4. In Herzog (1964), the Abraham figure, Father Herzog, comes “from the greatest Hasidic rabbis. Reb Zusya! Herschele Dubrovner! Just remember” (p. 559). The surviving manuscript of “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son” is among SB’s papers in the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. It is undated but the title page reads: “This is the first part of a rough draft ‘Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son.’ ” Below these words SB gives his name and an address: “333 Riverside Drive, New York City.” He rented an apartment at this address on 30 December 1953, and lived there for almost half a year. On 14 June 1955, in a letter to Leslie Fiedler, he was still at work on “Memoirs.” The quotations about “the Berel figure” in the novel (Grandpa Lurie), and his son, “the Abraham character” (Jacob Lurie, or “Pa”), are from page 2 of the manuscript. In “A Talk with Saul Bellow,” an interview of 20 September 1953 with Harvey Breit in The New York Times Book Review, SB is asked if his father appears in The Adventures of Augie March: “ ‘No,’ Mr. Bellow said laughingly, ‘I’ve saved him’ ”—for “Memoirs,” presumably. All subsequent quotations from “Memoirs” are cited within the text by page numbers.
5. In 1900 Druya had a Jewish population of 3,006, more than half the total population, according to the “Druya/Druja” page of the database “JewishGen” (http://www.JewishGen.org), the Internet site for Jewish Genealogy, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, founded in 1987. The phrase “more than half” is an estimate, based on figures for 1939, when Druya had c. 4,000 inhabitants, c. 2,500 of whom were Jews.
6. The age at which Father Herzog is sent away to yeshiva is four.
7. In 1900 the population of Dvinsk was 69,489, of whom 32,639 were Jewish (from the “Dvinsk/Daugavpils” page of the database “JewishGen”); it was thirteen times larger than the population of Druya. When SB’s paternal grandfather, Berel Belo, married Shulamith Dworkin, according to her nephew Louis Dworkin, it was considered a good marriage for the grandmother because her new husband had connections in a bigger and more important place than Druya. SB seems sometimes to have described his father as having come from Dvinsk rather than Druya, perhaps because he thought people were more likely to have heard of it. In a letter to SB of 27 November 1976 (among the Bellow Papers in the Regenstein),
Shelley Jacobson recalls his asking her where her parents came from: “I knew only too well that my father was born in Dvinsk, near the Lithuanian border—a little too near for the comfort of my mother, who was apparently well-bred and a snob.… My mother did not consider Dvinsk a suitable place to be born in.… So when you asked me that question … I was back with my mother and her reminiscences.… ‘He was born in Riga,’ I said, blushing. You answered, ‘MY father was born in Dvinsk.’ ”
8. According to James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (Random House: New York, 2000), p. 6 (henceforth cited as Atlas, Biography).
9. The granddaughter is Lesha Bellows Greengus, daughter of Samuel Bellows, the middle Bellow brother (email, 25 November 2009).
10. According to Willie Greenberg, a Montreal neighbor, who remembers Abraham, when out of work, visiting his mother in the Greenberg kitchen and entertaining her with stories of life in Russia (Atlas, Biography, p. 13); see also Alan Hustak, “St. Dominique St.’s Legacy Recalls ’20s Era,” Montreal Gazette, October 1990, in which Greenberg recalls his mother’s comments on SB’s own storytelling: “ ‘Oy is dos kind a bluffer’—‘Oh boy, is this kid a bullshitter!’ ” Compare also Ijah Brodsky, the narrator of “Cousins” (1974), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 201, on himself and his father: “As usual, I gave more information than my questioner had any use for, using every occasion to transmit my sense of life. My father before me also did this.”
11. The 1990 interview, the first of two conducted by SB’s friend and sometime colleague Keith Botsford, was originally printed in Bostonia magazine, November–December 1990, under the title “A Half Life,” reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 291. Abraham Bellow as “feisty” comes from Manea, “Conversation,” p. 11.
12. Lesha and her husband, Sam Greengus, remember hearing this story from Maury himself, but about himself, not Abraham.
13. For SB on his father’s “adventures,” see Manea, “Conversation,” p. 17; “A Silver Dish” (1978), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 18.
14. A Theft (1989), published as a paperback original by Penguin; reprinted in SB, CS, p. 124.
15. SB quotations from Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 10, 44, 45.
16. SB, More Die of Heartbreak, p. 16; Ravelstein, p. 30.
17. SB was much taken with the surviving photograph of Moses Gordin (see illustrations) and describes it in Dangling Man: “It was a study of my grandfather, my mother’s father, made shortly before his death. It showed him supporting his head on a withered fist, his streaming beard yellow, sulphurous, his eyes staring and his clothing shroudlike.” To Joseph, the novel’s SB-like protagonist, the photograph is “proof of my mortality.… Through the years he would reclaim me bit by bit, till my own fists withered and my eyes stared” (p. 53). Though striking, the photograph is misleading. SB’s mother, Lescha, had arranged for it to be taken without telling Moses in advance. He was furious. He looks every inch the otherworldly, mystical Jew, though his strand of Judaism was rational, anti-mystical. No photographs of Berel Belo survive.
18. According to Esther Elster, SB’s second cousin, who has compiled a family tree and genealogical records, Moses died in 1904. Not all Esther Elster’s dates jibe with those of official records, though, and many, as here, are based on word of mouth. According to police files for Vitebsk Province compiled in 1889, for Jews residing in rural areas not towns (see National Historical Archives, Belarus; fond 1416, inventory 3, file 21,591, page 421 ob), Moses was born in 1847; according to the 1897 census he was born in 1843. Esther Elster’s records say he was born in 1840. Elster is the daughter of SB’s cousin Moshe Gordin (1915–2007), son of Hone (Chana) Gordin (Moshe was named after his deceased grandfather Moses); she lives in Israel and is a research chemist, previously a professor at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, in the Tel Aviv district.
19. According to Moshe Gordin, Moses was thirteen when he married Sara Gurevich, who was nine at the time. Toward the end of his life, on 13 February 2003, Moshe Gordin published an impressionistic family memoir entitled “Memories” in the Russian-language Israeli periodical Vesti Negev. This memoir gets some details of the Russian family wrong, according to Elster, who “trust[s] more the data he gave me about 20 years ago, when his memory was sharp” (email, 8 June 2010), but its account of the marriage of Moses and Sara matches the earlier account. “On the first marriage night,” he writes in “Memories,” “the bride ran away. It required a lot of brains and tact from the women of the family of the child bride to convince her not to run away again.… Bit by bit, the two of them got used to each other and young Sarochka gave her Moshe 13 children” (from a translation by John Lloyd, 19 July 2010).
20. The 1877 date comes from the police files for Vitebsk Province compiled in 1889. The 1879 date comes from p. 805 of the 1897 census, the first census for the Russian Empire based on reliable sources.
21. The number twelve comes from notes taken by Janis Bellow of a conversation between SB and his sister, Jane Bellow Kauffman, in July 1990.
22. According to Moshe Gordin in “Memories,” one of the men who ran the farm for his grandfather was envious of his success and set fire to the farm’s cattle shed: “The material loss which came from that could be borne. But oh, how terrible! That fire was a black day for grandfather and grandmother. At that time, my uncle’s sister was in the cowshed. Her long hair caught fire in an instant. They put out the fire but they didn’t manage to save Moshe’s daughter, my uncle’s sister. The police arrested the guilty party and he was threatened with hard labor. But my grandfather made his own judgment. He was a godly Jew and decided that God himself should condemn
the incendiary. He didn’t want to hand him over to the Jewish court and he asked the official, who was his good friend, to let the guilty man go. Experiencing a terrible guilty conscience, that man couldn’t live in his job with any pride, and one day he came to my uncle … [and] offered all his savings, scraped together from years of service to my grandfather, but my uncle refused. Having lost everything, the man who was guilty of that tragedy went off to Palestine. He dreamed of softening the bitter memory of his sins at the Wailing Wall.” According to Elster, the episode took place in 1904, the name of the daughter who died in the fire was Gutka, and the name of the envious employee was Shepsl Lipgot.
23. The population of Dagda in 1897 was 1,516, 70 percent of whom were Jewish (according to p. 805 of the 1897 census, from which the description of Moses Gordin’s profession and the house he and his family lived in also come). Lipushki was even smaller.
24. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 3. There is some dispute about whether Robert’s fortune came from South African diamonds or gold. Atlas, Biography, p. 7, says diamonds, presumably on the word of SB in an interview; Lesha Bellows Greengus remembers a conversation in 2000 with her Uncle Saul in which he said Robert’s money came from “the gold fields.” In Herzog, Robert’s fictional alter ego, Mikhail, is said to have “made money out of those miserable black Kaffirs! Who knows how” (p. 560).
25. Several streets south of Nevsky Prospect, a cluster of adjacent wards made up the city’s Jewish district, “jokingly nicknamed Petersburgskii Berdichev” (Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], p. 113). The population of Berdichev, a city in northern Ukraine, was overwhelmingly Jewish. The city was famous as a center of Jewish life and culture. Sholom Aleichem lived there. Joseph Conrad, son of impoverished Polish Christian nobility, was born there.
26. According to interviews with his daughter Vivien Missner and granddaughter Susan Missner.
27. These details from Ruth Miller, Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), pp. 3, 297. SB’s term, “produce-broker,” from Atlas, Biography, p. 6.
28. Miller, Biography of the Imagination, p. 296.
29. Quoted in Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 7.
30. Salo Baron, The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 114. According to Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (London: Viking, 1988), p. 40, by the time of the 1897 census, all but 300,000 of the 5.2 million Jews in the Russian Empire resided within the fifteen provinces that made up the Pale of Settlement. Within the Pale, Jews accounted for 11 percent of the population, within the Russian Empire as a whole they made up 4 percent. In urban areas within the Pale where they were especially concentrated, Jews made up “more than half the population.… By the end of the century more Jews were living in cities than in shtetlekh, those largely Jewish hamlets which occupied a position midway between the vast expanses of rural Russia and her growing cities.”
31. Quoted in Irving Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 51.
32. Details of the story are sketchy and the only dates recorded are those of birth. According to the family tree compiled by Esther Elster, Nota was born in 1800 and his wife, Selda (her surname is not known), was born in 1821. Their first child, again according to Elster, was born in 1838, when Selda was sixteen or seventeen and Nota thirty-seven or thirty-eight.
33. The 1897 census lists a “Moses Notkov Gordin,” fifty-four years old, born in Rezekne, identified as literate, a self-employed baker, married to “Sora” (Sara), fifty years old, the daughter of Samuel. “Notkov” means “son of Nota” or “son of Natan,” thus indicating Moses’s real or birth father. The 1897 census lists no Gordins in the region who identify themselves as sons of Shmuel (Samuel) Gordin. It lists a number of Imenitovs, however. Aleksander Feigmanis, from Riga, a doctoral candidate and researcher for JewishGen, checked the census lists for me and found no Imenitov named Popa or Wulf. But he did find an “Aron Notov Imyanitov,” forty-three, living as a merchant in Rezekne, identified as literate, and the owner of a bookstore. The dates fit, and “Notov” is suggestive, but Esther Elster’s records of the children of Nota and Selda Imenitov make no mention of a son named Aron. It is possible that her records are wrong or incomplete. SB himself believed that Moses’s original family name was Imenitov; Lesha Bellows Greengus, in an email of 25 November 2009, reports his having told her so.
34. See Nathans, Beyond the Pale, p. 28.
35. From The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, tr. Peter Constantine, intro. Cynthia Ozick (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 601. “The Story of My Dovecote” is one of two Babel stories selected by SB in his edition of Great Jewish Short Stories (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1971).
36. See Nathans, Beyond the Pale, p. 135, on the Russian stereotype of the Jewish merchant: “ ‘Chase the Jew out the door and he’ll return through the window,’ warned a popular folk-saying. Whether in openly anti-Semitic diatribes such as Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer and Novoe Vremia’s influential article ‘Zhid idet!’ (‘The Kike Is Coming!’), or, more subtly, in the widespread belief among ruling elites that gullible Russian peasants required protection from the Jews’ overdeveloped entrepreneurial spirit, the culturally coded contrast between indefatigable Jew and easygoing Russian defined contemporary attitudes toward ethnic difference.”
37. According to Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, p. 34, in the 1905 pogrom in Odessa “over 300” Jews were murdered, “thousands were wounded, nearly six hundred children were orphaned, and about 40,000 Jews were ‘materially wounded.’ ”
38. See Simon M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, tr. I. Friedlaender (1918; New Jersey: Avoteyna, 2000), pp. 479–80.
39. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (1973; New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 57.
40. Bely’s novel is close in some respects to Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911), also set in St. Petersburg, with a plot partly based on the assassination of a high government official, Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve, minister of the interior from 1902 to 1904. Von Plehve’s portrait hangs in Apollon Apollonovich’s office, and he is presented in Bely’s novel as having been Apollon’s closest protector in government. He was killed by a bomb planted by assassins.
41. Andrei Bely, Petersburg, tr. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978), pp. 19, 308n.
42. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 3.
43. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, p. 105. Population figures for St. Petersburg are provided in the “St. Petersburg” entry in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908) (available online at http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com). In 1905 the city’s population was 1,635,100. In 1914 it had risen to 2,217,500. The official Jewish population of the city in 1900 was 20,385 or 1.4 percent.
44. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 8. The observations of Rose Dworkin, wife of Abraham Belo’s cousin, Louis Dworkin, were recounted to her daughter, Vivian Missner, who in turn told them to Susan Missner, Rose’s granddaughter (email, 30 March 2010).
45. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, p. 110; see also Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence, p. 41: “In a country where 80 per cent of the population was illiterate as late as the eve of World War I, almost all Jewish boys and most of the girls, learned to read and write their own language. By the twentieth century over 30 per cent of Jewish men and 16 per cent of the women could also read Russian.” For SB’s parents’ reading, see Manea, “Conversation,” p. 4, and SB to Oscar Tarcov, 2 October 1937.
46. An odd moment in the “Memoirs” manuscript is perhaps worth noting here. When Pa Lurie upbraids Ma Lurie for pu
tting aside money for her brothers, she says: “And if I do? … Think, Jacob. Did they do nothing for you?” To which Jacob replies: “And did they do nothing to me?” (p. 33). What Jacob means here is unexplained. It is possible—though at this level of speculation, anything is possible—that Pa Lurie is referring to some connection between the brothers and his arrest. As they were the ones who initially supplied him with forged papers or helped him to bribe officials to live and work in St. Petersburg, perhaps they also put him onto criminal connections, ones who somehow brought about his arrest.
Attempts to uncover the truth of Abraham’s arrest, trial, and escape from prison are hindered by the destruction of archives in the first days of the February 1917 Revolution. Archives of police investigations in St. Petersburg were destroyed early in the revolution by fire and riot, leaving virtually no criminal files at all for the period in question. Records from the Court Chamber were also destroyed by fire, as were other state archives, including the archive of the St. Petersburg Fire Brigade. Andrei Kudryashov, a theater historian and film critic from St. Petersburg, conducted research on my behalf in the Russian National Library, Library of the Academy of Sciences, and the Russian State Historical Archives. No mention of Abraham Belo (or Belous or Belousov) appears in the following locations: St. Petersburg Enquiry Book for Merchants and Other Ranks (1905–13); St. Petersburg Merchant Council (1906, 1908); legal, court, and police publications for the period 1909–13 (Civil Legislation Newsletter, Legal Newsletter, Newsletter of Law and Notary, Police Newsletter, Bulletin of Certificates of Convictions, Archive of Judicial and Legal Practices, Decisions of the General Assembly of the First and Cassational Departments of the Ruling Senate, Decisions of the Civil Cassational Department of the Ruling Senate, Decisions of the Criminal Cassational Department of the Ruling Senate); Jewish periodicals (Newsletter of the Jewish Community, Newsletter of Jewish Emigration and Colonization, Speech [Rech], Jewish Field [Evreiskaya Niva], New Dawn [Novy Voskhod], Dawn [Rassvet], Newsletter of Jewish Education); St. Petersburg newspapers (St. Petersburg News, Stock Exchange News, St. Petersburg Sheet); or Moscow newspapers (Moscow Governorate News, Early Morning, Moscow Evening News, Voice of Moscow, Moscow Newspaper).
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