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LETTERS 4 Stubborn Soul, Animal or Vegetable?, Life and Literature, David and Goliath

Features 5 Shmuel Trigano A Journey Through French Anti-Semitism There is a problem with the inevitable reflexive warnings after every vicious attack not to slip into Islamophobia. A short personal history of how France got here. 8 Michael Weingrad Drawing Conclusions: Joann Sfar and the Jews of France The great French comic artist is now working at the height of his considerable powers, and he is obsessed with questions of Jewish identity and life in Europe.

Reviews 11 Adam Kirsch Lincoln and the Jews Lincoln and the Jews: A History by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell 14 Ruth R. Wisse Coming with a Lampoon J: A Novel by Howard Jacobson 17 Jenna Weissman Joselit Jewish Geography Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way by Hasia R. Diner • The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam D. Mendelsohn 20 Gary Stein The Abrams Case and Justice Holmes' Philo-Semitism The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in America by Thomas Healy 23 Allan Arkush Lands of the Free Jews & Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe & the United States edited by Simon Rabinovitch • Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia by Joshua Shanes • Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia • by Simon Rabinovitch • The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe by Joshua M. Karlip • In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel by Adam L. Rovner 27 Walter Laqueur Love in the Shadow of Death Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman 30 Robert Alter Unsettling Days The Hilltop: A Novel by Assaf Gavron, translated by Steven Cohen 34 Amy Newman Smith A Spy's Life Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad Spy by Ram Oren and Moti Kfir 36 Alvin H. Rosenfeld Climate of Opinion The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel edited by Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm 40 Steven Englund An Affair as We Don't Know It An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris 43 Abraham Socher Live Wire The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 by Zachary Leader • There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction by Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Reading 47 Chaim Saiman The Fifth Question Whatever kind of Passover Seder one attends, there is a fifth question, usually whispered, that arises some time after the first four are asked . . . The Arts 49 Mitchell Cohen Going Under with Klinghoffer The new production of The Death of Klinghoffer at the Met this fall brought out protestors and defenders again. The opera’s defenders spoke of “truths” of art. But what, exactly, are those truths? Last word 55 The Editors High Fives

On the cover: Celebration! by Mark Anderson. LETTERS

Stubborn Soul amud plagiarized from the 1926 English edition of statements belittling Beilis, thus adding insult to in- Kol ha-kavod to David G. Roskies for his recogni- Beilis’ memoir, The Story of My Sufferings. Zipper- jury. Zipperstein focuses on Malamud’s remark that tion of the genius of the stubborn soul of Grażyna stein even adds an additional charge of plagiarism, Beilis “died a bitter man.” Zipperstein wonders how Pawlak, whose mind gave birth to the idea that saying that “Malamud lifted passages almost directly we can possibly disagree with Malamud’s assess- our friend Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett would from Life Is with People, much as he did from Beilis’ ment, given all that Beilis suffered, including trag- eventually deliver after years of nurturing by Jerzy memoir.” Given this acknowledgment of Malamud’s edies and disappointments, following Beilis’ release Halbersztadt (“POLIN: A Light Unto the Nations,” plagiarism, we are at a loss to understand why Zip- from prison. Winter 2015). perstein felt it necessary to make the sophomoric In addressing Malamud’s “bitter man” remark in I vividly remember my first meeting with Paw- comment that “even paranoiac relatives can have our book, we grant that “there may be an element of lak in the lobby of the Forum Hotel in 1994 where genuine cause for complaint.” Since we have genu- truth” to what Malamud said. We then argue, based she dismissed the superficiality of foreign Jews who ine cause for complaint, we are not paranoid. on documentary evidence, that while Beilis had came to Poland in those years, shed a few tears, Zipperstein writes that Malamud was “hounded cause to be bitter at the end of his life, he was prob- left, and forgot what they saw, thereby laying down ably less bitter than others would have been in his the gauntlet. I'm glad Roskies reminded us of her place. Our evidence includes what is probably Beilis’ great achievement and the pioneering work of Jerzy last recorded utterance, his 1934 letter to Oskar Gru- Halbersztadt. zenberg, the Russian-Jewish lawyer who had been Michael H. Traison Beilis’ lead defense counsel at the trial in 1913. In via jewishreviewofbooks.com this letter, written while Beilis was in failing health and close to death, he stated: “I am happy. God permitted me to live and I am able to write to you.” That does not sound very bitter to us. (By the way, in the Animal or Vegetable? listing for our book in this review, the author’s name Jeremy Wanderer’s interesting review of two books “Mendel” is misspelled as “Medel.” The price listed regarding sacrifice (“Silence of the Lambs?”) in the for the book is also wrong: It is $15, not $29.95.) Winter 2015 issue unfortunately gets off to a bad Jay Beilis start when his first sentence refers to the offering Jeremy Simcha Garber of a one-year-old lamb together with wine and a Mark S. Stein vegetable on the altar. Unless one thinks of bread as a vegetable, vegetables were not offered in biblical Steven J. Zipperstein Responds: sacrifices, after Cain’s rejected one (and that was not Family loyalty is nobler than literary acumen. On accompanied by a lamb). these grounds, Beilis’ heirs are to be commended Micah Bloomfield for their dogged defense of their famous, tragic New York, NY ancestor. But hounded by them Bernard Malamud certainly is: The appendix to Blood Libel: The Life Jeremy Wanderer Responds: by Beilis’ heirs” when The Fixer first appeared in and Memory of Mendel Beilis is nearly 70 pages of The first sentence of the review is ambiguous per- 1966. This is a vast exaggeration. David Beilis, the legalese-inflected bombardment. Just one example haps, but not outright mistaken. The sacrifice son of Mendel Beilis and the father of Jay Beilis, cor- from page 278: “Having plagiarized so extensively, imagined in the sentence was the korban olah, the responded with Malamud, sending him two letters. we contend, Malamud forfeited any artistic license burnt offering, described in Numbers (28: 3–8) as David Beilis also sent a letter to the editor of The to give his Beilis-based character, and that charac- accompanied by a mincha (“the tenth part of an New York Times Book Review, which was forwarded ter’s wife, unfavorable traits that would predictably ephah of fine flour for a meal-offering, mingled to Malamud and to which Malamud responded. be imputed to Beilis and his wife.” They would be with the fourth part of a hin of beaten oil”) and a David Beilis had two main concerns about The hard-pressed to cite any literary critic, anywhere, of libation. I simply followed others—see, for ex- Fixer, which remain our main concerns today. First, any standing that would defend such silliness. ample, Isadore Epstein’s “Introduction to Seder Malamud plagiarized from Mendel Beilis’ memoir. Malamud borrowed promiscuously from near- Kodashim,” in The Babylonian Talmud (Soncino Second, Malamud gave to his Beilis-based charac- ly everything around him. This is hardly less true Press)—in describing the mincha as “a vegetable of- ter, and to that character’s wife, unfavorable quali- of Dubin’s Lives or A New Life than of his Beilis- fering,” where the term “vegetable” is used in con- ties that would predictably be imputed to Beilis and inspired novel, The Fixer. It’s what he made out of trast to animal or liquid oblations. I agree it would his wife. all this, including the stray sentences he lifted from be incorrect to make mention of “offering of a one- These may seem like inconsistent criticisms, but Beilis’ memoir, that make him still worth reading year-old lamb together with wine and a vegetable in fact they are not. Indisputably, Malamud’s nov- today. The Beilis family should take solace in the on the altar,” but that was not something I said. el has caused two kinds of confusion about Beilis. simple fact that non-fiction accounts of Beilis’ tra- First, it has caused literary critics and other read- vails, including those I discussed, continue to be ers to give Malamud credit for inventing passages produced. Such works stand or fall on their ability Life and Literature that he plagiarized. Second, it has caused literary to relate with accuracy historical truth. The truth Steven Zipperstein faults us for including, in our critics and other readers to assume that the histori- that animates literary work is of a different nature, new edition of Mendel Beilis’ memoir, unfavorable cal Mendel Beilis shared some of the unfavorable and few have reminded us of this more bracingly commentary on Bernard Malamud and his novel traits of Malamud’s protagonist. We document both than Malamud himself. Recall that scene in The As- The Fixer (“Fateless: The Beilis Trial a Century Lat- kinds of confusion. sistant, where his protagonist exclaims when first er,” Winter 2015). At the outset, we want to stress There has been considerable debate over wheth- learning of Dostoevsky that “I’d rather read the that our main purpose in publishing Blood Libel: er authors of historical fiction have any responsibil- truth” only to be told “It is the truth.” The Life and Memory of Mendel Beilis was not to ity to avoid debasing the reputations of real people criticize Malamud, but to put Beilis’ memoir back about whom they write. We argue that the fiction into print. We are gratified that Zipperstein consid- author’s responsibility is at its highest when he is David and Goliath ers the memoir a “still-riveting tale.” writing about people who have come into the pub- I am gratified that the Jewish Review of Books gave That said, we do have an extended essay in the lic eye because they have suffered unjustly. We also space in its pages to a review of my book, Making book, titled “Pulitzer Plagiarism,” in which we level argue that whatever artistic license Malamud might David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against a number of charges against Malamud regarding his have possessed, he forfeited that license through his Israel and that your reviewer, Allan Arkush, present- fictionalized retelling of the Beilis story. We appear plagiarism ed a cogent summary of it (“And How Do You Like to have convinced Zipperstein of the justice of our Far from giving Beilis credit for the passag- first charge: that in writing his novel The Fixer, Mal- es he borrowed, Malamud made several public continued on page 54

4 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 FEATUREs A Journey Through French Anti-Semitism

BY Shmuel Trigano

f after the horrors of January 2015 there is any as Sub-Saharan Africa. This influx of millions of peo- These developments had unforeseen but dire consolation for the Jews of France, it would ple quickly became a political and social issue that ac- consequences. The Jewish community now found seem to lie in the words of Prime Minister quired a whole new dimension when then-President itself identified for the first time since World War II Manuel Valls. “How can we accept that people François Mitterrand opted for a dangerous new po- as a “community of immigration.” Before 1989, the areI killed because they are Jewish?” he cried out at a litical strategy. In order to break the republican right, immigrant population was regarded as a victim of special session of the French parliament a week af- Mitterrand invented an “anti-fascist front.” It focused racism and of the extreme right. At the same time, ter the massacres at the Charlie Hebdo editorial of- on presenting the National Front, then an insignifi- the heated controversy over the public wearing of fices and at the Hypercacher kosher supermarket. “History has taught us that the awakening of anti- In the year prior to September 2001, 450 anti-Semitic attacks Semitism is the symptom of a crisis for democracy and of a crisis for the Republic. That is why we must took place in France, but the French government and media respond with force.” We are at war, he said, “with terrorism, jihadism, and Islamist radicalism” (he has kept absolutely silent. spoken more recently of “Islamofascism”), but not, he added, “Islam and Muslims.” And yet, as someone cant party, as a major “fascist” danger against which the Islamic veil arose. In 1989, at the bicentennial of who has lived through and documented the last two all citizens, of whatever party, would have to unify— the French Revolution, Jews began to face popular decades and more of anti-Semitism in France, I note under the banner of the Socialist Party, of course. It criticism for their communautarisme (that is, their that there is a problem with the inevitable reflexive was really Mitterrand who, in effect, created Jean- tribalism, their disloyalty to the ideals of French warnings after every vicious attack not to slip into Is- Marie Le Pen and made his National Front party the republicanism and the common good). lamophobia by conflating Islam and terrorism. It is a pivot around which the French political system turns A coterie of intellectuals set the tone by attacking kind of automatic discourse in which the existence of to this day. Islamic communautarisme as a menace to the Repub- a threat to Muslims erases the recognition of the ha- In this new political game, Mitterrand used the lic. The Jewish community, which had been deemed, tred to which Islamic texts and doctrines have given Jews to prove the authenticity of the fascist threat. with the help of SOS-Racism, an “immigrant com- rise, as expressed by the terrorists themselves. For there is a long history of Islamic anti-Judaism, and it is the reason for the attacks against the Jews. After the great mass rally of solidarity in Paris, there was a call for national unity against the “bar- barians.” But if this is a threat which the whole nation faces, how can one explain the fact that it is the Jew- ish centers and institutions, almost exclusively, that are under the protection of soldiers and that every synagogue has a minyan of armed guards standing outside of it day and night? Our recollection of the prime minister’s fine—if somewhat belated—words cannot erase our memory of what France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said on the very morning of the rally. He affirmed that it is the conflict in the Middle East—read: Is- rael—that is the cause of anti-Semitism in France. There was no mention of the traditional Muslim disparagement of non-Muslims clearly invoked by the terrorists and reflected in the silence of the “moderate” Muslims, who have, with rare exceptions, refused to combat anti-Semitism. Nor was there a mention of the many failures of the French state to deal with these problems. It is to hide all of this that the authorities, at critical moments, again and again point the finger at Israel. The automatic French Prime Minister Manuel Valls speaking at the National Assembly, Paris, February 11, 2015. exculpation of Islam from any responsibility neces- (© Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images.) sarily shifts all of the blame to Israel and its policy toward the Palestinians. If Islam is not guilty, Israel With the assistance of Mitterrand and the Socialist munity” was subjected to the same nationalist suspi- is. Party, an association called SOS-Racism grew out of cions. This political balancing act facilitated the criti- the French Jewish Students’ Union (UEJF) and adopt- cism of the Muslim population. This was a turning hy are things this way in France, in Belgium, ed as its most significant slogan: “Jews=Immigrants.” point and, as I see it now, the beginning of the de- Win Great Britain, and, indeed, in Western The fight against the neo-Nazism of Le Pen thus con- scent into hell. It marked, in fact, the renewal of intol- Europe in general? To understand the situation in verged with the fight against anti-Semitism as well as erant French nationalism cloaked in the attire of the France, first of all, we have to go back several decades, against anti-Arab racism. This facilitated Mitterrand’s Republic, of civic morality, in the name of something to the 1980s, which witnessed large-scale Muslim im- cooptation of the newly arrived immigrants, who had universal. Jews, who had been citizens of the Repub- migration into the country from North Africa as well begun to become politically active during these years. lic since 1791—or, in the case of Algeria, 1870—were

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 5 suddenly suspect, as the result of questions raised not migrant community,” they by no means enjoyed promised by our Arab neighbors, the cramped ships by issues within their own communities but by those the favor that had been bestowed upon them be- and planes carrying an exodus of one million peo- of Muslim communities. fore 1989. In the year prior to September 2001, ple—myself included—the two-day wait at a mili- Little by little, the Jewish community lost its na- 450 anti-Semitic attacks took place in France, but tary airport to go wherever, as long as we could get tional legitimacy within France. After the Persian the French government and media kept absolutely out. The State had abandoned us; death loomed. Gulf War of 1990–1991, Mitterrand congratulated silent about them. The minister of foreign affairs “the two communities” (without identifying them, at the time, Hubert Védrine, even declared that he t the time of the Iraq War in 2003, President as if it were evident that there were two communi- “understood” why the “suburbs’ youngsters” were AJacques Chirac pursued an anti-American ties in France, both alien to French society) for reacting out, in light of what was happening in Israel. and pro-Arab policy. There were huge demonstra- maining calm. A rapid process of symbolic “dena- Were we not, in effect, Jews who were “close to Is- tions in the streets against the United States and tionalization” of the Jews had begun. rael,” an Israel then accused of killing women and Israel. Because he attributed decisive influence In their diverse efforts, the succeeding govern- children in the Second Intifada? Everywhere there over the Pentagon to Jewish Americans, Chirac ments never dared to call for religious reforms was a wall of silence—so strange in a society we be- feared, “American Judaism” would pressure Wash- within Islam that would prepare it to exist within lieved was pluralistic and free. Daniel Vaillant, who ington to turn against France if the extent of anti- the context of the Republic. Instead, the Republic had been minister of the interior during the Intifa- Semitism in France became public. On one of his vis- chose the path of “pacification” through “inter-re- da, later admitted that the Jospin government had, its to Washington he brought with him a delegation ligious dialogue,” further marginalizing the Jews as in an act of true censorship, imposed this silence in of Jewish leaders tasked with declaring that there strangers in their own country. While the govern- 2001 to “not throw oil on the fire.” In other words, was no anti-Semitism in France in order to “calm” ment, at its best, has been able to conceive of a poli- the government knowingly disregarded the rights of American Jews. The Chirac years were the darkest cy that could ensure security for the Jews (yesterday, French Jews, as citizens, to receive protection from for French Jews in this period and put a negative through the police, today by means of the army), it their country, in order to ensure “public peace.” We stamp on the future fight against anti-Semitism. In has never formulated an appropriate political solu- felt abandoned. Speaking personally, my memories Chirac’s times, the invocation of anti-Semitism in tion on a national scale. of the end of French Algeria in 1962 came tumbling France became proof of “anti-French” activity. If the Jews were now considered to be an “im- back to me: the frenzied escape to avoid the death Taking its cues from the government, French society refused to recognize anti-Semitism for what it was. People found words to deform reality. The vio- Celebrating our lence, it was claimed, was not anti-Semitic but rather a product of “inter-community tensions.” This perverse JEWISH REVIEW concept dilutes the responsibility of the aggressors 5th anniversary! and shares it with the victims; since one is permitted OF BOOKS to denounce the bellicosity of the victims, they are no longer recognized as victims. Indeed, the “aggression” of the Jewish community (or else the “the Jewish Lob- by,” the Israeli “colonialists,” or “communautaristes”) has become a commonplace in the media. For 5 years . . . we’ve had it covered. The eruption of violence, it was similarly From Daniel Gordis on the future of the Conservative movement claimed, did not emanate from French society, but was rather an “imported conflict” from the Middle To Ruth R. Wisse on the making of Jewish humor East. This dishonest phrase surreptitiously impugns And Shlomo Avineri on talking Kant with Henry Kissinger the nationality of French Jews by grouping them together with recent immigrant communities, many We look forward to the next 5 years as the magazine of whose members are often dual citizens of North for serious readers with Jewish interests. African countries. Neither could the violence be Subscribe today and get: called anti-Semitic, it was further claimed, because only the Nazi, extreme right could be so termed. Print + Web + App + Archive + e-Book How could the Arabs, themselves “Semites” and www.jewishreviewofbooks.com “victims of colonization,” be anti-Semites? How could Islam, the “religion of peace,” inspire hostil- or call 877-753-0337 ity? It was simply “anti-Zionist,” a “legitimate” opinion, given what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. Subscribe now for Anti-Semitism was thus upgraded to a manifesta-

only $29.95/year tion of “inter-communal tensions,” leaving the Jews (4 issues) as responsible as anyone else for what they suffered. In the face of all this, the official institutions of French Jewry kept silent for an entire year. Find- ing themselves left to their own devices, each Jew, or at least the most conscientious amongst them, underwent a process of growing isolation from French society. Many of us began avoiding non- Jewish friends—no more dinner parties in the city in order to avoid the anger of friends who no longer wanted to hear us out. In every milieu, social as well as professional, Jews were reproached, sum- moned to apologize for or distance themselves from Israel, from Ariel Sharon. Those with dignity and honor refused this deal—one that would have offered them access to society and recognition; they preferred to leave behind the public sphere, with its Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover. enmity toward Israel and Jew-bashing. Some nonetheless tried to clarify, debunk, ex-

6 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 plain, and, above all, alert political and journalistic it overturns their erroneous prism of interpreta- public opinion. Despite the profound malaise, we tion. The thesis that France faces an “imported believed then that the problem might have boiled conflict” still reigns today—and it remains as false down to a lack of information, or rather, disinfor- now as it was 14 years ago at the time of the Sec- mation—a malentendu. In 2001, I founded a journal ond Intifada. We are in the same place. There has called l’Observatoire du monde juif whose primary been no improvement. task was to publish a list of attacks that the official The political impasse for the Jews in France organs of the Jewish community knew about but did today is still almost total. President Hollande and, not make public. From 2001 through 2005, we pub- especially, Prime Minister Valls both now speak lished 12 bulletins and edited numerous small books far more frankly and openly of anti-Semitism

Grassroots Fascism

The War Experience of the Japanese People YOSHIMI YOSHIAKI Translated by Ethan Mark

“Although this classic work concentrates on how ordinary people were enlisted into Japan’s fascist project, it also shows in rich detail the role they were willing to play as agents at the level of everyday life. Yoshimi’s book joins a post–Cold War historiographical tradition that once more recognizes the necessity to take fascism seriously as a global conjunctural event.”

—Harry Harootunian, Columbia University

A remembrance ceremony, Jerusalem, January 11, 2015, which paid tribute to the 17 victims of the Paris massacres. (Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.) without institutional support of any kind. These and its sources and even of vigorous new policies were sent to the entire political class, to members of in security and education, but it is hard to be- both chambers of parliament, to leading intellectu- lieve that the left will not continue to flatter the als, and to journalists. When it became clear that the Muslim electorate with multicultural promises. crisis of anti-Jewish violence was not episodic but The right, whose pro-Arab tilt goes all the way permanent, I ceased publication of l’Observatoire du back to Charles de Gaulle, is unlikely to provide a monde juif. We could no longer continue the fight, at significant alternative in this regard. Meanwhile, Judaism, Christianity, every corner, against this or that article, newspaper, the extreme right maintains an ominous silence and Islam or opinion. about its relations to Jews, letting others do their I then created the journal Controverses to pro- work. Finally, the foreign policy establishment Collaboration and Conflict vide an intellectual haven for writers to say what remains fundamentally and historically hostile to in the Age of Diaspora was impossible to say elsewhere. In 2011, after pub- Israel. Will the political courage and new frank- EDITED BY SANDER L. GILMAN lishing 18 issues, I gave this up, too. It was not sim- ness exemplified by the prime minister be suffi- This volume examines Abrahamic cultures ply the lack of financial means or the aliyah of many cient to alter the historical course on which the as minority groups in societies which may of the editors that led me to this decision. I had the Jews of France seem to be headed? It is too early be majority Muslim, Christian or Jewish, or feeling that everything had already been said. I drew to say. For myself, I cannot help but feel that the self-consciously secular. The focus is on from this a terrible conclusion: When words no lon- decades, events, and attitudes whose story I have the relationships between these religious ger carry weight, one can expect violence. briefly told here are all stages on a long journey identities in global Diaspora, where all of Over the years, we saw a legion of intellectuals, for which Jerusalem is the ultimate goal. them are confronted with claims about who had always been far removed from Jewish life national and individual difference. An and Jewish thought, rise to denounce Israel and the important theme is how the complex pat- terns of interaction among these religions Jewish community in the name of Jewish morality, or, Shmuel Trigano is a professor of the sociology of embrace collaboration as well as conflict — rather, “another Judaism,” or else “the memory of the politics and religion at Paris University and founder even in the modern Middle East. Holocaust.” This invocation often depicted Israel as a of the Popular University for Judaism. He is the Nazi state, radically misinterpreting both the one and author of 23 books including Le judaïsme et l’esprit Hong Kong University Press, the other. Not even the spectacle of Muslim Brother- du monde (Grasset), which proposes a global theory distributed by hood–led protests in all French cities in 2014—com- of Judaism. He is also the author of, in English, The Columbia University Press plete with cries of “Death to the Jews”—has brought Democratic Ideal and the Shoah: The Unthought in these people to their senses. Behind the pretext of Political Modernity (SUNY Press) and Philosophy COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS Palestine, the religious motivations of the anti-Jewish of the Law: The Political in the Torah (Shalem CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU · CUPBLOG.ORG violence remain misunderstood. It would cost French Press). He has just published, in French, Fifteen elites too much doctrinal and psychological effort to Years of Loneliness: France’s Jews 2000–2015 (Berg accept this fact, after such a long period of denial, for International).

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 7 Drawing Conclusions: Joann Sfar and the Jews of France

BY MICHAEL WEINGRAD

n March 19, 2012, a French jihadi on a whom Sfar has roaming the bordellos of Paris with ing a longstanding interest in philosophy. (He has shooting spree targeted a Jewish school fellow painters Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall) published illustrated versions of Plato’s Symposium in Toulouse, murdering three children and his popular children’s book, Little Vampire, and Voltaire’s Candide, and an early ambition of his and a rabbi. A few days later, a Jewish whose Jewish protagonist Michael befriends the un- was to render the classics of Western thought in com- cemeteryO in Nice was defaced. Both events were on dead. In 2010, moreover, Sfar directed an acclaimed ic form.) His comics began to appear in the 1990s, the mind of comic book creator Joann Sfar as he film based on the life of the superstar French musi- and he was involved early on with L’Association, the resumed work on the final book of Klezmer, a five- cian Serge Gainsbourg, who was also Jewish. publishing collective that brought out such works volume fantasy on Jewish life in turn of the century Eastern Europe. Published last year by Gallimard, The Jewish worlds of Sfar are always fantasies, set in the last installment imagines a group of musicians on their way to Kishinev in the immediate after- the past but only loosely connected with history. math of the infamous pogroms that took place there in 1903. Versions of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and far, who is now working at the height of his con- as Marjane Satrapi’s celebrated Persepolis and Sfar’s Chaim Nachman Bialik make their appearance in Ssiderable powers, was born in 1971 and grew up own series about the Jewish modernist painter Julius the book. In the Afterword Sfar explains that his in Nice. His Algerian-born father was a bon vivant Mordecai Pincas, known as Pascin. His first major Kishinev is a symbol for the fundamental dilemma and lawyer, who later became well-known for pros- success was Donjon, an ongoing series of dozens of of Jews in Europe not only in 1903 but throughout ecuting neo-Nazis; his mother, a promising young whimsical, interconnected fantasy adventures, which the 20th century and today in the 21st: namely, how singer in the breathy style of Brigitte Bardot. When Sfar created with Lewis Trondheim. More successes to respond to the anti-Semitism that threatens both his mother died suddenly at the age of 26, his family followed, as well as collaborations with a number of the physical existence of Jews and their dream of decided to tell the three-year-old Sfar that she had different artists and writers. participation in a cosmopolitan European society. left on a trip and would return when he was older Apart from his recognizable almond-eyed wom- Sfar is neither the first nor the only significant if he behaved himself, a pretense they kept up for a en, Sfar is not known for a distinct drawing style, Jewish contributor to French comics. Jews who year. The young Sfar found refuge in constant draw- borrowing instead from a wide range of influences have left their mark on what the French call “bandes ing despite his family’s concern that it had become including Jules Feiffer, Quentin Blake, illustrator of dessinées” and regard as a serious art form include, alarmingly obsessive. He has also been quoted as many of Roald Dahl’s books, and Marvel Comics’ for instance, René Goscinny, the co-creator of the saying that by the age of six he had realized that “it artist Jack Kirby. His main talent in any case is not as iconic French comic book Asterix, and Marcel Got- was useless to behave and maybe also to believe.” an illustrator but as a storyteller. Sfar is a font of nar- lib, whose satirical creations helped propel French He went on to study art and drawing at the École rative creativity, a Scheherazade with pen and brush. comics into adult territory in the 1960s and 1970s. Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, while continu- And he is at his best when chronicling the vagaries of That satirical territory was most famously occupied by the comic periodical Charlie Hebdo to which Sfar, along with other Jewish writers and artists (including Elsa Cayat and Georges Wolinski, who were murdered in the recent Islamist attack on the magazine’s editorial offices) also contributed. Yet, as the historian of bandes dessinées Thierry Groensteen observes in Entretiens avec Joann Sfar, an informative book-length interview with Sfar published in 2013, Sfar is the first French comic book artist whose reputation rests on works that explore Jewish themes and characters directly. Sfar is best known for The Rabbi’s Cat (English translation in two volumes, 2005 and 2008) about a talking cat and its Jewish owners in North Africa between the world wars. First published a little over a decade ago, the series became a best-seller in France and has since been translated into several languages, including English, and adapted as an animated feature film. Sfar has also treated Jewish themes at length in other graphic novels including the three- volume Les Olives noires (2001–2003, story by Sfar, art by Emmanuel Guibert), the two-volume Chagall en Russie (2010–2011), and Klezmer (2005–2014, Volume One translated in 2006). Jewish characters and references feature prominently in other of his works as well, such as his series Pascin about the French painter Jules Pascin (who was Jewish and Joann Sfar at work, 2004. (© Arnault Joubin/Corbis.)

8 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 love and jealousy, as in his sad yet delightful Vampire the Talmud.”) It may reflect nothing more than his and didn’t see signing anti-Israel petitions as the Loves, in which the romantically inept vampire Fer- own preference for fantasy over reportage, but it way to start. More recently, his name was not to dinand tries to find happiness after the collapse of his does seem significant that none of Sfar’s narrative be found among those, including his interviewer relationship with the fetching plant-girl Liana. works about Jews is set during his own lifetime, ei- Groensteen as well as some American colleagues Yet it is Jews and Judaism which most exercise ther in France or in Israel. such as Ben Katchor, who signed a petition in Jan- Sfar and with which he struggles in his best-known works. And struggles is the word, since Sfar is nothing if not ambivalent about these subjects. Certainly, Some years ago, when he was asked, as “a good Jew,” to sign he makes no secret of his aversion to rabbinic ortho- an anti-Israel petition, Sfar refused, saying that he had never doxy. Jewish law is, as he puts it in the Groensteen interview, “absurd” and “Jesuitical,” and Judaism is been a good Jew and didn’t see signing anti-Israel petitions often a “teaching of hyperbolic guilt.” The point is made repeatedly in his books, in which strictly ob- as the way to start. servant Jews are portrayed as sanctimonious and foolish, while characters who free themselves from Sfar has, however, taken pains to keep himself uary 2015, demanding that the prestigious annual Jewish tradition tend to be sympathetic. In the first at arm’s length from the Israel-bashing so common celebration of comic book art at Angoulême drop volume of Klezmer, the Talmud prodigy Yaacov is in the worlds of French leftist politics and bandes the Israeli company SodaStream as one of its spon- expelled from his yeshiva, freeing him to declare his dessinées alike. Some years ago, when he was asked, sors. While his political sympathies are left-wing, disbelief in God, express his indifference to Jewish as “a good Jew,” to sign an anti-Israel petition, he Sfar deplores France’s “neurosis about Israel and law and prayer, and take up with a band of lively refused, saying that he had never been a good Jew Palestine” which he sees as an unsavory French musicians. Les Olives noires, set in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period, features the cowardly fanatic Josue, a Jewish nationalist who cares more about the strictures of kashrut (dietary laws are a bête noire of Sfar’s) and the exclusion of Gentiles than about protecting a child. Throughout Sfar’s books, ethics and compassion lie for the most part outside the structures of traditional Judaism. Artistic creativity certainly does: His artists and musicians and writers stand outside of, and often against, their traditional communities. Sfar prefers instead to draw his Jewish characters in fellowship with non-Jews. The rabbi in The Rabbi’s Cat, for instance, is best friends with a Sufi Muslim. (This

The rabbi and the cat. (From the film Le Chat du Rabbin. Courtesy of Autochenille Productions.) makes it all the more ironic that no publisher has dared to publish the Arabic translation of the book.) In Klezmer, the quartet of musicians includes a philo-Semitic Roma guitarist based on Django Re- inhardt, and they are assisted by a rather improb- able Cossack killer with a heart of gold. Of course, the Jewish worlds of Sfar are always fantasies, set in the past but only loosely connected with history. They are at times informed by scholarly works—he has drawn upon the work of Jeffrey Veidlinger and Michel Gurfinkiel, among others— but are more often inspired by tales from his Polish and Algerian grandparents, whom he tends to ro- manticize. (For instance, he uncritically reports his From The Rabbi’s Cat. (© Joann Sfar. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, a division of irreligious grandfather’s claim to have “memorized Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.)

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 9 Winner of the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in History The Golden Age Shtetl A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern

“Petrovsky-Shtern . . . succeeds in vividly evoking a Jewish world that survived not merely in spite of its neighbors but in complex collaboration with them. . . . A moving feat of cultural reclamation and even, in its way, an act of quiet heroism.” —Jonathan Rosen, New York Times Book Review Cloth $29.95 A panel from Klezmer. (© Joann Sfar, used with permission of First Second Books.)

Leaving the attempt “to settle World War Two and the Alge- So where does this leave Sfar as violence contin- Jewish Fold rian war on the cheap.” ues to escalate against the Jews of Europe? How does Conversion and Nevertheless, while Sfar sees Zionism as an un- he draw the Jews of France after the massacre of his Radical Assimilation derstandable Jewish response to anti-Semitism, the colleagues at Charlie Hebdo and, most recently, his in Modern Jewish State of Israel holds no attraction for him. The Rabbi’s fellow French Jews at a kosher grocery? History Cat, for instance, concludes with a story in which Here we must return to the final volume of Todd M. Endelman the characters search for a fabled Jewish homeland Klezmer, which dramatizes Sfar’s suspension be- in the wilderness of Africa. Apart from the cat, the tween an anti-Semitism that makes life for Jews im- two characters who reach this mythical Jerusalem possible in France and the forms of Jewish solidar- are Marc Chagall and the African woman he falls in ity (Orthodoxy and Israel; religion and state) that he love with along the way. They hope to find a place rejects. He writes in the Afterword that the Kishinev where they will be accepted—Jew and black, victims pogroms are a metaphor for the moment in which “An astonishingly comprehensive, lucid, and beautifully crafted work. With sure command of the full range of of anti-Semitism and European racism, respective- Jews must choose whether to stay in Europe or leave early modern and modern Jewish history, Endelman ly. However, the foreboding, Assyrian-esque city’s for Israel. To stay in Europe is to embrace a Judaism casts his net wide in a study that explores every inhabitants—gigantic, blue-skinned, sword-and- that is diasporic, European, cosmopolitan, progres- significant manifestation of radical assimilation in Jewish life over the last several centuries. His superb book is magen-david-toting “Jews who have never left the sive, and cultural rather than religious—all traits that a reminder of the great clarity a first-rate historian can land of their ancestors . . . Happy, balanced people he apparently believes cannot be found in Israel. Yet bring to opening up the past as well as present.” who radiate self-confidence”—expel Chagall and his he recognizes that in choosing Europe one possibly —Steven J. Zipperstein, Stanford University wife. She, after all, is not Jewish and they do not be- chooses destruction. “In 1903, the Jews that left Eu- Cloth $39.50 lieve that he is either, since they have never seen a rope were wrong . . . yet their families survived,” he white-skinned Jew. The couple must make their way writes, while those who remained “and had the truth Analytical in the world, relying on their love for each other. It on their side . . . with rare exceptions died.” requires little interpretive effort to see this as Sfar’s Yet the resolution of this dilemma is one that, Psychology portrayal of Israel, martial, oriental, and alien, and Sfar freely admits, he cannot depict: in Exile which he believes can offer no welcome to a cosmo- The Correspondence politan artist of European background, let alone one [M]y characters go neither to Auschwitz nor to of C. G. Jung and Erich Neumann whose wife, like Sfar’s, is not Jewish. Jerusalem. They are not exterminated, because C. G. Jung & I cannot draw the massacre. They are not in Erich Neumann far’s Klezmer series began as a celebration of an Israel, because that is not my story . . . My Edited and introduced Sidealized diasporic Jewishness, authentic and country is France. The territory where I feel by Martin Liebscher freewheeling, which according to Sfar was utterly de- legitimate is Europe. And klezmer. And all my Translated by stroyed by “the Cossacks and Hitler and Stalin.” Sfar books testify to this alone: the Jews who had Heather McCartney is dismissive of the notion that any of this Jewishness the courage to remain in Europe made a noble might be alive today. Orthodox Jews today, he claims and worthy choice. I write to justify the Jews of “This work is a significant contribution to the field of in the Afterword to the first volume (translated by Europe. They were right. And many died for it. Jung studies. It offers Neumann’s unique perspectives as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who lived first Alexis Siegel), “think the Jewish soul is to be found in in Zurich and then settled in Palestine. Of particular compliance with dietary rules” while he finds Israel And so, at the end of the final volume of interest is Neumann’s dialogue with Jung concerning lacking the spirit of the world of Klezmer: Klezmer, Sfar leaves off just before his characters the archetypes of Jewish culture and Jung’s involvement with psychotherapists who remained in Germany after reach Kishinev, before the moment in which they Hitler came to power.” I love Israel, because it’s a beautiful country and must choose. Their train approaches the city, but it —Geoffrey Campbell Cocks, author of The State of I have family there, but give me a break! Israel never arrives. Health: Illness in Nazi Germany is the opportunity to transform my fellow Jews Philemon Foundation Series into ordinary people: Jewish farmers with a Cloth $35.00 fence around their field, with an army—regular Michael Weingrad is professor of Jewish studies at people, in fact. From a quality of life standpoint Portland State University. His latest book is Letters to See our E-Books at that’s a good thing, but I don’t see what I have America: Selected Poems of Reuven Ben-Yosef press.princeton.edu in common with them. They are far less Jewish (Syracuse University Press), and he writes at than I am. investigationsandfantasies.com.

10 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 Reviews Lincoln and the Jews

BY Adam Kirsch

it is a country founded not on blood but on an idea of the period. But Sarna, who wrote the book’s text, Lincoln and the Jews: A History of freedom. and Shapell, a Civil War collector who provided by Jonathan D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell For American Jews, the question of our relation- many of the documents and artifacts that illus- Thomas Dunne Books, 288 pp., $40 ship to the Civil War is complex. On the one hand, trate it, show that Lincoln encountered a surpris- the vast majority of American Jews are descended ing number of Jews throughout his life. Lincoln and from Eastern European immigrants who arrived the Jews is largely a catalogue of the American Jews whose paths happened to intersect with his, from Why Lincoln was immune from his early career in Springfield, Illinois to his years he Civil War is, even now, the most im- as president and commander-in-chief. Throughout, portant event in American history, but it this conventional prejudice is he seems to have treated them with the benevo- is one to which fewer and fewer Ameri- lence and absence of prejudice one would expect cans can claim a direct familial connec- cause for speculation. from the Great Emancipator. As Sarna summarizes tion.T If your ancestors came to this country after on the book’s last page: He “interacted with Jews, 1865—if your background is Italian or Greek, Puer- here after 1880, and so they have no ancestral con- represented Jews, befriended Jews, admired Jews, to Rican, or Korean—then you probably have no nection to the war. At the same time, as Jonathan commissioned Jews, trusted Jews, defended Jews, relative who took part in the struggle over America’s D. Sarna and Benjamin Shapell amply demonstrate pardoned Jews, took advice from Jews, gave jobs to destiny. But does this mean that you are less con- in Lincoln and the Jews, there was a sizable number Jews, extended rights to Jews . . . His connections nected to American history than if your forebears of Jews in America in the mid-19th century—some to Jews went further and deeper than those of any wore Union blue or Confederate gray? Are you 150,000 by the time Lincoln was elected president previous American president.” less susceptible to the “mystic chords of memory” in 1860, many of them recent immigrants who fled Lincoln’s philo-Semitism is especially notable in of which Abraham Lincoln famously spoke in his Germany in the aftermath of the failed revolution of contrast to his fellow politicians and his own gen- erals. Lincoln and the Jews reproduces a number of letters in which such figures refer to Jews, almost always with a sneer—as when George McClellan, Lin- coln’s battle-shy general and later rival in the 1864 presidential election, finds himself on board a ship unfortunately full of “the sons of Jacob.” Exactly why Lincoln was immune from this conventional prejudice is cause for speculation. Perhaps it is because he grew up in rural Kentucky and Indiana, areas with no Jewish population, and so gained his earliest im- pressions of Jews from the heroic accounts of the Bi- ble, with which he was deeply familiar. (Sarna notes that the Protestant denomination in which Lincoln was raised believed in predestination and was thus indifferent to efforts to proselytize Jews.)

incoln met his first real-life Jews in the mid- A letter from Abraham Lincoln to Abraham Jonas L1830s, when he moved to the Illinois capital acknowledging him as “one of my most valued friends.” of Springfield to serve in the state legislature. They (Courtesy of Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & tended to be small businessmen, clothing retailers, Museum.) Right: Abraham Jonas. (Courtesy of the Wells or department store owners, whom he encoun- Family.) tered as neighbors, constituents, and legal clients. While nothing in particular is known about his re- first inaugural address? Only a mind immune to the lationships with men such as Louis Saltzenstein, a power of historical imagination could answer yes. postmaster whose store the young Lincoln patron- The Civil War continues to make a double claim ized, or Julius Hammerslough, from whom Lin- on the memory of every American, regardless of 1848. This was a small fraction of the nation’s popu- coln bought some suits, such acquaintances show when his or her family became American. The first lation, then 31 million, but it means that if we look that Lincoln was accustomed to dealing with Jews is that the issues about which the war was fought— for Jewish connections to the Civil War, we will find on familiar terms. slavery and sectional division—continue to define plenty of them. Jews fought and died on both sides In one instance, Sarna shows, there was some- American society and politics to this day. It’s impos- of the conflict, at ranks from private to general; they thing more like real friendship. Abraham Jonas was, sible to make sense of quite a few daily headlines served in government in the North (two Pennsylva- like Lincoln, a lawyer and politician who became or election results without knowing about the Civil nia congressmen were Jews) and in the South (Ju- an activist in the newly founded Republican Party. War’s causes and consequences. Second, and even dah P. Benjamin, a former U.S. senator from Louisi- Jonas, it seems, was not especially religious—“on more important, is that at a distance of 150 years, ana, was the Confederate secretary of state). at least one occasion in 1854 he dined openly with no American can claim any living memory of the This means that Lincoln and the Jews is a less Abraham Lincoln and others at an ‘oyster saloon’”— war. To possess it imaginatively today requires the unlikely conjunction than it might first appear. It but he was well known as a Jew in his small town of work of reading and thinking, which are open to cannot be said that Lincoln spent a great deal of Quincy, Illinois. The two Abrahams probably met in anyone, regardless of ancestry. To say otherwise is time thinking about Jews or Judaism, or that Jewish 1843, at a Washington’s Birthday event in the state to deny the very premise of America, which is that questions formed a significant part of the politics capital, and soon Jonas became Lincoln’s political

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 11 ally. Jonas hosted Lincoln during his statewide tour slavery and emancipation in 1858 for the Lincoln-Douglas debates and later stands at the heart of Jew- boosted his candidacy for president. After Lincoln ish history, rabbis could was elected, Jonas reaped his reward in patronage, be found who justified getting a job as postmaster in his hometown of the institution—and not Quincy. While the two men do not seem to have just in the South. Sarna been especially close—surely Lincoln had many po- introduces the reader to litical friends like Jonas—the relationship did help Rabbi Morris Raphall to contribute to Lincoln’s view of Jews as equal citi- of New York’s B’nai Je- zens and ordinary Americans. shurun, who devoted Interestingly, Sarna notes that Jonas urged Re- his sermon on Janu- publican leaders to earn favor with Jewish voters by ary 4, 1861—which blasting the inaction of the Buchanan administra- had been declared a tion over the Mortara Affair. This was the notorious national day of fast- case in which a young Italian-Jewish boy who had ing by President Bu- been baptized without his parents’ knowledge was chanan—to a biblical subsequently abducted from his home and held by defense of slavehold- Catholic authorities who refused to return him to ing. Isaac Mayer Wise his family. “In the free states,” Jonas wrote to Illinois’ was unimpressed Senator Lyman Trumbull, “there are 50,000 Jewish by Lincoln and ap- votes, two thirds of whom vote the democratic tick- palled by the crowds et,” but a strong stand on the Mortara Affair might that gathered in Cin- win them over to the Republican side. This may Issachar Zacharie’s Surgical and Practical Observations on the Diseases of the cinnati to greet the have been the first time in American politics that Human Foot, 1860. (Courtesy of the Shapell Manuscript Collection.) president-elect on a strategist talked about courting the “Jewish vote,” his way to Wash- which, small as it was, could have been significant were Democratic strongholds, and the involvement ington, comparing them to Philistines worshiping in a closely contested election. of many Jews in the clothing trade led them to fear their god Dagon. Lincoln’s personal friendships with Jews did not the disruption of cotton imports should the South se- As president, Lincoln had to pass judgment on lead the majority of Jewish voters to support him in cede. (There was also, perhaps, though Sarna doesn’t many issues involving Jews, from appointments 1860. Some German-Jewish immigrants, who had speculate on it, a certain inherited fear of social dis- and promotions to cases of desertion. Sarna and fled their home country on account of their liberal ruption: Historically, civil wars and ideological strife Shapell chronicle all of these, no matter how minor, politics, continued to fight on the side of progress had boded ill for Jews in Europe.) and show that Lincoln always acted generously and and anti-slavery, becoming Republican stalwarts. Nor, as Sarna points out, were American Jews nec- without prejudice. While General Benjamin Butler But the majority of Jews lived in eastern cities that essarily opposed to slavery. Though the experience of was writing about Jewish smugglers, “They are Jews

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12 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 who betrayed their Savior; & have also betrayed us,” justice that, as soon as he heard about Grant’s im- countermanded. Soon after, a delegation of Jews Lincoln proclaimed to a visitor, “I myself have a re- petuous order, he ordered it revoked. Legend has it came to Washington to thank the president, who gard for the Jews.” He even extended this regard to that when one of the Jewish expellees, Cesar Kaskel, told them that he would permit “no distinction be- a character like Issachar Zacharie, the most colorful tween Jew and Gentile.” figure to appear in Lincoln and the Jews. Zacharie, a Such acts of benevolence helped Lincoln to win chiropodist and con man, managed to use his foot- the support of many Northern Jews who had ini- doctoring skills to win the president’s confidence, tially opposed his election. And when the president whereupon he was entrusted with secret diplomatic was assassinated, the outpouring of grief from Jew- missions to the South. Alas, Zacharie’s dream of ish Americans was intense. As Sarna notes, the day establishing an Army podiatric corps came to noth- Lincoln was shot—April 14, 1865—was a Friday, ing, even though Lincoln took time out of his fren- which meant that the next day was Shabbat. As the zied schedule to give him not one but three hand- news of his death early Saturday morning spread written testimonials. across the country, rabbis were the first clergymen There was only one occasion during the Civil War to eulogize the president. As one Jewish observer when the treatment of Jews actually posed a serious noted, “it was the Israelites’ privilege here . . . to be policy and political issue for Lincoln. This was in De- the first to offer in their places of worship, prayers cember 1862, when Ulysses Grant issued his notori- for the repose of Mr. Lincoln.” Some congregations ous General Order No. 11, expelling “Jews as a class” spontaneously offered a Kaddish prayer for Lincoln, from the territory under his command, from Missis- an unprecedented gesture for mourning a Gentile. sippi to Illinois. It remains the most famous act of of- If, in fact, he was a Gentile: Isaac Mayer Wise, ficial anti-Jewish discrimination in American history. who had disdained Lincoln in 1860, declared in Sarna, who has previously devoted a book to the affair, 1865 that “he supposed himself to be a descendant points out that Grant’s pique had a personal source. of Hebrew parentage,” “bone from our bone and His own father had entered into partnership with flesh from our flesh.” Call it the madness of grief, some Jewish merchants who hoped to take advantage Note from Lincoln to Dr. Zacharie, thanking him but this desire of Jews to claim Lincoln for their own of the family connection to get a permit to purchase for his deep interest in the Union cause, September was a way of demonstrating that being American cotton in Grant’s territory. When Grant banned Jews 19, 1864. (Courtesy of Brown University.) and being Jewish could be complementary parts of from his department, it was less out of religious big- the same identity. To this day, American Jewish life otry than from the widespread belief that the mer- rests on that same promise. chants who traveled to war zones for the purpose of came to the White House to seek Lincoln’s help, he commercial speculation were mostly Jews—as indeed used biblical language: “we have come unto Father many were, just as many Jewish businessmen served Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.” “Whether or Adam Kirsch is a columnist for Tablet and the author the Union Army as sutlers and quartermasters. not such a conversation actually took place,” Sar- most recently of Rocket and Lightship: Essays on It is a sign of Lincoln’s good nature and sense of na writes, General Order No. 11 was immediately Literature and Ideas (W.W. Norton & Company).

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Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 13 Coming with a Lampoon

BY Ruth R. Wisse

assumes a recognizably Jewish family name to erad- love story reveals the condition of their world. We J: A Novel icate the kind of distinctions that presumably led learn that they are damaged in opposite ways, Ai- by Howard Jacobson to what happened—if it happened. That the given linn by the absence of any known family, having Hogarth, 352 pp., $25 names of all the characters are British or Celtic in been picked out “like an orange” from an orphan- origin situates the action somewhere in the fictional age, while Kevern is haunted by a father and mother England of all Jacobson’s fiction, with the adopted who beleaguer him from beyond the grave. He continues to hear his dead mother’s voice as a cry for help, pronouncing his name “Key-vern,” which mi- oward Jacobson’s latest novel really got One is not permitted to speak nus the last consonant is the Hebrew-Yiddish word to me. I have been reading Jacobson of what happened except by keyver, for grave. The complementarity of this man with pleasure since his 1983 debut nov- and woman would appear to make them a perfect el Coming from Behind and was hap- adding “if it happened.” fit; others recognize their affinity before they feel it Hpily surprised when he was awarded the 2010 Man on their own. Both are homespun artists, he a wood Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, although in Jewish patronyms ensuring a permanently irritating turner and she a designer of paper flowers, and they my opinion he ought also to have won it earlier for reminder of what is being denied. express their love through art without words. He his darker novel Kalooki Nights. Jacobson is a world makes her a lovespoon “in which the two of them master of the art of disturbing comedy and each n “breaking” the J code and making explicit could be recognized, entwined, inseparable, carved new work of his advances the genre—this one by a Iwhat the novel never does, I do not in the least from a single piece of wood,” in return for which giant step. lighten its nocturnal atmosphere which is tele- she makes him “a pair of exquisitely comical purple J, or more precisely j , begins with a challenge, graphed in the opening sentence: pansies, a paper likeness of his face in one, hers in first to typesetters and then to readers, to crack the another,” and arranges them so code of the double lines that cross the eponymous that “they stared at each other letter. Kevern “Coco” Cohen’s father would always unremittingly.” Alas, mere words “put two fingers across his mouth, like a tramp suck- are the medium through which ing on a cigarette butt . . . to stifle the letter j before society—and the novel—must it left his lips.” Kevern follows his father’s custom, function. which might have been taken over from his father. When they meet, Ailinn is But if this is a family sport, it is not much fun for the painfully literal, unable to recog- son who would have liked to understand this habit nize let alone grasp the implica- of erasure. As a reader who sees the potential jew tion of Kevern’s wit. He instructs in every jewel, I was certain I grasped what Kevern her in humor. (So as not to alarm doesn’t, but my anxiety then focused on the whys her by overuse of that freighted and wherefores of striking or muzzling that porten- J, he avoids the word joking.) tous consonant. She tells him that she feels con- This novel is situated in the aftermath of “WHAT stantly—eternally—in flight HAPPENED,” a fictional time at about the same from some pursuer, like Herman chronological remove as we are now from the Sho- Melville’s white whale from Cap- ah, whose horrors have been written about, com- tain Ahab. Around such intimate memorated, and mourned by a people schooled revelations they develop lively in such matters since Jerusalem’s destruction at repartee: the hands of the Babylonians. However, unlike the events of the Shoah, WHAT HAPPENED has been “I was going to ask . . . [he says] deliberately and systematically repressed. whether Ahab is a generalized In stark contrast to Jews who transmitted their idea for you or you actually pic- heritage from generation to generation, always ture him coming at you with his focused on their eventual recovery of Zion, the lampoon.” residents of Jacobson’s allegorical territory inherit “Lampoon?” a frightful history they refuse to confront. Deter- “Slip of the tongue. You’ve been mined to create a “harmonious society,” they try to making me nervous. Harpoon.” erase the murderous past for perpetrators, bystand- She stared at him. “You call that ers, and victims alike through strategies of silencing a slip?” and pacification. They look for a final solution to “Why, what would you call it?” the J question by trying to expunge all memory of “A searchlight into your soul.” the evil that was done as a means of stamping out both the evil and those destined to become its vic- Howard Jacobson, September 2014. (© Richard Saker/Contour by She has figured out how his mind tims. One is not permitted to speak of what hap- Getty Images.) works. “You set it a problem and pened except by adding “if it happened,” which at- when it could come up with no tempts to suppress reality itself. Nor may one teach answer, it came up with a joke.” a J about his ancestor Js, as a means of ensuring that Mornings weren’t good for either of them. She also realizes that his obsessions about being in- it will never happen again. Heirlooms and memora- vaded are those of a paranoid who has real enemies. bilia are proscribed. Everyone in this fictional land They are Ailinn Solomons and Kevern Cohen, whose In fact, they are both the objects of pursuit, though

14 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 by pursuers with opposite intentions—Kevern’s aim birth, including in the personal behavior of his fascist resistance. The Jew and his mother were the to complete the deeds of the unmentionable past, “first-generation” parents. There are secrets of all only ones of their family to survive the war, and so while Ailinn’s aim to undo them. kinds in private and public life, but historical era- our Christian hostess insisted on raising their chil- The forces shadowing Kevern in the seaside vil- sure makes it hard to separate genuinely evil deeds dren as Jews as an extension of their “resistance.” lage of Port Reuben have been likened by other from fairly innocent assignations, such as Kevern’s Their boys were circumcised and when their eldest reviewers to East Germany’s STASI or the Big mother apparently had in an unconsummated af- son decided to circumcise his newborn son, she Brother network of George Orwell’s 1984, but they fair with a local butcher. Weighing Kevern down called her mother-in-law to share the good news. appear to be spying less for a state than for a state is the cumulative weight of WHAT HAPPENED, But the Jewish great-grandmother insisted they call it off, saying: Ça“ suffit! It’s enough!” So what’s this about Jacobson’s “disturbing come- Just as the biblical Tamar waylays Judah, the female duo of dy”? My ham-fisted (forgive me) exposition has con- veyed too little of the book’s wit. “This place needs Esme and Ailinn conspire to seduce Kevern for the sake of a cheering up,” Ailinn says when she and Kevern visit a cathedral, and indeed, she picks up the habit of tribe he has no wish to perpetuate. joking as though she were genetically predisposed to it. So she is. Yet it must be said that all the cheer of mind. Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky is which his “harmonious society” and his survivor that she and her author bring into their world is not a teacher of “Benign Visual Arts” who starts out parents forcibly suppressed. The only solution he enough to brighten it. The book is a satire of all the rather liking Kevern, but later rages with mistrust can see is to end their line. unfunny people that surround the novel’s J-crossed of him and holds him responsible when his wife Because Esme persuades Ailinn to perpetuate lovers, anti-Semites ranging from Wagner and his walks out on their marriage. Equally unhinged and her species, Kevern is betrayed by the woman he enthusiasts to local blokes who can’t help baiting overzealous is Detective Inspector Gutkind, him- loves. Just as the biblical Tamar waylays Judah, the Js because that is what they are predisposed to do. self the eventual victim of a murder he doesn’t see female duo of Esme and Ailinn conspire to seduce This society’s homogenizing attempts at self- coming. It seems that everyone in this small village Kevern for the sake of a tribe he has no wish to per- improvement cannot eliminate its malice. Small- is reporting on the residents known as “aphids”— petuate. Whether this constitutes a happy or unhap- er forms of corruption seep back with a ven- those marked as alien not by their genealogical re- py ending may depend on whether one believes that geance: Kissing, for which Jacobson uses the cur- cords (which are taboo as is everything relating to Jews or anti-Jews will win out. rent British slang verb “snogging,” is brutal and the past) but by their distinctive behavior. Neither ugly; marriages are vengeful and ugly; murders Kevern’s gentler nature that earns him his clownish hen I came to the final page of this book, I are coarse and almost random. If I were English, nickname nor his being a native of Port Reuben Wwas reminded of something I had heard 30 I would shudder as Jacobson approached with his make him any less suspect in the eyes of his goyish years ago while on a visit to Paris. We were stay- lampoon. beholders. ing with a Frenchwoman who had met her Jewish And what of the Js? When Ailinn begins to read Ailinn falls under the no less intense scrutiny of husband-to-be when they were both in the anti- about her forebears, the dog-eared books tell her: Esme Nussbaum, a researcher employed by Ofnow, “the non-statutory monitor of the Public Mood.” In the course of studying the effects of the social experiment, Esme discovers “the continuance of low- and medium-level violence in those very areas of the country where its reduction, if not its cessation, was most to have been expected, given the money and energy expended on uprooting it.” The summary of Esme’s report as delivered to her superior enunci- ates its dystopian premise: “The past exists in order that we forget it.” Ofnow requires that the citizenry continually disremember and apologize. Esme, art however, concludes that unless one learns from photogr aphy the past . . . but she is cut off before she can com- architecture modernism plete the thought. Her defiance of Ofnow almost judaica & bibles gets her killed in the kind of staged accident whose holocaust intentionality cannot be proven. As she slowly re- yiddish & hebrew covers the use of her broken body she resolves to foreign language learn what did happen. When she discovers Ailinn olympic games and deduces her origins, she becomes the orphan’s appraisal services unsolicited guardian and reacquaints her with the PICTURESQUE PALESTINE: identity her ward had not known was hers to claim. SINAI AND EGYPT (2 VOLS. COMPLETE) Wilson, Charles W. (ed); Fenn; Woodward Thus the aphid lovers are of equal importance 1881–1883, New York, D. Appleton & Co. First American edition. Authoritative and to two opposing constituencies: those who need descriptive account of the geography, to reconstruct them to recover their prelapsarian history and archaeology of the Levant, along with socio-anthropological world and those who need to destroy them as a observations of Jewish, Christian and Muslim life. Narrative text by eleven means of inhibiting their own need to keep de- renowned British researchers, explorers stroying them. Much as we are invited to enjoy and scholars, organized into 30 geographical sections covering Palestine, the emerging love of this smart and well-matched Egypt and Arabia. Extravagantly illustrated with 40 steel-plate engravings couple, we come to realize that the forces press- after drawings by the masterful Harry ing in on them allow them no private getaway or Fenn and J. D. Woodward, 600 wood engravings and two double-page maps. escape. On one such attempted excursion to the Indexed. Deluxe edition with figurative blind-stamping on brown morocco, gold Necropolis that his parents warned him against lettering, gilt edges, dentelles and marbled endpapers. Includes the first visiting—at this point the text jarringly interjects official modern survey of Jerusalem. “Who wanted to holiday in the environs of Babi Distinguished and engaging. (35048) $2000. Yar?”—Kevern unwittingly learns about the enor- Hebron (detail) by Harry Fenn mity of violence and betrayal that preceded his

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 15 They demanded too much. They set too high a standard. A second writer understood their defining characteristic as a near irresponsible love of the material world, and it was this that • • had landed them in hot water. Offered the mo sa ic spirit, they chose matter. Offered emotion, /mo za’ ik/ J feels less like a book by a 1. of or pertaining to Moses or the laws, faith, writer who went looking for institutions, and writings attributed to him. a subject than the outcry of a subject that was in need 2. an artwork made of small pieces of inlaid stone, tile, marble, glass, etc., forming a patterned whole. of its writer. they chose reason. This one said they were 3. a new web magazine advancing ideas, deeply pious; that one found them profoundly sacrilegious. They were devoted to charity, yet argument, and reasoned judgment they amassed wealth regardless of how they came in all areas of Jewish endeavor. by it. When they weren’t consumed by self-regard they suffered a bruising sense of worthlessness. They saw the universe as a reflection of the God that loved them above all people, but moved through it like strangers.

She recognizes herself in none of this except, slightly, the alienation. Given the depth of her deracina- tion, her only function in the future world of the novel is as fodder for her antagonists. J feels less like a book by a writer who went looking for a subject than the outcry of a subject that was in need of its writer. Europeans composed no Book of Lamentations to record the destruction (self- destruction) of their civilization, leaving it mostly to Jews to document their losses as though theirs was the reckoning that mattered. But nothing had HAPPENED that was not made to happen and Jews were not the agents of that happening, although the temptation to blame them retroactively remains as great as it ever was. The tens of thousands of real and fictionalized survivor testimonies contribute little to our understanding of the forces that gener- ated the destruction of European Jewry. This novel does so by shining a searchlight into the soul of Europe; it functions as the fictional equivalent of Esme’s report to Ofnow. The record of now’s adaptation to then through forcibly harmonizing people To read our recent editions, featuring powerful essays on and indiscriminate apologetics without arduous self-scrutiny shows how the conditions of violence by Jack Wertheimer are reconstituted. the Modern Orthodox culture wars Of course, the British are a special case. Their by matti Friedman habits of obfuscation are different from conti- Israel's ascendant Middle Eastern Jews nental malice, and the atmosphere of this book is by atar hadari that of an island nation, a people that wants to be the Bible's most complicated character decent if only it could figure out how. As a genre, the dystopian novel aims at warning against the worst that can happen. I pray that Jacobson’s may visit us at have some effect, though, as another J once noted, www.mosaicmagazine.com prophets are usually without honor or impact in their own country.

Ruth R. Wisse recently retired from the Martin Peretz Professorship of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University and is currently a distinguished senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund. Her book No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton University Press) has just been released in paperback.

16 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 Jewish Geography

BY JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELIT

peddler’s pack while also hinting slyly at the occa- sequential, too. A catalyst of migration, an agent of Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to sional incongruity between the man and his wares: modernization, the harbinger of news, founding the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged father of hundreds of Jewish settlements through- the Way There are Jew peddlers everywhere traveling out the world, a de-fanger of stereotypes who not by Hasia R. Diner with boxes of haberdashery on their backs, only “exposed people to Jews as real people,” but Yale University Press, 280 pp., $35 cuckoo clocks, sealing wax, quills, weather also dealt with newly emancipated slaves when no glasses, green spectacles, clumsy figures one else would, the Jewish peddler was as influential The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to in plaster of paris, which you see over the as he was ubiquitous. “The world the peddlers and Success in America and the British Empire chimney of an alehouse parlor in the country, their customers forged together constituted a new by Adam D. Mendelsohn or miserable prints of the King and Queen, the chapter in Jewish history, one that made the new New York University Press, 320 pp., $35 Four Seasons, the Cardinal Virtues, the last world different than the old,” Diner writes. Naval Victory, the Prodigal Son, and such like subjects; even the Nativity and the Crucifixion. or all his many virtues, the “Jewman” was not Falways welcomed with open arms. Custom- alt Whitman may have sung the ers (and latter-day historians) might delight in his praises of the open road, but for his Wholesalers of dry goods presence, but legislators, storekeepers, and clerics contemporary, the Jewish peddler did not. The many disturbing examples of anti- shouldering a 160-pound pack as would propel peddlers off into peddler animus that Diner uncovered will be new heW made his way over dusty trails in the Australian to most of her readers. We learn of successful efforts Outback or down country lanes in Wales, that life the wild “like Noah sending to restrict peddling licenses to the native-born, of left a lot to be desired. Peddling, as Hasia Diner’s the dove from the Ark.” the posting of signs whose bold letters screamed latest book, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migra- “No Peddlers Allowed,” and of public demonstra- tions to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged tions and dramatic boycotts like the one that roiled the Way, makes clear, was not an occupation for a Saddled with stuff, the Jewish hawker, or smous Limerick in early 20th-century Ireland. nice Jewish boy. Wherever he and his coreligion- as he was called in South Africa, did more than just That the established Jewish community was not ists went—just about everywhere, it turns out—the peddle. Though the working life of a peddler typi- always well-disposed toward its peddling brethren “Jew peddler” faced challenges that were at once cally lasted no more than a decade—hardly anyone either is another one of Diner’s many revelations. cultural, economic, and meteorological. Staring considered it a proper career—its implications for Peddling was thoroughly enmeshed in the broader down the hostile expressions of those who bristled modern Jewish life, Diner argues persuasively, were Jewish ethnic economy where, Hatzfirah, a Rus- at his rootlessness, let alone his Jewishness; compet- as numerous as the items in his pekl, and as con- sian-Jewish periodical, noted evocatively in 1891, ing with local storeowners who took offense at his wholesalers of dry goods would lack of fixed expenses; traipsing through snowdrifts propel peddlers off into the wild in winter and hiding from the blazing sun in the “like Noah sending the dove from summer—the Jewish peddler, the “slave of the bas- the Ark.” What’s more, many of the ket or the pack; then the lackey of the horse,” did not modern Jewish community’s lead- have an easy time of it. ing lights had once been peddlers You get the sense that Diner, whose substantial themselves. All the same, thinking and wide-ranging body of work encompasses a study ill of coreligionists on the move was of American foodways, as well as an inquiry into the not uncommon, while attempts to public culture of Holocaust remembrance, is rooting “exterminate peddling,” as the Jew- for these itinerant purveyors of goods and ideas, de- ish Alliance of America infelicitous- termined to rescue them from the shadows to which ly declared in 1890, by encouraging both economics and history have consigned them. farming and other more sedentary Deeply and richly researched, festooned with color- pursuits, were thick on the ground. ful detail, her account follows their peregrinations By highlighting the centrality of as they cut a wide geographical swath through the peddling to the modern Jewish ex- United States and South Africa, the Caribbean, and perience, Diner’s account prompts Latin America of the 19th and 20th centuries. us to take the measure of its global What renders the narrative particularly fresh reach. An exercise in transnational and compelling is its sensitivity to the fundamental history, her book also reflects the tension that lies at the heart of peddling: A bundle recent economic turn in Jewish of contradictions, these men (and they were almost studies, whose sophisticated un- all men) were strangers who trafficked in intimacy. derstanding of the marketplace has, Crossing a threshold which, under ordinary circum- of late, invigorated the field. Still, I stances, would be closed to them, they insinuated could not help wonder whether our themselves into the lives of their customers. Peddlers understanding of the far-flung phe- stoked and satisfied a desire for possessions: mirrors, nomenon of peddling might have eyeglasses, buttons, picture frames, bedspreads, sus- been enhanced had the people who penders, and statues of the Virgin Mary. Diner quotes move in and out of the volume’s pag- the early 19th-century English poet Robert South- “Old clothes” man selling his wares to a gentleman at his home, ca. es been more fully fleshed out and ey who disdainfully cataloged the contents of the 1820. (Courtesy of the Jewish Museum, London.) realized. All too often, they don’t

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 17 inhabit the narrative as much as illustrate a point. tle-known, corners of a global exchange based on opening acts,” Mendelsohn chides, adding “the role Writing, for instance, about Julius Meyer, whose kinship and the Jewish collective. Focusing on the of earlier immigrants in opening the arena and de- dealings with the Pawnee earned him the sobriquet “old clo” man and other unsung heroes of Jewish signing the props essential for the success of the later of “Box-Ka-Re-Sha-Hash-Ta-Ka,” Diner simply tells history, Mendelsohn’s objective is to revamp, or, drama has not been fully recognized.” us that he “helped stimulate a market for Indian arts as the lingo of the market in second-hand goods To make his case, he marshals a stunning array of and crafts around the world.” Surely more could be would have it, “renovate,” our understanding of the sources, whose ranks include the writings of Dickens made of the “curly-headed white chief who speaks past. “This attention to ‘old clo’ dealers is one of the and a dictionary of British slang, petitions to the lord with one tongue.” ways this volume cuts, crimps and reworks several mayor of London, 19th-century travel literature and ad- The same goes for the material culture that is pieces of the standard narrative of the economic vertisements galore, among them this amusing piece at the heart of the story Diner tells. Thanks to her history of the Jews in England and the United of doggerel, courtesy of the house of E. Moses & Son: eye for detail, we come away with a clear sense of States,” he writes, drawing heavily and character- the peddler’s inventory. Less fully developed or sus- istically on verbs that trumpet his subject’s roots in A dress coat, if it fit too tight/Will make the tained is its larger meaning. How Jewish peddlers the making of things to wear. wearer look a fright./ obtained their wares and distributed them is fasci- Shuttling between Petticoat Lane in London and And if the garment fit too loose, /It scarcely is nating, to be sure; of equal moment, I should think, Chatham Street in New York, between that self-styled of any use. is what the growing availability of eyeglasses and “Eldorado on the shores of the Pacific,” a rosy-eyed mirrors, photographs, and trinkets betokened. This reference to California, and an auction mart in Mel- Exhaustively and imaginatively researched, is, after all, a study in the circulation of goods. Now bourne, which, wrote one disgruntled eyewitness, Mendelsohn’s book is replete with detail—so much and again, it seemed if Diner was just about to go “might have been mistaken for a Jewish synagogue,” so that at times the reader gets lost. The text sprawls down that road, writing effectively, for example, of Mendelsohn vividly documents the process by which in narrative ways as well and would have benefited the ways in which the sale of spectacles promoted clothing made the rounds. Well before globalization greatly from a much tighter structure. That it, too, literacy. But what about the rest of it? How did own- became the darling of the contemporary academic like Diner’s account, ultimately treats clothing more

J. Minsky, tailor’s trimmings, Aldgate, East End, ca. 1905. (Courtesy of Jewish East End Celebration Society.)

curriculum, the Jews made it a common practice. as an economic object of exchange than as an inde- As wide-ranging in scope as the ambitions of Elias pendent cultural phenomenon was a further source Postcard depicting a merchant by H. Goldberg from Moses and Joseph Seligman, whose transmogrifica- of disappointment. the “Jewish Livelihoods” series. (Courtesy of the tion from itinerant peddlers into respectable bankers And yet, for all the snags in its fabric, The Rag William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection, Special underscores the book’s main theme—the “alchemy” Race is a remarkable achievement, a testament to the Collections, College of Charleston.) of success—this study situates the nascent apparel vitality of the historical imagination. So, too, is Roads trade within such varied contexts as the California Taken, an exhilarating display of research and syn- ing and gazing into a mirror promote a sense of the gold rush, the development of the British Empire, thesis. While each volume stands tall on its own, they self? And what of color and texture that enlivened and Civil War procurement practices. Were it not are even more profitably read together. They remind one’s surroundings? Or the pursuit of fashion and for the presence of Jewish peddlers or “Jehudem,” us that the volatile and complex world of fashion can novelty that quickened the appetite? who, like Levi Strauss, plied their trade in the min- find a home in the academy as well as on the street. ing camps outside of San Francisco; the Jewish cloth- he Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Suc- iers who sold “emigrant outfits” to those who sought Tcess in America and the British Empire, Adam their fortunes in Australia; or the participation of Jenna Weissman Joselit is the Charles E. Smith Professor Mendelsohn’s first book, reckons directly with the Jewish wholesalers from Cincinnati in outfitting of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at The George discarded rags, second-hand clothes and spit-and- Union troops with hats and boots, jackets and pants, Washington University, where she directs its master’s polish uniforms that fill its pages. An inquiry into the modern garment industry as we know it would program in Jewish cultural arts and co-directs its program the wellspring of modern Jewish economic suc- not have come into being. “…To begin a discussion in experiential education and Jewish cultural arts. She is cess, it attends to the origins of the garment in- of Jews and the clothing trade in America with the the author of A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the dustry, poking around in the dusty, and often lit- sweatshop is like presenting a stage play without its Promise of America (Metropolitan Books).

18 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 SPONSORED CONTENT A Great Novel of the American Jewish Experience: Prayers for the Living Adapted from Tova Mirvis’ Foreword to Prayers for the Living by Alan Cheuse (Fig Tree Books, 2015) Tova Mirvis is the author of three novels: Visible City, The Outside World, and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller.

hen a recent move Manny sent while away at school, and goes. The pieces. The pattern. What and storied cast of Jewish mothers. required me to pack other material is gathered on the sly, happens next,” Minnie agonizes, re- But while she shares many of the pre- and unpack all my for which Minnie expresses no apolo- calling her husband’s demise. sumably worst qualities attributed to books, I seized the gies. Reading the private writings of Young Manny begins studies with this group—she too can be called in- opportunityW to reassess my literary her daughter-in-law, for example, she the rabbi, who tells him, “Your father trusive, overbearing, self-centered— real estate. I situated the books I love says, indignantly, “What do you mean died like a goy and you’re helping to Cheuse wrests open these words to in prime real estate. In the Jewish part you don’t want to snoop? This is not make him a Jew.” The father’s dilem- find the empathic center. If Portnoy’s of town, a selection of Yiddish writers snooping, snooping is something else. ma is visited on the son: “Did he want mother was skewered for an intru- gave way to the great American Jews; This is learning.” to live a life dedicated to study? Or did sion born of consuming anxiety, Israelis reside one shelf away, and to This is a novel of immigration. he want to live a life in which he could Minnie’s intrusiveness seems forged assuage my discomfort at shelving Newly arrived in America, Minnie’s use the talents he inherited from his primarily of love. If Minnie comes Jews only with Jews, these clusters are husband Jacob, a “dreamer and hard- father? . . . He heard a voice in his off as controlling, it is only out of a interrupted by a row of favorite nov- working peddler all in one,” decides, as head telling him, both! Choose both!” desire to steady her family’s careen- els. I read Prayers for the Living the did so many immigrants, to work on Whether he can choose both is ing lives. same weekend this arranging took the Sabbath, setting into motion one one of the novel’s central questions. If the redeeming power in this place, wondering: Where does this of the central questions of the novel: Is Jewish law to be lived in a vacuum, novel is motherly love, the corrupt- book fit in the landscape of American away from the world? Does the rabbi ing powers are business and money and American Jewish fiction? reside on high, upon a dais such as and greed. Manny rises higher than Prayers for the Living could live the one on which Manny stands as his father could have imagined. What happily next to Philip Roth’s American the book opens on Yom Kippur? In a distinctly American story, and an Pastoral for its intensity and scope; the biblical ren- American Jewish story—the fruit with its rendering of immigrant ex- dering of Yom peddler’s son who rises to own an en- perience, it ought to dwell in proxim- Kippur, the high tire banana-producing country. But as ity to Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers; priest wears a always, there are no simple stories of its rich descriptive power suggests it red thread that arrival or success. would share space well with Jonathan turns white, sin All the characters are damaged— Franzen’s The Corrections. Prayers for expunged, holi- and if there is redemption here, it is in the Living is a novel with the weight of ness affirmed; the act of telling a story that is ruth- legend, the feel of myth. In this story in this Yom Kip- lessly honest and unsparing. This is a of the rise and fall of Manny Bloch, pur, the rabbi novel, in the end, about the ways our a rabbi turned business mogul, Alan stands on the lives inevitably crash into one anoth- Cheuse explores the shedding of tra- podium, experi- er. Prayers for the Living offers a vision dition and the return to it; the immi- ences a vision delivered by a bird, and of harsh beauty and for its wrench- grant’s travails; and the complexities he falls and he falls. But even as this ing honesty, for its simultaneous inti- of success, which brings its own bur- dichotomy is framed, the book argues macy and wide scope, for the power dens. The novel asks a dazzling array Prayers for the Living and Alan with the division between the world of of its soaring language, it deserves to of questions about living a life of the Cheuse, above. the spirit and the world of the everyday. live among the great novels of Jewish spirit or of the world, about order and And yet, even as Minnie is will- American experience. randomness, about the long shadow ing to argue with God, some of her of the Holocaust, about silence in the Is it possible to be both “rich and prayers are as raw and wrenching as Alan Cheuse has been reviewing books face of injustice, and about families blessed”? If you work on the Sabbath, any imaginable. Most forcefully, she on National Public Radio’s All Things connected and estranged. a rabbi tells Jacob, you will wander, speaks as a mother. “I make this si- Considered since the 1980s. He is the au- At the book’s heart is Minnie and your son will wander. “I’m going lent request of you, God, whoever thor of five novels, half a dozen collections Bloch, mother of Manny, grandmoth- to wander up to Union Square, that’s You are, wherever You are—a burn- of short stories and novellas, and the er of Sarah. She speaks in a Yiddish- where I’ll wander, so I can sell enough ing bush, a naked back, a cry in the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. inflected, Jewish mother’s voice that bananas to buy this boy a winter coat,” night, a great big white, flapping, is funny and endearing; it feels famil- Jacob tells the rabbi in one example winged bird. Whoever. Whatever. iar without veering into stereotype; of the book’s irreverent humor. And Dear God. Please keep my children it moves seamlessly from the quip to then, the sinner’s worst nightmare: from harm.” This last sentiment— the deepest emotional registers. As the God whom you defy is indeed please keep my children from harm—is Minnie says, she has arrived at an watching over you and punishes you uttered in varied ways throughout the On Sale March 17 age when “we can eat and weep at the for your transgression. In Jacob’s case, book, even as it proves ultimately to Read the first chapter for free at same time.” punishment comes in the form of a be a futile plea. No one can be kept www.FigTreeBooks.net Some of what Minnie tells is based toppled milk cart, which crushes him from harm here, because to live is to on recollected conversation. Some in- to death while his son Manny looks be inevitably harmed. Follow us @FigTreeBks formation is based on letters her son on. “The way a life breaks. The way life Indeed, Minnie belongs to a long The Abrams Case and Justice Holmes' Philo-Semitism

BY Gary Stein

ceptance in the marketplace of legal ideas and came tates growth in economic markets. The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell to represent the majority view of the Supreme Court. Yet in Professor Healy’s retelling, Holmes’ Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed Why Holmes changed his mind has long been transformation was as much a change of heart as a the History of Free Speech in America a source of fascination and puzzlement for legal change of mind, and for that Laski bears even great- by Thomas Healy scholars. In The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wen- er responsibility. The decisive factor in that transfor- Picador, 352 pp., $20 dell Holmes Changed His Mind—and Changed the mation, Healy suggests, was a campaign to banish History of Free Speech in America Thomas Healy, Laski from Harvard for his left-wing views. In the a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law fall of 1919, Laski created an uproar by vocally sup- and former journalist, has given us a highly read- porting an unpopular strike by the Boston police n 1919 Oliver Wendell Holmes changed his able and thought-provoking account of this impor- force. Denunciations from the press, the Boston es- mind and in so doing transformed the law of tant moment in American constitutional history. tablishment, and wealthy Harvard alumni followed, free speech. Before his famous dissenting opin- Like scholars before him, Healy draws heavily on along with calls that Laski be fired. A few days be- ion in Abrams v. United States, the Supreme Holmes’ contemporaneous correspondence with fore Abrams was decided, Laski asked Holmes if he CourtI justice had shown little interest in a speech- several progressive intellectuals who, as prosecu- would write an article on toleration for The Atlantic protective approach to the First Amendment. That tions of wartime protestors mounted, sought to Monthly, which would aid Laski’s defense. That re- same year Holmes had authored a trilogy of unani- move Holmes toward a more liberal position on free quest was made at the suggestion of future Supreme mous decisions for the Court upholding the criminal speech. Prominent among these was the British- Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, another Jewish convictions of Philadelphia socialist Charles Schenck, Jewish political scientist Harold Laski, then only in Holmes acolyte then teaching at Harvard. Missouri newspaper publisher Jacob Frohwerk, and his mid-20s and teaching at Harvard. (Laski would While Holmes did not share Laski’s political perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Eu- views, he had grown extremely fond of him gene Debs for protesting America’s involvement in personally. The two summered near one an- World War I. This was in line with the abiding te- other on the North Shore of Boston, and net of Holmes’ overall constitutional philosophy: a Holmes took “the greatest pleasure” in Laski’s fatalistic (some say nihilistic) deference to the pre- conversation. As well he might: Immensely rogatives of the democratic majority, no matter how learned and extraordinarily agreeable, Laski wrong-headed the majority might be. displayed, as Edmund Wilson once observed, When Abrams came before the Court in the fall a “genuine emotion of piety” towards Holmes, of 1919, it would have been reasonable to expect some 52 years his senior. For both the child- Holmes to view the case through the same lens. less Holmes and the non-observant Laski, The defendants were five Russian-born Jewish an- estranged from his own Orthodox father, archists prosecuted for distributing leaflets in New their association took on the psychological York City (both in English and in Yiddish) urging dynamics of a father-son relationship. Healy workers’ strikes at munitions factories. Targeted at hypothesizes that empathy for Laski, “the son the Wilson administration’s opposition to the new [Holmes] never had,” is what finally pushed Bolshevik government in Russia, the leaflets none- Holmes into the pro–free speech camp: theless were distributed while the United States was at war with Germany and were deemed a potential For what had been merely an abstract interference with the war effort. In Red Scare, post- question for Holmes over the past year was, armistice America, the Abrams defendants could suddenly, concrete and personal. The face of expect little sympathy in the courts. A 7-2 majority free speech was no longer Eugene Debs, the of the Supreme Court showed them none, affirming dangerous socialist agitator. It was his good their convictions and rejecting their First Amend- friend Harold Laski, and Holmes’s views ment arguments on the strength of Holmes’ reason- shifted accordingly—and dramatically. ing in the Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs cases. Yet Holmes himself—joined by Justice Louis Holmes never wrote the article for The Brandeis—disagreed. “Persecution for the expres- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ca. 1924. (Courtesy of the Atlantic Monthly. But Healy contends that he sion of opinions seems to me perfectly logical,” the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) wrote his Abrams dissent as a kind of sub- seminal passage of Holmes’ dissent began. “But,” it stitute. Contemporaneous evidence from continued, “when men have realized that time has go on to briefly chair the Labour Party after World Holmes supports that contention. In a November upset many fighting faiths”—in other words, that War II and clash with Foreign Secretary Ernest 1, 1919 letter to Frankfurter, Holmes explained that the persecutors are often proven wrong—“they may Bevin over the latter’s anti-Zionist Palestine policy.) although he was “too busy” to write the proposed come to believe even more than they believe the very It was at Laski’s suggestion that Holmes read a new article, “Just now I am full of a tentative statement foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate biography of Adam Smith and re-read John Stuart that may see light later on kindred themes to your good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas— Mill’s On Liberty. These works, according to Healy, subject.” In fact, he had just completed his Abrams that the best test of truth is the power of the thought inspired the intellectual rationale of the Abrams dis- dissent and sent it off to the printer. to get itself accepted in the competition of the mar- sent and in particular the now-familiar metaphor of ket.” Ultimately (as if to prove the validity of its own a marketplace of ideas where free speech facilitates ealy’s insight gives rise to an intriguing ques- major premise), Holmes’ dissenting opinion won ac- the discovery of truth, much like free trade facili- Htion that Healy touches upon but does not

20 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 directly explore. As Healy notes, anti-Semitism dice against Frankfurter; I think partly because he (as Holmes’ philo-Semitism is something of a cu- was “prevalent” at Harvard at the time, and it was well as Laski) is a Jew.” As for himself, Holmes told riosity. As a Boston Brahmin, Holmes might have perceived as a motivating force behind the anti- Pollock: “It never occurs to me until after the event been expected to share the anti-Jewish prejudices of Laski campaign, as well as a similar campaign in that a man I like is a Jew, nor do I care, when I real- his social class. Holmes’ grandfather advocated con- the spring of 1919 to banish Frankfurter for his ize it.” That same month Holmes asked Laski why he verting Jews to Christianity. Holmes’ father, himself supposedly radical views, as well as an attempt and Frankfurter were encountering such opposition, a famous physician and popular writer, admitted that year to oust yet a third Jewish professor, phi- and Laski replied by relaying a colleague’s view that, growing up “inheriting the traditional idea that [the losopher Harry Sheffer. (There were only five Jews on the entire Harvard faculty at the time.) When Laski was nominated for membership in the Har- When Laski was nominated for membership in the Harvard Club vard Club in early 1919, the membership commit- in early 1919, the membership committee deemed it tee deemed it necessary to conduct further due diligence on him because, as the club secretary ex- necessary to conduct further due diligence on him because, plained in a letter, “Mr. Laski is a Jew.” During the police strike firestorm, one alumnus as the club secretary explained, “Mr. Laski is a Jew.” told Harvard President A. Lawrence Lovell (himself known to harbor anti-Jewish sentiments) that at least in Frankfurter’s case, “it is antisemitism.” Jews] were a race lying under a curse for their obsti- if a “Russian Jew” and “out-and-out Bolshevik” like Historians have often noted that Holmes did not nacy in refusing the gospel” and “shar[ing] more or Laski remained on the faculty, he would refuse to share the anti-Semitism common in his day. To the less the prevailing prejudices against the persecuted contribute to the university’s endowment campaign. contrary, he formed friendships with many Jewish race.” (Later in life, Holmes’ father experienced an And in January 1920, The Harvard Lampoon de- intellectuals for whom, according to Edmund Wil- epiphany while seated between two Jews at the the- voted an entire issue to vilifying Laski in 16 pages son, he “felt a special affinity”: not only Laski and ater and became a proponent of religious toleration.) Even Holmes’ wife of more than five decades, Fanny, disagreed with him on the subject of Jews: “‘She calls them Keiks and how can I bother with them,’” a friend once re- called Holmes saying, “‘but I never notice their noses, it’s their conversation I like!!!’” Holmes, whose views of human nature were shaped by the brutality of his Civil War experiences, was also deeply influenced by So- cial Darwinism. “The real Holmes,” as he was unkindly judged by the late Yale law professor Grant Gilmore, “was savage, harsh, and cru- el, a bitter and lifelong pes- simist who saw in the course Socialist handing out pamphlets in Union Square, New York, ca. 1908. of human life nothing but a (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose of anti-Semitic “poems, plays, cartoons, songs, and Frankfurter but their will on the poor and articles” mocking him as “Professor Moses Smar- also Brandeis, the A page from the January 1920 issue of The Harvard weak.” Black causes did not telickoff.” A few months later Laski resigned from philosopher Mor- Lampoon throughout which Harold Laski is mocked fare particularly well before Harvard and returned to England, confiding in Ber- ris Raphael Co- and vilifed. (From the collection of the Harvard Holmes, who voted repeat- trand Russell that he was “heartily sick of America” hen, the journalist University Archives.) edly to uphold segregationist and eager to be in a land “where an ox does not Walter Lippmann, legislation. Yet Holmes, him- tread upon the tongue.” and the diplomat Lewis Einstein. “When I think of self agnostic in matters of religion, seemed to treat Could Holmes’ reaction to anti-Semitism have how many of the younger men that have warmed Jews as equals and react adversely to discrimina- played some role in his historic shift in Abrams? If, as my heart have been Jews,” Holmes once told Laski, tion against them. Healy posits, Laski became the “face of free speech” “I cannot but suspect” that “loveableness is a char- Four years before Abrams, Holmes had stood up for Holmes when writing his dissent, it follows that acteristic of the better class of Jews.” for Leo Frank, the unfortunate Jewish Atlanta facto- the face of repression hovering in Holmes’ subcon- This was an era when an avowed anti-Semite, ry manager falsely accused of murdering a 13-year- scious may have been the anti-Semitism that sought James McReynolds, could sit on the Supreme Court old girl and convicted at a trial conducted in the to silence Laski (as well as Frankfurter). And if so, and refuse to talk to (or even be photographed with) shadow of an angry anti-Semitic mob. A majority this might help explain why Holmes viewed Laski’s another justice, Brandeis, simply because Brandeis of the Supreme Court refused to entertain Frank’s plight, and that of the Abrams defendants, differ- was a Jew. By contrast Holmes welcomed Brandeis application for habeas corpus relief. Dissenting (this ently than the seemingly similarly situated dissenters and his “hopeful attitude toward the future that time joined only by Justice Charles Evans Hughes— in Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs. Certainly Holmes seems characteristic of his race,” and the two men Brandeis was not yet on the court), Holmes decried was aware of the anti-Jewish prejudice directed at went on to form one of the Court’s most historically Frank’s conviction as the product of “the passions his two young Harvard friends. In an April 5, 1919 significant collaborations. “To me it is queer to see of the mob” and “lynch law.” (Shortly thereafter letter, Holmes asked English legal scholar Frederick the wide-spread prejudice against the Jews,” Holmes Frank was, in fact, lynched after Georgia’s gover- Pollock if he knew Laski, adding: “People in Boston once remarked to Pollock while praising Brandeis. nor commuted his death sentence.) In correspon- seem to have got the idea that he is a dangerous man “I never think of the nationality and might even get dence, Holmes described his opinion as “a dissent (they used to think me one) . . . There is also a preju- thick with a man before noticing that he is a Hebrew.” as to which I feel a good deal” and characterized

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 21 to sit down, complaining “the Lord knows I can not out-talk a Jew.” At sentencing, Clayton contrasted the defendants with “our good, free American Jew- ish citizens” who understood the virtues of capital- ism, offering the irrelevant aside that previously For all its philosophical abstraction, the Abrams dissent radiates an undercurrent of empathy. “the Irish had all of the offices and the Jews had the money,” but now Jews “actually have taken some of the offices away from the Irish.” Clayton sentenced Abrams and two of his co-defendants to the maxi- mum prison term of 20 years. In his Abrams dissent, Holmes went out of his way to criticize Clayton’s sentences, which, as Healy notes, were not even at issue before the Court. Even Labor Parade, New York, ca. 1915. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and if properly convicted, Holmes wrote, “these poor Photographs Division.) and puny anonymities” were deserving of only “the most nominal punishment.” The harsh sen- Frank as “a Jew convicted of murder in Georgia af- Healy, Clayton could not conceal his contempt tences effectively made the defendants “suffer not ter a trial that we thought a farce.” for the cadre of Jewish revolutionaries before him, for what the indictment alleges but for the creed who had arrived from Russia only a few years ear- they avow”—a creed that “no one has a right even he Abrams defendants were also Jewish (al- lier. When Jacob Abrams, testifying in his distinct to consider in dealing with the charges before the Tthough, like Laski, non-observant), and anti- Yiddish accent, referred to “our forefathers of the Court.” Holmes’ insistence that the defendants’ Semitism infected their case as well. Although American Revolution,” Clayton, a fifth-generation “creed”—what they thought and believed—was their trial took place in federal court in Manhat- American, immediately cut him off. “Your what?” strictly off limits (“no one has a right even to con- tan, the presiding judge was a pinch-hitter from he asked incredulously. “Do you mean to refer to sider” it) is a powerful expression of the principle of down South, Henry DeLamar Clayton, Jr., brought the fathers of this nation as your forefathers?” An- toleration. Although Holmes was apparently refer- in to help out with a case backlog. An “Alabama noyed at defense lawyer Harry Weinberger’s persis- ring to the defendants’ political “creed,” there is an bigot” and “apologist for slavery” as described by tence in a line of questioning, Clayton ordered him obvious parallel to be drawn with Holmes’ religion- blind approach in dealing with Jews, which likewise gave no consideration to their religious “creed.” Legal scholars have long struggled to make sense of Holmes’ Abrams dissent, both because of NEW FROM THE TOBY PRESS its seeming inconsistency with Holmes’ prior free speech opinions and because of its doctrinal in- coherence. The opinion advances a quintessential liberal humanist goal—toleration for the opinions ЖЕЛЕЗНЫЙ ЗАНАВЕС Judaism / Jewish Life / Personal Memoirs

John Lennon W Open Up the Iron Door of others—while seeming to lack a liberal human- eiss and the Jews Memoirs of a Soviet ist soul. Rather than proclaim any individual right

A Philosophical Jewry Activist to self-expression, Holmes instead emphasized the IRON DOO OPEN UP THE A kgb officer once taunted famed Prisoner of Zion Anatoly (Natan) OPEN UP THE Sharansky in the Gulag by saying that the only people concerned for him were ЖЕЛЕЗНЫЙ ЗАНАВЕС “students and housewives.” But it was precisely this grassroots movement of societal interest in promoting the search for truth in Rampage students and housewives, and every ordinary yet extraordinary Jew, which helped force open the Kremlin’s iron doors. IRON DOORR Avi Weiss Spurred by a philosophy of spiritual activism, Rabbi Avi Weiss helped Memoirs of a Soviet Jewry Activist spearhead the Soviet Jewry freedom movement, one of the most effective community struggles of the twentieth century, proving that the love of a a marketplace of ideas. Given Holmes’ abhorrence fellow Jew knows no boundaries – physical or spiritual, political or social. R

Ze’ev MaghenIn Open Up the Iron Door, Rabbi Weiss writes a powerful memoir, giving the reader an inspiring front-seat look at the seemingly-insurmountable Rabbi avi Weiss Reflections on the challenges obstacles of the Soviet Jewry freedom movement. Written with the devotion and tenacity of a successful social activist, Weiss recalls how determination of natural law doctrines centered on individual and passion ultimately changed the course of history forever.

Advance Reader’s Copy For bound books, please contact: [email protected] rights, that is not surprising. But it is hard to square “A dazzling intellectualBooksellers and triumphs of the Student We’d be pleased to have your comments on this book. Please write to [email protected] ISBN 978 1 59264 385 1 USA $24.95 hardcoverUSA $29.95 amusement park.” Pub Date: FebCAN 15,$33.95 2015 CANADA $27.95 with Holmes’ longtime pragmatic epistemological COMING SOON! Struggle for Soviet Jewry. - The Jerusalem Post stance, which held that “truth” comprises nothing more than what the dominant majority believes. For all its philosophical abstraction, the Abrams

Jewish History dissent radiates an undercurrent of empathy.

This collection of brilliant and never-before-published essays by six Menachem Begin’s Two Scholars Who of the most perceptive observers of Jewish and American life gives fresh insight into the personal, political, and religious character of Holmes himself probably would have denied that. one of Israel’s most remarkable and controversial figures. Menachem Begin’s Zionist Legacy explains Begin’s “unabashed and Zionist Legacy Were in Our Town unapologetic commitment to his people before any others,” the misunderstood relationship between Begin and his mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky, why Begin was detested by his rival David Ben-Gurion, But he too sensed that his stated reasoning was and the true role of Jimmy Carter in the process leading up to the Camp David Accords, and more. and Other Novellas With never-before- incomplete, acknowledging in the last sentence of Menachem Begin was one of the most transformative figures in the shaping of modern Israel. His Zionism was firmly rooted in the ancient traditions of his people, which enabled him to be an effective leader with a common touch. With great insight and vigor, the essays in this volume reveal the published essays on scope of his historical vision and the depth of his commitment. I highly S.Y. Agnon the dissent: “I regret that I cannot put into more recommend this volume not only for those who care about Israel’s future, but for anyone interested in leadership and character.

Ambassador Yehuda Avner Author of The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership one of Israel’s most This debut translation in impressive words my belief that in their conviction controversial figures. upon this indictment the defendants were deprived English weaves folklore of their rights under the Constitution of the United

ISBN 978-1-59264-415-5 51995 www.tobypress.com and aggada into modern USA $19.95 CAN $ 21.95 9 781592 644155 Published in conjunction with States.” What was it that Holmes intuited but was Mosaic & Yeshiva University. literature. unable to articulate? The answer may well be that Holmes felt a very human impulse to protect victims of those prejudices—like anti-Semitism—that to him were incomprehensible. www.tobypress.com www.korenpub.com Gary Stein is a lawyer in private practice in New York City.

22 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 Lands of the Free

BY Allan Arkush

meetings called by Lenin. “He had very discreet Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO), which had Jews & Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on ways of doing it,” his son remembered. “He folded up its tent not long after the establishment of Jewish Peoplehood in Europe & the United would get up as if to stretch his legs, lean, and the British Mandate for Palestine. States cover his head with hand. But you knew he was Rovner follows in the footsteps (quite literally, edited by Simon Rabinovitch Brandeis University Press, 296 pp. $26 In April 1947, the Dutch governor of Suriname agreed to Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in permit large-scale Jewish colonization “with rights of Habsburg Galicia by Joshua Shanes autonomy in local government” in part of the colony. Cambridge University Press, 336 pp., $29.99

Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism silently running through the prayers, which he with a lot of zest and a friend who took plenty of and Autonomy in Late Imperial and knew by heart. He never missed it.” pictures) of Steinberg and the other Freelanders as Revolutionary Russia they roamed large parts of Africa, Latin America, by Simon Rabinovitch But he didn’t stick around long either. By March and Australia in search of a territory that would Stanford University Press, 392 pp., $65 1918 he was out of the government, and soon there- serve their purposes in the years prior to World The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and after he fled the Soviet Union (taking with him the War II, during the war, and even after the war. They Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe above-quoted son, who would grow up to become achieved their greatest success in April 1947, when the legendary art historian Leo Steinberg). the Dutch governor of Suriname agreed to permit by Joshua M. Karlip Resettled in Germany, Steinberg devoted himself large-scale Jewish colonization “with rights of au- Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $45 to scholarship and literature (he played an impor- tonomy in local government” in the Saramacca dis- In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands tant role in setting up YIVO) until Hitler took over. trict of the colony. This was too late, of course, to be Before Israel Fortunately, he was lecturing in London in early of any use to the Jews threatened by Nazism, whom by Adam L. Rovner 1933, out of reach of the goons who were tasked the Freelanders had once been desperately eager New York University Press, 352 pp., $35 to rescue. And it was also a time when the Zionist movement, in command of world Jewry and on the brink of achieving its goals, looked askance at any plans that might divert survivors of the Holocaust from Palestine. nowing that the Jews have recovered The prominent American Zionist leader Stephen their homeland, however contested it S. Wise had played a part in helping Steinberg enter remains, makes it almost as entertaining the United States in 1941 (not an easy matter for a as it is painful to look back on the unsuc- former Soviet official). But by 1948 he regarded him cessful search for an alternative in the first half of as an enemy. “I personally believe,” he cabled to a Kth the 20 century, when Palestine seemed unattain- friend, “that Steinberg should be lynched or hanged able or insufficient. It is still sad to watch the ter- in quarters, if that would make his lamented de- ritorialists engage in their wild goose chases all over mise more certain. He represents a combination of the globe at a time when multitudes of Jews were a Messiah complex and anti-Zionism, that appeals, in need of a place, any place, to go. But it is also en- understandably, to many Jews.” As Rovner astutely trancing to read about the idealists and adventur- comments, “For Wise, one of the founders of the ers who prowled through chanceries and jungles in NAACP, ‘lynching’ was not an empty image.” Need- their efforts to outdo Theodor Herzl and his succes- less to say, nobody was strung up, but the Dutch sors and find the Jews a refuge in a land that was government, apparently under Zionist pressure, “uninhabited or scarcely populated so as to avoid seems to have compelled the local authorities in Su- competition with the native population.” riname to suspend negotiations with the Freeland Take, for instance, Dr. Isaac Nachman Steinberg, League at the end of 1948. the man Adam Rovner describes in In the Shadow If the Zionists in fact played a part in sabotag- of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel as “one of the ing the Freelanders at this time, they were only ful- most important Jewish figures of the twentieth filling their own founder’s prophecy. He had taken century you’ve probably never heard of.” Steinberg notice of Freeland when it was still just a book, a was an anti-tsarist activist who did time in a Rus- utopian novel (entitled Freiland) composed by a sian prison but who, when he was eventually exiled, man Rovner describes as “an educated, assimilated earned a doctorate in Heidelberg for his study of Back cover of Freeland, a publication for socialist Jew from Budapest” and a writer for the Viennese criminal law in the Talmud. A leader of the non- territorialism, 1934. (Courtesy of YIVO.) newspaper Neue Freie Presse with “penetrating eyes Marxist Social Revolutionary Party during World and an impressive beard.” After naming the book’s War I, he became Lenin’s first commissar of justice with hunting down intellectuals like him. Resettled author as “Theodor Hertzka,” Rovner hastens to in- after the Bolshevik Revolution: once again in the British capital, Steinberg became form us: “That is not a typo. Improbably, Dr. The- active in the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial odor Hertzka was a colleague of Dr. Theodor Herzl’s He remained religiously observant during this Colonization, the successor to the writer-activist and shared with him a parallel background and pro- period and would pray in the middle of cabinet Israel Zangwill’s better known but by then defunct fessional trajectory.”

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 23 In The Jewish State, Herzl was quite eager, for ob- the same journal that made “absolutely no reference tionists” and socialists culminates in an assessment vious reasons, to distinguish his own proposals from to any Diaspora agenda” and declared “that the only of the nationalists’ less than grand but still impres- what he considered to be the unrealistic dreams of solution to the Jewish problem in Europe was Pales- sive demonstration of political power. True, it did Freiland. “Even supposing ‘Freiland societies’ were tine.” The Jewish State was a game-changer. not result in any major victories. “The party did not to come into existence,” he wrote, “I should look on Deliverance wasn’t quickly forthcoming, howev- succeed in achieving its major goal, the recognition the whole thing as a joke.” The Freeland organiza- er, and the older tendencies reasserted themselves, of Yiddish as a legal Umgangssprache and the acqui- tion that Herzl mockingly foresaw wasn’t established especially in the aftermath of Herzl’s diplomatic sition of national rights for Habsburg Jews.” But it until the early 1930s, and although it borrowed its failures. Galician Zionists eventually returned to did succeed in inducing sizeable numbers of Gali- name from Hertzka’s novel, it did not hearken back cia’s hundreds of thousands of Jews to see to his specific ideas. Still, one can’t help but feel that themselves in the years before World War its final defeat provided Herzl with the posthumous I as one of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s last laugh. constituent nationalities and to demand “the rights associated with this status.” he territorialists were by no means the only TJews for whom Zion didn’t seem like an en- f the Zionists of Galicia, in practice, tirely adequate answer to “the Jewish Problem.” Iveered toward diaspora nationalism, There were also the diaspora nationalists. And, as there were other Jews, at the same time Joshua Shanes argues in his Diaspora Nationalism and mostly further east, in the tsarist em- and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia, there were pire, who raised it to the level of theory. In Zionists who were, de facto, also diaspora nation- Jews & Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on alists. At the end of the 19th and in the early 20th Jewish Peoplehood in Europe & the United centuries, the Zionism of Austrian-ruled Galicia States, Simon Rabinovitch surveys these was, he informs us: theories. The first thinker included in this anthology, Perets Smolenskin (1842– largely a Diaspora-oriented movement, directed 1885), conceived of the Jews as a “spiritual primarily toward national cultural work in nation” bound together eternally by its the Diaspora (i.e., building Jewish national cultural heritage, “even if we assert that consciousness) and the acquisition of national restoring sovereignty to Israel is unattain- minority rights, long before Zionism in either Mordechai Ehrenpreis, ca. 1910. (From The National Library able.” While he himself was more or less Russia or the West had begun to engage in such of Israel Collections.) prepared to make such an assertion when activity. he launched his attack on the Haskalah in the early 1870s, Smolenskin changed his Galician-Jewish intellectuals came to Jewish na- mind after the pogroms of 1881 and the tionalism either in the aftermath of failed attempts emergence of the Lovers of Zion. at integration into local, Gentile society or as part This change of heart did not prevent of an effort to “integrate into the modern world Smolenskin from being hailed as a prede- without abandoning their sense of authentic Jew- cessor by the leading diaspora national- ishness.” But whatever their motives, they were not ist, Simon Dubnov, who, beginning in the people whose lives had been shaped by the kind of 1880s, presented a comprehensive picture pogroms or civic repression that afflicted their Rus- of the Jews as a “spiritual (cultural-his- sian counterparts. Living in the Austro-Hungarian torical) nation” that should seek limited Empire under a rather liberal constitution, they “felt autonomy on the European soil where it more confident that they might achieve national had been so long established, as well as in rights without having to emigrate.” countries like the United States, where it The lead article published in 1895 by the young had new footholds. Like other territorial or Zionist yeshiva student Mordechai Ehrenpreis (who non-territorial nations, the Jews, he main- was later to become the chief rabbi of Stockholm) tained, “share internal connections and col- in the Galician Zionists’ Yiddish-language annual lective national interests”: is representative of the pre-Herzl period. After lamenting the extent to which Jewish children were These mutual national interests are in being alienated from their own national ideals, he practice expressed by specific forms declared that: of internal self-governance, in the independent organization of popular We want to do what is in our power to decrease communal, educational, and religious our misery, to raise our income, to multiply institutions; in the autonomy of the and increase our political rights, to improve school curriculum (including its the education of our children, to further the linguistic autonomy); and lastly, by education and vocational training [Ausbildung] a united voice in parliamentary and of our people [Volksmassen]. social debates that results in distinct Yiddish poster for the Jewish Folkspartey by Solomon national policy. The expression of such everyday aspirations did Borisovich Iudovin, 1918. (Courtesy of YIVO.) not come at the price of building a national home Skeptical of the practicality of Zionism from the in Palestine, Shanes tells us, but it definitely “tended Landespolitik, Jewish domestic politics. Shanes de- outset and irreversibly convinced that it could nev- to mean paying lip service to the settlement of the votes the final chapters of his book to the Zionist-led er provide a solution to the problems faced by the land of Israel as a long-term dream while actually campaign to win Galician seats in the Austrian Par- preponderant majority of Jews, Dubnov also had focusing primarily on cultural and political work in liament, one in which “the Zionists completely sev- deeper reservations concerning the restoration of a the Diaspora.” ered the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine Jewish state. He argued, as the historian Jonathan Just a year after Ehrenpreis published his piece— from their domestic political agenda.” His vivid ac- Frankel observed “that the Jewish nation, lacking a and after Theodor Herzl published his bombshell— count of the 1907 election campaign in which Jew- territory of its own, represented the highest form in Ehrenpreis’ colleague Adolf Korkis wrote a piece for ish nationalist candidates competed with “assimila- the evolution of nationalities, dependent as it was

24 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 entirely on ‘cultural-historical’ and ‘spiritual factors,’ While Dubnov and his Folkspartey helped to chosen representatives ever to assemble. What So- with ‘no possibility of striving for political victories, shift Jewish politics, as Rabinovitch maintains, in viet Jews enjoyed under their subsequent rule was territorial annexations or the subjugation of other the direction of increasing “Jewish collective rights,” anything but autonomy (despite the name affixed to peoples.’” This attempt to develop a benign nation- neither they nor the other supporters of autono- the bogus homeland established for a few of them alism is what, perhaps, makes Dubnov and his col- mism, including Russian Zionists, could achieve in the 1930s, the “Jewish Autonomous Region of leagues attractive to cosmopolitan idealists even anything concrete in the context of a deeply anti- Birobidzhan”). Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, after today. Semitic regime. But following the overthrow of the the war, the situation was better—but not much bet- In addition to seminal texts of Smolenskin and tsar, in February 1917, “Jews focused their political ter. In Poland and Lithuania, the autonomists tried Dubnov, Rabinovitch includes in his anthology ex- energies on creating the mechanisms of Jewish na- and failed to implement their program. “The idea of cerpts from the theoretical writings of other dias- tional autonomy that had been discussed in theory nonterritorial Jewish autonomy,” Rabinovitch notes pora nationalists, such as Chaim Zhitlowsky and in the Jewish press since Simon Dubnov’s articula- in his book’s final pages, proved “incompatible with Jacob Lestchinsky, as well as the writings of Ameri- tion of autonomism between 1897 and 1907.” The the nation-states that emerged in the post-World can Jewish thinkers whose work reflects Dubnov’s nationalist intellectuals finally had “the opportunity War I era.” ideas. In his more recently published Jewish Rights, to turn what had been theory into action.” National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late In the spring of 1917 (when Isaac Nachman n The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall Imperial and Revolutionary Russia, Rabinovitch Steinberg still had his eyes focused on bigger things) Iof Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, Josh- focuses not so much on explicating theories as on the Jewish nationalists prepared the ground for an ua Karlip concentrates on the way in which sev- attempting “to define Dubnov’s sociopolitical foot- “all-Russian Jewish congress as the ultimate expres- eral Russian-born supporters of autonomism, who print” up to and beyond the Russian Revolution. sion of Jewish autonomy in Russia,” but when elec- were also secular-minded Yiddishists, came to He relates, among other things, how in 1907 Dub- tions for this congress were held in November, the terms with the post-war collapse of their dreams. nov and his allies created, in a far more tumultu- Zionists won them handily. This did not necessarily Less than illustrious but still important intellectu- ous environment and a much less stable state than represent a defeat for the Folkspartey, for, accord- als Elias Tcherikower, Isroel Efroikin, and Zelig Habsburg-ruled Galicia, the “Folkspartey,” a party ing to Rabinovitch, it is not really clear how many Kalmanovitch changed from believers that the that aimed to achieve three goals: of its members “actually wanted power within the “hour of national redemption had come,” with the community rather than simply the adoption of Russian Revolution, into people who had “largely (1) a democratic Russian government with their and Dubnov’s ideas about Jewish autonomy.” despaired,” by the late 1930s, “of the ideologies to “complete equality of rights for all peoples of In fact, what Russian Jews did on the national level which they had dedicated most of their careers.” the empire”; (2) the legal recognition of Jewish and on the level of local communal governments Their experiences with hostile or unsympathetic nationality “as a single whole with rights to “must be considered a vindication of the Dubno- regimes, in the West as well as in the East, to- national self-government in all realms of vian worldview.” If it was a vindication, it was short- gether with the steady “disintegration of the Jew- internal life”; and (3) the convocation of an lived. Following their coup in the very month that ish national collective,” led them to question not all-Russian Jewish national assembly, “for the Russian Jewish Congress’ elections took place, only autonomism but the benefits of the entire age the purpose of establishing the principles of the Bolsheviks, fierce opponents of Jewish nation- of emancipation that had given rise to the idea. national organization.” alism, made it impossible for the Jewish people’s Breaking painfully with Dubnov, Tcherikower, for

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Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 25 his part, issued a call in 1939 for “a return to the practical as well as theoretical grounds, he vaunted status as a stateless nation as advantageous and ghetto,” albeit a very ambivalent one. the Jews as a people that had “liberated its exis- avant-garde.” tence from the reign of a piece of land.” But the Although he started out as something of a Zion- We know that the call backward is in vain. The Bolshevik seizure of power in the land he consid- ist, Karlip’s third major figure, the philologist, trans- old sources of religious faith are very dried up, ered his own soon forced him to migrate to the lator, and editor Zelig Kalmanovitch, was for many even among the common people themselves. still-not-communist Ukraine, where the Zionists decades a dedicated proponent of autonomism. In Our generation is too far gone in skepticism, once again beat out the folkists in elections that 1917 he dismissed the Balfour Declaration as a cyni- indifference, and criticism to be able to once didn’t matter for very long: “When the Ukraine cal, self-aggrandizing move on the part of British again bind itself with tfilnstraps. We long ago fell to the Soviets in 1920, Efroikin left Russian soil imperialists, one that would do nothing for the Jews lost the past simplicity of religious faith, and forever, immigrating to Paris.” other than embroil them in conflict with the Arabs. no one has the strength to once again pour old wine into new vessels. But we also do not have Kalmanovitch went to his death addressing the following the strength to free ourselves from the need for yontev; and from envy of the harmonious words to his German oppressors: “I laugh at you; I am not religious world of previous generations. We are tired of gray, rationalistic commonplaces. This afraid of you! I have a son in the Land of Israel!” is a tragedy of the generation that conducts a struggle with itself, a struggle between Even as he became a wealthy businessman, When Ukraine fell to the Soviets in 1920, he resettled modernism and its own inheritance. Efroikin remained actively committed to diaspora in Lithuania. Working there, in Latvia, and ultimately nationalism. But his limited success as head of the in Poland (as an administrator at YIVO in Vilna) to This perception of a tragic dilemma did not lead Federation of Jewish Societies and the worsening implement the cultural program of diaspora nation- Tcherikower into passivity. “Although not overtly Zi- overall situation destroyed his hopes for change. alism, he eventually despaired of ever achieving any onist,” he envisioned a Jewish exodus from Europe that “In 1938, Efroikin visited Palestine and returned real success. After Hitler took power in Germany, he “echoed Herzl’s vision in Der Judenstaat.” He escaped to Paris an admirer and supporter of the Labor Zi- became a territorialist and joined the Freelanders. from occupied France in September 1940 and settled onist leadership of the Yishuv” who saw Palestine As late as 1938, he dragged Lucy Dawidowicz, then in New York, where he continued—until his death as the site of a future Jewish national home. When a young graduate student from America, to public from a heart attack in 1943—his revisionist, counter- he made his escape from France, however, in meetings where he “enraptured his audience with emancipationist work in modern Jewish history. 1942, it was to Montevideo, Uruguay. In his writ- speeches in favor of territorialism.” Efroikin, who along with Dubnov played a ings from Uruguay, Efroikin developed a some- Following the outbreak of World War II, Kal- leading role in the Folkspartey in Russia in 1917, what peculiar Zionist vision that “incorporate[d] manovitch “referred to the founders of the Zionist was, Karlip writes, “more Dubnovian than Dub- the best elements of folkism” while repudiating movement as ‘wise Jews and Jews with love for their nov himself.” Opposing the Zionist movement on the folkist argument “that understood the Jews’ people and Jews with love for their people,’ . . . [who]

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26 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 had predicted the possibility of such a catastrophe scale it would be in a future state in Palestine.” gues, is “to accept the inevitability of Jewish au- as early as two generations ago.” But for Kalma- Rabinovitch, for his part, is somewhat more tonomism’s failure in the remnants of the Russian novitch, it was now too late to escape to Palestine, tentative. “Autonomism’s greatest success,” he Empire is to a certain extent to accept the Bolshevik where before the war he had been offered what he says, “was in the most unlikely of places: Pales- historical narrative of the inevitable triumph of pro- called “a spectacular position” with the National Li- tine.” All the other “successes” he has in mind, in letarian socialism.” brary. His work now, under increasingly trying and Russia and Ukraine, for instance, were admittedly It is indeed possible, as Rabinovitch insists, to eventually desperate circumstances, was to do what very short-lived. But this, in his judgment, does imagine a different history than the one we have he could to preserve the Jewish cultural heritage. As not retroactively demonstrate that this is the way had. And even for those who see little value in such the diary he wrote in the Vilna ghetto reveals, he things had to be: counterfactual speculation, it remains interesting to found himself returning to “some aspects of bibli- discover the intricate and often surprising connec- cal and rabbinic faith and theodicy.” He survived his Whether autonomism and genuine national tions between Zionism, autonomism, and territori- deportation from the ghetto to forced labor camps rights for Jews as a nonterritorial minority alism. What matters most, in the end, however, is in Estonia for only a few months. “According to sur- might have taken hold in Eastern Europe what Rovner tells us in the very last sentences of his vivors, Kalmanovitch went to his death addressing largely depends on how one views the historical book: “The mythopoesis of Israel ultimately proved the following words to his German oppressors: “I prospects of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian more potent a nationalist force than any other ter- laugh at you; I am not afraid of you! I have a son in Empires. The collapse of those empires, and ritory. Of all the many promised lands, only one to- the Land of Israel!” the manner in which they collapsed, was by no day is real.” The moral of this story might seem clear enough. means historically inevitable: As Karlip observes in his conclusion: “The State of Israel has proven Kalmanovitch, Efroikin, and Tch- Had the Russian Revolution ended some other Allan Arkush is professor of Judaic studies and history erikower correct in assuming that if secular Jewish way, some of the abortive experiments might have at Binghamton University and the senior contributing national politics ever would be realized on a mass proved long-lasting. To deny this, Rabinovitch ar- editor of the Jewish Review of Books. Love in the Shadow of Death

BY Walter Laqueur

migrants from Central Europe. The book was reprint- longed was more German than Jewish, but this was Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My ed in 1998, as a curiosity, no doubt. true for much of German Jewry at the time. This or- Grandfather Left Behind I was a witness not exactly to what Sarah Wild- ganization was not political; we were far more inter- by Sarah Wildman man relates, but to some of the events that preceded ested in camping and hiking than in intellectual, let Riverhead Books, 400 pp., $27.95 her story, and I am one of the very few still alive alone spiritual, preoccupations. With Hitler’s rise to who knew some of those who figure in it. I may power, things began to change. Some of us became be forgiven therefore for beginning with my own Zionists; others discovered their religious identity. recollections, which go back a long time. They do One member of Hans’ family, a few years older, his is a sad story, one that might be bet- not concern Karl or Valy but a boy of my acquain- joined the Communists and went with several oth- ter (or at any rate differently) discussed tance named Hans Fabisch. I remember visiting this ers to the Soviet Union. He seemed not to have been by someone further removed from the aware that a “purge” was in progress in Moscow. events it reconstructs and the time in It would have been only After a short time he was arrested and returned to whichT it took place, someone who never met any of Nazi Germany, in fact handed over to the Gestapo. the people who had the misfortune to be affected by human if Karl suppressed (One of Martin Buber’s daughters-in-law, Marga- these events. It begins with Sarah Wildman’s discov- rete Buber-Neumann belonged to this group.) ery among the papers of her grandfather, a physician the memory of Valy. The head of Hans’ group was a medical student in Massachusetts, of a file of letters dating back to nicknamed “Stork,” who in later life became a sur- 1939–1942. The file had obviously been misplaced, classmate on an afternoon in the late 1920s, in our geon in New York. Stork’s father, also a physician, for it was in the middle of his patients’ records. The hometown of Breslau (at that time a German city, was one of the very few Breslau Jewish survivors. letter writer was not a patient but a young doctor and now Wrocław in Poland). We were exactly the He was head of the local Jewish hospital, and it had named Valy (Scheftel) from his native Vienna. They same age but I was a year ahead in school, having been Gestapo policy to liquidate Jewish hospitals had been lovers. He had the good fortune to escape skipped a grade. It was mainly good luck: I did not last. Had this very German Jew lived a few more just in time; she was caught in the deadly trap. like school at that age and for this reason worked decades he would have been surprised to learn that Wildman, a highly accomplished journalist, want- hard to get it behind me. In the end, this saved my one of his granddaughters was to become the biog- ed to find out everything she could about Valy. How life, for I graduated a year before the outbreak of the rapher of Isaac Bashevis Singer while another would did she take the separation? Could anything have been war and was compelled to make an immediate deci- marry a young man from Yemen. done to bring her to America? Why did Karl answer sion about my future. And this meant leaving Ger- In winter Hans’ group and mine went skiing just Valy’s letters so infrequently? Even the vocabulary many as quickly as possible. on the other side of the border with Czechoslovakia. raised questions. What exactly was a “certificate”? What Hans and I belonged to the same Jewish youth We rented the hayloft belonging to a local peasant; did “Chamada” mean and who was Paltreu? Why did organization, whose local branch was divided into to this day I wonder how we survived the icy nights. the possession of $150 make the difference between two groups. He belonged to one, I to another, and Recently, I received a call from members of the U.S. life and death in a case like Valy’s? (It was the price of a there was a friendly rivalry between us. Everyone skiing association. It had come to their knowledge visa for Chile.) Answers to the other questions can be had a nickname. Being short of stature, his was that we had been helping people who were in po- found in the very last Jewish book published in Ger- Zwerg (dwarf). But there was nothing derisive in litical trouble in Nazi Germany to escape the Reich many a week before Kristallnacht: the Philo Handbook this. He was not that tiny and was in fact rather by evading border controls. Was it true? It was true, for Jewish Emigration. A primer in misery, it explained popular, a very lively, nice boy, pleasant to talk to up to a point. As groups we were not involved; we that no one wanted immigrants, especially Jewish im- and to work with. The movement to which we be- were too young to engage in political militancy. But

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 27 individuals among us did assist in such escapes, and two of them were again reunited. could provide for his silence was that he belonged to I remember one girl who paid with her life for this. Her letters were more than just affectionate; it was a generation that had been destroyed by war even if I do not recall when I last saw Hans Fabisch. In “my beloved only one” and “I consider myself as be- it had escaped its cannons. “I am dead because I have the years that followed, during the war and after, I longing to you wholly and entirely and I am bound died mentally and morally. I cannot remember hav- met many members of his group in various parts to you.” She lived in the past and the future, because ing laughed even once during the past three years.” of the world, often unexpectedly. But there was the present was horrible. She wrote about how they It would be wrong to dismiss these words as a clev- no word from or about him. I met his older sister, had enjoyed the forests and the lakes in Austria, the er but cheap way to explain his inexcusable behavior. Ilse Meyer, who lived not far from our apartment Friday evenings at his mother’s, about trips to Dal- But it was at best only part of the truth. His mental in North London. She was married to “Yogi” (yet matia and Italy, the Viennese medical students ball: and moral death did not prevent him becoming, by another nickname, yet another man with a variety of achievements to his credit) who had been the overall head of the youth movement mentioned earlier on. (It was banned by the Gestapo as early as 1934.) But she knew little about her brother’s last year beyond the fact that he had not survived. She knew that before the war he had trained as an ag- riculturist together with a group of young people on a farm near Breslau but had switched over to a school where he could study chemistry. After that, there had been occasional letters from Berlin, which had to be carefully worded because they were sent by way of neutral countries and subject to careful censorship in more than one country. She had no information at all about his last months or the date, place, and circumstances of his death. Eventually, however, the mystery was cleared up. Following the publication of my book Genera- tion Exodus in 2001, which told the story of young people from the German-speaking communities of Central Europe who fled from the Nazis, many survivors of this generation contacted me. One of them was Ernest Fontheim, a senior researcher in space science at the University of Michigan. He related to me in considerable detail events as he witnessed Karl Wildman on the banks of Vienna’s Donaukanal. Valy Scheftel, in an undated photo, from Karl them in wartime Berlin. I put him in touch with (Courtesy of Riverhead Books.) Wildman’s files. (Courtesy of Riverhead Books.) Ilse, who found out from him what had happened to her brother. It was from a letter that he wrote to “And thus I constantly dream of how things will be his own account, a successful doctor with two prac- her that Sarah Wildman learned the details con- when I am with you again my darling and how in- tices. Nor did the fact that he had many worries pre- cerning Hans’ marriage to Valy. credibly happy I shall be.” “In such moments I let vent him having affairs with other women and getting our entire life together pass in front of my inner eyes married not long after having written this draft. rom the letters she found in her grandfather’s and live through all the different phases of our life The true explanation seems to be threefold. His Ffiles, Wildman knew that Valy had returned, together.” And in January 1941: “Dearest, how much attachment to Valy, while probably deep at the be- after the German annexation of Austria in March I had wished to be with you finally on this birthday ginning, was no longer as intense and lasting as 1938, to her home in Troppau, Czechoslovakia, of yours. Darling, I want so badly to say to you how hers. And her feeling (mentioned earlier on) “that both to escape the Nazis and to take care of her I wish you all the best from the bottom of my heart. with you I never knew” was probably right. What mother. But Hitler’s seizure of the “Sudetenland” I yearn to tell you finally everything that is written was by that time their three-year separation could at the end of 1938 made life impossible for the Jews only on paper, so dead, so empty and so boring. How only have been a severe trial; many, perhaps most, there. To break loose from the “stifling, virulent, I wish I could see you, behold your dear face.” And so unmarried couples in such a situation would have small-town racism” that surrounded them, Valy she went on week after week. drifted apart. He probably felt guilty, but how much and her mother headed for—of all places—Berlin, But for long periods there was no reply from love was left? And last and probably decisively: He where there was at least the prospect of employ- Karl. What had happened? Had he deserted or for- was not, and could not, be aware that the issue at ment. They settled in Babelsberg, a suburb of Ber- gotten her? October 1941: stake—her leaving Germany—was not a matter of lin (and the center of the German film industry) love or gradual estrangement but of life and death. where Valy got a job in a Jewish children’s home Beloved, I knew that I could believe in you. In the same letter, he wrote “darling I have not ne- and hospital. Since Jews were almost completely Once, many years ago we were walking through glected anything regarding your immigration.” He barred from the practice of medicine, she worked the Prater, it was in October and you recited was in debt at the time, perhaps heavily, and his as a nurse except when one of the non-Jewish doc- the Oktoberlied [a poem by Theodor Storm] for ability to help her was quite limited. He could not tors went on holiday or fell ill. me, about the overcast day which we wanted even help to contribute to the very meager sum that The letters Valy wrote to Karl make painful to make golden. We were happy then or at might have enabled Valy, at one point in 1940, to reading. She was very much in love and hoped that least I was. With you I never was quite sure escape to Cuba. Moral imbeciles like Breckinridge the separation would be of short duration. She had how things were. This morning when I saw the Long at the State Department who were bitterly, expected that he would do everything possible to overcast ugly utterly depressing day I thought in emotionally opposed to the immigration of even a help her to join him in the United States. It was this my despair that I should gild it. And just a few few Jews made it exceedingly difficult for people like love that kept her going. There were periods of de- hours later your letter arrived and made this Valy, if not impossible. In all probability Karl would pression, and they became more frequent as time day golden as ever a day turned golden. have failed even if he had tried his utmost. went by. But she tried to keep up a brave front. She Karl did not destroy the letters, but it is unlikely was “dreadfully lonesome,” she wrote in one of her But the end of Valy’s last golden days was approaching. that he read them very often after the war. It would letters and reported the purchase of a flute. She There is the draft of a letter by Karl dated Octo- have been only human if he suppressed the memory practiced as frequently as she could, so that she ber 1941 in which he tries to explain why he did not of Valy. Even with all the extenuating circumstanc- would be a more accomplished player when the answer her “sacred” letters. The only explanation he es, he must have lived with a very bad conscience.

28 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 he last letter from Valy was dated November means of escaping a fate that seemed more inevi- members of my generation. I have witnessed similar T17, 1941. To learn her subsequent fate Wild- table by the week. They managed to buy or fabricate situations in my own life and that of my contempo- man went to the archives in Arlosen, Germany, false identity papers. But more than forged identity raries: fear, the panic of being trapped, relief at being of the International Tracing Service, originally papers were needed. One had to obtain money and saved owing to accident, love in the shadow of death, assembled for the sole purpose of helping govern- above all contacts with local people willing to help, sacrifice and betrayal, and guilt for not having done all ments and survivors trace the path of the Nazis’ and this was not easy for those like Valy and Hans that one could have done to save a person close to him. victims but now, finally, open to outside research- who were not native Berliners. For someone like Sarah Wildman, who enjoyed ers. What these files revealed was sketchy, but she In the end, psychology was the decisive factor, what is now termed die Gnade der späten Geburt now knew, at least, that Valy had survived in Ber- and, of course, accident also played a central role. As (the good fortune of being born too late), the telling lin until she was deported to Auschwitz on January one contemporary put it: Pessimists stood a better of the story of Karl, Valy, and Hans Fabisch involved 29, 1943. And she also found out that at that time chance of survival than optimists for they expected more than an enormous amount of research in sev- she had a husband, a man 10 years her junior and the worst and were inclined to go into hiding im- eral countries and various languages, interviewing born in Breslau—my friend Hans Fabisch. mediately. Hans was an optimist almost to the end. both experts and contemporaries of Karl and Valy, In the files there was also something that gave He and Valy waited too long. persuading them to open up. It also required a mea- Wildman a shock. Someone else had asked about On January 18, 1943, when he learned that de- sure of empathy seldom displayed by writers dealing Valy, more than 50 years earlier, and it hadn’t been portation vans were on Hans and Valy’s block, Er- with a period so different from their own. I thought her grandfather Karl. In 1956, Ilse, Hans Fabisch’s nest did his best to warn them, but he wasn’t suc- it could not be done and half-tried to persuade her sister, had made an inquiry about her brother and cessful. The details of his attempts and failure would (as she relates) not to undertake the effort. his wife. But rather than trying to locate this wom- be better related in a film noir than in cold prose. I am glad she ignored my advice. For by telling an, whose last known address was in London and Hans Fabisch died, probably by suicide, two weeks the story of three individuals from among the mil- who, if she were still alive, would have been in her after his arrival in Auschwitz; the date of Valy’s lions who were exiled or slaughtered she has made nineties, Wildman first retraced Valy’s footsteps in death is not known. Their married life together had a major contribution towards the understanding of Vienna, Berlin, and Czechoslovakia. Eventually she lasted less than two weeks. this whole tragic period in recent history. placed an ad in a British publication, the Journal of Ernest himself survived the next 30 months in the Association of Jewish Refugees, announcing that a garden allotment in a distant Berlin suburb. He she was “looking for descendants of Ilse Charlotte was almost caught at the very end, but good luck for Walter Laqueur was for many years chairman of Mayer.” Within two months, one of them showed once did not desert him. This is yet another amaz- the International Research Council of the Center for up: her youngest daughter, Carol Levene. She sup- ing story which should be told one day. After the Strategic and International Studies in Washington, plied Wildman with a seven-page letter that Ernest war he went to the United States where he finally re- D.C. He is the author, most recently, of After the Fall: Fontheim had written to her deceased mother after ceived the higher education he craved and enjoyed The End of the European Dream and the Decline of talking to me, the document that became her “key his successful career. a Continent (Thomas Dunne Books) and Optimism to understanding everything that happened after The dreadful events described in this book will not in Politics: Reflections on Contemporary History my letters end.” come as a shock or total surprise to the few surviving (Transaction Publishers). Ernest (as I shall call him, since we became friends over the years) described Hans as his best friend during the 21 months they had known each other in wartime Berlin. He could not report how Hans and Valy first met, though it was probably at the institution in Babelsberg where Valy worked and where OVER 1 MILLION Hans had also found employment. Hans at that time, COPIES SOLD he says, remained a great optimist: The war would end one day and he would become a medical doctor, FOREWORD BY MARCIA CLARK not of course in Germany. He was studying medical textbooks and Valy offered to coach him. The two be- “Before In Cold Blood, Meyer Levin’s came a couple and moved into a little apartment in one of the “Jew houses,” the new ghettoes. Compulsion was the standard-bearer At the end of 1942, however, the Babelsberg chil- for what we think of as the nonfiction dren’s institute was on the verge of closing, which novel. Though this trial took place in meant that Valy would be deported. Hans, for his 1924, the book raises issues pertaining part, was safe, at least for the time being, since he had in the meantime moved to Siemens, where he to society and our justice system—such was doing work that was of some importance for the as popular biases, groupthink, and the war effort. Hans offered to marry Valy so as to ex- inherent, perhaps unfixable, flaws in empt her from deportation. Valy seems to have been a little reluctant at the beginning. She was, after all, our legal system—that are as much in 10 years older than Hans. But she had also at long evidence today as they were back then.” last given up any hope as far as Karl was concerned. —MARCIA CLARK They married on January 5, 1943. Was it a marriage “[Compulsion] is a masterly of convenience? Ernest, who knew them best, says achievement in literary craftsmanship.” that practical reasons were of course involved, but –THE NEW YORK TIMES (1956) that they were also deeply in love. Follow Us on What did deportation mean? Hard labor under “The most significant Jewish Twitter and bad conditions in Eastern Europe—or something writer of his times.” Facebook: much worse? By mid-1942 matters became much –THE LOS ANGELES TIMES (1974) FigTreeBks clearer. It was a trip from which no one ever returned, nor were there any letters or other signs of life. In brief, it meant death even if it was not yet ON SALE APRIL 14, Read the first chapter free: clear by what means. Ernest, Fabisch, Valy, and WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD www.FigTreeBooks.net their circle of friends among Siemens workers did what they could to hang on, but they also discussed

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 29 Unsettling Days

BY Robert Alter

tlements. They could scarcely all be like Ma’aleh per, who suddenly arrives at the settlement after The Hilltop: A Novel Hermesh C, but novelists are obliged to use one having lived for an extended period in New York, by Assaf Gavron, translated by Steven Cohen instance to stand for the societal whole (surely not and Gabi Nehushtan (he has Hebraized the family Scribner, 464 pp., $26 every orphanage in 1830’s England was quite like name), who has joined the settlement as a ba’al te- Oliver Twist’s). shuvah (in Cohen’s slightly odd translation choice, Ma’aleh Hermesh C is a rigorously Orthodox “a reborn” Jew). In order to flesh out their identi- community: Worship takes place in its little make- ties, Gavron presents their backstories through

ssaf Gavron’s The Hilltop, first published in Hebrew in 2013, is a refreshing re- Roni flees first to San Francisco, and then, with investigators minder that traditional realism is still an effective vehicle of insight into contem- hot on his trail, he hops on a plane for Tel Aviv. poraryA society and politics. There is nothing modernist or postmodern in the way Gavron tells his shift synagogue morning and evening; the Sabbath lengthy flashbacks, which constitutes something of story—no experimentation with narrative form, no is strictly observed; the men, with beards and pe’ot, a structural problem: Just when things at Ma’aleh dense interior monologues, no stylistic fireworks. wear large knitted skullcaps and regard the small Hermesh C have come to a boil, we are taken back What Gavron repeatedly evinces is a very keen eye kippot of the modern Orthodox as a shameful con- to Roni and Gabi’s childhood, their time in the for characteristic gesture and speech, for the reflexes cession to the secularists. Some, though not all, of army, and afterward. of social milieu, and for the ways in which ideol- these settlers are genuinely devout, dedicated to a Roni is an unreconstructed secular Israeli and ogy suffuses attitudes and actions. The sum effect in serious quest for spiritual fulfillment. The novel something of a sensualist. When, for example, a this novel is a probing representation of the settler group of leftists arrives at the settlement to conduct movement and the ambiguous relation to it of the a protest against it, his eye is caught by the alluring Israeli government and of the consumerist world of figure of one female protester: secular Israel. The book is alternately satiric (it includes And that’s what Roni could see, freely bouncing scenes of sheer farce) and somber, ending on a up and down under a shirt bearing the slogan mock-idyllic note that points to a future fraught The Occupation Weakens Us—large and juicy, with ominous potential. Though it seems safe to poking against the fabric, erect, fleshy nipples of infer that Gavron strenuously objects to the set- volume and experience; the nipples of someone tler movement, part of his achievement is that he who knows they are there and how to leverage is able to imagine it sympathetically from within, them. making us see the world as the settlers, who perceive themselves as embattled idealists, must see it. Roni is also an indefatigable entrepreneur. After the The book begins with ironic echoes of the Garden army, he ends up becoming the proprietor of a trendy story in Genesis (“In the beginning were the fields bar in Tel Aviv. Eventually, tired of the business, he . . . And so it came to pass that Othniel deferred makes his way to New York, acquires an MBA, and to the vintner . . .”), ironically intimating that the secures a place as a Wall Street trader. He wheels and settlers may imagine they are living in a new Eden. deals, picking up insider information from Israeli The English version of the novel is well served by contacts in the financial sector, then forges his boss’ Steven Cohen’s lively translation, which takes mi- signature to make unauthorized trades. On the eve of nor liberties with the Hebrew to vivifying effect the 2008 crash, he bets against a new Apple product and can be faulted only for the now predictable re- called the iPhone, having been assured by his infor- peated use of “like” where “as” is required and for Assaf Gavron. (Courtesy of Jonathan Bloom.) mants that it doesn’t work very well. He thus loses sometimes making the dialogue sound too Ameri- immense sums that were not his to lose. He flees first can (“dude” for the Hebrew gever, “man” and “bro” to San Francisco, and then, with investigators hot on for the Hebrew ahi, “brother”). embodies a sympathetic understanding of the Sab- his trail, he hops on a plane for Tel Aviv: The hilltop of the title is a small illegal settle- bath tranquility experienced by these Jews and the ment in the West Bank, Ma’aleh Hermesh C, which sense of security and harmony realized through The gambles, the successes, the mistakes, that, adjoins two older, authorized settlements, Ma’aleh the familiar cycle of daily rituals and annual fes- within the space of a few months during the Hermesh A and B, and sits above an Arab village tivals. But since Gavron is a realist, he also knows American economy’s most dramatic fall, had surrounded by old olive groves. A large cast of that people, however religious, will inevitably be pushed his brief and meteoric career into a fatal characters populate Ma’aleh Hermesh C, ranging people, and so a piquant subplot involves a pas- tailspin . . . and eventually [had] driven him from an ideologically ferocious beautician—the sionate affair between the teenage daughter of one that wintry day in February from San Francisco choice of her profession is itself amusing—to a of the large, pious families and a young Ethiopian straight to the West Bank, dressed in an elegant young and prejudiced American immigrant floun- soldier who serves in the IDF contingent assigned Hugo Boss suit and worn-out socks, and in dering with his rudimentary Hebrew, and several to protect the settlement. possession of scarcely anything else. couples, some happy and some dysfunctional, who mainly want to enjoy family life in a quiet pros- avron juggles these ramifying relationships The combination of the Hugo Boss suit and the pering place, an aspiration probably shared by a Gand personalities quite deftly, but he places worn-out socks, from affluence to exposed impecu- large part of the population of very different set- two brothers at the center of the novel, Roni Kup- niousness, is a particularly apt realist stroke. Roni,

30 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 then, makes himself his brother’s uninvited guest be- to create a convincing case for each side of the more to the political point of the novel, in which cause this is a place where no one is likely to find irreconcilable dispute. Here is a characteristic both sides are wrong. Gabi’s disapproval of his him. exchange: brother has a clear warrant in the rudderless and The brothers have grown up on a kibbutz af- morally shabby nature of Roni’s life. It is not much ter being orphaned in early childhood when both “I don’t feel the need to apologize for doing of a life—the most one can say of it is that he has their parents were killed in a car accident. Gabi has business and living the good life. Is your life made no pretense of being someone he is not. a long history of sporadic outbursts of violent acts, from boyhood to the period of his army service to While Gabi concentrates on his spiritual self-realization, a time when he is married, living in Tel Aviv, and the father of a small son. It is as a consequence of the penniless Roni cooks up a questionable scheme to one of these violent episodes—its precise nature is not spelled out until relatively late in the nov- market the olive oil produced in the neighboring Arab el—that he finds himself in jail and susceptible to the persuasion of an ultra-Orthodox proselytizer. village to Tel Aviv boutique shops. Thus, when he comes to the settlement, he prays three times daily, pores over the writings of the any better? Are you happier? Are your values Gabi, for his part, has in fact found peace of mind Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, longs any nobler? To be silent? To pray? To stop using in religion, but it all seems, as his brother suspects, to go on a pilgrimage to the Bratslaver’s native electricity at a certain time on Friday? I don’t rather self-consciously willed (his enthusiasm for Uman in Ukraine, and contemplates more or less get it.” the pilgrimage to Uman has been kindled by You- constantly all the bounties that the Holy One has Tube videos). He remains cut off from his child bestowed on him. His fellow settlers regard him as “I know you don’t get it,” Gabi said. and, until very late in the novel, from any intimate “a saint,” though they do not appear to share his “Explain to me, then. What do you get out of relationship. The tranquility, moreover, is not per- particular passion for Bratslaver Hasidism. While endlessly reading and memorizing things said fect: He becomes involved in a politically motivat- Gabi concentrates on his spiritual self-realization two hundred years ago by some Ukrainian ed act of destructive lawlessness that reminds us of (irrevocably removed, however, from his ex-wife rabbi, who told you to be silent, or to sing, or to the violent episodes of his earlier life, so, for all his and his son), the penniless Roni cooks up a ques- rejoice, or God knows what? piety, he does not seem to be an entirely trustwor- tionable scheme to market the olive oil produced “Peace of mind,” Gabi replied. “It brings me thy figure. in the neighboring Arab village to the boutique tranquility, love, happiness. For some reason, it’s shops in Tel Aviv. hard for you to accept that. Maybe you’re trying he crucial background to the conflict between The two brothers were once close, but fell out too hard not to see it.” Tthe brothers is the disputed status of the hill- of touch during Roni’s sojourn in America. Now “And maybe you’re trying too hard to see it.” top settlement. It is, as I have noted, illegal from they belong to utterly incompatible worlds, and the official Israeli viewpoint, and near the begin- there are frequent arguments between them. One It should be evident that this is one of those argu- ning of the novel a government order is issued for of the strengths of the novel is that Gavron is able ments in which both sides are right, or perhaps, its imminent evacuation. Though the expulsion of

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Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 31 the settlers, overseen by the army and carried out are products of the kibbutz, which has often been gressively confident values has flourished because with bulldozers, seems on the verge of enactment thought of as the finest flowering of Zionist ide- it fills a vacuum in a country that senses or at least more than once, it never happens. “Fortunately for alism. One of the settlers is in fact writing a dis- fears the withering of national values. us, the right hand has no clue as to what the left sertation on the failure of the kibbutz movement, The last extended scene of the novel is an attempt one is doing,” a settler aptly remarks. The Ma’aleh involving “the appropriation of land, the decisions by the army to remove the settlement in the midst Hermesh C activists pull strings in Jerusalem and vis-à-vis sources of livelihood and the receipt of of a Purim celebration. Everyone at Ma’aleh Her- obtain a temporary stay of the edict. (Israeli gov- state credit and benefits, including, too, the reli- mesh C is in costume. This carnivalesque moment ernment circles here look rather like the Circumlo- ance on slogans and ideology, and through also to perfectly exemplifies the country’s topsy-turvy po- cution Office in Dickens.) Then aWashington Post the condescension and arrogance of a closed so- litical realm as well as the confusion of identities correspondent publishes an article on the unau- ciety, alienated and on a pedestal, functioning ac- with which it is beset. The bulldozers are poised thorized occupation of this site. “The hodgepodge cording to its own set of rules.” All of which makes among the masked revelers. Then a quixotic and of laws and conflicting authorities,” he writes, “like the kibbutz sound like a precursor to the settle- idiotic act on the part of three of the settlers trig- something out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, has al- ment movement. gers a chain of events that brings the evacuation lowed Jewish settlers to create a kind of Wild West, The brothers grow up in the waning phase of to a halt. where they behave like outlaw sheriffs.” This con- the kibbutz experiment, and neither considered The Hilltop is throughout a lively, engaging demnation triggers outrage in the White House, and American pressure is brought to bear on Israel to remove the settlement. An Israeli cabinet minister shows up at Ma’aleh Hermesh C with full entourage, writhing under the blazing sun in his suit and tie, his physical discomfort a comical correlative to the political discomfort of his hopeless effort to placate both the Americans and the settlers. This long farcical scene vividly illustrates the government’s impotence in the face of the fierce determination of the settlers. The minister makes a little mealy-mouthed speech about “certain adjustments” that will have to be made at Ma’aleh Hermesh C. The fanatic beautician responds with a blistering, self-righteous denunciation:

“Tell the American president that he doesn’t stand a chance against us, because the king of the world is on our side! . . . What do Americans understand about the Israeli people’s struggle against Arab brutality? Who asked you to come here? Have you come to weaken the Jewish people, who’ve returned to the Land of Israel after two thousand years of exile and persecution and wars and pogroms and the Holocaust? Are you forcing us out of here—here, God’s sanctuary, the land of our forefathers? You’re throwing us out of here? A West Bank Jewish settlement, May 19, 2013. (Photo by Mendy Hechtman/Flash90.) And you dare to call that peace? Chutzpah!”

What emerges from Gavron’s representation of remaining there. In New York (Gabi also has a novel, shrewdly perceptive about contemporary the settler movement as it is manifested in Ma’aleh brief stay there) and in Tel Aviv, they are seen as Israeli society, and at times even quite funny, but Hermesh C is that it has been enabled not by a different manifestations of the loss of orientation in the end it is a sad book. It seems that no one grand governmental plan of territorial expansion in “post-Zionist” Israeli society—Roni in pursuit will be able to get rid of Ma’aleh Hermesh C. The but, from the Labor government in 1967 to the of profit and pleasure with no deep human con- existence of such settlements in the heartland of succession of right-wing coalitions that continue nections, Gabi ensconced in the bourgeois vapid- Arab population is surely a recipe for disaster in to the present, by a checkered history of religious ness of a failing marriage as he is riven by his per- the long run, and perhaps now even in the short idealism, political acquiescence, cynicism, diplo- sonal demons. run. In the final image of the novel, Gabi is ham- matic gridlock, confusion, and sheer incompe- The divergent paths they then take in the mering away at the reconstruction of his cabin, tence—the right hand not knowing what the left wake of their private failures trace what amounts which was reduced to ruins by an army bulldozer. is doing. There is considerable justice in what one to a national trajectory. Roni remains where he He soulfully meditates, as he is wont to do, on the visitor from the other side of the “Green Line” says began, an embodiment of the Israeli hustler, the “one immense and powerful holy God, who sees to Roni: “Tell me, are they not lunatics, burning paradigmatic figure of an acquisitive and hedo- and knows everything.” This is Gavron’s last irony. with messianic ideological fervor, outlaws and nistic society. Gabi is driven by the collapse of his His omniscient narrator sees what Gabi cannot bullies who harass the Arabs and steal land and all personal life to the reassurances of faith. But at a see, and what Gabi’s God will not prevent, namely that?” The lunacy and even the ideological fervor historical moment when believers have become the historical catastrophe that is waiting to be born are not shared by the representatives of the Israeli political activists, his turn to religion entails the out of all this noble building and sowing and reap- government we see in the novel, but they are not expropriation of land, acts of hostility toward the ing and tending of flocks. resolute enough to confront them in any effective neighboring Arabs who are scarcely neighbors, es- or sustained way. trangement from much of the Jewish population The intersecting stories of the two brothers in within Israel proper, and a withdrawal from what Robert Alter’s latest book, Strong As Death Is Love: the end become an emblem for the underlying na- is bracing and challenging along with what is de- The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel, tional context of the potent trouble spot that is the based in the modern world. The fate of the broth- will be published by W.W. Norton & Company in settler movement. The two boys, we should recall, ers suggests that the settler movement with its ag- March.

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forth between the two. In 1948, as Sylvia was delv- an English teacher in Holon, unsatisfied with the Sylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a ing deeper into her Jewish heritage, Ali, who was work but unable to find anything that quite suit- Mossad Spy three years younger, was with his father, Hassan ed her. Then, as is the norm in elite Israeli units, by Ram Oren and Moti Kfir Salameh, on the road to Jerusalem, watching a Jew- where “a friend brings a friend,” the Israeli secret University Press of Kentucky, 288 pp., $29.95 ish convoy approach and grind to a stop as it met service, specifically the ultra-clandestine Unit 188 the roadblock his father’s men had prepared: fallen that performed covert operations outside of Israel, rocks and a booby-trapped dead dog. Ali watched found her: as Hassan ordered the attack, preventing the convoy ylvia Rafael: The Life and Death of a Mossad from reaching the besieged city of Jerusalem. He Sylvia’s roommate, Hannah, had a friend named Spy opens not with an intrepid secret agent stayed at the roadblock, watching more ambushes, Zvika, who was an instructor at the unit’s about to pull off a bold maneuver, as books more death on both sides, for two days. It was all School for Special Operations. During one of with such titles usually do, but with nine part of Ali’s training to follow in his father’s foot- his visits to the flat, Zvika was introduced to menS gathered around a table in 1977, studying a steps. “For the Jews of pre-state Palestine, Hassan Sylvia and had a long conversation with her. He picture of an Israeli agent. “This woman must die,” Salameh’s name was synonymous with destruction was impressed by her intelligence, her native orders the group’s leader, Black September terror- and annihilation,” Kfir and Oren write. Earlier in English, and her burning desire to serve the ist Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh had support at the State of Israel. highest level for this action against her, with financ- “I think she could be right for us,” he told his ing personally provided by Yasser Arafat. The team colleague, the commander of the School for had assembled in Oslo, retrieved weapons from a Special Operations. stash in the Libyan embassy, and prepared to launch the attack on Rafael from a public park as she left Rafael soon had a cloak-and-dagger meeting her home the following morning. The night before, with “Gadi,” an interview for a job he could only the hit squad “avoided using the telephone, hid out describe as “a hugely challenging job involving in their rooms, made do with sandwiches, and re- quite a lot of travel abroad” with an organization he tired early.” couldn’t name. Gadi was in fact co-author Moti Kfir, After this ominous beginning, the book flashes the school commander to whom Zvika had spoken. back to the South African backwater in 1946, when It was an unusual dance, feeling out someone for a a bedraggled Holocaust survivor found his way to job you couldn’t tell her about until you were fairly the prosperous home of Ferdinand Rafael, Sylvia’s sure she could do it. Kfir thought that she could father, and collapsed on the doorstep as his fam- and recommended she go through the unit’s initial ily was enjoying tea time. In his pocket was a So- battery of tests and psychological evaluations. She viet passport in the name of Alex Rafael and in his passed them all with flying colors. hand a letter, written years ago from Ferdinand in Rafael continued to excel throughout her train- Graaff-Reinet to Alex in Kiev on the occasion of his ing, which covered everything from explosives bar mitzvah. From this newfound uncle Alex, after to how to avoid looking like an Israeli when she he was revived, young Sylvia (whose Boer mother peeled an orange. She mastered the business of be- had never converted but fasted on Yom Kippur) re- ing a spy as she began to inhabit the new persona ceived the beginnings of her Jewish education. He created for her by “Yitzchak,” her mentor as she told her both Bible stories and the tale of his own transitioned from training to operations. While miraculous escape from the deadly pit at Babi Yar at times Kfir and Oren veer close to propaganda where his entire family (including his own daughter, (or hagiography) in describing Rafael’s life, their Sylvia’s age) had been murdered. She put things in Rafael undercover as Canadian news photographer account of her mentor Yitzchak’s ability to “act her own words in a school essay: Patricia Roxenburg. (Courtesy of Keshet Publishing any part, assume any disguise, and blend into any Company.) background” is, if anything, understated. Readers Our entire family in Europe was killed before we will have to turn elsewhere for the sensational de- had a chance to meet them. My father told me the decade, Salameh had been the senior aide of the tails of Yitzchak’s key role in the execution in Uru- that they were very nice people . . . They were exiled Hajj Ammin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of guay of Herbert Zuckers, aka Herbert Cukurs, the taken from their houses and killed, just because Jerusalem, in Nazi Germany. “Hangman from Riga.” they were Jews. The Ukrainians and the Germans When Israel declared its independence, Sylvia On the other hand, they spare no superlatives as had rifles and cannons, but my family didn’t hoisted the flag of the new state in front of her fami- they tell how Sylvia “became” the Canadian photog- even have a revolver to protect them . . . I asked ly’s home. Wounded in the June 1948 battle at Ras al rapher Patricia Roxenburg, charming the neighbors my father why God didn’t protect his Jews, why Ayn, the dying Hassan Salameh made his wife and and making friends who could vouch for her if the didn’t He save our family, and Father only said: young son promise Ali would carry on the struggle need arose; how her photographic skills developed If the Jews don’t defend themselves, nobody else against the Jewish presence in Palestine. to the point where she was hired by a French photo will do it for them. When she was 22, Sylvia Rafael moved to Israel, agency and had an exhibition of her photographs leaving behind a family that, with the exception from war-torn Djibouti in Paris; how she calmly History had made its mark on her. of her mother, neither understood nor supported withstood detention and the threat of execution As they tell Sylvia Rafael’s story, co-authors Moti her decision to abandon a promising young lawyer in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, where Kfir and Ram Oren (a writer of best-selling He- who wanted to marry her and a comfortable life she had gone, undercover, to take photographs. brew thrillers) also trace the life story of her even- in South Africa. For a while, she wandered, work- Although she doesn’t appear in Steven Spielberg’s tual nemesis, Ali Hassan Salameh, cutting back and ing first as a volunteer on a kibbutz and then as Munich, readers will realize that the dramatic as-

34 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 sassination by telephone bomb it depicts was made the disaster at Lillehammer, one can hear the emo- possible by Sylvia’s ability to get the target, Dr. Mah- tion in Moti Kfir’s voice when he says, “It was a dis- moud Hamshari, out of his Paris apartment on the appointment to the state; it was a disappointment to pretext of a newspaper interview long enough for the people who took part in it.” Mossad agents to plant the bomb. After close to 200 pages of historical narrative tying Salameh and Rafael so tightly together, Oren and Kfir are left to deal somewhat awkwardly with Rafael’s training covered the reality that at the end of the day Rafael was a brilliantly adept and charismatic player in a larger everything from explosives game that continued without her. As it turns out, to how to avoid looking like Ali Hassan Salameh was something of a pawn in that “great game.” Since 1969, he had maintained, an Israeli when she peeled with Arafat’s knowledge, an ongoing dialogue with CIA officer Robert Ames, forming the first back- an orange. channel link between the PLO and the U.S. government. Although Salameh had never formally agreed espite his playboy ways and love of fast cars, to become a paid CIA asset, he was certainly an as- Dthe adult Ali Hassan Salameh made himself set to the CIA, and the Mossad knew it. indispensable to Yasser Arafat and the PLO. While The Mossad continued to look after Rafael, sources within the CIA and Black September ap- learning of and stopping the 1977 plot to kill her parently play down his importance, the Mossad in Oslo, where she had moved after marrying her was sure he had earned the moniker “the Red Norwegian defense lawyer, Annæus Schjødt. And, Prince” for his lineage and for the blood of the after inquiring whether he was under CIA protec- innocents that was on his hands. Their analysts tion and receiving no answer, it continued to look placed him at the center of the planning not just after Ali Hassan Salameh, tracking him down in of the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Beirut, where on January 22, 1979, another bright, but of operations the previous year, including the Yasser Arafat and Ali Hassan Salameh’s eldest son at ambitious young female Mossad agent pressed the hijacking of a Brussels-to-Ben Gurion Sabena Salameh’s funeral in Beirut. (Courtesy of Keshet button on her explosives-packed Volkswagen, kill- airliner and coordination with the Japanese Red Publishing Company.) ing him. After several decades of happily married Army terrorist group in its deadly attack in the Ben life, Sylvia Rafael died of leukemia in South Africa Gurion Airport. eroded my desire to continue serving with the peo- in 2005. Sometimes Kfir and Oren strain too hard to ple I respected so highly. My heroes had appeared connect Rafael and Salameh—over-emphasizing to be men of absolute integrity, but suddenly I saw their fundamental differences as well as their simi- them in a different light.” Speaking some 40 years Amy Newman Smith is the associate editor of the Jewish larities. It’s entirely believable that Sylvia’s Mossad later to a Canadian radio program about Sylvia and Review of Books. file contains a note from a psychologist concerning a comment she made in one of her initial inter- views: “The word ‘impossible’ doesn’t exist in my lexicon.” But do Kfir and Oren really know that, at a meeting called to plan the explosion of an El Al plane in mid-air, Ali told his incredulous co- conspirators: “The term ‘impossible’ doesn’t appear New to in our lexicon”? If the Mossad had either the listen- Routledge ing capabilities to overhear such a conversation or a mole deep enough inside Fatah and Black Sep- in 2015 tember to report it, would Kfir, even now, reveal it? And would it have made it past “Ilan Ben David and the censorship team” or “Aryeh Zohar, Chair- man of the Ministerial Book Censorship Commit- Israel Journal tee,” who are thanked in the book’s acknowledge- ments? One wonders. of Foreign Affairs After a string of legendary successes, the Israeli hunters of the men responsible for the Munich mas- A publication of the Israel Council on sacre famously met with failure in Lillehammer, Foreign Relations under the auspices Norway. It was a disaster that Rafael, a member of of the World Jewish Congress the team, tried to avert, pointing out that the hastily assembled team had no backup plan if the opera- Visit the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs tion took a bad turn. And she had her doubts, as did website at www.tandfonline.com/rifa to: others, that the man they were trailing really was n Register for table of contents email alerts Ali Hassan Salameh. But her voice went unheeded, n Find out how to submit an article and on July 21, 1973, the Mossad murdered Ahmed n Access the latest journal news and offers Bouchiki, a Moroccan Arab, in front of his pregnant n Find pricing and ordering information. Norwegian wife as they walked home from a movie. Six of the team members were apprehended and sentenced to prison, among them Sylvia. She served two and half years of her five-year term before being released—but not back to the Mossad, and only www.tandfonline.com/rifa for a time back to Israel. “Something in me broke after Lillehammer,” wrote Sylvia, who had refused an administrative position within the Mossad. “[I]t

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 35 Climate of Opinion

BY ALVIN H. ROSENFELD

some of Israel’s “racist” and “sadistic” actions against “insidious policy of extermination” so merciless The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel the Palestinians “are reminiscent of common Nazi in its character and extent as to constitute “one of edited by Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm practices against the Jews.” Needless to say, he offers the most massive ethnocidal atrocities of modern MLA Members for Scholars’ Rights, distributed by Wayne no evidence to support these outlandish charges. times.” It was signed by more than 900 academ- State University Press, 552 pp., $34.99 Anti-Zionism has developed a language of its own, voicing in

strongly felt terms a now-familiar litany of accusations and ast year, the British scholar Alan Johnson indictments directed at Israel. spoke up against a resolution to boycott Is- rael at the National University of Ireland, Barghouti, who is pursuing an advanced degree in ics. Since then, still larger numbers of people have Galway. As he recounts the experience, philosophy at Tel Aviv University, leads a move- endorsed proposals to boycott Israeli universities, “Anti-IsraelL student activists tried to break up the ment that would boycott the very institution where cultural events, and commercial products, includ- meeting by banging on the tables, using the Israeli he studies, a consequence that seems to trouble him ing Sabra-brand hummus, which has been banned flag as a toilet wipe, and screaming at me, again and not in the least. from certain American university dining halls. again, ‘Fuck off our fucking campus you fucking Zi- Mark LeVine, a professor of history at the Uni- What is going on? The anti-Zionism that has onist!’” This outburst came from students “whose versity of California, Irvine and an outspoken been emerging in recent years usually has little or heads were filled with the common sense of intel- supporter of BDS, is hardly any more convincing. nothing to do with Zionism itself. What distin- lectual circles in Europe—Zionism is racism, the LeVine recently wrote that “There is only one criti- guishes anti-Zionism more than anything else is the Zionists ‘ethnically cleansed’ the natives from the cism of Israel that is relevant: It is a state grown, negative passions it embodies. Through the frequent land in 1948, Israel is an ‘Apartheid State,’ Israel is funded, and feeding off the destruction of another repetition of a limited but emotionally charged lexi- committing a slow genocide against the remaining people. It is not legitimate. It must be dismantled, con of defamatory slogans, anti-Zionism has de- Palestinians, and so on.” Johnson recognizes that students who recite this litany of angry accusations are “in thrall to an Anti-Zionist Ideology” that turns them into dedicated “Anti-Zionist Subjects.” Most probably know little if anything about the history of Zionism or have any first-hand experience of Israel, but this ignorance does not keep them from eagerly participating in the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement or from putting forward resolu- tions such as the one to which Johnson objected. Johnson’s essay appears in Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm’s impressively comprehensive collection The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. The students Johnson encountered in Ireland have their counterparts among students, faculty members, and community activists on college and university campuses across the United States, Canada, and various European countries. They are a diverse group, and their motives may vary, but they are linked by an ideological and political stance towards Israel fueled by what Paul Berman calls “inexhaustible sources of rancor and rage.” As the chapters of this book persuasively demonstrate, one can develop a strong case against the anti-Israel Israeli Apartheid Week, May 2010, University of California, Los Angeles campus. (Courtesy of boycott proposals, but inasmuch as these proposals AMCHA Initiative.) are fueled by overwrought and adversarial passions, rational counter-arguments are unlikely to change the same way that the other racist, psychopathic veloped a language of its own, voicing in strongly many minds. states across the region must be dismantled. And felt terms a now-familiar litany of accusations and Intellect, in fact, is not what is first and foremost everyone who enables it is morally complicit in its indictments directed at Israel. The truth-content of at work here. Indignation is, and it is hard to per- crimes.” these charges is taken to be self-evident. Fixation, suade angry and indignant people to rethink their fervor, the hubris of moral certainty, and a height- positions. How, for instance, could one hope to rea- cademic scholars, of all people, should recog- ened degree of self-righteous anger are enough to son with Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of Anize that excoriation is not an acceptable sub- get many to sign on. Add the consolations of group- the BDS movement, who is certain that “we are wit- stitute for argument, but, in fact, it pervades much think, and it is no wonder that, in his contribution, nessing the rapid demise of Zionism, and nothing of the discourse that today passes as “criticism of Paul Berman refers to the phenomenon less in po- can be done to save it.” He unashamedly boasts, “I, Israel.” In 2009, for instance, a letter was sent to litical terms than in pathological ones, as a fevered for one, support euthanasia.” Barghouti claims that President Obama accusing Israel of pursuing an “madness.”

36 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 Nevertheless, BDS is emphatically a movement this book’s most notable chapters, including those Is it also a recipe for or a product of anti- with political goals and a reasoned strategy to meet by Alan Johnson, Sabah Salih, and David Hirsch. Semitism? The question comes up time and again in those goals. Cary Nelson describes these in detail Other chapters, by Martha Nussbaum, Russell Ber- this book with respect to the whole BDS movement. in his useful introduction, which offers a brief his- man, Gabriel Noah Brahm and Asaf Romirowsky, Butler is Jewish, as she repeatedly avows, but that tory of BDS. It began at the University of California, and Emily Budick, expose the hollowness of the fact hardly adds validity to arguments she makes Berkeley in early 2002 and soon thereafter spread supporting arguments and the political bad faith of against the Jewish State or necessarily keeps her at to Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and else- the BDS campaigns. Several other contributors— a distance from Israel’s fiercest enemies. She is on where. Recognizing that academic boycotts violate Sharon Ann Musher, Michael Bérubé, Donna Rob- record, for instance, affirming Hamas and Hezbol- the norms of academic freedom, hundreds of college inson Divine, Nancy Koppelman, Samuel M. Edel- lah as “progressive” movements that are to be sup- and university presidents have spoken out against man, and Carol F.S. Edelman—point out the threats ported as part of a global left wing, a position that them, and virtually every major multidisciplinary to academic freedom that BDS activities pose and most Jews would find abhorrent. Nelson claims no academic organization has opposed them as well. offer revealing case studies of damage already done knowledge of what is in Butler’s heart, but his analy- Still, the movement maintains a good deal of mo- on certain campuses. sis of her thinking, which he finds “fundamentally mentum, and divestment drives and proposals to Cary Nelson’s dismantling of Judith Butler (“The flawed by its unmitigated hostility toward Israel,” boycott Israeli universities are ongoing and will likely Problem with Judith Butler: The Philosophy of the leads him to conclude that the positions she argues for “have antisemitic consequences and lend support to antisemitic groups and traditions.” Kenneth Marcus devotes an entire chapter to this question (“Is BDS Anti-Semitic?”), offering a learned review of definitions of anti-Semitism, as well as several categories that are useful in thinking through the issue. He concludes that “in the last analysis, the BDS campaign is anti-Semitic.” Even if some of its proponents may hold no particular disdain for Jews, they “operate out of a climate of opinion that contains elements that are hostile to Jews.”

ne wants to know more about this “climate of Oopinion” and, in particular, understand why certain academics are so receptive to it. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin answers these questions in her groundbreaking chapter, “Interrogating the Academic Boycotters of Israel on American Cam- puses,” a carefully researched, empirical study of

JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Israeli Apartheid Week, May 2010, University of California, Los Angeles campus. (Courtesy of AMCHA Initiative.) Subscriber Benefits continue. Depending on which BDS spokesperson Movement to Boycott Israel”), the movement’s lead- one listens to, the aims may vary somewhat, but all ing philosopher and political theorist, succeeds of them speak up for greater Palestinian rights and strikingly. His analysis of the abstract, ahistorical argue that Israeli universities somehow deny those notion of justice on which Butler bases much of her rights. Yet any informed observer knows that Israeli argument for the dissolution of Israel is fully con- universities are among the most liberal institutions in vincing. To Butler, as Nelson points out, the history the country, that many of their faculty members and of the Jewish people in the land of Israel and the students actively advocate for a two-state solution, land’s connection to Judaism are without meaning. Magazine Web App e-Book and that large numbers of Arabs attend these insti- She simply “eschews the Zionist linkage of nation to tutions. Ilan Troen’s chapter, “The Israeli–Palestinian land” and rejects the very existence of a Jewish state, Your subscription includes our magazine and many Relationship in Higher Education: Evidence from not just its policies. Adopting the moral stance of other subscriber benefits located on our the Field,” is particularly clarifying in this regard. an absolutist, she insists on justice as the basis for website and app. Some highlights: Academic boycotts, divestments, and sanctions are a state’s legitimacy and finds justice only in the Pal- not, in fact, likely to work in favor of the Palestinians. estinian cause. For her, “there is no valid case to be Web-only: Allan Nadler’s exposé of Reza Aslan’s questionable Jesus expertise and more. There is ample reason, therefore, to suspect that the made for Israelis as citizens of a Jewish state.” In the movement has more ambitious goals in mind than rhetorical economy of her work there are no com- App bonus feature: Original newsreel footage of T.E. Lawrence’s WW I exploits. boycotts of Israeli universities. One of its advocates peting arguments. It is a conflict between truth and says as much. As As’ad Abu Khalil writes: error. Positioned on the side of error, Jews, there- Archive: Anita Shapira’s “The Kibbutz and the fore, are to give up their state and submit to gover- State,” along with al the articles from our first five years The real aim of BDS is to bring down the nance by a Palestinian majority, a prospect that the e-Book: Our first ever e-book, JRB Israel state of Israel . . . That should be stated as overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews are not likely Take advantage of all your subscriber benefits! an unambiguous goal. There should not be to endorse. Nelson is correct to conclude, then, that any equivocation on the subject. Justice and Butler’s proposal for a one-state solution is “a recipe Visit: www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/user/register freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible for war,” for Israelis would not stand idly by while www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/app-access with the existence of the state of Israel. the Jewish State disappears and they fall under the dominance of Muslim Arab rule. They would fight, The political philosophy that guides such an an outcome that never figures into Butler’s fantasy Jewish Culture. Cover to Cover. eliminationist goal is deftly analyzed in several of of a non-violent route to a single state.

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 37 938 faculty members at 316 American colleges and leap to seeing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the (they deserve a study unto themselves). Their various universities who have endorsed statements calling same binary terms, casting the Palestinians as the boycott campaigns have scored no major victories to for an academic boycott of Israeli universities. oppressed and the Israelis as the oppressors.” date, but by constantly maligning Israel as an unjust, Rossman-Benjamin’s findings are revealing: To view the Palestinian-Israeli dispute in these racist, apartheid state, they no doubt are making the A vast majority of these scholars—789 (86 per- terms is, of course, to reduce its complexity to country seem sinister in the eyes of growing numbers cent)—are located within the humanities (453 or Manichean notions of good and evil. This is not of people. Instances of Israeli scholars being dropped from the editorial boards of certain journals or oth- To view the Palestinian-Israeli dispute in these terms erwise shunned are documented in this book. One also hears anecdotally of scholars who will no lon- is to reduce its complexity to Manichean notions of ger collaborate with Israeli colleagues or participate in conferences at Israeli universities. In such cases, it good and evil. is more than just good professional manners that are being violated: decency is, and fairness, and personal 49 percent) or social sciences (336 or 37 percent). the way one would hope that our teachers of his- and national dignity. Those in engineering and the natural sciences tory, literature, and society think, but, of course, It is hard, personally and professionally, for Is- comprise a mere 7 percent of the total (4 percent Rossman-Benjamin is right that it is the kind of raelis to know how to respond to such insults. To were affiliated with the arts). The departments thinking that shapes much of the discourse of Is- answer indignation with indignation will not ease with the largest number of boycotters are English rael’s academic boycotters. The language and the the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but, then, neither or literature (21 percent), followed by ethnic stud- anti-Zionist politics they reflect are largely prod- will BDS and its faithful followers. What it will do ies (10 percent), history (7 percent), gender studies ucts of the ideological left, with which many of is let the latter know that Israelis and their support- (7 percent), anthropology (6 percent), sociology those who pursue race, class, gender, and empire ers will not remain passively on the receiving end (5 percent), linguistics or languages (5 percent), studies align themselves. Within certain scholarly of moral smugness and undeserved insults. To re- politics (4 percent), American studies (3 percent), and intellectual circles, to be a member of the left fuse to accept an imposed defensive crouch as one’s and Middle Eastern or Near East studies (3 per- in good standing today almost requires that one natural posture, as this book admirably does, also cent). Analyzing her data in order to understand be an anti-Zionist. As Cary Nelson comments, “An makes a case against academic boycotts of Israel. the boycotters’ ideological motivation, Rossman- overall progressive agenda cannot move forward Benjamin discovers four recurring themes at the without first dismantling the State of Israel. Anti- heart of their work: race, class, gender, and empire. Zionism becomes the necessary precondition of all Alvin H. Rosenfeld is the director of the Institute for the Rossman-Benjamin posits that scholars invested other progressive commitments.” Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Irving M. in the study of these subjects are apt to understand Try as they might, BDS and other campus-based Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University, human experience in terms of power relationships anti-Israel activists will not succeed in dismantling Bloomington. He is the editor, most recently, of that divide the world into the oppressed and their the Jewish State, nor will the tiny minority of Israeli Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (Indiana oppressors. Thereafter, it is but “a short ideological scholars who have emerged as boycott advocates University Press).

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BY Steven Englund

Harris makes clear, he did not like Jews—but then, Harris then has the sly and knowing Émile Zola re- An Officer and a Spy few did. Nonetheless, he was fair-minded, and he ply, “It is already a work of art, Colonel . . . All that by Robert Harris understood that “The Affair” was not only a public is required is an angle of attack.” Something similar Knopf, 448 pp., $15.95 moral failure but a political calamity for the French might be said to Harris. Army. The truly staggering moment, as Harris is When Harris’ skillful and absorbing historical

aptain Alfred Dreyfus can’t be the “spy” As Harris recounts, the going view was that of the French in the title of Robert Harris’ recent his- minister of war: “We simply can’t allow ourselves to be torical thriller, since he was entirely innocent. An Officer and a Spy, newly out distracted from these great issues by one Jew on a rock.“ inC paperback, is, in fact, mostly about Lieutenant- Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, the French Army well aware, was not so much Dreyfus’ ghastly public thriller appeared last year, it is not likely that many counter-intelligence chief who eventually proved degradation in January of 1895, but his retrial and people read it with current events in mind. (Or if that the Jewish captain had been falsely accused and re-conviction four years later. they did it was in a more general sense, in line with wrongly convicted of spying for Germany. Late in the novel Picquart says to a group of the blurb on the recent paperback edition: “A whistle Harris retells the “Dreyfus Affair” from Pic- Dreyfusards, including the prominent novelist blower. A witch hunt. A cover-up. Secret tribunals, quart’s point of view, dramatically reconstructing Émile Zola and the journalist and future prime out-of-control intelligence agencies, and govern- how he zeroed in on the true culprit, Major Ferdi- minister Georges Clemenceau: ment corruption. Welcome to 1890s Paris.”) Now, nand Walsin Esterhazy, by setting up, among other however, in the aftermath of the massacres that things, a wonderfully quaint fin de siècle stake-out in took place in Paris in January and with so the neighborhood of the German embassy in Paris. much news about Jewish emigration from The climactic moment, however, comes at Picquart’s France, readers may come to Harris’ novel desk, staring at a recently obtained specimen of Es- not only to hear an exciting tale but with terhazy’s handwriting: some hope that it will help them better to understand the present-day France. If so, The writing is neat, regular, well spaced. I that would be unfortunate. am almost sure that I have seen it before. According to the standard version of At first I think it must be because the script the Affair, which Robert Harris’ tale faith- is quite similar to that of Dreyfus, whose fully reflects, Dreyfus was condemned be- correspondence I have spent so many hours cause he was Jewish and because France studying lately. was an anti-Semitic society, notwithstanding the fact that the country had emanci- That was something Picquart had been ordered to pated its Jews a century earlier. The ugly do, in the hope that he would find additional evi- truth about France finally emerged at the dence concerning Dreyfus’ motives. end of the century when the French military elite, made up of Catholics in its great And then I remember the bordereau—the majority, conspired to accuse and arrest covering note that was retrieved from the only Jew on the General Staff. It took Schwartzkoppen’s waste-paper basket and that three years before the real story began convicted Dreyfus of treason. to spill out. And even as it did, as Harris I look at the letters again. recounts, the going view was that of the No, surely not . . . French minister of war: “We simply can’t Thebordereau , in facsimile, is a column of allow ourselves to be distracted from these thirty narrow lines of handwriting—undated, great issues by one Jew on a rock. It would unaddressed, unsigned . . . tear the army to pieces.” Largely thanks to The leading handwriting expert in Paris swore Picquart, however, the forces of light man- The public humiliation of Alfred Dreyfus at the École that this was written by Dreyfus. I carry the aged to pull themselves together and take Militaire by Henri Meyer, which appeared on the cover of Le photograph over to my desk and place it Petit Journal, January 13, 1895. (From the Bibliothèque up the cudgels on the innocent Jew’s behalf. between the two letters from Esterhazy. I stoop Nationale de France.) It then took another eight years—so, 11 in for a closer look. all—of enormous social and political tur- The writing is identical. bulence that rent French society before the What I do believe is that somehow this affair unhappy captain received a full pardon and rein- Harris, a well-known British novelist with eight must be taken out of the jurisdiction of the statement at the rank of major. best-sellers to his credit, dramatically depicts Pic- military and elevated to a higher plane—the quart’s transformation into what we now call a details need to be assembled into a coherent hat’s wrong with this version of events? It has whistle-blower who switched sides and became the narrative, so that everything can be seen for Wlong been fashionable to quote the lament of star witness for the “Dreyfusards,” the defenders of the first time in its proper proportions . . . the great writer Charles Péguy that “everything [in the Jewish captain imprisoned on Devil’s Island. Reality must be transformed into a work of art, the Affair] began as mystique and ended as poli- Picquart was a conservative Catholic and, as if you will. tique.” This sounds glorious but is misleading, for

40 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 the truth is that the Dreyfus Affair, from start to hand of its enemy at every turn, while resorting to the including several prime ministers, privately had se- last, for better or worse, was about politics—and highest-flown moral-ideal language to combat it. Giv- vere doubts about Dreyfus’ guilt and qualms about that includes the Affair’s career in posterity. Not- en this explosive tension, it is quite remarkable how the military’s railroading of him but they were not withstanding the mountain of unproven assertions comparatively uninvolved the Catholic hierarchy it- inclined to take on the Ministry of War. and unwarranted assumptions to the contrary, the self remained in the Dreyfus case. Leo XIII made it obsession with Dreyfus did not contort and con- clear that he thought the captain innocent. This said, reyfus was arrested because there was some vulse the whole of France. If we keep this gentle priests and religion’s secular hacks were another mat- Devidence to incriminate him and because reminder firmly in mind, we shall have a much ter, and this is where anti-Semitism came in. his superiors were desperate to find a culprit. The fact that this captain was rich, arrogant, secularly trained (at L’École polytechnique, the French version of MIT, rather than West Point), and Jewish only further justified his arrest. The going logic was, in Joly’s priceless words, “It’s perhaps he, so then it must be he.” The military justice machine went into high gear to justify the hasty arrest. Rather than back off, the brass compounded error upon error, lie upon subterfuge, each step making it harder—and soon, impossible—for them to stop or step backward without ruining their own and the Army’s reputation. Until Picquart changed his mind, after Dreyfus’ first conviction but before the second, no one even tried to stop this implacable flight forward. The Affair became politicized, then highly politicized, as it became clear that all sides on the conten- tious French public scene could use it to do their old business destroying each other’s reputations. The great success of the handful of leading anti- Dreyfusards lay not in rallying “the French against the Jew” but in managing to project and sustain the myth that the cause of a few criminal officers in military justice was the cause of the Army, hence French political cartoon by Louis Dalrymple, which appeared in Puck, 1898, depicting the Dreyfus scandal. (automatically) the cause of the “wounded” country. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) But what about the infamous anti-Jewish riots that took place in the winter and spring of 1898, following Zola’s exposé of the framing of Dreyfus easier time understanding both what the Affair was in his “J’Accuse”? Harris is indeed true to the facts about—and what it was not: namely, a crusade of when he has Picquart observing an anti-Semitic evil against good. Much serious scholarship is there demonstration in the Boulevard du Palais in Paris to tell us—and Robert Harris, if he had engaged in where there are cries of “Death to the Jews!” “Death a more thorough study of the latest research—that to the traitors!” “Yids to the water!” Nor is he fic- the French had, as they like to say, other cats to tionalizing when he reports what Picquart witnesses whip. The “Dreyfus obsession,” as a leading his- a little later: torian of this period, Bertrand Joly, terms it, was largely a retrospective construction. We cross the river and have barely travelled The social-psychological background against a hundred metres along the boulevard de which everything took place in France in this Sébastapol when we hear the cascading sound period was the national resentment and self- of plate glass shattering and a mob comes defensiveness that accumulated in the wake of the running down the centre of the street. A man country’s shocking military loss to Prussia, coupled yells, “Down with the Jews!” Moments later we with the latter’s transformation into the Kaiser- pass a shop with its windows smashed and paint reich—and at Versailles, no less. What Harris aptly daubed across a storefront sign that reads Levy calls “the lingering stench of defeatism after 1870” & Dreyfus. saw France develop a semi-conscious xenophobia and quasi-revanchist focus on military, diplomatic, And not only in Paris but in a score of other French and “national” might, together with a cult of its cities, jeering throngs spewed epithets at many army (“the sacred Ark”) that hadn’t been seen since targets, including the Jews. But, as Joly and others the Napoleonic empire. And as for spies, France have shown, the crowds usually numbered only in caught a long-term case of what the historian Vin- the hundreds, rarely the thousands. They did mate- cent Duclert calls, “veritable espionnitis.” rial damage but shed no blood, and the turbulence Second, now that the Republic was re-established stopped as swiftly as it arose, requiring only modest (after its overthrow in 1852, by Louis-Napoléon Lieutenant-Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, repressive action from police or military. Bonaparte), the century-old rivalry between church testifying at the Zola trial in Paris, 1898. Engraving Even at the height of the Affair, Judeophobia and state returned with a vengeance. The Rome- by Sabattier et Thiriat from l'Illustration. did not translate into electoral support for enemies Republic tension defined the era—and the Drey- of the Jews. The elections of 1898 saw 23 deputies fus Affair. What is essential to keep in mind is that Third, and finally, the Third Republic itself had (out of a total of 565) returned to the Chamber French Catholics, though not quite persecuted, had serious structural weaknesses that made it hard whose political platforms contained anti-Semitic good reason to feel penalized for publicly practic- for it to create enduring parliamentary majorities. discourse, in some guise or other. These men were ing their religion. Both church and state developed French governments in these years were hopeless at to prove wholly inactive, and all were defeated a real paranoia about the other, tending to see the dealing decisively with any crisis. Many politicians, in the next elections. By contrast, the numerous

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 41 Austro-German anti-Semitic political parties mo- eeing the Dreyfus Affair through the same lens curious to note that not one of the 57 images from bilized hundreds of thousands of voters over two Sas we view, say, the Mendel Beilis trial and the French publications contains an anti-Semitic or Ju- decades, and in the case of Vienna, the municipal Leo Frank lynching of roughly the same period deophobic theme. administration of the capital fell into the anti- is common but mistaken. The blood libel accusa- It was understandably the Second World War that Semitic groups’ hands for a generation. tions against Beilis in Kiev and of rape and murder launched a reconsideration of the Dreyfus Affair. Édouard Drumont, the only important French against Frank in Georgia centrally turned on the “[The Dreyfus Affair was] a huge dress rehearsal for anti-Semite, was certainly a rhetorical force to be reckoned with at home throughout the years of the Seeing the Dreyfus Affair through the same lens as we view, Affair, with his incendiary denunciations of the “big Jews and their accomplices” who ought to be court- say, the Mendel Beilis trial and the Leo Frank lynching of martialed and executed. But Drumont was a political pariah who was viewed as a corrupt monomaniac. roughly the same period is common but mistaken. The few dozens of secondary and tertiary French anti-Semites who trailed after him were largely im- accused’s religious identity, while in the Dreyfus a performance that had to be put off for more than mature adolescents, a handful of failed artists, some Affair, this was (mainly) not the case. This is not to three decades,” wrote Hannah Arendt. There was, it is police spies, and a plethora of accomplished huck- say that the assertion (far more than sincere belief) true, plenty of Judeophobia on the French landscape sters and embezzlers. What is remarkable is how this that the Affair turned on “the Jewish Question” of the late 1890s—as there was in every European farrago of frauds has mesmerized so many historians was absent at the time—far from it!—but it was the country. But what the French had more of than other who have taken them for what they said they were. countries was freedom of expression, together The French public of the Dreyfus years did not with an old tradition of violent, virulent polem- dream of a Holocaust avant la lettre; they simply ics. The tiny handful of professional anti-Sem- could not quickly make sense of the shrill opponents ites did themselves proud in this department, attacking each other and haranguing “the people” but this was the distant threnody in a minor on all sides. Partly this ignoring of what posterity chord of the long history of contempt for Jews so badly wants to see as the leitmotif of the Affair and the use of “Jew”-language for every nega- stems from the fact that the France of the 1890s had tive purpose. very few Jews: around 80,000 in a population of 35 So is history of any help to us in parsing the million. Many Frenchmen had never met one. The undeniable spike in Jew-hatred in France and would-be assassin of Dreyfus’ lawyer at the retrial at elsewhere in Europe these days? Possibly, but Rennes in 1899 ran off after he shot Labori yelling, not until we clean the Augean Stables before “I’ve just killed a Dreyfus,” meaning, one suspects, “a filling them up again. Despite her irresistible Jew.” (Labori was a practicing Catholic.) It took a sol- brilliance and good heart, Hannah Arendt had id year or two before all the disclosures of what really it wrong. L’Affaire (as the French still call it) happened turned the tide of opinion against the an- is a complex saga which, at its most depress- ti-Dreyfusards. Finally, it became politically correct ing, presents a truly pitiable portrait of French to see not simply the innocence of Dreyfus (which society and the Republic, but it wasn’t a “dress was, after all, long suspected) but the stupidity and rehearsal” for anything. By 1899, both society criminality of a few officers, who did not necessarily and the Republic began to pick themselves up represent “the Sacred Ark” of France’s army. This em- and do the right thing and continued to do powered a craven and weak government to act, and so until the Nazis brought France’s anti-Sem- presently the Affair ended. But the fulcrum on which ites to power during their occupation of the it has turned is not, was never, “the Jew”; it was raison country. d’État versus the rights of man. As for the genuinely alarming events of to- At many points throughout the Affair, many day, it is important to register that the attackers parties tried to “explain” what was “really happen- are not assailing Jews in the name of France. In ing” in terms of plots against the state or the so- Depiction of Dreyfus in Musée des Horreurs: Le Traître! fact, it is hard to imagine a premier of an ear- ciety—Jesuit, Freemason, Jewish, anti-militarist- by Imprimerie Lenepveu, ca. 1899. (Courtesy of the lier Republic stating, as Monsieur Valls recently anarchist, anti-clerical, anti-Semitic, and so on. Such Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair, did, that if 100,000 Jews left France to make ali- thinking, such mendacity, such nonsense gained a University of Pennsylvania Libraries.) yah, “France will no longer be France.” lot of temporary ground, but few people took these This being said, there is a connection between allegations seriously for long. They were elements of the anti-Semitism of the “old” France, and other verbal escalation in bitter partisan wars. product of small highly partisan groups, making Christianity-inscribed societies, and the violence of to- What we need to keep in mind—as Robert Harris political capital. Outside of France, however, it be- day. Muslim anti-Semitism no longer consists mainly certainly does not—is that the anti-Dreyfusard wave came the common wisdom. in the contempt that the historian Bernard Lewis cor- which unquestionably swept France did not imply Pastors in upstate New York preached to their rectly distinguished from hatred. Rather, as Britain’s widespread approval of Drumont or his anti-Semitic flocks that “all the world is watching the second trial former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has pointed out, it cause. Even most anti-Dreyfusard newspapers ignored of Captain Dreyfus because Dreyfus is a Jew,” while traffics in the kind of chimerical charges and explosive the anti-Semites when they did not revile them, and an American publication (The Independent) waxed violence, backed by official complicity or indifference, the same held for most of the leading nationalists. more erudite, “Nothing but the story of Esther and that once characterized anti-Semitism in nominally Camille Krantz, who became minister of war in 1899 the Book of Job can equal the Dreyfus case in the Christian cultures, from Imperial Russia and Austria and was personally convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt, de- symmetry of its ending.” Newspapers in Wilhelmi- to Nazi Germany—and yes, though to a far lesser detested the Jew-haters (“they inspire me with absolute an Germany and tsarist Russia—two infinitely more gree, the French Third Republic. repugnance”) and refused to shake Drumont’s hand. anti-Semitic societies than democratic France— Nor, on the other hand, were the leading Dreyfusards welcomed the opportunity to chastise the preachy particularly wrought up over the Jewish question. and superior French Republic. But in France itself Steven Englund is the author of Napoleon: A Political When the League of the Rights of Man was founded in matters were less clear. In 1994, the centennial of the Life (Harvard University Press), which won the 1898 its statement said nothing about combatting anti- arrest and trial of Dreyfus, a French scholarly review American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize. Semitism but spared no shot in firing at counter- published an issue devoted to nine country-by- He is currently writing a comparative study of political revolution and clericalism, while equating Dreyfusard- country studies of cartoons that appeared in Britain, anti-Semitism in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and ism with the battle for liberty, fraternity, and equality. France, and Germany at the time of the Affair. It is France.

42 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 Live Wire

BY Abraham Socher

the elusive (and uncharmed) great author. The title literary front,” “it is a novel of ideas to put it in the The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, is taken from Frost’s famous poem in which the kindest light,” and, “After four marriages, Bellow 1915–1964 drumlin woodchuck’s “…own strategic retreat/Is was forced to acknowledge his shortcomings as a by Zachary Leader where two rocks almost meet,/And still more secure husband, but he continued to cast himself in the role Knopf, 832 pp., $40 There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: That Bellow’s own fiction drew so heavily on his famously Collected Nonfiction full and messy life has been both an obstacle and a blessing by Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor Viking, 544 pp., $35 for his biographers.

and snug,/A two-door burrow I dug.” A decade later, of victim.”) Most recently and poignantly Bellow’s n his brilliant novella The Ghost Writer, Philip Ruth Miller, who had been among Bellow’s first stu- first son Greg has published a memoir, Saul Bellow’s Roth sends his fictional alter ego, a young Na- dents in 1938 and a friend ever since, tried to corner Heart, which, while less than subtle in its literary than Zuckerman, on a pilgrimage to discuss him with a study called Saul Bellow: A Biography readings, is nonetheless forceful in registering the the life and art of fiction with the eminent of the Imagination. It wasn’t a great book; it was al- human costs of his father’s art. Iwriter E.I. Lonoff, a character clearly modeled on ternately chatty and ponderous, unsure whether it Bellow’s new biographer Zachary Leader is both Bernard Malamud (with a bit of Henry Roth thrown was a testimonial or a critical study, but it did hint authorized and judicious. His excellent biography in). Eventually they come to their greatest contem- at how much Bellow had drawn from his life for his is being published on the occasion of what would porary. “The disease of his life,” Lonoff says, “makes fiction. They never spoke again. have been Bellow’s 100th birthday—he made it to Abravanel fly.” 89—as is a new collection of his essays, lectures and reviews, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, I admire what he puts his nervous system edited by Benjamin Taylor. The two books comple- through. I admire his passion for the front- ment each other nicely and both should push the row seat. Beautiful wives, beautiful mistresses, reader back to the great fiction, which is in the end alimony the size of the national debt, polar their justification. (Taylor also put out a terrific col- expeditions, war-front reportage, famous lection of Bellow’s letters a few years ago, reviewed friends, famous enemies, breakdowns, public in these pages by Steven J. Zipperstein.) lectures, five-hundred-page novels every third Although Atlas did the initial spadework and in- year, and still, as you said before, time and terviewed many people who have since died, Leader energy left for all that self-absorption. The has clearly done new and prodigious work in recon- gigantic types in the books have to be that big structing and thinking through the details of a by- to give him something to think about to rival now familiar but still fascinating life, or rather the himself. Like him? No. But, impressed, oh first half of it. Whereas Atlas took some 600 pages yes. Absolutely. It’s no picnic up there in the to tell almost the whole story (his Bellow: A Biogra- egosphere. I don’t know when the man sleeps, phy was published in 2000, five years before Bellow or if he has ever slept, aside from those few died), Leader takes almost 800 to get Bellow to the minutes when he had that drink with me. height of “fame and fortune,” after the publication of Herzog at the age of 49 in 1964. A second volume will Abravanel is even more clearly Saul Bellow (with, carry Bellow through (to stop just at the highlights) maybe, just a bit of Norman Mailer thrown in), who, a Broadway flop, a bitter divorce and decade-long according to Roth’s recent chronicler Claudia Roth alimony battle, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, co-editorship Pierpont, was not amused. of several small literary magazines, journalism from That his own fiction drew so heavily on his fa- Tel Aviv and Sinai in the midst of the Six-Day War, mously full and messy life has been both an obstacle Bellow, newly elected member of the Department of Humboldt’s Gift, the Nobel Prize, marriage to a and a blessing for Bellow’s biographers. On the one Literature of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, glamorous Rumanian mathematician, then another hand, it is hard to wring new insight from situa- February 1958. (Photo by Victoria Lidov, © Bettmann/ bitter divorce, and his brilliant late-life renaissance tions and events that Bellow described and thought CORBIS.) culminating in Ravelstein, his novel about—an im- through so deeply, repeatedly, and vividly in his fic- precise but unavoidable preposition with Bellow— tion. On the other, it is easier to correlate the life and Finally, in the 1990s, James Atlas was given full his friend and University of Chicago colleague Allan the art when the novelist in question approaches fic- access to Bellow, his surviving family, friends, and Bloom. And, of course, his final, and finally happy, tion as “the higher autobiography.” papers (also his former friends, ex-wives, and en- marriage to Bloom’s student Janis Freedman Bellow. Bellow’s first would-be biographer was Mark emies). Atlas succeeded in pinning Bellow down, It is hard not to be, like Roth’s Lonoff, overwhelmed Harris, a novelist and acquaintance who approached and—to switch animals and famous poems (one just thinking about the roiling turmoil and gigantic Bellow in the mid-1960s and self-consciously imag- Bellow once parodied in Yiddish, in fact)—when achievements of such a life. ined himself playing Boswell to Bellow’s Johnson. the novelist was pinned and wriggling on the wall Bellow ducked and weaved for 15 or so years un- Atlas alternated between shrewd insight and a com- aul Bellow was born in 1915, in Lachine, Que- til Harris—who is now remembered mostly for petitive, sneering condescension. (Three examples Sbec, just outside of Montreal, but Leader begins his baseball novel Bang the Drum Slowly—finally of Atlas’ tone from early, middle, and late in the instead with his father Abraham and the family’s published Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck. It’s an biography, taken almost at random: “Bellow’s oner- life in Russia. Abraham Belo (or Belous) was a vola- odd, charming memoir of his failures to pin down ous duties as a parent didn’t slow him down on the tile man, who had been briefly prosperous in Saint

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 43 Petersburg before he was arrested for living there membered it in one version of the story (there were unabashed Yiddish flavor, while the one that follows under false papers. In fact, the prosperity may several and Leader quotes another variant). That is, reminds you that Augie is as American as Huck have come from dealing in such papers (some- he was suddenly writing the justly famous opening Finn but not unlettered: one named “Belousov” was convicted of doing so lines of The Adventures of Augie March: around the same time, at any rate). Turn-of-the- But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, century Russia is not Leader’s scholarly beat, but I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise he is rightly more interested in the Russia of fam- that somber city—and go at things as I have the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on ily lore that eventually made it into Bellow’s fic- taught myself, free-style, and will make the the door or gloving the knuckles. tion than that of history. As Bellow once remarked record in my own way: first to knock, first “the retrospective was strong in me because of my admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, Bellow later spoke of his first two novels, Dangling parents,” so Leader moves swiftly from the Rus- sometimes a not so innocent. Man and The Victim, as too proper, narrow, and con- sia of Abraham Belo’s life to the old country that strained, an attempt, perhaps, to glove his knuckles shadows his son’s fiction. Soon we are hearing of As Leader says, this is when Bellow “found his voice or change the door. Herzog’s parents, who briefly lived like Bellow’s as a novelist,” that distinctive freestyling prose that Bellow’s not so innocent knock is generally tak- in a dacha in the old country, and of Pa Lurie in affects not to care exactly how its sprung rhythms en as the moment when Jews barged into American Bellow’s unpublished manuscript from the 1950s and startling observations knock the reader. The literature without apology, but it wasn’t just a matter “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” who was violent, last semi-grammatical phrase of that famous open- of voice. Augie March made an argument that the “nervous like a fox,” and escaped from “Pobedon- ing sentence, “sometimes a not so innocent,” has an rough-and-tumble lives of Chicago Jews were as fit osteyev’s police” in Saint Petersburg, before even- a subject for literature as any other. Standing there tually ending up in Chicago. as the cleaning crew hosed down the Paris streets, Bellow’s mother died when he was in high Bellow says he thought of “a pal of mine whose sur- school. It hit him hard, and his relationship with his name was August—a handsome breezy freewheel- father was never easy. Although Bellow was a tough ing kid who used to yell out when we were playing guy in print, Bellow’s father was a real tough guy, an checkers ‘I got a scheme!’” Charlie August, like his operator who ended up running Chicago coal yards later fictional counterpart, Augie March, was a so- with his two older sons, and who could not under- cial type of the 1920s and 1930s that basically no stand his youngest or credit his success, even when longer exists in America, a poor immigrant Jew: it finally came. Of course things were not quite that simple; his parents had read Tolstoy and the other His father had deserted the family, his mother was, great Russian novelists (Dostoevsky was to become even to a nine-year-old kid, visibly abnormal, he Bellow’s favorite), and, in an essay “On Jewish Sto- had a strong and handsome older brother. There rytelling,” included in There Is Simply Too Much to was a younger child who was retarded—a case Think About, Bellow credited him with his sense of of Down syndrome, perhaps—and they had a narrative, or rather with his sense that everything granny who ran the show. (She was not really the was a story. “My father would say, whenever I asked granny; she’d perhaps been placed there by a social him to explain any matter, ‘The thing is like this: agency that had some program for getting old There was a man who lived . . . ’ [. . .] ‘There once was people into broken homes.) a widow with a son . . . ’ ‘A teamster was driving on a lonely road . . . ’” In Seize the Day, a beautiful novella This recollection, along with that of the street clean- published the year after Bellow’s father had died, the ers’ “hydrotherapy,” comes from the wonderful (if protagonist Tommy Wilhelm is asked if he loves his First edition of Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie fragmentary and repetitive) written interview that aged, emotionally remote father: March, 1953. Philip Roth conducted on and off with Bellow in the

“Of course, of course I love him. My father. My mother”—As he said this there was a great pull at the very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the live force in your hand. A mysterious being beneath the water, driven by hunger, has taken the hook and rushes away, writhing.

Although it took him a while to find it—he was in his late 30s and had already written two novels— Bellow’s first great subject was really his family and the Jewish Chicago in which he had grown up. He was in Paris on a Guggenheim fellowship, working on a depressing manuscript called “The Crab and the Butterfly,” in which two invalids philosophize in a hospital ward. As he later told Philip Roth: “I was walking heavyhearted toward my workplace one morning when I caught up with the cleaning crew who opened the taps at the street corners and let the water run along the curbs, flushing away the cigarette butts, dogs’ caca, shredded letters, orange skins, candy wrappers into the large-mouthed sewers . . . Watching the flow, I felt less lame, and I was grateful for this hydrotherapy and the points of sunlight in it—nothing simpler.” Bellow walked away from the street washers repeating to himself “I am an American—Chicago born,” at least so he re- Saul Bellow, 1962. (Photo by Truman Moore/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.)

44 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 last years of his life and published in The New Yorker March, one can see him asserting their signifi- There was no fairy tale time different and bet- after his death. Leader draws upon it in his biogra- cance as subjects from the very beginning, con- ter and stronger than ours, or, even if there was, phy, and it is now the last main selection in Taylor’s juring up the world of his childhood as he sits at one is still obligated to live and reflect upon this collection of Bellow’s nonfiction. a writing desk in Paris. Grandma Lausch, Augie’s age and one’s own people. Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Bellow said that Charlie August lived next door dictatorial matriarch who “wasn’t really the gran- Einhorn were also based on figures in Bellow’s life, in this case the parents of his close friend, later It is perhaps this emphasis on literary art as the jolt of enemy (he was his divorce attorney) Sam Freif- eld, though it was another friend Dave Peltz, not observant caring that brings memories and facts to life that Bellow or Charlie August, who really worked for them. As Leader quotes Bellow on the relation be- explains a puzzling feature of Bellow’s work. tween fact and fiction: “The fact is a wire through which one sends a current. The voltage of that cur- to him on West Augusta Boulevard, which is an Au- ny,” is described as “one of those Machiavellis of rent is determined by the writer’s own belief as to gustinian coincidence, though not impossible, even small street and neighborhood.” Augie’s descrip- what matters, by his own caring or not-caring, by if it’s an unlikely name for a Jew and the novel he tion of his first great mentor, the devious crippled passionate choice.” ended up writing about him was cast It is perhaps this emphasis on literary art as the as a kind of spiritual autobiography. jolt of observant caring that brings memories and He also said that he never knew what facts to life—as “when a fish strikes the line,” and became of his pal, which is surprising, “you feel the live force in your hand”—that explains given that the book was a best-seller a puzzling feature of Bellow’s work. He was, with- and the first chapters were a close, out a doubt, the most celebrated American novel- heartbreaking description of life in ist of his generation, winning every prize and most the March/August home. Wouldn’t of them two or three times. But as compositions Charlie/Augie, or someone who knew very few of the novels really hold together. Narra- him, have called? Everyone else Bel- tors overshare, narratives trail off, seemingly stray low ever wrote about seems to have. characters take over, and the individual elements of Atlas took this all at face value in his a novel can feel curiously unbalanced for a writer biography, but there is no indication of such manifest artistry. The individual parts— that he checked it carefully, and I breathtaking descriptions, brilliant dialogue, utterly wonder if the Marches were a “purer,” original turns of phrase—often seem greater than or at any rate more complicated, fic- the whole. tional invention than Bellow let on. Philip Roth, who is Bellow’s greatest champion, Zachary Leader doesn’t say this, but puzzled over this and once suggested that maybe he on the other hand he doesn’t quite was in just too much of a hurry, which, in a way, is repeat Atlas’ claim that the actual Au- what Bellow himself wrote to Malamud in defense gusts had the same familial set-up as of Augie March: “A novel, like a letter, should be the fictional Marches. Whatever the loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of case here, one has the sense that, as a mortality and decay.” He wasn’t aiming for a jew- biographer, Leader has complete con- eler’s perfection but rather to capture and requicken trol of his material and does not feel messy, creaturely, contingent moments of human the need to let the reader in on every life, when a “mysterious being beneath the water, calculation, contested reading, and driven by hunger, has taken the hook and rushes judgment made in the back room. away, writhing.” And he loved a good joke. Bellow’s sense of the relation between life and lit- ellow gave Augie March himself An advertisement for Hart Schaffner & Marx Clothes by Jay Hyde erature and the purpose of the latter also helps to ex- Bmany of his own adventures and Barnum, 1926. plain a curious feature of the non-fiction collected in experiences, from teenage jobs and There Is Simply Too Much to Think About. He was one pranks to his visit to Leon Trotsky in Mexico, only landlord-philosopher William Einhorn, sets out of our great men of letters, the most discursive of fic- to find the great man dying in a hospital from the the theory behind this, what you might call Bel- tion writers, a professor at the University of Chicago’s wounds of his axe-wielding Stalinist assassin. And low’s American aesthetic: august Committee on Social Thought who seemingly Augie’s streetwise older brother Simon so closely gave lectures and wrote essays at the drop of an (ele- resembles Bellow’s older brother Maurice, down He had a brain and many enterprises, real gant, rakish) hat, but he disdained literary critics and to the salacious details of a scandalous affair and directing power, philosophical capacity, and even the act of literary criticism. His own few reviews love child, that it caused a rift between them. Years if I were methodical enough to take thought are more in the way of astringent encouragement of later, Maurice’s daughter Lynn said of her uncle before an important and practical decision and his peers. Reviewing Philip Roth’s now-famous first “What kind of creative? He just wrote it down.” also (N.B.) if I were really his disciple and not book of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, he wrote This was a frequent complaint from Bellow’s what I am, I’d ask “What would Caesar suffer “Unlike those of us who came howling into the world, friends, relatives, and acquaintances who did not in this case? What would Machiavelli advise blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with hair, nails and realize that they were sitting for a portrait, or did or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?” teeth, speaking coherently.” realize but didn’t like the way it came out. Not that I’m not kidding when I enter Einhorn on this Critics, in short, ought to provide useful en- he was easier on himself. Herzog, which is prob- eminent list. It was him that I knew and what I couragement and then get the hell out of the way. ably Bellow’s best, most fully realized novel, is an understand of them in him. Unless you want to This—as much as their differing temperaments and account of an intellectual falling apart and pulling say that we’re at the dwarf end of all times and approaches—helps to explain the lifelong tension himself back together after discovering that his wife mere children whose only share in grandeur is between Bellow and Lionel Trilling, the leading and best friend are lovers, which of course is what like a boy’s share in fairy tale kings, beings of a critic of his time, certainly among the Jewish intel- happened to Bellow. different time better and stronger than ours. lectuals who came of intellectual age with Bellow in As a truly literary biographer, Leader under- the 1930s. Invited to write a review of a new book stands that what is important is how Bellow “wrote Of Einhorn’s wife, he writes, “While Mrs. Einhorn was of essays about Shakespeare’s sonnets for Trilling’s it down.” In the case of the humble, mostly Jew- a kind woman, ordinarily, now and again she gave me book club magazine The Griffin, Bellow writes “Per- ish cast of characters in The Adventures of Augie a glance that suggested Sarah and the son of Hagar.” haps the pleasure this collection gives me is in part

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 45 the pleasure of seeing modern critics working hard both of them made the meaning of Jewish identity him were exterminated perhaps. Shall we say in the 17th century. It is like having mischievous chil- a central problem in their fiction in ways that Bel- nothing in their behalf? dren at last out of the house.” Around this time, the low did not. Although Bellow was, intermittently, mid-1950s, Leader recounts a story of Bellow greet- Bellow’s unapologetic moral clarity here (and not ing Trilling at a party: “Still peddling the same old only here) derived, in part, from the same intuition horseshit, Lionel?” Around this time, the as the famous opening of The Adventures of Augie March: that one can be Jewish and entirely Ameri- alling his Bellow-character “Abravanel” was mid-1950s, Leader recounts can. His job was to make something of that. As he Ca good joke, though one doubts that either wrote in an introduction to an anthology of Jewish Philip Roth or Bellow would have recognized Don a story of Bellow greeting stories: “We do not make up history and culture. Isaac Abravanel if he had stepped out of Ferdinand Trilling at a party: “Still We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make and Isabella’s court and swatted them with a copy what we can of our condition with the means avail- of his commentary to the Guide of the Perplexed. In peddling the same old able. We must accept the mixture as we find it—the the autobiographical lecture, which opens There Is impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.” This Simply Too Much to Think About, Bellow wrote that horseshit, Lionel?” was written in 1964, the last year Leader’s biogra- he had tried “to fit his soul into the Jewish-writer phy covers, but the sense of life and literature it ex- category but it does not feel comfortably accommo- a spiritual seeker, his sense of Judaism, or rather pressed will carry his subject forward into the next dated there.” And then comes the famous crack: Jewishness, was visceral, not intellectual. When volume. Bellow remained ineluctably Jewish and William Faulkner advocated, as chairman of a dis- perpetually attuned to living in chaos. I wonder now and then whether Philip Roth tinguished committee of writers empanelled by This is the key to understanding his life, his live- and Bernard Malamud and I have not become President Eisenhower, freeing the fascist poet Ezra wire approach to artistic creation, even his jokes. A the Hart Schaffner and Marx of our trade. We Pound, who had been tried for treason but found friend of mine was invited out to dinner with Bellow have made it in the field of culture as Bernard insane, Bellow wrote to him: sometime in the 1990s. At the restaurant, his wife Baruch made it on a park bench, as Polly Adler urged him to order healthily to which Bellow re- made it in prostitution, as Two-Gun Cohen, the Pound advocated in his poems and in his plied “enough of this Tofu va-vohu!”—Tohu va-vohu personal bodyguard of SanYut-Sen, made it in broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached being, of course, the book of Genesis’ description China. My joke is not broad enough to cover hatred and murder. Do you mean to ask me to for the chaos out of which God created the universe. the contempt I feel for the opportunists, wise join you in honoring a man who called for the guys and career types who impose such labels destruction of my kinsmen? I can take no part and trade upon them. in such a thing even if it makes for effective Abraham Socher is the editor of the Jewish Review of propaganda abroad, which I doubt . . . Free him Books and professor of religion and Jewish studies at Roth and Malamud also resisted the category, but because he is a poet? Why better poets than Oberlin College.

WINNERS The Association In the Category of Jewish Literature and Linguistics: Poetic Trespass: Writing between Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine and American Culture for Jewish Studies LITAL LEVY, Princeton University JOSH LAMBERT, Yiddish Book Center/UMASS-Amherst (PRINCETON UNIvERSITY PRESS) (NEW YORK UNIvERSITY PRESS) salutes the 2014 In the Category of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History: Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe Jordan Schnitzer ELISHEVA CARLEBACH, Columbia University (HARvARD UNIvERSITY PRESS) Book Award In the Category of Modern Jewish History—European Countries: The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 PAWEL MACIEJKO, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Recipients (UNIvERSITY OF PENNSYLvANIA PRESS)

Honorable Mentions

After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk JONATHAN RAY, Georgetown University ELISSA BEMPORAD, Queens College, CUNY (NEW YORK UNIvERSITY PRESS) (INDIANA UNIvERSITY PRESS) Information and application procedures for the 2015 competition will be available The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege on the AJS website in March 2015. Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice after the Reformation YAACOB DWECK, Princeton University MAGDA TETER, Wesleyan University Support for this program has been (PRINCETON UNIvERSITY PRESS) (HARvARD UNIvERSITY PRESS) generously provided by the Yankel’s Tavern: JORDAN SCHNITZER FAMILY FOUNDATION Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland OF PORTLAND, OREGON. GLENN DYNNER, Sarah Lawrence College (OxFORD UNIvERSITY PRESS)

ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES | 15 W. 16TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10011 | [email protected] | WWW.AJSNET.ORG | 917.606.8249 Reading The Fifth Question

BY CHAIM SAIMAN

hatever kind of Passover Seder one Jacob Ben Asher. Both Rabbi Caro and his prede- A person is required to delve into the laws of the attends, there is a fifth question, cessor were thinking about the children, but there Pesach sacrifice and the exodus from Egypt and usually only whispered, that arises was also a deeper disagreement with Maimonides to recount the miracles God performed for our sometime after those famous four at play. Understanding that disagreement will help forefathers until he is overtaken by exhaustion. questionsW which begin the long Maggid (literally, us understand what the Seder, and to some extent telling) section of the haggadah are recited: “When rabbinic thought, is all about. The obligation to stay awake all night learning To- do we eat?” Of course, the haggadah itself says that rah, then, applies after the Seder has been complet- “whoever elaborates in the retelling of the story either the Shulchan Arukh nor the Tur even ed. In fact, the section where this ruling is recorded of the exodus is surely praised” and illustrates the Ncites the haggadah’s statement that “whoever is largely devoted to the rule that one should not point with the famous story of the five sages of the elaborates in the retelling of the story of the exodus is drink any more wine after the fourth of the Seder’s 2nd century, who stayed up all night doing just that: surely praised.” This is particularly unusual, because legislated cups, in order to stay awake. the Shulchan Arukh tends to follow Maimonides’ Once again, the apparent source for the practice It happened that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, lead—often verbatim—unless a line of competing is found in the Tosefta, which presents an alternate, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiva, and authorities rule to the contrary. In this case, however, or perhaps parallel, story about mishnaic rabbis Rabbi Tarfon were reclining at a Seder in Bnai no such authorities are to be found, and yet the pre- who stayed up the night of the Seder: Brak. They were retelling the story of the exodus from Egypt the entire night, until their students came and told them: “Our Masters! The time has come for reciting the morning Shema!”

Writing one thousand years later, Moses Mai- monides took this story as precedent in the Mishneh Torah, his code of Jewish law. In his introduction to the laws of the Seder, he writes: “Even great scholars are obligated to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt. And anyone who elaborates in recalling the events that occurred is surely praised.” Three para- graphs later, he spells out what this means:

One begins by recalling that we were slaves in Egypt and recounting all the hardships Pharaoh wrought. But he should conclude with the miracles and wonders that were done for us, and with our freedom. That is, he should expound on the verse “my father was a wandering Aramean” until he concludes that paragraph. And anyone Passover Seder by Malcah Zeldis, 1999. (Art Resource, New York, © 2015 Artist Rights who adds and elaborates is surely praised. Society (ARS), New York.) This is the halakhic source for delaying the matza ball soup and brisket. What is surprising, given the scriptions of both the haggadah and Maimonides are One does not eat any desserts after the Pesach text of the haggadah and Maimonides’ position, not not merely ignored but actually reversed. sacrifice [has been eaten], such as dates. A person to speak of common practice, is that the most au- The authority for this “hurry-up-and-eat” view is obligated to engage in the laws of the Pesach thoritative code of Jewish law, the 16th-century Shul- appears to come from an early rabbinic text, includ- sacrifice all night. . . . It once happened that chan Arukh, disagrees: ed in the Tosefta (a collection of texts that parallels Rabban Gamliel and the elders were reclining and to some extent supplements the Mishnah) and at a Seder in the home of Beithus ben Zunin in One’s table should be set while it is still daytime, in later cited in the Babylonian Talmud: Lod, and they were engaged in the laws of Pesach order to eat immediately as it gets dark. And even that entire night, until the rooster crowed. At that if he is engaged in Torah study, he should conclude Rabbi Eliezer states: We grab the matzot so that time, the tables were removed from before them, his studies and hurry [home] as it is a mitzvah to the children will not fall asleep. Rabbi Yehuda and they arose to attend the synagogue. eat right away so that the children not sleep. related in his name: Even if he has only eaten one appetizer, and even if he has not dipped in relish, The first thing to note is that in the Tosefta’s -ver Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan (more popularly known as we grab the matzot so that the children will not fall sion, the all-night study session took place after the the Hafetz Hayim) was so shocked by this statement asleep. Pesach sacrifice had been eaten (when we would that, in his Mishnah Berurah, he insisted on glossing now eat the afikoman), and what we would call the it as urging us to start the Maggid section right away; What does “grab the matzot” mean? For Maimonides Seder is already over. Second, whereas in the hag- the talking not the eating. That makes sense in terms this is the source for common practice of the parents gadah’s story the rabbis stayed up all night to retell of 19th-century Ashkenazi practice, but it is not the hiding the matza from the children. The Shulchan the story and miracles of the exodus, in the Tosefta, plain meaning of the Shulchan Arukh. Arukh and the Tur plausibly take it as a mandate to they spend all night learning the technical laws of the In fact, its author, Rabbi Joseph Caro, is drawing “grab the matzot” and eat them early in the evening, Pesach sacrifice. Finally, whereas the haggadah sug- upon the great halakhic code that appeared between before the children fall asleep. But this does not mean gests that the students had to remind the rabbis to Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and his own “Set Ta- that the Shulchan Arukh imagines the parents following wrap up the Seder because they had lost track of time ble,” the 14th-century Arbah Turim (or Tur) of Rabbi their children to bed after the meal, at least not ideally: (the 19th-century Hasidic master the Sefat Emet even

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 47 suggested that they had forgotten to eat the matza!), in however, also a cost to setting ambitions so high: The the priorities: The wise son is taught the story of the Tosefta the rabbis were not surprised to find that it kids might fall asleep and the adults may tune out. the exodus, whereas the simple son is taught the was morning. They concluded their discussions and The conception of the Seder in the Tosefta and laws of the Seder. The first view sees in halakha not prepared for morning prayers in orderly fashion. the Shulchan Arukh is more modest. The Seder just a series of rules, but a complex religious world Maimonides never mentions the Tosefta’s story, starts promptly and is (relatively) short so that no view developed from fundamental legal principles. nor any requirement to stay up all night studying one misses out on the essential, legally mandated, Law is not only to be observed, but is to be stud- the laws of Pesach. To the contrary, he ends his ritual elements. Then, once the Seder is over, those ied, analyzed, and its meaning absorbed. By con- laws of the Seder with a discussion of what hap- with the ability to follow Rabban Gamliel’s lead trast, the story told to the simple son is just that—a pens when someone falls asleep at the Seder (which can stay awake all night discussing the laws of the story, for those who can’t handle more. Arguably, will occasionally happen during all that praisewor- Pesach. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that in the the Jerusalem Talmud teaches the exact opposite. thy discussion and elaboration). Further, he offers haggadah itself it is Rabban Gamliel who reminds In assigning the story of the exodus to the wise son, a very different reason for not drinking after the us that “whoever does not mention the Pesach sac- story comes to mean the theology of Jewish cho- fourth cup: so that the last taste of the matza (the rifice, the matza, and the maror has not fulfilled his senness, the service of God, and the correspond- afikoman) remains the final memory of the Seder. obligation.” His statement immediately follows the ing complexities of freedom, slavery, choice, and For Maimonides, the work of the Seder is done be- elaborate expositions of the biblical verses, and we destiny. The laws taught to the simple son are, on fore and during the meal, not after. can almost hear Rabban Gamliel reminding us to this account, just ritual directions: eat this, drink I have already noted that, unlike Maimonides, the keep the focus on the accessible, tactile experienc- that, and so on. Shulchan Arukh does not cite the most famous line of es of the Seder: the ritual foods and their symbol- The same tension exists between the two com- the haggadah that “anyone who elaborates in the retell- ism. (Incidentally this approach is probably closer peting stories of how the great rabbis of the Mish- ing of the exodus story is praiseworthy,” but, tellingly, it to what happened during Temple times, when the nah spent the Seder night. Did these “wise sons” also doesn’t cite what might be its second most famous food came first and the discussion followed.) study the halakha of the Pesach sacrifice, or retell line, that “everyone must see himself as if he personally The difference between these two views of the Seder the aggada of the exodus? The disagreement is re- participated in the exodus from Egypt.” Why not? also relates to what is being taught. According to the ally a debate over how to preserve and convey the haggadah and Maimonides, the centerpiece of the Sed- essence of the Jewish experience. Through law or n short, two distinct conceptions of the Seder er is the retelling of the Pesach story, a form of narrative narrative, legal reasoning or theology? This tension Iemerge from the classical rabbinic sources and are or aggada (a word that shares its root with both hagga- is present in the earliest rabbinic texts, carried for- codified, respectively, by Maimonides and the Shul- dah and maggid). By contrast, the Tosefta, whose views ward in the positions of the later great halakhic au- chan Arukh. The view of the Mishnah, Maimonides, are incorporated in the ruling of the Shulchan Arukh, thorities, and is still present at our own Seder tables. and the haggadah itself is that what the Seder is emphasizes studying the laws of the Pesach sacrifice. about is the retelling and discussion of the story of A similar distinction runs through another of the exodus from Egypt to the point where one sees the Seder’s well-known passages, the discussion of Chaim Saiman is a professor of law at Villanova oneself as having been personally redeemed. Here, the four sons. In our version of the haggadah, the University. His book, Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of the entire family uses story, study, and song to re- wise son is taught the laws of the Pesach sacrifice, Law, will be published by Princeton University Press live the birth of Jewish nationhood. When success- whereas the simple son is told the basic Pesach next year. The ideas in this article were developed ful, this is surely close to the Seder’s ideal. There is, story. The Jerusalem Talmud, however, reverses together with his study partner, Joshua Weinberger.

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48 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 The Arts Going Under with Klinghoffer

BY Mitchell Cohen

hen it came to New York’s Met- on a screen as if to say: This is really history. A Met Both Adams and Sellars have been particularly ropolitan Opera this past fall The program note by Thomas May, editor of an anthol- engaged by his work, and there is nothing intrinsi- Death of Klinghoffer faced angry— ogy on Adams, says that the opera has been accused cally suspect about that (I have been too). In Sieg- and, it must be admitted, some of “implicit” anti-Semitism and support of terror- frieds Tod the title character is a sacrificial victim, prettyW shrill—demonstrators. Of course, this was to ism because of its “in-depth characterization of the though as a youthful force of nature, he is radically be expected. Its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Acad- Palestinians.” But this misses the problem entirely. different from the elderly Klinghoffer. Siegfried emy of Music (BAM) a quarter-century ago also led is slain by Hagen, son of the evil dwarf Alberich, to controversy. The opera, which was created by who stole the Rhine’s gold and renounced love in director Peter Sellars, composer John Adams, and The opera begins by identifying order to have wealth and power. Siegfrieds Tod has a librettist Alice Goodman, famously depicts the Oc- happy ending. Sort of. Siegfried and the celebrated tober 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro the Israelis with the Angel of Brünnhilde are immolated and ascend to Valhalla. by terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front Hagen, by contrast, is drowned in the Rhine by the (PLF), during which the title character, a 69-year- Death in the Passover story. “Water Women” (later called the Rhine Daughters). old crippled American Jewish tourist, was shot and And Alberich “sinks” with a “lamenting gesture.” It thrown with his wheelchair into the Mediterranean. An opera can be pro-Palestinian and depict Pales- is often said that Alberich (and other characters) in- The Met’s program listed 25 productions of Kling- tinian grievances without being anti-Semitic just as vokes anti-Semitism with his lustful pursuit of the hoffer since 1991, in Europe, the United States, and an opera can be pro-Zionist without being preju- maidens and his desire for riches and power over even New Zealand. These included concert perfor- diced against Palestinians. It is, however, another love; Wagner, so it is claimed, is telling us that Alb- mances and a heavy-handed film adaptation aired matter when an opera weaves old anti-Semitic ste- erich and his progeny must go under. on British TV. (The Met’s was the fourth version I reotypes into its very texture. The Death of Klinghof- Wagner’s venomous essay “Judaism in Music,” have seen.) Not a bad record for a relatively new op- fer does just that. While it speaks to Palestinian suf- published in 1850, accused Jews of many familiar sins. era whose creators and backers complain that it has fering, it is uncomprehending of Jewish agony and They controlled the artistic world, he claimed, turn- been repressed. Certainly there have been pressures, its sources. ing culture into commerce, and dominated the press but perhaps the creators also protest a little too much, too. And Jews inevitably mangled the connections unable to face the possibility that the opera is simply oodman reports that Klinghoffer originated between words and music. This is especially thanks not very good, or that both its champions and its de- Gin a joke “in rather bad taste” by Sellars as to the use of melismas—florid settings of multiple tractors may be reacting to its political implications the three collaborators were finishing Nixon in notes to a syllable—and the rhythms of synagogue as much as its artistic achievements (or failures). It music, that “nonsen- is unlikely that Klinghoffer will simply fade from the sical gurgling, yodel- stage because of its many intrinsic weaknesses, so ing and cackling.” more trenchant scrutiny of its underlying politics is Money, manipulation, needed. Too many critics have seemed preoccupied and melismas lurk in with those demonstrating in the streets (or in the the- the marrow, thwart- ater) against this opera. Well, it makes snazzy copy. ing attempts by Jew- But it also makes for moral shortcuts and easy, if not ish composers or po- smug, generalizations. ets to create anything The opera certainly doesn’t represent Adams’ “truly” human. Lifting music at its best. His “post-minimalist” choruses this “curse,” Wagner in it are often beautiful and the orchestrations are wrote, required the frequently appealing. The interplay between strings “redemption of Aha- and woodwinds—Adams grew up playing clari- suerus—decline and net—can be especially attractive. Still, what passes fall.” That last phrase for recitative (operatic song-speech) and aria don’t resonates in German differ significantly enough or in interesting ways because Wagner used from each other and are frequently overwrought or a single word, a favor- droning. Goodman has suggested that the opera’s ite, Untergang, literally foes ruined her literary career because she broke “going under.” “taboos.” That, of course, is an appealing way to Critics who con- think of oneself while sidestepping reasons for criti- An opening chorus in The Death of Klinghoffer at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln tend that Wagner’s Center, New York City, October 2014. (Courtesy of Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.) cal and moral censure of the libretto. Jewish fixation is Tom Morris, the director of the Met’s Klinghof- often embedded in fer, considers it “powerfully relevant,” and his ver- China, their remarkable and highly original first his “music dramas” point often to 19th-century al- sion seemed to want to have things all ways. At the opera. Sellars had turned his sights on the recent lusions that might not be as evident now. The al- beginning a screen announced that this was a “fic- Achille Lauro hijacking and jibed that an opera lusions are certainly there, but conclusions need be tionalized” account and not “an exact reconstruc- should be written called Klinghoffers Tod, German cautious. There were many 19th-century treatments tion.” Well, even if the Achille Lauro had an orches- for “Klinghoffer’s death.” It’s a Wagnerian in-joke, of the mythological Ahasuerus, the oddly named, tra aboard, all that would have been true, since it is playing on Siegfrieds Tod, the title of the first ver- accursed wandering Jew, and Wagner admitted he an opera. Yet as the opening choruses, Palestinian sion of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twi- had him in mind when he composed The Flying and Jewish, sing one after another—they exchange light of the Gods). Dutchman. The Flying Dutchman doesn’t really have costumes so that the first becomes the second— There is no better starting point to any discus- anything to do with Jews, but Wagner’s sole mature dates (1948, 1956, and so on through 2014) roll by sion of anti-Semitism in opera than with Wagner. comedy, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, is another

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 49 story, if a little indirectly. Some years ago a storm Klinghoffer, which was so obviously a political in- months planning it, was a paid proxy of Saddam broke out when Barry Millington, a British Wagner tervention. But that is just it. When aspects of this Hussein within Palestinian politics. He and Yasser expert, argued that not only was its libretto anti-Se- opera based on events fresh to memory are chal- Arafat applauded Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Ara- mitic, so was some of its music. In it, Beckmesser, lenged, defenders have a recourse that is a little too fat’s role in the Achille Lauro affair is uncertain (the town clerk and unbending keeper of singing rules easy: How dare you? It is artistic meditation and PLF was a faction within the PLO). When the Met for the Mastersingers’ guild, is an old creep who the stage is illusion. Or they claim that it is “even- production projected “historical” pointers onto a salivates for the beautiful Eva. She, however, loves handed” or harbors some “truth” or is a “master- screen, it told viewers that he denounced the hijack- the new knight in town, and her hand is the prize piece,” whatever the historical details. ing, but neglected to mention that he pioneered the in an annual song contest. Beckmesser woos her There is, of course, no opera without license. very tactic, along with making attacks on civilians by singing beneath her window and makes an ass Nobody in Venetian audiences in, say, 1642 would and evasive pronouncements afterwards to elude of himself. Many critics, including Theodor Ador- have thought seriously that debate between Nero responsibility. Targeting innocents was also regular no, marked him out as an anti-Semitic figure; he is and Seneca in Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea PLF practice. The Achille Lauro’s hijackers demand- lascivious, limps (a characteristic often ascribed to ed freedom for some 50 men in Israeli pris- Jews by detractors), and is the defender of law (read: ons, including “the great man from Naha- Old Testament) against love (read: New Testament). riya”—the PLF’s Samir al-Qantari, who had Millington’s wrinkle was to show that Beckmesser’s murdered a child (and others) in the name of song rouses mirth by exaggerated melismas, exactly liberation in northern Israel in 1979. what Wagner chastised as “Judaism” in music. Taking political sides doesn’t necessarily Critical howls ensued: Wagner was too much make an opera or an argument anti-Semitic. the artist to do such things, and, anyway, a Jew Yet something is amiss, something should would never have been Nuremburg’s clerk. No he make us queasy, when proponents speak of wouldn’t have been, responded Millington, but the “truths” without explication or don’t perceive issue is what Wagner evoked. He pointed to a let- that sides are being taken. When the opera was ter in which Wagner wrote of another work that “I still a work in progress Sellars insisted that “the have learned to feel that to make one’s intentions too boys,” that is the hijackers, not be called “ter- obvious risks impairing a proper understanding . . . rorists.” Well, boys will be boys and great men, in drama—as in any work of art—it is a question of like al-Qantari, will be great men. Adams says making an impression not by parading one’s opin- that “we weren’t making an overly conscious ions but by setting forth what is instinctive.” attempt to be neutral,” and after studying the Goodman has not been so subtle, neither in background “it was impossible not to have Klinghoffer nor in her earlier, much better, libretto strong feelings.” Still, he wonders why Kling- for Nixon in China. In it, Henry Kissinger has what hoffer was killed. “Whether this was a kind might be called the Beckmesser function. He is of Nietzschean decision on the terrorist’s part the opera’s boor, allowing everyone else, including I don’t know . . . It seems like a kind of hec- Nixon, to appear heroic. Goodman declared that tic, rash decision.” Does it seem so? And the she wanted an opera of “character” whose protago- previous seven PLF operations, each of which nists were eloquent. And so it is for Dick and Pat, entailed hostage-taking—were they preceded Mao and Madame Mao, and Zhou Enlai. Kissinger, by responsive reading of Nietzsche’s Beyond however, is a lump on legs, tongue hanging out (in Good and Evil? Adams thinks that “neither Sellars’ Houston production), lusting for girls. He is side” in the Achille Lauro affair “is beyond re- “the only character I ended up disliking, and it is fit- The English National Opera’s production of The Death of proach. Nor can either side be condemned.” ting that he is a buffo bass,” says Goodman. Klinghofferat the London Coliseum, February 2012. Neither side? For what, exactly, would Adams In a brilliant scene Pat and Dick go to see the fa- (© Robbie Jack/Corbis.) reproach Leon Klinghoffer? mous agitprop opera-ballet The Red Detachment of Klinghoffer’s trio of creators has spoken Women. On stage Wu, a peasant heroine, is victim- openly of the kind of research they did while ized (and pawed) by Lao Szu, a creepy whip-bearing aimed to clarify political morality in ancient Rome. preparing it. Adams tells us he read about “the his- henchman of a tyrannical landlord. “Doesn’t he Remote history was deployed to address contem- tory of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the roots of Zion- look like you know who?” asks Pat. Lao Szu is, in porary Venice; the historical Nero and Seneca did ism, the Balfour Declaration, and the long history fact, sung by and played to look like Kissinger. If not sing to each other about the merits of rule by of British, French and American meddling” in the Beckmesser makes himself a chump by exaggerated emotion as opposed to those of reason. We can be region. (Oddly, he seems to have missed German melismas, Lao Szu/Kissinger does so with musical sure that Leon Klinghoffer’s assassin didn’t sing to and Italian meddling in the 1936 Palestinian Arab angularity: His voice bounds an octave as he sings him either. revolt and the vigorous activities on behalf of the that Wu is “hot.” Money is involved too. After Lao Some advocates try to deflect censure of Kling- Third Reich by Palestinian nationalist leader Hajj Szu brags of his usefulness, Nixon tosses him coins. hoffer by suggesting that all negative criticism of it Ammin al-Husseini.) He reread the Old Testament (“Here friend, something for you.”) At the end of the comes from political “hardliners” (for the record, I and the Koran (“difficult going”). He found Noam opera, when all the other characters are busy reflect- am a left-of-center dove) or gesture irrelevantly at Chomsky’s writings “one-sided” but those of Ed- ing on their experiences and history, Kissinger— supposedly larger contexts. Take, for instance, mu- ward Said “more reasonable.” And Adams learned the German-Jewish intellectual who fled from the sicologist Michael Steinberg’s liner notes for the that “the Israeli-Palestinian issue was the most care- Nazis—goes to the toilet. opera’s first recording, in which he sneered that the fully controlled and fastidiously managed debate opera was completed as the United States dropped in American political life” due to “lobbies” which two-fold caution: No opera can be reduced “smart bombs” on Baghdad and premiered at the spoke moderately in public but whose “consider- Aentirely to its creators’ intentions, even if these Gulf War’s end. These facts, it seems, should make able clout in Washington often smothered” efforts come together to constitute a political world view us wonder who the real terrorists are. But what did to present the Palestinian side in public. open to legitimate criticism. But one must also re- the murder of an old man on a cruise ship in the Sellars believed the opera to be “beyond all politi- sist the pretense that art takes place in some aes- Mediterranean in 1985 have to do with a war half cal differences” because it was “human,” as if political thetic ether, especially when the subject is politi- a decade later, far on the other side of the region, differences are not human. It is, he thinks, compa- cal. When an artist, he was purely an artist, living provoked by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait? rable to Bach’s Passions and Greek tragedies. Good- in truth, say Wagner’s defenders. When disliking Actually, it is possible to make a kind of connec- man read “the Koran, the Book of Lamentations, the Jews, he was in a separate sphere of life. It seems tion. The PLF’s leader, Abu al-Abbas, who master- Psalms, Brecht” and Spanish Renaissance poetry. Ab- absurd even to suggest such a defense in the case of minded the Achille Lauro hijacking and spent 10 sent from any of their studies were explorations of the

50 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 history of anti-Jewish prejudices (Christian, Muslim, ends?” he asks. Does not art, especially music, rance? After all, didn’t Leni Riefenstahl’s camera secular) and how they have been presented in theol- have particularly important powers “to explore the give fresh perspective on a political event? ogy, in politics, or, say, on stage. To what extent do old emotional interiors of fictional and nonfictional Klinghoffer and Triumph of the Will are not of tropes continually reappear, consciously or not, in characters, especially bad ones . . . ”? He compares a piece. Still, doesn’t comparing them make more new costume—tropes about obstinate, self-occupied Lady Macbeth to the terrorists in Klinghoffer. “Just sense than speaking in one breath of Macbeth and Jews; rich, materialistic Jews; wily and screechy ones by giving voice to those being portrayed, music, in Klinghoffer? What do we know of one Lady Mac- with hidden powers? its subliminal way, can seem to be revealing inner beth? Is Shakespeare’s tweaking of Holinshed’s lives and feelings” together with “seething griev- Chronicles the same as Sellars’ tweaking of the his- efore denying that anti-Semitic themes are ances.” An artist, after all, may provide “a fresh tory of PLF? Do historical proximity and political Bembedded in Klinghoffer you must reflect on way” of perceiving a “historical event” and thereby purpose count for anything at all in our judgments them in the first place. Adams does not seem to “lead to a deeper understanding of what was go- of artistic representation? If they don’t, then every- have done so and neither, apparently, has Anthony ing on.” Journalists may be averse to fidgeting with thing is simple: The better the imagination the bet- Tommasini, music critic of The New York Times, facts but “on balance, artists can claim the right to ter the propaganda. Or you can call it a matter of who long ago embraced Adams’ claim that Kling- bend a story to their aims.” myth or spiritual depth, providing other layers of hofferoffers “the sad solace of truth.” His article en- But of course artists tweak stories—that’s what protection from scrutiny. titled “Toward a Truth That Defies Precision,” pub- they do. And of course art and especially music In a fall 2001 interview Adams avowed that Kling- lished after last fall’s controversies, hails the opera have unusual capacities to explore inner lives and hoffer’s “sacrificial” murder was akin to the crucifixion as “courageous” and dismissed “parsing ‘Klinghof- grievances. The difficult question is: What are the in Bach’s Passions. “Both Jesus and Leon Klinghoffer fer’ for evidence of a pro-Palestinian slant” because implications when talented artists tweak history were killed because they represented something that “artistic issues” would thereby be “sidelined.” Can for political reasons, harnessing creativity for un- was suspect and hated.” But Jesus goes knowingly to an artist “tweak or fictionalize a story for artistic truthfulness or perhaps, to be gentler, smug igno- his fate as part of God’s plan for humanity’s redemption while Klinghoffer was an elderly cripple on a last vacation with his terminally ill wife. For whose sake is he sacrificed? Jews? Palestinians? The souls of the opera’s audience? According to Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, Jewish hatred led to Jesus’ death and culpabil- ity followed. Has Adams ever thought this through? Before, or after, all the controversy?

ccused of creating “CNN operas,” Sellars in- Asists his aim is the opposite. Among “the most important reasons” for his kind of opera, he explains, is to alter American understanding of the world since media frenzies distort “actual history.” In our “Age of Information,” he elaborates, “we are strangely underinformed” and an opera can provide “a structure which is context rich,” filling in the “historical blank.” Few can doubt that our news media are fast- moving and shallow. Is Sellars the credible alternative, the exponent of “actual history”? Oedipus Rex, he says, is not about “an exploding eyeball” but “why someone would dig out their own eyes.” Whether it is Oedipus or suicide bombers or 9/11 hijackers, Director Peter Sellars, librettist Alice Goodman, and composer John Adams discuss Nixon in China at the American Repertory Theater, November 2011. (Photo by Jon Chase/Harvard he explains that “the question that is not allowed to News Office, © President and Fellows of Harvard College.) be asked to this day is ‘Why would people do this?’ That’s the question, of course, that drama asks. Ex- actly to find what was not in the news, what was missing from the news: that’s why we worked in this genre.” The headline is not essential but rather providing “a longtime picture” is the essential goal. A long time indeed. It seems to me that Sellars’ “question” has been asked for about as long as anyone has thought about history or theater. Answers, of course, may differ. Adams, Sellars, and their critical defenders have a bizarre sense of history. As we have seen, to fill in the “historical blank” they pair Lady Macbeth and the Palestine Liberation Front, Jesus and Klinghoffer, Oedipus and Osama. What Sellars calls the “longtime picture” depends, of course, on how, and if, you understand events. In the 20th century, according to Sellars, the United States was “the oppressor against every popular democracy movement” (presumably Washington did not oppose Nazi or Stalinist oppression). But Americans have never been “allowed” to ask, “What are these people hoping to achieve?” he says. Let’s bracket all of the journals, editorial pages, and books Sellars has ap- Wolfgang Koch as Alberich in the Royal Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, parently never read and examine how he sees the London, September 2012. (© Robbie Jack/Corbis.) relation between art and democracy:

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 51 Democracy is the creation of and ability to drink. But “Israel/Laid all to waste,” and men’s voic- mensch!”) while his wife Alma calls the president an sustain an environment where even difficult es join in intensifying anger at “the supplanter.” The “asshole.” As their visiting 30-year-old son Jonathan things can be talked about without inflicting doleful “Chorus of Exiled Jews” introduces a more eats cold spaghetti, Mr. and Mrs. Rumor chatter further damage, in an atmosphere where all artificial world: “When I paid off the taxi, I had no about experiences on a luxury cruise. Well, rumors sides can be heard, as Alice Goodman likes money left.” If Palestinians invoke loss of their idyllic travel; they commended it to Leon and Marilyn. to say, “as eloquently as possible,” and where natural place, wandering Jews mourn lost cash. The And money is always on the family mind. The dollar the structure itself is large enough to contain Jewish chorus becomes a love song to “the daugh- is up, says Harry; “good news for the Klinghoffers,” all the voices. The heart of the operatic form ter of Zion” and, as music critic Edward Rothstein says his son. They will have a great time, remarks is simultaneity, where all things are held in neatly summarized it, Israel represents in it “a sort of Jonathan sarcastically: “Friday, Manhattans by the contingency. You have to recognize everything tourist’s recollection of devotional sentiment about pool/Saturday Eretz Yisroel.” as part of a larger interlocking structure. That the Promised Land, mentioning sights like military The affluent, world-wise Rumors have many has incredible social and political implications. barracks, the Western Wall, movie houses picketed souvenirs in their home. Harry describes Alma’s en- by Hasidim . . . and a goat in an orchard.” Jewish counters with natives selling their wares: This eloquent scramble seems to confuse democ- history is context-less, save for the memory of the racy (which only works when people listen to each Holocaust. There was no Jewish problem before . . . Tourist traps other) with a postmodern version of Wagner’s then. If these choruses display even-handedness, it And sweatshops on five continents Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art in which word, is with one hand cuffed behind the back. Turn the stuff out. Your mother haunts music, and dance meld). But in the end, “context” for Does this construction rest on Goodman’s scorn The markets when we go ashore, Sellars—it is one of his favorite words—simply means for her own education as a comfortable Reform Jew Looking . . . tweaking stage events on behalf of his own views. in Minnesota? “We were shown movies of the Ho- . . . for some In fact, Sellars wanted Klinghoffer to be “much locaust in Sunday school,” she recalls, “. . . to create a Hideous relic to bring home. more pro-Palestinian than it is,” according to Good- sense of us and them. And it seemed to me that this Out rush the natives at first sight man. Klinghoffer “deals with Palestinians,” says Sel- was the wrong idea altogether.” She “converted to Of her enormous summer hat lars, but it “is about Americans in the middle of the Christianity between writing the choruses and arias Rubbing their hands . . . situation, through the Klinghoffer family.” Here we of Klinghoffer.” Ordained in the Anglican Church, must turn to a few lines in the libretto. Early on she began to minister in London to a mostly Pal- You were in the toilet all the time, she ripostes. (Per- Molqi, the PLF team leader, sings, estinian congregation. Goodman has also noted haps he was waiting in line behind Kissinger.)

. . . we are Soldiers fighting a war. We are not criminals . . . But men of ideals.

Later, “Rambo,” a nickname for the most mean- spirited of the Palestinians, responds with contempt to Leon Klinghoffer’s one speech against his tor- menters with this:

You are always complaining Of your suffering But wherever poor men Are gathered they can Find Jews getting fat . . . America is one big Jew.

In his liner notes, Michael Steinberg admits this taunt is “nasty” but finds it “eloquent and horribly truthful,” indeed “a speech of a lifetime” because— and here he follows Adams—it tells off its bourgeois audience. What horrible truth? It would seem to consist in the identification of Jews with America and then both with global exploitation. More cir- Alan Opie and Michaela Martens as Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer, and Ryan Speedo Green as Rambo, a cumspect defenders of the opera argue that the hijacker, in the Metropolitan Opera’s premiere of The Death of Klinghoffer, Lincoln Center, New York City, pronouncements of Molqi and Rambo express what 2014. (Courtesy of Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.) some Palestinians think, not the creators of Kling- hoffer. Yet doesn’t Rambo’s war against the “one big Jew” justify Molqi’s self-image as a man “of ideals.” with evident amusement that her conversion posed Yes, the Rumors are materialistic, although in And, with fervor tempered, how distant is this really a possible public relations embarrassment because different ways. After more banter—Jonathan should from Sellars’ world view? “John and Peter and I had always said cheerfully meet a nice girl!—the scene ends with Mrs. Rumor that if anyone objected to the libretto they could expressing disdain for Yasser Arafat and bother at t is true, as Times critic Tommasini stresses, that push me forward because I’m Jewish.” press reports about world misery. “It’s never-ending. Ithe arts reveal human sensibilities in special ways. Those who went to the opera’s 1991 premiere in God knows why/I still get angry, but I do,” she says But one way is prejudice, as in the case of Wagner’s Brussels would have seen an oddly named Jewish with the oblivious compassion of a well-heeled lib- Beckmesser. As Klinghoffer opens a “Chorus of Ex- family from New Jersey. “The Rumors” appeared eral consumer. iled Palestinians” sings a grieving, beautiful plaint: between the two opening choruses, and Adams says Like Beckmesser, the Rumors represent a type, “My father’s house was razed/In 1948/When the they mirror the Klinghoffers. They live comfort- in this case someone you would find on the Achille Israelis passed/Over our street.” Thus the opera be- ably in a suburban world of materialistic well-being: Lauro. Instead of Beckmesser’s melismas, there is gins by identifying the Israelis with the Angel of ivory carpet, a fake Jackson Pollack, magazines like sitcom-like music; mockery after the Palestinian la- Death in the Passover story. A female voice sings of Architectural Digest and The New Yorker on a cof- ment. Adams insisted that the scene was not anti- her house with a “pure well” from which all could fee table. Harry watches Reagan on TV (“What a Semitic but misconstrued so badly by some viewers

52 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 that it was removed to allow “the rest of the opera” to his murder takes place before our eyes—he is shot noted that Jesus’ words are accompanied by an “au- be taken “seriously.” Still, he “very much enjoyed Al- point-blank—both in the BBC film and in this fall’s reole” of violins and violas, effectively providing a ice’s sly humor” in what was supposed to be a “come- Met production. As Klinghoffer goes under, Adams kind of halo in sound. Adams provides a compa- dic interjection in the middle of an intensely tragic provides an “Aria of the Falling Body.” Klinghoffer’s rable luminosity as Klinghoffer’s body falls. How- narrative.” He doesn’t ask if the motifs of the Rumor time has stopped, but that of the cosmos continues ever, something similar—call it musical sanctifica- scene still thread the opera even with it gone. For endlessly as the now former Jewish vacationer sinks tion—is heard elsewhere in the opera solely to ac- Goodman, who like Adams assimilates the Rumors company Palestinians. We hear it in their opening and Klinghoffers, more was at stake: chorus, we hear it when Molqi declares his squad Marilyn’s aria is one of agony, to be “men of ideas,” when one of his accomplices I think what upset a lot of people was that sings of love songs, and when another expresses his the libretto violates certain taboos . . . People an expression, as would be desire for martyrdom. We don’t hear it compliment- didn’t like the way that I presented Klinghoffer expected, of excruciating ing their victims, only the descending Leon. “Only as an ordinary, touchy, vulgar bourgeois— after death,” concludes Taruskin, does the familiar there’s this Jewish fantasy that our heroes private pain at her husband’s middle-class American Jew join glamorously ex- and our victims are always either highly otic Palestinians in mythic timelessness. Only as his cultured or pious. Well, some of them can be murder. body falls lifeless is his music exalted to a compara- very vulgar—we aren’t all Nathan the Wise. bly romanticized spiritual dimension.” UCLA mu- And we have behaved very badly towards the into it and dissolves into it and universality. (Kling- sicologist Robert Fink has replied to this argument, Palestinians, they have justifiable grievances, hoffer’s bullet-ridden corpse was actually found in a snarling and intellectually shabby article cited and we and they are very, very much alike— off the Syrian coast after al-Abbas and Arafat an- widely in the press last fall. Dismissing early criti- temperamentally, culturally, in family cal reception of the opera’s BAM premiere as merely dynamics and in ultimate origin. the response of “Brooklyn” Jews translating worries about American Jewry into anger at an opera, Fink Given Goodman’s depictions of Jews and the lambasted Taruskin for not hearing “aureoles” else- way that she imagines the dramatic alternatives— where in the opera, in particular in Marilyn Kling- either Jews are impossibly perfect like Lessing’s Na- hoffer’s final aria. than the Wise or they are vulgarians like her Kling- Fink missed the larger political point: The “au- hoffer—her use of the first person plural is jarring. reoles” sanctify moral and collective claims for the (She is Jewish, she has elaborated, by “nearly every Palestinians and only individual tragedy for Jews. definition” except that she has become a Christian.) Marilyn’s aria is one of agony, an expression, as Now imagine some changes in the scenario. would be expected, of excruciating private pain at Suppose a Jewish chorus opens the opera, adding her husband’s murder, but it lacks the cosmic di- to Goodman’s clumsy Jewish mourning some lines mension of the Liebestod, the powerful love-death about the pogroms of 1881 and the Mufti in Berlin. aria that Isolde sings over Tristan’s body as she sinks Then Palestinian sitcom music lightens the mood. into the “surging swell.” Marilyn just sings of loss Keffiyehs on their heads, men of the al-Hearsay and her own wish to die (she would, in fact, four family sit outside their stone hut, fiddle with beads, months later). An audience is usually stunned af- and smoke hookahs. Goats wander about as they ter hearing Isolde; Marilyn’s Liebestod is musically banter in guttural sing-song; but melisma animates strained anger, leaving listeners (or at least this one) their voices when, agitated, they refer to infidels, ar- anxious for its completion. rogant Zionists, and jihad. The women are inside Yet what seems entirely personal at first does get preparing kabob. The accompanying music, in- reconnected in an odd way to Jews; Marilyn Kling- terspersed with a muezzin’s call, is a monotonous, hoffer’s voice, towards the aria’s end, is joined by screechy combination of strings and drums: oud, those of a women’s chorus in the same key of G mi- rebab, and tabla. And then Palestinian sorrow in- nor we heard in the “Chorus of Exiled Jews” at the tones: “My father’s house was razed/In 1948.” opera’s beginning. But of course those exiled Jews Would this honor Palestinians as Goodman says were just complaining tourists. And now her vaca- that the opera honors Jews? Or would it be right- Marilyn Klinghoffer being escorted off the Achille tion has been disrupted by the world’s woes, the ly skewered as a Palestinian Beckmesser scene, as Lauro three days after the murder of her husband, kind of woes her friend Alma Rumor tried to but prejudiced images of Palestinians, indeed all Arabs? Leon, Port Said, Egypt, October 10, 1985. (© Mike could not quite avoid. And then what if motifs with horrible truths from Nelson-Jean Claude Delmas/AFP/Getty Images.) Although Alice Goodman maintains that “Any- this “sly humor” reappeared throughout the opera? one who attends this opera with an unprejudiced Would any self-respecting critic (or sophomore mind will perceive that it does honor to the destiny literature major) think the fact that the scene had nounced that he had died of a heart attack.) The of the Jewish people,” it would be more accurate to been removed after the first showing meant it was music, mostly soft and solemn, but with intensi- say that it honors them only as they go under. Such irrelevant to an understanding of the work? fying strings at points and a poetic oboe weaving aestheticization of political murder must be called in, is virtually the opposite of Siegfried’s Funeral out for what it is, particularly now. (As it happens, here is an anomalous but curiously telling March, music given to the dead hero of Götterdäm- I wrote much of this essay in Paris during and after Tsymmetry between the endings of Wagner’s merung. Staging Klinghoffer in a convincing way the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher market massa- Tristan und Isolde and Klinghoffer. At the begin- is not so simple; in the Met production the corpse cres in January 2015.) The Death of Klinghoffer is, ning of Wagner’s opera, its protagonists cross was upright; since cinema allows a harsher realism, in fact, completely uncomprehending of collective waters towards a destiny that unites them in un- viewers of the 2003 film saw the recognizable body Jewish history and tragedy. It may aspire to be an realizable love, death, and the cosmos; at the end, with a bullet hole in his forehead sink in the waters; artwork of complex moral and historical imagina- wounded Tristan lies dying as he awaits Isolde, Sellars’ staging had a dance of body and soul as a tion, but it depends on rumor. who travels by boat with a potion hoping to save shrouded double of Klinghoffer led him on. him. Klinghoffer gives us a couple on a last vacation In 2003, Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin together aboard a ship. The sea will finally separate argued that the music accompanying Klinghoffer’s Mitchell Cohen is professor of political science at Baruch them. In both operas the male protagonist dies and descent betrayed deep biases in the opera. Point- College and the Graduate Center of CUNY and editor then the female protagonist sings a closing aria. ing to Adams’ frequent comparisons of Klinghoffer emeritus of Dissent. He is writing a political biography In the original staging, Leon was shot offstage but to Jesus in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, Taruskin of Richard Wagner.

Spring 2015 • Jewish Review of BooKS 53 Letters (continued from page 4)

Israel?” in Winter 2015). I was naturally disappoint- about the turn against Israel. Were I to discuss the or who would make a career of radical feminism ed, as I imagine any author would be, that, apart from American right, I would be writing about a turn to- and explicitly embrace Hezbollah and Hamas (But- saying I had done something deftly, he found little to ward Israel. In 1948, Israel enjoyed more support on ler). (I confess further that I laugh when I picture commend and a handful of things, albeit none fun- the left than the right. In modern times this align- Professor Butler trying to explain her mantra that damental, to criticize. Whether the book is worthy ment has reversed. This summer, the Pew organi- gender is constructed to such comrades as Khaled of more commendation than he voiced is of course zation reported that “the partisan gap in Mideast Meshal and Hassan Nasrallah.) I leave it to Profes- impossible for me to judge. But I feel confident that sympathies has never been wider,” with 73 percent sor Arkush to give these thinkers their due. each of his criticisms is misplaced. of Republicans and only 44 percent of Democrats Joshua Muravchik First Professor Arkush writes that my account of sympathizing with Israel. Among Republicans, pro- Wheaton, MD Israel’s alienated intellectuals is “puzzling” because Israel sentiment was strongest among self-identified I describe them as, in his words, “refugees from the “conservatives.” Allan Arkush Responds: left” who “find their bearings, once again, on the It seems odd to tax me with not mentioning Pat As Joshua Muravchik notes, I do not disagree left.” What I in fact wrote was that as long as Zion- Buchanan without mentioning that the most telling with the fundamental argument of Making Da- ism was dominated by Labor Zionism it was rela- indictment of Buchanan on this count was written vid into Goliath: How the World Turned Against tively easy to be both a leftist and a Zionist. When by me (“Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews,” Com- Israel. In fact, I am more in accord with him than Israel turned rightward and abandoned socialism mentary, January 1991). When William F. Buckley, he seems prepared to recognize. I did not write, as this dual identity became more difficult, and as a the doyen of modern conservatism, weighed in on he maintains, that his account of Israel’s alienated result some one-time leftist Zionists abandoned Zi- the Buchanan controversy, he concluded reluctantly intellectuals is puzzling. I did say that some read- onism, not leftism. that Buchanan was guilty as charged, and he based ers might find Muravchik’s account of the trajec- Next, Professor Arkush writes that “Europe is his verdict in large part explicitly on the case I had tory of these particular Israelis puzzling, but then, still suffering from the after-effects of right-wing put. Buckley, in effect, excommunicated Buchanan in the very next paragraph, I tried to show such and Nazi anti-Semitism, and that the revival of anti- from the ranks of respectable conservatism, and readers how his analysis of the recent metamor- Israel sentiment . . . reflects this.” He complains that this marginalization has left Buchanan largely de- phosis of leftism clears this matter up. I also regis- I “overlook” this. If so, it is because I find no sense void of influence. tered my agreement with Muravchik’s contention in his formulation. Whatever the lingering impact Lastly, Professor Arkush complains that I am that it was this metamorphosis and not, as Yoram of Nazi ideology it is preposterous to suppose that it too “dismissive” of the thought of Avraham Burg, Hazony has argued, the revival of Martin Buber’s grows stronger the further we get from the Nazi era. Judith Butler, and Oren Yiftachel. It would suffice to anti-Zionism that spurred the growth of post- As for right-wing anti-Semitism, that alas is quite reply that my subject was the impact of the Jewish Zionism in Israel. contemporary, not a mere “after-effect,” but it has no and Israeli radical left and that engaging with the When I applauded, at the end of my review, Mu- appreciable impact on the stances toward Israel of political philosophy of each of its exemplars was ravchik’s “timely warnings” against the dangers posed European governments or on public discourse. well outside the ambit of my book. But I confess by Judith Butler and the other American as well as Professor Arkush goes on: “In his discussion that I find absurd individuals who would seek the Israeli foes of Israel and said that his book had to be of America, too, Muravchik pays no heed to any- prime ministership of a country and six years later “complemented by vigorous refutations of what they thing that has taken place on the right. He makes forsake loyalty to it, branding it “fascist” and seek- have to say,” I was paying Muravchik at least some- no mention, for instance, of Pat Buchanan’s ugly ing citizenship elsewhere (Burg); or who would call thing of a compliment. If he does not wish to stoop to insinuations and denunciations.” But my book is it a “living hell” and not seek to leave it (Yiftachel); the level of such all-too-influential writers by refuting their arguments directly, we must set his valuable history alongside that of others who will. Where I actually differ most with Mr. Murav- chik is in his assessment of the relevance of anti- Semitism/anti-Zionism stemming from quarters to the right of those he has investigated. I did not suggest, as he seems to think, that this animosity has grown stronger “the further we get from the Nazi era” or that it is of comparable significance to what C has taken place on the left. But I do think that some European figures and Pat Buchanan, in particular, have had an impact over the last generation that has C extended far beyond their own ideological circles. Who knows, for instance, how many of the people who heard Buchanan describe the Sabra and Shatila $19.95 massacres as the “Rosh Hashanah massacres” began then to think differently about Israel—and later bought Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (and their arguments)? I remember reading “Patrick J. Buchanan and the Jews” in Commentary and being very impressed by it. I Save once. am only sorry that I forgot who wrote it. More than that, I am sorry that Joshua Muravchik didn’t return C to this subject in his fine new book. Read eveRywheRe. Corrections visit commentarymagazine.com/subscribe The Rav Hisda’s Daughter series by Maggie Anton is not a trilogy as stated in “Common Clay” by Shai Se- cunda. It is two volumes: Apprentice and Enchantress. The image on page 14 of the Spring 2015 issue of Commentary Abraham and his son was incorrectly identified as being from an Arabic manuscript. It is of Persian origin.

54 Jewish Review of Books • Spring 2015 Last Word High Fives

BY The editors

hen I was first out of grad school was Moses of Narbonne. I’ve been rereading his ing Alan Dershowitz offhandedly as a “a law profes- and looking for jobs, there was one, 14th-century commentary, but to be fair that sor at the same university.” This isn’t exactly chutzpah, a plum, for which a member of the should count for two books (Guide and commen- but it’s certainly not meant to be flattering. I’ve also hiring committee, a Falstaff-sized tary). Which leaves me with one more: In my sem- been taking a peek every once in a while at Jonathan Wprofessor of Christian thought, was asking appli- inar this semester, we’re reading I and Thou, which Soffer’sEd Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City. cants—I almost wrote supplicants—for their two fa- was probably the kind of thing that interviewer It’s not really my kind of book, but the author’s father vorite books. “Early Auden and late Wittgenstein,” I was expecting. For all Buber’s prophetic-poetic was for a long time my father’s lawyer, and I’m curi- snapped back, happy with the speed and symmetry posturing and his determination to bypass tradi- ous to hear, now and then, the voice of a landsman I of my answer, but also worried as I watched his large tion for the Eternal You, it is a deep and moving last encountered decades ago, when he was in high puzzled face and realized that, obviously, he had been book. I’m tempted to say that it’s my favorite work school, precociously and anachronistically absorbed looking for an answer that was, well, more Jewish. of Protestant thought. —Abraham Socher in the writings of Ber Borokhov. Standing there in my blue interview suit before At the base of my pile (because it’s the fattest) is this bluff tenured eminence I felt like the dog in a Ron Chernow’s decade-old biography of Alexander joke my father used to tell: A man walks into a bar. Hamilton. I picked up a copy of it a long time ago, “Will you give me drinks on the house if my dog but didn’t open it until I heard that it was the inspira- can talk,” he asks. “Sure,” says the bartender. tion for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new off-Broad- “Rover, what’s that?” asks the man pointing way musical Hamilton. I don’t know why, upward. “Roof, Roof,” says the dog. The bar- but that made me want to read the book. tender folds his arms. “Wait,” says —Allan Arkush the man. “Rover, who’s the greatest baseball player of all time?” orking at the JRB “Ruth, Ruth,” says the dog. Wmeans a reading Out on the sidewalk, the list that never gets any dog turns to the man, shorter, with new books “Maybe I shoulda said (reviewed and not) DiMaggio?” jumping on faster than Still, I do like a you can cross titles off. good book list. Late- In heavy rotation is ly, we’ve all—well Joann Sfar’s charming all five of us—been Little Vampire collec- walking around the tion of comic books, JRB offices smiling. which is as interest- It’s been five years ing to me as it is to since we put out our my children. They have first issue, and we feel, if prompted deep dinner not venerable, at least estab- table discussions about main- lished—and as proud as kinder- taining faith after tragedy gartners, so we’ve been playing a game: and the relative scariness of What five books are you reading right mummies versus vampires. now? TheJRB staff, from left, Betsy Klarfeld, Allan Arkush, Abraham Socher, Also raising the issues of faith Amy Newman Smith, and Lori Dorr. (Illustration by Mark Anderson.) in the face of tragedy is The Bloomsbury have a stack of Saul Bellow books two-and- Companion to Holocaust Literature, which, Ia-half feet high (see pages 43–46), but forced to n top of my pile of five is Tuvia Friling’s A for me at least, poses as many questions as it answers choose, I’ll go with The Adventures of Augie March. OJewish Kapo in Auschwitz: History, Memory, and has caused the stack of books on my bedside table Asked what it was about, Bellow replied “about 200 and the Politics of Survival, the bleak but irresist- to overflow the three shelves and spread to the floor -un pages too long,” which is true, but the first 100 pages ible story of the son of Yitzhak Gruenbaum, one of der the bed. may be the best American prose of the 20th century. the interwar leaders of Polish Jewry who later be- A book I couldn’t put down—either the first or Less fun: I’ve been reading Jeremy Bernstein’s Nu- came Israel’s first minister of the interior. I’m not the second time I read it—is Howard Jacobson’s J: clear Iran, which came out last year (we sent it out sure yet what I think of the book underneath it, A Novel. Despite Ruth R. Wisse’s prodigious power for review, but, the old preacher notwithstanding, Hillel Cohen’s 1929: Year Zero of the Jewish-Arab with words (see pages 14–16), it is, I think, impos- sometimes one casts one’s books upon the waters Conflict, but it’s full of fascinating things. One of sible to capture the nuanced perfection of what and no review floats back). Bernstein, a physicist them is an account by General Israel Tal (a great Jacobson has created, even though his imagined who worked at Los Alamos as a young man, is al- commander who developed the Merkava tank) of world is perfectly horrible. ways an engaging writer and no kind of alarmist, how he narrowly escaped death in 1929, as a five- Back in the present, I am reading dueling Begin which makes his book all the more alarming. year-old, at the hands of an Arab mob in Safed. biographies by Avi Shilon and Daniel Gordis. And In 1625, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo of Crete Poking through his exasperating At Home in Ex- for Shabbat reading—and a respite—I’m regularly wrote to a student that the four leading commen- ile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews (in a nutshell: reaching for an annotated Book of Proverbs. Look- tators of Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed because the ones in Israel might some day have the ing forward to many more years of making our ears were like the four sons of the Passover haggadah. sense to listen to those who aren’t), I found Professor attentive to wisdom and our minds open to discern- The “wicked” one, who further radicalized Mai- Alan Wolfe of Boston College quoting an obscure re- ment (see Prov. 2:2). monides’ most daring philosophical doctrines, searcher at Harvard in the 1970s and then introduc- —Amy Newman Smith

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