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James Baldwin Review editors Douglas Field and Justin A. Joyce interview author and Baldwin biographer James Campbell on the occasion of the reissue of his book Talking at the Gates (Polygon and University of California Press, 2021).
) and by explicit allusions to other ‘wild American Jews I admired’ (323–24), such as Saul Bellow (64, 91) and Norman Mailer (64, 80, 103). Moreover, Who Gives a Monkey’s? seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Bernard Malamud’s novel God’s Grace (1982), in which the sole survivor of a nuclear apocalypse creates a new society with a group of chimpanzees, cohabiting and procreating with them, before they turn against him, finally hanging him as they ‘laughed, screamed, barked, hooted’ ( Malamud 1983 : 196). Ableman himself claims that Who Gives a Monkey
more fully than my father believed we [i.e. English Jews] had, or ever would’ (35), it is tempting to see an implied analogy with those American Jewish authors, such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and, of course, Philip Roth, whose works were much more frequently to be found on the bookshelves of English Jews of Glickman Senior’s generation than those of their arguably less adventurous, certainly lesser-known, British Jewish contemporaries. Although Glickman Junior distances himself from the deference to American Jews expressed in this