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In the April 6 front-page article about the late Saul Bellow, “Chicago’s novelist,” writer James Atlas was quoted as saying that Bellow “always said he was a writer first, an American second and Jewish third.”
I have never understood this kind of identification. To me it means that initially he is identified as a writer; and when he stops being a writer, he is then known as an American; and when he stops being an American, he then will be known as Jewish.
I think a more apt description of Saul Bellow is that he was an American of the Jewish faith who, by vocation, was a writer.
