WHO WAS SAUL BELLOW?
Born in Lachine, (Canada), and raised in Chicago (US), Saul Bellow grew up in a traditional Yiddish-speaking home, and continued to speak Yiddish with his brothers long after he had become the most honored writer in American history (he received three National Book awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1976). Bellow developed a voice that was recognizably Jewish and utterly American at a time when Jews were entering the American mainstream no longer as immigrants, but as an integrated minority. Whereas earlier Jewish writers had tended either to tell a “Jewish story” or to omit the Jewish subject entirely, Bellow’s characters were Jewish the way they were males, or tall or short as a function of their being rather than a necessary element in the plot.
