The American Century: Literature since 1945 743certainty, that sense of mattering, of moving and being moved, of being one and
indivisible with the great of the past, with all that freed, ennobled.”
Memories of the Holocaust haunt immigrant survivors in several other notable
fictions of this period. Arriving in America as the remnants of a murdered culture,
rather than the fragments of a decaying one, the protagonists of these fictions, just
like the central figures in Singer’s trilogy, demonstrate a corrosive skepticism –
particularly about the hopes and dreams enshrined in the supposedly new world
they have entered. So, Arthur Sammler in Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow sees
New York City merely as a metaphor for global disintegration. The city, he observes,
“makes one think about Sodom and Gemorrah, about the end of the world.” And
Sophia Sawistowska, the gentile survivor of a Polish concentration camp in Sophie’s
Choice by William Styron, seems wedded to death. Her past, the narrator Stingo
observes, trails “its horrible smoke – as if from the chimneys of Auschwitz – of
anguish, confusion, self-deception and, above all, guilt.” She cannot believe in the
American promise, or even live in America; in the end, she commits suicide and she
persuades Stingo, a thinly disguised avatar of the author, to surrender his attachment
to the national pastoral, the fresh green breast of the new world. Cynthia Ozick
(1928–), too, has explored characters unwilling to accept the notion of their new
home, the United States, as Eden, in her novel The Cannibal Galaxy (1983) and her
two-part novella, The Shawl (1980). And a similar failure to adapt is something she
observes, with quiet humor and irony, in a more recent novel, Heir to a Glimmering
Wo r l d (2004) (titled The Bear Boy (2005) in the UK). Born in New York City, Ozick
explores the twin dilemmas of being Jewish in a Christian world and being haunted
by a European past in an American present. In her short stories, in particular, she
expresses her oppositional difference by turning postmodernism against itself. Two
of her most engaging tales, for instance, about a character called Ruth Pottermesser,
included in Levitation: Five Fictions (1982), employ postmodernist techniques to
undermine postmodernist values and reaffirm traditional Jewish values of
conscientiousness and respect for the limits of the self. The first Pottermesser story,
“Pottermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife,” ends with the
challenge, “Hey! Pottermesser’s biographer! What will you do with her now?” And
the second, “Pottermesser and Xanthippe,” responds to that challenge by showing
the protagonist’s utopian daydreams getting strangely out of hand, before she
recognizes and accepts the fact that the imagination must have ethical limits.
It is in the longer fiction, however, that the limits to imagining America are
seriously addressed, through the experience of Holocaust survivors. Tortured by
what are called in The Shawl “cannibal dreams,” the human devastation they have
witnessed, these survivors seem not only skeptical but substanceless. Ghostlike, they
appear hardly to inhabit their own bodies, or to belong, to be really there in a culture
that their own memories turn into something irredeemably mediocre, meaningless.
The vision of America nurtured by Joseph Brill, the protagonist in The Cannibal
Galaxy, is scarcely pastoral or paradisaical. A French Jew who survived the war in
hiding, he sees the United States, where he now works as a school principal, as a land
of the mediocre. “He saw himself in the middle of an ashen America, heading aGGray_c05.indd 743ray_c 05 .indd 743 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM