Where Are All the Anglo-Jewry?

In 1937 the teenaged Irving Howe, future literary critic, excitedly unwrapped the very first edition of Partisan Review and read the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, written a couple of years earlier over a July weekend when Schwartz was 21. The story is about a young man who goes into a cinema and sees on the screen the unfolding images of his own parents’ courtship, including a trip to Coney Island culminating in a marriage proposal, which causes the narrator to rise from his seat and deliver one of the funniest pay-offs in literature.

What amazed Howe was the depiction of American Jewish life: of the struggling immigrant, the dogged pursuit of education at the Harvard, Oxford and Sorbonne of American Jews – City College of New York – and the intellectual wastrel generation that followed. Schwartz’s early genius burned out almost at once: he drank, went mad and was found dead in a flophouse in 1966 aged 52. I first came across him in the late 1990s when I read Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, a fictional account of their relationship – one soaring, the other squalid and forgotten. Bellow picked up where Schwartz was unable to continue: into the novel, where American Jewish life belonged; because if you are Jewish, as the Israeli novelist David Grossman has pointed out, you are already stuck in a big story – the Old Testament is one great epic novel.