow offers his edifying autobiographies with their appeal to “communal awareness” and “communal unity.”

It has always been the same story in Jewish-American letters: the individual writer versus the organized middle-class “community” that fears and hates the individuality. Harold Bloom told the present writer about sharing a platform with Philip Roth at a recent event that was open to the nonacademic Jewish “community.” It seems he and Roth were both subjected to the attacks to which Roth, after all these years, has become inured. Bloom reports Roth as saying to him: “Harold, we are here to be humiliated.”

When the community feels endangered, it has public relations specialists like Harold Ribalow who can be dispatched to destroy reputations before gentiles get the idea that these Jewish writers truly represent mainstream Jewish opinion. Thus, in his “Introduction” to Autobiographies of American Jews, Ribalow alludes to “an unhappily large number of Jewish novelists, writing out of a sense of dissatisfaction and rebelliousness, (who) have elected to focus on neurotic and maladjusted individuals like themselves.” It turns out that “neurotic” and “maladjusted” mean that these writers “reject affiliation with the Jewish community.”⁵

In emphasizing the American scene, I don't at all mean that Israeli autobiography shows a stronger impulse toward self-reliance. Up until fairly recently the highly differentiated individuality of the West was rare in Israeli writing. If anything, Jewish writers in America have been more individualistic than Jewish writers in other countries and earlier periods. American Jews have usually been at least as much American as they are Jewish. That's a way of saying that there is a powerful streak of willfulness in American fiction. Saul Bellow's Augie March is representative of that spirit in declaring that he is “not a candidate for adoption.” Augie is a Jewish Huck Finn out of Chicago. Huck knows it would be safer to be adopted by the widow Douglas, but he doesn't believe in her religious “flapdoodle” and doesn't want to be “sivilized.” Most Jewish-American writers are like Augie: They tend to be unchurched, unsponsored, and free, even when they wish they could feel authorized and able to believe in the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac.

How, then, do communal myths find their way into Jewish-American autobiographies so as to distinguish them from Jewish novels? I have space here only to point to two examples. First, there is Mary Antin's classic immigrant autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), the model for countless subsequent stories of assimilation and acculturation. The actual particulars of little Mary's life get lost amidst the myth-making, as she takes salient elements of the biblical story of Exodus and translates them into a new religion of Americanization. Egypt is now the East Europe of the czar and his Jew-hating minions; Canaan is America; Moses is transformed into George Washington, “father” of Mary's new country; and the Temple, the center of Jewish religious life, is replaced and decentralized. The sacred place of Jewish life in America is the public school.

But the price of this mythmaking is that Antin has to play down her specificity in order to present herself as a “type” of the Jewish immigrant. Mary's actual life was more interesting than the myth. In 1901, at the age of twenty, she married a Lutheran, the German-American geologist and paleontologist Amadeus William Grabau. They moved to New York, where Grabau became a professor at Columbia. The once-happy marriage fell apart with the coming of World War I. American hatred of Germans, including even German-Americans born in America, as in Grabau's case, and his own support for the German side in the war, kept Grabau in a state of chronic irritability and made him act erratically both at home and in public. Grabau lost his position at Columbia, and Mary, who had given birth to a daughter in 1907, now carried the emotional and financial burden for the entire family. Having established a certain reputation with The Promised Land, Mary went out on the lecture circuit to argue against closing the doors to potential immigrants, and presumably to make up for the loss of her husband's income. For his part, exasperated by anti-German prejudice, Grabau left his family in 1917 to take up a major research position at the Chinese National University in Peking. He remained there until his death nearly thirty years later. Antin's book ends before the tumultuous World War I period, but one supposes she might have left out the story of her life with Grabau in any case because it detracts from the happy myth she was half-reporting and half-inventing. Her life after the Grabau years was downhill all the way.

Another example of a writer's resort of communal myth rather than to an attentive “close reading” of his own, more private motives is Paul Cowan's An Orphan in History: Retrieving a Jewish Legacy (1982). Cowan, who was a good friend of mine in college, was the son of Louis G. Cowan, the president of CBS-TV at the time of the scandal over the game show The ＄64,000 Question. Cowan, Sr. disclaimed knowledge of the fraud, but he had been one of the original producers of the show, and was forced to resign in 1959 in order to protect the reputation of the network.

Paul Cowan only discovered after his father's death that Lou Cowan had concealed his deep Jewish roots, even to the extent of changing his name from Cohen. Paul writes at length about his search for the past that his father had deliberately elided. That search takes him to genealogists and brings him into contact with an Hasidic sage in New York. I have written about Paul's book elsewhere.⁶ Here I would only say that, attractive as is the neat narrative he makes of his life, it seems to me too rounded, too much an accommodation to the cultural prestige of the back-to-origins mythos that the African-American writer Alex Haley had made popular with Roots (1976), a seven-generation family chronicle that later became a docudrama on TV. What for me is more interesting than the simplifying grid that Paul used to organize his fascinating material is the relationship the reader only glimpses here between father and son, a relationship that left the son challenged by a difficult legacy—of finding out the truth about who he was, without doing damage to his idealized image of his father.

JEWISH MYTH, HISTORY, FICTION

Zakhor, a stimulating book on “Jewish History and Jewish Memory” over the ages, touches on our question of myth, though here the myths are metahistorical rather than communal. The author, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, says that, despite being immensely history-minded, the Jews were slow to arrive at historiography, which he defines as the modern way of explaining events in terms of objective causes. Jews had their God, who intervened actively in Jewish history, which itself was unique due to the covenant between God and the Jews. What need had they of historiography? God was either pleased with them or not.

Yerushalmi is writing about histories of the Jewish people as a whole, not about biographies of themselves by individual Jews. But inevitably the inhibitions on Jewish historiography carried over into the writing of Jewish autobiographies, and the much-delayed rise of Jewish autobiography coincided with the rise of Jewish history-writing. As with so many other aspects of modern Jewish life, everything started with Napoleon and the emergence of the Jews from their European ghettos. As Yerushalmi says, “Modern Jewish historiography … originated, not as scholarly curiosity, but as ideology, one of a gamut of responses to the crisis of Jewish emancipation and the struggle to attain it.”⁷

Jewish-American autobiographies are like modern Jewish historiography in having their roots in the decline of Jewish collective memory. That decline, Yerushalmi says, “is only a symptom of the unravelling of that common network of belief and praxis through whose mechanisms … the past was once made present.” In these circumstances, Yerushalmi says, history has become “what it had never been before—the faith of fallen Jews.”⁸ It would require another essay to explore the implications of the corollary, that autobiography has become a post-religious quest for identity of fallen Jews. The question of the self only becomes a question with the decay of faith and collective memory. In this essay, I can only suggest, in the context of Jewish-American autobiography, that (a) communal myths have taken the place of the earlier, religious-based “network of belief and praxis,” and (b) these myths enable but also place narrow limits on modern Jewish ideas of what a self might be.

Sometimes the myth that has replaced religion in modern Jewish autobiographies is History itself, capitalized because in Marxism, the most influential modern displacement of Jewish messianism, History replaces Divine Providence. Or consider Freudianism, another “ism” commonly associated with the Jews in America. Or Zionism. But in our own time the myth that has served most effectively to unify the Jews, for lack of a more positive program or faith, is the Holocaust. I hope it is not necessary to say that in pointing to the mythic dimension of the Holocaust, I mean something quite different from those who contend that the Holocaust did not occur. I am thinking, rather, of the uses to which this historical actuality have been put in the collective consciousness of Jewish Americans as a group.

The Holocaust, cited only once in Yerushalmi's book, provides an occasion for his own, slightly irritated remark about the continuing appeal of myth in the Jewish understanding of the past. Yerushalmi argues that Jewish fiction, myth, and ideology all function in the same way, to obscure history, things as they were and are. He points out that although “[t]he Holocaust has already engendered more historical research than any single event in Jewish history,” the popular idea of the Holocaust is being shaped more by the novelist than by professional historians. Then he complains that, even as in the sixteenth century, Jews either “reject history” or show themselves to be “not prepared to confront it directly.”

Here is the crux. A novelist might agree that simplistic myths—such as those Antin and Cowan put to work—need to be exposed. But does the historiographer “confront [history] directly,” like the traveler in Lapland looking directly at the whiteness of everything? Yerushalmi has a curiously positivistic notion of the novel, as the functional equivalent of ideology and myth. He chides us for hoping beyond historiography, awaiting “a new, metahistorical myth, for which the novel provides at least a temporary modern surrogate.”⁹

PHILIP ROTH AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

We all express a community even in our most intimate revelations. But Jewish writing seems especially vulnerable to the pressure for group solidarity because it concerns itself with a minority group that is dwindling, and also because the Jews, more than most groups, have been fertile in the construction of ideologies and what Yerushalmi calls “metahistorical myths.” Not all Jewish novelists have escaped the nets of community, but they have seemed more aware than Jewish autobiographers of the special problems of the individual in a community suffused by ideological debate. It ought to be acknowledged as well that the novelist's medium allows more latitude for experimentation in the presentation of the self. As a form, then, the novel may not be a panacea, but neither is it a Jewish sickness. The fiction of Philip Roth in particular has found a fertile subject in the problems and interplay between the demands of a singular, fractious writer and the resistance of the Jewish community.

Roth is difficult to write about in relation to autobiography because, although he has published two volumes of memoirs, The Facts and Patrimony, detailing what is purportedly the “true story,” it is in his fiction that he has written best about the condition of Jewishness. And that is paradoxically because the actual details of Roth's life in Newark, New York, England, and beyond are less useful for depicting a general condition than the fantasias that grow out of those actual details. Although some literal-minded critics have confused Portnoy and Zuckerman with their inventor, the “fact” is that in writing fiction the actual circumstances of Roth's life have mainly served as points of departure for manic flights of invention.

Roth's fiction allows him to try out different selves. Even as early as Portnoy's Complaint, Alexander Portnoy was both the “cunt-crazy” teenager, “whacking off” using the piece of liver his family would eat that night for dinner—and the assistant commissioner of New York's Commission on Human Opportunity, a man devoted to high principles and good works. Later Roth discovered the idea of “counterlives,” such that his alter ego, Zuckerman, could exchange places at will with his brother in the same novel. The Counterlife develops this method to best effect, but My Life as a Man, in 1974, shows how important it had been to him almost from the start. That earlier novel, offered to us as having been written by one Peter Tarnopol, has two parts. Part One (itself made up of two short stories) is entitled “Useful Fictions”; and Part Two, Tarnopol's autobiographical narrative, is called “My True Story.” For the principle of counterlives, there may be no better example than the invention of Mickey Sabbath, the anarchical puppeteer of Sabbath's Theater, followed in Roth's very next novel by Seymour Levov, a man obsessively devoted to living by the law. It is as if, in the case of the aging Sabbath, Alex Portnoy had grown up to become a man who acts on every impulse that young Portnoy could allow himself to imagine when masturbating; and, correspondingly, Seymour is a paragon of Jewish-American moral conduct such as Portnoy the assistant commissioner couldn't even imagine becoming. What energy and protean shapeshifting: a witches' sabbath of a novel combining elements of Shakespearean tragedy and mad farce, followed by another novel that reads as if by another writer altogether, or perhaps the same writer in a convalescent phase or after having taken medication to bring him down from Sabbath mania.

If we ask what these two recent novels have in common, we might answer that they make use of feelings, attitudes, and situations Roth himself lived through in the early 1990s, when he suffered a psychological crack-up and, not long afterward, the collapse of his long relationship to the actress Claire Bloom. These are in some sense “autobiographical novels.” Sabbath's Theater depicts the terrifying but also farcical emotional breakdown of an artist amidst the self-liberation of his various women. Mickey Sabbath has been a puppeteer, in his real-life relationships as well as professionally. Felled now by arthritis, among other debilities, he finds he can't practice his art and has also to surrender what had been his obsessional control over wife, ex-wives, lovers, and others.

What it may have felt like to chafe under such control is clear in the title and revelations of Leaving a Doll's House, Claire Bloom's account of her relationship with Roth. But is Bloom's story not fiction, too, shaped as it is by the author's identification with the Ibsen heroine, a role she had played on stage; the specific priorities of contemporary American feminism; and perhaps also her desire to persuade their mutual friends that the fault was all her husband's? This isn't just fiction; it is dramatic performance, a chance to live up to a classic role, that of the good woman wronged.

American Pastoral, on the other hand, may appear to have little autobiographical reference. But consider that Seymour Levov finds that leaving Newark for an idyllic setting does not protect him from (his daughter's) madness or (his wife's) betrayal. Roth, too, although never an innocent like Seymour, seems to have nurtured a dream of perfect happiness summed up, perhaps, in the early years of his relationship with Bloom in the converted farmhouse in rural Connecticut that he had bought some years before. But, as we see, madness and death are present even in Arcadia.

The typical Rothian novel, whether The Ghost Writer or one of the more recent, more experimental works, is not an autobiography pure and simple but a parody of autobiography. Roth is far more interested in the possibilities of literary form than is the literal-minded posse that greets each new book of his with a measurement of how pro- or anti-Jewish it is. His project involves exposing the foundations, cultural as well as epistemological, of autobiography as a form of writing and of Jewish autobiography in particular. Roth helps us to see that, although autobiographies such as those in Ribalow claim to be authentic personal history, time after time one finds them to be organized around what I have been calling communal myths, and what Roth himself calls fictions. Roth would assent to Paul de Man's famous affirmation of literature as superior to other forms of writing by virtue of its awareness of its own rhetoricity. The sanctimonious self-celebrants in Ribalow think they tell the story of their lives as it was. From Roth's point of view, they are engaged in the writing of fiction as surely as he is, the main difference being that they don't know it.

Roth clearly regards the novel form not as an ally of ideology, as Yerushalmi asserts, but as its antidote. And his recent fiction may be most usefully understood as a self-consciously conceived exposure of some kinds of snake oil that have been peddled as cures for the “Jewish Question” in our time. The novel as form may at its best serve as a prophylaxis for the myths and ideologies that pass as truth.

I point to one more late novel of Roth to show what kind of lesson he could teach Jewish autobiographers. In Operation Shylock: A Confession, Roth's main character, a novelist named “Philip Roth,” is trailed in Israel by a double, who also calls himself “Philip Roth.” The double appears on Israeli TV and meets with world leaders like Lech Walesa. The double pretends to be the celebrated novelist and perpetrates his imposture in order to promote a political program he calls “Diasporism,” according to which the best hope for peace in the Middle East, and for the Jews as a people, would be for all Israeli Jews of European descent to return to their former homelands.

The dizzying effect of this baroque comedy is intensified by the impersonations and hallucinatory effect of repeated doubling, even tripling. Every character has his distorting mirror-image, every action its shadowy possibility. Roth outdoes mere quotidian life. Still, his inventiveness makes us think about what “straight” autobiography might be like were an autobiographer to try and do justice to the roles and impersonations that are part of our actual lives. If autobiographers like Antin and Cowan refused the simplifying convention of a “true self” for whom there can be only one story and one truth, they would be less tempted to submit to simplifying explanations for their lives.

Philip Roth is not a candidate for adoption any more than Bellow. After Operation Shylock, the editors of Commentary and Forward seemed ready to welcome him back into the organized official Jewish family. Worried perhaps about being embraced by just the kind of people who had scorned him after Portnoy's Complaint, Roth made clear his desire for independence by writing Sabbath's Theater, a book so excessive in its will to violate sexual taboos that one felt the author was trying with all his might to offend everyone. The novel that came out of this maelstrom of feeling is very uneven. But Roth did make his point, as he does periodically to assure himself as much as his readers, that he hasn't yet come to terms. The message is that he is not Saul Bellow, not a Jewish sage, not a cultural conservative, not a nice Jewish boy even when he is writing about his hero's ritual return to his parents' cemetery plot.

Roth is unusual among Jewish writers, American or European, in not being willing to settle for a wise sadness. He wants to live, and if his own body or other people fail him, he acts out his rage and his grief. Certainly there is nothing in Bellow's fiction, including the funeral scene at the end of Seize the Day, that compares in emotional power to the final section of Sabbath's Theater, when the broken-down hero, utterly at the end of his rope, visits the garbage dump of a cemetery where the remains of his parents lie. The pain and grief are lacerating, and the mix of pathos and buffoonery makes one think at times of King Lear.

Roth has obvious limits, especially as regards general ideas of politics, history, and culture. Unlike Bellow, who came of age in the ideological 1930s, Roth is not searching, even allowing for Bellow's self-irony, for a “five-cent synthesis.” Lacking such an intellectual synthesis, Roth's novels do not provide a thematic model for autobiography. Rather, they point to a new art, of anti-autobiography, founded on the idea of counterlives. We might start by imagining what Roth might do with the stiffly correct autobiographers excerpted in Ribalow's compilation. Or set him to doing parodies of the only marginally livelier ones in a more recent volume, Writing Our Lives, edited by Steven Rubin.¹⁰ The voice of the anti-autobiographer, already audible in French writers like Michel Leiris, would sacrifice the authority of the Jewish “notable” as held up for our admiration by the Jewish community. But one purpose of this essay has been to expose the bad faith implicit in taking over the ready-made language and idols of the tribe.

Notes

1. Kazin has up to now published four volumes culled from his journals: A Walker in the City (1951); Starting Out in the Thirties (1965); New York Jew (1978); and A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996). Kazin is at his best in the last of these, in which he presents the notebook entries plain, without converting them into continuous narrative. (Kazin passed away after this essay was written.)

2. See the chapter on Leiris in John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

3. Harold U. Ribalow, “Introduction,” Autobiographies of American Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1965).

4. “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals,” Commentary 31 (April 1961), 320.

5. Ribalow, Autobiographies, 4, 13.

6. Mark Krupnick, “Assimilation in Recent American Jewish Autobiographies,” Contemporary Literature 34 (Fall 1993), 462-73.

7. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 85.

8. Ibid., 86, 94.

9. Ibid., 98.

10. Steven Rubin, ed. Writing Our Lives: Autobiographies of American Jews, 1890-1990 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991).