Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1381

Krim says, in short, that he is a suffering Jew.

The only possible answer to that is, I am a suffering Franco-Irishman.

We all love to suffer, but some of us love to suffer more than others.

Had Krim gone farther from New York than Chapel Hill, he might have discovered that large numbers of American Jews do not find his New York version of the Jews' lot remotely recognizable.

More important is the simple human point that all men suffer, and that it is a kind of anthropological-religious pride on the part of the Jew to believe that his suffering is more poignant than mine or anyone else's.

This is not to deny the existence of pogroms and ghettos, but only to assert that these horrors have had an effect on the nerves of people who did not experience them, that among the various side effects is the local hysteria of Jewish writers and intellectuals who cry out from confusion, which they call oppression and pain.

In their stupidity and arrogance they believe they are called upon to remind the gentile continually of pogroms and ghettos.

Some of us have imagination and sensibility too.

Finally, there is the undeniable fact that some of the finest American fiction is being written by Jews, but it is not Jewish fiction ; ;

Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, through intellectual toughness, perception, through experience in fact, have obviously liberated themselves from any sentimental Krim self-indulgence they might have been tempted to.