Saul Bellow's Heart (2 page)
In the novels I often find what amount to familiar snapshots from the Bellow family album, images of people, stories, and lives I know well. Thoughts and feelings my father places in the mouths of his narrators are, on occasion, so clear to me that, at moments, I feel as if I am peering over the shoulder of Saul Bellow the author as he writes in my father’s diary. My rereading strengthens impressions I had garnered in our quiet conversations, and I take them as an invitation to move thoughtfully between the works of fiction and the life of a man who took such pains to protect what Saul called his “inner life.” In
Dangling Man
the narrator, Joseph, describes a heart surrounded by a thicket “seldom disturbed” as his least penetrable part. I was raised by a man who surrounded his heart with a thicket that I was able to penetrate from time to time, though it remained difficult for both of us to fathom.
Despite my doubts about writing publicly, I have determined to learn more about my father, to reassess my patrimony as a writer’s son, and to have my say. I can no longer climb into
Saul’s lap as he sat at the typewriter, hit the keys, and leave my gibberish in his manuscripts as I did at three. Nor can I visit Saul in his dotage and stir up fading embers of our past. I can visit his gravestone and, in the Jewish tradition, put another pebble on it. But my “Pop” deserves more from his firstborn, as full and as honest a written portrait as I can render. Shutting my study door and struggling to find my voice on paper as I listen to Brahms or Mozart, as he did every day for more than seventy years, is as close as I can now get to my dead father.
“YOUNG SAUL”: THE REBELLIOUS SON
Shrouded by the passage of more than a century and the thousands of miles between Lithuania and Chicago, my only palpable connections to my great-grandparents and the previous generations are a few photographs and what Saul called my “Litvak tongue,” a propensity for sour-tasting food he cultivated by feeding me pickled herring when I was six months old. Everything I know about my Bellow side came to me through Saul’s vivid accounts, told and retold.
My paternal grandfather, Abram Belo, whose name is Russian for the color white (as in Belarus), was born in Dvinsk in 1878 and grew up in Lithuania. Family lore has it that his father, Berel Belo, was a harsh parent. As a young man Abram’s brother Willie joined a Bund, a left-wing organization linked to labor unions. Berel was having none of this transgression, and as a punishment he apprenticed Willie to a brush maker. Being consigned to a manual trade was a terrible humiliation for a Jewish boy from an aspiring family. Worse, the bristles came from pigs, animals Jews are forbidden to touch or to eat. Perhaps as much as anything else to escape their father, Willie
and his two sisters, Hanna and Rosa, chose to leave Russia for Lachine, a poor suburb of Montreal, Canada.
Berel had Abram studying for a rabbinical career before his son was six. Not long thereafter, Abram began to live at the seminary, but poor physical conditions and the rabbis’ brutality toward their students alienated my grandfather. He quit during his teens. From then on, skeptical about religious belief, Abram chose a worldly path, and by age twenty-four he was living illegally, beyond the Pale of Jewish Settlement (areas permitted under czarist law), in St. Petersburg. Although common among Jews at the turn of the century, living outside the Pale was dangerous. My grandfather was in a precarious situation and bribed the authorities to prevent exposure.
Abram worked at a company that imported Egyptian onions and Turkish figs, luxury items that he later claimed to have sold to the czar and wealthy residents of St. Petersburg. In a photograph my grandfather is sitting with a group of co-workers and looking dapper. The impression I garnered from my father is that Abram was a raconteur, a glib and entertaining fellow who was good to have around, though better at telling a story than at strenuous labor.
The Gordins, my grandmother Lescha’s family, were also from Lithuania, a town named Dagda, near Riga. Moses Gordin, my great-grandfather, was a rabbinical scholar renowned for being able to recite lengthy sections of the Babylonian Talmud from memory. The one picture of him, secured without his knowledge because Orthodox Jews would not let themselves be photographed, shows a tiny man with a flowing beard and penetrating eyes. His appearance, which my father always thought otherworldly, made a deep impression on Saul, who
thought his own eyes, facial structure, and capacious memory similar to his maternal grandfather’s.
Moses Gordin had twelve children, but his family was sufficiently prosperous to support his religious studies without the need for him to engage in degrading physical labor. As adults, several of his children, including my grandmother Lescha, moved to St. Petersburg. Another brother went to South Africa and made a fortune before returning to live in St. Petersburg. Two or three Gordin brothers ran a restaurant that bore the family name, an indication of their proficiency in working the system despite the complexities of living where they were not legally permitted.
My grandmother first saw her prospective groom when a matchmaker brought Abram Belo to the Gordin house. Before being considered a worthy suitor, the young man had to be vetted by the Gordin male hierarchy by demonstrating his religious knowledge. As a former seminary student, Abram had no trouble impressing them as my grandmother, smitten by this handsome young man, looked on from behind a curtain. Both of my grandparents were well educated. Consistent with her romantic inclinations, Lescha enjoyed reading Pushkin.
Lescha Gordin was twenty-five and Abram Belo was twenty-seven when they married in 1905. The wedding was so grand that years later, in Lachine, when he and his family were in desperate financial straits, Abram’s sisters often complained of what they considered its excess. At the time, however, the marriage proved to be a financial windfall for Abram, thanks to the Gordins’ generous dowry. The newlyweds lived in a large house and had servants. In 1906, their first child, Zelda, was born; in 1908 their son Movscha arrived; and in 1911, Samuel.
The growing Belo family owned a country house to which
they escaped from St. Petersburg in summertime. Though Abram continued to import vegetables, his in-laws did not think he had a good head for business. They were dismayed when he quickly went through Lescha’s substantial dowry and requested a second large sum. But the Gordin brothers, particularly the one who had made his fortune in South Africa, were generous toward their sister and her young family.
In 1912 the police cracked down on Grandpa. Abram was convicted of illegal residence and was nearly deported to Siberia before a Gordin brother arranged for the family to get out of the country. According to Saul, the papers that allowed them to leave Russia were “the best forgeries money could buy.”
The entire family was on the same boat to Canada, but because they were traveling on forged papers the children were instructed not to acknowledge their father during the journey. The Belos landed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where their westernization began. An immigration official changed Grandpa’s name to Abraham Bellow, while Zelda and Movscha became Jane and Morris. Samuel and Lescha’s names survived unscathed.
The family left the material comforts of Russia for a perilous life in the New World. My grandmother was permanently separated from her family. All of our relatives in Canada were on the Belo side of the family. Lescha never returned to Russia and dearly missed her family. When news of a brother’s death from typhus arrived by post, she wept bitterly. By all accounts, my grandmother was often sad and morose. The strains imposed by poverty and an immigrant life weighed heavily upon her. Furthering her isolation, Lescha learned neither French nor English. In the New World she read sentimental novels in Yiddish that frequently brought her to tears.
By 1913, the Bellows were living in Lachine, the Montreal suburb where several Belo siblings had settled already. The factories and streets were filled with immigrant populations in a polycultural community my father captures in a 1992 autobiographical sketch, “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son.” But inside the house the Bellow family preserved the old country along with its religious and cultural customs. Lescha kept a strictly kosher kitchen and insisted that her children study Hebrew, the Torah, and music. Yiddish was the family’s primary language, and even in later years when discussing serious family business, Saul and his siblings would lapse into the familiar tongue of their childhood.
The struggling Bellow family rented a small house in a slum where rat droppings encrusted their front steps. Sam and Morrie shared a bed. In the 1990s several family members were granted brief access to the house, and my cousin Lesha told me later how tiny and dark the rooms were. Soon the Bellows moved into the same house as Rosa and Max Gameroff, Abraham’s sister and brother-in-law. Rosa was a sharp-eyed businesswoman, and the Gameroff children, several years older than Morris and Sam, were hardworking boys. Uncle Max didn’t share Rosa’s ambition, but she had enough drive for two, and the couple began buying up property in town. Because Abraham was unable to make comparable success, frictions boiled over between a brother in need of money and a sister who not only refused to help him but twisted the knife when she said no. Kindhearted Uncle Max actually lent Abraham the capital to start a dry goods store after Rosa refused because she considered her brother’s partner lazy and their location poor. Sure enough, the enterprise soon failed, fueling Rosa’s doubts and
sharpening her tongue. In addition to the dry goods store, Abraham began a series of failed enterprises that included the junk business and even a brief foray into matchmaking. Things were so bad that my grandfather considered farming, a vocation for which he was ill suited, but Lescha vetoed a rural life, which would have isolated her children from the schooling and cultural pursuits upon which she insisted.
Abraham could not make any economic progress in Lachine. A man full of ambitions and schemes to get rich, he was unwilling to work for someone else but unable to support his family as a businessman. My grandfather was always either unemployed or working fitfully. Saul’s narrator Moses Herzog, in the novel that takes his last name for a title, describes his father as a man of sufficient charm to lure birds out of trees. Abraham possessed a similar charm, but his skill as a raconteur did not suit him in Montreal as it had in St. Petersburg. Out of work and often at home, his audience was now limited to his wife and children and his stories were told around the kitchen table.
The family’s precarious financial situation was worsened by a schism between my grandparents when it came to spending their limited income. On one side was the struggling Abraham, egged on by Rosa Gameroff, a pragmatist bent on making money in the New World who wanted his children to earn their keep. On the other side was Lescha, who insisted her children be exposed to learning, culture, and scholarship, which Abraham considered expensive, time-consuming enterprises that took able hands away from the work that would ease his financial and physical burdens.
Abraham’s failure to earn an adequate income aggravated his already volatile temper. He often blamed parenthood for his impoverishment
and gave each of his boys a whack to cover their presumed sins when he got home from a day of hard work. Morrie, the oldest, largest, and most willful, silently took the brunt of his father’s abuse. Abraham called him the Yiddish equivalent of “Tubby,” which was meant to shame my uncle for his costly habit of eating too much. As adults, Saul and Sam charitably chalked up Abraham’s anger to the frustrations of immigrant life, but Morrie rarely, if ever, talked about his father’s beatings.
Into this family, Solomon Bellow was born on June 10, 1915. According to a story Saul told over and over, perhaps embellished and perhaps not, the doctor who delivered him was found in a tavern, intoxicated, by one of the Gameroff boys who was sent to fetch him when my grandmother went into labor. When Saul arrived, Jane was nine, Morrie seven, and Sam four. The family living quarters were so cramped that he slept in a perambulator his first year. Morrie always claimed to be his mother’s favorite, but a nursing baby brother was a serious competitor. Lescha doted on her youngest, who was frail and often sickly. Saul’s aunt Jenny, Uncle Willie’s wife, who was childless during Saul’s first years, also doted on him, singing him popular songs in English that she mangled with her Yiddish accent. Once he was deemed old enough to leave the perambulator, Saul joined his brothers in a common bed, where Morrie got his revenge on his baby brother by pinching him and stepping on his toes or fingers. Yet, outside the house, Morrie looked out for Saul and they were very close. Sam, while not blameless in picking on Saul, avoided as much of the family strife as he could.
Saul loved to tell the earthy story of his weaning, which he claimed to remember. At three or four, he made a noise signaling a desire for Lescha’s breast. Abraham, irritated, opened his
own shirt and exposed his useless nipple, a message that Saul was too old to nurse and that all he could expect from his father and the world was cold comfort. On another occasion, Sam was very sick and kept the household up all night with his coughing. Annoyed, his father said, “Let him die already.” Yet Saul made it clear that somehow, despite his complaints and beatings, Abraham let his sons know he cared about them.
Saul emphasized the family’s poverty and often told a story about asking his father to buy him an ice cream cone as they walked down the street in Lachine. My father gave two versions of Abraham’s response. In the one he usually told, Grandpa opened his coin purse and showed Saul that it did not contain even the required penny. In the other, he hid the coin from Saul, who discovered it behind a fold. The first version touches on the extent to which the Bellow family lived on the edge, while the second hints at Abraham’s resentment over the financial demands of four growing children. Saul attributed the absence of toys in the house to a lack of money, but there was a trunk full of fancy memorabilia and clothes left over from St. Petersburg that became playthings for the Bellow children. A symbol of the opulence left behind in Russia, its contents became Saul’s repository of imaginative possibilities, and he co-opted the handle of a Russian samovar to use as a pistol.