Since the 1980s, a series of non-fiction works has changed the way we think about many of the great Jewish writers of the 20th century. We thought of them as novelists, but it became clear that their non-fiction was just as great, opening up new ways of thinking about subjects from the Holocaust to Israel, and indeed was enhanced by their storytelling skills.
Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary (translated 1995) was first seen as just a notebook that Babel drew on for his acclaimed book of short stories, Red Cavalry, but it is a great work in its own right, one of the outstanding books on war and antisemitism in the last century.
Vasily Grossman was one of the best Soviet novelists, but the appearance of Luba Vinogradova’s translation of Grossman’s A Writer at War (2005) and The Road, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (2010), which included his extraordinary account of Treblinka, showed that reportage could also be great literature.
Primo Levi wrote fiction about the Holocaust, but two non-fiction books translated just before his death in the mid-1980s, The Periodic Table and The Drowned and the Saved, finally established his reputation as one of the greatest writers on the Holocaust.
More recently, Amos Oz and David Grossman engaged with Israel in their fiction but just as important are the 15 books of essays and reportage they have published, such as Grossman’s The Yellow Wind (1987 and 1993) or Oz’s In the Land of Israel (1983). Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), is arguably his greatest work, but it is a memoir rather a novel and, while Oz contests the view that the book is anything other than a “tale”, it is deeply rooted in his own life.
Oz’s recently published Dear Zealots (Chatto & Windus, 2018), is a set of three essays on fundamentalism, Jewishness and Israel — those on Jewishness and Israel being the strongest. The former speaks eloquently of Jewish traditions of doubt, disagreement and dissent, and Jews’ love of texts, which, for Oz, is very strongly directed at the new Hebrew literature, which has “persistently expressed theological distress”. Who are “the most Jewish Jews,” he asks. The obvious answer may be the most Orthodox and theological. But Oz believes it is the Jews who engage with the present as much as the past. “It is not possible to renew without days of old,” he writes, “and days of old cannot exist without renewal.”
Of course, the Soviet Union, the Holocaust and Israel are huge subjects that have resonated throughout and beyond the 20th century. In a sense, the Anglo-American Jewish writer’s task is harder. What kind of non-fiction can they produce that could compare with first-hand accounts of Stalingrad or Auschwitz?
And yet they have also produced a fascinating body of essays and non-fiction. When Philip Roth died earlier this year, few tributes did justice to his essays or his book of conversations with other writers, Shop Talk (2001). No critic has written as well about Bellow and Malamud as Roth did. No one did more to alert English-speaking readers to writers behind the Iron Curtain. And a passage he wrote about Irving Berlin is one of the best things ever written about Jews and gentiles in America.
The late Clive Sinclair was as good a critic as he was a novelist. In his review of Roth’s The Plot Against America, he picked up what everyone else missed.
The clue was in Roth’s conversation with Primo Levi, especially when they talk about how safe Italian Jews felt at home. Levi throws the question back at Roth: “How about Jews in America? How secure do they feel?”
Sinclair was also a first-rate film critic. Many of his best pieces, especially on his beloved Westerns, have been gathered together in a book, True Crit, produced with his son Seth Sinclair, (2018).
Frederic Raphael is perhaps better known for putting his fictions on screen — Darling (cinema), The Glittering Prizes (television) or his screenplays in general, including Far From the Madding Crowd. But he deserves recognition for his essays (including The Necessity of Antisemitism) and memoirs. Against the Stream, published this month by Carcanet, is the seventh volume of Raphael’s memoirs and brings us to the early 1980s. It is a wonderful evocation of the period, full of lively gossip and sharp portraits of leading figures in Britain and Hollywood.
It is hard to imagine more contrasting writers. But it is time to acknowledge non-fiction — reportage, memoirs, critical essays — as one of the jewels in the crown of modern Jewish literature. It has been neglected for too long.
David Herman is the JC’s senior fiction reviewer
