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The Mabam Strategy by Amos Yadlin & Ari Heistein JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS Volume 10, Number 1 Spring 2019 $10.45 John J. Clayton Nobody Expects the Inquisition: A Memoir Michael Weingrad Harold Bloom’s Science Fiction Diane Cole Giorgio Bassani’s Memory Garden

Plus: Nathan Englander’s New Novel, Aleph-Bet Mysticism, Mizrahi Spies, and more Editor BRANDEIS Abraham Socher Senior Contributing Editor Allan Arkush UNIVERSITY PRESS Art Director Spinoza’s Challenge to Jewish Thought Betsy Klarfeld Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy Managing Editor Edited by Daniel B. Schwartz Amy Newman Smith “This collection of Jewish views on, and responses to, Spinoza over Editorial Assistant the centuries is an extremely useful addition to the literature. That Kate Elinsky it has been edited by an expert on Spinoza’s legacy in the Jewish world only adds to its value.” Steven Nadler, University of Wisconsin Editorial Board Robert Alter Shlomo Avineri March 2019 Leora Batnitzky Ruth Gavison Moshe Halbertal Hillel Halkin Jon D. Levenson Anita Shapira Michael Walzer J. H.H. Weiler Ruth R. Wisse Steven J. Zipperstein

Executive Director Eric Cohen Associate Publisher Nadia Ai Kahn

Chairman’s Council Blavatnik Family Foundation

Publication Committee Marilyn and Michael Fedak The Donigers of Not Bad for The Soul of the Stranger Ahuva and Martin J. Gross Great Neck Delancey Street Reading God and Torah from Susan and Roger Hertog A Mythologized Memoir The Rise of Billy Rose a Transgender Perspective The Lauder Foundation– Wendy Doniger Mark Cohen Joy Ladin Leonard and Judy Lauder “This heartfelt, difficult work will “Walking through the snow to see “Comprehensive biography . . . Sandra Earl Mintz Wendy at the stately, gracious compelling story. . . . Highly introduce Jews and other readers home of Rita and Lester Doniger recommended.” of the Torah to fresh, sensitive Tina and Steven Price Charitable Foundation will forever remain in my memory.” Library Journal (starred review) approaches with room for broader Pamela and George Rohr Francis Ford Coppola human dignity.” Daniel Senor March 2019 Publishers Weekly (starred review) Paul E. Singer

The Lost Library Jewish Legal The Legacy of Theories The Jewish Review of Books (Print ISSN 2153-1978, Online Vilna’s Strashun Writings on ISSN 2153-1994) is a quarterly publication of ideas and Library in the State, Religion, criticism published in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, by Bee.Ideas, LLC., 165 East 56th Street, New York, NY 10022. Aftermath of the and Morality Holocaust For all subscriptions, please visit www.jewishreviewofbooks. Edited by Leora com or send $39.95 ($49.95 outside of the U.S.; digital sub- Dan Rabinowitz Batnitzky and scriptions: $19.99) to Jewish Review of Books, PO Box 3000, Yonatan Brafman Denville, NJ 07834. Digital subscription orders must include an email address. Please send notifications of address changes to the same address or to [email protected]. For customer service and subscription-related issues, please call (877) 753-0337 or write to [email protected].

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LETTERS 4 Lachrymose Criticism?, Was Lincoln Jewish?, The Rebbe and the Professor, and The Transjordan Question FEATURE 5 Amos Yadlin & The Mabam Strategy: Israel, Iran, Syria (and Russia) In 2017, Israeli fighter jets hit an Iranian weapons facility Ari Heistein in Syria, and such strikes have continued over the last 18 months. But as Assad solidifies his victory in the Syrian civil war while Iranian and Russian forces remain on the ground, the next Israeli government must rethink its strategy in “the campaign between the wars,” known in Hebrew as mabam. REVIEWS

7 Shai Secunda Quarried in Air Sefer Ye ṣirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Voices by Tzahi Weiss • Victoria Hanna by Victoria Hanna 9 Steven E. Aschheim Moses and Hellenism Moses und Homer: Griechen, Juden, Deutsche: Eine andere Geschichte der deutschen Kultur (Moses and Homer: Greeks, Jews, Germans: A Different History of German Culture) by Bernd Witte 12 Lawrence Rosen Victim Enough? The Jews of North Africa During the Holocaust The Holocaust and North Africa edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

15 Diane Cole In Giorgio Bassani's Memory Garden The Novel of Ferrara by Giorgio Bassani, translated by Jamie McKendrick 18 Allan Arkush Seventy Years in the Desert Desert in the Promised Land by Yael Zerubavel • Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israel’s Periphery by Pnina Motzafi-Haller 20 Yehudah Mirsky Universal Rights and the Particular Jew Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century by James Loeffler 23 Jesse Tisch Some Kind of Genius Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman 26 Chloé Valdary The Fire Now Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt 28 Esther Schor America's Jewish Bridegroom Horace Kallen Confronts America: Jewish Identity, Science, and Secularism by Matthew J. Kaufman 30 David B. Green Our Man in Beirut Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel by Matti Friedman 32 Amy Newman Smith All or Nothing? kaddish.com by Nathan Englander

READINGS 33 Elliott Abrams Lessons of the Soviet Jewish Exodus Between the mid-1960s and 1991, more than two million Jews left the USSR. To the extent that the Soviet Jewish exodus is remembered, its lessons are misunderstood. 37 John J. Clayton Nobody Expects I mug at myself in the mirror and recite the old Monty Python gag. 39 Michael Weingrad Harold Bloom: Anti-Inkling? The great critic’s greatest literary obsession? A little-known 1920 fantasy novel called A Voyage to Arcturus. LOST & FOUND 41 Isaac Bashevis Singer A Letter to Mama A story, with an introduction by David Stromberg.

LAST WORD 47 Jake Marmer Disgruntled Ode

On the cover: Outside the Café Royal by Mark Anderson. LETTERS

Lachrymose Criticism? (and Agnon reminded Bellow), it is only in Hebrew The Rebbe and the Professor Dara Horn’s review of Black Honey, a film dedicated that our texts in other languages will be preserved— Ariel Evan Mayse’s translations of the correspon- to the poet Avraham Sutzkever (“Yiddish Heroism, hence, the Hebrew translation of Sutzkever’s oeuvre dence between Salo W. Baron and Rabbi Yosef Hebrew Tears,” Winter 2019), turns on a series of is a project of commemoration, of resurrection. Yitzchak Schneerson (“The Rebbe and the Profes- moments when people interviewed in the movie cry: Uri Barbash sor,” Fall 2018) were incredibly evocative, illustrat- the poet’s granddaughter when she reconstructs her Tel Aviv, Israel ing in two short letters the worlds of difference be- memory of a German actor announcing the death of tween two types of modern Eastern European Jews, her grandfather during a performance in Berlin; the Dara Horn Responds: the Hasid and the university-educated professor, Yiddish scholar Avraham Novershtern when he de- I thank both Anita Shapira and Uri Barbash for their contrasting approaches to reestablishing Jew- scribes Sutzkever requesting funding for his journal their thoughtful letters. Professor Shapira is utterly ish life after the Holocaust, and the role of the Jew- Di goldene keyt from the general secretary of the His- correct that Sutzkever is an unsentimental poet. My ish cultural treasures plundered by the Nazis in that tadrut in 1948, unaware that the man had just lost his review, however, was not of his poetry but rather process. son in the War for Independence; and Ruth R. Wisse of the film and how it inverts the traditional Zion- Dana Herman’s fine dissertation (“Hashavat Ave- as she describes an encounter with Sutzkever, who ist disdain for sentimentality (I am reminded of a dah: A History of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, accused her of not understanding the Holocaust. Last sarcastic poem by Yehuda Amichai entitled “You Inc.”) treats the history of both Baron’s initial orga- but not least, Ms. Horn also describes herself shed- Mustn’t Show Weakness”). What I found amazing nization, the Commission on European Jewish Cul- ding tears at a security checkpoint in Israel. about Black Honey was how it showed not only the tural Reconstruction, and its successor, Jewish Cul- I found this the wrong tone for a review of a movie power and unsentimental beauty of Sutzkever’s life tural Reconstruction, Inc., which was only given the about a great poet and a wonderful human being. The and work but also the astonishing way that his utter- authority to work in the Offenbach Archival Depot in last incident, the encounter with the soldier at the check- 1949. Before then, Max Weinreich, Lucy Schildkret point, was, I thought, too much. The story of Sutzkever (who became Lucy Dawidowicz), Seymour Pom- and of Yiddish poetry, even in Hebrew translation, does renze, and many others worked tirelessly to save and not need the embellishments of sentimentality. redistribute the libraries and archives brought to the Anita Shapira depot. Gershom Scholem had a bibliophilic field day Tel Aviv University in Offenbach before Baron’s organization got there. Finally, I wish Dr. Mayse could have said more I am the director and screenwriter of the filmBlack about Baron’s comment, “To my chagrin, the Yid- Honey, The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever. dish language neither trips off my tongue nor flows Dara Horn’s essay is the first article written about from my pen.” Was he telling the truth? any of my films that moved me to respond—to start Nancy Sinkoff a dialogue with her text. Rutgers University From the title on, Horn’s “Yiddish Heroism, Hebrew Tears” is a revolutionary and subversive at- The Transjordan Question tempt to challenge the consensus that Yiddish is es- In “Chaim of Arabia: The First Arab-Zionist Alli- sentially the language of diaspora, of surrender, of ance” (Winter 2019), Rick Richman states that the helplessness and hopelessness, whereas Hebrew is Zionist movement in 1919 agreed that the boundar- the language of the victors who have taken control ly disciplined poetry opens the emotional floodgates ies of the Jewish national home meant “leaving al- of their destiny. Here, the situation is reversed, re- of others. Barbash could have easily made a film that most all of Transjordan to the Arabs.” This, however, vealing to us a new and exciting alternative for Jew- simply told the phenomenal story of Sutzkever and does not agree with Chaim Weizmann’s statement ish thought. Horn’s article exposes the very concep- his work. He did that, but he added another layer by before the United Nations Special Committee on tual roots that guided me in making this film. baring the emotional responses the poet has evoked Palestine, on July 8, 1947, where he made clear that The more we study and research the Holocaust, in contemporary readers—which are ultimately re- “Palestine” was in 1919 understood as “Palestine and the more helpless we remain in the face of human sponses to the tragedies and triumphs of the last 70 Transjordan.” He stated, “[The Transjordan] was cut existence. Attempts to give artistic expression to what years of Jewish life. Uri Barbash’s eloquent letter and off . . . at a moment’s notice. First you amputate Pal- happened “over there” are swallowed in a black hole. his film express this far more directly than I did. estine. You cut off a country which is three or four Theodor Adorno famously said that “writing poetry or five times the size of Palestine, and then you turn after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The poet Avraham Sutz- Was Lincoln Jewish? round on poor Zionists and tell them, you are a small kever, on the other hand, climbed to dizzying heights Stuart Schoffman’s provocative article “Was Lincoln country; you cannot bring any population.” In other of harmonious, musical, refined poetry—at the height Jewish?” (jewishreviewofbooks.com, February 12, words, 28 years after the Versailles conference, Weiz- of the extermination in the Vilna Ghetto. Like the 2019) mentions both Daniel Boone and Abraham mann still felt that certain tracts of Transjordan (cur- sages of the Kabbalah, he redeemed the sparks from Lincoln as possible Melungeons (southerners of rently Jordan) were also meant to be included in the within the fragments of catastrophe—and thereby lit- mixed, partly Sephardi, heritage). As it happened, future Jewish national home. If so, then the separate erally saved his own life. Even Sutzkever, however, as the Boones and the Lincolns were immediate neigh- Transjordan created by Winston Churchill, as colo- Ruth R. Wisse says in the film, never spoke about what bors in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Both families nial secretary, in 1921, in fact was an Arab Palestin- actually happened in the ghetto. As the French philos- were prominent in local affairs and indeed intermar- ian state. In 1948, when it absorbed the major Arab opher Jean-François Lyotard put it, Auschwitz was an ried. The Boones were Quakers from Devonshire. settlements in the West Bank and changed its name earthquake that destroyed all seismographic devices. Abraham Lincoln the elder married Anne Boone, to Jordan, it was, in fact, a Palestinian state. But the Another idea that guided my work, which Horn first cousin to Daniel. Through her the Lincolns be- name was only revived when Jordan attacked Israel beautifully elaborated upon, was that the film should came associated with the local Friends meeting, and on June 6, 1967, and consequently lost the West Bank not be a nostalgic journey toward the Yiddish past both Boones and Lincolns are buried in its ceme- to Israel occupation. Then came the outcry for a Pal- but an attempt to enrich our spiritual and cultural tery. The genealogy of Squire Boone, father of Dan- estinian state. But isn’t Jordan itself (even without the world and derive inspiration from the world of the iel, is well known and goes back to the Plantagenet West Bank) also a Palestinian state? diasporic Jews. As the late Rabbi Shimon Gershon kings, as is the background of the Lincolns of Exeter Dr. Mordecai Paldiel Rosenberg said, “The long years of the diaspora did Township. I think that the likelihood of Melungeon New York, NY not pass for us to disown them, but for us to inter- ancestry in either family is between slim and none. nalize them, even while we are a free people in our I happen to know all of this because I was born and country.” Yiddish—a language with no borders, no grew up in Berks County, where we are very proud Correction bureaucracy, no army or police—meets the mod- of our landsmen, the Boones and Lincolns. The photo on page 25 of our Winter 2019 issue was ernized ancient Hebrew that lives vibrantly, if not Mimi Miller of the German musician Heinrich Ehrlich, not Hen- wildly, in the here and now. But as Horn reminds us via Facebook ryk Ehrlich of the Polish Bund. We regret the error.

4 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 FEATURE The Mabam Strategy: Israel, Iran, Syria (and Russia)

BY AMOS YADLIN AND ARI HEISTEIN

n September 7, 2017, Israeli fighter jets series of reprisals on both sides. As all military ex- trary,” and “gross violations of Syrian sovereignty.” hit a “scientific research center” (in re- perts know, it is easy for even the most disciplined Following the September 2018 downing of the ality, an Iranian weapons facility) in military to stumble into a full-scale war in such situa- Russian surveillance plane, the Kremlin equipped the city of Masyaf in northwest Syria. tions. And the risk is not confined to any single mili- Syrian air defenses with S-300 surface-to-air missile AndO so began the next phase of the “campaign be- tary force: With fighters from Syria, Russia, Iran, and batteries to enable better defenses against Israel’s air tween the wars” (known in Hebrew as m’aracha bein force. If Israeli operations in Syria continue at their ha-milchamot or, more succinctly, by the acronym Russia is increasingly hostile present pace and the current trend in Russia-Israel mabam). Since then, Israel has continued to quietly relations persists, the deconfliction mechanism but decisively counter Iran’s entrenchment in Syria, about Israeli activities, calling with Russia may not hold up. What could happen worked to thwart the activities of its terrorist proxy if Russia stops cooperating with Israel? Might it em- Hezbollah on the northern border, maintained them “provocative” and “gross ploy its own even more advanced S-400 air defense studied neutrality with regard to the outcome of the systems to protect Iranian personnel, weapons, or long Syrian civil war, and put into place a “decon- violations of Syrian sovereignty.” facilities in Syria? fliction mechanism”—regular exchanges of infor- Even if Russia and Israel manage to maintain cor- mation and a protocol when things go wrong—to Lebanese Hezbollah all operating on Israel’s northern dial relations, Jerusalem clearly cannot depend on avoid an unintentional conflict with Russian forces. front, an exchange of fire between Israel and any one Moscow to achieve or guarantee its goal of security It’s been a complex operating environment, and it of these military actors could deteriorate into a battle on the northern border, notwithstanding its pos- won’t be any easier for the next Israeli government, against all of them, and perhaps even against Iran- turing as a useful mediator in Syria. As we were whether it is led by Bibi Netanyahu or Benny Gantz. backed Hamas in Gaza. drafting this article, Israel struck Quneitra, just 500 Under the leadership of Major General Qasem So- feet from the 1974 ceasefire line between Syria and leimani, commander of its Quds Force, Iran’s aim has n May 9, 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu was the Israel, killing both Iranian and Hezbollah opera- been to equip proxies based on Israel’s northern bor- Oonly Western state guest to attend the mili- tives. This February 2019 strike was only the latest der in Syria and Lebanon, and perhaps in Gaza as well, tary parade on Red Square, but that was before 15 reminder that Russia’s promise to distance hos- with advanced missiles. These missiles could serve to Russian soldiers died when a Russian surveillance tile forces from Israel’s border remains unfulfilled. deter attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, while a nuclear plane was downed by Syria’s air defense systems Meanwhile, the unpredictable nature of the U.S. weapon would eventually give its conventional forces this past September during an Israeli bombing raid government’s decision-making process in this arena on Israel’s borders the ability to act with impunity. on an Iranian target in northern Syria. Netanyahu should make Israeli strategists wary of depending Iran has sought to establish airfields and naval bases did return to Russia just last month, in February on Washington for anything beyond a green light in Syria, built several precision missile plants like the 2019, to meet again with Putin, who issued a point- to strike when necessary and diplomatic support in one at Masyaf, and imported Shia militias from other ed statement that he “hope[d] . . . continuity will international forums. countries into Syria so that it can continue operations be preserved in the development of Russian-Israeli For Israel’s pilots, sorties over Lebanon and into even after withdrawing most of its own troops. It also relations,” regardless of the outcome of Israel’s elec- Syria will likely become more dangerous as the Iran- continues to attempt to establish a Syrian Hezbollah tions. Between these two meetings, however, Rus- led axis’s antiaircraft capabilities improve. Moscow modeled on the Lebanese version. Israel’s next prime sian officials became increasingly hostile in their says that the S-300 batteries it recently delivered to minister will have the complex task of evolving a strat- comments on Israeli activities in Syria, calling Syria will be operational shortly (though it is not egy to prevent new strategic threats from emerging them “criminally negligent,” “provocative,” “arbi- yet clear who will operate them and who will make as changing circumstances make the situation even more explosive. Every Israeli airstrike in Syria carries three major risks: the potential for uncontrolled escalation on the northern front; the possibility of harming Israel’s already tense relationship with Russia; and the danger to Israel’s air force. In 2018, each of these risks was realized to some degree: Iran twice responded to airstrikes by firing missiles at Israel; a Russian plane was downed by the Syrians during an Israeli bombing operation, causing a diplomatic crisis between Moscow and Jerusalem; and an Israeli F-16 was shot down (though, fortunately, its pilot was able to eject over Israeli territory). There is no reason to believe that any of these incidents was a one-off. On the contrary, close observers believe that such risks may grow in the coming months. With Syrian rebel forces all but vanquished as of this writing, the Iran-led axis will likely have a greater appetite for escalation against Israel. While Syrian forces are still deterred from firing on Israel in any capacity beyond air defense, it is feasible that Iranian and Hezbollah forces will seek to strike Is- rael from Syrian territory, eliciting a powerful Israeli response, and that could easily lead to a spiraling Sculpture on the Golan Heights, near the Syrian border, October 2016. (Photo by Bernhard Richter/iStock.)

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 5 decisions about how and when they are used). strategy, Israel’s leaders have four strategic options tion. The advantage of this policy is that, unlike the So far, Iran has not responded in a serious way to from which to choose. present mabam, it entails no immediate operational Israeli strikes in Syria—because it has not been able First, Israel could, of course, simply continue cost or risk of war, but the danger is that the failure to develop an effective operational plan for doing with the current approach, despite its growing risks of deterrence is “predictable” or explicable only in so—but that could change. Indeed, there is consider- and the new challenges. Israel could even seek to retrospect—and the cost of war is considerable. able danger that Tehran will feel increasing pressure use the growing possibility of escalation in its favor Third, Israel might use technological tools to to strike back in order to save face in the lopsided negate the efficacy of the advanced weaponry being conflict. Such pressure will only grow as Israel be- supplied by Iran, in order to prevent missiles from comes more vocal in claiming credit for strikes and hitting their targets in Israel. For example, Israel’s more explicit about its goals. It was only this January leaders could decide to fortify the country’s exist- that outgoing IDF chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot spoke ing missile defense by purchasing additional Iron openly of activities on the northern front as a coher- Dome or Arrow batteries, or the country might ent strategy of mabam, in an interview with Bret Ste- develop enhanced disruptive technologies like jam- phens in the New York Times. The next month, after mers for use against GPS missile guidance kits. Like the Quneitra strike, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, deterrence, this approach does not risk escalation, “We operate every day, including yesterday, against but new technology is both expensive and uncer- Iran and its attempts to entrench itself in the region.” tain. Moreover, any defensive measure can eventu- But no matter how many Iran-run facilities and ally be evaded by an adept enemy. Iranian troop positions Israel strikes, it will never be Finally, rather than continuing with the current cost effective to remove every Iranian soldier from piecemeal approach, Israel could launch a compre- Syrian soil. Instead Israel should focus on prevent- hensive preemptive strike to destroy all known ad- ing its adversaries to the north from acquiring advanced weapons systems and the facilities used to vanced weaponry and constructing the infrastruc- produce them in Syria. In a single day, Israel could ture for terror (from underground tunnels to mis- Major General Qasem Soleimani in civilan deal a major blow to the Iranian/Hezbollah military sile batteries) along Israel’s border. dress during a public ceremony in 2015. build-up and set it back significantly. Of course, if the next Israeli government chooses this tack, war fter the next election, Israel’s leaders need to by highlighting the risks that Iran’s provocations would be a fully expected outcome rather than a Adecide if its current strategy is still the best pose to Russia’s interest in stabilizing Syria, which possible risk—albeit a war that Israel’s enemies way to keep the country safe from threats along its might push Moscow to rein in Tehran. would fight with considerably reduced firepower. northern border. More fundamentally, Israel must Second, since 2006, the IDF has adopted a pas- These four strategic options are not mutually ex- clearly delineate its strategic goals with regard to sive approach toward Lebanon that depends on de- clusive; Israel might adopt elements of all of them as Syria, which will be ruled by Bashar al-Assad with terrence to avoid war. Israel could deploy this same it formulates a new multilayered mabam strategy. For the active assistance of Russia and Iran for the fore- strategy in Syria, in essence choosing to minimize example, Israel could raise the threshold for approval seeable future. In designing an updated mabam the immediate risks, particularly the risk of escala- of airstrikes, continue to carry out a smaller number of surgical attacks on targets of the highest priority, and work to develop technology to interfere with the successful operation of precision missiles, while at the same time planning a major strike on the mass production facilities of Iran’s advanced weapons project if and when they approach completion. Of the many threats facing Israel, Iran’s effort to build major military capabilities in Syria and Leba- non ranks highest in both immediacy and magnitude. The supreme leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei has art made it abundantly clear that his ultimate goal is not photogr aphy to deter Israel but to destroy it, and his proxy forces architecture and advanced missiles in Syria are on the front lines of modernism those efforts. As always, Israel must balance the need judaica & bibles to prevent the emergence of a strategic threat against holocaust yiddish & hebrew the importance of avoiding unnecessary escalation. foreign language As the dust settles at what appears to be the end olympic games of civil war in Syria, Israel must rethink its strategy appraisal services and tactics in the “campaign between the wars.” The

statut de kalisZ decisions made over the next year may determine szyk, arthur. 1932, Paris: editions de la the strategic balance of the region for decades to table Ronde. 1/50 estimated extant. Folio. the most important, personal and rarest come. As one of us wrote in these pages four years work by arthur szyk celebrates the text of the General Charter of Jewish liberties, ago, “Assad’s demise and the collapse of the radical which granted civil and religious rights to axis is the best strategic outcome Israel could ex- Polish Jews when issued in 1264 by duke Bolesław the Pious in Kalisz. Elaborate pect.” That, unfortunately, did not come to pass. Is- lettering in nine languages, initials illuminated or historiated, geometric and rael’s next prime minister must deal with the reality floral borders plus detailed miniature paintings of historical and mythic events. we have, not the reality we hoped for. Influenced by French, Italian and Flemish manuscript styles. Metallics embellish the original’s gauche and watercolor, while with wit, figures include Szyk’s family and Major General (ret.) Amos Yadlin was chief of Israeli two self-portraits. Begun during the May 1926 Polish coup and supported with military intelligence from 2006 to 2010 and is now the research from Józef Piłsudski’s Polska Partia socjalistyczna government, arthur director of the Institute for National Security Studies Szyk’s masterwork subtly contrasts past (INSS) in Israel. mistreatment and post-WWi fascism with the ideals of justice and freedom. (44855) $37,500 Casimir III ratifies the Statute in 1334. Ari Heistein is an independent security and policy consul- tant based in Tel Aviv.

6 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 REVIEWS Quarried in Air

BY SHAI SECUNDA

His name—the Lord of Israel, in five positions: Sefer Yesirah and Its Contexts: Other Jewish Living God and King of the world, certain sounds in the throat, Voices merciful, gracious God almighty, certain sounds on the lips, by Tzahi Weiss on high and dwelling in eternity, certain sounds against the palate University of Pennsylvania Press, 208 pp., $59.95 His name is holy and certain sounds against the teeth, and He is sublime and others along the tongue. Victoria Hanna and created His world by Victoria Hanna out of three words As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that these 38 minutes, $10 sefer, sfar, sippur— Hebrew discourses on phonology and numerology letter, limit, and tale. have only the veneer of rationality. The text reveals one handbreadth while concealing another, urging Ten spheres of restraint, its readers to “consider what a mouth cannot utter riday afternoons in Sabbath-observant Ten ciphers of Nothing— and what the ear cannot hear.” The prevailing image homes are a frenzy of cooking and clean- And twenty-two letters at the foundation. is of immensity and solidity emerging from a great ing. As the old adage goes, whoever pre- void—“tremendous columns out of air that cannot pares for the Sabbath eats on the Sabbath. Scholars have demonstrated that Sefer Yeṣirah be grasped”—which shimmers with peril: YetF the Talmud tells of a pair of rabbis who regularly comprises two shorter works: a passage about the spent Fridays outside of the kitchen studying a mys- 10 generative numbers and another, more substan- Bridle your mouth and keep it from speaking, terious work about creation. Luckily, these sessions your heart from wondering, also produced succulent meat, saving the good rab- and if it wanders, return to the place. bis from hunger and, one would imagine, domes- tic discord. The identity of the rabbis’ magical text, n the introduction to his Sefer Yeṣirah and Its known in medieval talmudic manuscripts as either IContexts: Other Jewish Voices, Tzahi Weiss “The Laws of Creation” or “The Book of Creation,” is quips that after a century and a half of research, unknown, but a text bearing the latter name—Sefer we know almost everything there is to know about Ye ṣirah in Hebrew—has circulated since the Middle Sefer Yeṣirah except the identity of its author, the Ages, and it is even more wondrous than any alche- time and place of its writing, the shape of the origi- mist’s cookbook. nal text, and, also, its meaning. Sefer Yeṣirah is the most influential Jewish book The book is, in fact, devoid of identifiable mark- you never heard of. Its many references to the deci- ers. It appears suddenly in the historical record of mal counting system, which it calls sefirot, gave us the 10th century, and, unlike most surviving classi- the central icon of Jewish mysticism—the 10 inter- cal Hebrew literature, there are no rabbis named in locking facets of the Godhead, which also came to be the text. Tradition may attribute Sefer Yeṣirah to the known as sefirot. Indeed, it has been argued that early patriarch Abraham, based on the book’s bizarre coda commentaries written on the book tilled the gnostic that describes how God set Abraham “in his lap, and soil out of which sprouted the tree of Kabbalah. At kissed him upon his head . . . He made with him a Diagram of the 22 the same time, the text was creatively read against covenant between the ten fingers of his hands . . . Hebrew letters mapped the grain by determined rationalists such as the 10th- bound twenty-two letters into his language, and the onto the sefirot, found century Babylonian rabbi Saadia Gaon, who under- at the end of the Vilna Holy One revealed to him the secret,” but for philolo- stood it as disciplined cosmological speculation. And Gaon’s commentary to gists, that is neither here nor there. Many conceiv- it inspired Gentiles, too, from Gottfried Wilhelm able contexts have been proposed, ranging from 1st- Sefer Yeṣirah. Leibniz to Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. century Jerusalem to the 9th-century Islamic world, What attracted this readership of kabbalists, but nothing near a scholarly consensus has emerged. philosophers, writers, and dreamers? For one, it Weiss acknowledges his debt to the scholars who was the book’s arresting thesis that the basic com- tial treatise about the 22 procreative letters. These preceded him, those who edited the text from the ponents of mathematical and verbal language, the two courses in arithmetic and grammar conjure medieval manuscripts, teased out its layers, and letters and numbers that make up human speech up a chiding homeroom instructor possessed of a drew connections with other works. But he is still and equations, are the very elements through which poetic soul: confident that he has something new and important God fashioned the universe. At least as important is to say. Like his subject, his monograph is brief, and Sefer Yeṣirah’s idiom, which helped this obscure and Ten spheres of restraint Weiss gets swiftly to work by disclosing his chief extremely concise text—it weighs in at just a couple ten, not nine or eleven— hermeneutical assumption, which is that, “We have thousand words—secure a permanent place in the fathom through wisdom, no reason to assume that it tries to conceal its con- canon of Hebrew literature. be wise through knowing; text.” For Weiss, Sefer Yeṣirah’s lack of identifiers and Indeed, what is most striking about it is its judge through them and with them search, its exclusion of named rabbis from the text are nei- precise yet allusive prose, which somehow comes set a word straight ther frustrating accidents of omission nor deliberate across as both scientific and sorcerous. This is ap- and restore the Creator to His place. occlusions, they are clues that alert us to the text’s parent from the book’s opening lines, rendered here . . . nonrabbinic origins. by the poet and translator Peter Cole: Twenty-two letters It is true that the rabbis of late antiquity were pas- carved through voice, sionate about the Hebrew letters, whether tallying Through thirty-two hidden paths of wisdom, quarried in air, their value and forging connections between numer- YAH, the Lord of hosts, engraved and fixed in the mouth ically equivalent words in a still-popular language

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 7 game known as gematria, or probing the shape of the to be expected of a work written in exquisite Hebrew, Victoria Hanna is a stage name combining aleph-bet for metaphysical meaning. Some rabbinic Sefer Yeṣirah has had a fascinating afterlife in modern the names of the artist’s paternal and maternal texts even ascribe creative power to the four letters of Hebrew literature. For one, Israel’s founding novel- grandmothers. The album Victoria Hanna, like Sefer God’s ineffable name—the Tetragrammaton. Yet, as ist, S. Y. Agnon, alluded to the book several times Ye ṣirah, is actually two works fused together, the Weiss demonstrates, classical rabbinic literature does and, arguably, named the protagonist of his beloved first dedicated to her Egyptian grandmother Victo- not share this text’s alphabetology, where all of the let- A Simple Story Blumah after its great “nothingness”— ria’s holy and sensuous rebellion against her child- ters, from aleph to tav, make up a kind of divine pe- hood marriage, and the other inspired by her Per- riodic table. In the religious writings of late antiquity, Of the countless uses and sian grandmother Hanna’s pious response to similar this really can only be found in the Syriac Christian travails. (The artist herself was raised in what her literature of northern Mesopotamia, where an an- abuses of Sefer Yesirah over website describes as an “ultra-Orthodox” Mizrahi cient interest in the generative powers of the divine community in Jerusalem.) alphabet flourished, having overcome earlier opposi- the past millennium, perhaps The “Hanna” section of the album is a collection by Neoplatonists and Church Fathers. tion of haunting melodies with lyrics mainly taken Weiss contends that Sefer Yeṣirah applies the the most faithful is Victoria from the Bible and Jewish mystical literature, and Syriac Christian alphabetology to the singular lan- the instrumentation soothingly frames Hanna’s guage of Hebrew. He argues that the text emerged Hanna’s recent self-titled incantation-like utterances. The “Victoria” collec- from a barely known northern Mesopotamian album. tion pulsates with the frenzy of creation. Punctu- Jewish community at some remove from rabbinic ating rap-like renditions of passages from Song Babylonia, located to the south. If this is right, then blimah. The lovesick young man smitten by Blumah of Songs, the Zohar, the Hoshanah prayers recited Weiss has done more than locate the true origins is so dumbstruck that the narrator, riffing on Sefer on Sukkot, and, of course, Sefer Yeṣirah are drums, of Sefer Yeṣirah, he has recovered the “Other Jewish Ye ṣirah, insists that we “consider not what his mouth horns, and strings, including zither and oud. Yet Voices” of his monograph’s subtitle, voices that had utters . . . as the heart knows more than the mouth, the most versatile instrument is the artist herself, been drowned out by the rolling waters and gasp- and the ear hears what the mouth cannot say.” not only her voice, which ranges across “oriental” ing wind of the talmudic sea. scales, and her tongue and teeth, which hiss and Weiss includes the usual click rhythmically, but also her entire body, which scholarly caveats that his theory reverberates with Sefer Yeṣirah’s vision of simultane- is a theory and more research ously carnal and other-worldly language. needs to be conducted. The thesis Victoria Hanna was released in 2017, after many seems compelling, and Weiss may years in which the artist toiled away in relative ob- indeed have finally solved the scurity. She had spent time in New York, in asso- problem of Sefer Yeṣirah’s origi- ciation with the saxophonist and new Jewish music nal context. Yet, one cannot avoid impresario John Zorn’s downtown scene, but she the sense that Weiss’s straightfor- also traveled to the four corners of the earth, of- ward scholarly detective work is ten performing for audiences who had never heard a poor interpretive fit for a text Hebrew before, let alone considered it the Adamic that revels in mystery, repeatedly language of creation. Throughout this period, she invoking its “ciphers of restraint” experimented intensely with the language, breaking and “substance from Nothing.” It it down into its smallest particles and recombining seems almost as if the author (or them. Like the talmudic rabbis’ Friday afternoon authors) knew that many cen- study sessions, it was an arduous process of creation. turies after the book’s creation, A few years before the album’s release, the first scholars would be disputing its two tracks went viral and launched the artist’s now original context and wanted to meteoric career. Of course, the popstar Madonna have some fun. Perhaps the text’s Victoria Hanna in a still from the video for “22 Letters.” (Courtesy of had already produced songs incorporating kabbalis- originators, who had incredible Victoria Hanna.) tic ideas and imagery, but there is no comparison be- facility in an unusually sophisti- tween the profound depths of Victoria Hanna’s work cated Hebrew, were not so distant from their playful Of the countless uses and abuses of this text over and Madonna’s New Agey adaptation of third-hand scholarly rabbinic cousins after all? the past millennium or more, perhaps the most mysticism imbibed at the Kabbalah Centre. faithful adaptation has been achieved just recently. In “The Alphabet Song,” Hanna brilliantly em- study of a book’s contexts looks not only for The self-titled album of the Israeli vocal artist Vic- bodies the instructive voice of Sefer Yeṣirah, teaching Aorigins, but also at subsequent settings of re- toria Hanna includes lyrics taken from Sefer Yeṣirah, Orthodox schoolgirls the aleph-bet and its honeyed ception, and Weiss does an admirable job retriev- and its aesthetics realize the book’s embodied and mysteries. The song “22 Letters” is also an act of in- ing the scattered evidence for how Sefer Yeṣirah was evanescent view of language. Here, from the liner struction, though more for mystics in training than read in the first centuries of its existence. He reex- notes, is a translation of the beginning of the second elementary-school students. Dressed in a dark and amines late midrashim that mention the work, ear- track, appropriately called “22 Letters”: demure dress, the artist uses her hands to count, ly commentaries that try to explain it, and explan- point, and mime the ways in which the Hebrew let- atory glosses lodged in the text. He also considers Twenty-two foundation letters / Engraved in ters are grouped, where they can be found in the Islamic parallels and a tantalizing reference in a voice / hewn in wind / fixed in mouth in five body, and how God “engraved them / hewed them 9th-century Latin epistle to Jews who “believe that places / In throat / In palate in tongue / In teeth / weighed them / exchanged them / permutated the letters of their alphabet exist eternally and that in lips / Twenty-two letters he tied in his tongue them.” before the beginning of the world they received dif- / and revealed his secret / He drew them up in With her eyes wide open in awe, and her mouth ferent tasks.” For Weiss, all of this proves that the water ignited them in fire sounded them in wind working sonorous wonders, it occurs to me that in rationalist readings, which begin with Saadia, were set them on fire in seven / Led them in twelve our generation, Sefer Yeṣirah resides nowhere more thoroughly apologetic, rear-guard attempts at de- constellations / Twenty-two letters / He engraved than in the person of Victoria Hanna. nying the book’s original mythic view of the world. them / hewed them / weighed them / exchanged A lengthier book might have continued its re- them / permutated them / And created with view of Sefer Yeṣirah’s later contexts and considered them the soul of all created / and of all future Shai Secunda holds the Jacob Neusner Chair in Jewish the book’s appearance in Hasidic thought and in the creation / He created substance from chaos / Studies at Bard College. He is the author of The Iranian writings of Christian Hebraists, early modern philos- Made no-thing some-thing / Hewed great stones Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context ophers, and modern and postmodern writers. As is / From air that cannot be conceived. (University of Pennsylvania Press).

8 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 Moses and Hellenism

BY STEVEN E. ASCHHEIM

man classicism—Winckelmann, Goethe, Herder, strated that this archetype of noble Greek beauty Moses und Homer: Griechen, Juden, Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Fichte—are impli- and character often served as a foil to the ugly, mis- Deutsche: Eine andere Geschichte der cated. Heidegger’s Greek-inspired anti-Semitic rav- proportioned stereotype of the cunning, nervous, deutschen Kultur (Moses and Homer: Greeks, ings turn out, in Witte’s narrative, to have a long and rootless Jew. (Ideals of beauty have always been part Jews, Germans: A Different History of distinguished pedigree. of racist thought.) German Culture) To be sure, others preceded Witte in pointing Somewhat surprisingly, Nietzsche, with his fa- by Bernd Witte out the dangers of Hellenic worship as a national mous irrationalism, his anti-Christian and intoxi- De Gruyter, 384 pp., $57.95 cated Dionysian impulses, is not central to Witte’s Worship of Homer was story. Instead he concentrates on earlier figures, including Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Herder, and dialectically related to Hölderlin. Each of these thinkers valorized Grecian ideals as part of their modernizing zeal, while at- n a provocative new work recently published contempt for Moses. tacking the God of Judaism and Christianity. But, in German, Bernd Witte proposes nothing less Witte argues, because Christianity was supported than an “alternative history of German cul- model for Germany. In 1935, the English scholar by state power, their rhetorical onslaught was con- ture,” as the subtitle of his finely wrought work E. M. Butler published The Tyranny of Greece Over centrated on Judaism. Under the rubric of ancient Iof scholarship tells us. Moses and Homer: Greeks, Germany. Though she made little explicit reference polytheism, these thinkers promulgated the wor- Jews, Germans is a historical and cultural argument to contemporary events, she clearly had in mind the ship of the cosmic forces of “Nature” and set the au- animated by powerful indignation. This history, he racially politicized and neopagan currents coursing tonomous person—typically in the form of the con- insists, has yet to be fully confronted. through Nazi Germany. But Witte has a great deal quering warrior—as their crowning ideal. Homeric Like most important works of intellectual pas- new to say, not least in his analysis of the many Jew- history, Witte asserts, is one of murder, war, and sion, Witte’s book reflects his autobiographical cir- ish interventions in this culture-defining discourse. death. Positing society as a ruthless site of struggle, cumstances. He was born in Germany in 1942 and German Grecophiles promot- clearly belongs to a war generation that gradually ed a worldview that increas- became aware of Germany’s great guilt and the ne- ingly suppressed the Judaic cessity to grapple with it firmly and honestly. Witte affirmation of God-created life was originally trained as a classicist, grounded in the and the proscription, “Thou manifold enchantments of the Greek world and un- shalt not kill.” In its place, they instructed in Jewish tradition. However, as a young constructed a ruthless image German, upon meeting Jewish intellectuals such as of society. This, Witte argues, Jean Bollack, Paul Celan, and Peter Szondi in the was the other side of the En- 1960s, he excitedly discovered what he describes lightenment, and it left a deep as a lost world, an “intellectual cosmos.” He is now mark on 20th-century German perhaps best known as the first biographer of Walter culture. Benjamin and has devoted much of his later career Readers familiar with Ger- to aspects of that European and especially German man Jewish history may be Jewish firmament. He is presently the chief coeditor somewhat surprised by Witte’s of an ambitious multivolume project to collect and account of these classical Ger- publish all of Martin Buber’s writings. man thinkers as essentially Moses and Homer is essentially a work of hom- neopagan and anti-Jewish. age and witness. It combines Witte’s affirmation of Most acculturating Jews at the Judaism’s ethical and social values with a shocked time and even later—what- indictment of the German obsession with ancient Achilles by Richard Westmacott, 1822, Hyde Park, London. The statue pays ever their orientation—did not Greece, which he sees as culminating in Nazism and tribute to the Duke of Wellington. (Chris Dorney/Alamy Stock Photo.) see things that way. Indeed, in genocide. His book is a provocative tour de force, their eyes, Goethe and Schiller ranging through the entirety of modern German itte begins by juxtaposing Heraclitus’s pre- were liberating heroes of German Jewry. They re- high culture. Witte argues that modern Germany’s Wscription that “War is the father of all and garded them—and not all that mistakenly—as En- ever-insistent worship of Greece was almost inevi- the king of all” with Isaiah’s proclamation that “na- lightenment humanists who advocated reason and tably coupled with a negation of the monotheistic tion shall not lift up sword against nation, neither a secular culture of Bildung (ethical self-cultivation) Judaic tradition. Worship of Homer was dialectical- shall they learn war anymore.” At the founding core that was open to everyone. It was only through these ly related to contempt for Moses. Witte shows that of what he dubs this Greco-Germanic “counterreli- broad-minded and humanist postulates that newly German Jews, too, were entangled in this discourse, gion” stands the 18th-century art historian and ar- acculturating Jews believed they could integrate forced to synthesize it with their Jewish commit- chaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Witte into German culture. “The significance of Friedrich ments or, in some cases, actively subvert it. regards Winckelmann’s idolization of the naked Schiller for the formation of Jewish attitudes toward Beginning around 1770, Witte argues, the Ger- body as concretized in ancient Greek sculpture as Germany is almost incalculable,” wrote Gershom man idealization of the ancient Greek world—its the negation of the Jewish prohibition against im- Scholem (who was not exactly a proponent of Ger- cult of beauty and the body, its ideal of the noble ages. Plastic representations of human form served man Jewish assimilation). As “spokesman for pure warrior, its polytheistic reverence for “Nature”— to gradually displace Judaism’s rational text- and humanity, lofty poet of the highest ideals of man- evolved into an antimonotheistic, anti-Judaic tradi- word-centered culture. Here Witte could have but- kind, [he] represented everything they thought of, tion. In close readings, he shows that virtually all of tressed his case with the work of a historian whom or wished to think of, as being German.” the main literary and philosophical giants of Ger- he does not mention, George Mosse, who demon- Ernst Bloch, to take another example, regarded

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 9 Goethe and Humboldt as the proper forerunners portrayed Moses—rather than God—as the great cient Greece, she tried to fuse what she saw as the to his radical Marxist humanism. Indeed, these emancipator of mankind, a kind of liberating so- best of the worlds of Homer and Moses. After be- luminaries were perceived not only as embodying cialist. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism retells the ing turned back at the Swiss border, she was sent to the best of Germanism and universalism but as story of revelation as a Greek myth, where Moses Theresienstadt, where she worked as a nurse, serv- strengthening a new kind of Jewishness. Scholem’s (rather than God) is a kind of father, whose mur- ing her fellow inmates. Acutely aware of both the friend Walter Benjamin agreed that “above all, in a der paradoxically results in the formation of ab- beauty and the vulnerability of the human body, she study of Goethe one finds one’s Jewish substance,” stract ethical and spiritual consciousness, indeed a developed an ethic of mental and physical service, an while the Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld argued that superior Judaic civilization. Witte regards Freud’s affirmation of “whole life.” Incredibly hard working, making Goethe a part of one’s life facilitated Jewish story as an implicit response both to the Homer- by April 1945 she had withered to no more than 80 national consciousness! (Hindsight may judge these ic and Nazi world of war and barbarity, and the pounds. On her deathbed, she was found reading as tragic misperceptions, but Schiller, Goethe, and many attempts to unseat Moses as the founder of Homer in the original Greek. Witte sees her story as Humboldt certainly were welcome alternatives to Western culture. Martin Buber and Leo Baeck also exemplifying both the tragedy and the triumph of the both Christian and ultranationalist exclusion.) German Jewish experience. Nonetheless, Witte shows Moses and the Jew- ish tradition were negatively caricatured not only itte’s work is scholarship as outraged per- by the usual ultranationalist and anti-Semitic sus- Wsonal reckoning. For Witte, the idolization pects but by the classical thinkers of early German of Greece and the concomitant ousting of mono- modernity. Indeed, he argues that even their seem- theistic Judaism not only helped to shape modern ingly positive portrayals were often anti-Jewish. German self-understanding and identity, but also Thus, while Schiller rendered Moses as an enlight- paved the way to the murder of the Jews of Europe. ened statesman, he dismissed the Jewish mob as a “A specific form of so-called Bildung,” he writes, contemptible band of slaves and—in a theme that “that transmitted an uncritical and unreflective later became increasingly familiar and ominous— human conception of Greece contributed to the as traitors to the state. Herder’s Moses did lead and fact that so many educated intellectuals could at- liberate homeless Jews, but they are portrayed as tach themselves to murderous National Socialist dishonorable vagabonds and parasites. (By con- ideology.” Moses and Homer were transmuted into trast, Herder regarded Homer’s Greeks as ancient the collective bodies of the Volk and race by schol- exemplars of patriotism.) ars who were heir to a morally flawed tradition. (In- Goethe’s Moses, by and large, is a powerful, deed, part of his anger consists of the fact that such positive figure, but Witte focuses on an obscure— individuals merged seamlessly back into postwar and hitherto relatively unremarked—piece Goethe German academic life.) “In this perspective,” Witte wrote in the shadow of the French Revolution. In writes, “the Shoah must not be seen as a break in it, a Robespierre-like Moses not only fails to civi- Germany’s history . . . it is also a historical con- lize his people but murders Egypt’s firstborn be- Nazi propaganda against racial mixing shows sequence of the paradigmatic exclusions that had fore he himself is murdered. In this way, Witte ar- side-by-side profiles of a stereotyped Jew and an their origins in 18th-century Germany.” He adds: gues, Goethe dethroned Moses as the founder of “Aryan” woman. From Antisemitismus der Welt “The beautiful dream of an ‘aesthetic’ education of Western civilization. The demonization of Moses in Wort und Bild, 1935. (Courtesy of Yad Vashem mankind ended in the murder of ‘life-unworthy reached its climax in 1933 with the German poet Photo Archive.) life’ and the attempt to finally exterminate the Jews Gottfried Benn, who, though he regarded Sinai as of Europe.” one of the world’s most significant events, depicted sought to save the cultural memory of Moses as a Here we need to pause. If the mountain of schol- Moses as “the greatest völkisch terrorist of all time foundational law-giving and ethical figure in op- arship covering virtually every nook and cranny of and the greatest eugenicist of all nations,” the one position to both his cultured, philhellenic despis- German (and European) society is to be believed, who first brutally applied the laws of breeding for ers and Nazi barbarism. nothing is a stranger to the Holocaust. In the field the greatest good of his own pure race and to the Witte also tells the less well-known story of of German intellectual and cultural history alone, detriment of other foreign tribes. Gertrud Kantorowicz (a cousin of the famous his- from the Teutons to Martin Luther, Hegel, Kant, There were German Jewish responses to such torian Ernst Kantorowicz), who was a historian of Fichte, Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Wagner (and cultural attacks. Heinrich Heine, who had once ancient art, poet, translator, disciple of the char- the list goes on) who has not been indicted? Many called himself “a secret Greek,” traded in his Hege- ismatic poet Stefan George, and lover of the great scholars, like Witte, assume that Germany pursued lian philhellenism for the prophetic tradition and sociologist Georg Simmel. Intoxicated with an- a qualitatively different and particularly dangerous path from the West (a so-called Sonderweg) that led, ultimately, to Auschwitz. Such studies often contain an account of a kind of disembodied JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS “German Mind.” As Geoff Eley pointed out some time ago: This approach means “reconstructing the intellectual pursuits of an earlier epoch in the image of Nazi ideology. . . . All these ideas are described as in some way distinctively German and all are traced Hear Robert Alter back to the eighteenth century as aspects of an un- on broken linear continuity.” Certainly, one must investigate the deeper roots Translating the Hebrew Bible of this catastrophe. Yet if nothing is alien to such a complex, multifactorial event, careful caveats and differentiations must be made. Thus, for example, Sunday, May 19, 2019 it’s clear that without the vast contingent event of World War II, the Holocaust could not have Museum of Jewish Heritage occurred, but it would be more difficult to trace the New York City outbreak of war in 1939 to philhellenism. Moreover, even if ones leaves aside crucial economic, political, and bureaucratic forces and limit ourselves to cultural analysis, one would at least have to men- www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/event 10 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 tion demonizing medieval folk mythologies and the notions of the Chosen People. German racists power state, built upon war and genocide, the central place of a traditional and transfigured Chris- often borrowed from the Jewish example in a kind of murderous and predatory society of the Third tian (and later Protestant) Jew-hatred, as well as the perverse usurpation. Thus, Hitler himself invoked Reich, opposite the Utopia of a society that obeys important role of Nordic (as opposed to Greek) a distorted Judaism, writing that “no one knows God’s law and whose exponents sought to design myths in the formation of the Aryan pantheon. Many better than the Jew” about blood purity. a just and peaceful social order. tributaries ran into these muddy German waters. I believe that a subtle, unstated, scholarly po- For all that, Witte’s work is illuminating on many In the annoying absence of an index, I cannot levels. He is not afraid to attack the vexed question be sure, but as far as I can tell Witte only mentions of the ways in which both Jews and Germans imag- the famous German Egyptologist and cultural the- ined their peoplehood. He posits Jewish chosenness orist Jan Assmann once. Yet, it seems to me that the not as a doctrine of superiority or power but as one entire work stands as an intriguing refutation of of morality, as duty to serve God and the ideals of Assmann’s most provocative thesis. Assmann has the covenant always in pursuit of a just society. One argued that it is precisely the “Mosaic distinction”— of Witte’s aims is to restore such ethical conscious- between the one “true” God and “false” reli- ness to contemporary German culture. An accom- gion—that stands at the root of Western “con- panying danger to this admirable project, however, flict, intolerance, and violence,” whereas ancient consists in an almost entirely uncritical, romanti- polytheism rendered different cultures mutu- cized philosemitic approach (war and cruelty are ally compatible. Some have read Assmann as not, after all, absent from biblical history, nor is arguing that because Jews initiated the “first contemporary, and sometimes insensitive, Jewish distinction” and have been resented for it ever self-celebration). since, they may have been, in some sense, partly On the other hand, Witte describes the German responsible for the ghastly fate that overtook them. version of chosenness as diametrically opposed We should be grateful to Bernd Witte for hav- to the Jewish conception, emptying the idea of its ing provided a powerful, if, perhaps, comparably metaphysical and religious content and transform- Bernd Witte. essentialist, counterargument to Assmann, along ing the highest ideals of the Greek model into a with an intriguing, provocative rereading of the entire murderous superiority of blood, power, and race. lemic runs underneath the text of Homer and modern German intellectual tradition. Witte also draws our attention to the fact that Jew- Moses with regard to these issues. Between 1933 and ish chosenness came to be represented as a kind of 1945, Witte concludes, two opposed concepts of the arrogant and aggressive separatism—a cunning Volk confronted each other: Steven E. Aschheim is emeritus professor of cultural move whereby the victims were transformed into and intellectual history at the Hebrew University of putative perpetrators. Even more challengingly, Here the “Doric World” in National Socialist Jerusalem. His latest book is entitled Fragile Spaces: he suggests that there was a kind of ironic inter- Berlin, and there in Theresienstadt and Forays into Jewish Memory, European History and dependence between the Jewish and German Jerusalem the “People of God.” Here the absolute Complex Identities (De Gruyter).

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Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 11 Victim Enough? The Jews of North Africa During the Holocaust

BY LAWRENCE ROSEN

North Africa, think so, albeit with historical nuance. apolitical and deferential, Jews were often ignored The Holocaust and North Africa “[T]he Holocaust was experienced by Jews in North but rarely mistreated. One way of accounting for the edited by Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein Africa,” they write, “through the implementation of position of Jews in North Africa as opposed to those Stanford University Press, 360 pp., $29.95 French and Italian racial laws, the expropriation of living in Europe is to think of them as intimate and property and economic disenfranchisement, and valued strangers who occupied an interstitial place internment and forced labor.” in the organization of Muslim society.

oon after the fall of France in 1940, on the The sultan told the Jewish community representatives that anniversary of his ascent to the throne, the sultan of Morocco, Muhammad V, held “I consider you to be Moroccans in the same capacity as a banquet. Present at the palace were offi- Muslims, and your property, like theirs, will not be touched.” cialsS from the collaborationist Vichy regime who had forced him to sign laws setting educational and occupational quotas for the country’s Jews and re- In the years leading up to the war, roughly If you have even the most passing notion of the quiring them to move back into their ghettos. Pres- 470,000 Jews lived in the countries of North Africa: Arab world, it probably includes an image of the ent too, however, was a group of rabbis the sultan 240,000 in Morocco, 110,000 in Algeria, 80,000 in bazaar, a marketplace in which hawking and hag- had sneaked into the palace in a supply wagon and Tunisia, and 40,000 in Libya. Some of these Jews gling are rampant and the prices depend more on seated next to the French officials. Appalled, a Vichy traced their ancestry to traders who accompanied patron-client relationships than impersonal market representative wrote back to his superiors: Phoenicians in the 9th century B.C.E., others to mechanisms. If you then think of this social world those who fled Roman Palestine after the destruc- as rather like the bazaar, you can picture a culture For the first time, the Sultan invited representatives of the Jewish community to the banquet and placed them most obviously in the best seats, right next to the French officials. The Sultan had wanted personally to introduce the Jewish individuals present. When the French officials expressed surprise at the presence of the Jews at the meeting, the Sultan told them: “I in no way approve of the new anti-Semitic laws and I refuse to be associated with any measure of which I disapprove. I wish to inform you that, as in the past, the Jews remain under my protection and I refuse to allow any distinction to be made among my subjects.”

On another occasion, the sultan told the Jew- ish community representatives that “I consider you to be Moroccans in the same capacity as Muslims, and your property, like theirs, will not be touched.” Later, he invited another group of Jews to his son’s circumcision, telling them that “my palace is open at all times.” Were these the actions of a decent and courageous man, an assertion of sovereignty by a belea- guered sultan, or merely a negotiating tactic by a clever, if powerless, leader? And even if it is only a myth that the sultan threatened to wear a yellow badge himself if the Vichy regime forced them upon The German Entry into Nabeul, Tunisia, December 1942 by Rafael Uzan, 1988. (Gift of the artist. the Jews, what is the backdrop to Muslim-Jewish Courtesy of Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem.) relations in North Africa during World War II that distinguishes it from the European experience? Indeed, in the absence of death camps, crema- tion of the Second Temple, still others to those in which people are constantly building networks of toria, and skeletal survivors, is it fair to speak of the expelled from Spain in 1492. Notwithstanding mo- indebtedness that define who they are. It is a world experience of Maghrebi Jews and that of their Euro- ments of pillage and chaos, when regimes teetered in which a loan can be repaid with a marital inter- pean coreligionists during the Holocaust in the same and tyrants reigned, there was, unlike most periods vention or a political favor, virtually all relationships breath? Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, the in Europe, no endemic history of anti-Jewish dep- being negotiable, a matter of what the traffic will editors of the fine new collectionThe Holocaust and redation in North Africa. So long as they remained bear. In this complex pool of exchange and favor,

12 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 obligation and ingratiation, the Jew is betwixt and role in Moroccan society. In Tunisia, which fell un- but because colonialism worked, in part, through between—too weak to be a potent ally, too distant der colonial sway in 1881, the Jews quickly adopted the bureaucratization of racial divisions. Indeed, to be a member of the family, but by that very weak- much of French culture and identified heavily with she argued, the Nazi program was modeled on the ness immunized from certain entanglements. the “civilizing mission” of the colonial power. Libya, imperialism and colonialism practiced outside of Not being fully part of the dominant society’s which became the Italian prize in the scramble for Europe and the linkage of racism, bureaucracy, and scheme of reciprocity had its advantages: A Jew African colonies, is remembered by Jews who lived mass murder that characterized events in a number could, for example, enter a Muslim’s home to repair there in the prewar years as a place of close familial of the colonies. If we combine Arendt’s insight with the plumbing but was not likely to use his knowl- and community ties, warm relations with immediate an understanding of traditional Muslim social life edge of the house or its inhabitants to help a Muslim Muslim neighbors, and increasing tensions as Mus- as built on webs of indebtedness, it becomes pos- acquaintance gain a bargaining advantage; he could solini’s policies took hold. sible to begin to understand the wartime experience keep a Muslim’s confidence but wasn’t likely to con- Following the fall of France and the establish- of Jews in North Africa. vert it into a marital alliance. Since, as the Arabic ment of Vichy’s control over the country’s over- In Algeria, for example, the hostility of the resi- saying goes, “your neighbor who is close is more seas territories, the Crémieux Decree was revoked, dent colons (later called pieds noirs) to the Jews was important than your kinsman who is far away,” the thus depriving those Algerian Jews covered by it palpable. Theirs was indeed the anti-Semitism of nearby Jew could be viewed as neither intrusive nor of their French citizenship. After the Allied inva- European heritage, but even so it took on local col- threatening. Like that oration as a vehicle for asserting that the Muslims stranger you meet while too were a distinct and inferior race. Local officials, traveling and to whom working with Vichy, set up about three dozen camps you might tell things you in Algeria (along with two dozen in Morocco and a wouldn’t tell a friend, handful in Tunisia and Libya) where some resident the Jew occupied a cru- Jews, political prisoners from Europe, and Algerian cial space in traditional Jewish soldiers serving in the French army were in- Muslim society, all of carcerated. Treatment in those camps located at the whose other relation- edge of the Sahara was harsh, but actual murder ships implied claims of was rare. Several of the contributors to the present obligation. Like women volume note that in a number of instances Muslim (to whom they were guards refused orders to harm the Jewish prisoners. commonly compared) a Similarly, with regard to Tunisia, the only North Afri- Jew was both weak and can country directly occupied by Germany for a few valuable. To this day in months, Daniel Lee shows that, while the later claim North Africa, a house by Vichy officers that they did not really enforce the abandoned by departing racial laws is untenable, it is clear that their overriding Jews may be left alone by concern was how to maintain their own colonial con- Muslim neighbors in the trol. Some prisoners from both countries were sent belief—at least among an to concentration camps—but not death camps—in Children bringing lambs for Passover. (Courtesy of the Hamos Guetta older generation—that Europe; most of them survived. Collection.) in their return a missing Libya forms a distinctive case. As Jens Hoppe part of local self-regard points out, in 1931 there were 25,000 Jews in Libya will be restored. and only 39,000 in all of Italy. Local Italian fascists It was into this com- attacked Jews in Tripoli and Benghazi on several plex traditional culture occasions in the early and mid-1930s, but, as Ao- that the European colo- mar Boum and Mohammed Hatimi argue, for the nist—and at the time of southern part of Morocco, German anti-Semitic World War II the Euro- propaganda had no real effect on the local Muslims. pean fascist—intruded. Indeed, many Muslims took Jews into their homes The repercussions, how- to protect them from the colonial administration ever, were not identi- during this period. Ironically, it was only after the cal throughout North British recaptured Libya in 1942–1943 that some Africa. Algeria, which Muslims attacked the Jews (who, while the British had been conquered turned their backs, bravely defended themselves), (though not fully paci- believing them to support continued Italian control fied) in 1830, was ren- over national independence. dered an integral part of France. As a result, he contributors to this collective volume are it saw the settlement of Tfaced, like so many of the Jews who lived tens of thousands of Eu- through these years, with the question as to how ropeans in both urban the North African experience should be treated and rural areas, many within the broader context of the Holocaust. While of whom came to regard the Jews of North Africa did suffer they were not themselves as a distinct The interior of the Dar al-Bishi synagogue, Tripoli, Libya, May 2011. subjected to a program of systematic genocide. On racial population. When (Photo by Diaa Hadid/AP Photo.) the other hand, the Jews of the region—and more Jews were made French particularly much of the Israeli establishment— citizens by the Crémieux Decree in 1870, Muslims sion of North Africa in 1942, many of the Nazi have either remained silent about their experience raised few objections, but as nationalistic sentiment racial laws were lifted, but the Crémieux Decree or downplayed it. If, as the editors state, it is nec- clashed with settler interests the sense of Algeria as itself was not restored. As Hannah Arendt argued, essary on behalf of North African Jewry to “push comprised of separate racial groups increased sig- in a paper written for the American Jewish Com- the boundaries of Holocaust history [because] nificantly. Morocco, which became a French protec- mittee, the failure to reestablish such citizenship justice has not been served,” this still leaves open torate in 1912, contained by far the largest number was not for the stated reason that it would create an the question of how and to what end their history of Jews in the region in part because, as both traders inequality between the Muslims and Jews of Alge- should be included in the larger narrative of the and noncompetitive neighbors, they played a key ria (thus further inflaming nationalist sentiment) Holocaust. As the Tunisian Jewish novelist Albert

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 13 Memmi wrote, “I am not enough of a victim; that is why my conscience is tortured.” Must the Jews of North Africa, as contributor Lia Brozgal puts it, write “a history that competes with a more catastrophic one, or be written out of history?” Many of the contributors accept that the experience of the Maghrebi Jews was marginal to the WHY LISTEN TO THE events of the European Holocaust. But they also make the case that a view from the margins can be COMMENTARY revealing. That the Nazis and Vichy cared so much Must the Jews of North Africa MAGAZINE PODCAST? write “a history that competes with a more catastrophic one, BECAUSE OUR LISTENERS or be written out of history”? ARE RIGHT. to enforce their race laws, even (as Ruth Ginio shows) in French West Africa, demonstrates how deep-seated the connection between racism and the colonial venture was. As Susan Slyomovics shows in an excellent chapter, we can see how local popula- ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ tions succumbed to or resisted the colonizers’ racial “Podhoretz and company are categories as they responded to the plight of their Jewish neighbors. excellent. Come for the insight. Telling the story of the Jews of North Africa dur- Stay for the excellent analysis ing the Holocaust also has practical implications. There is the question of the willingness of several and the joke of the week.” European governments to include these Jews in their reparation programs. Perhaps more importantly, inclusion in the overall narrative of the Ho- ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ locaust has a bearing on the place of Mizrahi Jews “It’s free! They’re nice! in Israeli society. By including their experience in this period one can better understand that while the You’ll find out what the hell North African Jews rarely lost their lives the Holo- is going on!” caust did cost them a cherished way of life. In recent years several Muslim scholars have made their careers writing about the Jews of North ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Africa. Aomar Boum, who along with his coeditor “A bit of solace and sanity in the midst Sarah Abrevaya Stein teaches at UCLA, returned to his home village in the High Atlas Mountains of such political madness. of Morocco to eavesdrop on the remarks Muslims Podhoretz and Rothman offer perceptive and made about the now-absent Jews and discovered a deep sense of loss by the older people who remem- sharp commentary on the day’s topics. bered their Jewish neighbors. However, this was not passed on to the younger generation, who think of A must-listen podcast for all conservatives.” Jews in stereotypical terms, predominantly as the oppressors of Palestinians. Sultan Muhammad V—despite the urging of Shimon Peres and many others—has not been included among the righteous Gentiles honored at Commentary Magazine’s twice Yad Vashem. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, it is important to understand how or- weekly podcast is hosted by dinary Muslims comprehended what was happen- ing to their Jewish neighbors, to their country, and John Podhoretz, Noah Rothman, to themselves under Nazi and Vichy oversight. Even more importantly, we must understand the experi- Abe Greenwald and Sohrab Ahmari. ence of the North African Jews themselves. Boum and Stein’s book is a good start. THE COMMENTARY MAGAZINE PODCAST Lawrence Rosen is Cromwell Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Princeton University and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. His books include Bargaining for Reality: The Construction www.commentarymagazine.com/podcast of Social Relations in a Muslim Community and Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco, both from the University of Chicago Press.

14 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 In Giorgio Bassani’s Memory Garden

BY DIANE COLE

concentration camp uniforms, making him look books of fiction that make up The Novel of Ferrara. The Novel of Ferrara like a ghoulish clown. But rather than being emaci- The last one,The Smell of Hay, appeared in 1972. by Giorgio Bassani, translated by Jamie McKendrick ated, his body is weirdly bloated, as if “swollen with Over the course of those years he had increasingly W. W. Norton, 800 pp., $39.95 water, a kind of drowned man.” come to see these works as a unified whole. That led If you visit Ferrara, you can let Bassani guide you as you stroll along “the crowded rows of stores, shops and little outlets facing hen, in August 1945, Geo Josz reappeared in Ferrara, each other” to arrive at the synagogue’s “baked-red facade.” the only survivor of the 183 members of the Jewish com- And yet here he is, forcing the townspeople to him to embark on what might be called a literal re- “Wmunity whom the Germans had deported to Ger- remember him, even though they would prefer vision as he reworked the individual books to cre- many in the autumn of 1943, and all of whom were not to recall where, why, and how he and so many ate his now epic The Novel of Ferrara. This unified generally believed to have ended up in the gas cham- other Jews had disappeared. Geo reclaims the for- edition appeared in 1974, but he was not yet done. bers, no one in the city at first recognized him.” mer family house that had not so long ago been He reworked it once more and brought out his final Thus begins the short story “A Memorial Tablet in version in 1980, which Via Mazzini” by the Italian author Giorgio Bassani, is what Jamie McKend- who was best known for his 1962 novel The Garden rick has now masterfully of the Finzi-Continis (and the Oscar-winning Vittorio translated. De Sica film based on it). Along with Primo Levi, While free-standing Bassani was among the first writers to chronicle the as individual volumes, fate of the Italian Jews under Mussolini and over all six of Bassani’s books the course of the Holocaust. Now Bassani’s com- hang together themati- plete magnum opus has reappeared in a new Eng- cally, just as his title sug- lish translation by British poet Jamie McKendrick, gests, as the story of Ferr- published in a single volume under the title Bassani ara. Throughout, Bassani chose: The Novel of Ferrara. conjures a street map of Bassani set all six of the separate volumes that Ferrara as vivid as it is comprise his larger saga—the others are Within precise. The city’s distinc- the Walls, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, Behind the tive historic landmarks Door, The Heron, and The Smell of Hay—in and serve as the unchanging around his native town of Ferrara, where Jews have backdrop to personal lived since 1277. The city’s medieval walls and the dramas that play out over streets of its one-time Jewish ghetto, still intact and several decades, while visible today, provide physical metaphors for the this outward-seeming boundaries that in the centuries before World War stability deepens the II separated the Jewish community from its Chris- contrast to the dramatic tian neighbors while also embracing its members political transforma- within the shared borders. tions that will upend the Contemporary visitors to Ferrara can also see the characters’ lives as the actual memorial tablet on Via Mazzini, which was A street in the Jewish ghetto of Ferrara. (www.cittadarte.emilia-romagna.) 1930s and 1940s prog- the main street of the former ghetto and, even after ress. Wherever you go in that, of the city’s Jewish community. If you visit Ferr- seized and occupied by the fascist regime respon- these stories, Bassani brings you back to the town’s ara, as I did recently, you can let Bassani be your mel- sible for deporting his and the town’s other Jewish historic center, a spot from which you only need raise ancholy guide as you stroll along “the crowded rows families. He compels his fellow Ferrarans to view your eyes to see the city’s defining structure, the four of stores, shops and little outlets facing each other” the photos he has salvaged of the family members crenellated towers of the fortress-like 14th-century to arrive at the synagogue’s “baked-red facade.” The who were killed and listen to him recount the hor- Este Castle. stone plaques bearing the names of the Ferrarese Jews rors of his life in the camps. His very insistence on deported to extermination camps between 1943 and remembering makes Geo intolerable to them, his he effect of reading them one after another is 1945 flank each side of the entrance to the synagogue, survival an impediment to their postwar desire to Timmersive, carrying the reader to the years be- a palazzo that dates to the 15th century and whose in- put the past—including Geo’s past—behind them. fore, during, and after Mussolini’s rise to power. It terior Bassani describes in detail. Before long, the townspeople shun him, their faces is an epoch that encompasses two world wars and This very spot, at no. 95 Via Mazzini, is where, “lit up with malice.” They cannot understand why he the Holocaust, all shown in microcosm within the four months after the war’s end, Bassani has Geo doesn’t get over the past and get on with life, as they walls and on the streets of Ferrara. Josz suddenly reappear among the living. But how are. They expel him from a town club and breathe a Bassani’s focus encompasses the inhabitants of could that be, the town wonders? His name is there collective sigh of relief when Geo mysteriously dis- the entire city of Ferrara: Christians as well as Jews, for all to see, among the Jewish dead listed on the appears from Ferrara once again. fascists and communists, members of the Resis- memorial plaque, and his concentration camp tat- “A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini” was one of tance, and passive bystanders. We come to know too visibly testifies to where he has been. His clothes Bassani’s earliest short stories, written in the 1950s his Jewish characters as they weigh their odds for resemble a ragtag combination of the remains of and included in Within the Walls, the first of his six survival, agonize over whether to escape or stay—

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 15 and after the war, if they survive, whether to return. how easily it was brought to the fore. That warning impoverished scamp. These two exist at opposite We also watch as his non-Jewish characters choose pervades Behind the Door, set in the early 1930s. It’s ends of Ferrara’s social spectrum, yet they agree on what they wish to see or ignore. He recounts all this the story of a schoolboy humiliation, but no less trau- one thing, their baseline disgust for Jews. In a cruel with an abundant mixture of tenderness, intensity, matic for that. In the narrative sweep of The Novel of prank, the narrator is manipulated into eavesdrop- and ferocity. Bassani’s prose invites an intimacy that Ferrara, it foreshadows the many blows to come. ping as his two supposed friends laughingly discuss makes it seem as if he is telling us his own life story. their shared distaste in crude detail. The narrator And in many ways, he is. burns with shame and rage at this pitiless betrayal So many biographical details does Bassani share of trust, but it is also a revelation, exposing the false with the first-person narrator of the novels The sense of security and acceptance that Italian Jewry Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, Behind the Door, and The had been lulled into taking at face value. Garden of the Finzi-Continis that it is difficult not By 1936–1937, the years in which The Gold- to view the narrator as a fictional double. Born in Rimmed Spectacles is set, the book’s narrator, like Bas- the university city of Bologna in 1916, Bassani grew sani, has entered the university at nearby Bologna. up in nearby Ferrara, where both sides of his family Anti-Semitic propaganda has become common, and had lived for several generations. His father, a phy- so have openly anti-Jewish remarks and behavior. sician, had served as a medical officer in the Italian Speculation abounds about the possibility of anti- army during World War I; his mother had studied Jewish legislation, with newspaper columns con- music and voice before marrying his father. stantly referring to Italy’s “Israelite” problem. Gentile Even in the first years after Mussolini came to family acquaintances openly praise not only Musso- power in 1922, Jews experienced little or no anti- lini but Hitler, and the narrator’s non-Jewish univer- Semitic stigma. Many of Ferrara’s Jews, including sity friends begin distancing themselves from him. Bassani’s father, were even proud members of Mus- Bassani dramatizes these changes in tandem with solini’s Fascist Party. The Jews of Ferrara considered the story of Dr. Athos Fadigati, a respectable Chris- themselves as thoroughly Italian as they were Jewish. tian physician in his late forties. As a closeted gay And so Bassani depicts Jewish families min- man he is an outsider whose secret has long been gling easily—at least outwardly—with their non- ignored by his many patients in return for his excep- Jewish friends, just as he and his family did: va- tional medical care. When his secret is exposed, he cationing at the same resorts on the Adriatic Sea, A poster for the film version of The Garden becomes a pariah. The question that hangs over the playing tennis at the local sports clubs to which of the Finzi-Continis directed by Vittorio narrative is: Could a similar trajectory await the Jews? they all belong, and pursuing educational oppor- De Sica, 1970. It could, and it did, starting with the series of ra- tunities at public schools and universities that are cial laws that began rolling out in September 1938. open to all, regardless of religion. Here the adolescent first-person narrator is in- The laws banned the country’s 46,000 Jews from at- He also shows the residual anti-Semitism hiding troduced to casual anti-Semitism by two Christian tending or teaching school; from civic service jobs in plain sight even during such halcyon times and schoolmates, one a wealthy aristocrat, the other an and roles in politics, finance, and government; and from practicing law, medicine, journalism, and pub- lishing, among other professions. They also expelled Jews from memberships in libraries and sports “A fascinating book about a crucial moment in Jewish history.” clubs, barred them from most hotels and restau- —Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal rants, and allowed the confiscation of their homes, personal property, and businesses. Bassani experienced these outrages himself and vividly depicts his characters’ shock and outrage as When Christians Were Jews The First Generation the privileges they had until so recently taken for PAULA FREDRIKSEN granted are rescinded, one by one. “[W]e no longer belong to any class, we make up a social group apart, as in medieval times,” the recurring character Bruno compelling account How did a group of charismatic Lattes bitterly laments. of Christianity’s Jewish missionaries end up Jewish beginnings in becoming the foundation In his life as in his fiction, Bassani had managed A to receive his degree at the University of Bologna by Roman Jerusalem, from one of the gentile church? In of today’s leading scholars of this electrifying social and virtue of a loophole; he had enrolled for his final year ancient religion. intellectual history, Paula just before the racial laws went into effect. But unable Fredriksen answers this to follow his wished-for career path as a teacher, he “Engaging, provocative, question by reconstructing the and admirably lucid, this took instead the only educational job available to him forty years of this community’s account of the Jewish origins as a Jew, which was teaching the Jewish students who lifetime. Moving from its of earliest Christianity will had been expelled by the state schools—an alterna- hopeful beginnings with force readers at all levels to tive work path also chosen by the character Lattes. Jesus at Passover to its fiery reconsider their assumptions Lattes, we eventually learn, manages to save end in the war against Rome, and rethink their views.” himself by escaping to America, where he builds Fredriksen presents a vivid —Bart D. Ehrman, author of portrait both of this temple a successful academic career. But Bassani chose to Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet remain in Italy, soon joining the anti-fascist Resis- of the New Millennium centered messianic movement, and of the bedrock convictions tance. In 1943, he was imprisoned for three months, that animated and sustained it. after which he went into hiding until the end of the war. (The prison building where he served his sentence now houses the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah.) Paula Fredriksen, Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University, is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A fellow of the he Holocaust shadows all six books of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has published widely on TNovel of Ferrara, but especially The Garden of Yale university press www.YaleBooks.com relations between pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman world. the Finzi-Continis. It is the most fully realized and resonant of the individual volumes and deserves its

16 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 place at the very center of The Novel of Ferrara. than any possible memory, belonged to the same At its heart lies the friendship and unrequited religious observance. love of the narrator for Micòl, whom we know from the novel’s very first pages will not survive the Holo- Possible answers are suggested as the story jumps caust. The narrator begins his reminiscence when a forward to 1938, two months after the racial laws visit to ancient Etruscan tombs sparks his memory have gone into effect. The narrator, along with all of another once grand but now abandoned monu- other Jews, has been banned from the city’s public mental tomb built to provide eternal repose for tennis club, and Micòl’s older brother Alberto in- deceased members of the aristocratic Jewish Finzi- vites them to use the clay court at the Finzi-Contini

The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon The Complete Translation Solomon Maimon

Giorgio Bassani at the Villa Blanc, ruined by decay and neglect, Rome, May 1974. (Photo by Mario Edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed De Biasi/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images.) & Abraham Socher Translated by Paul Reitter With an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal Contini family of Ferrara. In 1943, they had been estate. There the group convenes their own club, as deported to Germany, “and no one knows whether it were, with games of tennis the backdrop for flir- they have any grave at all.” tation and friendship. As parks, piazzas, and other Even before the war, the narrator tells us, the public places become off-limits to Jews, the elegant flamboyant tomb was regarded by Ferrara’s Jews and snacks provided by the Finzi-Contini staff also serve The first complete non-Jews alike as an aesthetic “monstrosity” aimed at as an alternative café where the group can sit and and annotated English separating and elevating the family in death. Similar- chat as they used to. When the narrator is uncer- ly, their elegant mansion and its vast garden isolated emoniously told to leave the town’s library—“a place translation of Maimon’s them from the lives around them, and so old or ill are I’d hung around since my school days and where I influential and delightfully some members of the family that they seem to have always felt at home”—Micòl and Alberto’s father in- cut themselves off from life altogether. vites him to use his extensive personal library in- entertaining memoir But the wealth and prestige of the family lent stead, where he finds all the resources to complete them a dual aura of mystery and enviability. One the writing of his university thesis. day in 1929, when he is in ninth grade, the narrator The self-sufficient Finzi-Contini compound be- “This new translation of Maimon’s accidentally wanders into the lushly wooded garden comes a shared ghetto for the outcasts. The estate, pathbreaking autobiography is timely, after school and falls asleep. He awakens from his with its alluring garden, promises security from the and the editors and translator are exactly nap as into a real-life dream when he hears Micòl world outside. But this imagined assurance against the right team to pull it off. It is a kind calling him from afar. She has climbed to the top harm, whether from within or without, is illusory. of Jewish picaresque, with Maimon of a ladder on her side of the garden wall, and from When Micòl rejects the narrator’s romantic over- playing the role of the rude barbarian there she invites him to climb up his side to join her. tures, he exiles himself from the Finzi-Contini es- who can’t help but import his Talmudic But he is not quick enough, and she disappears. tate, never to see her or her family again. sensibility into the philosophical debates It turns out that though the two have never been After the war, only the decaying tomb remains, of late eighteenth-century Germany.” formally introduced; they know each other as fel- as well as the narrator’s memory of the garden that, —David Biale, low members of Ferrara’s Jewish community. But for all its beauty and all its owner’s wealth and pres- coauthor of Hasidism: A New History what does such a bond actually mean, the narrator tige, had no power to defend or magic to save them. wonders? The expulsion from the garden is complete, and so Cloth $35.00 is the wreckage of a family and a culture. What, after all, did that word “Jewish” mean? Bassani’s monumental elegy to the city’s doomed What sense could expressions such as “The Jewish Jewish community restores the dignity that it is owed community” or “The Jewish Faith” possibly have, even as it compels us to relive the devastation endured. for us, seeing that they entirely left aside the existence of a far greater intimacy, a secret one,

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DO NOT PRINT THIS INFORMATION JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS SPRING 2019 19 271 Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 17 Seventy Years in the Desert

BY ALLAN ARKUSH

to situate them in the context of a broad range of the desert bloom. Beersheva has grown into a size- Desert in the Promised Land “complex and contradictory” Zionist stances toward able city, and its satellite suburban communities by Yael Zerubavel the desert in general and the Negev in particular. have flourished. Surprisingly, despite the fact that Stanford University Press, 368 pp., $29.95 The biggest of the many contradictions Zerubav- the Beersheva region contains more than half of the el discusses is between the Zionist longing to trans- Negev’s Jewish population of 422,000, Zerubav- Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israel’s form the desert and a longing to be transformed by el devotes only a few scattered paragraphs to it, Periphery it. The celebrated poet Natan Alterman, for instance, focusing instead on smaller but more exotic devel- by Pnina Motzafi-Haller opments, such as urban kibbutzim in development Wayne State University Press, 360 pp., $36.99 Those who arrived in the Negev towns such as Sderot, new residential religious settlements in the center of the Negev, and the unin daylight would sometimes usual expansion of individually owned farms. Much of the impetus to enhance and diver- ometime around 1965, I took a bus to New refuse to disembark. sify Jewish settlement in the Negev has stemmed, York City for a round of the International in recent years, from what Zerubavel describes as Bible Contest, not to compete but to cheer wrote “The Road Song” (1934), in which a road the fear that “the fast-growing Bedouin population on a high-school friend. My main reason builder sings, “Wake up, wasteland, your verdict in the Negev posed a demographic and security forS going, however, was to see David Ben-Gurion, is decided / We are coming to conquer you!” The threat.” The Bedouin population has mushroomed who was scheduled to pose some of the questions to less well-known, countervailing tendency reflects from around 12,000 after the exodus that took place the contestants. All I can remember now are the two the susceptibility of some Zionists to a “desert mys- during the War of Independence to around 170,000 that he addressed, in his trademark high-pitched tique,” which imagined both “the ancient Hebrews in 2007 and to 249,800 in 2016, more than a third of shout, to the entire audience: “How many of you and the contemporary Arabs as close to nature, a the total population of the Negev. The Israel Land are ready to make aliyah to the Land of Israel?” And quality that had been lost to Jews during centuries Administration projects that their population will then, more specifically, “How many of you are ready of life in exile.” In a 1912 story by Yosef Luidor, “a reach 300,000 by next year (the Negev Bedouins to come and live with me in the Negev?” native Hebrew boy . . . rebels against school and adult have one of the highest natural growth rates in the The recently retired prime minister’s questions authority, preferring to ride his horse and spend time world). Jewish fears that they will someday become certainly weren’t in the spirit of his famous 1951 with the Bedouins.” His immigrant Jewish friend sees a majority in the area are based, it seems, on real promise to the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob him as “a desert figure whose black eyes burn with a statistics. But are the Bedouins a security threat? Blaustein not to play Pied Piper to idealistic Jew- strange, wild fire.” A little later there was the real-life As is well known, some Bedouins volunteer ish youngsters in this country. But Blaustein, had he Pesach Bar-Adon, an oleh from Poland who dropped to serve in the Israeli army, but their numbers, as been present, would not have been worried. Only a out of the Hebrew University in the mid-1920s to live Zerubavel observes, have remained small (between few people raised their hands in response to the first with the Bedouins as an apprentice shepherd. 5 and 10 percent of the draft-age population) and are question, and no one at all did so after the second one. decreasing. This is largely a reflection, according to This isn’t too surprising, given the Negev’s n the course of time, however, the Negev itself Zerubavel, of festering inequalities in the towns to mostly empty and severe terrain, its aridity, and its Ihas been transformed more than the Jews who which thousands of Bedouins were forcibly removed notoriously hot climate. Indeed, Ben-Gurion hadn’t settled there. While development has not taken and the state’s refusal to legalize the “unrecognized had much better luck in Israel itself than he did in place on the scale or in the way that Ben-Gurion villages” in which 100,000 Bedouin residents lack New York. As Yael Zerubavel reports, he had, while imagined, Israel has, in fact, made a large swath of “the basic infrastructure of roads, running water, a prime minister, “championed the national goal of ‘making the desert bloom’ [but] there was a limited response to this call.” Most of the Jews who came to settle in Israel’s south in the first two decades after the establishment of the state did so involuntarily. Immigrants, mostly from Arab countries, were transported “directly from the boat to their desig- nated settlement in the Negev in order to minimize the possibilities for them to object to this plan.” In fact, some were smuggled into their new homes in development towns in the dead of night to prevent them from being alarmed by the deso- lation all around them. Those who arrived in daylight would sometimes refuse to disembark. On such occasions, Zerubavel writes, “the driver would raise the truck on a slant ‘and they were poured on the ground. The truck would leave, and the people remained on the ground.’” Zerubavel is far from alone in highlighting such bleak moments in Israel’s history. But her book is not another indignant exposé of statist manipula- tion of distasteful “human material.” She writes not to condemn nor, for that matter, to celebrate the policies pursued by Israeli leaders in the 1950s but Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev, ca. 1957. (National Photo Collection, Israel.)

18 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 central sewage system, electricity and public trans- and class-based inequality in Israel over three gen- which some of the women take their lives into their portation to which legal settlements are entitled.” erations.” The story she has to tell is both fascinating own hands, exercising real “agency” even when it Dislocated, alienated, and impoverished, the Bed- and surprising. doesn’t quite work. Take Esti, for instance, the child ouins are becoming increasingly inclined toward re- Motzafi-Haller’s subjects are all the descendants of immigrants from Morocco in the 1960s who has ligious fundamentalism and political radicalization. of the people who were unceremoniously dumped in worked on and off as a cleaner for most of her life. A This volatile situation has sparked fears that the the desert half a century or more ago. Some of them single woman with shaky finances who largely sur- Negev will be the scene of the next intifada. After have risen above the unfavorable circumstances— vives on welfare and money derived from unclear quoting a number of newspaper headlines that including homes in apartment blocs that are noth- sources, she insists on living flamboyantly, well warn of such a development, Zerubavel summarizes ing more than “concrete boxes”—into which they beyond her means, and has had to deal with the Tzur Shezaf’s 2007 Hebrew novel The Happy Man, were born, but others have never escaped them or consequences. Observing her unnecessary purchas- about a revolt led by two Bedouins, a neurosurgeon have done so only for a short time. Motzafi-Haller es, Motzafi-Haller oscillates “between an accepting, and a high-ranking IDF commander. Disillusioned herself comes from a background similar to theirs, inclusive stance from which I cheer on Esti’s wild “by the state’s coercive measures against their revelry, and a middle-class, moralist, external posi- people,” they launch a peaceful protest that soon tioning that asks her to be serious.” Motzafi-Haller escalates into a war that lasts for two years and never loses sight of Esti’s self-sabotage, but neither culminates “in the destruction of the Bedouin does she cease to see in her “a spirited rebel, who villages and the expulsion of their residents develops clear means of survival . . . that allow her to across the border to Egypt.” cultivate self-worth in a reality that seems designed While taking note of such nightmares, to deny her . . . such dignity.” Zerubavel does not prophesy catastrophe. Here and there, she even sees bright spots. Things f all the options available to her subjects, how- seem to be better in urban environments than in Oever, it is not rebellion but “religious strength- rural ones, especially in Beersheva, which “pres- ening” (hit’chazkut) that Motzafi-Haller regards as ents a range of formal and informal opportuni- the “most constructive,” an attempt to transform, ties for Jews and Bedouins to interact,” including or at least better, their lives, rather than escape Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the So- them. “The act of participating in religion classes roka Medical Center. marks them as serious, respectable women with Zerubavel also provides evidence that the high spiritual aspirations, not gossips who spend early 20th-century “desert mystique” isn’t entirely their evenings watching shallow soap operas on gone. She notes that Jewish desert tour guides television.” This can lead not only to greater peace often wear white kaffiyehs, and the website for the of mind but also to new patterns of consumption. New-Agey Desert Ashram in the southern Negev Motzafi-Haller quotes one woman: promises visitors that they can “connect to your inner Bedouin and stay in a genuine wool tent.” “Religious women are different from us David Ben-Gurion on a balcony overlooking the Zin financially. They manage with what there is. ael Zerubavel teaches at Rutgers, but she valley, Sde Boker, October 1968. (Photo by Fritz Cohen, They’re more careful with money. They don’t Ywrote most of Desert in the Promised Land National Photo Collection, Israel.) go to some boutique. They don’t buy stupid at the Ben-Gurion things. No Digimon or Pokemon. No TV or Research Institute for PlayStation. They invest more in their children.” the Study of Israel and Zionism in Sde Bok- Motzafi-Haller tells us about going to an in- er, near Ben-Gurion’s terview at a nursery school in Sde Boker with one own kibbutz in the of her subjects, a mitchazeket named Efrat. At the heart of the Negev. school, they ran into Efrat’s older sister, a part-time Pnina Motzafi-Haller, cook and cleaner. The nonreligious sister’s tight pur- an anthropologist at ple pants and loose, faded sleeveless shirt contrasted Ben-Gurion Univer- starkly with Efrat’s modest dress, which radiated sity, lives and works respectability. Efrat got the job. in Sde Boker, but Motzafi-Haller is, we shouldn’t forget, an un- her new book, Con- abashedly secular woman. Her recognition of the crete Boxes: Mizrahi beneficial aspects of religiosity is neither pious nor Women on Israel’s apologetic. She sees hit’chazkut as just the best avail- Periphery, focuses on able option for women like Efrat who have been the nearby develop- failed by “liberal and neoliberal efforts to break ment town of Yeru- Yerucham’s intergenerational cycle of poverty and cham, which is a sym- social isolation.” bol, throughout Is- Things have turned out very differently from rael, of socioeconomic what David Ben-Gurion was imagining when failure. Jewish and Bedouin employees work together in the SodaStream factory in the he urged a bunch of American Jewish teenagers It is also the home Bedouin city of Rahat, Negev, February 18, 2019. (Photo by Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/ to come and join him in the desert. As both Yael of the Mizrahi wom- Getty Images.) Zerubavel and Pnina Motzafi-Haller demonstrate en who cleaned her in their different ways, Israel’s effort to conquer the office, and she would often schmooze with them and she openly empathizes with them. In the course Negev has been incomplete and plagued with unin- there around 11 a.m., “after they have finished the of writing the book, she tells us, her “position within tentional consequences, but they also both provide first part of their daily cleaning rounds and before the research, as a Mizrahi academic woman strad- reasons for hope. their lunch break.” However, Motzafi-Haller did the dling the lines between ethnic belonging and class bulk of her research in Yerucham itself, where she borders, took center stage.” interviewed a large number of men and women. In While she depicts the material hardship and Allan Arkush is the senior contributing editor of the the end, she decided to focus her book on five wom- aimlessness of many of her subjects’ lives, Motzafi- Jewish Review of Books and professor of Judaic studies en whose lives reflect “the reproduction of ethnic- Haller is also eager to demonstrate the extent to and history at Binghamton University.

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 19 Universal Rights and the Particular Jew

BY YEHUDAH MIRSKY

contemporary “historical amnesia” that has yielded after; the other asking whether Zionism was the Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human “a lazy dichotomy between nationhood and cosmo- only form of modern Jewish nationalism. Briefly, it Rights in the Twentieth Century politanism.” This, he argues, has left us “with a hu- wasn’t. “Autonomists,” most famously the great his- by James Loeffler man rights universalism that pretends to come from torian Simon Dubnow, who were not so much anti- Yale University Press, 384 pp., $32.50 nowhere and a Jewish nationalism that is positioned Zionist as un-Zionist, argued that Jewish national in opposition to the world.” identity was a brute social fact that could be accom- modated within nation-states which were committed to protecting the rights of minorities. This was a The League of Nations model, proposition with which Zionists did not necessarily n 1925, Jacob Robinson, a Jewish lawyer, former disagree. German prisoner of war, and member of Lithu- Jacob Robinson darkly quipped, In 1919, the Zionist movement called not only ania’s parliament, gave the keynote at the Con- for recognition of Palestine as the Jewish national gress of European National Minorities and put was “I hit my Jews, you hit your home and equal rights for Jews in all countries but hisI finger on the fatal flaw of the League of Nations. also for Jewish national autonomy—cultural, social, It was, he said, “a league of states, and not a league of Jews.” and political—in the countries where they would nations. Its members are only governments and not remain. The forum that was meant, in theory, to citizens.” Its model of reciprocity, he darkly quipped, t the center of Loeffler’s story is a quintet: enforce those rights was the League of Nations. was “I hit my Jews, you hit your Jews.” AJacob Robinson; Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, a But the league’s dominant powers, France and Eng- In other words, Jews, like so many other mi- major figure of postwar international law; Peter land, weren’t interested. There emerged instead a norities, whether they had states or not, deserved Benenson, the founder of Amnesty Internation- system of minority treaties, giving Jews and other recognition and protection as nations. Whether, as al; Jacob Blaustein, the longtime president of the minorities freedoms and protections—as individu- America’s founders and France’s revolutionaries had als, utterly dependent on the political will of asserted, all individuals were endowed with inalien- member states. able rights was moot. Only states could deliver basic The league was a political failure, but rights, and without a Jewish state of some sort, there it was a legal failure, too. The death of its were no Jewish rights to be had. The idea that there minority rights system only sharpened could be a delivery system for rights other than a the question of how to square nation-state nation-state was made thinkable by the unthinkable citizenship with national belonging beyond trauma of statelessness visited on Jews and other borders, a question whose most vivid sym- “undesirables” over the next two decades. bols and actors were, then as now, the Jews. Today, as authoritarianism and xenophobia Hence the dark comedy of Jacob Robinson’s surge, the global human rights apparatus meant remark to the Congress of European Na- to tame those evils has become a cruel joke whose tional Minorities. running punchline is monomaniacal, wildly imbal- Robinson wasn’t the only Jewish jurist anced criticism of Israel and regularly, by implica- trying to think all this through. In 1927, tion or worse, the Jews. Israel, for all its flaws, is no- Lemberg-born Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, where near the depravity of dreadful regimes that founder of the World Union of Jewish Stu- escape United Nations’ censure. Is there something dents, published the doctoral thesis he had about human rights as an idea and institution that is written at the London School of Economics. inimical to Jews? States’ territories, he said, are their proper- The question is sharpened when we recall that ties, not the romantic inheritance of their some key architects of the human rights movement, peoples. Sovereign states in international including Robinson, were not only Jewish, but ac- society, like sovereign, property-holding tive Jewish nationalists. James Loeffler, a historian at individuals in liberal society, are, and must the University of Virginia, has now told their story. be, bound by laws—in the case of states, in- His book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested ternational laws. These ideas would guide in human rights or modern Jewish political thought him through a celebrated career as a profes- and history. He marshals remarkable archival sor at Cambridge and on the world stage. research, literary grace, and philosophical insight to Soviet anti-Semitic proaganda equating Zionism and Nazism, Meanwhile, Maurice Perlzweig, Orthodox- recover a forgotten chapter of history (several, actu- 1961. born Reform rabbi, leading English Zionist, ally) and make us think more deeply about political and head of the British section of the World ethics, both Jewish and universal. American Jewish Committee; and rabbi-activist Jewish Congress, worked through the late 1930s His genealogy of human rights shows the par- Maurice Perlzweig. (The informed reader may ask: to remake the WJC from a quasi parliament into a ticular role that group rights, usually seen as an Where’s the father of the Genocide Convention, self-defense agency. Jews, he said, had to claim “hu- illiberal idea, have played in the history of modern Raphael Lemkin? Good question, but hold that man and national rights” together. Those years also liberalism. It also casts light on the deep theological thought for now.) brought home to Jews the sheer terror of stateless- undercurrents shaping the seemingly secular dis- The intertwined stories of these five men bring ness as never before. pensation of human rights. together two discrete trends in recent histori- As the magnitude of the Nazi catastrophe The book’s clever title plays on the epithet Stalin cal scholarship, one exploring how human rights dawned, so did the understanding that securing bestowed on Jewish intellectuals before murdering movements and institutions arose so swiftly in the Jewish existence in the postwar world would take them. But Loeffler has a larger point: He indicts the mid-to-late 20th century, only to flounder soon new institutions and new ideas. With European

20 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 Jewry murdered and Eastern Europe falling to Yet the nation figured powerfully in an UN seems the most straightforward legal response to the Soviets, the search for Jewish rights shifted to instrument enacted that same year on December the murder of European Jewry. Loeffler suggests America and Palestine. 9, the day before the passage of the declaration. that it was precisely a desire to avoid the appear- Jacob Blaustein, Maryland oilman and head of The Convention on the Prevention and Punish- ance of special pleading that led Lemkin, by then the patrician American Jewish Committee, then ment of the Crime of Genocide was the brainchild an American law professor, to obscure his Zionist perhaps the premier American Jewish organization, of yet another Eastern European Jewish jurist, past. What’s more, Lemkin had his doubts about saw Judaism as “an apolitical religious faith” and a exile, and crusader, Raphael Lemkin. It was Lem- the whole framework of human rights, which partner in “an American Judeo-Christian vision of kin who most clearly saw state-sponsored murder seemed too vague and declaratory to actually stop human rights (that) would tame the fires states from killing peoples and cultures. He kept of Old World nationalism and advance in- his ideological and personal distance from Loef- ternational democracy at one fell swoop,” fler’s quintet, and they from him. obviating the need for Zionism. In 1944, One suspects something else may have been the AJC drafted a “Declaration of Human at work, as well. Lemkin, too, had emerged from Rights,” signed by 1,300 distinguished citi- the legal circles committed to the group rights of zens, Jewish and non-Jewish, and rabbis national minorities. The one Jewish thinker Lem- of all denominations, a stepping stone to- kin mentions in his carefully curated memoir is ward 1948’s epochal Universal Declaration none other than the historian Simon Dubnow. In of Human Rights. (Neither mentioned the other words, while his peers were affirming both Holocaust.) The AJC also commissioned a Jewish statehood and individual rights unteth- volume by Lauterpacht titled An Interna- ered from citizenship, Lemkin was working to tional Bill of the Rights of Man. The failure transplant the prewar idea that minorities have of the toothless League of Nations, Europe- group rights within other peoples’ states into in- an democracy, and vague notions of natu- ternational law. ral moral law, Lauterpacht wrote, showed Although he disagreed with Lemkin, Hersch there was no substitute for “rules, volun- Lauterpacht, who was one of the architects of tarily accepted or imposed by the existence the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, still of international society.” thought it was nonsense to declare rights before Robinson and Blaustein both disagreed building the machinery to enforce them. He sent with Lauterpacht’s internationalist vision. Ben-Gurion suggestions for Israel’s Declaration of Both thought rights meant nothing unless Independence to this end. His formulations on the backed by power. But whose? For Blaustein, natural sovereign rights of Jews and civic equality it would be American power—for Robin- for Arabs made it in, but his suggestions with regard son, Zionist. Neither gave up, though, on to international law didn’t. the promise of a new international legal Jacob Robinson, who became a legal advisor order. Through 1945 and 1946, they and The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution urging an to Israel’s delegation at the UN, believed in law other Jewish rights defenders took part as immediate ceasefire in the Middle East, November 2, 1956. too, but always in conjunction with politics. So he best they could in the creation of the UN Lower right: Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN; focused on state-to-state compacts: the genocide Charter, the war crimes trials at Nurem- directly behind him is Jacob Robinson. (Courtesy of the and refugee conventions, as well as the Internation- berg, and European peace treaties; each United Nations Photo Library.) al Criminal Court (on which Lauterpacht served time they came back disappointed. and which, in the absence of support from the Great At the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, Laut- of nations qua nations, physical and cultural, as the Powers, went nowhere). Meanwhile, with Jewish erpacht was on Britain’s prosecutorial team, and distinctively modern crime. This complicated, fas- nationalism relocated safely and exclusively to the his idea of “crimes against humanity” was in the cinating figure scarcely figures in Loeffler’s book Mediterranean, Jacob Blaustein became a supporter tribunal’s charter. Yet throughout the trials them- (though he will be the subject, one hears, of his of Israel, a favorite of Harry Truman, and one of the selves, no one count in any indictment specifically next one). As Loeffler has shown elsewhere, Lem- only people allowed to call Ben-Gurion by his first mentioned the Nazis’ war on the Jews. Finally, in kin was himself a Zionist early in his career but name. the fall of 1946, at the Paris Peace Conference con- later took pains to disavow it, along with his many vened to settle postwar arrangements, not one of other ties to Jewish organizations. This may seem eter Benenson (né Solomon) was born to a the 21 participating countries would agree to in- paradoxical, since the very concept of genocide Pwealthy Zionist family. He was a student of troduce a memo on Jewish rights. Once again, the wages of Jewish statelessness had been made pain- fully clear. JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS he year 1948 is the great turning point of Loef- Tfler’s narrative. On May 14, the State of Israel was declared. December 10 saw the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and on Hear Dara Horn as she December 11, UN General Assembly Resolution 194 brought Arab-Jewish hostilities to a (tempo- discusses rary) close. Crucially, the same Jews were engaged Writing Jewish Fiction in all three and saw no contradiction between them. Sunday, May 19, 2019 By the logic of the Universal Declaration of Hu- man Rights, each and every individual stands vis-à- Museum of Jewish Heritage vis the state, their own or any other, as themselves a New York City sovereign, at least when it comes to the individual rights articulated in the declaration. Unfortunately, Loeffler observes, left “out of this idealistic formula- tion was the crucial materiel that linked individual www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/event and state, and divided Arab from Jew: the nation.”

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 21 Perlzweig who worked in the 1930s to bring Jewish as Israel took a beating was, as Loeffler notes and behind the particular. In the post-1960s human refugees to England. During World War II, he served Marxists used to say, no accident: rights imagination, the pole of stubborn as a code breaker at Bletchley Park. After the war, he particularism increasingly came to be was a lawyer, journalist, human rights activist, and The quest for the universal always begins symbolized by Zionism. left-leaning Zionist. In 1958, he converted to Christi- with a rejection of the particular. . . . Amnesty anity, and in 1961 he founded Amnesty Internation- International . . . took the form of a religion- But history is full of surprises; in the late 1970s al. With Benenson’s story, the theological freight of less religion, or more properly, a secularized human rights activism and Jewish collective rights Loeffler’s narrative moves to center stage. global Christianity. Human rights left behind were reunited under the aegis of American power, as Though Benenson had converted to Catholi- cism, he rejected the work of midcentury Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain who had been instrumental in promoting the idea of human rights as an extension of classical ideas of natural law. Instead, Benenson drew from the deep well of Christian antinomianism first hewn by Saint Paul, who rejected the very idea of law as necessary for human salvation. “It has always seemed to me,” Be- nenson said in a characteristically Pauline remark, “that a humanitarian movement should decide its actions from the heart not from the book of law.” Benenson himself didn’t disavow his Jewish roots. He sought and received the blessing of his former rabbi, Maurice Perlzweig, who was then helping to lay the groundwork for Vatican II and calling for “a new beginning” for human rights that would somehow rise above the hard political choices of the Cold War. True to Benenson’s thinking, Amnesty Inter- national focused not on groups but lone dissenters, “prisoners of conscience.” In doing so, it offered, as Loeffler astutely notes, a kind of antipolitics, pitting the individual against the state, with the individual helped by activists from abroad who “would also redeem themselves in the process.” Benenson and Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht (top center) as a judge on the International Court of Justice, mid-1950s. (Flickr/ Amnesty International jettisoned the forums and Cambridge Law.) chanceries of international law for the chambers of conscience and the court of public opinion. President Jimmy Carter made human rights the theo- Meanwhile, the decolonization movement retical centerpiece of American foreign policy, while gathered steam under the sponsorship of the mili- Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson made saving dissi- tantly antiliberal and avowedly anti-Semitic Soviet dents and Soviet Jews one of its primary objectives. Union. Although awareness of the Holocaust grew The Soviet Jewry movement united the seem- through the 1960s, Loeffler notes its uniqueness, ingly antithetical rights claims of groups, states, and like that of the Jews, made for an ungainly fit with individuals. Its apotheosis came at the monumental postcolonialism’s moralizing temper. To care about rally for Soviet Jewry in Washington, D.C., in De- Jewish rights, as groups or individuals, was, at least cember 1987. That month also saw the outbreak on the radical Left, to paint oneself as an enemy of the of the First Intifada, and the relationship between oppressed of the earth. Jewish politics and human rights activism has been In a decolonizing world increasingly focused on tortured ever since. the evils of apartheid and colonialism, anti-Semitism Several truths peek out of the wreckage. First, hovered awkwardly between the categories of rac- although the drama of the particular and the univer- ism and religious intolerance. Like the Jews them- sal runs through all humanity, in Jews and Judaism selves, anti-Semitism was just too sui generis to fit they are joined at the root. That is why Jews are, yes- the dictates of the human rights imagination. terday and today, the lightning rod for arguments Then came 1967 and the Six-Day War. over nationalism and globalism (and why Jewish thought holds such deep promise for the world). he 1970s saw both rising consciousness of hu- Second, liberal theories unmoored from traditional Tman rights and the demonization of Israel religion, local culture, or democratic politics quick- as itself a quasi-colonial power. The unexpected ly become vacuous and self-deceiving, ammunition resurrection of human rights was, as historian for both hypocrites and tyrants. Nonetheless, the Samuel Moyn argued in his groundbreaking 2010 basic intuition underlying all human rights activ- volume, The Last Utopia, a reach for ideals after the Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson ism, that there are some things that governments crushing disillusionments of Soviet totalitarian- celebrates the group’s 20th anniversary by relighting must not be allowed to do to anyone, is one of the ism, postcolonial authoritarian mayhem, the failed the original candle, which he first lit at Amnesty’s deepest lessons of Jewish history. It is as true for us revolutions of the 1960s, and the floundering of in- birth in 1961, London, May 1981. (Simon Dack/ today as it was to those emerging in 1919, and again ternational law. By mid-decade, the World Jewish Keystone/Getty Images.) in 1945, from the ruins. Congress and American Jewish Committee’s UN offices were closed, the UN General Assembly had passed its infamous resolution equating Zionism international law to become a post-legal Yehudah Mirsky, a former State Department official, with racism, and Amnesty International had won instrument to free the minds and bodies of teaches Israel studies, Jewish thought, and human rights the Nobel Peace Prize. the unjustly imprisoned and abused. . . . But at Brandeis University. He is the author of Rav Kook: That Amnesty International rose to acclaim to reach the universal, Amnesty had to leave Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press).

22 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 Some Kind of Genius

BY JESSE TISCH

Preminger—Hecht penned a half-dozen bona fide fables—they’re cribbed from Hecht’s highly unreli- Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures classics. The Front Page, based on Hecht’s antic able memoirs. Some poking around in Hecht’s ar- by Adina Hoffman newspaper play, invented the screwball comedy. chives reveals more pedestrian truths. The newspa- Yale University Press, 264 pp., $26 Underworld, the ur-gangster drama, paved the way per job? In one account, Hecht’s mother got it for for later bloodbaths. No Hecht, no Goodfellas—and him; in another, he used a chain of connections. As for college, there’s no proof Hecht came anywhere “I need an audience, even in near the University of Wisconsin campus. A letter from a university staffer, recently deposited in the hrist, I’m tired,” Ben Hecht grum- my sleep,” the hero of an early, Hecht archives, exposes the fiction. Hecht wasn’t a bled to his wife Rose in 1931. Stuck “star reporter” for the Chicago Daily Journal, nor in Hollywood, Hecht was writing unpublished Hecht novel says. did he cover “crime and corruption in their most Scarface and complaining might- sensational form.” For the most part, Hecht was an ily.“C “Oh how tired I am!” he continued, gathering maybe no Sopranos, either. Hecht’s films “helped ordinary court reporter, covering unsexy stories in strength with every groan. “Aches, neck, back, eyes, create Hollywood as we know it,” Hoffman writes, Chicago’s byzantine court system. Most of his ar- heart—oh so tired.” but beyond that, they’re simply great fun—“among ticles were brief and unbylined. This is the sound of a man enjoying his misery; the most delightful ever made.” All kinds of dubious stories are foisted on a master at the Jewish art of recreational kvetch- ing. With Hecht, the line between pain and pleasure was vanishingly thin. In Hollywood, he wrote seemingly effortless dialogue until he collapsed (“I love a good honest pain, as you know”). Blurred lines abounded in Hecht’s life. When writing The Front Page, his great collaboration with Charles MacArthur, he set out to skewer journalism but produced a love letter. “Our contempt . . . was a bo- gus attitude,” he later confessed. Little was ever straightforward with Hecht, the playwright, journalist, and screenwriter-savant of Hollywood’s first golden era. Did he single-handedly rescue Gone with the Wind? Could he, or anyone else, have written Scarface in 11 days? Legends aside, there was something inscrutable about the man. “Hecht is a rather difficult man to pin down,” Saul Bellow once wrote. The poet Doug Fetherling, who wrote a shrewd 1977 appreciation of Hecht, ad- mitted that “no one is quite certain who Hecht was.” Ben Hecht, ca. 1915–1920. (The Newberry Library.) Poster advertising The Front Page, 1931. Hecht’s life should come with a warning label: Biographer, beware. A trickster, a prankster, a cool Then the chronological march forward begins, the reader in these chapters. Hecht never hoaxed Wildean ironist, he was always a fast-moving tar- and things get shaky. Hoffman renders Hecht’s early his editors; that story was itself a hoax. He almost get. When reporters quizzed him, they got the run- years in broad, colorful strokes, jumping from New certainly never lived in “the city’s most notorious around: evasion, omission, deflection. “I have always York City (“the ghetto,” Hecht boasted) to Racine, bordello.” He lived with, or across from, his doting had a distaste for telling the truth about myself,” he Wisconsin. Young Hecht is carefree and mischie- parents. In Hoffman’s telling, the writer Sherwood confided to H. L. Mencken. Indeed, mischief—get- vous, a talented thief, marksman, and saboteur of Anderson “was enraged” over Hecht’s portrait of ting away with things—supplied life’s greatest plea- railroad tracks. A young Lothario, he scores with him in a novel. He wasn’t. In letters to friends, An- sure for Hecht, along with writing rapidly and well. Racine’s willing daughters, whose irate fathers chase derson praised Hecht’s novel, saying nothing about No wonder so many Hechtian legends survive, with him over fences. For Hecht, youth is a carefree, un- his cameo. When Hecht left Chicago, a flattering some dust on them, 55 years after his death. In com- interrupted idyll, with the added bonus of benign, story appeared by his friend Ashton Stevens, but it mon memory, he is still the speed writer, the one- encouraging parents. was a squib, buried on page nine, not “front-page” draft wonder, the Hollywood-bashing iconoclast, So far, this resembles no childhood—certainly news. And on and on. the swashbuckling social critic. no writer’s childhood—that ever existed; yet it ex- What’s curious about all this is that Hoffman Inevitably, the legend takes a beating under tends long past puberty. Hecht goes off to college, seems to know better. In wiser moments, she notes Adina Hoffman’s scrutiny. In her compact new bi- drops out, and lands on his feet in Chicago. With his how slippery Hecht can be: Hecht’s stories “have the ography, she attempts to recover Hecht from legend, uncle’s help, he inveigles a newspaper job at the Chi- gusty air of legend”; some sound like “sheer make- refraction, obfuscation. It’s a valiant attempt, but in cago Daily Journal. Soon, he is hoodwinking editors, believe”; others like “vivid hyperbole.” Yet she ig- the end, she falls victim to Hecht’s expertly set traps. who print his fabulous stories about river pirates nores her own warnings. At some point she seems In a way, this book is like its subject: charming, nev- and earthquakes. Somehow, he parlays these pranks to have made the fateful decision simply to repeat er dull, and something less than trustworthy. into a “star” position at the paper. When Hecht Hecht’s gusty legends without any disclaimers. The leaves Chicago, it’s front-page news; a rival paper result is a steady stream of Hechtian whoppers. Ben offman begins confidently, asserting Hecht’s declares it a tragedy: flags lowered to half-staff! Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures is briskly Hstatus as a towering Hollywood scriptwriter. How much of this actually happened? Some, paced, stylishly written, and clearly the product Working with great directors—Hitchcock, Hawks, perhaps. Serious Hecht fans will recognize these of serious effort and research. But that research

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 23 is hopelessly interlaced with fiction and quasi fic- By 1918, Hecht’s star was indeed rising: he’d Finn” who never stopped reading. Sandburg, a gen- tion—Hecht’s wild, self-dramatizing lies. They slip cracked Mencken’s magazine, The Smart Set, and the erous soul, wasn’t being hostile. Yet, at the same in everywhere, insidiously. Even a doctored photo- Best Short Stories anthology; at parties, he seemed time, he refused to ignore the obvious, even if Hecht graph of the ship Hecht funded to smuggle Holo- to cast a spell over people. “There is only one intel- might have wished him to. caust survivors into Palestine sneaks in. As a crew ligent man in the whole United States to talk to— member wrote to Hecht in the 1950s, “the photo Ben Hecht,” crowed Ezra Pound, an early admirer. echt’s Jewishness—present everywhere, con- . . . is a fake. The name SS BEN HECHT was never Though these were, by most accounts, happy, secure Hcealed everywhere—is, not surprisingly, a painted on the bow . . . We should advertise to the years for Hecht, there were already signs of chaos major theme of Hoffman’s biography. What makes British Navy and Air Reconnaissance what we were and tumult. Hecht’s marriage to Marie Armstrong, a book Jewish, Philip Roth says, isn’t its subject, but doing?” a charming reporter at the Chicago Daily Journal, that it won’t shut up. By that measure, Hecht’s lo- was turbulent from the start. They were marvelous- quacious novel Erik Dorn (1921) belongs in every en Hecht was born in 1893, the favorite son of Jewish library. The book was Hecht’s breakthrough: Byoung, newly married Russian immigrants. The teenage Hecht, asked All at once, dozens of reviewers were singing his His father, an ambitious but feckless clothing de- praises. A year later, Hecht’s remarkable journal- signer, and his sober, practical mother, managed why he concealed his ism was collected in 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, a two impressive feats: escaping dire poverty and book so marvelously strange and cleverly written imbuing their son with supreme confidence. From Jewishness, replied that he that it’s still assigned in journalism schools. the start, Hecht recognized his own talents. In an In quick succession came a Broadway play, early autobiographical novel, Hecht projected him- “did not wish to boast.” several audacious novels, and the inevitable move self forward, into the bright future, and took stock to New York City. There, Hecht’s Jewish circle in- of his achievements. There would be stories, novels, ly ill matched: Hecht felt bored and trapped; Marie cluded Herman Mankiewicz, who would soon leave plays—“Triumph after triumph.” felt ignored and bullied. His Girl Friday it wasn’t. It for Hollywood (“Eretz DeMille”). “Millions are to In 1910, the budding littérateur landed in Chi- didn’t help that journalism supplied the fun and ex- be grabbed out here and your only competition is cago, where in some sense, his life began. Young citement Hecht craved. By this point, he was flour- idiots,” he famously wired Hecht—a note that sure- Hecht—or “Bennie,” as he was affectionately ishing, producing stories rich with humor and sto- ly appealed to Hecht’s snobbery, money-lust, and known—discovered bohemia, where literature was rytelling and vivid characters. thirst for adventure all at once. the rage. “I worked in Chicago, but I lived, a little Journalism occupied Hecht’s days, but daily Lighting out for Hollywood proved the best madly, between book covers,” he later wrote. He deadlines didn’t exhaust his astounding energies. and worst decision Hecht ever made. Until then, was fortunate to meet Sherwood Anderson, then Nothing did, apparently—Hecht worked with rest- unknown, unpublished, and somewhat illiterate, as less, manic energy. “I feared idleness as some men Hecht later recalled. A close, rivalrous friendship fear a contagious disease,” he recalled. “Without a soon developed, the older Anderson playing men- task to do, I became convinced I would expire of en- tor and sage, a role Hecht accepted and resented in nui.” A second compulsion was to entertain—to al- equal measure. ways impress and dazzle. “I need an audience, even in my sleep,” the hero of an early, unpublished novel says. “It is difficult to be amusing, always,” another character sighs. Headline of an ad that Ben Hecht wrote for Who, though, was behind the performance? placement in the New York Times, February 1943. Many young writers construct a self out of books, but few have done so as avidly and publicly as Hecht. In his twenties, Hecht was variously a cynic, writing had been his vocation. Now it was a com- a Decadent, a dandy, a poète maudit. (“There were mercial enterprise. Hecht’s immediate success with always a surprising number of me’s in operation,” he Underworld ensured more lucrative assignments. It later recalled.) It seemed Hecht borrowed promis- also primed him for an even bigger breakthrough: cuously, but, in fact, he chose his influences care- the grand success of The Front Page in 1928–1929. fully. Nietzsche’s gospel of superiority and boldness The play, a valentine to youth and irresponsibility suited him well. So did H. L. Mencken’s swashbuck- set among Chicago’s crime reporters, made Hecht ling style and amused contempt for phoniness and a genuine celebrity. Success begat success. As the cant. By his late twenties, Hecht was phenomenally country’s fortunes sank, Hecht’s continued to rise, well read, and, it seems, equally well armored with with screenwriting offers pouring in. Suddenly cynicism, snobbery, and humor—the young male flush, he acquired a kingly lifestyle, with an entou- writer’s classic arsenal. rage of servants, chauffeurs, and secretaries attend- A census of Hecht’s poses in the 1920s reveals ing to him. Hollywood needed Hecht, and Hecht one striking absence: There was no Jewish version needed Hollywood’s huge paychecks. Each new of Hecht. Of course, few people flaunted their Jew- contract from Samuel Goldwyn and David Selznick ishness back then. Even so, Hecht’s “passing” seems was an offer he couldn’t refuse. For the next decade, extreme. Years later, in crafting his life story, Hecht he veered between passion projects—novels, sto- insisted he had no Jewish past to speak of. “I had not ries, and plays of varying quality—and well-paid been a Jew in Chicago and I continued in New York “hackwork” (as he called it): classic films like Noth- not to be one,” he wrote. His life was one of “pleasant ing Sacred, Viva Villa!, and Gunga Din. Jewish anesthesia,” untouched by anti-Semitism. “I That might have been it—a hectic life shuttling repeat,” he wrote, “all my activities, all my writing between coasts and careers—had German fascism and living had been since my childhood as unJew- not seized Hecht’s attention. In 1939, he underwent ish as the doings of a Martian.” a startling public transformation: Gone, suddenly, The irony, of course, was that concealing his Jew- was the preening Hollywood showman. Gone, too, ishness only drew attention to it. To Ezra Pound, he was the arch individualist. In their place roared an was “Rabi Ben Hechtenberg”; to H. L. Mencken, a earnest, committed activist, proudly declaring “My political radical with “Jew-like” proclivities. Even Tribe Is Called Israel” and exhorting American a benign figure like Carl Sandburg, the heartland Jews—especially his wealthy, secular brethren—to poet, took notice, dubbing Hecht “a Jewish Huck express Jewish pride and vent Jewish outrage.

24 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 That was only the beginning. In 1941, Hecht against the grain. Pondering Hecht’s 1937 play To atching Hecht pinwheel through life, one “bumped into history” when Peter Bergson, a pas- Quito and Back, she senses a writer at sea, craving Wsenses the scale of Hoffman’s challenge. Bi- sionate activist from British Mandate Palestine a purpose. She’s certainly on to something, yet her ography imposes order on life’s chaos, but Hecht’s (there he was Hillel Kook, Rav Kook’s nephew), fast-paced narrative speeds ahead, with Hechtian unruly life and vague, contradictory personality recruited Hecht into his American operation. Soon velocity, never looking back. resist sense making. He could be frank or cun- Hecht was writing ferocious advertisements that Hoffman solves half the mystery of Hecht’s ning, boisterous or shy, harsh or tender, and the mixed humor with moral outrage. “FOR SALE to Jewish rebirth and conversion to militant Zionism. exact balance of those qualities was never quite Humanity: 70,000 Jews,” one ad proclaimed dur- Still, one senses a larger, more complicated story clear. Hoffman’s attempt to unravel “the puzzle ing the Holocaust, when rescue still seemed pos- unfolding. In 1935, his mother died, a devastating that was Ben Hecht” yields few deep insights. At sible. “Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece.” loss that haunted him for decades. In the aftermath, a loss, she labels him “perverse”—a biographer’s In his most incendiary ad, Hecht saluted “My Brave he embarked on a (predictable) affair, sneaking off shrug. Friends” of the Irgun underground. “The Jews of to Quito, Ecuador, with a young socialite. He re- That shrug alternates, here and there, with a America,” he added, “make a little holiday in their turned in 1937, his marriage to Rose miraculously wince. Hecht’s Holocaust pageant, We Will Never hearts” after each successful attack. Die, was “relentlessly lugubrious” and “almost bul- That bit of poetry—10 soft syllables, as lying in its high-minded mawkishness.” Hoffman hummable as a nursery rhyme—deto- groans at the “ad hominem assaults” in Hecht’s book nated across Jewish America. on anti-Semitism, A Guide for the Bedevilled, find- This chapter of Hecht’s life makes ing it “exhausting.” These are strange reactions—su- for exciting, if confounding, reading. rely “mawkishness” about the murder of European For seven years, he wrote speeches, Jewry was a lesser crime in 1943 than silence. mobilized friends (who marveled at Hoffman is harsher still on Hecht’s 1961 j’accuse, his newfound passion), and defended Perfidy, a contentious account of the Kastner affair, the Bergson campaigns, which faced which divided Israel over the question of wartime intense resistance from mainstream collaboration. To Hoffman, it reads like a clumsy Jewish organizations. western: “a flamboyant rhetorical shoot ’em up.” In 1946, his Zionist pageant A Writing about Israel, a country he never visited, Flag Is Born raised enough money to Hecht was “out of his element and less self-aware purchase a ship, dubbed the SS Ben than ever.” Going further, Hoffman finds “some- Hecht, which sailed incognito toward thing grotesque about the way he leaned back in Palestine with 600 DPs on board. The his Nyack lawn chair and accused the likes of Weiz- Bergson group’s courage, boldness, A young refugee aboard the SS Ben Hecht en route to Israel, 1947. mann and Ben-Gurion” of betrayal during the Ho- and integrity seemed to bring out the The ship sailed incognito to avoid detection by the British. locaust. Perhaps, she suggests, Hecht wasn’t really best in Hecht. Had they indeed awak- (The Jabotinsky Institute and PikiWiki.) angry, just acting out: “arguing for argument’s sake.” ened his Jewish self? Or did Hecht But any careful reader of the book (let alone Hecht’s have a secret Jewish life long before he met Peter intact, and promptly suffered a setback: the failure notebooks) can see that Hecht was full of righteous Bergson? of his comeback play. The New York Times called fury. Turning away from Hecht’s anger, here and Here, Hoffman’s research is illuminating. Her To Quito and Back “a sham battle of words and fine elsewhere, suggests a larger problem of biographical book’s main revelation is that Jewish issues had al- phrases.” understanding. ways preoccupied Hecht. Slowly, a portrait emerges: Turbulent though that period was, it seems con- All his life, Hecht was recklessly, noisily exces- Hecht wasn’t a believer, wouldn’t have recognized tinuous, in some ways, with Hecht’s earlier life. To sive, a man for whom too much was never enough. the inside of a shul, and didn’t keep kosher; yet he read Hecht’s letters from the 1920s is to behold a But for Hoffman, this too-muchness seems to felt profoundly Jewish. Sifting through archives, troubled soul, who, when he’s not playing the Su- be just a headache. Unlike Hecht’s movies, with Hoffman locates Hecht’s Yiddish-inflected poetry perior Man, is profoundly stuck. He’s tired of con- their cleverness and pizzazz, Hecht’s novels teem in a self-published magazine. She finds plans for a stantly performing and feels trapped inside his with unseemly angers, vanities, doubts, insecu- “peculiarly Jewish novel” (Hecht’s words) to be pub- many masks. “You have not a pose that is more rities. That, too, was a side of Hecht, though not lished in two volumes. The teenage Hecht, asked important than your soul,” he writes plaintively to a side Hoffman has much patience for. One pic- why he concealed his Jewishness, replied that he Rose. “I have. Artists usually have.” Moreover, he’s tures her slogging through novel after novel, wish- “did not wish to boast,” a detail quarried from an split down the middle: “A rueful truth—the contra- ing they were DVDs. Therein lies the problem. obscure memoir. dictory desires of humans who want always to be We never meet the author of these many vexing A conventional Jewish upbringing was the foun- free and at the same time to be servants of some- books. Hoffman all but ignores him, as if afraid dation for Hecht’s Jewish attachments. As a boy, he thing,” he later wrote. Hecht gave that dilemma to to confront something messy, murky, and human. suffered through Hebrew lessons, the misery end- his fictional stand-ins, tortured writers all. They fear What spurred his attention seeking? Why was he ing with his confirmation. In late 1925, Hecht sur- failure, these anxious, well-defended young men, so angry? Clearly, some of the answers must lie in prised his friends by moving to the Henry Street but even more than that, they fear hollowness and Hecht’s childhood—his actual one, not the happy settlement, near his childhood home. The sound of solipsism. picaresque one Hoffman writes about. spoken Yiddish, the comforting density of Jewish Generally, one shouldn’t conflate an author and communal life on that bustling shtetl block, called his creations. But with Hecht, you might as well. he question looming over any account of out to him. Even Hecht’s 1931 novel A Jew in Love, (“He is me,” Hecht wrote of one protagonist, a trou- THecht’s life is whether he wasted it, artisti- with its noxious Jewish stereotypes, suggests some- bled Chicago journalist.) What’s clear from Hecht’s cally speaking. In the early 1920s, he was one of thing more than indifference. Hoffman finds the writing—but not terribly clear from Hoffman’s bi- America’s most promising young novelists, “The book “perverse” but also revealing, proof of Hecht’s ography—is how greatly Hecht suffered, and how whirlwind prose hope of Chicago,” as Ezra Pound “deeply divided sense of Jewish self.” that suffering forged the person—and the Jew—he put it. Then came Hollywood, several fortunes, So much for Hecht’s claims to a belated Jew- later became. By 1938, Hecht was a changed man. and fame. What if Hecht hadn’t been lured west- ish awakening. Hoffman laughs: “He’d been a Jew “Compassion came to me,” he later wrote, “compas- ward—if, instead, he had channeled his consider- from the get-go.” Taking Hecht’s testimony “with a sion even for the stupid, the hypocritical and the able talent and energy into serious writing? Every grain of kosher salt” makes perfect sense, here and ugly.” The old Nietzsche-Mencken mask fell away. author has a shelf of unwritten books. It’s tantaliz- elsewhere. What about Hollywood, then? “While When German mobs began targeting Jews, Hecht ing to imagine Hecht’s. Or perhaps not. “Hecht was he claimed loudly to loathe the movies and all they faced a stark choice: stoic silence or raucous hell- among the very worst judges of his own talents,” stood for, he also quietly adored them.” That might raising. The first wasn’t his style at all. The second Hoffman states confidently. “Screenwriting was be stretching it, but at least Hoffman is reading most definitely was. Hecht’s calling, whether he liked it or not.” Well,

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 25 yes—it’s hard to argue with success. Hecht’s mov- geysers.” Some of that liquid was froth, it’s true, but a reckless, courageous, in some ways tragic life— ies are cherished; his best plays, especially The Front some was extraordinary. 1001 Afternoons in Chi- were filled with nostalgia, melancholy, and humble Page, stand as classics, but his novels and memoirs cago, Hecht’s 1922 portrait of his adopted city, is a attempts at self-betterment. As quippy dialogue are largely forgotten. marvel, as close to time travel as journalism gets. became passé, and Americans turned to television Could those works be rediscovered today? Then there’s A Child of the Century, Hecht’s 1954 for distraction, Hecht’s screenwriting career wound Hecht was, in fact, a superlative writer, a graceful, confident prose stylist of A. J. Liebling’s or Joseph He was a master of the simple sentence that snaps at the Mitchell’s caliber. He could do hardboiled, slap- stick, lyrical—you name it. He was a master of end, inducing whiplash. “The Jews have the greatest unity the simple sentence that snaps at the end, inducing whiplash. “The Jews have the greatest unity in in the world—as a target,” he once wrote. the world—as a target,” he once wrote. “They were for lucidity and laughter, when sober,” he wrote of autobiography—really, Hecht’s song of himself, his down. He returned to his youth in several charming his old newspaper chums. Writing on deadline, he greatest work. memoirs and embraced a kind of mindfulness. produced gem after gem, some while risking his These remarkable bookends—one a work of pre- “And what is joy?” Hecht wrote in his final years. life in Berlin after World War I. “Yet the cabarets go cocious brilliance, the other a capstone—contain “Existing out of myself. Responding to life with my on,” he wrote in one dispatch. “Whirling couples Hecht’s multitudes, his various public selves. And senses and not my prejudices. Seeing others with dance among the round-topped tables.” In addi- yet, as Hecht’s letters reveal, the real drama of his life amusement rather than fretting over being seen.” tion to his appallingly good sentences, Hecht was was internal: a person struggling against his dark- He began each morning with a prayer to the deity one of those writers with an invisible stopwatch er, destructive impulses and trying to cultivate the he never believed in, pleading for the strength not to in his head telling him exactly when paragraphs gentler, more generous side of his character. It was harm anyone. That private battle didn’t make head- should end. the struggle to abandon the false selves he acquired lines, but it was as dramatic, and perhaps as heroic, Predictably, Hecht’s phenomenal speed and pro- in his twenties and become who he really was—or as his more famous battles and triumphs. ductivity tend to obscure everything else. Hoffman wanted to be, at any rate. describes a force of nature: Hecht’s copy “splashed That story is largely lost on Hoffman, which is into his daily columns,” then it “erupted into a sec- too bad, since there’s pathos in Hecht’s efforts to em- Jesse Tisch is a writer, editor, and researcher. He lives ond novel”; later, it “gushed forth in impassioned brace his better angels. The final decades of his life— New York City. The Fire Now

BY CHLOÉ VALDARY

denier David Irving in 1996, and her book on the antisemitism is not. It is about the present. It Antisemitism: Here and Now experience was adapted for the 2016 film Denial. is what many people are doing, saying, and by Deborah E. Lipstadt Nonetheless, as she writes in the introduction, this facing now. Schocken, 304 pp., $25.95 In fact, the book is, unfortunately, even more timely than she could have known. The massacre of 11 Jews praying at the Tree of Life synagogue few months before I graduated from in Pittsburgh occurred while her book was being college, I received my first death threat printed, and, as I write this week, Lipstadt has been from an anti-Semite. Although I am not interviewed on NPR and elsewhere about Repre- Jewish, I had become a pro-Israel activ- sentative Ilhan Omar’s public insinuation that Jews istA on campus. The threat came in the form of a six- have dual loyalties and the ensuing crisis in the second YouTube video. First it showed me holding Democratic Party. an Israeli flag, then a picture of someone in a hospi- Rather than reporting directly on contemporary tal, and finally a picture of a tombstone; the accom- anti-Semitism or writing a history of its origins, panying audio called for the use of bullets—six to be Lipstadt has done something much more surpris- exact—to take me out. ing and effective. She has chosen to write a kind It was the first time I experienced anti-Semitism, of epistolary novel in which she corresponds with not as a historical phenomenon to be discussed in a Abigail, “a whip-smart Jewish student . . . trying to classroom, or even as an alarming contemporary news understand the phenomenon of antisemitism,” and item (anti-Jewish violence in Paris, genocidal threats an academic colleague Joe, a non-Jew who “teaches from Iran, or hateful words from American radicals, at the university’s law school” and who “has a deep right or left), but as a palpable danger that was, to quote Deborah Lipstadt speaking at the 3rd Annual Jewish appreciation for both the successes and travails of the subtitle of Deborah Lipstadt’s important new book Review of Books Conference, January 2018, New the Jewish people.” Antisemitism, “here and now.” A sense of dread entered York City. (Photo by Don Pollard.) Abigail is not so much as physically afraid— my dreams and stayed with me even after I woke up. though she and her fellow Jewish students are tak- The subject of anti-Semitism is hardly new to compact primer on present-day Jew hatred is, in ing precautions on an upcoming group trip to Eu- Lipstadt. A distinguished historian at Emory Uni- some ways, her most unsettling book: rope—as she is distressed. As she says, “I have no versity, she has written books on the American reason to fear for my physical safety here on campus. press during the Holocaust, the phenomenon of As horrific as the Holocaust was, it is firmly I feel comfortable as a Jew, except maybe when Israel Holocaust denial, and the Eichmann trial. She was in the past. . . . Though I remain horrified by is the topic of discussion.” Joe, on the other hand, is also famously sued in British court by Holocaust what happened, it is history. Contemporary puzzled. He is troubled by the heightened animosity

26 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 in American civic life, and he’s not quite sure where ket statements about Jews in their excoriation of lief in an all-powerful, nefarious cabal of Jews tire- anti-Semitism fits into the picture. “Antisemitism,” wealthy capitalists who oppress and exploit the lessly working to uproot and destroy the nations of he writes, “is something I’ve long abhorred, but also poor, who imply that Jews exert undue influence on the world, it is worth asking why the anti-Semite something that I fear I do not fully understand.” the media, who deny that Jews can be the victims suffers from such acute paranoia. A person who Lipstadt introduces her two correspondents of race-based hatred in the same way that people believes himself to be both a perennial victim and (who, she says, are each “composites of many peo- of color are, and who include offensive, hate-filled a hero fighting against a cosmic evil does not truly ple”) to each other and hits Reply All. Their cor- Jewish stereotyping in their criticism of Israeli know himself. What spiritual malady does belief in respondence on anti-Semitism covers everything government policies regarding the Palestinians,” the “Jewish problem” solve? from the spelling of the word—Lipstadt prefers the then one is not promoting equality but making a Lipstadt writes that “[a]ntisemites must be all-lowercase, no-hyphen option because it doesn’t mockery of the term. One of the great features of fought . . . but they are people of no consequence.” endorse the racist idea of “Semites,” and because Dr. Lipstadt’s book is that it helps the reader to see As a proud Jew and historian who has spent her life “[s]omething this absurd does not deserve a capital the underlying dysfunctions in democratic societ- studying and fighting those who irrationally hate letter”—to its deep ideological and religious origins. ies that allow anti-Semitism to flourish. These in- her people, she is under no obligation to occupy n these calm, lucid letters, Lipstadt shows Joe Combine racial essentialism—the belief that virtue is derived Iand Abigail how anti-Semitism currently emanates from both the Right and the Left, and under- from and inherent to skin color—with class warfare and a bizarre lines the moral failure of members in each of these political spheres to recognize and tackle the prob- belief that being an underdog suggests ethical superiority— lem in their midst. She quotes the editor of the neo- Nazi Daily Stormer, writing shortly after President and you can justify anything. Trump’s election, “Our Glorious Leader and UL- TIMATE SAVIOR [sic] has gone full-wink-wink- clude movements to suppress free speech, the “yes- herself with their spiritual problems. And yet, isn’t wink to his most aggressive supporters. After hav- but” excuses for Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe, it often precisely because they are people of no con- ing been attacked for retweeting a White Genocide and the reflexive erasure of the particularly anti- sequence that they often take their wretched sense account a few days ago, Trump went on to retweet Semitic nature of attacks on people, institutions, of dislocation and anguish out on others? As former two more.” Even if such retweets don’t prove what and, of course, one particular state that were clearly skinhead Arno Michaelis recently wrote, “In the the writer thinks they do—President Trump him- targeted because they are Jewish. absence of love’s light, hate can be exciting, seduc- self is clearly not an anti-Semite—the president’s tive. It beckons you and sends torrid, empty power refusal to, in Lipstadt’s words, “castigate, much less ipstadt’s book manages to cover a lot of hard and coursing through your veins. . . . Every minute you mildly criticize” such supporters without equivo- Ldepressing ground in an engaging, thorough spend hating someone is a hole in your life.” cation has undeniably encouraged them. way, yet I did leave it wishing for a bit more anthro- Deborah Lipstadt’s book shows what the anti- By contrast, when anti-Semitism comes from pological, or perhaps spiritual, depth. While Lipstadt Semitic hatred of such people looks like now, from the Left, it tends to be masked by an ideology that is trenchant about who the anti-Semite is, she is less Holocaust denial to the denial that Jews are a nation. preaches social justice and is ostensibly in pursuit interested in the question of why he is. “It’s not anti- One hopes that it will be read by the thousands of of helping the underprivileged. This, in my view, is semitism that is inconsequential, it’s the antisemite “Abigail”s and “Joe”s who are unlikely to be tempted a far more sophisticated form of bigotry, sweeping himself,” she writes. But I’m not so sure. by the first form of anti-Semitism but will undoubt- up well-meaning students and politicians with its In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote, edly be tempted by the second. This is, unfortunate- rhetoric. It is the ideology Abigail faces on campus, “White people in this country will have quite ly, a necessary book. and it is what British Jews face in Jeremy Corbyn enough to do in learning how to accept and and the current Labour Party. If President Trump love themselves and each other, and when they sometimes winks at anti-Semites, Jeremy Corbyn have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow Chloé Valdary is the founder of Theory of Enchantment breaks bread with them, invites them into the home, and may very well be never—the Negro prob- LLC, teaching conflict mitigation in schools and and is proud to call them friends. The formula for lem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be businesses. Her articles have appeared in the Atlantic, this, Lipstadt explains, is a coupling of “sympathy needed.” If, as Lipstadt persuasively argues, anti- Commentary, the New York Times, and the Wall Street for anyone who is or appears to be oppressed . . . Semitism is ultimately a conspiracy theory, the be- Journal. with . . . a class- and race-based view of the world. Anyone white, wealthy, or associated with a group that seems to be privileged cannot be a victim.” In other words, combine racial essentialism—the belief that virtue is derived from and inherent to skin JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS color—with class warfare and a belief that being an underdog suggests ethical superiority—and you can justify anything. In the case of Corbyn, it has justified Join Micah Goodman laying wreaths in honor of the members of the Black September faction of the PLO who massacred Israeli as he discusses athletes at the 1972 Olympics, speaking warmly of and to Hamas, and essentially purging “Zios” from the Catch-67 and the Labour Party. Since the Jew, in England and America, is often white, Ashkenazi, and a member of the elite, Future of Zionism she must be an oppressor. And so too must the only Jewish state and all of its inhabitants. This moral confusion is a product of the foun- Sunday, May 19, 2019 dational tenets of current leftist ideology. In one Museum of Jewish Heritage particularly interesting letter, Joe asks what to do New York City about people who do not recognize anti-Semitism when it comes from the social justice Left instead of the neo-fascist Right. In her response, Lipstadt points out that if, in the name of achieving equal- www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/event ity for all, one finds it acceptable to “include blan-

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 27 America's Jewish Bridegroom

BY ESTHER SCHOR

In 1906, Kallen cofounded the Menorah Society, and heredity. That Kallen repudiated racial thinking Horace Kallen Confronts America: Jewish a highbrow fraternity for Harvard’s Jewish students, in the 1930s and awoke to the cause of black civil Identity, Science, and Secularism and became a leader in the Intercollegiate Menorah rights in the 40s and early 50s is true but no anti- by Matthew J. Kaufman Association (IMA), launching his heterodox views dote to the toxic racism of these letters. And, while Syracuse University Press, 272 pp., $34.95 about American Judaism in the prestigious Menorah I know of no other disparaging comments about Journal. The same year, after talking Zionism with African Americans in his works and letters, Kallen Solomon Schechter, he became an evangelist for the has been justly criticized for excluding black ethnicity (as well as Asian and Native American ethnicity) from his seminal essay of 1915, “Democracy Versus orace Kallen can be found in the ill- Kallen’s career was spiral, the Melting-Pot,” and for deflecting, with an evasive starred pantheon of prolific writers not linear. He would double footnote, the subject of black Americans in his 1924 known for only one thing: one novel, book Culture and Democracy in the United States. one sonnet, one treatise, or, in his back to a previous topic, Kaufman should be applauded for plunging head- Hcase, one idea. That idea is “cultural pluralism,” first into these difficulties, framing them within which Matthew Kaufman describes in his use- revising his views in a new Kallen’s practice of integrating scientific concepts, ful new book, Horace Kallen Confronts America: theories, and discoveries into his ideas. Jewish Identity, Science, and Secularism, as “a theory historical context for a new Kallen, Kaufman argues, “viewed science as a re- of democratic cooperative discourse” affirming the source for a values-driven response to life.” At the centrality of ethnic identity in civil society. Kallen audience. same time, he also relied on scientific concepts to first expounded this notion in print in 1924, but he support his claims for Jewish inclusion in civil so- had coined the term almost 20 years earlier when he cause. He crafted a platform for the Federation of ciety. In addition to what was called “race science,” was a graduate student at Harvard. American Zionists and in 1913 helped to bring Louis Kallen culled support from evolutionary theory, In fact, Kallen’s oeuvre includes some 39 books D. Brandeis into the Zionist fold. It was Kallen who psychology, relativity, and even quantum mechan- and more than four hundred articles on a vast array provided Brandeis with the multicultural justification ics. Tracing “Kallen’s footprint in print culture”—in of topics: Zionism, the nature of truth, pragmatism, for Brandeis’s argument that “to be good Americans, wide-circulation dailies, weeklies, and monthlies, as ethnicity (or “hyphenation”), American Jewish we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we well as annuals, pamphlets, and books—Kaufman identity, synagogues and JCCs, internationalism must become Zionists.” While teaching at the Uni- makes the case for the importance of Kallen’s role in and the League of Nations, the future of the new versity of Wisconsin, Kallen crisscrossed the country the public conversation. Kallen also argued vigor- State of Israel, democracy and academic freedom, to promote, alternately, the IMA and Zionism. (The ously in private with leading intellectuals, from T. S. censorship and civil liberties, individualism, con- story of his Zionist activism is told in Sarah Schmidt’s Eliot to the Reform rabbi Abraham Cronbach. (It’s sumerism and cooperatives, separation of church invaluable 1995 monograph, Horace M. Kallen: moving to find Kallen contending with Eliot for five and state, Reform theology, religion and science, Prophet of American Zionism.) In 1919, after stints at pages, then offering him a room on his next trip to secularism and humanism, art and aesthetics, Princeton (where he was the victim of anti-Semitism) New York; could such a thing happen today?) The comedy, the book of Job, aging, premarital sex, race and Wisconsin, Kallen cofounded the New School, plethora of articles and essays is only one of the and “color blindness,” and education—of children, where as dean of the graduate faculty, he later hired— challenges Kaufman takes on here; the other is writ- adults, workers, Jews, and college students, the last and saved—dozens of German Jewish refugee schol- ing about a thinker whose trajectory is not linear in a blistering pamphlet called College Prolongs ars. He taught there until his retirement in 1973. but spiral. Every 20 years or so, Kallen would double Infancy (1932). His 91st year found him flying in Horace Kallen Confronts America is the first back to a previous topic, revising his views within a tiny plane from Cape Cod to Charlottesville to full-length work on Kallen since the ascendance a new historical context and for a new audience. lecture on the subject of his final book: Toward a of multiculturalism. One might assume that Kal- While Kaufman’s book is roughly chronological, he Philosophy of the Seas. He died a few months later, len’s star would have risen in this period, but that dramatizes not only what but how Kallen thought. in February 1974. hasn’t been the case. In 1986, the Harvard scholar The son of German Jewish immigrants from Sile- Werner Sollors wrote “A Critique of Pure Plural- n the first, stronger half of his book, Kaufman sia, Kallen arrived in Boston in 1887 at the age of ism,” which vilified Kallen for his fixation on race Ioffers a close study of Kallen’s writings on Jews five. His stern father, Jacob, intended his oldest son and heredity, comparing it unfavorably to his friend and race, widens out to consider cultural plural- to follow in his footsteps and become an Orthodox Alain Locke’s writings on “cultural racialism” and ism, then draws an even wider circle to assess Kal- rabbi, but Horace had other ideas. A scholarship boy black identity. Arguing that the origins of cultural len’s views on nationalism and transnationalism. at Harvard, he worked his way through college as a pluralism were tainted by racism, Sollors published In the second half, Kaufman studies Kallen’s writ- meter reader and settlement-house counselor, the excerpts from two letters Kallen wrote from Oxford ing about pluralism and democracy, as well as his latter job providing free room and board. He cred- about Locke. While deploring Locke’s ostracism by forays into modernism. Whether one agrees with ited Professor Barrett Wendell, in a course on the his American peers—though not by Kallen, who Kaufman on reading Kallen as a “religious think- “Hebraic” American Puritans, for restoring his pride spent Thanksgiving with him and threw him a tea— er,” as he does in his final chapter, depends on what in being a Jew. After a fellowship at Oxford, where Kallen conceded that he had “neither respect nor one understands Kallen to have meant by “reli- he befriended a young Bertrand Russell and his fel- liking for his race—but individually they have to gion.” In a long career of idiosyncrasy and hetero- low student Alain Locke, who would later become a be taken, each on his own merits.” The other, more doxy, Kallen’s writings on secularism as a religion leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Kallen returned to reticent letter simply nodded in assent to the corro- are among his most tendentious. Harvard to pursue a PhD in philosophy under Wil- sively racist views of his erstwhile mentor, Wendell. Kallen was hardly alone among Jews of his era liam James. In his last months, James hand-picked These are indefensible comments, even (per- in his racial discussions of Jewish identity, and his best student, “the critter Kallen,” to edit his final, haps especially) in the context of Kallen’s enduring Kaufman takes pains to specify exactly what he be- posthumous book; into his fifties, Kallen was still friendship with Locke; nor can it be denied that Kal- lieved. Kallen eschewed physiological theories of billed as “the student of William James.” len, in his early years, was fixated on the topic of race race based on craniometry, flirted only briefly with

28 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 the idea of “racial purity,” and favored the notion can Jews to listen to the “inward” call of Jewishness as pain, Kallen’s life was fairly free of physical pain) of an inherited Jewish “racial psyche.” While his they lived out their American freedoms. but because Job adapted to suffering by virtue of his sources denigrated blacks as “unstable” and “slow,” Kaufman’s patient probings in the archives show own human strength and not faith. It was a biblical Asians and Native Americans as “slow,” and Jews as Kallen defining the ideals of Hebraism in various prooftext for all of Kallen’s major ideas, whether he “materialistic,” Kallen himself focused on defend- ways. Sometimes he emphasized moral seriousness, weighed the claims of Jewish culture against Greek ing cultural difference by an appeal to nature. And sometimes ethical commitment, sometimes respect culture, dramatized his evolutionary version of where Kallen’s colleague E. A. Ross wrote about a for other peoples. Often it was the paramount value pragmatism, testified to his “belief” in secularism, Darwinian struggle among ethnic groups, warning of life itself. Though he dismissed the Reform plat- or acclaimed Job as an antitotalitarian hero of free- Anglo-Saxon whites against “race suicide,” Kallen form of a Jewish mission to the world, he endorsed dom—an American Job, as it were. used evolutionary theory to vindicate ethnic diver- the idea of a Jewish mission in the world, a contri- Another of Kallen’s provocations was a book sity. He was adamant in rejecting both racial hierar- bution that Jews could make only as a nationality, he published in 1954, at the age of 72, entitled chies and racial determinism. whether living on their ancestral soil or elsewhere, Secularism Is the Will of God. This book is the basis Trained at Harvard before philosophy and especially in the United States, in the context of a for Kaufman’s argument that Kallen must be read as psychology went their separate ways, Kallen was culturally pluralistic polity. For Kallen, Zionism was a “religious writer.” Kallen did call secularism “the both a functionalist psychologist and a philo- living Hebraism, the process of enabling Jews, as religion of religions,” vowing that he would “bet my sophical pragmatist, two approaches that focused a historical community, to become a nation in the life” on it. But who was demanding martyrdom for a on how individuals adapt to their environment. modern world. faith in secularism? Kaufman suggests that Kallen’s Kallen viewed identity as just such an adaptive ex- concept of secularism is “salvific” for democracy, perience, a dialogue between descent (what an in- but being a guardian and protector of democracy is dividual inherits) and consent (the freedom to ne- not the same as being its messiah. gotiate one’s environment). We experience descent, Comparing Kallen’s Why Religion? (1927) to Kallen wrote, as the “inward half” of our being, James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), comprising “‘methods of valuation,’ the group pat- Kaufman reads both Kallen and James as psycholo- ternings, the consuetudinous rhythms and symbols gists of religion, pursuing religious experience rath- of custom and speech that are [one’s] heritage, the er than dogma. But Kallen actually shows very little springs of [one’s] character”—all characteristics that interest in religious experience. In fact, he confesses could easily pass as an entirely cultural inheritance, that his only “religious” experience was under the were it not for his insistence that they are indelible influence of nitrous oxide and grudgingly concedes and inherited. “To me,” he later wrote to T. S. Eliot, that individuals in crisis tend to seek comfort in religion. Why Religion? is much more animated in “Jew,” “Irishman,” “Negro,” “Indian,” and so its discussion of the tyranny of religious leaders and on, signify nothing racial. Each word denotes institutions than it is about religious experience. He a singular configuration of beliefs, thoughts, could even turn on such a seemingly benign figure rites, rotes, works, and ways which have been as the Jewish Theological Seminary’s chancellor compounded into an ethos, that any individual Louis Finkelstein and accuse him, on account of his can enter by birth, by conversion, or by involvement in interfaith affairs, of making “a devil’s immigration and naturalization. No one is born pact with the Catholic Church.” By contrast, Wil- with an ethos. It is not an innate idea, but an liam James was clearly fascinated by the dozens of acquired one. It is to a group what personality A young Horace Kallen, photographed by testimonies he quotes by visionaries, stricken doubt- is to an individual—not an endowment but a Nicholas Ház. (Boston Public Library.) ers, saints, and converts. In short, a more stringent pattern of existence attained by learning and argument would be needed to characterize Kallen’s self-commitment. “religion of religions” as a serious engagement with allen’s most coherent articulation of Hebraic religious thought. If what mattered most to Kallen, as pragmatist Kvalues came in his lifelong obsession with But this lapse is a small matter in a book as valu- and psychologist, was culture, education, and ex- the figure of Job. Kaufman’s analysis of Kallen’s able as this one. Matthew Kaufman has given us a perience, why did he insist on racial inheritance? citations of the book of Job over half a century is revelatory, detailed account of a sorely neglected fig- Analyzing Kallen’s views in the context of racialist a highlight of his book. Kallen strongly identified ure in the history of American Jewish life. His Kallen discourse is enlightening, but it obscures Kallen’s with the book of Job’s anguished hero. When his is a man of contradictions: pragmatist and visionary, own strivings toward a “hyphenated” Jewish Ameri- play based on the biblical text was performed by iconoclast and true believer, encourager and scourge, can identity. To be the American Jew he needed to the Wisconsin Dramatic Society in 1913, he even deeply wise and, at times, foolish indeed. be—proud to embrace his Jewish heritage but radi- took on the leading role. Three years later, it was In an extraordinarily long and productive career, cally free to choose what and whether to believe— performed at Boston’s Jordan Hall, garnering a Horace Kallen’s most audacious act was to glimpse Kallen needed to define Jewishness as something favorable review in the Boston Globe, although a life for Jewish Americans beyond piety, beyond other than a religion. American Jews, he believed, Job—now played by a Harvard student—rushed his tolerance, and beyond pride in Jewish contributions needed to forge a modern Judaism, purged of chau- lines a bit. All the while, Kallen was eking out the and success. Why Kaufman has entitled his book vinism and freed from the illusion (inscribed in the audacious argument of The Book of Job as a Greek Horace Kallen Confronts America, as if Kallen some- Reform movement’s 1910 platform) that their reli- Tragedy (1918). In that book, he ventured that the how stood apart from America, is a bit mysterious, gion was a universal “light unto the nations.” Job author was a Jew who had seen a Euripidean since Kallen’s deepest desire was to wed America Kallen called his revisionary Judaism “Hebraism” tragedy and was inspired to compose a Hebraic to American Jews. On the evidence of Kaufman’s and traced it directly to the Hebrew Bible, especially tragedy of a suffering man who clings to his integ- book, when Horace Kallen confronts America, he the prophets, and on through the rich lifeways Jews rity in the face of an indifferent, inscrutable God. does so as a devoted, lifelong partner, “like a groom had sustained over the ages, in many parts of the According to Kallen, the playwright’s fellow coming forth from his chamber.” world. (Those who defined Jewishness in religious Jews, deeming the play blasphemous, interpolated terms only, he provocatively called “Judaists.”) And the voice out of the whirlwind (Job 38–41), the di- with Jews, as with any organism, phylogeny recapitu- vine voice that humbles and silences Job. Kallen, Esther Schor is the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor lated ontogeny: Just as Hebraism had descended from ever the provocateur, knew this would be read as a of American Jewish Studies and professor of English the Israelites, individual Jews bore within them indel- preposterous theory, but that was the point: Kallen at Princeton University. She is the author of Bridge ible vestiges of the Jewish past. Kallen’s insistence on wrote a preposterous literary history of an equally of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal biological inheritance was not only the ground for his preposterous theodicy. He identified with Job not Language (Metropolitan Books) and Emma Lazarus forward-looking identity; it also summoned Ameri- as a fellow sufferer (apart from occasional back (Schocken).

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 29 Our Man in Beirut

BY DAVID B. GREEN

riedman believes that both Israelis and non- nization, the universities and kibbutzim) were for Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth FIsraelis would understand the country better the most part of European birth or descent, and of Israel if they were more attuned to that part of the Jew- they deserve enormous credit, not only for those by Matti Friedman ish population that has its origins in the Islamic accomplishments, but for successfully taking Algonquin Books, 272 pp., $26.95 world. Certainly, it’s true that the culture, history, in and settling some 800,000 Eastern Jews vir- The Arab Section, suggests Friedman in one of the book’s nicer lines, “needed men idealistic enough to risk their lives ome of the most dramatic moments in Matti Friedman’s excellent new book about for free, but deceitful enough to make good spies.” the men of the Arab Section, an espio- nage unit that served Israel in the months values, and traditions of Mizrahi Jews were for too tually overnight when the latter were basically Simmediately before and after statehood, take long given short shrift, even as they became the expelled from their host countries. But it’s also place at the border. These immigrants, newly ar- majority of Israel’s Jewish population. The men true—and by now widely acknowledged—that rived from the collapsing Jewish communities of and women who founded the state and established the process of immigrant absorption showed little the Arab world, found themselves asked to turn its most important institutions (including the respect for or interest in the culture and traditions around and head back into what was now enemy Israel Defense Forces, the Histadrut labor orga- those Jews brought with them. They were mostly territory. Equipped with false identities, they were relegated wholesale to new settle- trained to gather intelligence and carry out occa- ments away from the center of sional missions of sabotage. Making the crossing, the country and were expected to often in the guise of a fleeing Palestinian refugee, adopt the majority culture. could be dangerous. “[O]ne slip, one second, and The Jews of North Africa and you were in a nightmare. There was no way back the Middle East came from a world through the gate. The only way out was forward, where respect and pride were into enemy territory.” pre-eminent values, and they But they could hardly let their guard down once were plunked down in a soci- they were living in countries that were at war with ety that had neither the time Israel from the day it was founded. Anything could nor the inclination to take pains set off the suspicion of their neighbors. Damascus- to avoid humiliating them. The born Gamliel Cohen had assumed the identity of a resentment that this treatment bred Palestinian named Yussef and ran a small candy shop is still with us today, as are many in Beirut. One day, he found himself questioned of the educational, economic, and by a nearby merchant: “You know what? . . . So far social gaps that could by now have we haven’t heard you say a word about your family. been overcome. Not a word.” Although the Arab Section “This was an innocent question, and also a gun played a foundational role in Israeli at Gamliel’s temple,” Friedman writes. But Cohen spycraft, its glory is, unsurprisingly, had an answer at the ready: “I’m miserable inside . . . Havakuk Cohen, trained as a radio operator at Morse headquarters, almost entirely unsung. Also called All I can tell you is that my whole family was killed, communicating with agents in Beirut. (Courtesy of the Palmach Archive.) the “Black” Section (“shachor,” in that no one is left, that I myself barely escaped and Hebrew), presumably because of am barely getting by. I have nothing else to say.” That the dark skin of most of its mem- shut the nosy neighbor up. But the danger was om- bers (its name that later morphed nipresent. The Arab Section, suggests Friedman, in into the “Dawn” Section, since one of the book’s nicer lines, “needed men idealis- “shachar,” the Hebrew word for tic enough to risk their lives for free, but deceitful “dawn,” sounds like “shachor” but is enough to make good spies.” less offensive), the unit took shape In another case, one of the spies elicited suspi- within the Palmach, which, to this cion in a Beirut boarding house because he cleaned day, is remembered as the quint- himself in the toilet not with water but with paper, essential icon of the seemingly in- “a habit that was Western and middle class,” lead- vincible Ashkenazi elite that led ing another resident to speculate aloud that he was Israel and its military in their first a Jewish spy (and leading him to immediately seek decades. out other living arrangements). Shimon Somech, Friedman makes his story com- the Baghdad-born trainer of the Arab Section, de- pelling by focusing on the lives of scribed the ideal recruit to his unit as “a talented four members of the section. Gam- actor playing the part twenty-four hours a day, a liel Cohen (nom de guerre “Yussef”) role that comes at a cost of constant mental ten- grew up in Damascus and was sent sion, and which is nerve-racking to the point of Isaac Shoshan (foreground) and Havakuk Cohen in Lebanon, ca. to serve the state-in-the-making in insanity.” 1949. (Courtesy of Isaac Shoshan.) Beirut in early 1948. There he was

30 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 joined by Isaac Shoshan (“Abdul Karim”), an Aleppo in the anti-Jewish riots of 1947. Friedman makes that if Israel had paid more attention to the people native; Havakuk Cohen (“Ibrahim”), from Yemen; a strong case that the missing leaves were stolen of the Arab Section—and to its Mizrahi Jews in and eventually by the Jerusalem-born Yakuba Co- by the then-director of the Ben-Zvi Institute, general—it would have understood this, since they hen, aka “Jamil.” (None of the Cohens were related.) which had been entrusted with its preservation. A had had a presence in the region since before the All of these men were “mista’arvim,” a Hebrew restrained, often ironic writer, Friedman por- dawn of Islam, in the 7th century. word meaning “Ones Who Become Like Arabs.” trayed an Ashkenazi Zionist establishment that You will be familiar with the concept if you’ve seen not only felt entitled to deceive the Aleppo com- The Jews who came to Israel from the Islamic episodes of Fauda, the hit Israeli TV series about munity, whose rabbis it viewed as primitive, into world brought a deep distrust of that world; an contemporary warriors who impersonate Arabs giving up its most cherished possession, but was appreciation of the importance of religion, which in order to infiltrate Palestinian terror groups. then unwilling to acknowledge or investigate the Westerners often don’t understand; and the But Gamliel, Isaac, Havakuk, and Yakuba lacked theft carried out by one of its own. knowledge that nothing good befalls the weak. the backup or technological support that Fauda’s In his 2016 book, Pumpkinflowers, about heroes can rely on. They had only their wits and the small IDF outpost in Israel’s self-declared Elsewhere, he writes that “the belief that eventually their native knowledge of Arabic to help them “security zone” in southern Lebanon where Fried- the Arab world would make peace with a Jewish maintain their subterfuge. man served as an infantryman shortly before state as the world moved toward greater amity” was They also understood that if they were caught, Israel’s final pull-out from Lebanon in 2000, he an idea from Europe, and today it’s dead. there was little their country It’s not that the mista’arvim, or Eastern Jews would be able to do for them. in general, hated Arabs. Gamliel Cohen, for ex- In fact, initially, “They had no ample, commented, late in his life, that, “Hatred is country”—hence the book’s ti- between nations, not people . . . so when some- tle— since “in early 1948, Israel one talks about ‘the Arabs,’ I always say that among was a wish, not a fact. If they them are people who are kind and good—I haven’t disappeared, they’d be gone.” found friendship among Jews as much as I’ve found Yakuba Cohen had a habit among Arabs.” At the same time, Gamliel could of attending public hangings not forget a scene he witnessed in the train station during his time in Beirut, be- of Tulkarm (in today’s West Bank), even before Is- cause he “thought one day it rael’s establishment. A nationalist leader had been would be him standing there, allowed by the British to return to his hometown and he wanted to know how it from exile. There he was greeted by a crowd crying, would feel.” He later described “Nahna nedbah el-yahud! We’ll slaughter the Jews!” how he pictured himself shout- It was a scene that, Gamliel told an interviewer in ing out, “Long live the State of the 1990s, “affects me to this day . . . [Extremists] Israel,” in Hebrew, before the live on a completely different level . . . They read gallows plank was removed their religion in completely different letters.” below him, until he realized Friedman may read more political, historical, that acknowledging his real David “Dahud” Mizrahi and Ezra Afgin of the Arab Section after being and strategic significance into the experiences and identity, even in death, would caught by the Egyptian army in Gaza. (Courtesy of the Palmach Archive.) reflections of his old Mizrahi spies than they can only endanger his colleagues. sustain, but he is undoubtedly correct that their Instead, he resolved, “I’ll keep quiet and they’ll writes about the folly of the type of wishful thinking stories are an unjustly forgotten—and fascinating— bury me like a dog.” that imagined Israel as poised on the brink of an era aspect of Israel’s founding. His deeply researched The legend that many still tell themselves about of peace. The country, he writes, was entering a new book is not only enjoyable but groundbreaking. Israel, writes the author, is that “people like our four era, but it was one “in which conflict surges, shifts, spies came from the Islamic world and joined the or fades but doesn’t end, in which the most you can story of the Jews of Europe. But what happened hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, David B. Green is a writer and editor at Ha’aretz was much closer to the opposite. The Palmach, a but only to remain safe as long as possible.” Now, English Edition. brash militia animated by the revolutionary en- in Spies of No Country, Friedman suggests outright ergy of mid-20th-century Europe, is famous as one of the country’s founding myths. The Arab Sec- tion, a tiny outfit of Middle Eastern Jews cautiously traversing their own dangerous region, isn’t famous. Subscribe now and get our Passover ebook free! But the Palmach explains little about Israel now. The Arab Section explains a lot.” The importance of the Mizrahi experience for a true understanding of Israel and its place with selections by in the modern Middle East has been a concern of Friedman’s since his first book, The Aleppo Marc Michael Epstein • Hillel Halkin Codex (2012). There he told the story of the epon- ymous 10th-century copy of the Hebrew Bible, the Yehudah Mirsky • Vanessa L. Ochs most authoritative version of the Masoretic text Abraham Socher • David Stern • and More! known to exist. Friedman described the journey of the book from its creation in Tiberias to its transfer to Cairo after the Crusader conquest of To subscribe, visit us at the Holy Land in 1099, and eventually its move to www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/pesach Aleppo, whose ancient Jewish community guard- ed it from the 15th century until 1958, when or call 1-877-753-0337 it was smuggled into Israel for safekeeping. During its final journey, or more precisely, probably just after its arrival in Jerusalem, more than half of its pages disappeared, a disappearance that JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS was retrospectively blamed on marauding Syrians

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 31 All or Nothing?

BY AMY NEWMAN SMITH

own well-publicized background as a yeshiva stu- head simply in order to survive. I’ve been kaddish.com dent who turned away from Orthodoxy. It is simi- using the phrase “bifurcated brain” for this; by Nathan Englander larly impossible not to contrast the tenderness with by which I mean a person’s ability to believe Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pp., $24.95 which Englander draws his Orthodox characters something and its contrary at the same time. in the present novel with the pointedly harsh judg- When I think back on the short stories that ments of Orthodox characters in the stories that have had a profound impact on me—whether made him famous, from the hypocritical Rabbi it’s Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Baum of “Reunion” to the lying, grasping Ruchama Jews,” or “Goodbye and Good Luck” by Grace f you picked an Orthodox person off the streets of “The Wig” in his debut story collection, For the Paley or “The Story of My Dovecot” by Isaac of Lakewood or Monsey to describe the life of Relief of Unbearable Urges. In this new book, the Babel—they all leave me with a sense of those someone who has gone religiously astray, or conflicting realities being challenged. “off the derech,” they might describe the life of ILarry, the flawed protagonist of Nathan Englander’s In kaddish.com, Englander creates his own conflict- latest novel, kaddish.com, though perhaps not in de- ing realities. How, for example, are we to experience tail. The more sheltered would be unlikely to imag- Dina’s heartbreaking plea that her brother be the ine “the everyday depravities filling the alternate one to say Kaddish? reality that ate more and more of sad Larry’s time.” Counting the ways in which he has suffered during “You don’t have to be religious,” his sister the shiva week for his father, Larry lists his foregone says. “You don’t have to believe. You can fleeting pleasures, congratulating himself for going think nothing and feel nothing and eat your almost a week, almost, without pornography. cheeseburgers every meal.” . . . “But you can’t skip a minyan. Not once. Not ever. It’s what our For nearly a week, despite his small rebellions, he’s father expects—what he expects right now smoked neither cigarette nor joint, he hasn’t had a from Olam HaBa. Because it’s that alone, what stiff drink (or three), he hasn’t once sunk into the you do, what you say, that sets for our father living-room couch to binge eat and binge watch, the best conditions in the World to Come.” gorging on junk (visual and edible) until the stomach acid burned and his brain conked out. Nathan Englander at the Venice Literary How can these prayers mean so much to her, and Festival, 2011. (Photo by Marco Secchi/Corbis how can they possibly mean anything to God, if Englander, whose earlier novels and short story via Getty Images.) she knows Larry will recite them resentfully as a collections established him as a creator of sharply litany of meaningless syllables? And how are we to drawn characters, has created in this protagonist both Orthodox characters are, while flawed in ordinary reconcile the real and recognizable kindness and a cranky, curmudgeonly nebbish and a flat social type. human ways, patient, understanding people. warmth of the Orthodox world Englander evokes Engrossed in his own loss, Larry is unwilling to under- To reduce kaddish.com to a middle-aged Eng- with the violent and callous yeshiva rebbe who hit take the commitment to say Kaddish for his father, a lander working out his own issues with Judaism young Larry so hard for not being able to answer a demand made clear to him by his still-frum sister Dina. and coming to a mature accommodation would be question that he was left with a permanent scar? This is 1999, in the midst of the first dot-com bubble, too easy, but it is difficult for a reader to ignore the And how, finally, are we to understand Larry/ so Larry searches out kaddish.com, a website where breadcrumbs. Here is Reb Shuli talking to a student Shuli himself? If Englander is right that human sur- Jews without the inclination to pray three times a day, who is testing the limits of observance: vival is predicated on not choosing but on holding seven days a week, for the elevation of the souls of their open the possibility that two opposites are true, then departed, can, for a fee, enlist those who would pray “Because with rebellion, it can also be a way to perhaps a selfish porn addict indifferent to his only with regularity in any case, “like a JDate for the dead.” acknowledge the importance of the thing we sister’s grief can become a loving family man, a caring With the web form completed and the duty rebel against.” Reb Shuli stops himself there, but teacher who deals sensitively with his students’ trans- discharged, kaddish.com jumps to the present day, Gavriel doesn’t respond. gressions, large and small. And perhaps this upright where Larry has returned to the fold, transformed “What I’m trying to say is, sometimes the model of Jewish propriety can, when the plot propels from “sad Larry” to pious Shuli, “a seventh-grade rejection is a way to let people know that the him from his yeshiva to sleeping rough on the streets Gemara teacher at the very yeshiva where he had thing we reject truly matters. It is its own kind of Jerusalem in an attempt to finally fulfill his obliga- gone,” living in Brooklyn, married to Miri, father to of faith, even if it’s the opposite of faith.” tion to his father, still be so impulsive that he threat- a boy and a girl born just a year apart. He is now so ens the life he has built. As far as Shuli has traveled, he frum that he requires the secretary of the school to In pitting secularism against religiosity as all-or- is still, to some extent, “sad Larry,” wearing different print out emails from parents and type his replies nothing propositions and in dividing the book so clothes, pursuing different goals, but still chafing at for him; he does not allow himself temptations of sharply into two sections, Englander administers imposed obligations, still tending toward excessive modernity, not even a flip phone. The transforma- what he has often called a fictional Rorschach test, monomania, and still willing to upend the life of oth- tion—again a story of an easily recognizable type— and perhaps readers who are further than I am from ers to pursue his own obsessive desires. is seen only in hindsight, as Shuli tells his story of the streets of Lakewood will read it differently. But kaddish.com is a small novel, easily read, but “coming home” both to inspire those who might be he has also said that as a reader, he himself revels Englander has nested inside it questions within poised to make a similar move as well as to prove to in contradiction. As he told Ted Hodgkinson in an questions and opposites within opposites. the faithful the rightness of their choices. interview for Granta:

s Englander no doubt knows, it is impossible It fascinates me how an individual has to Amy Newman Smith is the managing editor of the Ato read kaddish.com without thinking of his hold so many opposing realities in his or her Jewish Review of Books.

32 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 READINGS Lessons of the Soviet Jewish Exodus

BY ELLIOTT ABRAMS

etween the late 1960s and the fall of the greatest of which were the courage and determina- from the 1940s, when Jews played a smaller role Soviet Union in 1991, nearly two mil- tion of Soviet Jews. But recognizing that they (or on the American political stage and were, in many lion Jews left Russia, Ukraine, and other their parents) had failed to protest effectively—or cases, hesitant to use what power they did have. parts of the Soviet Empire. Their heroic enough—for their European brethren during the When discrimination against Soviet Jews became struggleB for the right to worship, to learn Hebrew, Shoah, American Jews were determined to be or- known, American Jews had more power and were and to emigrate enlisted the support of diaspora ganized, loud, and resourceful in aiding the newest willing to use it, as they had used it in support of Jewish communities around the globe, especially victims of systemic governmental anti-Semitism. the nascent State of Israel. Their numbers now in- in the United States. American Jews supported So- viet Jewry’s fight in many ways: from writing and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko asked President Carter: calling individual “refuseniks,” remembering those imprisoned at Passover Seders, and “twinning” their “Who is Sharansky?”—and that ended the matter. But after children’s bar and bat mitzvahs with those of Soviet Jewish children who could not celebrate them, to leaving, Gromyko asked Dobrynin: “Who really is Sharansky?” mass rallies, protests at Soviet embassies, lobbying Congress and the administration, and actually trav- While many parties can claim a part in the freeing cluded political donors and elected officials, and eling to Russia to meet refuseniks and express their of Soviet Jewry, American Jews surely played a large they had the ear of people who counted. As Yossi solidarity. In the 1970s and 80s it seemed as if every role. It is not only a heroic story but an extraordi- Klein Halevi wrote of the passage of the Jackson- synagogue in America had a huge poster outside of nary historical episode worthy of close analysis. Vanik Amendment, “For American Jews, it was it demanding freedom for Soviet Jewry. a stunning example of their capacity to influence But just as there is a myth that all international politics on behalf of their people—a Americans were united in the final powerful reversal of the failures of the Holocaust.” struggle against communism and the So- Good arguments are critical, but there is no substi- viet Union, there is a myth about the So- tute for power and the willingness to use it. viet Jewish exodus. The myth is that the Political power in America is one thing, but how American Jewish community was united did American Jews leverage their own country’s pow- from start to finish and that the power of er to affect the internal affairs of the USSR, a great this unity liberated Soviet Jews. There is power itself and an enemy of the United States? Here much to celebrate in American Jewish ac- our students would learn about how to turn good in- tivism in those decades, but the full story tentions into effective foreign policy. It is very clear is more complex. that demonstrations and speeches in the United The plight of Soviet Jewry first came States did not move the USSR. What moved it was into focus for American Jews in the 1960s. that persecution of Soviet Jews became very expen- In 1963, the Cleveland Council on Soviet sive. As Sharansky himself has made clear, it was Anti-Semitism was formed. In 1966 Elie Senator Jackson, more than anyone else, who applied Wiesel’s The Jews of Silence: A Personal Re- the pressure: port on Soviet Jewry, based on articles he wrote as a reporter for Ha’aretz, was pub- The contribution of Senator Jackson was in the lished in America and became a surprise fact that he was the first who made the direct bestseller. Thirty-two local groups formed linkage between freedom of emigration and very the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews important economic interest[s] of the Soviet (UCSJ) in 1970, and the first World Con- Union. And he did so against all the political ference on Soviet Jewry was held one year thought in the United States of America and later, the same year the National Confer- in the free world. Many of those people were ence on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) was formed. Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky speaks at the Freedom Sunday saying, “It is our interest to have more trade rally, December 6, 1987, Washington, D.C. (Photo by Jacques In October 1972, Senator Henry M. with the Soviet Union, and when there is more Langevin/Sygma via Getty Images.) “Scoop” Jackson first proposed linking trade there is less war.” And we, Soviet Jews, trade benefits for the Soviet Union with knew that our only hope to be released was that freedom of emigration; the Jackson-Vanik Amend- Yet there seems to be very little of such analy- the interests of the Soviet Union, economic and ment became law in 1975. Anatoly (Natan) Sharan- sis, at least at the academic level. I recently looked otherwise, would be so closely linked to our fate sky was arrested in March 1977 and arrived in Israel at the course offerings of Jewish studies programs in that the Soviet Union would have no choice. only after serving nine years in the Gulag. By Decem- 20 leading American colleges and universities and Senator Jackson was the first to understand the ber 1987, American Jewish support for Soviet Jewry found not a single course about the Soviet Jewry power of this linkage. was high enough to mobilize 250,000 people for the movement. The story of Soviet Jewry and American Freedom Sunday march and rally. As (and after) the Jewry’s mobilization to help save it is in danger of The Soviets gave ground on banning Jewish emi- Soviet Union collapsed, a million Jews moved to Isra- being forgotten. gration when those limitations appeared to cost them el from Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the former more than they were worth. Governments violate hu- Soviet Empire. In addition, another million went to ere Jewish studies programs to focus on the man rights because they think it is in their interest Canada, Germany, and the United States. WSoviet Jewry movement in the United States, to do so. Lecturing them is appropriate, but it will It goes too far to say that American Jewish what would they find? First, the students would not force change. Jews have understood this for a activism achieved this; there were other factors, the see that the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were very different very long time. After the Kishinev massacre of 1903,

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 33 Jewish financiers in New York City, led by Jacob Dobrynin, Gromyko asked the president: quently not very keen on Sharansky, who was the Schiff, prevented the Russian Empire from getting “Who is Sharansky?”—and that ended the bridge between the two movements. critical Wall Street loans during the Russo-Japanese matter. But in the car after leaving, Gromyko Sharansky had a clear view that the two move- War to pressure the tsar to stop the persecution of asked Dobrynin: “Who really is Sharansky? ments could strengthen each other, as did the lead- Jews or to punish him for failing to do so. Instead Tell me more about him.” Dobrynin did so er of the Soviet human rights movement, the great they sold Japanese war bonds; it has been estimated and discovered that Gromyko had previously physicist (and father of the Soviet atomic bomb) that this supplied half the cost of the war to Japan. instructed his aides not to bother him with such Andrei Sakharov. At a key moment in the struggle It is absolutely true that the Soviet Jewry move- “absurd” matters. over the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, when many in ment was on the side of the angels, and that helps Congress and even some leaders in explain its very broad support in the United States. the Jewish community were waver- But that isn’t what the Soviet regime was worried ing, Sakharov wrote an open letter about; trade, loans, and money were. As the then to Congress. Kissinger and Nixon head of the American Israel Public Affairs Com- were arguing that détente and world mittee (AIPAC) Morris Amitay put it, “If they want peace were simply more important trade and technology from us, let them pay for it in than the fate of Soviet Jews. Privately, what we want to get from them—persecuted Jews.” Kissinger told Nixon, “I’m Jewish The Soviet Jewry movement achieved the delicate myself, but who are we to com- balance between ethical principles and hardball poli- plain about Soviet Jews? It’s none of tics in part by focusing more on individuals than on our business.” Far worse, in a 1973 abstract arguments about human rights. As Douglas conversation with Nixon after the Kahn wrote in A Second Exodus: White House visit of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, Kissinger said, [T]here was a clear recognition that it would be “The emigration of Jews from the easier to engage American Jewish activists—and Soviet Union is not an objective to press the Soviet government—by focusing of American foreign policy. And if on individual cases. Even when there were they put Jews into gas chambers in more than twenty thousand refusenik families, President Jimmy Carter meets with Soviet foreign minister Andrei the Soviet Union, it is not an Ameri- the thrust of advocacy was on a personalized Gromyko at the White House, September 23, 1977. (UPI Photo/Frank can concern. Maybe a humanitarian approach. Cancellare/Files.) concern.” To be fair, this was more than just moral indifference. Nixon Names like Anatoly Sharansky, Ida Nudel, Yuli To Soviet officials the individual cases of Jewish and Kissinger argued that world peace and détente Edelstein, and Vladimir Slepak became watch- refuseniks were “absurd,” but calls to change the en- could not be undermined on behalf of Soviet Jew- words in the American Jewish community. Many tire Soviet system by respecting human rights were ry. Nixon’s response to that last quoted Kissinger American Jews wore bracelets inscribed with these dangerous. This also created a conundrum for the So- remark about the Soviet treatment of Jews was, “I names. The abstract goals of emigration and of viet Jewish movement: Were they a part of the Soviet know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.” Jewish rights became flesh and blood. This orga- human rights movement or a separate Jewish move- This argument had some support among influ- nizing tactic mystified the Soviets. In his recent ment with overlapping demands? To put it most ential Jews. Nahum Goldmann, the longtime head memoir, Stuart Eizenstat says that when Soviet for- pointedly, was the human rights movement an ally or of the World Jewish Congress, said at the time, eign minister Andrei Gromyko came to see Presi- a threat to the far narrower demands of Soviet Jewry? “Jews make a big mistake by treating the U.S.S.R. dent Carter in 1977, Carter confronted him with as if it were some minor country. Jews have no the Sharansky case. hese questions were at the heart of the battle in sense of proportion.” But Nixon-Kissinger realpo- Tthe Soviet Jewry movement over the “narrow litik was defeated by more powerful arguments, [A]s Carter recalled it, Gromyko dismissed or broad” issue: Was the goal respect for human and the most powerful were often made by Soviet Sharansky as “a microscopic dot” of no rights in the USSR, or was it just to get the Jews dissidents. Here is what Sakharov wrote to Congress importance to anyone. According to [Soviet out? And might one goal undermine the other? in support of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment: ambassador to the United States Anatoly] The Israeli government thought so and was conse- The amendment does not represent interference in the internal affairs of socialist countries, but simply a defense of international law, without which there can be no mutual trust. Adoption JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS of the amendment therefore cannot be a threat to Soviet-American relations. All the more, it would not imperil international détente. . . . The abandonment of a policy of principle would be Join Jack Wertheimer a betrayal of the thousands of Jews and non- Jews who want to emigrate, of the hundreds in as he discusses camps and mental hospitals, of the victims of the Berlin Wall. It would be tantamount to total The New American Judaism capitulation of democratic principles in the face of blackmail, deceit and violence.

Sunday, May 19, 2019 Sakharov was arguing that action on human Museum of Jewish Heritage rights was the only way to create a decent Russian regime with which the West could be at peace. This was New York City a debate about whether human rights could have a serious role in the Hobbesian world of international politics. As Sakharov saw, the first problem with realpolitik as a theory of international relations is that it www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/event takes states as black boxes. It is uninterested in their internal affairs. But people live in those states, and

34 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 they act—for example, they risk their lives and their and used all the power they had to save and free fellow freedom to have the right to learn Hebrew or to emi- Jews. What they could not do was work in unity. One grate to Israel. This is a key lesson of the Soviet Jewry might suppose that this would have been a great weak- Does Washington have movement, a reminder never to see Iran or China or ness of the movement, but history shows otherwise. any place else as if the only actual entity is a govern- There is, as we have noted, a widespread notion ment, a regime, or a dictator and not also a nation that the American Jewish community was entirely a Middle East strategy? consisting of millions of people. united behind this cause, left to right, all denomi- The second problem with realpolitik is that it nations, all organizations. Many wish that we could isn’t very realistic. It excludes the domain of indi- attain that kind of unity today, about Israel or any- vidual, principled, passionate action or sees such thing else. But that unity is a myth. The UCSJ and Why doesn’t the Bible NCSJ, for instance, were often at each other’s throats. In his history of the movement, Stuart Altshul- prohibit slavery? er writes that

petty turf battles, territorial disputes, character Who is the matchless assassinations, and threats coming from National Conference leaders about the master of modern Union of Councils burdened the movement overall Hebrew literature? and prevented necessary cooperation at critical times.

There were disagreements about particularism versus universalism, the role of Israel, activism versus old-fashioned shtad- lanut (go to the streets or go see Kissinger?), and the role of the Russian immigrants arrive in Israel in the early 1990s. Strong major community organizations as international condemnations caused the Soviet authorities to increase opposed to the newer single-issue the emigration quota. (Photo by Moshe Shai/Flash90.) groups such as the UCSJ. Unity would have been a strait- actions and movements merely as obstacles to the jacket. As things were, some people met with Kiss- smooth working of interstate relations. But such inger, while others denounced him as a traitor. Some relations are a means, not an end. It was never worth organizations, like the UCSJ, had only one issue, sacrificing the freedom of Soviet Jews or the Ameri- while the major Jewish organizations had to worry can commitment to human rights to smooth rela- about many interests, including relations with the tions with a hostile power. Freedom was more valu- government of Israel, major donors, and the U.S. gov- able—not only as an abstraction, and not only in its ernment. The major Jewish organizations also had to Questions impact on the lives of refuseniks and their families, get along with each other; they had a past and a future but in strategic terms. It helped bring about the col- together. So, the best outcome may well have been are out there. lapse of the United States’ greatest enemy. Thus, the what David Harris of the American Jewish Commit- Soviet Jewry movement, and later Ronald Reagan’s tee (who was back then Morris Abram’s deputy at confrontation with the Soviet Union, proved that the NCSJ) has described as a balagan. That’s Russian a freedom strategy was in the end more realistic as (and now Israeli Hebrew) for “a mess”; another good a matter of international politics. The Soviet Jewry word is “pluralism.” The existence of many different movement weakened America’s principal enemy perspectives was probably a secret of the movement’s where détente had strengthened it. success. What was necessary was activism, not unity.

hatever the Soviet Jewry movement achieved merican Jews relearned in the Soviet Jew- Win the Soviet Union, it also had a significant Ary movement what Jews had learned in the impact here in the United States. Yossi Klein Ha- 19th century and even the 18th: to think of Jewish levi, who was a teenage activist for Soviet Jewry interests in terms of American values. In its debate as part of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, with Nixon and Kissinger, the movement was quite wrote that “saving Soviet Jewry meant retrieving correct in arguing its case in terms of American not only the last great Jewry of Eastern Europe interests and principles—exactly as Jackson did but also the lost honor of American Jewry . . . The in his amendment, whose text said nothing about group’s slogans, which focused on our determina- Jews but instead backed freedom of emigration as a tion not to repeat the Holocaust-era sin of silence, basic human right. spoke precisely to my need: ‘This Time We Won’t Thus, the Soviet Jewry movement in the United Be Silent’; ‘I Am My Brother’s Keeper.’” Halevi States rightly presented itself not as struggling for added that “American Jews came to see themselves Jewish rights but as working for human rights of the as a major force for Jewish freedom and security sort all Americans believe in. The “narrow or broad” . . . In its struggle for the freedom of Soviet Jews, debate was a serious one for Soviet Jews: Should American Jewry liberated itself as well.” they seek the right of Jews to emigrate or all the hu- That’s a large claim and hard to prove. Suffice it to man rights that were guaranteed by the UN’s Uni- say that millions of American Jews worked together versal Declaration of Human Rights, the Helsinki

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 35 Accords, and even the Soviet constitution? But for was supposed to follow in a few months, but, after organizations should act like Jewish organizations, American Jews this wasn’t a hard question. a series of arrests, he was tried in 1977 for treason including creating balagans. What was far more difficult was dealing with the and sentenced to 13 years in the Gulag. Sharansky Here the lesson for our students is that officials complex role the state of Israel played in this entire was the key middleman between the Soviet hu- and experts do not know everything and too often drama. Israel pressed very hard not for the general man rights and Jewish emigration movements, the do not have enough skin in the game. The UCSJ right to emigrate but for the right to emigrate to personification of the linkage that Israel feared always listened first to Soviet Jewish activists, not Israel, while most American groups believed in the would both slow emigration and make Soviet other American Jewish organizations or politicians absolute right to select one’s own destination. From rulers furious at the Jewish state. When Sharansky and diplomats. The Israeli government had its own the Zionist perspective, Jews who fled the USSR was sent off to Siberia, his young wife (now called ideas; the Russian Jews knew better. were not stateless “refugees”; they were Jews being Avital) was advised by some Israeli officials to di- Too many officials in Washington and Jerusalem repatriated to their homeland. There were other vorce him and find someone new in Israel. No doubt, thought quiet diplomacy would work better than Israeli state interests at stake as well. As Sharansky they thought they were advancing national interests, confronting the USSR. They were wrong, and put it, “Israeli leaders, and [the] Israeli establish- but they had it all wrong: Support for Sharansky was Sharansky was right. At its best, the American Jew- ment, were afraid to irritate the Soviet Union, and obviously Israel’s most realistic path. In 1986, he was ish movement to free Soviet Jewry backed amazingly were afraid of public pressure coming from Israel.” freed from prison and reunited with his wife. A few courageous Soviet citizens who had to set the pace As well they might have been: Israel was a tiny, years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated. and make the most of the key decisions. The Ameri- endangered state facing a hostile superpower. A complementary point should be made from can Jewish role was crucial, but it achieved the most In short, the Jewish state is a state, has state inter- the perspective of the individual. States may act like when it backed the goals and strategies of Soviet Jews. ests, and pursues those interests, which do not per- states, but individuals are not states and need not, It isn’t surprising that the Soviet Jewry movement fectly align with the interests of any other state or often should not, act like them. Sharansky himself gets a great deal less attention than the Holocaust, with those of Jews living in the diaspora. We should made a related point shortly after arriving in Israel: but it is striking that it gets almost none at all. There not then be shocked when it pursues those interests. are important lessons to be learned about politics, That’s not a crisis, nor is it a disappointment or a [F]or us Jews there is no choice but to policy, and Jewish history from taking a close look sign that something is wrong with Israeli foreign undertake an open campaign and maintain at the 30-year struggle to free Soviet Jewry. The story policy. That is the kind of realism in foreign policy open pressure on behalf of Soviet Jews. While should be remembered, understood, and retold. that we should understand. States will inevitably President Reagan can use quiet diplomacy, pursue state interests, but those interests must still American Jews should not take this approach. be cogently defined. Elliott Abrams served in foreign policy positions for One story illuminates the difference between This was the error Kissinger made, or part of it: Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and was cold state interests badly conceived and private He seemed to think that because diplomacy might recently appointed Special Representative for Venezuela morality. On July 4, 1974, Sharansky married work for him it was therefore also the way the Jew- in the State Department. His most recent book is Realism Natalia Stieglitz, and the following day she left for ish community should act. That’s wrong. Govern- and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Israel because her exit visa was about to run out. He ments should act like governments, and Jewish Arab Spring (Cambridge University Press).

36 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 Nobody Expects

BY JOHN J. CLAYTON

ere’s what I thought was in store for year or—God forbid—ten years, I’ll be an observer. ble along—it’s striving just to get myself up in the me as I grew old: I’d stay clear, strong, Standing far outside, above the living world. Not morning. I’m no ghost. To pray morning prayers is and energized through my eight- hiding away in shame. I’ll still visit my children, I’ll a struggle. I strap on tefillin and mumble words of ies, keep writing stories, and then I’d still eat—though ghosts don’t eat so very much— gratitude and awe and try to feel connected with the Hslow down and my heart would begin to give out, still cook with pleasure, still read books, though not One. But fatigue fills me. I’ve always believed that a stammering motor catching, stumbling, dim- so fluently; maybe even write stories, as I’ve done all you find your deepest life not by getting rid of diffi- ming—sunlight blocked by cloud—and there’d my life, though now with more difficulty than I’ve culties, not by asking everything to go smoothly, but be a time when I’d say goodbye, goodbye to wife ever faced. But secretly, inwardly, I’ll be separate, by sailing your hardship through difficult seas. The and children and friends, and then rational con- taking in the world without acting in it. seas will change you, will make you a sailor. And sciousness would slip away, I’d fade into oblivion It’s foolish to strive. Saul Bellow’s Augie March now? And now? or, better, be enfolded into radiance, the radiance tells us, When striving stops, the truth comes as I mug at myself in a mirror, recite Monty Python’s that emanates through all the worlds, and I, barely a gift. A ghost’s truth: nothing at stake. I offer no old gag in which a character complains at being I anymore, would feel the diffusion of my individ- resistance, claim nothing, take no solid position, let questioned, saying, “I didn’t expect a kind of Span- ual light as it spread and spread. the food fall off my fork. I cope on my own. Ghosts ish Inquisition.” In bursts Michael Palin in 16th- But no, it turns out, no, that’s not what’s in store. don’t join together for mutual support. My whole century red cape, and sneers, “Nobody expects the For in my early eighties, Parkinson’s disease has set- adult life I’ve been firm; if anything, too firm. Now Spanish Inquisition.” tled on me, a vulture. It followed upon a terrible case of shingles. There’s no cure. This is the beginning. The very morning my first prayer,Modeh ani, Parkinson’s won’t kill me—I keep getting told this, as Eoffers thanks to God for awakening my if it should comfort me. It won’t kill me—but it has soul once again; great is your faithfulness. already submerged my life. I shake, I tremble. I Awakening my body out of the dark of sleep, have a hard time swallowing. So, I drool. Have awakening my spirit to the things of this begun to stumble. Ah, but that’s the least of it. Worse, world, things that, seen in a holy light, be- I become exhausted, wake exhausted, nap often. I’m come holy. usually half-asleep. If I take a pill, I can obtain an I can walk, thank God. Every long stride hour of writing—slow, muddy writing on my laptop. feels like a victory. And I can see, I can hear. And maybe still worse, when I speak But more easily I focus on the damage; grati- with friends or in a group—a book group, a tude is something I have to manufacture—it political group—it often feels as if my brain is doesn’t come without effort. Is this gratitude under water. Everything slows, slows. I reach for an a way of deceiving myself, a way of pretend- idea like a stutterer reaching for a word, struggling ing to compensate for what’s lost, broken, and to enunciate a word, but it has disappeared. My irreparable? There are ways of holding back mind feels sluggish, thick, yet empty, blank. There’s the growth of symptoms: exercises for devel- silence in the room. The group, uncomfortable but oping balance and strength. And what about wanting to help, waits, kindly giving me time. I can the pills? They work a little—until they don’t. feel their encouragement. I finally come up with There’s no way I can fight my way back to clar- a reduced version of my idea, lacking specifics, John J. Clayton, 2014. (Photo by Laura Clayton Baker.) ity of mind and full wakefulness. The more I spoken in a guttural croaking. A frog speaks. fight, the less good I’ll take from this. Any vic- All my adult life I’ve had the ability to manipulate tory of spirit has to come from not whining categories, play with the nuances of texts. Now I’m I’m permeable. Nothing to battle against; no expec- and not struggling. afraid, and with good reason, that I’ll have nothing to tation of a miracle cure. If you’re lucky it gets worse I am an old man, wanting to stay comfortable till say. If I write down an idea, I’m able to read it aloud more slowly. I die. Yet knowing that unless I give myself up to the and speak with the old intelligence. But I forget the I exercise hard, I stretch. I take time to notice unknown, I might as well die right now. How am I names of scholars, the titles of books or films. My and to love—maybe because as a ghost I don’t put going to make use of this time? That’s not the right analytical abilities, my understanding, remain. For myself in the way. I love more, not less. My love question. To say “make use of” is to think you’re in now. But I’ve become unsure about everything. Have surprises me. I sleep badly and there are mornings control; I need to relinquish control. I been punished because I’ve often been intellectually when I groan. By noon I’m usually in the mode of arrogant? Paid back for being a fool? I don’t believe ghostly acceptance. was riding the trolley—a streetcar we called the world works that way—that God works that way. I don’t expect a lot; my friends and family don’t Iit—down Broadway, Upper West Side, from But who knows how the world works? How God expect a lot from me. I wonder if they see the love, my classes at Columbia College, riding the old works? “And though worms destroy this body, yet in for my face has stiffened, I’m told, into a “mask,” the Broadway trolley—so you can imagine how long my flesh shall I see God”—what can that mean? My frozen face of Parkinson’s. I never expected to have ago this was, the 1950s, when there were still trol- body is already being destroyed. a frozen face. With effort, I can smile fully, with eyes leys in Manhattan. Rocking cross street to cross But early one morning, I stop in the middle of and cheeks and mouth. But to do so feels dishonest, street, it jingled to warn cars crossing the tracks. I morning prayers, and, in a moment of insight—or mugging for a camera. remember a sunny day. Afternoon sun going perhaps its opposite, delusion—decide that, in a A ghost? But please!—who do I think I’m kid- down over the other side of the Hudson slanted on sense, I’m in a place I’ve never heard anyone de- ding? Some ghost! Do ghosts drool? Oh, I’d like to every block between the buildings. I sat on the scribe: both alive and not alive. Like a kind of ghost, talk myself into seeing my disease not as deteriora- hard rattan seat looking down at my book as we I can look from a distance upon my children, my tion but as an opportunity for spiritual growth. But jogged along. wife, our friends—and love those I look upon. For a isn’t it self-deception to pretend I’m lucky to stum- I wasn’t paying attention. What I tell you about

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 37 the sun or about the stiff rattan seats is true, but matter. As if words could change things. I sigh: I three legs, maybe one lost to a truck? He may have frankly, I have to reconstruct it after the fact. I was watch my fingers shake. Oy! That oy of Yiddishkeit whined from pain when he was kept from lick- oblivious then. tries to handle pain with humor. Whadaya think, ing at the wound by an uncomfortable lampshade I began to be aware of a conversation going on chump? You expect the physical laws of the universe collar, but now that the collar’s off, he adjusts to the next to me. A distinguished older man in jacket and to be revoked just for you? What chutzpah! But how new condition as if there were no loss—it’s the way tie was exchanging words with a well-dressed wom- funny is it, somebody tell me, please, when you have I am. A dog will mourn for a lost master or for the an, same age, maybe 60, maybe 70. He tipped his to descend the stairs right foot down to the next loss of another dog in the same household, but not fedora. He stood up, she sat down in his place, and step, left plays catch-up, right foot down again? It’s for a lost leg. He doesn’t seem to experience the they commenced to talk about the “younger gen- no laughing matter, as my mother used to say. contrast between now and before. Let me become eration.” To talk about me—isn’t it a shame, young Still, this oy, this mode of handling suffering like a three-legged dog. people nowadays. can maybe be something of a help. Why? Because What should I make of this life? I make, have “Do they think to give you a seat? How were implied self-deprecation sets you slightly apart always made, words. they brought up?” from the pains. You split yourself, make fun of the I’d like to be brave, like to be cavalier—at least “They just sit—just sit and watch you stand.” complainer. And the word, pains, the plural, makes pretend to myself to be cavalier. But again and again “They must think they’re privileged.” They spoke loudly, so I would hear and take shame. It wasn’t fair! I had been in the world of my book. Usually, in fact, I made it a point to offer my seat. Nevertheless, I swallowed the shame, carried it block after block as they entertained themselves talking about me. If I’d been older, I’d have entered the conversation, laughed at my own impoliteness, apologized. But I’d waited too long. And I was too young and too mortified. They were old—white hair and wrinkles, probably full of aches and pains. I waited for my stop at 86th Street, and then my strategy came to me as I put the book in my book- bag. When the streetcar slowed, I got up and, blank of face, I played the gimp, the poor cripple, played it as if I were trying to avoid playing it, limping, limping, limping down the aisle, not looking back, careful not to exaggerate, one shoulder just a little higher than the other, grasping seat backs and poles, and then, when the door opened, I made my painful way down the steps and out the trolley. And when I crossed to the sidewalk I kept limping until the streetcar was well down the tracks, so that if they saw me, the old people, even a block away, they’d see a cripple, a poor cripple boy they’d bad-mouthed. I was elated. I can imagine walking down the aisle not of a trolley but of a rocking subway or bus, slightly “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquistion” declares Michael Palin, center, in a performance of Monty Python blank of face from the Parkinson’s, stiff, needing Live (Mostly), London, 2014. (Photo by Dave J Hogan/Getty Images.) to hold on. And now those old people, long dead, watch me walk. Ghosts. “Not so funny now, is it,” one of them says. light—as against the singular, pain. Pains can be I fall into monitoring my losses and my potential I pray for equanimity. I want to acknowledge my funny; pain can’t. Funny as a crutch. losses, as if I were my own banker. It’s a bum in- sickness with equanimity. But I don’t want to lie. From one to ten, how much pain are we dealing vestment. I might as well live it up, turn spendthrift, This long diminishment may, I pray, be a blessing. with here? Not a lot. Nothing to do with the Parkin- prodigal, profligate—very nice. Very nice. See if you The trivial is discarded, shrugged off, the ordinary son’s. Let’s call it a five point three, ladies and gentle- can fool yourself with words. and everyday accrue meaning, even beauty. It’s not men. Aach. Not so terrible; but not all that funny. We all know the way we’re supposed to respond just the Spanish Inquisition that’s not expected. God And now, three-fifteen in the morning, the cramp to a sickness such as Parkinson’s. So that at the is here, woven into the contradictions. Into the gap melts, the calf relaxes, and the old guy can stumble memorial service a eulogist can say, “He fought his that takes the breath away. out of bed, foot to the floor, other foot to the floor. sickness, but he never complained. He was kind and Love can be a distillate of growing old. And I’ve Can he stick the landing?—and yes! Yes he can. Let’s generous. He expressed gratitude for the life given loved my wife (you, Sharon) more and more, loved give said old guy a round of applause. him.” But I’m not going to fake it in order to rate a the children more and more. Yes, we deepen. But, Uncertain legs carry me to the bathroom, back decent eulogy. oh my God, what we pay for the deepening. to bed again, where my wife Sharon stirs. Dear God, help me accept what’s coming to me. “You okay?” she murmurs. “What’s the matter?” Help me join what’s coming as to the strange music of ho expects life in the form it arrives? The “Who said anything’s the matter?” a dance. I want to dance to the new music. You, com- WSpanish Inquisition knocks at the door. All “You groaned. Goodnight, then,” she says, and ing through the ballroom door, teach me to dance. my life the inquisitor has been waiting to burst in. turns over, already asleep. Her sleep comforts my Be my partner in the dance. Who knew? Now he enters with his case full of wakefulness. And I keep vigil till the morning light instruments. makes distinct the dresser, the bedside tables, my It’s three o’clock in the morning. Aches and slippers under the window. Once I get myself up for John J. Clayton is the author of four novels and five short pains have replaced sleep. My right calf wakes me in the day and exercise, and my pills have had time to story collections, most recently Minyan: Ten Interwoven nasty spasm. At the same time, because my throat work, time for the pain, deep sluggishness, and ex- Stories (Paragon House). His stories have been featured constricts from the Parkinson’s, I have to work to haustion to diminish, time for the tremors to quiet, in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, get down the pills I take for Mr. Parkinson, pills I’ve got it beat for the morning. My job now is to keep and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He was a professor of for said aches and pains. “Said aches and pains.” I Parkinson’s from becoming the totality of my day. English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for hear my language trying to make this a laughing Have you ever seen a dog trotting sprightly on more than 30 years.

38 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 Harold Bloom: Anti-Inkling?

BY MICHAEL WEINGRAD

t’s a bit surprising to come across Harold the Gnostic content didactically explicit. its furthest reach, outward and downward.” Bloom’s confession that the literary work that In Bloom’s version, the alien planet Lucifer is “This abides through ignorance,” Olam has been his greatest obsession is not, say, inhabited by warring tribes named for ancient rejoined, “but the ignorance is only our Hamlet or Henry IV, but a relatively little- Gnostic sects: Marcionites, Mandaeans, Sethites, knowledge reversed. This materiality will pass.” Iknown 1920 fantasy novel. After all, Bloom is our etc. Lindsay’s Krag is renamed Valentinus, after most famous bardolater. When I took an undergraduate class with him at Yale, he announced his Bloom grudgingly acknowledges that The Flight to Lucifer trembling bafflement before Shakespeare’s great- ness in almost every lecture. In the course of his ca- “reads as though Walter Pater was writing Star Wars.” reer, Bloom has named a handful of other literary eminences who compel from him a similar obei- (This may be generous.) sance—Emerson, Milton, Blake, Kafka, and Freud are members in this select club—but one does not the much-reviled 2nd-century Gnostic theolo- The book is filled with snappy exchanges like this find David Lindsay on this list. gian. Meanwhile, the Maskull substitute, Thomas one. Writing at the time in the London Review of Yet, in his 1982 book Agon: Towards a The- Perscors, has been turned by Bloom into a poor Books, Marilyn Butler summed it up as follows: ory of Revisionism, Bloom writes of Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus: “I have read it literally hundreds As fiction, The Flight to Lucifer has practically of times, indeed obsessively I have read several nothing to recommend it. The plot, so important copies of it to shreds.” The much-shredded book an element in fantasy, lacks suspense, pace has, he says, “affected me personally with more and variety. . . . Lucifer is not a fictional world intensity and obsessiveness than all the works of for the imagination to linger in: the landscape greater stature and resonance of our time.” In fact, is repellent, the light poor, and the native Bloom wrote his own fantasy novel—The Flight to inhabitants both nasty and feeble—while Lucifer, published 40 years ago this year—in ap- the visitor Perscors, angry, murderous, parent response to Lindsay’s. “I know of no exceedingly male, is about as empathetic as book,” he writes, “that has caused me such an King Kong. anxiety of influence, an anxiety to be read everywhere in my fantasy imitating it.” I wouldn’t call Perscors “exceedingly What is it about A Voyage to Arcturus that male,” but I agree with Butler that “it so captivated Bloom? Though it never had is hard not to speculate, in ordinary much mainstream success, Lindsay’s genu- Freudian terms, about this character’s inely strange and unsettling novel surely obsession with punishing a succession belongs on any list of the 20th century’s most of elderly and uninviting whores.” significant works of fantasy. The trendsetting Bloom’s novel features a cringeworthy British fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock, orgy and several S&M scenes that are writing in 2002 on the occasion of one of the even more soporific than the dialogue book’s republications over the years, called quoted above. A Voyage to Arcturus a “Nietzschean Pil- In Agon, Bloom grudgingly ac- grim’s Progress” and praised its “compelling, knowledges some of his novel’s short- almost mesmerising influence.” comings, remarking that it “reads as A Voyage to Arcturus opens with a though Walter Pater was writing Star drawing-room séance interrupted by three Wars.” (This may be generous.) Yet strangers: the threatening Krag, his glum Bloom also announced that he was at companion Nightspore, and the novel’s pro- work on a second fantasy novel, enti- tagonist, Maskull, who joins the first two on a tled The Lost Traveller’s Dream. It has journey to the planet Tormance. While explor- never appeared, and, when I encountered Bloom ing Tormance, which is ruled by an entity known as Harold Bloom. (Illustration by Mark Anderson.) in that classroom in the late 1980s, he enjoined his Crystalman, Maskull ends up sprouting a series of students to burn any copies of The Flight to Lucifer odd new limbs, eyes, and sensory organs. His often- cousin of Conan the Barbarian. He battles the plan- we might come across. fatal encounters with the planet’s inhabitants read as et’s demiurge with sword and shield but more of- mythic allegories of everything from the search for ten struggles to escape the sexual snares of several ccording to Bloom’s famous theory of the God, to the relationship between the sexes, to the monstrous yet alluring female deities. A“anxiety of influence,” we don’t get to choose artistic process. In deference to his scholarly reputation, review- our influences. Moreover, a writer’s explicit des- Bloom, though, views Lindsay’s novel as a kind ers tried to be forgiving, but most judged Bloom’s ignation of a major influence is usually a ruse, of spontaneous Gnostic scripture. In his reading, novel turgid. A typical example of the dialogue: intended to hide (mostly from himself) the real in- Crystalman is the oppressive god, or demiurge, fluence at work. By his own lights, then, Bloom’s who according to Gnostic theology keeps us locked Valentinus nodded as he rose. “This rocky explanation of The Flight to Lucifer as an anxious in the material world and ignorant of our radically world is a battered affection of the Pleroma. response to Lindsay deserves a second look. free natures. Whether or not this is what Lindsay When the inwardness fell away from itself, It seems significant in this regard that, in the had in mind, in The Flight to Lucifer Bloom makes through the passion of Achamoth, this became same chapter of Agon in which he reviews his own

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 39 novel, Bloom holds up Lindsay as a counter to the dacious, but presumably not “Promethian” enough tinues with an unintentionally self-parodic ac- fantasy writers known collectively as the Inklings: for Bloom’s taste, since it accepts rather than recount of Bloom’s interactions with Lewis in the J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Wil- jects the premises of Christian theology even as it mid-1950s when he was on a Fulbright scholarship liams. With his trademark portentousness, Bloom asks how that theology might play out on another at Cambridge: announces that Lindsay’s The Voyage to Arcturus is world. In The Flight to Lucifer, Bloom also attempts a I attended a few of his lectures, and for a while at the very center of modern fantasy, in contrast kind of rewriting of Genesis. His planet features regularly talked with him at two pubs on the to the works of the Neochristian Inklings versions of the biblical flood, the tower of Babel, river. As I was twenty-four, and he fifty-six which despite all their popularity are quite and Nimrod the hunter but with the familiar Gnos- and immensely learned, I attempted to listen peripheral. Tolkien, Lewis and Williams while saying as little as possible. But he was a actually flatter the reader’s Narcissism, while Christian polemicist and I an eccentric Gnostic morally softening the reader’s Promethianism. In his memory, some lectures Jew, devoted to William Blake. We shared a Lindsay strenuously assaults the reader’s and a few beers in Cambridge love for Shelley, upon whom I was writing a Narcissism, while both hardening the reader’s Yale doctoral dissertation, and yet we meant Promethianism and yet reminding the presaged something like the different things by “Shelley.” Cowed as I was, the reader that Narcissism and Promethianism inevitable break came after a month or so, and verge upon an identity. Inkling fantasy is Great Bloom-C. S. Lewis Schism we ceased to speak. soft stuff, because it pretends that it benefits from a benign transmission both of romance of 1954. Bloom’s retrojected memory inflates the merest of tradition and of Christian doctrine. Lindsay’s interactions into something like the Great Bloom- savage masterpiece compels the reader to tic twist: the biblical God is actually a satanic de- Lewis Schism of 1954. “We ceased to speak”? question both the sources of fantasy, within the miurge, and the characters who defy his authority Moreover, Bloom does not, in this essay on reader, and the benignity of the handing-on of are emissaries of truth. Unfortunately, in Bloom’s Lewis, discuss any of Lewis’s books—though he tradition. hands, these Gnostic inversions are repetitive does tell us, “I own and have read some two dozen and dramatically sterile. His characters wander of them.” He refers dismissively in passing to the As Bloom never clearly defines “Narcissism” or around expressing defiance of the powers that be Narnia Chronicles and Mere Christianity, while “Promethianism,” nor explains his assertions by (“Perscors decided that his quest now had a clear allowing the scholarly worth of Lewis’s celebrat- offering examples from any of the authors con- aim: to battle against the Archons, though it be in ed study of medieval cosmology, The Discarded cerned, it is not entirely clear what he means here. no cause and to no purpose”) and avowing that Image. Wholly unmentioned are The Screwtape Evacuated of its gassiness, his argument amounts religion is a lie of the demiurge. Bloom’s Valenti- Letters, The Great Divorce, A Grief Observed, Mir- to a preference for romantic rebellion to religious nus announces: acles, The Allegory of Love, That Hideous Strength, tradition. The Abolition of Man, Till We Have Faces, and— Interestingly, C. S. Lewis admired David Lindsay I saw that the Gnosis alone was sufficient of course—Perelandra, to name a few. Instead, we and called A Voyage to Arcturus “that shattering, infor salvation and freedom, and I cast out the get the following: tolerable, and irresistible work,” a fact which Bloom sacraments and rituals of the Great Church’s avoids. Bloom does quote from Lewis’s encomium mysteries. . . . Through knowledge, then, the C. S. Lewis, though as sedentary as myself, to the 19th-century fantasist George MacDonald, inner man, the pneuma, is saved, so that to us was a muscular Christian who is now the whose books offer an experience that, in Lewis’s the knowledge of original being suffices; this is intellectual sage of George W. Bush’s America, words, “gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper our freedom; this is the true salvation. whose Christianity is mere enough to than our thoughts or even our passions, troubles encompass enlightened selfishness, theocratic oldest certainties till all questions are reopened.” Judaism does not come out much better than militarism, and semi-literacy. (President Bloom responds to this by saying that he believes he Christianity, by the way, at least if Bloom’s por- George W. Bush vaunts that he never read a understands what Lewis is describing, but judges it trait of Lucifer’s Mandaeans, “this fearful, narrow, book through, even as a Yale undergraduate.) applicable only to Lindsay. aggressive remnant of a people” consumed with “the That a major Renaissance scholar, C. S. Lewis, Given these swerves, gaps, and evasions, it starts common quarrel about possession of land,” means should now be a hero to millions of Americans to look as if it was actually the Inklings, and espe- what I think it does. who scarcely can read is a merely social irony. cially Lewis, who got under Bloom’s skin. Is Bloom’s All in all, The Flight to Lucifer is less of an hom- Like Tolkien and Charles Williams, his good obsession with Lindsay a screen for a more anxious age to Lindsay than an anti-Perelandra. And yet, friends, Lewis is most famous for his fantasy- relationship with Lewis? Might we read The Flight to despite Bloom’s intentions, it demonstrates that fiction, particularly The Chronicles of Narnia. I Lucifer not as a weak rewriting of Lindsay, but rather what Bloom calls “Promethianism” is, well, kind have just attempted to reread that tendentious as a failed struggle against Lewis? of narcissistic. It turns out that Gnostic rebellion evangelical taletelling, but failed. This may is not especially interesting, at least in Bloom’s be because I am seventy-five, but then I can’t loom’s novel does have notable elements in dramatization; it seems rather adolescent and self- reread Tolkien or Williams either. Bcommon with two of Lewis’s books. One is the obsessed. children’s fantasy The Silver Chair, not least because One is reminded of another C. S. Lewis-hater, And so forth. Bloom concludes this splenetic belch both Bloom and Lewis draw on Spenser’s Eliza- Philip Pullman, whose far more impressive Dark with a final judgment: “Lewis was religious, which is bethan epic The Faerie Queene. Bloom even has Materials trilogy began with such promise but, not in itself an achievement.” Perscors quote a line from the poem—from an epi- hampered by its dogmatic materialism and smug Given this evident frustration and envy, it would sode that includes a silver chair. Both Bloom’s and insistence on the stupidity of organized religion, seem that C. S. Lewis was Bloom’s demiurge, the Lewis’s adventures feature sunless underworlds, he- petered out weakly with the main characters weep- Crystalman he sought to defeat and displace. As his roes who struggle to recall who they really are, and ing for joy over the survival of their atoms. Bloom’s failed attempt at a fantasy novel shows, he was not seductive villainesses who dress in green. fantasy lacks even Pullman’s moments of Blakean successful. But then, being heretical is not in itself The more telling juxtaposition, though, is with wildness, but neither Bloom nor Pullman achieve an achievement. Lewis’s Perelandra. In Perelandra, the second book the genuine surprise afforded by Lewis’s supposedly in Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the protagonist Elwin orthodox, yet truly wild, vision. Ransom travels to another planet at a point in its Michael Weingrad is professor of Jewish studies at history that corresponds to the Fall of Man in our loom’s introduction to his Chelsea House Portland State University. He is a frequent contributor own. At the behest of angelic “Archons,” Ransom BModern Critical Views volume on Lewis to the Jewish Review of Books and Mosaic and is tries to stop Satan’s attempt to corrupt Perelandra’s begins, “C. S. Lewis was the most dogmatic and currently working on a book about Jews and fantasy Adam and Eve. Lewis’s rewriting of Genesis is au- aggressive person I have ever met.” The essay con- literature.

40 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 LOST & FOUND A Letter to Mama

BY ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID STROMBERG

n “A Letter to Mama,” which appears here for the puts it bluntly: “you don’t have to make a fuss if a let- ner bought a store which handled the same sort of first time in English, Isaac Bashevis Singer tells ter is late since you yourself write seldom too. If you merchandise. the story of Sam Metzger, who, having immi- wrote more often, I’d also write more, God willing.” Miracles didn’t happen to Sam. He didn’t be- grated to America, marries and establishes a suc- In the early 1940s, Singer’s mother and his brother come a Rockefeller. He and his wife needed little cessfulI clothing shop with his wife, Bessie, without ever Moyshe were evacuated by the Soviets in cattle cars to and managed to earn three or four times more than writing home to his widowed mother in Poland. Now the Jambyl region of Kazakhstan, where they died of they needed. When they were in their thirties, a almost 60, unhappy in his marriage and estranged illness and starvation. daughter was born to them whom Bessie named from his daughter, he is overwhelmed by the enormity of his neglect of his mother in Poland and his aban- Like every other morning, Sam awoke feeling insufficiently donment of Yiddishkeit. “In his effort to forget,” Singer writes, “Sam had become a traitor to his people.” rested, with a bitter taste in his mouth which came from his Singer’s postwar fiction about America was generally set in the contemporaneous present, describing bile, his liver, or perhaps from his soul. the new American lives of refugees and survivors of the Holocaust. “A Letter to Mama,” which was origi- It is suggestive that just two days before “A Let- Sylvia—after her own mother, Sarah. The couple nally published in the Forverts on October 29, 1965, ter to Mama” appeared Singer published another hired a Polish servant, Antosia, who became devot- is something of an exception. Its mention of Hitler’s piece, “A Story that Mama Told Me,” which portrays a ed to the child. Antosia’s husband, a coal miner, had threats to invade Poland and the vivid description of young man who, having heard about the wonders of died in a pit. They had had no children. Antosia was the Yiddish literary scene in the Café Royal clearly the Garden of Eden his whole childhood, decides that more trustworthy than a relative of the family could place it in the late 1930s, and yet other details and when he grows up, he wants nothing more than to ever be. She ran the household, cared for Sylvia, and cultural markers have an anachronistic feel. For in- die. “A Letter to Mama” itself is exceptional in Singer’s was frugal. She invested her savings in Sam’s busi- stance, the Metzgers’ comfortable house in a small Il- body of work in its attempt to portray the conscious ness, eventually accumulating several thousand dol- linois town is described as being a “$60,000 home,” experience of death and the soul’s passing into the lars. Whenever Sam would try to pay her salary, she but in the late 1930s, $60,000 would have bought world to come. would argue, “What good is money to me? I have a mansion in the Midwest. Less definitively, Sam’s everything.” She drew up a will in which Sylvia be- daughter Sylvia goes to school in California, is en- he older he became, the less able Sam came her sole beneficiary. gaged to a non-Jew, and admits to her mother that she Metzger was to understand why he had Later, Sam bought a department store in a city in has had an abortion, all of which certainly could have never written to his mother after leaving Illinois where no more than twenty Jewish families happened in the 1930s, but would be more culturally Krasnobrod for America. This “letter to lived, mostly business people, a few professionals, a typical of the mid-1960s when Singer wrote the sto- Mama,”T which he never wrote, became the bane of doctor, a dentist, and a veterinarian. During the day, ry. Perhaps these somewhat incongruous details are his existence. Granted that he disliked writing let- the men were occupied with their work. At night, meant to underline its dreamlike atmosphere. ters and that the first years in New York he used to they played cards. After a while, they hired a rabbi The most powerful cultural reference is in the sto- work fifteen hours a day in a sweat shop. Still, to and established a synagogue, but there were never ry’s title. The song, “A brivele der mamen” (A Letter leave his widowed mother behind in Krasnobrod enough men attending to make up a minyan, except to Mama), was composed by Solomon Shmulewitz in and never write her so much as a single word, he for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The rabbi, a 1907, and tells the story of a young man who immi- had to be out of his mind. Sam could not fathom bachelor, was openly living with a Gentile girl. Ev- grates to America, finds success, but ignores his mother how this came about, although he had brooded over eryone called him by his first name, Jack. In the late back in the Old Country—until one day he receives a it many sleepless nights. twenties, fundraisers began coming from Chicago, letter saying that his mother has died and that her last At first, it was simply a manner of putting it off. New York, even from Palestine, all demanding large wish was for him to say Kaddish for her. More haunt- Then he seemed to forget about it altogether. At donations. They reprimanded the Jews for not giving than the reference itself, which Singer would have night, while trying to fall asleep in Moishe Leckech- ing their children a proper upbringing. But there expected his Yiddish readers to recognize instantly, is becker’s alcove on Attorney Street, along with three were hardly any Jewish children left, only grandchil- the fact that the song eventually inspired a film of the other boarders, he would think of it. In the morn- dren of mixed marriages. same name, which was one of the last Yiddish films to ing, he would forget again. Later the nagging sense Sylvia had grown up and had gone off to college. have been produced in Poland, in 1938. It opened to of shame turned into conviction that it was already Sam was approaching sixty. The years had been packed theaters in New York the following year at more too late. A devil possessed him who wouldn’t let filled with business, card playing, and an occasional or less the moment in which the story is set. With a him take a pen in hand. In New York at the time, trip to California or Florida. Antosia had died and single stroke, Singer evokes not only the difficult experi- they were all singing a popular Yiddish song which Sylvia had inherited her money. Sam set an elabo- ence of separation caused by emigration from Poland, went: “Why delay? Write your mother today.” From rate tombstone over Antosia’s grave in the Catholic but also the finality of that separation for those who the Yiddish theater stage, from Second Avenue cemetery. found themselves on the other side of the Atlantic with cabarets, in the workshops on Grand Street, from Over the years, Sam had managed to avoid the outbreak of the Second World War. record players blaring in homes, the song followed contact with anyone from Krasnobrod. He had no In some ways this must have resonated with Sing- him everywhere. idea whether his mother had died and whether he er’s personal experience. When he left Poland in 1935, Perhaps that was the reason Sam left New York. should say Kaddish and light an anniversary candle he left behind his mother Basheve, with whom he was He got as far as Chicago, where he became a ped- for her. He kept from mentioning the word Krasno- very close (he famously incorporated her name into dler. He knew no fellow countrymen from Krasno- brod among the town Jews, even though they prob- his pen name), and though he did write to family and brod there. He married a Lithuanian girl, a plump ably wouldn’t have known where it was since they friends from America, he was a poor correspondent. orphan named Bessie, and his business prospered. all were born either in Lithuania or Rumania. A letter from his mother, undated but appearing in Bessie had saved nine hundred dollars with which In his effort to forget, Sam had become a traitor the archives among envelopes dated September 1936, she opened a women’s wear shop. Sam and a part- to his people. Several of the Jewish spokesmen who

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 41 visited the town from time to time would refer to heavier. He and Bessie often quarreled about the had promised him she would turn off the radiator, the community as godless, materialistic, money- bedroom temperature. He was always too hot and but it was apparently still on. He kicked off the blan- grubbing. The other men resented these rebukes, she too cold. He had high blood pressure. An artery ket and lay uncovered as if it were summer. but Sam Metzger reluctantly agreed. in his left eye had burst and he had to be on medica- He was tired but his thoughts kept him awake. During the day, Sam was too busy to think about tions and stick to a diet. For years he had talked of retiring from the busi- these things, but at night, after the card playing, He was beginning to lose his hearing and had to ness. Were he to live to a hundred, he would have lying beside Bessie in the upstairs bedroom, his wear a hearing aid. He had to carry two pairs of eye- enough money. But what would he do with himself thoughts would assail him like a swarm of locusts. glasses with him: bifocals as well as sunglasses. He after he sold everything? Where would he live? He Sam owned a $60,000 home with a large garden constantly was switching from one to the other or had already tried Miami and Santa Barbara. The and a two-car garage for his and Bessie’s Cadillacs. misplacing them. He could find no shoes that fit him idleness soon became boring. It was difficult to find Sylvia was at school in California. Bessie now need- properly. Sooner or later, every pair began to pinch a good partner at cards. He had heard a great deal ed a pill before going to bed. Sam was in the habit of his feet. Somehow he was always taking medicine— about the Riviera, but how could he learn to speak taking a warm bath at bedtime. This late-night bath for gas, constipation, headaches, stomach cramps. French at his age? had become for him an hour of reflection. In her middle age, Bessie had lost interest in Sam Sam pictured his daughter, Sylvia, in bed with Every time he undressed and saw himself na- altogether. She lived only for her daughter, catering to her Gentile, caressing him, giving herself to him. ked in the mirror on the dresser or on the door, he her every whim. They had more than their share of Perhaps he was talking against him, her father, and would make a short reckoning of his life. He had problems in the business. Thefts, inefficiency, waste- she was covering his mouth with kisses. “Well, it’s all been lucky but had aged prematurely. His round, over, all over,” Sam muttered to himself, not know- bald head was ringed with sparse white hair. His ing himself what he meant by these words. Drowsy, crooked nose was covered with drunkard’s warts al- he lay quietly, looking straight ahead, and saw at the though he seldom drank. Loose flaps of skin hung foot of the bed a familiar form, a woman. He found beneath his brown eyes, and he had a flabby double himself staring at her, his mind empty of thoughts, chin. His legs were bowed and too short. His toe- not registering any surprise. A glow emanated nails were twisted and yellowish. from her in the dark. She stood as in a half-lit por- Occasionally, after his bath, he would sit down trait. Suddenly she approached him, not walking, in the dinette and drink a glass of orange juice. A but drifting between him and the heavily-draped photograph of Sylvia hung there. The girl was the windows. He noted that instead of eyes there were image of her grandmother, the very one to whom two green phosphorescent lights in her sockets. Sam did not write. When she spoke it was as if he heard her with his It was impossible to escape his mother. She entire being and not with his ears alone. sprang up before him over and over again in his new “Shmulik, it’s me . . .” house. The resemblance was apparent the moment At the sound of his mother’s voice Sam’s body the nurse brought the newborn Sylvia to him in the shuddered. He wanted to cry out, “Mama!” but Chicago hospital. Sam felt a love for this child which could utter no sound. At once the vision began he knew was excessive. to fade. It retreated, became dim, indistinct and Once Sylvia started to walk, she showed how in a moment was gone altogether. The darkness capricious and contrary she would be. Sam was al- returned, and he again became aware of Bessie’s most convinced that the girl was repaying him for snoring. He lay motionless, staring in amazement at the wrong done her grandmother. The cover of the music score for “A brivele der the spot where the visitor had just stood. “It’s Mama, Now Sylvia was planning to marry a Gentile, mame,” 1907. (Courtesy of the Library of Mama!” he muttered to himself, “She’s come to get a sportsman who won medals at racing sailboats, Congress Music Division.) me . . . She’s forgiven me . . .” the son of a rich engineer. She had confessed to her He remained awake for a considerable time, mother that she was living with him and had already waiting. Perhaps she would reappear. But she did had an abortion. Sam’s love for Sylvia was spoiled. ful competition, and quarrels. If Sam stayed away not show herself again. He tried to recall details. The fortune he had amassed through the toil of a from the business so much as a day, everything went How was she dressed? Was she wearing a wig or lifetime would eventually pass into the hands of this wrong. Despite her intelligence, Bessie was a woman a head covering? Did she have on a skirt, a shawl? stranger who looked down at Sam from his six-foot- with devious ways and stubborn as a mule. He could remember nothing. Could it have been a two-inch height with contempt. “Well,” he thought, “the whole thing is going to dream? But he knew he had been awake. He pon- But who else could he make his heir? The fund- fall to pieces. Nothing will be left to show for all my dered the event until he was overcome with fatigue raisers who came to town using threats to raise hard work.” and fell asleep. money? The American Jewish organizations, whose He vaguely recalled several biblical passages The alarm clock rang and out of one eye Sam red-nailed secretaries clicked away at typewriters, from the time he attended Hebrew school in Kras- could see Bessie getting up. Every morning she and where directors received enormous salaries? His nobrod, but he couldn’t remember the exact words. opened the store herself, not letting anyone forget visits to Chicago, his reading of newspapers, and his It all amounted to the idea that life was barren and that she was the owner. Now she sat on the edge of own observations had convinced Sam Metzger that nonsensical. A person took nothing with him to the the bed, her uncombed hair a mixture of brown, money given to charity was mainly spent to keep the grave but the sins he had committed against man red, and gray. Unkempt and haggard, she looked her organizations going. Even in his own city contribu- and God. very worst those first few minutes after the alarm tions were used to further personal ambitions. The Sam continued to sit quietly. Should he take a clock rang. Her eye make-up had dried overnight president of the synagogue had hired his son-in- sleeping pill? Or should he try to get along without and was like cracked plaster on a wall. Her forehead law as the architect for the new building. Another one tonight? He decided to take one. Nothing fright- was wrinkled. Her lower chin sagged. Her nose influential member had brought in a brother-in-law ened him as much as lying awake at night, thinking. seemed even more pointed than usual. Her mouth, with a hoarse voice to be the cantor. The rabbi was During the day, Krasnobrod and even New York without her teeth, was sunken and shut tight. In the also someone’s relative. They had overpaid for the were far off, but at night the years seemed to shrink. semidarkness, Bessie’s black eyes, surrounded with site of the Jewish Center and for building materials. He remembered all his troubles and those of others. wrinkles and dark shadows, reminded Sam of two The son-in-law architect had designed a synagogue Sooner or later the tune “A Letter to Mama” would black coals cheder boys in Krasnobrod used to set in which resembled a bat. start running through his head. a snowman’s head. This night, as on all the other nights, Sam Sam snuffed out his cigar in the remainder of the For a few seconds, Bessie hesitated, as if debating Metzger sipped his orange juice and smoked a orange juice, shut off the light, and with heavy steps whether it was worth getting up or not. Then she last cigar, though the doctor had forbidden him walked up to his bedroom. Bessie was snoring. He stood up. Her body was fat and flabby while her legs to smoke. Instead of losing weight, he was getting got into his bed and immediately felt too hot. Bessie were thin and varicosed. She walked unsteadily to

42 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 the bathroom. Sam’s gaze followed her, but he soon necessitated the signing of many papers. He told the who threatened Poland with war. He would travel shut his eyes. There was only one bathroom upstairs, bank official he had a chance to buy a business in to Krasnobrod and find his relatives there. Then and, though Bessie didn’t mind his sharing it with New York. Sam knew full well that the news would he would bring them to the American consulate in her, he preferred to wait till she had washed, bathed, soon spread all over town, but what did he care Warsaw and see to it that they all obtained visas. He and was out of the house before using it himself. She about small-town gossip? Let Bill Weintraub have would rescue as many as possible. never ate breakfast, just drank a glass of milk. something to think about. The words of the spokesmen of the Zionist orga- For a moment, Sam didn’t remember what had Sam went into a telephone booth and called nizations, even though he had never really listened happened to him during the night. Like every oth- Bessie, saying, “Bessie! I’m going to New York!” to them, now came back to mind with new force, er morning, he awoke feeling insufficiently rested, The two of them still conversed in Yiddish. Bes- as if he were hearing them for the first time. They with a bitter taste in his mouth which came from his sie was silent for a while. “What’s happened?” repeated themselves like a record being played over bile, his liver, or perhaps from his soul. He lived in “My mother died.” and over again: “Our suffering brothers are waiting. hope that the day would come when the ringing of “Only now? How do you know?” They are our flesh and blood. If American Jewry the alarm clock wouldn’t startle him each morning, “I received word.” doesn’t help, what then . . .” but that day was yet to come. “So what will you do in New York? After all, she’s “How could I have heard those pleas and remained Now he could neither fall back asleep nor really in Poland, not in New York.” indifferent?” Sam asked himself. True, to those wake up. He furrowed his brow in an effort to force Bessie argued that he couldn’t leave at this time. delegates it was just a business. They got a percentage. himself to sleep. “What time is it, eh?” he wondered, They were getting ready for a big sale. She couldn’t But what they were saying was nevertheless true. Who too lazy and too indifferent to look at the clock. would help if not he? Who should be concerned Surprisingly, he did doze off but soon awoke with about Krasnobrod—Hitler? a start. Bessie must have left the house because he Sam could hardly wait for the train to arrive heard nothing from the bathroom or kitchen. in Chicago. At the station, he inquired about a Suddenly, remembering the apparition, Sam flight to New York. Somehow, everything fell sat bolt upright. God in heaven! This was no ordi- into place. He took a cab and drove to the air- nary morning! This was like Yom Kippur morning, port. Ten minutes later he was airborne. “Will where even here, in this godforsaken town, every the plane crash? Let it,” Sam thought. He felt Jew went to pray in the synagogue. There was some- no fear at all, remembering a saying that those thing unusual in the air—something unidentifiably who go on a mission of mercy are protected. cool and heavy. The plane flew into a snowstorm and Ordinarily, Sam would fix himself a breakfast of started to roll from side to side, but Sam con- orange juice, a roll, and coffee after Bessie’s depar- tinued to sip the cocktail the stewardess had ture, but today he had no appetite. He shaved and served him. Seeing that other passengers were bathed. Standing in front of the mirror, scratching anxious, he smiled to himself. Next to him sat his beard, which seemed to become rougher from a young woman wearing a sable coat and a day to day, he came to a decision: He would go to Russian-style fur hat, a papakha. New York, look up the Krasnobrod people, and find Sam said to her, “We’ll soon be landing in out the truth about his mother once and for all. New York.” “My God, I still have relatives somewhere who “Either in New York or in a snowy grave,” most probably need me, need help,” Sam said to she answered. himself. “Maybe that’s why Mama came to me, to “Everything happens according to God’s get me to help them. For a few thousand dollars, I will,” Sam said, a little surprised at his own might save lives!” words. His conscience, which had been asleep for so “The question is: What is God’s will?” she many years, had awakened. “I’ll leave them enough! replied dryly. More than enough!” Sam spoke aloud. He was re- A clever woman, Sam thought. What does ferring to Bessie and Sylvia. “She can even remarry,” Isaac Bashevis Singer outside the S. Rabinowitz Hebrew God want? Who would dare go to heaven and ran through his mind. The painful possibility that book store on the Lower East Side, New York City, 1968. ask God to tell him His desire? Bessie might marry his enemy, his chief competitor, (Photo by David Attie/Getty Images.) Patches of fog drifted past the window. The Bill Weintraub, a recent widower, occurred to him. pilot tried to lift the plane above the storm Such things happened every day. be everywhere. She shouted at him in her Lithu- clouds but apparently wasn’t able to manage it. In a Sam tried to conjure up how Bessie and Wein- anian dialect, calling him names. But Sam yelled matter of seconds, it became dark as night outside. traub would look together in the local newspa- back and hung up, almost saying, “Let Bill Wein- Sam imagined the motors were operating on their per photo above an article describing the merger traub help you!” last bit of fuel. The wind was blowing against them of their businesses. “Maybe it’s not too late!” Sam Aside from the special excitement he was experi- from the Atlantic Ocean. The hostess had disap- called out, not really knowing what he was referring encing, he felt a long-forgotten wanderlust, a boyish peared as if she felt personally responsible for hav- to. “Changing the will isn’t enough. Once I’m dead, thrill at the thought of being free. He had bought ing trapped the passengers in this dangerous situa- a mere bribe can make a judge annul everything. A $5,000 worth of traveler’s checks. A train was leav- tion. person has to do good deeds as long as he can stand ing for Chicago in a half an hour. He walked out The woman in the sable said to Sam, “Better fas- on his feet. God Almighty has made it possible for of the bank and took a cab to the railroad station, ten your safety belt.” me to fulfill this task.” arriving in enough time to have a sandwich and “What good will it do me?” Sam gestured with Sam Metzger dressed, packed some underwear, a cup of coffee. “What in heaven’s name led me to his hand, expressing paternal gratitude. She is more a sweater, and the medicines he would need. A waste my life in this good-for-nothing hole? What devoted than Sylvia, he thought. Sylvia, in her place, long-forgotten energy awoke in him. The strength was I hiding from? Where was my brain?” wouldn’t have given him so much as a glance. of a man who knows that he must act vigorously or The train was warm and spacious. Sam looked The plane bumped down on the runway and lose everything. Bessie had left breakfast for him out of the window at the snow-covered fields. In came to a stop in the New York airport. Sam said on the kitchen table, but he had no desire either for contrast to his lifelong habit of frugality and saving, to the woman, “Now you know what God desires.” food or coffee. Though it was a winter day, the frost Sam was now eager to spend money. He would go “Yes, now I know.” had somewhat melted. In mid-February, it smelled to the Krasnobrod Society in New York and donate Some men have all the luck, Sam mused. I’ve of spring. Sam had shaved and bathed in minutes. a large sum toward relief. He would fly by plane to thrown away my best years struggling with that dried- He went to the bank and had a part of his account Poland. What could possibly happen to him? He up Lithuanian wife of mine, stuck in a town where transferred to a New York bank, a procedure which was old and sick. He wasn’t even afraid of Hitler, everyone knows what’s cooking in everyone else’s pot.

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 43 His eyes followed the handsome woman, ad- Sam started. “It’s been 30 years since I’ve been People were sitting at tables, shouting and apparent- miring her shapely legs. A tall man wearing a hom- h e re .” ly arguing. Sam looked for an empty table, but they burg greeted her. They must be aristocrats, society “Tomorrow you can go to the Yiddish newspa- were all occupied. Having come into this heated people, Sam decided. Perhaps he’s a diplomat. per office. They’ll fill you in on everything.” place from the cold his eyes teared up and every- It was already evening and the airport was “You’ve never heard of Krasnobrod?” thing appeared blurred. The room began to spin like brightly lit. Outdoors it was cold and foggy. The “Krasnobrod? No, my dad came from a town a carousel. Gradually things came into focus. Wom- planes waiting to take off to all parts of the world near Minsk.” en sat at the tables dressed like actresses, their faces looked fantastically huge. It still was impossible for “And your mother?” thick with make-up and their eyes blue with eye- Sam to comprehend how such immense and heavy “My mother? I don’t know. From somewhere in shadow, but they spoke the mother tongue. One of structures could fly across oceans and deserts. Russia . . . ” them, a heavyset woman, took out a jeweled lipstick Overnight, a machine like the one he was on could The driver grumbled continuously, scolding case from her purse and carefully applied lipstick to take him to Krasnobrod. other drivers. He blew his horn loudly at a truck her already red lips. On one finger, with a bright red It occurred to Sam that he didn’t have a passport. which was holding up traffic and zigzagged around nail, a stone sparkled with the colors of the rainbow. He hadn’t even taken his citizenship papers When the waiter approached her for her order, she with him. Carrying his suitcase, he walked commanded him with one word: through an enormous waiting room. Unlike “Blintzes!” a railway station, where the waiting passen- Sam was on the verge of tears. Blintzes? He felt gers are warmly clad, laden with packages, the shaky, as if he were drunk. He walked up to a table at people here were wearing lightweight cloth- which several men were sitting and said, “Is Yiddish ing, as if they were all flying to some mild cli- still spoken here? I want to hear it.” mate. They carried small suitcases or attaché “Where do you come from?” a big man with cases. It was airy and warm. Young men and a red face, bulging eyes, and childlike blond curls women stood about in small groups, chat- asked him. ting casually. People here didn’t seem terribly Sam told him. concerned with the frightening conditions in “Maybe you’d like to buy a Yiddish book?” every part of the world. “Su re .” Sam went outside and took a taxi. He “Have a chair, sit down. Hey, boys, let the man could tell that the cab driver was Jewish. He sit down! That’s the way. If you’re hungry, you can asked him, “Are you Jewish?” order what your heart desires. What would you like? “Sure. What else?” Here, you can get matzo brei any time of the year.” “Take me where I can find some Jews.” “I hear you can get blintzes here.” “New York is full of Jews.” “As much as you can put away.” “Where do people from the Old Country “Can I . . . may I . . . order for everyone?” get together? Do you by any chance know “Move in a little closer. Fellows, who wants blin- where any Jews from Krasnobrod meet?” tzes? Here, this is my book. It just came out in print. “Are you crazy, or are you putting on an Po e t r y.” act? Tell me where you want to go.” “Poetry?” “Where is the Yiddish newspaper office?” Sam had more than once heard the word poetry “Mister, I’ll take you down to Second Ave- but what it was he had forgotten. The man removed nue, to the Café Royal. You’ll find lots of news- a yellow book with gold engraved letters from his paper men there.” briefcase and said, “Would you like me to autograph The driver pushed down the flag on the Café Royal, New York City, 1938. (Courtesy of the Carl Van it? It costs twenty-five dollars.” meter. Sam leaned his head against the side of Vechten Trust/Museum of the City of New York. ©Van “Su re .” the cab, affected by the overwhelming odor of Vechten Trust.) Sam took a wallet full of bank notes from his jacket. tobacco. He rolled the window down a bit. His hands trembled. He had no five dollar bills, only It had been years since he was last in New York, it, almost knocking down a pedestrian. He never ten, twenty and fifty dollar bills. He handed the man and he hardly recognized the city. He had never stopped cursing: “Sons of bitches . . . They should thirty dollars wanting to say something in Yiddish, really known it. The streets seemed narrower and break their legs.” but all he could muster was, “That’s for good luck . . .” the buildings taller. There was a hint of the nearby When the taxi drove down Second Avenue, He felt an acute pang of embarrassment. Sam ocean in the air, which smelled of gasoline, exhaust Sam thought he recognized the street. He saw res- had never learned how to speak English properly. fumes, and all the pungent odors of city life. taurants with baskets of rolls on the tables, store How often he had made a fool of himself in front Early in the day it had been warmer, but it was windows displaying knishes, bagels, egg kichel, of Sylvia’s friends with his bad English. And now he turning colder now. The radio predicted a snow- challah, apple strudel. He could almost smell the had half forgotten his Yiddish. storm. Sam knew that he should first have made gefilte fish, peppered chickpeas, sauerkraut, all The big man with the gold-stitched tie, the hotel reservations, but he decided that there were familiar Krasnobrod dishes. Young boys were hawk- author, took out a fountain pen and wrote a long plenty of hotels in New York. Now that he was ing Yiddish newspapers. On a theater marquee inscription in the inside cover, sticking the tip of his here, he was anxious to be among Jews as quickly there was brightly lit Yiddish lettering. tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he did so. as possible. There had been a time when he had Sam Metzger’s eyes filled with tears. The waiter arrived with the blintzes. lived, worked, attended meetings in this city. He Jews had gone on living here while he wasted his More authors with their books joined the ta- had taken up with a girl who had been a passenger years in exile. He could hardly wait for the taxi to ble and Sam bought a book from each of them. He on the same boat from Europe with him. He had come to a halt. The meter indicated $2.80, but Sam accumulated a whole pile. The writers soon resumed kissed her, even planned to marry her, but through handed the driver a five dollar bill and told him to their interrupted debate. Though Sam understood the the years he had forgotten all the names and all the keep the change. The man was so astonished that he words, he couldn’t comprehend what these intellec- addresses. The girl was his age, perhaps a bit older. forgot to thank him. tuals were debating. They were accusing someone of She was undoubtedly a grandmother by this time. Sam spotted the Café Royal. Around here is where plagiarizing entire passages from Yesenin. Who is this Sam shut his eyes, letting the cool wind blow I’ll stay, Sam decided. I’ll get an apartment. Let Bes- Yesenin? Sam wanted to ask. He opened one of the across his forehead and eyelids. He inhaled the city air. sie sue me for divorce. He stood on the street, star- books and tried to read it, but though it was printed He couldn’t believe he was actually making this trip. ing up at the reddening sky, at the theater billboards, in Yiddish, he was unable to understand it. The words After a long silence, the driver spoke, “You’re at the crowd that was milling around the box office. didn’t seem to go together. The lines of print danced homesick for Jews, eh?” He walked into the café and heard Yiddish spoken. in front of his eyes, seeming to change colors. Am I

44 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 going blind? Sam thought. His throat felt dry. There Sam bought a newspaper. On the front page was put his reading glasses on, opened one of the books, was a tight feeling in his chest. He had forgotten to a headline about Palestine. “Why don’t I visit Pales- read a few of the phrases, and shut it again. “They take his pills with him. He asked, “Do you have any tine?” he asked himself. Sam paused in front of the eat blintzes like everyone else,” he thought, “but idea where I can find some people from Krasnobrod?” window of a Yiddish bookstore that also sold sheet their ideas are very difficult.” “Where is this Krasnobrod?” music. He would have loved to go in, but it was closed. He had to use the bathroom again. Where does “I’m from Krasnobrod.” Someone spoke up. It A fine, needle-sharp snow started to fall. In a moment, all this liquid come from? I don’t remember hav- was the voice of a woman at a nearby table, the same the crowded street emptied except for a few drunk- ing drunk so much. He knew the truth: He had an one who had been applying the lipstick. Sam sat up. ards who looked to him like actors on a stage set. A enlarged prostate. The doctor had recommended “Are you from Krasnobrod?” strong wind blew. A page of a Yiddish newspaper surgery, predicting complications if it were ignored. “Who are you?” lifted into the air, tried to fly up to the dark red sky, Sam’s heart was getting weaker, not stronger. “Say, everybody, let’s push the tables together!” fell back to earth again, spun around and came to rest He wanted to undress but he was too tired, so The big man with the blond curls called out, “It’s at Sam’s foot. Maybe it’s a message, he thought, a letter he just took off his coat and shoes, stretched out on about time the writers and the actors’ tribe got a the bed and shut the light. It was warm in the room, little closer.” How often he had made a the steam hissed in the radiator on one monotonous There was much gay conversation and laugh- plaintive note. Sam imagined that the steam was ter as the tables were pushed together. Sam asked, fool of himself in front of complaining, “I’m uncomfortable, I’m miserable, I “How many years since you were in Krasnobrod?” can’t get out, I can’t get out. No one can help me, not “Never ask a woman about years. What’s your Sylvia’s friends with his bad even God. I must suffer, suffer . . .” name?” The dance music from below became louder. “Sam—I mean—Shmuel Metzger. My mother, English. And now he had half Sam thought he heard a familiar melody he recalled may she rest in peace, was called Belle Itte, Bracha’s being played at Krasnobrod weddings. He wasn’t daughter.” forgotten his Yiddish. sure exactly what it was: the wedding march to the “Was your father a butcher?” chuppah? A scissor dance? An anger dance? Sam “A butcher? No, my father died when I was a from heaven. He wanted to stoop over and pick it up listened intensely. This music seemed to be played b oy.” but his back wouldn’t bend. “What kinds of thoughts by hometown musicians, magically transporting “How did your mother manage?” are filling my head,” he wondered. him to Krasnobrod. He saw the faces of relatives, “She would go to the village to buy some buck- A taxi drove up and Sam stepped in. Sam read neighbors, teachers, classmates. He pictured the wheat or a goose.” the driver’s name, David Cohen, on his back license. rabbi with his white beard, his puffy cheeks with “When did you come to America?” Sam said, “Take me to a Jewish hotel, Mr. Cohen.” fine blue veins, his thick white eyebrows and heav- Sam told her when. “Do you want kosher food?” ily lined forehead. The old man smiled blissfully, a “That’s before my time. Where did you live in “What? Yes, kosher.” grandfatherly indulgence radiating from his eyes. Krasnobrod?” “Well, on Broadway and Fourth Street there’s a The melodies followed one after the other, and Sam “On the street near the hill,” Sam replied. kosher hotel. Rabbis hold conventions there.” knew them all. Perhaps he just imagined he did. He “Near the meat market?” “Okay. Take me there.” had heard them back home. He found himself singing “No. The pines. What was your father’s name?” “I once took three rabbis there. Polish refugees.” along, humming the tunes. The party grew noisy. He Sam asked, barely able to speak, as if afraid of what “Have you ever heard of anyone from Krasnobrod?” could hear laughter, bursts of applause, loud masculine her answer might be. “Oh, you’ll find out about everything at this place.” pronouncements, responsive feminine giggling. This “Malech Berl Altele’s son. We sold oats and flax. A few minutes later the cab stopped in front of was not a party, but a wedding. In New York, people Where did you live?” a hotel. Sam went up to the registration desk and led a Jewish life, married their children according to “Near the bridge.” asked for a room. The clerk handed him a form to Jewish traditions, had Jewish in-laws. “What bridge?” fill out and a bellhop took him up on the elevator. As The band stopped and then struck up again. The longer the two of them spoke, the more they passed one floor, Sam could hear loud voices God in heaven, they were playing “A Letter to confused both of them became. Sam mopped the and music, and the foot stomping of a party. Mama.” As soon as Sam heard this tune, his face perspiration from his brow. The actress rummaged He went into his room, set down his books, was bathed with tears. A miracle had happened, a through her purse and took her lipstick out again. tipped the bellhop a dollar, and was given a key. This miracle! He had come to New York and on his very “Where in the world is your Krasnobrod?” she transaction took no more than a few minutes. He first night they had played a song that had con- asked impatiently. “In the Lublin region.” “I’m from the Czernichow area.” “Mazel tov, there are two Krasnobrods!” the big man shouted, clapping his hands together. JEWISH REVIEW BOOKS “Hey, waiter!” Sam stood up. He asked where the bathroom was. He had to urinate and he had to cry. It was late when Sam Metzger left the Café Royal Hear Ruth R. Wisse on with his load of books. “I didn’t know books could be so heavy,” he though in amazement. The appe- The Responsibility of the tizing smells of fresh bagel and coffee came from a nearby restaurant. Newsboys were shouting the Jewish Intellectual next morning headlines of the Yiddish newspapers. As he mingled with the crowd emerging from a Sunday, May 19, 2019 Yiddish theater, he heard people in avid Yiddish arguing over the merits of the play. Couples strolled Museum of Jewish Heritage arm in arm, some pausing to buy a newspaper. They New York City know how to live, Sam thought. I buried myself in some wilderness. It had been years since he and Bes- sie had walked arm in arm. As soon as he so much as touched her, she would protest, as if he had stepped on her foot or messed up her hairdo. She could only www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/event ridicule him and incite her daughter against him.

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 45 stantly echoed in his ears. Sylvia, who had played strange wedding. Well, they must have finished his eyes. He listened to his innermost self. His de- the piano and had studied some music, had re- their dancing. As he sat there, his mind vacant, he sires, his regrets, left him. He knew now that Bessie ferred to this song as “junk.” But how can “junk” felt a vibration and hollowness in his knees, as if he would marry Bill Weintraub, yet he felt no anger to- uplift the soul, fill it with a longing and love beyond had just climbed up, not down, all these stairs. He ward them. What’s the poor woman to do? description? Sam had the urge to go down to the was suddenly overcome by all that had happened to His mother reappeared, but something had wedding, to congratulate the bride and groom, to him during the past twenty-four hours. If yesterday changed. She and Sylvia were one and the same mingle with the guests. He was tired, but not sleepy. at this time, someone would have told him that the woman. “How come I didn’t understand this be- He got off the bed. His legs felt unsteady but just the next day he would be in a New York hotel, searching fore?” he asked himself. same he switched on the light, found his shoes, and for a wedding, sitting alone in a basement, he would He became light and started to fly into the night. went out into the hall. He rang for the elevator and have considered him mad. He flew past the New York skyscrapers. Together with waited a long time, but it didn’t come. He looked up and saw a pay phone. An urge to his mother he flew over a congealed ocean. Down Sam walked down the stairs, figuring that on the call Bessie took hold of him. She was, after all, his below, ships stood motionless. Then mother and son floor below he would find the wedding, but the cor- wife. She might be worried about him. He inserted approached a path between two mountains. In the ridor was dark and quiet. He walked down another a dime, intending to call collect, but didn’t hear the valley, he saw something shining like a brilliant red flight but there was no wedding there either. For a usual dial tone. The phone was apparently out of sunrise. Where is my father? he asked himself and moment he stood unbelievingly. “Is the wedding order. He clicked the receiver cradle up and down heard the answer, “You, Sam, are your own father.” over?” he asked himself. He decided to walk down to get his coin back but nothing happened. “When At the border, an unseen power held him back, one more floor but with the same result. men make something, you can be sure it will know but his mother embraced him. Together, arm in He rang for the elevator again, waited and still it how to steal,” Sam mused. arm, they floated back to Krasnobrod. didn’t come. “What kind of service is this?” Sam mut- At that moment everything became dark. It seemed tered. “Well, I might as well go down to the lobby.” someone upstairs had shut the lights. Sam shouted, Translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin. Copy- He went down a few more floors without reach- “Hey, you! Put the lights on! Hey, mister! Let me out!” right © 2019 Isaac Bashevis Singer Literary Trust ing the lobby. Instead he found himself in the He started to walk but couldn’t make out the exit. Like LLC. All rights reserved. basement. There were lights on but the place was a blind man, he felt his way in the dark. He began to empty. Folding chairs were stacked along the walls. panic. His heart beat loudly. He could no longer re- Sand-filled ashtrays held cigarette stubs. Smoke main standing. He had to sit down. His body broke Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903–1991) was an author of was still trailing from one of the cigarettes, a sign into a cold sweat and severe nausea gripped him. numerous stories, novels, memoirs, essays, and children’s that someone had just been there. No elevator door He felt the ground and heard the dull thud of his books. He emigrated from Poland to the United States in could be seen. body against the floor. Then it became still—a still- 1935 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. He wanted to go up to the lobby, but he needed ness outside of himself as well as inside. He lay quiet- to rest for a moment. For the past few years, he’d ly, not knowing whether he had fainted or just fallen. David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar lived in constant fear of a heart attack. Climbing “Is this a heart attack?” he asked himself. If so, it isn’t based in Jerusalem, where he teaches at Shalem College. He up and down stairs was too taxing for him. He was so terrible. It’s probably gas, from the blintzes. is the author of Narrative Faith: Dostoevsky, Camus, and beginning to regret having gone in search of this A sense of peace descended upon him. He shut Singer (University of Delaware Press).

In this striking volume, Nadine Epstein shares her memories of Wiesel and brings together 36 reflections from friends, colleagues and others who knew him—including his son Elisha Wiesel, Michael Berenbaum, Wolf Blitzer, Father Patrick Desbois, Ben Kingsley, Ronald S. Lauder, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Kati Marton, Itzhak Perlman, Natan Sharansky, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Oprah Winfrey and Ruth Wisse.

Featuring more than 100 photographs.

“Elie performed the alchemy of “This book of reflections is a fitting converting pain, injustice and horror tribute to the legacy of Elie Wiesel. EDITED BY into love, compassion and tolerance.” In its pages and through the words of its NADINE EPSTEIN — TED KOPPEL — contributors, you will feel a promise, not FOREWORD BY just to the souls who perished, but also RABBI JONATHAN SACKS to Elie and all those who survived AFTERWORD BY “It is absolutely imperative for this Europe’s darkest night.” TED KOPPEL legacy of Elie Wiesel’s to continue. — RABBI JONATHAN SACKS — It has to, and if it doesn’t, AVAILABLE AT YOUR FAVORITE it is our loss, and it will BOOKSTORES be an unfathomable loss.” AND ONLINE RETAILERS OR ORDER AT — SIR BEN KINGLSEY — MomentBooks MOMENTMAG.COM/SHOP An imprint of Mandel Vilar Press

46 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS • Spring 2019 LAST WORD Disgruntled Ode

BY JAKE MARMER

grew up in a dreary provincial town, in the swore off Russian, wanting to dissolve into the new means “return,” then the ba’al teshuvah is someone middle of the Ukrainian steppes, and early world, and I simply didn’t have enough English to with an appetite for turnstile acrobatics.) on turned inward, seeking to experience life enjoy reading in it. I also became an ardent ba’al The book seemed to stand against every fiber of through the books I was reading. When I teshuvah, embracing Orthodox Judaism with the the life I had so strenuously chosen for myself. As Ilearned the phrase “the book of life,” I imagined a sort of zeal of which only teenagers are capable. Portnoy says: sprawling sculpture, made of sutured books, each one representing a major junction in one’s life. If teshuvah means “return,” It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of It is not surprising that I was drawn to books the suffering Jews! Do me a favor, my people, and that described anything other than the world then the ba’al teshuvah is stick your suffering heritage up your suffering around me. Not surprising either was the fixation I ass—I happen also to be a human being! developed, as an early adolescent, over the modest someone with an appetite collection of Jewish literature we had in our home. But then, if the direction of Alex Portnoy’s vector Like many other Soviet Jews of my generation, I for turnstile acrobatics. was the opposite of mine, the force propelling us grew up unaware of Judaism, because the central was of similar voltage and fueled, perhaps, by some fact that defined the Jewish experience of my par- Within a year, I had decided to stay in America of the very same rebellious Jewish stuff. ents and grandparents—persecution—was also the and managed to enroll in Yeshiva University’s under- Moreover, when the narrator, describing his one from which they attempted to shield me. It was graduate business school—not because I saw myself family, quipped, “you don’t have to go digging where not until I read Isaac Babel that I understood how on Wall Street or even knew what, or where, it was, these people are concerned—they wear the old remnants of Judaism were hidden within the very unconscious on their sleeves,” I knew exactly what linguistic environment of my home, a “book of life,” he meant. It was the aplomb and the shame of being which is a story I have already told in this space. a first-generation intellectual, reflecting on the Jew- My grandmother called me a fantazyor— ish hysteria, earthy provinciality, and nerves, frayed daydreamer, though not the passive, Oblomov- over two millennia. ian kind, but more feverish and obsessive. For a Portnoy’s Complaint illuminated something for young fantazyor, nothing is more beautiful than the me that neither Babel, nor Sholem Aleichem, nor unspoken, which becomes the focus of desire. And Feuchtwanger had. It linked the ancient, the old, and the Jewish unspoken of my childhood was so vast the new worlds on a single psychological plane and that, within it, the imagination could reach near- showed me a glimpse of the puzzle whose pieces, spiritual proportions. it seemed, came tumbling out of the wrong bag I read Lion Feuchtwanger’s Josephus trilogy, but nevertheless somehow held together. Portnoy in which I encountered, for the first time, ancient admits to “indulging in the kind of ritualized belly- Israel, Jerusalem, and the Beit ha-Mikdash. I imag- aching,” and is there a better way to call out one’s ined myself within that world and felt the penumbra limitations while slyly letting loose the eternally of the religious and ethnic heritage that stretched troubled Ashkenazi unconscious? unthinkably beyond my family’s little shield of Of course, the book was illicit in ways that silence. I devoured the six-volume collection of shocked me and, at the same time, filled me with Sholem Aleichem’s work—which every self-respecting teenage glee. But perhaps most importantly, it Jewish family I knew owned but never read—and showed me that the only pleasure comparable to even ventured into Mendele Mokher Seforim. Al- but because I knew I would have to support myself. religious awakening was that of treading on the though Yiddish was occasionally heard in our home, I replaced bookish fantasies of Yiddishkeit with the grounds, outside of the perimeter of the allowable, and shtetl life was something my grandparents cer- pleasures of a religious life so intricate and incompre- while glancing back at the trembling fence. tainly had a sense of, to me, it was as exotic and re- hensible to the nonnative that I knew it would take I don’t think that it was Roth’s critique that mote as the ancient Temple. The pithy sarcasm of the rest of my life to imagine my way into it. It was led me to eventually question the sort of Judaism the Yiddish writers was completely lost on me: I was as if, within a year or less, my identity as a reader had I overzealously reached for as a teenager. Roth, looking for facts of whom Jews were and what their vanished, along with the old-world self I no longer as I later came to think, was an exquisite writer (our?) life was once like. As I read, I walked in the wished to be. of prose whose work never touched the actual haze of this world I liked far more than my own. depths of religion or nihilism—nor the real stuff, In reading these books, was I experiencing some nd then, in my second year of college, just as a combination of both, that one finds in Kafka or sort of an ancestral call or merely trying to justify AI turned 17, a fellow Russian Jewish classmate Dostoyevsky. Yet it was at the junction between and ennoble my adolescent alienation? I think that at Yeshiva University slipped me a copy of Philip Portnoy and the books I read afterward that my I was twining both impulses together with grow- Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Only after Roth’s life took a new turn: To imagine myself without ing desperation, for outside of my imaginary book recent death did I understand what his book had Roth’s novel would be to imagine having a differ- world, there was an actual, ever-widening social done for me two decades ago. ent “book of life”—or none at all. void: My Jewish friends—including many of those I read it in my dorm room, read it shaking on I hadn’t known were Jewish—were emigrating. The the subway to my first job, read it on a Washington unspoken was suddenly voiced again and again at Heights bench and in a van that shuttled me from Jake Marmer is the author of two poetry collections, The every farewell party. This felt all the more confusing Yeshiva University’s all-male campus, downtown, Neighbor Out of Sound (2018) and Jazz Talmud (2011). because my parents made their own choice to stay. toward its counterpart Stern College’s all-female His jazz-klezmer-poetry record Hermeneutic Stomp was When I finally came to the United States, campus. I guffawed and annotated, was bewildered released by Blue Thread Music in 2013. He is the poetry without my parents, as a 15-year-old high school and delighted, but, most importantly, the book had critic and a contributing editor at Tablet magazine and exchange student, I stopped reading for pleasure. I returned me to the pleasure of reading. (If teshuvah teaches at Kehillah Jewish High School.

Spring 2019 • JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS 47 JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS A Publication of Bee.Ideas, LLC. 165 East 56th Street New York, NY 10022

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