The Pauline Prophecy: Jewish-Christian Relations in Bernard Malamud’s A NEW LIFE

-- By Tom Phillips

Originally published in
ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 1/18/2020

A New Life, Bernard Malamud’s 1961 epic of a down-and-out New Yorker in the Pacific Northwest, is unique among his novels. The story takes place far from the urban Jewish milieu that was the author’s usual setting, and not coincidentally, it is the only work in which he fully develops a critique of American culture. Malamud studiously avoids mentioning religion until very late in the book, and then only obliquely. However a close reading, beginning with the significance of the main characters’ names, suggests an inter-religious dynamic.

Relations between Judaism and Christianity, Jews and Christians, and Jewish and gentile cultures are front and center in much of Malamud’s fiction – notably in The Assistant, the 1957 novel that immediately precedes A New Life. In A New Life these themes are concealed, or implied – probably because it was written while the author was sojourning in gentile territory, where his values came into sharp conflict with those of the dominant culture. A New Life can be read as a satire on American Philistia from a Jewish point of view, but in the end it goes beyond satire. The coupling of Seymour Levin with Pauline Josephson, the wife of his boss and enemy, and their absconding with her children, suggests a prophecy of a new age in which Jew and gentile combine in a generational assault on American values.

In short, the Sixties.

War Babies: Prophets of Peace

 This article was originally published in the Toronto Star, Sunday 12/29/2019

-- By Tom Phillips

Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, c.1963

The 1960's turn sixty in 2020, with their meaning and value still in hot dispute. It might help to divide the decade in two; the first half peace and love, the last fear and loathing. Still, in both phases, the Sixties were an age of prophecy.

Bob Dylan sang “The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”  Simon and Garfunkel saw “the words of the prophets written on the subway walls.”  New voices came out of nowhere, and found rapt listeners in the massive generation born after World War Two, the baby boomers. 

The prophets were not boomers themselves.  They were the big brothers and sisters of the boomers, the relatively small generation born during the war.  As elders, they knew from an early age that their voices would be heard. And they knew the world they were born into was not fit for future generations. Children of war, they became prophets of peace.