The Bellarosa Connection

The Bellarosa Connection (1989) is a much better crafted and more complex novella. Miller has called it Bellow's "reprise." It certainly does appear to be Bellow examining the net worth of his life as writer, and even more importantly, as an American Jew. The unnamed narrator of this unusual tale is a memory freak, who in his old age is trying, through memory to capture his past relationship with the remarkable and mysterious Sorella Fonstein and her husband. An overweight American Jewess who has missed out on early romance, Sorella Fonstein, has ultimately married Harry Fonstein, a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Italy .The focus of the story is primarily on the unnamed narrator is overcome with the desire to find the couple and repent of his own American Jewish amnesia with regard to the consequences of the Holocaust. However, he has left it too late, and as he is informed that they have died several months earlier, he must deal with his identity as a Jew and the realization that he has lived more through memory than through actual relationships and moral commitments than has the spiritually sage Sorella. Through the narrative device of Harry Fonstein's lifelong attempt to locate and thank Billy Rose, who rescued him in Rome where he was imprisoned under the Nazi occupation, a fascinating tale emerges. Sorella, Harry's wife, initially fails to get her husband an audience with the sleazy Billy, until his now alienated colleague, Mrs. Hamet, gives Sorella the secret journal which documents all of Billy's bribery, sexual escapades, extortion, profiteering, and sabotage. Armed with this, Sorella now compares the two Jews, Harry and Billy: "If you want my basic view, here it is: The jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test--America.--Can they hold their ground, or will the USA be too much for them." Thirty years later in the second half of the story, the narrator, who is the director of the Mnemosyne Institute, cannot find any of these dear characters because all are dead. Once again, Bellow is counting the cruel, ironic loss of one's significant dead, while one still possesses a perfect and powerful memory which preserves them all as if it were yesterday they visited. All he can do is record both their presence and their absence simultaneously. But it is the wise and capacious Sorella, his anima, whose loss he feels most sharply. Ultimately, it is the possible loss of his own feeling, Jewish soul he mourns as he wonders whether he has passed the American test and held his ground. He laments: "Maybe the power of memory was to blame. Remembering them so well, did I need actually to see them? To keep them in mental suspension was enough. They were part of the permanent cast of characters, in absentia permanently. There wasn't a thing for them to do."