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APPRECIATION
The Norman Mailer who died in New York last Saturday at the age of 84, and whom I met in November 2006, was not the brash showman - arm-wrestling with Muhammad Ali, boxing with Jose Torres, hobnobbing with Jackie Onassis at a New York society dinner. This Mailer looked more like my beloved rabbinic grandfather: nearly blind, practically deaf and maneuvering around painfully with the use of two steel canes. Yet at this late date, as Mailer's famous deep-blue eyes sparkled, his spirit of Jewish mischief, which animated both his life and work, remained undimmed.
As a scholar of Jewish American writing, I have always been fascinated by the ways in which Mailer is able to bring Jewish themes into writing that often seems very different from Jewish work. When I mentioned to a group of scholars at a conference last year at the Harry Ransom Center (occasioned by Mailer's selling his papers to the University of Texas at Austin; he was the latest in a long line of Jewish writers to do so) that I thought Mailer was a deeply Jewish writer, my claim was met with a good deal of skepticism.
Yet, much like Woody Alien's character in "Annie Hall" pulling Marshall McLuhan out from a ticket line to settle a dispute about his work, I turned to Mailer, who was by this time sitting by himself, enjoying a glass of Chardonnay off to the side. I introduced myself and mentioned that I thought he was far more deeply engaged by Jewish ideas in his work than is often supposed. I also said...