This Month: Saul Bellow’s Profile in Courage

This Month: Saul Bellow’s Profile in Courage

Saul Bellow was born in 1915 in a suburb of Montreal to immigrant parents from Saint Petersburg, moved to Chicago at nine, and spoke Yiddish and Hebrew before he spoke English. He spent his youth trying to reconcile the Talmudic world of argument he was raised in with the brash democratic energy of American life, and eventually concluded that the reconciliation was not merely possible but was itself the subject of literature. Ten novels, a Pulitzer, three National Book Awards, and the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature followed, and through all of it he never sanded down the Jewish inflection of his characters or his sentences. “I was a Jew and an American and a writer,” he wrote. Bellow is featured in Chazak: Profiles in Jewish Strength, a JLiving campaign celebrating Jewish Americans who fought antisemitism by living their identity fully, loudly, proudly, and without apology. We invite you to read his story.

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