Between Heaven and Earth

Abstract

This chapter examines Saul Bellow’s use of Jewish vernacularity within his world-writing project. Focusing on the 1960s and ’70s, the height of his fame, the chapter analyzes how Bellow embeds his characters in post-immigrant Chicago, yet also active within global networks—and all while still longing, dialectically, for the universal. To reflect this dialectic, Bellow created a style that translates and aestheticizes Yiddish and immigrant colloquialisms. The result is writing characterized by obsessive, exhausting acts of compensation in which Bellow’s narrator must balance descent into Jewish vernacularity with a reach for sublime metaphor. Bellow’s attempts to translate Jewishness without abandoning the vernacular lead to an underdetermined attachment to Jewishness, producing, paradoxically, a parochial world literature—writing that hinges on the possibility of the local as a site of transcendence. But this locality remains untranslatable, such that instead of arriving at the universal Bellow is left with a set of uncertainties.