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“What Bellow does — magically almost — is to make the schlemiel into a liberal humanist. Herzog is cuckolded. Here you have this great intellectual, this man who has written a tome on romanticism, Moses Herzog, a prominent professor and what happens? His best friend is making out with his wife and everybody knows about it. The only person who doesn’t know about it is he. That’s a classic comic situation, from Chaucer onwards everybody has always made the cuckold into a comic figure. But here again, Herzog is in control of the narrative. Everything in the book is seen from his perspective…It’s actually one of the most autobiographical works that Bellow wrote. Not only in the sense of being based on the facts of his life, but in that he really draws on his own childhood, on his own use of Yiddish. Bellow was one of the best Yiddish speakers I ever met in my life” Read more...
The best books on Jewish Humour
Ruth Wisse, Literary Scholar
