Urban Rites and Civic Premises in the Fiction of Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Sandra Schor

Abstract

onsider the following thought experiment: imagine the Jews as a rural people. In modern times this is not possible. The miraculous yields of Israeli agriculture are the product of the urban, modern sophistication of its farmers. There are no country cousins among the sharp-eyed kibbutzniks. Reaching backward to the Talmudic era, we can envision the rural Jewish experience that included the two kallah months of Adar and Elul, which fall at the beginning of spring and the end of summer when the fields did not need tending, and so were designated as a time for free adult education by the great Babylonian rabbis Rav and Shmuel, in order to enlighten their country folk and prepare them for the yearly (at least) pilgrimage to Jerusalem. By contrast, the shtetl culture of the European Jews with a few isolated exceptions depended upon the fact that they were not allowed to own land or have access to the means of production of the rural economy. Here too they had to live by their wits. In any event, rural nostalgia quickly fades before the stinging phrase with which Karl Marx banished pastoral Rousseauism to the dust-heap of history. No, in modern times, the Jews do not partake of the idiocy of rural life; they are city people. That was the core of the Nazi hatred of the Jews. In the ideology of Nazism, the country virtues insured the best Aryan stock. Hitler hated his capital city, rightly guessing that Berlin was a mysterious world that even he could not control: right through to the end of the war, many Jews managed to hide in it. What Hitler and the Nazis could do, however, was take revenge upon these city people, driv-