The Bellarosa Connection by Saul Bellow

First published: 1989

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1959 to the 1980’s

Locale: Principally Jerusalem

Principal Characters:

• Sorella Fonstein, an imposing woman who is the center of the action
• Harry Fonstein, Sorella’s husband, the man whose life story is the source of both plot and theme
• Billy Rose, an impresario whom Sorella seeks out
• The narrator, the storyteller whose memories shape the meaning of the novel

The Novel

One of Saul Bellow’s shorter works, The Bellarosa Connection tells the story of a wife’s persistence in gaining an interview with impresario Billy Rose, who was responsible—through his anonymous underground railroad—for saving from the Nazis a number of Jews, Harry Fonstein among them, by bringing them to America. The narrator, a distant relative of the Fonsteins, remembers being told Harry’s history.

Harry Fonstein has made his way to Italy in fleeing the Nazis, but in Rome, he is arrested and faces deportation to a concentration camp. A representative from the American impresario Billy Rose—whom the Italians called “Bellarosa”—arranges for Harry’s prison door to be left open and for him to be met by a car, given false papers, and put on a ship bound for America.

In New York, Harry learns English and studies refrigeration and heating. He sails to Havana and is employed as a “legman” tracking down other Jews whose surviving relatives are looking for them. A few years later, he meets Sorella, an American girl from New Jersey. Back in America, married to Sorella, Harry works hard, studies diligently, and becomes rich.

Harry harbors a desire to meet Billy Rose, his benefactor. For years, Harry had sent Billy numerous letters, but Rose had never acknowledged them. Harry had been turned aside at Billy’s office and had been snubbed by Rose in New York’s famous Sardi’s restaurant. Harry, though, had never given up his desire simply to thank his savior.

All this the narrator has recounted as prelude to his personal involvement with the Fonsteins. Himself now prosperous and on the eve of his retirement as head of the Philadelphia-based Mnemosyne Institute, which he has directed for forty years, the narrator meets the Fonsteins in Jerusalem, where they are vacationing. He is particularly impressed with Sorella, whom he had remembered as a huge woman whose bulk of body was matched only by her tenacity of will and the solidity of her convictions. Over tea on the terrace of the King David Hotel, Sorella continues the story of the “Bellarosa connection.”

She had decided personally to take up Harry’s cause, to force Billy at least to meet the man whom he had refused even to acknowledge. To this end, she explains, she had tracked down the agent whom Billy Rose had sent to meet Harry on Ellis Island. The agent, a Mrs. Hamet, had been a frustrated actress and had probably loved Billy. She was living miserably when Sorella found her and the two struck up a kind of bond, each sympathetic to the other’s needs. Old and dying, Hamet tells Sorella of a journal she has been keeping, a record of Billy’s “comings and goings” and of his scandalous behavior. The journal is now in Sorella’s possession, and the narrator is convinced that Sorella intends to use it in some way.

A few days later, Billy Rose arrives in Jerusalem to donate a sculpture garden. The narrator now realizes that Sorella intends to confront Billy and to blackmail him with the journal. This confrontation, the central scene in the book, takes place in Billy’s suite in the hotel. In spite of Billy’s crudeness and his attempts to disavow any relationship with Harry, Sorella successfully intimidates him into believing that she will expose Billy’s excesses to the press unless he acknowledges Harry. Billy becomes irate, mean, insulting, and dehumanizing. At this point, Sorella flings the journal at Rose and leaves.

The narrator does not see the Fonsteins again. Thirty years later, alone in his Philadelphia mansion, beset by loneliness and bad dreams, he receives a telephone request from a rabbi seeking information about the Fonsteins for a man claiming to be a relative. The narrator makes a phone call or two and learns that the Fonsteins’ only son has become a failed gambler in Las Vegas. The Fonsteins themselves are dead, killed in an automobile accident. He has recorded their story as a kind of memorial.

The Characters

Sorella Fonstein, the central figure in the novel, is a woman of great intelligence. Her bulk and her plainness serve, to the narrator, as physical emblems of her inner strength and dignity. Unlike some other women portrayed in Bellow’s novels, Sorella is a “tiger wife” of admirable force and humanity. She does not subdue Harry with the force of her character but acts as his liberator, one who understands his need for respect beyond the middle-class values of success. She has impressed the narrator with her persistence and her wit. She takes on the role of the Furies to Billy Rose’s conscience, forcing him to acknowledge what his personal crudity and selfishness seek to conceal. Like the Furies of ancient Greek myth, Sorella is unbending, inexorable. There is nothing of self-consciousness, nothing of personal vanity in her campaign. It is deliberate, direct, and natural, like a life force.

Though his is the story that forms the central focus of the book, Harry Fonstein is, ironically, not the central character nor even a minor one. Though his rags-to-riches narrative is summarized early in the novel, Harry himself is a pointedly shadowy figure, existing on the periphery of the action. He has little dialogue, no movement, no real physical presence. Harry is, in fact, an abiding presence as a concept, a point of reference from which Sorella and the narrator develop their own courses of action.

Billy Rose, the half-real, half-fictional “villain” of the piece, is the most puzzling of the group. His crudity, selfishness, and hypocrisy, his blatant egotism, and his human cruelty are highlighted all the more by his one seemingly genuine act of altruism, the underground railroad. Billy seems threatened by his connection with Harry. He shows no pity, no admiration, no feelings of any kind. As a showman, Rose is more concerned with his public image than his private life; his disavowal of his “connection” is his way of sealing the crack in his public image, a crack through which his emotional, moral life might reveal itself.

After Sorella, the narrator is the most compelling character. A case may be made, in fact, that he is the central figure, since the events and their meaning are filtered through his observations and his memory. The narrator is both historian and judge. As he recalls the story, he admires Sorella and damns Billy Rose as he fully understands the real meaning of the connection. Additionally, he understands his own connection: He is the means through which the Fonstein-Rose story lives on, and the meaning of the story reverberates through his memory to the world at large.

Critical Context

The Bellarosa Connection can serve as a good introduction to Bellow’s works. Despite its brevity, the book treats major themes of human compassion and kinship that have engaged Bellow during his long career as a writer. The characters, though not as fully drawn as in earlier, more ambitious novels, are suggestive of the fine portrayals of heroes and villains that fill Bellow’s books. Billy Rose, for example, is a kind of antithesis to Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day (1956), fleeing the demands of humanity that Tommy is seeking to validate. He is also in the tradition of such Bellovian villains as Dr. Adler in Seize the Day and the fast-talking con-man Einhorn in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), unfeeling men who never come into contact with their humanity.

Bibliography

Bach, Gerald, ed. The Critical Responses to Saul Bellow. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. A collection of critical essays on Bellow’s career from the 1940’s to the 1990’s. Includes essays on The Bellarosa Connection, a chronology of Bellow’s life, and a bibliography.

Braham, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Examines Bellow’s novels as centering on the theme of discovery. The central characters seek to understand their spiritual conflict within an American context. Bellow’s works thus sit squarely in the American literary tradition; his heroes pursue a personal vision tempered by, yet transcending, the American experience.

Clayton, John J. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. 2d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Traces the affirmation implicit in Bellow’s work. Examines Bellow’s characters as alienated and paranoid, yet acting in such a way as to reject alienation and to affirm the brotherhood of man. Clayton insists that Bellow is a psychological novelist first and a moral spokesman second.

Cronin, Gloria, and Ben Seigel, eds. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. A collection of interviews with Bellow from 1953 to 1992 in which the novelist reflects on the craft of writing, his approaches to fiction, and his times.

Library Journal. CXIV, October 1, 1989, p.115.

The Nation. CCXLIX, November 27, 1989, p.652.

The New Republic. CCII, January 1, 1990, p.37.

The New York Review of Books. XXXVI, October 12, 1989, p.34.

The New York Times. September 28, 1989, p. B2(N).

The New York Times Book Review. XCIV, October 1, 1989, p.11.

The New Yorker. LXV, October 23, 1989, p.146.

Newman, Judie. Saul Bellow and History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. An interesting study, concentrating on the five “major” novels from The Adventures of Augie March (1953) to Humboldt’s Gift (1975). Provides an introduction summarizing critical opinions on Bellow’s religious and psychological views of life. Newman’s thesis is that Bellow is a novelist concerned with the effect of history and specific time on the actions of the protagonist.

Pifer, Ellen. Saul Bellow Against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Argues that each of Bellow’s heroes is in conflict with himself. The conflict between reason and religion ends with the hero’s affirmation of a metaphysical or intuitive truth. Bellow’s novels thus “go against the grain” of traditional realism and are radical in their “questioning of accepted notions of reality.”

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVI, August 25, 1989, p.57.

Time. CXXXIV, October 2, 1989, p.88.

The Times Literary Supplement. October 27, 1989, p.1181.

Trachtenberg, Stanley, comp. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. A compendium of the most significant critical essays about Bellow and his work. Beginning with the novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the reviews and articles discuss Bellow’s heroes as seekers and doubters and treat some of the author’s main themes. The article on Herzog as a latter-day Odysseus is particularly insightful.

Wasserman, Harriet. Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow—A Memoir. New York: Fromm, 1997. An illuminating memoir by Bellow’s former literary agent. Wasserman gives insights into Bellow’s personal and literary life and his approaches to writing.