A Conversation Between Joshua Cohen and Harold Bloom (2018)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

+ ... But then, I’ll be 88 next week —/that /is information — and all 
the writers of my generation are now gone.

*Not all of them.*

Of course Pynchon, DeLillo, and McCarthy are still around, but they are 
younger than I am. I’m in touch with Cormac; we speak on the phone. But 
all of the Jewish writers of my generation are gone except Ozick.

*Ozick is the queen, for me. I sometimes recite just the titles of her 
stories, as a prayer: “Bloodshed,” “Usurpation,” “Levitation,” “Envy.”*

By the way, you must feel the same way I do about Nathan Weinstein.

*Nathanael West? Yes, of course.*

When I was with Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, at his apartment, he 
talked about Walter Benjamin all the time. But when I recommended 
Nathanael West to him, he exploded, “You recommend to me a Jewish 
anti-Semite? A man who changed his name?”

*I’ve always wondered about the contempt that Scholem seemed to have for 
American Jewish writers, and for Yiddish writers. I’ve been rereading a 
lot of the latter lately — maybe because I’ve been trying to understand 
the current American political climate, or maybe because I’ve just been 
trying to avoid it, but I’ve found myself returning especially to 
those great Yiddish writers of Russia who came into conflict with Soviet 
ideology and were destroyed. The poets Peretz Markish and 
David Hofstein; the novelists David Bergelson and Pinchas Kahanovich, 
who wrote under the name Der Nister.*

And what about Isaac Babel? If he had lived, God knows how grand he 
would’ve been. But he was shot by Stalin too. Whatever one feels about 
contemporary Israel, at least nobody is going to shoot its writers. Just 
as nobody’s going to pop you off, Joshua. But there is another way to 
go, of course. All of the Yiddish poets I read as a boy — the Yiddish 
writers who lived in America and published in /Der Tog/ and /Der Morgen 
Freiheit/— they were wonderful, but possibly the only ones who will 
survive are Moyshe-Leib Halpern and Jacob Glatstein. Alas, I’m afraid 
the rest will be forgotten.

*And what about the literature of American Jews?*

/Call It Sleep /by Henry Roth, /Miss Lonelyhearts /by Nathanael 
West,/Sabbath’s Theater/by Philip Roth, and quite possibly your /Book of 
Numbers /are the four best books by Jewish writers in America. Your 
/Moving Kings /is a strong and rather hurtful book, but that helps 
validate it. /Book of Numbers/, however, is shatteringly powerful. I 
cannot think of anything by anyone in your generation that is so 
frighteningly relevant and composed with such continuous 
eloquence. There are moments in it that seem to transcend our impasse.

*I don’t know what to say. I’m honored. Thank you.*

But why is D. H. Lawrence missing in you? I would have thought that his 
vitalism would appeal to you.

*I don’t know. Probably because Bellow, Malamud, and Roth are too 
present in me?*

Philip and I were friends off and on. Saul and I didn’t get along: we 
were different people. Bernie, though, was a sweet man. Every time I 
lectured up at Bennington I’d play poker or pinochle with Bernie and I’d 
lose to him much of my lecture fee ... +


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stories-as-prayer-a-conversation-between-joshua-cohen-and-harold-bloom/