John Steinbeck, American author and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature
Shalom Goldman is Professor of Religion at Middlebury College, an author and contributing writer to Tablet Magazine. This is his essay on Steinbeck, Israel and America.
John Steinbeck’s Promised Land
Within days of his arrival in Tel Aviv, John Steinbeck, the recent Nobel laureate and one of America’s greatest bards, wrote back to the States singing Israel’s praises. “This country boils and burbles,” he told his editor at New York Newsday, “squirms and gallops with energy. If there is such a thing as a boisterous ferment, it is here. In most countries I have seen and lived in, everything that can be done has been done. In Israel, in spite of its 4,000 years of history, everything is to be done and as though for the first time. It kind of bears out what I have always felt—that only those people who have nothing to do and no place to go are tired. I see no evidence of weariness here.”
In his 1966 jaunt across Israel, Steinbeck found what he felt was lacking back home. He encountered a people flush with patriotism, loyalty, and enthusiasm for military service—a stark contrast to what he saw in the youth of the United States, who, he wrote, were “burning draft cards because war in Vietnam was intolerable.” As Jay Parini, Steinbeck’s biographer, noted, the great novelist “was intent on contrasting Israel’s energetic vision of itself with America’s loss of vision.”
and,
This sense of American decline permeates East of Eden, Steinbeck’s 1952 masterpiece. The novel takes its title and structure from the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis, a narrative that tells the story of the sons of Adam and Eve. Cain kills Abel for reasons that the biblical text leaves mysterious, and the story concludes with Cain’s departure from Eden. “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”
Steinbeck’s sprawling, 500-page opus can be understood as an elaborate midrash on this biblical story. In the novel, Steinbeck turns these two competing brothers into two families, the Hamiltons and Trasks of California’s Salinas Valley. After achieving an Edenic life in California’s Salinas Valley, the Hamiltons and Trasks lose their legacies through dissension and bitterness, ultimately reenacting the fall of man and expulsion from Eden.
This was Steinbeck’s haunting and prescient view of America even in 1952. America, though young and industrious had been through two World Wars, Great Depression in less than 30 years. It was fighting the Chinese proxy of North Korea to the east in a deadly war and staring down the Soviet Behemoth in Europe. Something was brewing in the spirit and soul of the nation and Steinbeck was worried.
In addition to his profound interest in the Hebrew Bible, Steinbeck had a family connection to the history of Israel. Both his paternal grandfather and his great-uncle had been members of Mount Hope, a small group of German and American Protestants that established an agricultural mission near Jaffa in 1853. The Steinbeck men were Germans married to American women. In Ottoman Palestine they hoped to convert local Jews to Christianity.
In January 1858, a dispute with local Arabs over a stray cow led to a vicious attack, during which Steinbeck’s grandfather was killed and his grandmother’s sister and her mother were raped. The attacks caused a diplomatic flare-up, with the Prussian and U.S. governments demanding justice from the Ottoman authorities. Soon after the attack, the survivors of the massacre left Jaffa for America, where they settled first in New England and later in California. In American diplomatic history, this incident is known as the 1858 “Outrages of Jaffa.”
It doesn’t appear the Palestinians have changed at all.
Read the entire essay.
Here is Shalom Goldman’s archive of Tablet columns if you are interested.
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