"I Took Myself As I Was…"
"The only life I can love, or hate, is … this American life of the Twentieth Century, the life of Americans who are also Jews."

How enviable it sometimes seems to have a brief and simple history. Ours is neither simple nor brief. You have honored me with an award, and my part in acknowledging this distinction with gratitude, is to make a short speech about America and its Jews, the Jews and their America. The difficulty of this obligation is considerable, for the history we share is full of intricate, cunning and gloomy passages; it is also illuminating and it is noble - it is a large piece of the history of mankind. Many have tried to rid themselves in one way or another of this dreadful historic load by assimilation or other means. I have, myself, never been tempted by the hope of waking from the nightmare of history in a higher state of consciousness and freedom. As much as the next man, I enjoy meditating on such things, but my instincts have attached me to what is actually here, and among the choices that were actually open to me, I have always preferred the liberal and democratic ones - not always in the popular sense of these terms.

When I read last summer in the American Scholar an article by Professor Sidney Hook on the great teacher and philosopher Morris R. Cohen, I was stirred by Cohen's belief that "the future of liberal civilization" was "bound up with America's survival" and its ability to make use of the heritage of human rights formulated by Jefferson and Lincoln." Professor Cohen was no sentimentalist. He was a tough-minded man, not a patriotic rhetorician.

He arrived on the Lower East Side at the age of 12. He knew the slums and the sweatshops. His knowledge of the evils of American life was extensive and unsparing - the history of the Indians and of the Negroes, cruelty, prejudice, mob violence, hysteria, injustice. Acidulous is Hook's word for Cohen's criticism of the U.S.A. Cohen, says Hook, was not a nationalist. He knew that no one chooses the land of his birth. He placed his hopes in the rule of enlightened world law. But Cohen was in some ways piously American. Now piety has become one of our very worst words. It used to be one of the best - think of Wordsworth's desire for "natural piety." Maybe we can do something to rehabilitate the term. Cohen accepted Santayana's definition of piety as "reverence for the sources of one's being." This emotion, says Hook, was naturally acquired by Cohen without ideological indoctrination or blinding.

I understand this without effort. Most of us do. There are people for whom it is entirely natural to despise the life that they were born in to. There are others, like myself, who suspect that if we dismiss the life that is waiting for us at birth, we will find ourselves in a void. I was born in Eastern Canada and grew up in Chicago. My parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. The sent me to a heder. They didn't want me out in the sandlots or playing pool in the poolroom. All these matters were discussed or disputed by us in Yiddish. But when I went to the public library, the books I borrowed were by Poe and Melville, Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. I did not bring home volumes of the Babylonian Talmud to read. I took myself as I was - a kid from the Chicago streets and the child of Jewish parents. I was powerfully stirred by the books brought home from the library, I was moved myself to write something. - These are some of the sources of my being. One could have better sources, undoubtedly. I could make a list of those more desirable sources, but they are not mine, and I can not revere them. The only life I can love, or hate, is the life that I - that we -- have found here, this American life of the Twentieth Century, the life of Americans who are also Jews. Which of these sources, the American or the Jewish, should elicit the greater piety? Are the two exclusive? Must a choice be made? The essence of freedom is that one makes the choice, if choices must be made, for the most profound of personal reasons. It is at this very point that one begins to feel how intensely enviable it is to have a brief and simple history. (But is there any such thing?)

In Israel, I was often and sometimes impatiently asked what sort of Jew I was and how I defined myself and explained my existence. I said that I was an American, a Jew, a writer by trade. I was not insensitive to the Jewish question, I was painfully conscious of the Holocaust, I longed for peace and security in the Jewish State. I added, however, that I had lived in America all my life, that American English was my language, and that (in an oddly universalist way) I was attached to my country and the civilization of which it was a part, But my Israeli questioners or examiners were not satisfied. They were trying to make me justify myself. It was their conviction that the life of a Jew in what they call the Diaspora must inevitably be "inauthentic." Only as a Jew in Israel, some of them told me, could I enter history again and prove the necessity and authenticity of my existence. I refused to agree with them that my life had been illusion and dust. I do not accept any interpretation of history that declares the deepest experience of any person to be superfluous. To me that smells of totalitarianism. Nor could I accept the suggestion that I repudiate some six decades of life, to dismiss my feelings for some of the sources of my being because I am a Jew or nothing. That would wipe out me totally. It would be not only impiety and irreverence, but also self-destruction.

But one need not hold long arguments with views that are so obviously wrong. What underlies the position that I have just rejected is the assumption that America is bound to go the way of other Christian countries and expel or destroy its Jewish population. But is it a Christian country like the others? The question almost answers itself as soon as it is asked - this nation is not, in the European sense, a recognizably Christian country. One could write many volumes on what America is not. However, there is no need, in a brief talk on an occasion such as this to make grandiose statements about liberal democracy. It is sufficient to say in the most matter of fact way what is or should be obvious to everyone. In spite of the vastness and oppressiveness of corporate and governmental powers the principle of the moral equality of all human beings has not been rejected in the United States. Not yet, at any rate. Sigmund Freud, I remember reading, once observed that America was an interesting experiment, but that he did not believe that it would succeed. Well, maybe not. But it would be base to abandon it. To do so would destroy our reverence for the sources of our being. We would inflict on ourselves a mutilation from which we might never recover. And if Cohen is right, and the future of liberal civilization is bound up with America's survival, the damage would be universal and irreparable.

Copyright © by Saul Bellow. This originally appeared in the December 1976 ADL Bulletin.