How Jewish literature and activism shaped the work of Paul Auster
Paul Auster in Oxford, England, 2017. Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry May 2, 2024
Paul Benjamin Auster, who died April 30 at age 77, used Jewish literature and family life as inspiration for his works, from The New York Trilogy (1987) to Book of Illusions (2002).
A devotee of Jewish poetry by the American Charles Reznikoff, the Romanian Paul Celan, and Edmond Jabès, a Frenchman of Egyptian origin, Auster was first introduced to literature as a boy. His uncle Allen Mandelbaum, a translator from Classical Greek, Latin and Italian, stored his personal library with the Auster family when he relocated for a dozen years to Europe.
Years later, in the Park Slope, Brooklyn brownstone that Auster long inhabited, a Judaica collection was featured in a downstairs guest room alongside volumes on sports, crime and film. Integrating Yiddishkeit with other lifelong passions, Auster told one interviewer that he thought the mixture of topics “would be really interesting to anyone staying the night here.”
Equally blended would be Auster’s occasional side-projects, like the lyrics to the 2006 song “Natty Man Blues,” reportedly inspired by the Cincinnati-based Jewish poet Norman Finkelstein. Auster was a fairly natty presence himself on the New York literary scene.
Especially in his early years, he was photographed in a series of sultry publicity photos, redolent of a Robert Mitchum-like machismo. Small wonder that Auster’s 1982 memoir The Invention of Solitude included mention of the “faded pictures of Hollywood movie stars” pinned to the wall in the Amsterdam bedroom of Anne Frank, the sight of which moved the narrator to tears.
No idle weeper in real life, Auster’s activist stances were perhaps his most Jewish characteristic. In 2018, he called for the release from house arrest of Chinese poet and artist Liu Xia, and four years earlier Auster intervened when the Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti was jailed by the Chinese for asking for autonomy for his region. One year later, Auster participated in a protest to Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, asking him to stop violence against journalists in his country.
These public calls for justice occasionally raised hackles, as in 2012, when Auster stated that he would not visit China or Turkey because hundreds of writers were imprisoned in those two nations. Then-prime minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asked if Turkey would “lose any grandeur” by missing a visit from Auster.
Erdoğan added that Auster had already visited Israel, which he accused of “repression and rights violations.” Auster issued a statement: “Whatever the prime minister might think about the state of Israel, the fact is that free speech exists there and no writers or journalists are in jail.”
Unfortunately, this status, if ever technically true, did not persist; earlier this year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) claimed that for the first time, Israel has emerged as one of the “world’s leading jailers of journalists.”
If no clairvoyant about the future, Auster was lucid about the past. And he was no mere visitor to Israel; Auster was related to Daniel Auster, a Galician Jewish attorney who served as first Jewish mayor of Jerusalem. And Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008) was dedicated to Israeli author David Grossman and to the memory of his son Uri Grossman, who was killed in Lebanon at age twenty.
Of Polish Jewish origin himself, Auster implied a certain self-identification with Charles Reznikoff, who had Russian Jewish roots, in an essay. Auster declared that despite a “deep solidarity with the Jewish past,” Reznikoff never “deludes himself into thinking that he can overcome the essential solitude of his condition simply by affirming his Jewishness. For not only has he been exiled, he has been exiled twice – as a Jew, and from Judaism as well.”
When writing about Biblical characters, Reznikoff was “in effect writing about himself,” and Auster shared a similar inward-gazing “preoccupation with his ancestors.” Auster’s novel 4321 includes a version of a venerable Ellis Island jape. Supposedly a Jewish immigrant, named Isaac Reznikoff in the novel, was counseled by a friend to give an American-sounding name to immigration authorities, but forgets the new appellation, saying in Yiddish, “Ikh hob fargessen” (“I’ve forgotten”). So the official writes down the name “Ichabod Ferguson.”
This mythology apart, Auster offered concrete details about his own sense of Jewish identity in a 2013 essay for Granta. His family was non-observant, apart from a “couple of desultory Passover Seders in the company of relatives, Hanukkah gifts every December to offset the absence of Christmas,” and a bris.
Yet his parents considered themselves “simply Americans who happened to be Jews, thoroughly assimilated after the struggles of their own immigrant parents.” But the young Auster grew up in his native Newark understanding that “Jews were invisible, they had no part to play in American life, and they never appeared as heroes in books or films or television shows.”
Despite a few exceptions in sports and the performing arts, for Auster, being a Jew meant “to be different from everyone else, to stand apart, to be looked upon as an outsider.” This in turn meant that some Americans, like schoolboys who called him “Jew-boy” and other slurs, “felt you didn’t belong, that even in the place you called home, you were not fully at home.”
He noted in Report from the Interior (2013) that according to family lore, his father had been discharged as an assistant at Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory after the “vicious antisemite” Edison discovered that the elder Auster was Jewish.
Intriguingly, after the Second World War was over, and the destruction of European Jewry had been revealed, Auster’s non-pious parents decided to join a local Reform synagogue. As if echoing this response decades later, after the 2016 US presidential election, Auster announced his intent to upgrade his participation in defending freedom of speech through PEN America and related associations.
Auster’s later fiction included the well-received Baumgartner (2023), with a septuagenarian schlimazel as eponymous hero. In an interview that same year to promote his Bloodbath Nation, a nonfiction plea for gun reform in America, Auster asked about sane laws controlling ownership of firearms, “But if not today, when?” He was surely echoing the rabbinical saying attributed to the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder: “And if not now, when?” as printed in the Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot), also used as a title for a novel by Primo Levi.
Auster was targeted for some peculiarly snide critical sniping, especially from The New Yorker in 2009; Auster informed a friend that although he had not read the carping article himself, second-hand reports left him feeling like he “had been mugged by a stranger.”
Another naysayer, Mitchell Abidor, a fellow Brooklyn Jewish author and translator, kvetched that Auster’s 4321 was flawed, mostly due to “Auster’s inflated sense of his self-worth.” In further fault-finding, Abidor even asserted that Auster, celebrated as the quintessential Brooklyn author, had only a superficial knowledge of the borough.
Yet Auster’s international posterity is secure, as indicated by Thiais, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, where the Austrian Jewish novelist Joseph Roth is buried; it has no fewer than two roads named in Auster’s honor.
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