Life
The very Jewish legacy of the non-Jewish Martin Amis
Unlike his father, the novelist had an abiding interest in the Holocaust and the great modern Jewish-American writers
May 24, 2023 15:14
Unlike his father, the novelist had an abiding interest in the Holocaust and the great modern Jewish-American writers
May 24, 2023 15:14Since Martin Amis’s death this week, many have paid tribute to the quality of his writing, his impact on British fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, his extraordinary comic style and his range from pornography and trash culture to the great evils of the 20th century, what he called, “the modern infamies, the 20th-century sins,” in particular the Holocaust and Stalinism.
As his friend Ian McEwan said, for Amis the Holocaust was “the rock-bottom pit of human nature”, “the bass-line is the Holocaust.”
Amis's book Einstein's Monsters
Martin Amis was one of the best British writers to address the Holocaust: in his story Bujak and the Strong Force in Einstein’s Monsters (1987), in his novel about an SS doctor, Time’s Arrow (1991), his only novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in his later Holocaust novel, The Zone of Interest (2014).
When we are introduced to Bujak we are told, “his life went deep into the century… [H]e fought in Warsaw in 1939. He lost his father and two brothers at Katyn.”
There was another very different reason why Jewishness mattered so much to Amis. He was hugely influenced by Saul Bellow and by Jewish-American writing. His father Kingsley was not very interested in either Jewish or American writers.
There’s a famous scene in his novel, Stanley and the Women, where someone tears up a novel: “There was a tearing sound and I saw that Steve was in fact tearing the cover off a book. I shouted out to him.
Saul Bellow (Getty Images)
