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Title: Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer (Essay)
Author : The Mailer Review
Release Date : January 22, 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 172 KB

Description

IN THE PAST YEAR OR so as a result of the publication of The Castle in the Forest, Mailer has tackled his "Jewish question" in a way that brings him if not back to the "nice" Jewish boy image he eschewed many years ago at least to an acknowledgement of that past in a way that embraces it with new warmth and understanding. Not that he ever really denied his Jewish past. Even though Mailer has never been considered a major figure in the canon of American-Jewish writers or as concerned about purely Jewish issues as his contemporaries Bellow, Malamud, or Philip Roth, he has never disavowed his religious affiliations. Nearly all his central characters claim some sort of Jewish parentage or ancestry, from Rojack to Harlot and, of course, Jesus. On the personal level, when several years ago I was stranded in New York on Passover and had nowhere to go for the seder, I called up Norman and asked if I could conduct one in his house. He readily agreed, admitting it would be his first seder in fifty years! During the seder, at which John Buffalo, his youngest, recited the four questions, it was delightful to watch Norman explain the Hebrew alphabet to John and read some of the Hebrew script. Mailer encapsulates his own attitude to Judaism very succinctly in an interview he gave earlier in 2007 with Nermeen Shaikh and published in Nextbook. When she asked, "what role has your being Jewish played in your being a writer," Mailer replies emphatically, "an enormous role." He picks two aspects of the Jewish experience that influenced him, the sense of history that makes it "impossible to take anything for granted" and also the Jewish mind: "We're here to do all sorts of outrageous thinking, if you will ... certainly incisive thinking. If the Jews brought anything to human nature, it's that they developed the mind more than other people did." Not surprisingly, Mailer continues in the interview to bemoan the loss of this ability owing to what he terms "cheap religious patriotism."