Saul Bellow's Heart (3 page)

All the children studied Hebrew, but Morrie and Sam were being groomed by Abraham to go into business. However, Lescha insisted that funds be set aside for music lessons for Jane, the marriageable daughter, and for Saul, despite her husband’s complaints about every penny she spent. She was frugal and even saved enough money to send a bit to her brothers in Russia, who had fallen on hard times after the Revolution of 1917.

Jane studied the piano and Saul took violin lessons. His teacher, as was the custom, administered physical punishment for poor performance. My father told me that he kicked the teacher in the shins, an unthinkable act of defiance for which he was severely punished by his father. Saul adopted his mother’s cultural values, which descended from the Gordin family’s roots in Talmudic scholarship. His facility for language and prodigious memory enabled him to quote long passages from Genesis in Hebrew at three or four years of age. Many years later, Abraham told my mother, “The family thought Saul was a genius until he was five.”

Like many immigrant families with insufficient incomes, the Bellows took in boarders. One, a man simply called “the boarder” by the family, made a deep impression. Separated from his family in Russia, he spent time with the Bellow children in lieu of his own, and confided in Lescha. A lonely melancholic, he took to tippling and frequenting bordellos, drinking up his pay and dooming any possibility of sending for his wife and children. The boarder would come home in his cups, complaining about his boss or singing in Yiddish: “Ein, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, die vanzen dansen” (One, two, three, four, five, the bedbugs dance). Another of his songs, the meaning of which became apparent when I grew up, translates as: “Alone, alone, alone with my ten fingers alone.”

In
Herzog
, as seen through the eyes of young Moses, the family’s boarder returns home drunk, disheveled, and singing loudly enough to awaken the family and the neighborhood. At the urging of Mother Herzog, Father Herzog, who is wearing his fine St. Petersburg nightshirt, gets out of a warm bed to help the boarder up the stairs and out of his soiled clothes. His
wife’s compassion is enough to stir even Father Herzog to sacrifice his own comfort for the benefit of another human being. Even as a young boy, Saul could see the benign effects of his mother’s kindness and her ability to soften my grandfather’s harshness.

The extra money from the boarder’s rent allowed the Bellows to buy my aunt Jane a piano after she showed a musical aptitude so strong that she pretended to play an imaginary piano on the walls. By 1920 Jane was fourteen and a budding young woman whose marital prospects took high priority. In typical Jewish fashion, Jane was being groomed to marry a “professional” man. In order to cultivate the refinements that were required to attract such a match, she was accorded privileges, such as elegant clothes and a musical education, as soon as the family could afford to pay for them. Abraham, initially scornful of such luxuries, did not hesitate to show off Jane’s musical accomplishments to impress guests in the Bellow home.

In his seventh year, Saul, suffering from a misdiagnosed case of peritonitis, spent six months on the children’s ward of a tuberculosis sanatorium. A surgical drain made out of a safety pin was placed in his abdomen. The doctors held out little hope for his recovery. Saul read his chart and understood the gravity of his condition. Around him, little kids died in the night, leaving no trace but an empty bed come morning.

Used to being doted on by his mother, Saul woke up every morning eager for his family’s company. Now, away from everyone familiar, he was lonely and bored. There was little to do on the ward; reading the funny papers filled but a few minutes. A woman volunteer who read the New Testament aloud to the
children served as one of the few distractions. She made a deep impression on Saul by exposing the lonely and frightened boy to Jesus. Saul secretly fell in love with Jesus as a man who loved mankind and suffered without complaint. Surrounded by other boys who taunted him for being Jewish, he quickly realized that loving Jesus was a complicated matter best kept to himself on the ward and from his parents. Though I never heard Saul make a connection between his love of Jesus and his indirect style of personal communication, I have often wondered whether Jesus’s use of meaning-filled parables strengthened my father’s inclination to communicate via stories.

The weekly visits to the children’s ward were limited to a single adult family member, so Lescha and Abraham took turns riding the tram to see their son. Both cautioned Saul to behave, pressing him to control his temper when teased. On one occasion, Saul’s siblings accompanied both parents to the hospital, even though they weren’t allowed to see him. After the visit, Saul went to the window to look down on his family. He opened the window as they tried to throw a bag of forbidden candy to him. When they failed to get it to him, they left and ate it themselves. Saul told this story with humor that barely concealed his disdain for the readiness of self-interest to assert itself among the Bellows.

Living in the sanatorium required a different form of emotional toughness than enduring his father’s beatings or teasing from the non-Jewish boys without complaint. Saul was, no doubt, bereft after visits that reminded him of life at home. But he put up a brave front and reserved his tears until after his parents left. In
Herzog
, Saul touches on the kind of toughness, the suppression of self-pity, he came to think was a requirement of
day-to-day immigrant life. A young Moses Herzog is dragged into an alley and sexually assaulted. After the attack, the lad returns home and eats his soup, uttering nary a word. Later, as an adult, Moses observes that there was no room to be a frightened little boy and remarks that “the tender-minded must harden themselves.”

Unhappy with Saul’s absence and concerned by the slow pace of his recovery, Lescha took him out of the sanatorium to nurse him back to health sooner than the doctors thought safe. My father often described the journey back home, during which Lescha pulled him on a sled rather than making him walk. A similar scene is described in
Herzog
when Moses’s mother drags him through the snow on a sled as they return from the hospital. Watching Mother Herzog struggle, an old woman warns her not to sacrifice her strength for the sake of her children. Moses, who well understands the old woman’s warning, knows he is taking advantage of his mother but selfishly lets her continue to struggle. I must wonder if, when Lescha passed away ten years later, my father asked himself whether her life had been shortened by the family burdens she so willingly assumed.

After nearly a decade in Lachine, Abraham remained unable to support his family by legitimate means. He built a still on the outskirts of town and began selling a few illegal bottles of whiskey to locals. Many Jewish immigrants were making larger profits running rum into New York State during Prohibition, and Abraham soon acquired an ambitious partner who urged him to expand. But in order to make the whiskey salable in America, bootleg hooch had to pass for legitimate brands with recognized labels. Abraham had labels printed, and it became a family game to sit around the kitchen table gluing them onto bottles filled
with the cheap stuff. It was great fun when he asked, “What shall we make this bottle, children, White Horse or Three Feathers?”

The life of a bootlegger was fraught with dangers for which my grandfather was ill prepared. Unlike the large operators, he could not afford to pay off the police, hire a truck, or form reliable New York connections. Spurred by ambition, the two small-time bootleggers tried to move a truckload over the border only to be double-crossed, most likely by the driver they recruited from a large operator unwilling to tolerate new competition. Hijacked and beaten, Abraham walked home bloodied, his bootlegging career over.

During the years the Bellows spent in Lachine, living on the edge drew the young family close. Everyone pulled his or her own weight, and individual needs were deferred for the common good. In the middle of winter, five-year-old Saul’s chore was to go out into the backyard, break the ice that had formed over the brine, and retrieve several pickles for the family meal. As the kid brother, he took great pride in his contribution to the sense of shared responsibility that he later called “family feeling.”

Despite the external chaos, privation, and even his father’s beatings, Saul treasured the years in Lachine and looked back on them wistfully whenever life dealt him a blow. Uncle Willie’s story offers a partial explanation. Having escaped from his fate as a brush maker in Russia, he worked in a fruit store in Lachine, where, with great aplomb, he would snap open paper bags for his customers before filling them. To my father, that confident gesture personified a type of order and optimism the New World offered immigrants.

The deep roots and the sense of belonging that my father felt
within his family are revealed in
Dangling Man
when Joseph, as a child, takes it upon himself to shine all of the family’s shoes. Blissfully happy in the service of those he loves, the boy feels such a sense of belonging that nothing can dislodge him from his chosen spot. As an adult, the duty, loyalty, and shared sacrifice that had afforded Saul a sense of safety became a sacred memory. My father returned to that “family feeling” in times of personal adversity, and it was so powerful in him that he expected it to extend into the next generation through his sons.

My father talked of Lachine as an Eden, a place without evil. In
Herzog
, a young Moses, touched by his father’s palpable suffering after a flawed bootleg deal, creates a paradise by finding nobility in his father’s failure. Though just a lad, Moses understands Papa Herzog’s poor judgment and the threat to the family’s survival it has caused. Rather than turning his back on his father, Moses calls Papa Herzog “my king,” ennobling him as a man brought low by immigrant circumstance. A son not only turns a blind eye to his father’s failure but also finds admiration rather than the pity or the blame that might crush them both.

Chapter Two
Paradise Lost: 1924–37

Failure as a bootlegger was the last straw, and Grandpa left Lachine for Chicago to work in his cousin Louie Dworkin’s bakery. It was a comedown for a man of high ambition, but four hungry children allowed him no choice. Six months later, in the summer of 1924, Lescha and the Bellow children were smuggled across the U.S. border in the back of a bootlegger’s truck. In Detroit they boarded a train for Chicago, where Cousin Louie and his wife, Rose, picked them up at Union Station in their convertible. Rose drove the Bellow family to their new home. She was the first woman Saul had ever seen behind the wheel, a sign of the heady air of freedom my father felt the moment he set foot in Chicago.

Before the family joined him, Abraham had shaved off the mustache he had worn for years, and his altered appearance initially frightened Saul. Exhausted by the hard physical labor of his night shift, Grandpa came home around breakfast time, his clothes white from flour. While he slept all day, Lescha had to keep the kids quiet to avoid angering him and provoking a beating.

Abraham and Lescha soon realized that the opportunities
afforded by life in America were superior to those in Canada. The children went off to school and excelled, and the Bellow family settled in. Abraham soon tired of working for someone else and keeping baker’s hours. Lescha saved up enough money from his earnings for him to start a business delivering wood to bakeries. Soon he was selling coal, a form of fuel that was just coming into use to heat homes. Within five years, the Carroll Coal Company was providing a comfortable income and the earlier disagreements about working to help out the family versus getting an education faded into the background.

Anything was possible, especially in a wide-open city like Chicago. Street life flourished and the newspapers were filled with accounts of bloody rivalries between gangsters that fascinated the already bookish Saul. He told me that bodyguards toting tommy guns escorted Colonel Robert McCormick, the
Chicago Tribune
’s publisher, to his office on Michigan Avenue. My father captured the attraction of the underside of life in Chicago in the short story “Something to Remember Me By,” where a gullible adolescent boy becomes victim to a nasty prank played by a bunch of his brother-in-law’s streetwise pals.

The opportunities to make fast money in freewheeling Chicago appealed to Morrie. At fifteen, he was already working and turning over his earnings to Lescha, but soon he began to see angles and eventually to make political connections that Abraham could never imagine. As he became expert in the ways of capitalism, Morrie withdrew from the close-knit family and his rivalry with Saul took the form of deriding the high cultural interests his kid brother was developing.

Saul’s continuing need for protection from his father and from the bullying of his older brothers required him to move
beyond physical strength and master the mental toughness which was the common currency of Bellow men. My father did so by developing an intense interest in Harry Houdini and Teddy Roosevelt. Both famous men had strengthened their physiques and minds through disciplined training. Houdini, a Jew from a similar immigrant background, had mastered every muscle. Saul began to exercise regularly studied and tried to emulate Houdini’s skills, practicing his tricks to Abraham’s bewilderment.

Acting strong covered Saul’s emotional weakness, which he associated with his mother and with women and which he found intolerable within himself. His solution to that vulnerability was to embrace rational argument, a strategy that allowed him to channel his massive intelligence, quick tongue, and volatile temper. Thus he was able to fend off his father and his brother’s derision. According to Morrie’s daughter, for years Morrie and Saul argued vehemently over the meaning of words, with one or the other running to the dictionary to settle matters. The competition between the brothers was so intense that in his Nobel lecture Saul cited a desire to exceed his brothers as a motivation to excel. And the rivalry never abated: just before his death (long after both Morrie and Sam were dead), Saul said to Sam’s daughter Lesha, “I showed them.”