Saul Bello was born in a suburb of Montreal in 1915, to a traditional Jewish family recently arrived from Russia.

Raised in Chicago, where the family moved when he was nine years old, he became part of a circle of

brainy Jewish teenagers who read and debated weighty books and learned much more from each

other than from their formal schooling, which in Bello's case included the University of Chicago

and Northwestern University.

The young Bella decided early on to become a writer and worked at it so hard and so successfully

that by the time of his death in 2005, he'd become America's most decorated novelist,

recipient of, among many other honors, the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature,

three National Book Awards for Fiction, a Pulitzer Prize, and the American Academy

of Arts and Letters gold medal for the novel. France made him a commander of its Legion of

honor. Italy awarded him the Malaparte Prize and Israel the Agnone Prize for literary achievement.

That's a quote from Ruth Weiss's ranging essay, What Saul Bellow Saw, published in

October 2019 in Mosaic. Today on the Tikva podcast, we think together with Ruth Weiss about one of

America's preeminent writers, Saul Bello. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

We should expect philosophers and political theorists and social scientists and cultural critics of various stripes

to address themselves to questions concerning social order and the human condition,

the fate of the person in modernity, the crisis of the cities, and the Jew in America.

For Ruth Weiss, Saul Bello did in fact think about all these themes and more,

but he went about his work advancing ideas through the form of the novel.

In this conversation, we look at several of those novels, dangling man, the victim,

Mr. Samler's planet, to Jerusalem and back. And we get but the

briefest glimpse of Bello, the thinker. If you've never read Saul Bellow, or it's been a while,

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