Ajs Review, 1988: Nos 1 and 2

Front Matter Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988) Published by: Cambridge University Press on be...

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Front Matter Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988) Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486231 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge University Press and Association for Jewish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AJS Review.

http://www.jstor.org

AJS VOL. SPRING

The

Journal

of

the

1 &2

NOS.

XIII,

&

Association

FALL

1988

for

Jewish

Studies

('I

REVIE

Volume XIII, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 1988

ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

AJS Review EDITOR:

Robert Chazan, New York University ASSOCIATE EDITORS:

Seymour Feldman, Rutgers University Robert Goldenberg, State University of New York at Stony Brook Paula E. Hyman, Yale University David C. Jacobson, Wesleyan University

Benjamin C. I. Ravid, Brandeis University S. David Sperling, Hebrew Union CollegeJewish Institute of Religion CORRESPONDING EDITOR:

Lloyd P. Gartner, Tel-Aviv University BOOK REVIEW EDITOR:

Michael Stanislawski, Columbia University EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Jonathan Hecht The AJS Review (ISSN 0364-0094) is published twice annually by the Association for Jewish Studies. Manuscripts for consideration should be sent to Prof. Robert Chazan, Skirball Dept. of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, 51 Washington Square South, New York, N. Y., 10012. Books for review should be sent to Prof. Michael Stanislawski, Dept. of History, Columbia University, N. Y., N. Y. 10027 ? 1989 by the Association for Jewish Studies MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

AJS REVIEW THE JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION

FOR JEWISH STUDIES

VOLUME XIII, NUMBERS 1-2, SPRING-FALL,

1988

Articles 1

ARNOLD J. BAND

The Beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature: Perspectives on "Modernity" 27

DAVID G. ROSKIES

Sholem Aleichem: Mythologist of the Mundane 47

KATHYRN HELLERSTEIN

"A Word for My Blood": A Reading of Kadya Molodowsky's "Froyen Lider" (Vilna, 1927) 81

JANET HADDA

"Warding Off Chaos: Repetition and Obsession in the Poetry of Glatshteyn, Halpern, and Manger 103

WARRENBARGAD Binary Oppositions in the Poetry of Amir Gilboa

129

DAVIDC. JACOBSON "Kill Your Ordinary Common Sense and Maybe You'll Begin to Understand": Aharon Appelfeld and the Holocaust

153

DONALDKARTIGANER Ghost Writing: Philip Roth's Portrait of the Artist

171

NAOMI SOKOLOFF

Reinventing Bruno Schulz: Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and David Grossman's See Under: Love 201

Collected Studies

205

Books Received

Publication of this volume of the AJS Review has been made possible by grants from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, the S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Family Foundation, and the Dorot Foundation. The Association is grateful for their support and encouragement.

Volume XIII of the AJS Review represents this editorial board's second effort at devoting an issue of the journal to a central theme, in this case the theme of modern Jewish literature. The number of studies presented has resulted in the dedication of volume XIII in its entirety to modern Jewish literature and has necessitated the omission of the normal book reviews. The editorial board is deeply indebted to Professors David C. Jacobson and Naomi Sokoloff who shouldered the heavy burdens of organizing these eight studies, of presenting them to the editorial board, and of supervising the required revisions. We would once again be delighted to receive reactions to this departure from our normal format.

With great sadness, the Editorial Board of the AJS Review notes the death, after a lengthy illness, of Frank Talmage, the founding editor of the Review. Some years ago we wrote the following: "Frank Talmage single-handedly created a major new journal. His indefatigable work, his careful editing, his insistence on the highest standards-all these traits are well known to his colleagues and amply reflected in the excellence of the journal which he edited for the first eight years of its existence. The Association for Jewish Studies and the entire Jewish scholarly world will remain indebted to Frank." At the time of his death, Frank was Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto. A prolific author and editor, he was internationally recognized as an outstanding authority in medieval Jewish intellectual history, biblical exegesis, and Judeo-Christian polemics. Frank combined an extensive mastery of primary sources and secondary literature with wide knowledge of European and Semitic languages and a great sensitivity to texts and their nuances. His passing is a major loss to the field and to the journal which he served with such distinction.

The Beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature: Perspectives on "Modernity" Author(s): Arnold J. Band Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 1-26 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486232 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge University Press and Association for Jewish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AJS Review.

http://www.jstor.org

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE: PERSPECTIVESON "MODERNITY" by ARNOLD J. BAND

I The traditional opening statements in the debate concerning the beginnings of modern Hebrew literature usually assume the form of claims or accusations of paternity. Claims-if the child is legitimate; accusations-if it is not. I wish to avoid the paternity issue because, as I shall argue, it is essentially groundless and precludes consideration of other perspectives. My strategy shall therefore be an oblique attack from an unexpected quarter using traditional camouflage, I begin with a prooftext. The SecondTemple,completedseventyyearsafterthe destructionof the First by Nebuchadnezzar,differedin four waysespeciallyfromthe Templeof Solomon. Thoughabout the same in area,it was not so high. It was also less of a unit, being divided now into an outer and inner court. In equipmentand decorationit was barer.Above all, the Holy of Holies was now an empty shrine,as it was also to remainin the magnificentthirdTemplebuiltby Herod. 1

2

ARNOLD J. BAND

The Ark of the convenantwasgone, and no one felt at libertyto try to replace it with a substitute. A careful reading should alert the reader to the fact that the author is probably not thinking in normative Jewish terms, in which there are ordinarily two temples, not three, even though the Temple destroyed in 70 C.E. was by no means the Temple built by Zerubavel in 516 B.C.E.,but what the Mishnah and Josephus (Ant. 15:380 ff.) knew as "Herod's Building." Dispensing with solicitation of conjectures, I shall simply reveal the sourcenot really from a history of the Jews, but from W. Jackson Bate's The Burdenof the Past and the English Poet, a now classic essay dealing with the difficulties the modern poet felt since the eighteenth century about achieving something new and significant.' Aware of the creative achievements of his predecessors and obsessed with his self-consciousness of the rich legacy of the past, Bate argues, the poet felt the past was a crushing burden which he had to bear and manipulate. The sustained metaphor of the Second Temple-a revealing metaphor in itself-was not, of course, Bate's invention but rather a term current in the literature of the neoclassical period beginning with the Restoration. The employment of biblical tropes is by no means surprising in an age reared on Bible reading and sermons and for whom the most popular poet was unquestionably Milton. Bate extends the figure in his book by calling the romantic period, for him the creative solution of the problems induced by the burden of the past, "The Third Temple." Since England has housed few Hebrew writers of any importance after the readmission of the Jews in the time of Cromwell-Ephraim Luzzatto and Shmuel Romanelli come to mind-one does not ordinarily think of its literary history as a ground for comparison with modern Hebrew literature.2 The known direct eighteenth-century English influences upon Hebrew literature, for instance, are not considerable: Addison and the English periodi1. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). "The burden of the past" has, to be sure, Nietzschean overtones. See Hayden N. White, "The Burden of History," History and Theory 5 (1966): 111-134. 2. On Hebrew literature in eighteenth-century England, see J. Schirmann, "The First Hebrew Translation from English Literature: the Play The Mourning Bride by William Congreve" (Hebrew), in J. Schirmann, Letoldot hashirah vehadramaha'ivrit, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1979), and articles on Ephraim Luzzatto and Samuel Romanelli in the same volume, pp. 217-301.

BEGINNINGS OF MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE

3

cal, Young's "Night Thoughts," Lowth's biblical studies, and the notion of Longinian sublimity are important examples. "Why England?" one might ask. Why begin a discussion of early modern Hebrew literature with a reference to a country which never was a center for Hebrew creativity?The opening gambit is obviously deliberate: it aims to reject traditional tracing of "influences" in order to pose new questions. The early eighteenth century in England should be of particular interest to students of Hebrew literature since it borrowed and further developed the Ancients vs. Moderns controversy from the French seventeenth-century critics and also witnessed many of the early phenomena we usually associate with modernism: secularization, enlightenment, industrialization, urbanization, the increase of literacy, democratization. The English experience was replicated on the continent, particularly in Germany. As Lawrence Marsden Price has demonstrated so convincingly in his English Literature in Germany, most of which deals with the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, one cannot form a coherent picture of German literature in Germany during that period without factoring in the English influence.3 Price, for instance, has fully documented chapters on the moral weeklies, Pope, Thomson, Milton, Young, MacPherson's Ossian, Percy's Reliques, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Locke, and Shaftesbury, and an entire section on Shakespeare. As one reads through studies of early modern Hebrew literature, particularly of the Berlin maskilim, one is struck by the gross neglect of the English connection. England, furthermore, presents a useful paradigm for modernization because of its priority in many areas, its relatively unbroken line of development, and the widespread commercial and cultural influence of England until World War I. Much of the recent literary criticism written in France, England, and America has been obsessed with the problematics of modernity, often attributed to the subversion of the scriptural underpinnings of language since the eighteenth century, which has led to such notions as the indeterminacy of language, the crisis of consciousness, the abyss gaping between consciousness and reality, and the reinterpretation of Nietzsche and Freud-in short, the entire deconstructive enterprise. Since so much of the criticism of culture traces its roots back to the eighteenth century, it behooves us to examine the Hebrew writers of the period in this light even if we discover that the crisis of consciousness cannot be found there. 3. L. M. Price, English Literature in Germany (Berkeley, 1953).

4

ARNOLD J.BAND

In the past twenty-five years, there has been little theoretical debate concerning either the beginnings of modern Hebrew literature, its secularity, or its consequent problematics. The energies of research in modern Hebrew literature have been invested elsewhere, in formalist, semiological, or narratological studies. The eighteenth century, in fact, has attracted relatively little attention. With the exception of pioneering work being conducted in the aesthetic analysis of the Hasidic tale (composed at the end of the eighteenth century, but published at the beginning of the nineteenth), the few articles devoted to eighteenth-century writers have essentially illuminated some dark corners in the work of the Berlin maskilim. The avoidance of theorizing about the beginnings and nature of modern Hebrew literature is concomitant with a recrudescence of interest in the problematics of modernism and literary history in Western Europe, England, and America, for this is the period of Foucault and Derrida in France, of Jauss in Germany, Bloom and Hartman in America, let alone Marxists of all stripes throughout the Western world. While I do not argue that all or any of these theoreticians should be applicable to our own field of study, I do find it curious that precisely when modernity becomes a burning issue in the more advanced Western literary societies, it is not an issue which exercises contemporary Hebrew literary criticism. Bate, to be sure, is no deconstructionist, but even in his more traditional mode of criticism he points to an aspect of the anxiety of the eighteenthcentury English poet. Contrasting him with Harold Bloom, one of the more influential American critics of crisis, is particularly illuminating, since Bloom tries to understand and perhaps bridge this abyss with ideas taken from Buber and Scholem. Bate's argument, put simply, is that the modern poet in general, and the eighteenth-century poet in particular, had to struggle with the poetic tradition of his forebears in order to create his own modes of expression. This struggle was beset with a psychological anxiety first alluded to by David Hume, but expanded upon in recent years by Bloom.4 This anxiety engendered a pervasive self-consciousness which, Bate asserts, is one of the hallmarks of the literature to which we attribute the nebulous term "modern." Note that Bate's passage subtly suggests the themes which inform the self-consciousness of the poets and critics of the 4. The books by Bloom pertinent to this argument are The Anxiety oflInfluence (New York, 1973), A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (New York, 1975), Poetry and Repression (New Haven, 1976), and Agon (New York, 1982).

BEGINNINGS OF MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE

5

period: "not so high"; "less of a unit"; "barer"; "an empty shrine." Bate, furthermore, never forgets that the history of literature is the account of the struggles of a succession of creative writers to express themselves in their own idiom despite the burden of past writers which is part of the linguistic and literary tradition which enables them to express themselves.5 He, nevertheless, regards the transition from period to period as evolutionary, that through such new notions as sublimity and the imagination, romantic poets learned to bear the burden of the past and the problematics of modernity generated by it. Bloom's position is a "revision" of the traditional one advanced by Bates in that where Bates sees evolution, Bloom sees cataclytic, but creative, disjunction. Bloom's version of this anxiety is, as is well known, formulated in Freudian terms: the struggle of the poet against his immediate ancestors is Oedipal and violent. Whatever we might think of Bloom's exotic ratios, or his often rash excursions into gnosticism and Kabbalah to seek metaphors for his theories, one must grant that he has revitalized the study of literary influence in the past decade. Since the periods discussed by both Bate and Bloom are what has commonly been recognized as the threshold of modernity-the eighteenth century-a testing of the applicability of their theories to Hebrew literature of that century to which we commonly attribute the beginnings of modern Hebrew literature should be a fruitful heuristic exercise. It should, furthermore, provoke a sorely needed rethinking of the basic critical assumptions we utilize in approaching the materials of the period and make us conscious of the "tropics of our discourse," to use the term of Hayden White. It is illuminating, for instance, to cite at least one sharp contrast between the problematics occupying Bate and Bloom and that facing the scholar of eighteenth-century Hebrew literature. When one speaks of the burden of the past suffered by the eighteenth-century English poets, one refers to the immediate past, to Milton and, a bit more removed, to Shakespeare. To escape parental authority, they espoused ancestral authority in the form of classical antiquity with canons of aesthetics often borrowed from the French, who had experienced somewhat similar problems. Bate (p. 22) argues that "this is the first large scale example, in the modern history of the arts, of the" leapfrog use of the past for authority or psychological comfort:

5. See Hayden N. White's remarks on this subject in the article cited in note 1.

6

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J.BAND

the leap over the parental-the principal immediate predecessors-to what Northrop Frye calls "the modal grandfather." It should be immediately clear that none of the Hebrew writers we shall discuss, Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, N.H. Wessely, and the early Hasidic storytellers, suffered from this "burden of the past," since they were not preceded by towering literary talents which they had to overcome. To the extent that there was a burden to overcome, it was the burden of the present, more specifically, the repressive force of traditional rabbinical authorities. If we were to utilize the parental/ancestral terms proffered by Frye and Bate, we would have to designate the parental as the normative Judaism of the period of the author and the ancestral as an idealized biblical ethos, different in each case, upon which the author could draw to legitimize his activities in the face of the recognized, established authorities. While Luzzatto's and Wessely's long poems openly employ biblical diction and character-types, the Hasidic tales almost always have as prooftext or subtext some biblical image or reference. In each of the three cases we shall study, the composition of an aesthetically pleasing drama, or poem, or story-whatever the overt religious or social message may be-is an imminent goal. The formal qualities of the text are those of accomplished literary artifacts. We must remember, furthermore, that the notion of "beauty" in all its manifestations is problematic in itself. While the admiration for "the beautiful" in life and literature was one of the basic Haskalah tenets, it is difficult to know when the preoccupation with aesthetics is inextricably bound up with the whole complex of Haskalah notions and impulses and when it is an independent value.6 When a poet or a critic expresses his admiration for a certain work, e.g., Wessely's Shirei Tiferet, and extolls its "beautiful poetry, the likes of which we have not seen since the Bible," what, we must ask, does he really mean? Aesthetic notions rarely exist in isolation from other ideological considerations.

6. See Y. Friedlander, "The Concept of the Essence of Poetry at the Beginning of the Hebrew Haskalah" (Hebrew), Bikoret ufarshanut 1 (March 1970): 55-60; I. Barzilay, "The Ideology of the Berlin Haskalah," PAAJR 25 (1956): 1-37, and "The Italian and Berlin Haskalah," PAAJR 29 (1960-61): 17-54; A. Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn (Philadelphia, 1973), particularly chaps. 5 and 8; Azriel Sholhet, 'Im Hilufe Hatekufot (Jerusalem, 1960); Moshe Schwartz, "The Poetics of Sublimity and Solomon Loewisohn's Melitzat Yeshurun"(Hebrew), Moznayim 17 (September-October 1963): 373-383; Tova Cohen, "Influences upon Solomon Loewisohn's Melitzat Yeshurun"(Hebrew), Bikoret ufarshanut 6 (December, 1974): 17-28.

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II No consideration of any aspect of Hebrew belles-lettres of the eighteenth century can dispense with an orienting discussion of the various theories of beginnings and definitions.7 Though the recognition of a new period in Hebrew poetry was recorded as early as Franz Delitzsch's Zur Geschichte der Juedischen Poesie8 in 1836, which reflected the awareness of such figures with whom he collaborated, such as S. D. Luzzatto and Meir Halevi Letteris, the now classical positions were fully formulated, as is well known, almost a century later by Y. F. Lachower (1928)9 and J. Klausner (1930).Io In each of these two cases we find a conceptual need to attribute the beginning of the modern period to an individual, either M. H. Luzzatto (by Lachower) or N. H. Wessely (Klausner). In neither instance does a specific word for "modern" appear; the term throughout all theoretical discussions in Hebrew of modern Hebrew literature is simply "new" as h.adashah, 'Al gevul hayashan veheopposed to "old" (cf. Lachower's book of essays; suggesting that on the theoretical level, at least, there was little h.adash), awareness of the problematics of modernity much discussed in other literatures and forcefully injected into the discourse on the topic by Baruch Kurzweil as late as the 1950s." When it comes to reasons and definitions, Lachower is irritatingly elusive. He refers to a "new spirit," a "new style" and "content," immense literary talent; but while he finds in Luzzatto's Migdal Oz clear echoes of the secular environment, he also finds in it unavoidable references to kabbalistic sources, particularly in the image of the tower-and yet seems to feel no

7. The histories of literature (and several high school textbooks) have been treated in detail by Avraham Holz in "Prolegomenon to a Literary History of Modern Hebrew Literature," Literature East and West 11, no. 3 (1967): 253-270. I discuss only those writers and aspects relevant to my argument. 8. Leipzig, 1836. 9. Toldot hasifrut ha'ivrit hahadashah (Tel Aviv, 1928). We shall quote from the 1952 edition. To this one should add Lachower's 'AlIgevul hayashan vehehadash (Jerusalem, 1951), which contains three essays on Luzzatto, pp. 29-95, published some twenty years earlier. 10. Historiyah shel hasifrut ha'ivrithahadashah(Jerusalem, 1930; 2 ed., 1952). Klausner had already established his position in brief in his Russian-language history of modern Hebrew literature first published in Warsaw in 1900. 11. Kurzweil's many essays of the 1950s on this subject were first collected in Sifrutenu hahadashah: hemshekh o mahpekhah [Our Modern Literature: Continuation or Revolt?] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1959).

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need to reconcile the two strains. His claims of subsequent historical influences are sparse and undocumented. Klausner's argument is more cohesive: he chooses Wessely as the key proponent of the new period, since his pamphlet Divre shalom ve'emet (1782) was a forthright statement espousing secular education and enlightenment, the ideals of the group known as the Me'asfim, which generated such controversy at the end of the century.'2 He rejects Lachower's arguments for Luzzatto's primacy on three grounds: Luzzatto was essentially a religious author, a kabbalist even in his dramas; his plays were not known until a century after their composition; Luzzatto had never intended to begin a new age. The last reason is naive at best, since it assumes that the individual writer to whom one can attribute a new departure has deliberately and consciously set upon a new path-a position which few historians would accept. Wessely, furthermore, did advocate educational reform, but had no dreams of being the father of a new epoch in Hebrew literature. On the matter of historical filiation, Klausner is on somewhat firmer ground: only some fifty copies of Luzzatto's Layesharim Tehilla were published in 1743, while Migdal Oz was not published until 1837 and Maase Shimshon was not published until 1927. By the time Migdal Oz was finally published, the reputation of Wessely as the prime literary influence on such figures as Shalom HaCohen, Meir Letteris, and Adam HaCohen was firmly established. What Klausner neglects to mention (and I shall treat at length) is the great popularity of Layesharim Tehilla between 1780 and 1836. Klausner's categorical identification of the new, i.e., modern literature as secular was by no means new, but was decisive because of his reputation. Once secularism, however, ill-defined, was posited as the dominant characteristic of this new literature, the unanswered-perhaps unasked-question remaining was: What was this secularism? The more important question: What value does one assign to it? had been taken as a given, even though what would seem to be the prior question, the definition, had not yet been adequately clarified. Clearly both Lachower and Klausner considered this modernity a positive achievement. For Klausner, a militant Zionist, it was associated with worldly activism, which led through the Haskalah to the Jewish Renaissance and political Zionism, which he advocated. Lachower, no less a nationalist than Klausner, was more attuned to the vitality mani12. This pamphlet was published in Berlin at the beginning of 1782 as a reaction to Joseph II's Edict of Toleration, promulgated October 13, 1784.

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fested in the expanded scope of the imagination, in linguistic expressiveness. His essays should be read in conjunction with Bialik's two essays: "HaBahur MiPadova" ("The Youth from Padua" [on Luzzatto]) and "Giluy vekhisuy balashon" ("The Revealed and the Hidden in Language").'3 Bialik's editorial work on Sefer HaAggadah or the medieval Hebrew poets was later paralleled by Lachower's work with Y. Tishby on the Zohar.'4 In all these cases one finds a relentless preoccupation with language: How does one create in language? How does one write in Hebrew? What is figural language? How does one edit a legend to make it more attractive in literary terms? The Zohar, finally, self-consciously creates worlds of thought and emotion through language. The clarification of the term "secular" (hiloni) is one of the tasks of H. N. Shapira's lengthy introduction to his Toldot HaSifrut ha'ivrit hahadashah ("secular(1940).'~5Since he finds a mixture of kodesh ("holiness") and of concepts: ism") throughout Jewish history, he prefers a different seth.ol "terrestrialism" (the concrete reality of the terrestrial world) vs. "empyrealism" (Heb. superliut) (the etherealized reality of the spiritual world). These two terms are paralleled to "introcentrism" vs. "transcentrism." In the course of history, Jewish life has affirmed the preponderance of"terrealism" over "empyrealism"; modern Hebrew literature, in striving as an expression of the collective Jewish will to restore the preponderance of "terrealism," is thus an organic link in the unbroken chain of Jewish culture, a move in the dialectic between these antithetical forces. This latest dialectical swing, the beginning of modernism, began-for Shapira-after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, when Jewish life had reached the extreme of landless spirituality and began to shift back to concerns for territorial, or terreal, realities. Following the suggestions of Gershom Scholem, Shapira regarded the Sabbatean movement as an abortive step in this direction which ultimately led to the Haskalah, in turn, a necessary move towards Zionist nationalism. Literature, of course, is a manifestation of this cosmic dialectic, not an isolated phenomenon to be regarded on aesthetic grounds alone. Shapira's elaborate exposition and coinage of bizarre terms evidence his 13. In Kol kitve H. N. Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1951). The article on Luzzatto, first published in 1927, appears on pp. 228-229; that on the revealed and hidden in language, on pp. 191-193. 14. Mishnat haZohar, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1948), vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1961). Tishby shared with Lachower a lifelong fascination with Luzzatto. See Tishby's two definitive essays on Luzzatto's mysticism in the former's Netive ha'emunah vehaminut(Tel Aviv, 1964), chaps. 8 and 9. 15. (Kovna, 1939), pp. 1-168.

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struggle with the definitional problem of modernity, not with its valorization, which he takes for granted. He also is not exercised by the psychological or spiritual implications of modernity, so defined. He is essentially in accord with Klausner's assignment of eighteenth-century secularism of modernism to the 1780s in Berlin, and not with Lachower's choice of Luzzatto, though many of his reasons are those which led Lachower to select Luzzatto as the beginning of the modern era: a greater power of expressivity, an expansion of the human imagination, etc. The expansion of human capacities and horizons is also the criterion identified by Simon Halkin as the mark of modernity in modern Hebrew literature.'6Though much less specific than Shapira, Halkin does assert that modern Hebrew literature is essentially the product of the past two centuries and also finds in the Sabbatean movement, as Scholem portrayed it, the desire for a "fuller life in the heart of the simple Jewish folk." While differing from Shapira regarding the terminus a quo, Halkin agrees with his basic criteria. Halkin thus includes Luzzatto in his concept of modern Hebrew literature and also the Hasidic folktale. Both Shapira and Halkin are obviously eager to demonstrate that modern Hebrew literature was a natural growth of literary or cultural phenomena which preceded it. They try to demonstrate the fallacy of the prevailing view that this modern literature represented a sudden, unanticipated jump from the medieval to the modern without the mediating period of gradual development in the Renaissance. During the centuries of the Renaissance in Italy, France, and England, most of world Jewry was not affected by the new humanism. Both Halkin and Shapira endeavor to fill this gap by reference to kabbalism, hence their espousal of Scholem's ideas, which Shapira cites as early as 1939-as does Lachower. Avoidance of the potentially critical issues posed by modernity and secularism seems to be the goal of Dov Sadan's holism,'7 which is actually

16. Halkin's position is found in his Modern Hebrew Literature, Trendsand Values (New York, 1950), chaps. 1-4; Mavo lasiporet ha'ivrit, notes taken at Halkin's lectures by Tzophia Hillel (Jerusalem, 1954); and in a much-neglected essay, "History and Historicism in Modern Hebrew Literature" (Hebrew), in his collection of essays Derakhim utzedadederakhimbasifrut, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1969), pp. 155-182. The last essay, written after Kurzweil's savage attacks on Halkin, demonstrates that these attacks had little effect on Halkin's initial position. 17. Dov Sadan's central essay, Al sifrutenu, first appeared as a monograph in 1950, Tel Aviv, but was later included in his Avne bedek (Tel Aviv, 1962), pp. 9-61, under the title "Masat Mavo'" ("Introductory Essay").

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an expansion of Zinberg's concept of "Jewish literature.'""'(Since Zinberg was a Marxist, it is possible that notions of"totalizing" informed his writing on Jewish literature.) Rather than focusing upon the narrow confines of the Hebrew Haskalah as delimited by either Klausner or Lachower, Sadan presents a concept of modern Hebrew literature which embraces the totality of literary creativity in Hebrew over the past three centuries, including traditional rabbinic and Hasidic literature. This holism, in fact, impells him to include in the field of his study everything of Jewish content or concern written by Jews not only in Hebrew, but also in Yiddish, Ladino, and any other language, even if not specifically Jewish, such as German or French or English. While Sadan grants that secularism is the distinguishing feature of Haskalah literature, he regards it as a minor, surface phenomenon under which the subconscious currents of Jewish creativity continue to course. Sadan's thesis has had far-reaching ideological and curricular effects since its formulation in 1950, but it contributes little to a clarification of the question of modernity. It should be clear that all the above-mentioned positions are Ahad HaAmic rather than Berdiczewskian in their view of the structure of Jewish history. In all cases, Jewish history, for all its variety, was to be considered as a unitarian flow through time, always preserving its essential identity and source of energy, the will to survive of the Jewish people as a distinct cultural entity. Where Ahad HaAm saw essentially superficial changes, Berdiczewski detected radical disjunction and the concomitant relentless struggle by the forces of privilege and power to repress all dissent or change. The well-known provenance of their respective positions bears mentioning at this point in our argument. Ahad HaAm derived his evolutionary perspective from Spencer and other British social philosophers of the nineteenth century; Berdiczewski, admittedly Nietzschean, also read deeply in Schopenhauer and Faust. The comparison with Bate's evolutionary development and Bloom's cataclytic struggles is illuminating. From Lachower's history (1928) through Halkin's and Sadan's books 18. Israel Zinberg's History of Jewish Literature has a complicated publication history. Its first volumes were published in Russian in the 1920s, but the entire work, including the incomplete last volume, was issued in Yiddish beginning in the late 1920s in Vilna and ending in 1943 in New York. The six-volume Hebrew edition appeared between 1955 and 1960 in Tel Aviv. A twelve-volume English edition was translated and edited by Bernard Martin (Cincinnati and New York, 1972-78). Zinberg, incidentally, includes Luzzatto among the medieval Hebrew poets.

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(1950) the secularity of modern Hebrew literature, however defined, was not seen as a disjunctive force or problematic from a cultural point of view. The problematics of this secularism, this modernity, was forcefully thrust into the public debate on the nature of modern Hebrew literature, affecting both the interpretive and evaluative processes, in the 1950s by Baruch Kurzweil in a dazzling flurry of splenetic articles including attacks on Halkin, Shapira, Ahad HaAm, Scholem, and most native Israeli writing. Kurzweil derived his ideas from Max Wiener's Juedische Religion in Zeitalter der Emanzipationlg9 and Isaac Breuer's Judenproblem.20From the former he learned the psychological or spiritual problematics of secularism; from the latter, the critique of secular Zionism seen from a traditional religious point of view. In a variety of different formulations, Kurzweil argued that modern Jewish secularism, the ethos which informed most of modern Hebrew literature, was a radical break from traditional Judaism and therefore an ethos which had been emptied of the fundamental certainty in the sacred which embraces all the phenomena of life and measures their value. Unlike all his predecessors mentioned above, Kurzweil considers this modernity a disaster, a radical discontinuity with the Jewish past, a specious attempt to claim its legitimacy as the rightful heir of historical Judaism while it is actually its repudiation. His answer to the loaded question posed by the title of his most influential book, Our Modern Literature-Continuity or Revolt?,is obvious, and the literature, in his opinion, is an accurate reflection of the calamitous results of this revolt: not the renewal of the Jewish spirit, but its fragmentation and desolation. This fragmentation of the Jewish consciousness was far more catastrophic than the similar fragmentation which appeared in European literature in the eighteenth century, since the European nations had a whole range of social institutions and traditions grounded in landed states of one sort or another from which a viable literature could be sustained even when traditional faith in an all-embracing divinity was undermined. The Jew had nothing but his faith, his halachically structured way of life, and when the sacral underpinnings of that were sapped, there was left a void which could not be filled even with the reestablishment of Jewish political sovereignty in the State of Israel. Steeped in the phenomenological philosophy of his student years, Kurz-

19. Berlin, 1933. 20. Frankfurt-am-Main, 1922.

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weil holds that language flows from being and therefore insists that Hebrew, whose essence is sacral, used by secular authors can only produce a disjointed, shallow literature, the literature of the Haskalah, for instance. Only when authors begin to sense the inadequacy of their secularism as a replacement for traditional belief, only when the problematic is intuited-as in the case of Feierberg, or Bialik, or Brenner, or Agnon-does Hebrew literature achieve an aesthetic, though tragic, quality. Kurzweil therefore devoted his literary studies to an examination of the "tragic paradox" which informs the works of some of the foremost modern Hebrew writers. The paradox is the product of their belated realization that their secularism was inadequate to sustain a spiritual way of life. Ruthlessly consistent, he could find little of value in Israeli literature (with the exception of some of Amichai and Ravikovich), and of all modern Hebrew writers, only Uri Zvi Greenberg, with his mystic view of Jewish destiny, elicited his unstinting approval. Kurzweil has thus presented a theory of Hebrew modernism which is totalist and revisionist. It is totalist in that it comprehends all of modern Jewish life, hence modern Hebrew literature as the most accurate reflection of modern Jewish life, and allows for no phenomena which might not fit into his theory. As a hermeneutic philosophy, it determines the interpretation of every literary text, and though Kurzweil claims he reads with the authority of Dilthey, Heidegger, or Gadamer, it should be clear to any sensitive reader that he is not engaging in an open dialogue with the text, but searching in it for those passages which might corroborate his views of the catastrophic nature of modernism. It is revisionist in that it completely rejects the normative Zionist overview of Hebrew literature, which posits a dynamic that moves ever upward from traditionally informed texts, to maskilic works, to revival (tehiyah) creativity, culminating in the literature of the State of Israel. Kurzweil's periodization is significantly different from the normative: simplistic Haskalah; militant-reformist Haskalah; the tragic period (which corresponds to the Zionist tehiyah), and the period of the apocalyptic vision of redemption, which actually includes only one writer, Uri Zvi Greenberg. As for eighteenth-century Hebrew literature, Kurzweil has little to offer that is new or even evidences close familiarity with the material. He follows others in regarding the Berlin Haskalah as the point of departure and relies upon Natan Rotenstreich's formulation of the period as radical change in Jewish consciousness.21 Thotigh Rotenstreich was primarily concerned with 21. Jewish Philosophy in Modern Timesfrom Mendelssohnto Rosenzweig (New York, 1968). Original Hebrew: Hamahashavahayehudit ba'et hahadashah,2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1945-50). For a

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the philosophers of the period, Mendelssohn in particular, and not literary texts, Kurzweil has no difficulty with this discrepancy. In general, one realizes that for all his assertions about the validity of his "inherent reading" of the text, Kurzweil is no less an ideologue than Klausner; neither exhibits much concern with the very nature of the literary text, its literariness, its basic figurality. Since relatively little attention has been devoted for some time to these are ultimately problems of selfproblems of beginnings-which definition-new departures are called for. The following paragraphs, therefore, comprise the beginning of an exploration of the three most influential works of the period in an attempt, not to solve problems, but to put them in such a way as to reopen the discussion, which has been neglected, perhaps deflected, for too long.

III We have seen that in refuting Lachower's attribution of the beginning of modern Hebrew literature to Luzzatto, Klausner cited both the belated publication, hence influence, of Migdal Oz, and Luzzatto's kabbalistic, hence anti-secular (i.e., anti-modern) bent. Klausner's citation of the belated publication of Migdal Oz offers a convenient point of departure for a theoretical excursion into several important aspects of literary history which are usually neglected. (Among these I find most useful the notion of Rezeptionsgeschichte introduced by Hans Robert Jauss.) While Klausner correctly established the fact that Migdal Oz was available only in manuscript, hence unknown in the formative decades of the Haskalah period, 1780-1830, he strangely neglected to record that Luzzatto's third play, Layesharim Tehilla, though published in only fifty copies in 1743, was republished in Berlin in 1780 and 1799, precisely at the peak of the Berlin Haskalah; in Lemberg, the publishing center of the subsequent Galician Haskalah, in 1799, 1813, 1823, 1825; in Lissa in 1824; Yosefow in 1826; and Bamberg in 1827.22 By the time summary of Kurzweil's career and ideological stance, see James S. Diamond, BarukhKurzweil and Modern Hebrew Literature (Scholars Press, California, 1983). 22. The popularity of the book might reflect a readership beyond maskilic circles. Luzzatto was admired among pious Jews for his ethical tract, Mesillat Yesharim.Layesharim tehilla

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Migdal Oz was rediscovered (Almanzi bought it from the heirs of R. Elhanan HaCohen, a disciple of R. Israel Benjamin Bassan for whose wedding Luzzatto wrote the drama), Layesharim Tehillawas well known in both Berlin and Galicia, as was Luzzatto's famous ethical tract, Mesillat Yesharim, which had been published in ten different editions between 1740 (Amsterdam) and 1835 (Yosefow). From the 1780s through the middle of the nineteenth century, the two belletristic books that every maskilic writer had were Wessely's Shirei Tiferet (1789-1811) and Luzzatto's Mesillat Yesharim. Simply from the point of view of factual Rezeptionsgeschichte, the Lachower-Klausner argument has been a futile exercise, since both writers, Luzzatto and Wessely, exerted a powerful influence simultaneously on Hebrew writers and readers during the formative decades: 1790-1830. The historical record was unfortunately blurred by Franz Delitzsche's influential statements, which both reflected the prevalent opinion of the 1830s and gave it authority for following generations: "Mose Chajim ben-Jakob Luzzatto ist der Begruender der moderner Schule in Italien" (p. 89), and "Der Begruender der neuen germanischen Schule ist Naftali Wessely" (p. 95). What Delitzsche and his colleagues might not have realized, since they were themselves receptors-as members of the first generation with a realization that they were experiencing a new phrase in the history of Hebrew literature-was that it was precisely their perceptions which determined what was modern. It is at this point that Hans Robert Jauss has much to contribute to our argument.23 Rezeptionsgeschichte is, for him, more than a history of the reception of a work of art by certain audiences; it is an ambitious attempt to rejuvenate literary history, which has been anesthetized by the formalists, on the one hand, and the Marxists, on the other. In the process, Jauss also rejects the standard philological approach. He quotes Walther Bulst's statement that "no text was ever written to be read and interpreted philologically by philologists," and adds "nor. . .historically by historians. Neither approach recognizes the true role of the reader to whom the literary work is

would not offend a pious reader, since it demonstrates the victory of the just (the yesharim; note that the term appears in the title of both books) over the evil and all the "characters" bear the names of virtues or vices. 23. Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," New Literary History 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1970): 7-38. Also collected in H. R. Jauss, Towardsan Aesthetics of Reception (Minneapolis, 1982). Page numbers in text refer to NLH.

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primarily addressed, a role as unalterable for aesthetic as for historical appreciation" (pp. 7-8). The history of literature, claims Jauss, "is a process of aesthetic reception and production which takes place in realization of literary texts on the part of the receptive reader, the reflective critic, and the author in his continued creativity" (p. 10). To dispel the doubts often voiced that an analysis of the aesthetic impact can approach the meaning of a work of art or serve as the basis for an objective history, Jauss introduces the notion of the horizon of expectations, by which he means the set of expectations with which the reader approaches the text, expectations which are historically contextualized since they are based on the reader's reading experience, his notion of genre, his sense of the implicit relationships to familiar works of the literaryhistorical context, and by the contrast between the poetical and practical functions of language which the reflective reader can always realize while he is reading. (Note the similarities with Bate and Bloom.) As to our ability to gauge the newness of a specific work for a specific audience, Jauss says: If the horizonof expectationsof a workis reconstructedin this way, it is possible to determineits artisticnatureby the natureand degreeof its effecton a given audience. If the "aestheticdistance" is consideredas the distance betweenthe givenhorizonof expectationsand the appearanceof a newwork, whose receptionresults in a "horizon change" because it negates familiar experienceor articulatesan experiencefor the firsttime,this aestheticdistance can be measuredhistoricallyin the spectrumof the reactionof the audience and the judgmentof criticism(spontaneoussuccess,rejectionor shock, scattered approval,gradualor later understanding).(p. 14). Turning to Luzzatto and Wessely, it should be clear, in the light of Jauss's theory, that the combined reception of Layesharim Tehillaand Shirei Tiferet between the late 1780s and the middle of the nineteenth century is a central phenomenon in the history of modern Hebrew literature. These two books inspired a host of plays, translations, epic poems, even Avraham Mapu's Ahavat Tzion (1853), the first Hebrew novel. We can detect traces of these books in works by Franco-Mendes, Shalom HaCohen, Meir HaLevy Letteris, Adam HaCohen, Micah Yosef Levinson, and Y. L. Gordon, let alone dozens of less accomplished writers. No less important is the testimony about these books by many of these writers who were also critics and scholars. Nowhere does one find approval

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of these two books because they are secular (Klausner's argument); when they are admired for their praise of wisdom and derision of folly, these are not cited as their cardinal virtues.24The readers, after all, could and did read "enlightened" books in German or French. The recurring note of admiration, even adulation-however awkwardly articulated-is reserved for the sheer beauty of the poetry, its expressiveness, its openness to experience, which is always compared with the poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures. Time and again one encounters the phrase: "Poetry like this has not been written since the time of the Scriptures." The comparison with Scriptures has two effects: it legitimizes the new work and aestheticizes Scriptures. The fact that Wessely and Luzzatto were pious Jews, that the former was attacked for his "new" though really moderate ideas on education, or that the latter was hounded out of Italy for his messianic intimations, seems to have meant little to the readers of their poetic works. For these readers and aspiring poets, schooled primarily on rabbinic texts and those portions of the Bible used in one form or another of religious worship, books like Layesharim Tehilla or Shirei Tiferet represented a major "change of horizon," for while they were written in a Biblicizing idiom, hence accessible and familiar, they offered a narrative sweep (Wessely), an enchanting portrayal of nature, of passion, and sensuous figural language (Luzzatto). Each, in fact, offered a different mode of poetic expression: Shirei Tiferet became the paradigm in modern Hebrew literature for the lengthy narrative poem, the poema; La YesharimTehilla (and, after 1836, Migdal Oz), which was poor in plot but rich in figural language and lyrical passages, demonstrated for several generations of poets-and novelists-the potentialities of complex lyrical expression in a language which none of them spoke. The most eloquent testimony to the impact of Luzzatto's achievement in expanding the linguistic horizons of Hebrew poetry is found a century later in Bialik's famous essay "HaBahlurMiPadova,"25written upon the publication of Luzzatto's book of plays by Simon Ginzburg in 1927.26 Bialik, to be sure, was no historian or trained philologist. His enthusiastic, lavish praise is historically distorted: he attributes the entire upsurge of modern Jewish 24. On Wessely, see Klausner, op. cit., pp. 138-143. On Luzzatto, see Simon Ginzburg, The Life and Works of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (Philadelphia, 1931), pp. 110, 113, 114; Yonah David, Hamahazot shel M. H. Luzzatto(Jerusalem, 1972), notes pp. 75, 101, 112, 113, p. 97 (nn. 9, 14, 37, 38, 40, 41, 46). 25. See above, n. 13. 26. M. H. Luzzatto, Sefer Hamahazot (Tel Aviv, 1927).

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creativity to Luzzatto, the inspiration, he implies, for the three fountainheads of modern Judaism: Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, the Baal Shem Tov, and Moses Mendelssohn. Bialik is on much sounder ground when he focuses upon Luzzatto's poetic contribution, the purification and healing of a defiled and sick language, the concrete expression of the soul of the people. Deliberately following Luzzatto, Bialik indulges in bold imagery. Luzzatto is always compared to the light of redemption; just as his disciples saw in him a redeemer and messiah, so Bialik, referringto Hebrew literature, does not hesitate to name Luzzatto "The Redeemer" and "The Messiah"; it was through Luzzatto's genius (always described in popular kabbalistic terms) that the morning light of Hebrew literature burst forth to "a new life, and most importantly, a life different from that which preceded it."27 The modernity of modern Hebrew literature, for Bialik, begins with the explosive literary creativity of Luzzatto, an explosion repeatedly portrayed in kabbalistic metaphors connected with the purifying light of redemption. (It would be interesting to compare Harold Bloom's recourse to kabbalistic metaphors with that of Bialik.) No less crucial is Bialik's formulation of the manifold aspects of Luzzatto's personality and creativity, a problem which troubles most critics, even so perceptive a scholar as J. Schirmann, whose essay on Luzzatto's plays is still the point of departure for all studies of this material.28Both at the beginning and the end of his essay, Schirmann wonders about the contrast between the "enlightened" poet who writes pastorals in the Italian style and the mystic who heard voices and claimed he was the messiah. (The naivet6 of this query is puzzling and exhibits a resistance to a common phenomenon in religion. Luzzatto's combination of mysticism and dramaturgy is no more paradoxical than Joseph Karo's mysticism and rational jurism, as demonstrated by R. J. Z. Werblowsky.)29In several well-crafted, almost lyrical passages Bialik claims that this confluence of seething, seemingly contradictory streams gathered in the pool (berekha, the same metaphor for the introspective soul in Bialik's poema "HaBerekha") "which God prepared for their repose in the soul of his chosen one, Luzzatto. From there

27. Bialik, p. 228. 28. J. Schirmann, "The Plays of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto" (Hebrew), in J. Schirmann, Letoldot hashirah vehadramaha'ivrit, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1979), pp. 161-175. 29. Joseph Karo, Lawyer and Mystic (Oxford, 1962).

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they emerged, sevenfold pure and cleansed, with a different face, and a totally different appearance."30 Though much more responsible to historical fact and sober in his language, Lachower's position on Luzzatto clearly resembles that of Bialik, as do Halkin's and Shapira's.3' Certainly, there is a dimension to modernity in literature which transcends ideological positions, either traditional Zionist (Klausner) or traditionally religious (Kurzweil). When one approaches the literary text on its own terms and formulates the initial questions in accordance with the peculiar nature of literary language, the line of investigation leads us to different perspectives regarding the meaning of the text or its modernity. If, for instance, scholars studying Luzzatto's plays, all of which have a pastoral element, had spent as much time delving into the assumptions of the genre as in mechanical line-by-line comparisons of Luzzatto with Guarini, they would have asked more interesting questions.32 For instance, the psychological impulse which generates the pastoral poem is the sense that the world is too much with us, that we must find an escape from the overwhelming present to a past Golden Age of simple innocence and happiness or forward to an equally tranquil, carefree utopia. From the Hellenistic period on, pastorals are written by urban dwellers about an imaginary landscape free of urban concerns. As P. V. Marinelli puts it succinctly: The landof Arcadiais reallythe landscapeof an idea. ... Arcadiais primarily the paradiseof poetry. It is a middle countryof the imagination,half-way between a past perfectionand present imperfection,a place of Becoming

30. P. 229. 31. Toldot hasifrut ha'ivrit hahadashah(Tel Aviv, 1952), pp. xi, xii. Introduction written in 1927 for first (1928) edition. 32. See Sergio J. Sierra, "The Literary Influence of G. B. Guarini's Pastor Fido on M. H. Luzzatto's Migdal Oz," Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. 50, no. 3 (January 1960): 241-255 and ibid., no. 4 (April 1960): 319-337. Though Yonah David (op. cit.) does discuss the pastoral or allegorical features of the plays, he draws no substantial conclusions. Nomi Tamir-Ghez seems to be moving towards a deeper understanding of the pastoral, but ultimately concentrates on the disjunctive nature of Migdal Oz in "On Literary Contacts and the Thematic Structure of Migdal Oz" (Hebrew), Hasifrut, nos. 30-31 (IX/1-2) (April 1981): 95-100. The literature on the pastoral is vast. See Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London, 1971), bibliography, pp. 83-88. Of particular interest are: William Empson, Some Versionsof the Pastoral (London, 1950); H. Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington, 1969); and Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). The concept of the allegory has been radically revised in Angus Fletcher's Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, 1964).

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ratherthan Being,wherean individual'spotenciesfor the artsof life and love and poetry are exploredand tested.It points two ways, therefore,backward into the past and forwardinto a possible future.33 Speculative and practical mysticism, we are told, does not arise in a void, but rather within the circles of institutionalized religions which the mystic feels no longer satisfy his deepest religious needs. One then creates a Zohar, figuratively speaking, a work of literary speculation about the inner workings of the cosmos or the soul or the Godhead. The literary form may be entirely different-homiletic rather than pastoral drama-but the psychological similarities are too numerous to dismiss. Both the author and his receptive audience obviously find in this literary, mythic world, an escape from the real world in which they are constrained to pass their daily existence. While Luzzatto patently found it necessary to purge the pastoral of pagan or Christian elements, to Judaize it, his choice of the pastoral as a genre of literary composition implied certain assumptions and conventions which are not contradictory with zoharic modes of thought, but actually complementary to them. The first generation of maskilim also praised Wessely's Shirei Tiferet34 primarily for its poetry and not for its rationalist ideology. One of the poetic aspects admired is the narrative sweep of the biblical tale retold in clear, unencumbered verses, free from convoluted syntax and quantitative metrics. And while this lengthy epic on the life of Moses leading up to the Sinaitic Revelation failed to maintain interest after the 1880s, we should not overlook the innovation it represented to Hebrew readers and writers between the publication of its first volume in 1789 and the end of the subsequent century. Despite Wessely's enlightenment didacticism and veiled philological pedantry, the poem was the first intentional "epic" treatment in Hebrew of the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai. For readers intimately acquainted with the biblical original, the epic treatment, in alexandrine sestets, was not only exciting but revolutionary precisely because of its narrative line energized by a sense of the sublimity of subject and hero. Unlike the satirists like Euchel, Berlin, or Wolfsohn,35Wessely was one

33. Pastoral (London, 1971). 34. Berlin and Prague, 1789-1811. Klausner provides full bibliography on Wessely until 1930 in op. cit. (1952 ed.), pp. 103-104. 35. Moshe Pelli, "Naphtali Herz Wessely: Moderation in Transition," Hebrew Studies 19

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of the most conservative, pious, and reverent of the writers associated with the Berlin Haskalah. Despite his intention to create a work that would render the sacred teachings of the Torah more accessible to the reader, he actually produced one of the most "modern," even potentially subversive works of the period: he departed from the traditional norms of exegesis and homily, and rendered the most theologically central moments of the Pentateuch in a verse form adopted from the German literature of the period. In a sense, this was a literary act far more daring than that of Luzzatto's. Ironically, the dangers of this departure from, hence challenge to, traditional norms of literary expression associated with Scripture were never an issue at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And when Uri Kovner, by no means a defender of the faith, opened his attack on much of Haskalah literature in 1866 by savaging Shirei Tiferet, he faulted Wessely for trying to compete with the original biblical text, not because this act was sacrilegious, but because it was aesthetically a failure.36Shirei Tiferet thus presents us with a Rezeptiongeschichte totally different from that of Luzzatto's dramas. Wessely's work found-or created-its audience upon publication, but lost it within two generations. S. D. Luzzatto, for whom anything written in Hebrew was a source of national pride, found it boring; even Klausner, who posits Wessely as the father of modern Hebrew literature, must strain to describe its virtues. The first two important literary works we have discussed, Luzzatto's Layesharim Tehillaand Wessely's Shirei Tiferet, each commonly recognized as a major work in the first generation of what we call modern Hebrew literature, were written by pious Jews. Our third example, Shivhe HaBesht,37 actually a compilation of Hasidic tales edited and published by Dov Ber ben Shmuel in 1815, also took shape in the last decades of the eighteenth century in circles of pious Jews, this time the Hasidim of the Ukraine, who knew nothing of the Italian pastoral or the German epic poem. Our inclusion of Hasidic literature is done with full awareness of the problematics of such inclusion; no history of modern Hebrew literature has, to date, included the Hasidic tale. Zinberg did include the tale (in vol. 9), since he was writing a (1978): 43-55, and Yehudah Friedlander, Perakim basatira ha'ivrit beshilhe hamea'ah ha-18 beGermania (Tel Aviv, 1979). 36. Originally in Heker Devar (Warsaw, 1876), pp. 41 ff. Collected in Kol Kitve Kovner(Tel Aviv, 1948), pp. 33-34. 37. 1st ed., Kapust, 1815. The most frequently cited Hebrew edition is that of S. A. Horodetzky (Berlin, 1922; Tel Aviv, 1946). English edition: In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov,ed. and trans, by Dan ben Amos and Jerome R. Mintz (Bloomington, 1970).

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comprehensive history of Jewish literature, not only Hebrew literature or belles-lettres. Since the Hasidic tale was ordinarily first told and transmitted in Yiddish but then transcribed either in Yiddish or Hebrew, Zinberg's Marxist leanings would naturally lead him to include such popular literature. Sadan, as mentioned above, insists on including the Hasidic tale, though he has never written a history, while Kurzweil dismisses Sadan's suggestion together with his entire holistic theory. Halkin supports Sadan's contention and finds the concomitance of the emergence of modern Hebrew literature in the west and the Hasidic tale in the east not a coincidence, but an historic inevitability.38 The justification for this inclusion is complex but defensible. Though the tale was not the prime genre of Hasidic expression-the homily was-most students of Hasidism concede that the movement did endow the tale with an importance and dignity it had not received previously. The oft-quoted preface to ShivkeHaBesht by the printer, Israel Yoffe, corroborates this contention.39 From it we learn that even in the period of Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk's sojourn in Eretz Yisrael (1777-1788), it was already a custom among Hasidim to substitute pious tales for the customary Torah lesson at the third Sabbath meal late on Saturday afternoon; the tale, that is, had already assumed a quasi-ritual function and could be substituted for a Torah lesson. This, of course, is not the aestheticism we find in Western Europe, an integral part of the maskilic ethos with all its ambiguities. The tradition of storytelling became well entrenched in Hasidic circles and continues till today. While it is true that maskilim ridiculed Hasidic tales until the 1880s, the enormous popularity of these tales among Hasidim cannot be overlooked unless we choose to restrict modern Hebrew literature to writers directly associated with the Haskalah. One cannot neglect, furthermore, the satires of Perl and Erter, which parody Hasidic tales, since these satires are among the most significant achievements of early modern Hebrew literature (1819 ff.).40However negative the portrayal of Hasidism, the Hasidic tale with its 38. Halkin, "Historia and Historicism," pp. 175-176. Halkin, like Shapira and Sadan, leans heavily on G. Scholem's "Mitzvah haba'a ba'avera," originally in Keneset (Tel Aviv, 1937). English translation, "Redemption Through Sin," by H. Halkin and G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971). 39. Horodetzky, ed. pp. 33-34. 40. There are many articles on both Joseph Perl and Isaac Erter (see bibliographies in EJ and El), but there is no scholarly monograph on the satire in the Galician period of the Has-

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motifs enters the mainstream of Haskalah literature at that point. As the Haskalah waned in Russia in the late 1870s and the early 1880s, the partial nationalistic turning inwards led secular Hebrew writers to the abundant corpus of Hasidic tales for materials to collect or recast for their own purposes and own audiences. This process has continued for a century and shows no signs of abatement. On the contrary: in the past decade the Hasidic tale has become a subject for serious academic study as literature.41 Close analysis of the tales included in the two classical collections, Shivhe HaBesht and Sippure Hama'asiyot of Nahman of Bratslav,43reveals a surprising literary sophistication which raises many unanswerable questions regarding provenance of the tale-telling tradition, the nature of the intended audience, the reception by the actual audience.

IV In the light of our discussion of the perspectives on modernity prevalent in the studies of modern Hebrew literature and our examination of the three cardinal cases taken from the eighteenth century, it should be clear that one must constantly approach this problem from several perspectives at once. What is or is not "modern" depends upon the beholder of the phenomenon-as the Latin etymology of the word "modern" (modo) denotes: "just now." The etymological sense was very much alive in the seventeenthcentury debates in France, Italy, and England of the Ancients vs. the Moderns and implies simply "what we believe in, or delight in, now." During the course of these debates, the term became reified, and the original implication lurking beneath the surface, i.e., we, as opposed to the ancients, are bound by no stable truths, was blurred. Specific critics might then identify modern with secularism, or nationalism, or Marxism, etc-all with the

kalah. Perl's Megalei Temirin(Vienna, 1819) has elicited some of the best research efforts, since it is one of the most accomplished Hebrew works of the nineteenth century. 41. See Joseph Dan, Hasipur hahasidi (Jerusalem, 1975) and Gedalya Nigal, Hasiporet hahasidit (Jerusalem, 1981). Also articles by A. Band, J. Elbaum, Y. Elstein. 42. Sippure hama'asiyot of Nahman of Bratzlav, ed. by Nathan Sternhartz (Ostrog, 1815/16). 43. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation(New Haven, 1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago, 1967). See F. Lentricchia's critique of Hirsch in After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980), pp. 256-280.

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inevitability that today's modern is tomorrow's ancient. One can handle these shifting perspectives only by maintaining the clear distinction between what E. D. Hirsch calls interpretation, i.e., the investigation of textual meaning, vs. criticism, i.e., the relevance to the reader of a specific period.43 "Meaning" in this sense is parallel to Husserl's "inner horizon"; "relevance," to his "outer horizon." Jauss, as we have seen, builds on Husserl and Ingarden to provide us with the conceptual tools for a sound literary history. The notion of secularism is no less troublesome. While it derives from "of this world" as opposed to the world of faith (originally: of the Church), its Hebrew equivalent, hol, is by no means as distinct, since traditionally the hol was embraced by a world whose coordinates were categorically kodesh. Though oblivious to historical research, Kurzweil's distinction between traditional hulin and modern hulin was valuable. A more precise and fruitful formulation can be found in Luzzatto's contemporary and countryman Giambattista Vico, whose Scienza Nuova was unappreciated for at least a century after its initial publication in 1725.44Vico's concept of the New Science, the science of human society, involved a universe of discourse in which what man recognizes as true (verum) and what he himself has made (factum) are identical. In short, the "physics of man" reveals that men have created themselves-and their concept of God in their myths. Not only does man create societies and institutions in his own image, but these, in turn, create him. In this process, language, myth, metaphor play a dominant role, since they are the tools by which man shapes the world in his imagination, and which, in turn, shape his perception of the world. The realization that this is fundamentally a world without God, that God has been a creation of the human imagination, that the ultimate reality is language, is what informs much of the discussion of modernity during the past generation. Bate and Bloom, for instance, refer to this realization and its psychological consequences, as do many other theoreticians of repute. It is therefore crucial that we examine our eighteenth-century texts for signs of this anxiety of modernity. Kurzweil's claim that the last two decades of the eighteenth century are marked by a radical change in the nature of Hebrew literature would be dif44. La Scienza Nuova (Naples, 1725, 1730, 1744). English edition: The New Science, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, 1948). Though the studies of Vico are numerous, Isaiah Berlin's Vico and Herder (London, 1976) is particularly applicable to our study.

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ficult to substantiate on the basis of the evidence of these central texts. Indeed, if one were to seek undeniable proof of radical secularization, one would have to advance about a century to the 1890s, where the secularization one thinks of in European literature bursts forth in full bloom. One, of course, could find instances in 1860s, but the attack upon traditional institutions and moeurs which one finds in such abundance in the 1860s refrains from any open denial of divine providence. This unmistakable mark of secularism begins to surface in the 1890s. As for the sense of belatedness which generated anxiety in eighteenth-century English poets, one cannot find it in modern Hebrew literature until the first decade of the twentieth century, when the new, overwhelming standards of literary achievement had been set by Mendele, Bialik, Ahad HaAm, and Tchernichowski. "Modernity" thus is a term applicable to modern Hebrew literature only with the greatest caution. We certainly cannot simply equate it with a vague notion of secularism and go on from there. An analysis of eighteenthcentury texts precludes the possibility of this common option. We cannot, furthermore, avoid the difficulties of the problem by facilely attaching the literary problem, which has its own determinants, to general considerations of Haskalah culture (which, incidentally, is fraught with ambiguities) and therefore claim that the literature is "modern" rather than "medieval"whatever that means. We must ask what works display signs of modernity which we can agree upon. (Perhaps, for instance, Shirei Tiferet is the most "modern" eighteenth-century literary work precisely for the reasons suggested above.) We must ask what were the notions of modernity maintained by the audience of the work in the specific period under study: the 1780s or the 1830s or the 1860s or the 1890s or the 1980s. Perspectives change rapidly, since the very term "modernity" implies unstable norms of perception. We must concede, furthermore, that anyone engaged in the academic study of Judaism is, as Y. Yerushalmi notes, "a product of the rupture" in history. "Once aware of this, he is not only bound to accept it; he is liberated to use it."45 The acceptance and productive use of the rupture is an act which would elicit assent from such disparate figures as Foucault, Bloom, andcloser to home-M. J. Berdiczewski. It is precisely Berdiczewski who among Hebrew writers was most aware of the ruptures of "modernity" in the sense used today. Though he appeared

45. Y. Yerushalmi, Zakhor (Philadelphia, 1982), p. 101.

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on the stage of modern Hebrew literature in the last decade of the nineteenth century together with such "strong" (in the Bloomian sense) writers as Ahad HaAm, the late Mendele (of his second Hebrew period), Bialik, Tchernichowski, and Frischmann, he was regarded by them as an aher-an "other," and reveled in this position. Refusing to paper over the cracks in the facade of Jewish existence with verbal formulations of one sort or another, he was sensitive to the crisis of consciousness which motivated his contemporaries, Nietzsche and Freud. If, then, one is to discuss modernity in terms meaningful today, terms compatible with those employed in theoretical discussions in France, Germany, England, and America, one should investigate the problematics of the texts of the 1890s, not those of the eighteenth century. Rather than beginning with Luzzatto or Mendelssohn-or even Ahad HaAm-one should begin with Berdiczewski and move from his texts to those of his contemporaries and successors. Universityof California Los Angeles, Calif.

Sholem Aleichem: Mythologist of the Mundane Author(s): David G. Roskies Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 27-46 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486233 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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SHOLEMALEICHEM: MYTHOLOGISTOF THE MUNDANE by DAVID G. ROSKIES

What could be more obvious for a writer who called himself How-DoYou-Do than to place folklore and folk-speech at the center of his work? After all, it was his childhood friend Shmulik who had inducted him into the world of storytelling; ever since then, the celebrated author could have mined the treasures of Jewish myth and legend as his natural legacy. But Shmulik's formative role in From the Fair was as much a fiction as the name Sholem Aleichem itself, which masked the true beginnings of a typical Russian-Jewish maskil named Rabinovitsh.' Everything in the program of the Haskalah, as in Sholem Rabinovitsh's early career, militated against the discovery of folklore: the overwhelming antipathy of the Jewish Enlightenment to fantasy, superstition, and folk custom;2 Rabinovitsh's concern for fostering a highbrow literary culture in Yiddish based on the realistic por1. David G. Roskies, "Unfinished Business: Sholem Aleichem's From the Fair," Prooftexts 6 (1986): 73-74; Dan Miron, Sholem Aleykhem. Person, Persona, Presence (New York, 1971). 2. Dan Miron, "Folklore and Antifolklore in the Yiddish Fiction of the Haskalah," in Studies in Jewish Folklore, ed. Frank Talmage (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 219-249.

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trayal of poverty, on social satire and stylistic discipline;3and, perhaps most importantly, the young writer's adulation for the arch-maskil AbramovitshMendele, who embodied this new critical standard.4When, along with other of his contemporaries, Sholem Aleichem finally overcame these formidable obstacles and negotiated his way back to the folk, readers were so taken by his reinvention of Jewish folklore that they mistook it for the real thing. In the heyday of maskilic rationalism, the fledgling group of secular East European Jewish writers had striven for a negotiated settlement with the sources of fantasy. Miracles in the Bible, especially such epoch-making events as the Splitting of the Sea of Reeds, were still to be credited, but the purveyors of contemporary miracle tales-the Hasidim-were to be laughed off the stage of history.5 The dichotomy in Abraham Mapu's fiction between biblical romance (Ahavat Zion, 1853) and social satire ('Ayyit Zavu'a, 1857) epitomized this divide-and-conquer strategy. According to Abramovitsh, writing in 1860, fantasy was legitimate in works of fiction so long as it was governed by logic, morality, and the laws of grammar.6 In general, fantasy was best relegated to dreams or prophetic visions, and even then, was best understood in an allegorical vein. By the time the young Sholem Aleichem entered the literary scene, a new period of Jewish self-determination had begun, ushered in by Leo Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation(1882). Answering Pinsker's call, intellectuals were now expected to serve the "folk" by depicting its socioeconomic life in a critical, realistic manner.7 The main measure of change, however, was in the treatment of the past; a sense of a common past, the argument went, would 3. Sholem Aleichem. "Der yidisher dales in di beste verke fun undzere folks-shriftshteler," supplement to Yudishes folksblat (St. Petersburg), 1888, pp. 1075-1090, 1101-1110, 1149-1157, 1183-1189, 1205-1216; idem, Shomers mishpet, oder der sud prisyazhnik af ale romanenfun Shomer (Bardichev, 1888); H. Reminik, "Sholem-Aleykhem in kampf far realizm in di 80er yorn," Shtern (Minsk), nos. 5-6 (1938): 122-148. 4. Dan Miron, A TravelerDisguised: A Study in the Rise of YiddishFiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1971), chap. 2. 5. The following survey of myth and fantasy in Hebrew literature from the Haskalah until the turn of the century is based on Dan Miron, Bo'ah, laylah: ha-sifrut ha-'ivrit bein higayyon l'ee-gayyon be-mifneh ha-me'ah ha-'esrim (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1987), esp. pp. 11-22, 86-96. 6. S. Y. Abramovitsh, Mishpat Shalom (Vilna: Rom, 1860), pp. 9-10, as quoted by Miron, Bo'ah, laylah, p. 89. 7. How the ideological shift of the 1880s affected Yiddish literature has been covered most extensively by Nokhem Oyslender in "Der yunger Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn roman 'Stempenyu,'" in Shriftn fun der katedre far yidisher kultur bay der alukrainisher visnshaftlekher akademye 1 (1928): 5-72.

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generate a common purpose. History, heretofore seen as the realm of madness (most notably, in Abramovitsh's Di klyatshe / Susati, 1873), was now rehabilitated as a source of national pride. Midrash, which the maskilim had viewed as the repository of canonized falsehood, was selectively reclaimed as a legitimate source of postbiblical fantasy. Dreams and nightly visions proliferated, especially in Hebrew narrative poetry. Still, history, midrash, and hallucination were hardly the stuff of everyday life. The problem for Sholem Aleichem, as for all the other lapsed positivists, was finding a believable this-worldly setting for fantasy. The shtetl, or East European Jewish market town, while ideally situated to provide the requisite social panorama, had long since been discredited among the maskilim as a hotbed of superstition and exaggerated response.8 True son of the Haskalah, and a loyal disciple of Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, too, wrote comic expos6s of shtetl foibles in the requisite satiric style-a pastiche of biblical Hebrew.9 To be sure, if one went back far enough in the East European Jewish past, one could find a marvelous tale or two. Why, even Ayzik-Meyer Dik, that died-in-the-wool Litvak, had allowed for legendary exploits in the Vilna and Poland of old.'0 Everything was possible before the partitions of Poland. In the dreary, industrialized present, however, with Jews flocking en masse to the big cities, or farther still, where it was every man and woman for themselves-from this rocky terrain no marvelous waters could flow. In 1897, the inchoate yearnings of the 1880s coalesced into the two great political movements of Jewish eastern Europe-Zionism and the Bund. This politization process freed the creative writers-as opposed to the journalists and ideologues-to steer an independent course, to look inward and to more fully explore the internal resources of their culture. The first point on the unexplored map of Jewish culture was the world of fantasy that was 8. Dan Miron, "Batrakhtungen vegn klasishn imazh fun shtetl in der yidisher beletristik," in Der imazh fun shtetl: dray literarishe shtudyes (New York, 1981), pp. 19-138. 9. Sholem Aleichem, "Tmunot u-tslalim milhayyei hayehudim bi-Mazepevka" (1889-1890), in Ktavim ivriyim, ed. Chone Shmeruk (Jerusalem, 1976), pp. 87-156. Most relevant to my thesis is the story called "Ha'otsar" (pp. 106-115), in which Sholem Aleichem burlesques the legend of the lost treasure. On this, see Dan Miron, "Otsarot muqdamim," in Shalom Aleichem: Masot meshulavot, 2d rev. ed. (Ramat Gan, ca. 1980), pp. 244-256. 10. See, for example, AMaD (Ayzik-Meyer Dik), Yudis di tsveyte: ayn herlekhe royber geshikhte in Vilne (Vilna, 1875) and Sholem der karabelnik (Vilna, 1877). In contrast, Dik's Di gayster geshikhtn (Vilna, 1871) recounts incidents from the author's life in Vilna and Nesvizh which appeared to be supernatural but whose rational cause was eventually revealed.

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situated in the heder, in the house of study bein minhzahle-ma'ariv, in the hasidic shtibl, or closer still-in the realm of the human conscious. So close, and yet, so far. it was easier, in fact, for this generation of moderns to drain swamps in Palestine or to organize tallith weavers into a labor union than to turn folklore and fantasy into the substance of their art. No wonder, then, that two writers who successfully remade themselves into modern Jewish storytellers became canonical figures on the strength of their stylized fictions. As different as Zionism was from the Bund, that is how differently Peretz and Sholem Aleichem negotiated the perilous terrain of Jewish fantasy. Peretz, who quickly emerged as a chief exponent of Jewish neoromanticism, used every trick in the book to bracket the experience and expression of the folk: in particular, through his choice of setting and speakers, and through a strict separation between fact and fancy. As the maskilim had done before him, Peretz continued to relegate folklore and fantasy to the legendary past. "There once dwelt in Safed a Jew of great wealth and good fortune," began his most perfect romance, Mesires-nefesh("Devotion Without End"), "who traded in jewels, diamonds, and other precious stones. He was truly a man of great wealth, not like the upstarts of our day."''"To such marvelous settings as Safed and Prague, the old stand-bys of the magical itinerary, Peretz now added the shtetl-a prelapsarian shtetl of his own making, where every water carrier was a hidden saint and every traveling magician could be Elijah in disguise. Just as the shtetl was close enough to be believable and far enough to allow free rein to fantasy, so the speakers in these stories had to combine faith and a certain level of sophistication. For if Peretz didn't believe in the miracle himself, he had to keep inventing narrators who did. In his celebrated hasidic monologues, the miracle existed only in the eyes of the beholder. To narrate the romances and folktales, Peretz created a slightly bookish, slightly playful voice, modulating between them as the occasion required. Finally, by an elaborate use of supernatural props, Peretz preserved the distinction between illusion and reality. Through a bureaucratic heaven where even the Devil was subject to protocol, Peretz made it perfectly clear that his real subject was the world of human strivings and human failings.'2 11. Mesires-nefesh, in Ale verkfun Y. L. Perets, 11 vols. (New York, 1947-48), 5:207-251. Trans. as "Devotion Without End" in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York, 1954), pp. 118-148. 12. For more on Peretz's reinvention of Jewish folk narrative, see Gershon Shaked, Ha-

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In contrast, Sholem Aleichem never abandoned his commitment to critical realism. Throughout his career, he stuck to observable reality and drew, wherever possible, on firsthand experience. Fortunately, during the period of his debut, a simple technique was introduced into Hebrew literature that allowed for a recreated-but safely distanced-world of fantasy. All one needed was to conjure up the experience of a child, for whom, presumably, marvelous things were an everyday occurrence.'3 For Sholem Aleichem, the experiment proved that recreating the myth from a child's point of view was as difficult as from a Hasid's. Dos meserl ("The Penknife," subtitled "A Foolish But a Sad Story from My Childhood") was Sholem Aleichem's first little masterpiece.14 It tells the story of a Jewish boy from a "good home" who has a passion for penknives that ultimately leads him to an act of theft. First written in 1886, the story suffered from two conflicting agenda: an expos6 of the heder and its debilitating effect on the body and soul of Jewish boys, and a universal tale of initiation. To achieve the first, Sholem Aleichem addressed his adult male readers (mayne lezer, mayne brider)in a modern European diction, complete with Russian proverbs. At the same time, through dramatic vignettes, he tried to vivify the child's world from within. The story turns mythic when, on a midsummer's night, the moon intrudes upon the hero as he fondles his stolen treasure. Suddenly, images of hellfire crowd his mind, destroying the idyllic mood. Then, the next day in heder he has to witness a povertystricken boy being brought to trial for stealing money from a charity-box. This is enough to unhinge our hero completely and he falls into a delirium. Upon awakening, the hero's mother tells him what actually happened. vi azoy me hot mikh oyfgehoybnfun der erd kimat a toytn; vi azoy ikh bin gelegntsvey vokhnkeseyderin a helishfayerun hob nor gekvaket,vi a zhabe, un epes keseydergeredt fun shmits un fun meserlekh... me hot shoyn gerekhnt,az ikh bin shoynkholilegeshtorbn... un nokh dem,plutsem,hob ikh a nis gegebn zibn mol, mameshfun toyt lebedikgevorn...

sipporet ha-'ivrit 1880-1970, vol. 1 (Israel, 1977), pp. 140-160; David G. Roskies, "Peretses shaferisher farrat fun der yidisher folks-mayse," in Proceedings of the Eighth WorldCongress of Jewish Studies, Division C (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 349-355. 13. Miron, Bo'ah, laylah, pp. 91-92. 14. All references are to the critical ed. of Dos meserl prepared by Chone Shmeruk (Jerusalem and Cincinnati, 1983) as a sample text of the Complete Edition of Sholem Aleykhem's Works.

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how they picked me up from the floor half-dead;how I lay in bed for two weeks on end croakinglike a frog, and kept on babblingsomethingabout lashesand penknives... peoplethoughtthat I was alreadydead,God forbid ... and then, suddenly,I sneezedseventimes, and cameto, as if arisenfrom the dead... (p. 16) Through the seven-fold sneeze, the hero's fate is linked to that of the Shunammite woman's only son whom Elisha miraculously resusitates in 2 Kings 4. Though there is no Man of God to effect the birth and rebirth of the son, the courageous and God-fearing Shunammite woman is implicitly figured in the hero's mother. Thus, Sholem Aleichem superimposed two complementary layers of myth-one emanating from the child, the other from the adult (the hero's mother and the adult male reader). It is one thing for a child to translate his naive conception of reward and punishment into mythic terms, but quite another when life itself replays one of the most poignant scenes in the Bible. The child's myth of good and evil is reinforced by the adult myth of death and resurrection. Were it not for the young Sholem Aleichem's overriding need to be useful, to press for educational reform, to tell rather than to show, he might have been able to exploit this myth of death and resurrection-so subtly played out on a realistic plane-by allowing for some catharsis, some reconciliation between the son and the adult world. (That catharsis is precisely what resolves the second version of the story, written in 1901-3, for children.) In the 1880s, the time had not yet come for rehabilitating the experience of childhood for its own sake or for properly integrating the mythic component into one's fictional world. Nevertheless, with this modest beginning Sholem Aleichem had already laid the groundwork for a particular use of myth. Myth, for Sholem Aleichem, came to mean two different but complementary things. (1)It was the belief system of the Jews, the stories they actually lived by, that structured their perceptions of reality. As he later developed it, that myth was accessible to all Jews, inasmuch as every Jew had once been a child, celebrated some festival or other in one way or another, and knew how to talk. Myth was the source of hope and of transcendence. (2) Myth was also the deep structure of Jewish experience, a fixed number of archetypal plots that were embedded not in one's individual psychology but in Jewish history itself. Myth was fate and it was inescapable.

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When, to return to our exercise in Jewish literary history, the rediscovery of myth and fantasy in the last decade of the nineteenth century irrevocably changed the form and content of Jewish writing in Eastern Europe, Sholem Aleichem had already crossed the threshold on his own terms. The most innovative writers-Peretz and Berdichewsky in prose, Bialik and Tchernichowsky in poetry-began to seek the sources of renewal not horizontally, in the latest developments in European culture, but vertically, in the medieval, ancient, and folk strata of Jewish and (in Tchernichowsky's case) pagan culture.'" Though Sholem Aleichem, too, embarked on a period of internal renewal, the Bible and midrashim, the medieval romance, the stories of Nahman of Bratslav and of Shiviheiha-Besht exerted no special attraction for him. He did not cultivate them as the buds of Jewish efflorescence.'6 What captured his imagination instead were the contemporary, often secular, forms of Jewish folk expression: how young lovers in the shtetl reenacted the Song of Songs; how the Jewish holidays brought momentary relief to an otherwise unbearable existence; how the folksong idiom was updated to comment on current affairs. At a time when Jewish students at the Moscow Conservatory went slumming in the small towns to collect authentic Jewish folksongs,'7 Sholem Aleichem was doing the lecture circuit with his own local find-a lawyer and amateur songwriter from Kiev, Mark Warshawski.'8 Sholem Aleichem maintained that these newly composed songs, often set to well-known Slavic melodies or dance tunes, could legitimately be called Yiddish folksongs. "Folksongs," he instructed Joel Engel, the pioneer of Jewish ethnomusicology in Eastern Europe, were "all songs written in the simple Jewish folk language [prosteryidisherfolksshprakhe] . . . that are put out for the sake of the folk."'9 As proof that the function of a cultural artifact was more impor-

15. On the reappropriation of traditional narratives, see David C. Jacobson, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of TraditionalJewish Narratives by Twentieth-CenturyHebrew Writers (Albany, 1987). 16. Analyzing Sholem Aleichem's attitudes towards Yiddish and Hebrew, Abraham Novershtern arrives at a similar conclusion. See "Sholem-Alyekhem un zayn shtelung tsu der shprakhn-frage," Di goldene keyt 74 (1971): 167. 17. Albert Weisser, The Modern Renaissance of Jewish Music.: Events and Figures fin] Eastern Europe and America (New York, 1954), chap. 3. 18. Nachman Meisel, "Sholem Aleichem and His 'Find'," in Sholem Aleichem Panorama, ed. Melech Grafstein (London, Ont., 1948), p. 46-50. 19. Sholem Aleichem, "A briv tsum h' Engel fun'm 'Voskhod'," Der yid 3, no. 24 (June 13, 1901): 14-16.

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tant than its origins, Sholem Aleichem pointed to his own song on the mass immigration to America, Shlofmayn kind ("Sleep, My Child"). Published in 1892, it was already incorporated as a traditional lullaby in the GinsburgMarek collection of 1901.20 While Sholem Aleichem certainly did not disparage the work of retrieving and preserving the Yiddish folk heritage,2' his own concern was for the varied manifestations of Jewish popular culturethose hybrid forms that were being adapted by and for the folk in the hereand-now of everyday life. This dynamic approach to the materials of the folk turned Sholem Aleichem's oeuvre into the source of a new popular culture. Some 200,000 copies of his stories were to circulate in chapbook form; on the eve of World War I, they would be available on newsstands from Warsaw to New York.22 The neoromantic writers in Yiddish and Hebrew could appropriate folklore, fantasy, and storytelling only as something bracketed in time, something removed from the industrial present by virtue of its style, simplicity, marvelous occurrences, dualistic schemes, and heroic struggles. All these bespoke an act of noblesse oblige on the part of the sophisticated minds that worked so hard to adopt a "lower" form of literature and raise it to the status of Western art. Only Sholem Aleichem achieved a true synthesis of storytelling and contemporary life: something so subtly stylized that it didn't sound like "literature" at all; something so spontaneous and real that it all but covered its anecdotal and mythic tracks; something so normative and commonplace that it appealed to every kind of reader-except the highbrow intellectual. In the typical dialectic of literary evolution, Sholem Aleichem sought to carry out his new agenda by looking to the "periphery" of the Jewish literary "system," that is, to those genres that he and the other innovators had heretofore considered hackneyed, conservative, and outdated.23Unlike the others, however, Sholem Aleichem went back only one generation, to the 20. Evreiskie narodniyepesni v Rossi, ed. S. M. Ginsburg and P. S. Marek (St. Petersburg, 1901), no. 82. 21. On Sholem Aleichem's interest in folklore, see I. Mitlman and Kh. Nadel, "SholemAleykhem der redaktor-aroysgeber," in Sholem-Aleykhem: zamlung fun kritishe artiklen un materyaln (Kiev, 1940), p. 191. 22. Y. D. Berkovitsh, Undzere rishoynim, 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1966), 4:70. 23. See Itamar Even-Zohar, "The Relations between Primary and Secondary Systems in the Literary Polysystem" (1973), in Papers in Historical Poetics (Tel Aviv, 1978), pp. 14-20.

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discarded elements of Haskalah literature itself: the monologue, the epistle, and the maskilic chapbook.24 In his first Tevye story (1894), he revived a particular type of monologue-the pseudo-maggidic sermon, complete with scriptural epigraphs, a homiletic structure, and a dazzling array of proverbial sayings.25 In his first Menakhem-Mendl series (1892), he revived the whole brivn-shteler("letter-writer") with its archaic formulae at beginning and end and its inflated diction throughout.26For his first and only stylized chapbook, A mayse on an ek (1901), later retitled Derfarkishefter shnayder, he chose a mayse-bikhl written by Ayzik-Meyer Dik as his model, with its invented Hebrew captions, farcical plot, and grotesque characters.27 What these three forms had in common was that they were "closed": closed by virtue of their stylized language, their rigid formal conventions, and their personal mode of narration.28In all three there was a fixed, predictable structure that allowed only for repetition, not for significant change, and the human experience was conveyed through clich6d speech by a totally subjective and presumably unsophisticated narrator. In contrast, the feuilleton and novel genres that he had just spent a decade trying to

24. This is an adaptation of Dov Sadan's thesis outlined in his seminal essay "Three Foundations [Sholem Aleichem and the Yiddish Literary Tradition]" (1959), trans. in Prooftexts 6 (1986): 55-63. 25. The precise genealogy of Sholem Aleichem's monologues has never been established. Sadan (ibid.) argues for a direct link with the "naive" and "satiric" monologues of the Galician Haskalah. Victor Erlich implies a connection to the Russian skaz in "A Note on the Monologue as a Literary Form: Sholem Aleichem's 'Monolgn'-A Test Case," in For Max Weinreich on His Seventieth Birthday.:Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, and Society, ed. Lucy Dawidowicz (The Hague, 1964), pp. 44-50. In "Magidishe maskes fun Markuze biz Mendele" (Paper read at the Second International Conference on Research in Yiddish Language and Literature, Oxford, July 11, 1983), I first suggested that the Tevye monologues be read in the context of "maggidic masks" in Yiddish Haskalah literature. 26. Surprisingly little work has been done on the epistolary genre in nineteenth-century Yiddish literature. The only studies I know of are Yehude Elzet [Judah Loeb Zlotnick], Mit hundertyor tsurik.:Shtudien in dem amolikn inerlekhn yidishn lebn (Montreal, 1927) and Max Weinreich, "Lewin Liondor's brivn-shteler," YIVO-bleter 18 (1941): 109-112. Prior to writing Menakhem-Mendl, Sholem Aleichem experimented with the epistolary form in "Di ibergekhapte briv af der post" (1883-1884). See the Soviet ed. of Ale verk (Moscow, 1948), 1:54-155, 487-511. 27. Oyzer Tsinkes un di tsig (Vilna, 1868), described by Haim Liberman in "La-bibliografia shel A. M. Dik," Ohel RaHleL (Brooklyn, 1980), pp. 498-499. The only extant copy of this chapbook is in the private library of the Lubavitsher Rebbe. All my efforts since 1971 to secure a Xeroxed copy of this book have failed. 28. On the concepts of "closed" and "open" forms, see Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader.: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, 1984).

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master were "open" forms in which an omniscient narrator was expected to use a modern, fluid diction to represent the linear course of life in its social causality. Though Sholem Aleichem continued writing feuilletons and novels for the rest of his life, this retrieval of very old-fashioned genres was to finally unlock the source of his genius. In the maggidic monologue, the letter-writer, and the chapbook, Sholem Aleichem discovered an objective correlative for an alternate approach to human existence itself. These closed narrative forms would not serve him merely as a naive folk vehicle which he could then subvert or allegorize to his heart's content, the way Peretz and Berdichewsky creatively betrayed the hasidic tale and monologue. Like Gogol, his new literary idol, Sholem Aleichem discovered a natural affinity between his own imagination and that of the folk. The patterns of experience that he drew from his own psyche he found to be identical to those of Jewish folklife.29 By appropriating the literary genres most recently rendered obsolete, he could now explore for the first time the interplay of stasis and change, fate and free will, myth and the mundane. And that exploration would corroborate the experience of the folk from below and from within. Few works in Sholem Aleichem's oeuvre stand in such glorious isolation as "A Tale Without an End."30Though originally conceived as one in a series of endless tales, only one other, Oylem-habe ("Eternal Life," 1902), was ever written, and that story, narrated in a leisurely style in the first person, moved realistically from innocence to experience. In contrast, the tale of the frenetic tailor rushing to and from the neighboring town in search of the she-goat his wife sends him out to buy is a self-consuming artifact. It stands alone because fantasy goes berserk here. The myth remains unchecked and unmediated. It is as if, in this one-time experiment in stylized folk narrative, Sholem Aleichem let fantasy loose and watched it

29. Donald Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 100. For more on the Gogol connection, see I. J. Trunk, Sholem-Aleykhem: zayn vezn un zayne verk (Warsaw, 1937), pp. 41-47, and David G. Roskies, "The Storyteller as Hero," The New Republic, 9 November 1987. 30. Sholem Aleichem, A mayse on an ek (Warsaw, 1901). The caption to this first version reads: "Aroysgenumen fun an altn pinkes un baputst." References to the Yiddish text (Y) are from "Der farkishefter shnayder" in Mayses un monologn, vol. 13 of the Progres ed. (Warsaw, 1913), pp. 3-51. The English trans. (E) by Leonard Wolf is in The Best ofSholom Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (New York, 1982), pp. 3-46.

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wreak havoc in the world of experience. Still, it taught him everything he needed to know. (1) Through its famous opening line, Ish hoyo beZlodievke, with its comic allusion to Job and its friendly jab at Ayzik-Meyer Dik, he signaled to the reader that the story was a foregone conclusion, that the hapless hero would never be able to escape his tragicomic fate. (2) He then proceeded to situate the hero within a charmed circle of like-sounding towns: "there was a man in Zlodeyevke, a shtetl near Mazepevke, not far from Khaplapovitsh and Kozodoyevke, between Yampoli and Strishtsh, just on the way from Pishi-Yabede to Petshi-Khvost to Tetrevits and from there to Yehupets." This was a fictional geography redolent with legends (of Mazepa, the Robin Hood of Russia), with he-goats (kozes) and scoundrels (zlodeyi), with Slavic sounds and Slavic humor. (3) For all the hero's confidence that his voice would finally be heard, whence his nickname, Shimen-Elye Shma Koleynu, Sholem Aleichem endowed him and everyone around him with repetitive, parasitic speech patterns, the product of limited minds that could not cope with the slightest change, let alone with the inscrutable forces conspiring against them. (4) Then, at the center of this grotesque little world, our storybook narrator introduced a she-goat, the symbol of desire, the mythic creature that was supposed to mediate the polarities between husband and wife, rich and poor, town and country, but would, through its constant transformations, turn the hero into a scapegoat and drive him mad. (5) Finally, the most difficult part of Sholem Aleichem's exercise was figuring out how it should end, since, by definition, it was a story never destined to end. At first, as Uri Eisenzweig argued in a brilliant exposition of the story,3' Sholem Aleichem tried to resolve the plot on the plane of history: the workers of Zlodeyevke take up Shimen-Elye's cause and set out in protest for the neighboring town. But in the final version of 1909-11, Sholem Aleichem introduced the storyteller himself as a deus ex machina who alone could rescue the narrative from its subversive indeterminacy and, by extension, save the world from its inevitable fate. Laid bare, as the formalists would say, in this one-of-a-kind stylized chapbook, were the main elements of Sholem Aleichem's storytelling art: the reuse of anecdotes or well-worn plots that allowed for few structural changes; a self-contained symbolic landscape that was both nurturing and 31. Uri Eisenzweig, "Le Chtettl, Retroactivement (le Tailleur ensorceld, de Cholem Aleichem)," Territoires occupis de l'imaginairejuif (Paris, 1980), pp. 196-198.

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claustrophobic; a gallery of characters whose sole means of escaping disaster was to talk their way out of it; a mythic presence or ideal derived exclusively from the realm of everyday life and all this within a larger contest between the destructive force of history and the redemptive power of the storyteller. The chapbook format allowed Sholem Aleichem to play with the stylistic and structural conventions of Yiddish popular fiction in such a way as to underline-and undermine-the workings of myth and fantasy. Stylistically, one of two choices was open to him: either to write in daytshmerish,the Germanic syntax and vocabulary used to situate a Yiddish narrative in the European romance tradition, or to adopt a more learned, Hebrew-Aramaic style that situated a work within a canon of Jewish sacred legends. (AyzikMeyer Dik, the great Yiddish popularizer of the 1850s and 1860s, had cultivated both styles, depending on his subject matter.) In "A Tale Without an End," Sholem Aleichem brilliantly exploited the latter possibility by playing two different Hebrew-Aramaic styles off one another: that of the storybook narrator and that of the central male characters.32Mythic and mock-mythic allusions abounded in their language, beginning, as we have already seen, in the opening sentence of the story. The problem with Shimen-Elye, however, is that his pastiche of Scripture, liturgy, and life is the ossified product of a mind that cannot generate anything new.33Like Major Kovaliov, the collegiate assessor who wakes up one morning in St. Petersburg to find himself without a nose, Shimen-Elye is a man of limited psychological resources who is trapped by the world of experience.34 Which is too bad, because Shimen-Elye's favorite sloganshayom haras oylem, "today the world was created," and undzerfolk sher un ayzn-amkho, "steam-iron and shears, our people Israel!"-bespeak an optimistic outlook on life and a concern with the commonweal. Among his own-the other laborers and guildsmen of town-Shimen Elye is looked upon as something of a scholar, but his verbal skills carry little weight with 32. On this, see Dov Sadan, "Kmo shekosuv: araynfir-bamerkn tsu Tevye dem milkhikers toyres," in Tsvishn vayt un noent: eseyen, shtudyes, briv (Tel Aviv, 1982), pp. 9-23. 33. The satiric use of parasitic speech patterns in nineteenth-century Yiddish fiction and drama has occupied all of the major scholars in the field. For the most seminal statements, some of which have a direct bearing on Sholem Aleichem, see Meyer Wiener, "Di rol fun shprakh-folkor in der yidisher literature," Shriftn (Kiev) 1 (1928): 73-129; Miron, A Traveler Disguised, esp. pp. 169-179; and Benjamin Hrushovski, "Dekonstruktsiah shel dibbur: Shalom Aleichem veha-semiotika shel ha-folklor ha-yehudi," afterword to his trans. of Tevye hahalban ve-monologim(Tel Aviv, 1983), pp. 195-212. 34. Cf Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, p. 236.

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Tsipe-Beyle-Reyze, his wife. All he can offer in defense on that score is the biblical prooftext hu yimshol bakh, "he shall rule over thee" (Gen. 4:16). Would that it were so! Now when myth functions properly, according to Levi-Strauss, its purpose is to mediate the binary oppositions of life and death, heaven and earth, purity and pollution.35 Precisely because Shimen-Elye's world is structured in so binary a fashion-husbands vs. wives, rich vs. poor, town vs. countryside-his failure to see the discrepancy between the ideal and the real, the sacred text and actual experience, is that much more apparent. For Shimen-Elye is a man hemmed in on all sides: tyrannized by a superregimented, emasculating, and impoverished society and trapped by metaphysical forces outside of his control. On one occasion alone, when released into the great outdoors for the first and only time in his life (the beginning of chapter 2), does he use the liturgy to express the ironic distance between the biblical promise and shtetl reality. Immediately thereafter, buoyed up by his newfound sense of autonomy, he locks horns with his great adversary, Dodi the Innkeeper. And that is Shimen-Elye's undoing. Dodi is the very embodiment of myth. He is the lord of enchantment, "a hairy, thickset Jew with a big belly and a potato nose and the voice of a wild ox," i.e., an ogre. Dodi is the perfect foil to our curly black-haired hero Shimen-Elye with his goatee and flattened nose and groove down his lower lip, all of which make him look like a goat even before his trials begin. And the setting for this battle between ogre and man-goat is equally fantastical: an enchanted inn situated midway between the poles of desire. This enchanted setting is what characterized both of Sholem Aleichem's "Tales Without an End" and would later resurface in many different guises.36 Just as Dodi's Oak Tavern exerts an ambiguous pull on all travelerswhether for good or for evil is still uncertain-the goal of Shimen-Elye's expedition is a town of appearances. How, for instance, can one expect to find a she-goat in a town called He-Goatsville, where peasant women in the market confuse a rooster with a hen, and where people's nicknames mask what they really are: Khayim-Khone the Wise is anything but, and his wife,

35. Claude L6vi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," in Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington and London, 1970), pp. 81-106. 36. For an analysis of this motif in Oylem-habe, see Ruth R. Wisse, Sholem Aleichem and the Art of Communication(Syracuse, 1979), pp. 19-21. Cf. also Iber a hitl ("On Account of a Hat"), where the train station in Zlodeyevke functions as an enchanted setting.

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Teme-Gitl the Silent, never shuts up? Indeed, what Shimen-Elye discovers in Khayim-Khone the melamed is his exact counterpart-another henpecked husband who operates with a fixed repertoire of religious formulae.37 No chance to redeem one's manhood here! The selfsame Khayim-Khone, however, first calls attention to the goat as a multidetermined mythic figure. Through his discussion of the Gemara which Shimen-Elye happens to walk in on, the reader is warned that goats beget sorrow, because as symbols of human desire they are bound to incur double damages. Az der shnayderiz arayngekumentsu reb Khayim-Khonedem klugn,hot er im getrofnbay der arbet,vu er iz gezesn... iberdergemoreun gelerntmit di talmidimmit a nign af koley-koylesdi gemoreBove kame:"Hahubarkhodi doziketsig, vos zi hot derzena min esnvargfun oybn afn fesl, hot zikh di tsig tsugekhapttsum esnvarg.... KhayvoRovo, hot Rovo gepasknt,az zi darf batsoln farn esnvargun farn fesl dem gantsn hezek..." Whenthe tailorenteredthe houseof Reb Khayim-Khonethe Wise,he found him at work ... bent over the Gemara,leadinghis pupilsat the tops of their voices throughthe Talmudpassage"On Damages":"Now that goat, whenit saw thattherewas food on the top of the barrel,that samegoat leapedtoward that samefood... Rabbahsaid 'Guilty,'andset it downthatshe mustpay for the fodder and the barrelthat was damaged." (Y 14-15, 16; E 14, 15) Hebrew-Aramaic, the language of Jewish learning and rational discourse, becomes instead the main repository of the myth, at least for the male members of shtetl society. It is more than these hapless henpecked husbands can bear. Whereas Shimen-Elye uses ineffectual mantras lifted from the liturgy, Khayim-Khone the melamed drills his unfortunate charges in a seemingly irrelevant passage from the Talmud. But the tailor's mythic quest for the nurturing she-goat seems to have disturbed the status quo and endowed all the goat-texts with a power of their own that cannot be domesticated by traditional means. Henceforth, many voices try to interpret the role of the goat-as goblin, as gilgul, as the kid of the Khad Gadya-but none dares verbalize its true

37. Eisenzweig, "Le Chtettl," p. 149.

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mythic function: Having failed to reconcile the polarities of life, the goat should serve as biblical scapegoat and be cast into the wilderness, thus expiating the failings of a very flawed society. Instead, in the story's ultimate transformation, Shimen-Elye himself becomes the sacrificial victim, while the goat runs wild and disappears. In this way Sholem Aleichem introduced a Jewish mythic component as a tragic subtext to a comic folktale plot. In the parodic folktale, the hero's back-and-forth movement between two essentially identical towns could conceivably go on forever, gaining in comic momentum as more people are drawn into the act. But through the biblical-talmudic-haggadic goat, Sholem Aleichem injected the fatalistic themes of thwarted desire, victimization, and vicarious sacrifice. The goat that was to provide the milk for Shimen-Elye's starving family causes his blood to be spilt instead.38 On every conceivable level, then, the "Tale Without an End" tells of failed mediation: of a traditional society that could not even resolve the petty rivalry between two neighboring towns; of a traditional language that did more to obfuscate and mystify reality than to break it down into manageable parts; of a mythic force let loose by the tailor's innocent quest that destroys him, his family, and the equilibrium of his town. Never before had a stylized Jewish folktale been used to expose so much dissolution. Never would Sholem Aleichem use this genre to do so again. Instead, there emerged out of the crucible of the "Tale Without an End" a new, normative mythology such as Jewish literature had not seen before, a humanistic myth that was both profoundly consolational and deeply ironic. On the simplest level, what made it normative was that Sholem Aleichem conjured up a world of mainstream, proto-misnagdic, East European Judaism: Hasidism, Kabbalah, demonology, heaven and hell-the stock-intrade of Jewish neoromanticism-figured in these stories hardly at all. Dodi the innkeeper, who keeps switching the goats on poor Shimen-Elye, is the most demonic character in Sholem Aleichem's storytelling corpus, just as the motif of the gilgul is about the closest that Sholem Aleichem ever came to Kabbalah. Even the Sabbath, so central to Heine, Bialik, and Asch,

38. Cf. the following in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature, rev. ed., 6 vols. (Bloomington and London, 1966): man transformed into a goat (D 134), goat's milk is inexhaustible (D 1652.3.2), revenant as goat (E 423.1.9), the devil in the form of a goat (G 303.3.3.1.6), and esp. tailor associated with a goat (X 222).

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played no role in Sholem Aleichem's search for Jewish myth. (According to Berkovitsh, Sholem Aleichem probably remembered the Sabbath as a time of boredom and intolerable restrictions.39)Rather, it was material culture, in the main, that mediated the myth. Sholem Aleichem understood that the folk apprehended the great myths of creation, revelation, and redemption through ritual objects and local custom. In particular, it was the holiday cycle-building a sukkah, buying an esrog, dancing with a flag on Simkhes Torah, leading the children through hakofes, lighting candles and playing cards on Hanukkah, delivering shalekhmones on Purim or putting on a purim-shpil, and above all, preparing for and celebrating the seder-it was on these communal and familial occasions that the ordinary Jew, rich or poor, male or female, experienced the transcendent power of Jewish myth. It was the time, to use Bakhtin's now-famous term, that the carnival aspect of life broke through the everyday routine. (To be sure, the Jewish "carnival" was a far cry from the Bacchanalia, or even from Breughel; still, in the relative asceticism of the shtetl, a few good drinks could go a long way!) Through his emphasis on material culture and the carnival, Sholem Aleichem expressed his egalitarian and humanistic bias. This was a Judaism equally accessible to all and not limited to the formal religious institutions. Though Shimen-Elye, the liturgical voice of the shtetl artisans, fails to use his modicum of learning to achieve a balance between myth and reality, other nonclerical figures in Sholem Aleichem's stories succeed. By making creative use of Jewish sacred texts they form a kind of folk aristocracy: Tevye the dairyman, Fishl the melamed, Berl Vinegar, Yankl Yunever, and more. Thus the myth could also be mediated by a certain type of folk hero who was situated outside the synagogue, the studyhouse, and the yeshiva, and got his hands dirty in the mud and muddle of everyday life. To a greater or lesser degree these characters had their own ironic sense of the discrepancy between the real and the ideal. Through them, as through the celebration of the holidays, the myth was invoked as a foil to reality. Nowhere was the gap between present reality and future promise drawn so precisely and so poignantly as in the holiday stories that Sholem Aleichem began writing in earnest after 1900. What made them so poignant-

39. Undzere rishoynim, 2:73.

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and so true to the folk conception of life-was that they showed how fleeting was the moment of transcendence, if achieved at all.40For the plot of these stories, such as it was, presented one of two alternatives: either the Kingfor-a-day motif or the Marred Holiday (der farshterter yontef). In either event, whether Yuzik the Orphan becomes king of the seder or Leybl bites off the pitom of the coveted esrog before it can be used, the celebrant has to return to the grind, to a life that is unredeemed. "My heart is shattered," says the child-narrator at the end of "The Guest," the story of an exotic visitor who absconds with the family silver, jewelry, and maid.4' nisht af di zilbernekoyses mit di zilbernelefl, goplen un mesers,vos zenen nem gevorn, un nisht af der mamestsirung,un nisht afn mezumengelt, un nisht af Rikl di moyd-khapt zi der ruekh!-nor af dem gliklekhn-gliklekhn land, vos se valgernzikh dortn brilyantn,perlen,dimentn,un af dem beysamigdesh,mit di kehanim,mit di leviyim,mitn orgl, mitn mizbeyakh,mit di korbonesun mit di ale iberikegute zakhn, vos me hot bay mir avekgeroybt, tsugenumen,tsugenumen,tsugenumen. Butnot on accountof the loss of our gobletsand silverwareor of my mother's scantyjewelryand the money.Not on accountof Rickelthe maid-the devil taker her! But becausenow I will never see that happy, happy land where preciousstoneslie carelesslyaboutin the streets,wherethereis a holy temple with priests,Levites,an organ, and an ancientaltarwith sacrifices.All these marvelousthings cruelly,wantonlystolen from me... Here, unlike "The Penknife," the child is transported into the world of myth as a matter of course; yet even so normative a dream cannot be sustained for more than a few hours. That is because the myth in Sholem Aleichem's stories now functioned as an ironic foil even when it was ostensibly most potent. Sometimes the glass was half-full and sometimes it was half-empty, but never was a state of permanent fullness held out as a realistic possibility. One way, then, that the great myths operated in Sholem Aleichem's 40. These are collected in the following volumes of Ale verk in the Folksfond ed.: Fun peysekh biz peysekh (vol. 2); Lekoved yontef (vols. 22-23), as well as in many of the Mayses far yidishe kinder (Vols. 8-9) which also double as holiday tales. 41. Sholem Aleichem, "Der oyrekh" (1906), in vol. 2 of Lekoved yontef vol. 18 of Ale verk in the Folksfond ed. (New York, 1925), pp. 114-115. Etta Blum's trans., quoted here from The Best of Sholom Aleichem, p. 288, does not quite capture the incantation of loss.

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stories was through the actual behavior and speech of very ordinary Jews. On the one hand, myth allowed them a momentary reprieve from the pain and drugery of life, and on the other, it underlined the unbridgeable gap between transcendence and life's inherent constraints. In the folklore of the nations, the operative myth was heroic; it was a tale of conquest and happy endings. Among Jews, the best that could be hoped for was a tale of averted disaster. In contemporary Jewish folklore Sholem Aleichem found the one recurrentplot that confirmed his innermost sense of life: "Ale yidishe mayses," he wrote in 1903, "ale umglikn bay undz heybn zikh on fun a kleynikayt" ("all Jewish tales, all disasters among us begin with a trivial occurrence"). And as for the endings: "Yidishe mayses lozn zikh oys, tsum maynstn, troyerik" ("Jewish stories end, for the most part, on a sad note").42 As a writer of sentimental novels, as a so-called realist, Sholem Aleichem always bowed to convention by ending his well-made plots on a more-or-less happy note. As a storyteller, Sholem Aleichem tried as best he could to mitigate the tragic ending that all Jewish stories had to end with.43He did it most boldly in the final version of "A Tale Without an End." The new ending deserves to be quoted in full even though everyone has heard parts of it before. Un der hayoytseylonu mize?Un der may-ko-mashmo-lon fun der mayse?vet fregn der lezer. Tsvingtmikh nisht, kinder!Der sof iz geven nisht geyn guter sof. Ongehoybnhot zikh di mayse zeyer freylekh,un oysgelozthot zi zikh, vi dos rov freylekhegeshikhtes,oy-vey, zeyertroyerik.Un makhmesir kent dem mekhaberfun der geshikhte, az er iz beteve nit keyn moryeshkhoyrenikun hot faynt klogedikeun hot lib beser lakhndikemayses,un makhmesir kent im un veyst, az er hot faynt "moral"un zogn museriz nit zayn derekh-lokheyn gezegnt zikh mit aykh metokh skhok der farfaser, lakhndik,un vintshtaykh,az yidn, unglat mentshnaf dervelt,zoln merlakhn eyder veynen. Lakhniz gezunt. Doktoyrimheysn lakhn...

42. The first quotation is from "Konkurentn" (1903), Fun peysekh biz peysekh, vol. 2 of Ale verk (New York, 1925), p. 140. The second is from "Di fon" (1900), Felitonen (Tel Aviv, 1976), p. 25. 43. Here I take issue with David Neal Miller, who argued: "the logic of fiction insists upon unhappy endings, the vocation of the storyteller upon happy ones." See "'Don't Force Me to Tell You the Ending': Closure in the Short Fiction of Sh. Rabinovitsh (Sholem-Aleykhem)," Neophilologus (Amsterdam) 66 (1982): 106.

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"Whatis the moralof this tale?"the readerwill ask. Don't pressme, friends. It was not a good ending.The tale began cheerfullyenough,and it ended as most such happy stories do-badly. And since you know the authorof the story-that he is not naturallya gloomy fellow and hates to complainand preferscheerfulstories-and you know that he hates insistingon a story's "moral,"and that moralizingis not his manner.. . . Thenlet the makerof the tale take his leave of you smiling, and let him wish you, Jews-and all mankind-more laughterthan tears. Laughteris good for you. Doctors prescribelaughter. This statement could not have been written in 1901, for then, at the beginning of his career as master storyteller, Sholem Aleichem was still looking to history to provide him with an ending. Now, in 1909-11, it was after the failed revolution of 1905; after his permanent exodus from Russia; after his near-fatal attack of tuberculosis in the midst of a triumphal return visit; after years of recuperation in this spa and that; and after he had composed the bulk of his major story-cycles, none of which, as yet, had actually ended.44 It was also during this period of enforced exile that Sholem Aleichem returned repeatedly to the figure of Shmulik the orphan, ever enhancing his status in the author's fictional autobiography so as to portray the Sholem Aleichem persona as a traditional storyteller.45 As opposed to the comic Hebrew-Yiddish glosses with which the story began, this author's finale was written in a weighty, repetitive, heavily Hebraized style, suggesting the importance the author himself attached to these thoughts. It was the closest he ever came to an explication of his storytelling art. The "closed" form of the story, he might have been saying, in anticipation of Umberto Eco, was addressed to Everyman ("Jews-and all mankind"), and therefore could yield as many potential meanings as there were readers. Unlike the novels that he was forced to write at the behest of his newspaper bosses, stories did not require of an Ideal Reader to respond in a prescribed way; and so, the "moral" be damned.

44. In a letter of 1 May 1909 to his Yiddish publisher Y. Lidsky, Sholem Aleichem wrote: "Neither you nor I should publicize the 'Tale Without an End,' because what you have is the revised copy ('The Haunted Tailor')." Two years later he instructed his son-in-law Berkovitsh to publish the story with its new ending (letters of 10 and 24 March 1911, in Russian). I am indebted to Dr. Abraham Novershtern for this information. As mentioned earlier, this new ending did not appear in print until 1913. 45. Roskies, "Unfinished Business," pp. 73-74.

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Secondly, the storyteller was the doctor of the soul. He alone knew the diagnosis, having laid bare the recurrent pattern underlying the vagaries of life. He alone could describe the myth as actually lived-truncated, ironic, tragic. He alone could piece it back together again by playing the different forces off one another: language against life, stasis against historical change, fate against free will. In the end, it was the story itself that kept hope alive, or more precisely, the ability of Jews to reconstitute themselves wherever they were into a community of listeners-whether as third-class passengers on a Russian train or on board a ship bound for America or even as a one-time audience to hear the famous Sholem Aleichem himself read aloud from his works. And the story they heard, as told to them by a master raconteur, an expert in Jewish life and lore, was a story that could happen to anyone precisely because versions of it had already happened countless times before: in the home of a Shunammite woman, in the land of Uz, or in some enchanted forest. JewishTheologicalSeminaryof America New York, N.Y.

"A Word for My Blood:" A Reading of Kadya Molodowsky's "Froyen-Lider" (Vilna, 1927) Author(s): Kathryn Hellerstein Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 47-79 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486234 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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"A WORD FOR MY BLOOD:" A READING OF KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER" (VILNA, 1927) by KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

In her autobiography, My Great-Grandfather'sInheritance, the Yiddish poet Kadya Molodowsky (1893/94-1975) recalled her feeling upon publishing her first book of poetry, Kheshvandikenekht ("Nights of Heshvan") in 1927. Although this was my first book, I didn't feel like a beginner.A book is a book. For me, writingpoemswas firstand foremostspeakingfrom the heart. Days I was occupiedwith [teaching]school.I wrotethe poemsmostlyat night. The povertyof the Jewishpopulation,the limitationson Jewishlivelihoodlay heavyon my heart,and writingthe poems,I oftensheda tear.The occasionof my book was not a celebrationfor me, but a kind of easing up, a kind of unloading. At that time I composeda poem that began with these lines: 11KV1' J'K t1'I~b~31~llP

I don't write a poem, I try

47

I33~

48

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

To find a word for my blood That cries in my body.' In public terms, Molodowsky's literary career was extraordinarily successful, especially for a woman writing poetry in Yiddish.2 Her first book was accepted immediately by the renowned Vilna publisher B. Kletskin and well received with some twenty reviews in Poland and America.3 Such recognition continued throughout her life. She was awarded prizes for her numerous books of poems, short stories, plays, novels. In her later years, she founded and edited Sviva, an influential literary journal. Despite her outward literary successes, Molodowsky's work as a woman poet was deeply conflicted, caught in what one critic has called "the double bind of the woman poem."4 Molodowsky's early books of poems5 in particular are

1. Kadya Molodowsky, Fun mayn elterzeydnsyerushe, chap. 47, "Mayn ershter bukh lider, Kheshvandikenekht," [From my Great-Grandfather's Inheritance, "My First Book of Poems, Nights of Heshvan"], Sviva 35 (December 1971): 62-64. The lines are quoted from: Kadya Molodowsky, "Marsh" [March], Dzshike gas: lider, 2d ed. (Warsaw: Di Literarishe Bleter, 1936), 10-11. 2. See Norma Fain Pratt, "Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers, 1890-1940," American Jewish History 70, no. I (Summer 1980): 68-90. On Molodowsky's life, see Ezra Korman, ed., Yidishedikhterins:antologye [Yiddish women poets: Anthology] (Chicago: Farlag L. M. Stein, 1928), p. 348. Molodowsky, Elterzeydns yerushe, chap. 37, Sviva 33 (January 1971): 54-57. Born in Kartuz-bereze, Lithuania, in 1893 or 1894, Molodowsky lived in Kiev, Warsaw, Bialostok, and Vilna before immigrating to New York in 1935. She visited Israel several times. She died in New York in 1975. 3. See, for example, Yehoshe Perle, "Bikher velt" [Book World], Literarishe bleter 5, no. 2 (13 January 1928): 40. Perle defends Molodowsky against two poets who had previously attacked her in "Bikher velt" calling her poetry "no better and no worse than all our women plets," that is to say, "delicate, soft, and womanly." See also Sh. Niger, "Froyen-lyrik," Literarishe bleter 5, no. 46 (16 November 1928): 909-910. 4. Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 1-6. 5. Molodowsky's early books are: Kheshvandikenekht [Nights of Heshvan] (Vilna: Farlag B. Kletskin, 1927); Dzshike gas [Dzshike Street], 1st ed. (Warsaw: Literarishe Bleter, 1933), 2d ed. 1936; Freydke (Warsaw: Literarishe Bleter, 1935). Her early books of children's poems also reflect these concerns: Mayselekh [Tales] no. 5 (Warsaw: Yidishe Shul Organizatsye fun Poylin, 1931); Geyen shikhlekh avek vu di velt hot nor an ek [Little shoes walk away to wherever the world may end] (Warsaw, 1929?). I have not been able to locate this text nor an exact citation. Molodowsky mentions that it won a prize after the publication of Kheshvandikenekht, so I assume it was published between 1927 and 1933. See Molodowsky, Elterzeydns yerushe, chap. 49, Sviva 36 (April 1972): 56-58.

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER"

49

explicitly concerned with the questions of creativity and gender of the sort that have become central to recent literary criticism and theory dealing with writing by women.6 The conflict that Molodowsky faced was, in fact, only reformulated in 1972 by the American poet Adrienne Rich: "To be a female human being, trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way, is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination."7 As the study of women and writing has developed through the subsequent years, critics have extended Rich's statement from the struggle between reproductivity and creativity within women writers' lives to the subversive implications of gender within literary language itself--in reading, in metaphor, and even in syntax.8 This range of criticism can help us read Molodowsky's poems as the 6. See Susan Stanford Friedman, "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse," Feminist Studies 13, no. I (Spring 1987): 49-82. Friedman cites Susan Gubar, "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: [Re]production, the KunstelerromanTradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield," in The Representationof Womenin Fiction, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 19-59. And Susan Gubar, "'The Blanck Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 243-264. See also Eavan Boland, "The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma," American Poetry Review 16, no. 1 (January-February 1987): 17-20; Sandra M. Gilbert, "Life's Empty Pack: Notes Toward a Literary Daughteronomy," Critical Inquiry 11 (March 1985): 355-384; Nina Auerbach, "Artists and Mothers: A False Alliance," Womenand Literature6, no. I (Spring, 1978): 3-15; Verena Andermatt, "Helene Cixous and the Uncovery of a Feminine Language," Womenand Literature 7, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 38-48. See also Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood," in The (M)other Tongue. Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Intepretation,ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 352-377; Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in The Signs Reader: Women, Gender,and Scholarship, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 279-297; Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis.:Configurationsof Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 114-17, 139, 232-34, 237; Donna C. Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 157-82; Margaret Homans, "A Vision of Language," in Feminist Critics on Dickinson, ed. Susan Juhasz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 198x). 7. Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979). Also in The Norton Reader, ed. Arthur M. Eastman et al., 5th ed. (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 519. 8. Susan Stanford Friedman argues that the resonances of "the childbirth metaphor" vary for readers and writers of different genders and cultures. Margaret Homans argues the essential role that gender plays in the very nature of figurative and literal language. Helene Cixous challenges the syntax and logic of most writing in French and English, which she calls "marked writing," governed by a "masculine economy." See Friedman, "Creativity and the Childbirth

50

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

linguistically fertile products of the clash between gender and imagination. Reciprocally, a reading of Molodowsky's poems may enrich the vocabulary for the study of women to describe the experience of women who emerged from traditional Judaism by writing poetry in a Jewish language, Yiddish. An anecdote from her autobiography illustrates the conflict Molodowsky perceived between the work of women as mothers and as writers. A certain woman once brought her son to see Molodowsky, because he admired her children's mayselekh, or tales.9 The boy apparently expected to find the poet enthroned on a golden chair, and "all the joyous events that occur in her mayselekh would be seen around her in the house."'0 Instead, he saw Molodowsky at her mending, and, as the mother later told her, complained, "She darns socks! Just like you!" From this child's point of view, a writer of tales and poems should not act like a mother. Molodowsky responded, "When I write, I sit on a golden chair, but when I finish writing, the golden chair flies off and I'm left darning socks!" Molodowsky's whimsical distinction between the two occupations of a woman writer-upon the throne of the imagination and in the stitches of quotidian tasks-indicates a serious dichotomy between writing and woman's work that contradicts the notion of poetry as an organic entity, as the "words for my blood." As this contrast suggests, Molodowsky's poems attempt to reconcile a struggle between a romantic notion of poetry that privileges a woman creator and the socially ordained roles that limit her on account of her gender. Although the poet and the woman are mutually embodied, Molodowsky's early books play out the irreconcilability of these two kinds of creativity, and a later poem, "Mayne kinder" ("My Children"), expresses directly the consequences of a poet's choice between Metaphor," pp. 49-50; Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word:Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1-39; Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," The Signs Reader, p. 283. 9. The Yiddish word mayse comes from the Hebrew root for "deed" or "act." According to Alexander Harkavy, Yidish-english-hebreyishverterbukh,3d ed. (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1928), pp. 310-311: the first meaning in Yiddish is "deed, act, occurrence"; the second meaning is "tale, story." Within this meaning, there is a third denotation, "thing, matter," which leads to the fourth, slang meaning of "female genital organ." Although this slang usage is hardly the first association a reader would have with the title of verse for children, its very existence suggests an implicit, powerful connection between the acts of telling stories and of reproduction. As the title of Molodowsky's children's poems, mayselekh connotes the fantastic, folklike quality of these narrative poems. Also see Nahum Stutchkoff, Der oytser fun der yidisher shprakh, ed. Max Weinreich (New York: YIVO, 1950), p. 180, entry 240. 10. Molodowsky, Elterzeydns yerushe, Sviva 36 (April 1972): 56-57.

51

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER"

creativity and reproductivity. The speaker's four unborn children surround her in the night, and the first son demands of her: l••_'•1311P*T,713•.•_'•P•

p~nl,,• •n~;oym•s

Whydid you not delivermy share, The one decreed,the one orderedfor meInto your world of fears and music? What good are all your songs, the melodiesand the choruses? Sincebeneaththemour witheredsouls LANGUISH?" This complaint of the unborn children drives home to the poet how irreversible is a woman's choice of imagination over procreation. In the autobiographical passage previously quoted, Molodowsky describes the act of writing poetry as finding "a word for my blood." In this charged phrase, the metaphor emphasizes the correspondence in Molodowsky's imagination between the act of writing poems and the biological function of her body. Poetry becomes the occasion for finding a word to articulate the essential fluid of life itself. Significantly, this trope appears in writings by women in many languages in the latter half of this century. For example, Sylvia Plath, in 1962, uses the figure negatively to describe the predicament of a woman who cancreate, it seems, neither children nor words. While her barren womb "Rattles its pod," this woman, "Spiderlike, ... spin [s] mirrors, / ... Uttering nothing but blood."'2 In contrast, the French writer Helene Cixous, in a positive figure, depicts the blood of menses as the medium for fertility, providing the basis for a peculiarly female creativity in words: " . . . all these drives are our strengths, and among them is the gesta-

11. Kadya Molodowsky, "Mayne kinder," Der melekh dovid aleyn iz geblibn (New York: Farlag Papirene Brik, 1946), pp. 86-87. 12. Sylvia Plath, "Childless Woman," in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 259. Also cited in Friedman, "Childbirth Metaphor," p. 69.

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KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

tion drive-just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood".'3 Both the negative and the positive connotations of the female body in this trope return us to its Ur-source in Genesis, where words as blood are linked not with procreation, but with murder. After Cain kills Abel, God accuses Cain, "What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto Me from the ground" (Gen. 4:10).14 Although here Abel's blood itself seems to speak to God, in the next verse, the grammatically feminine ground, ha-adamah, which has "received" this blood, is said to curse the murderer whose hands have shed it: "And now cursed art thou from the ground, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand" (Gen. 4:11). This passage plots a contrary causality for blood and words. At first the blood itself appears both to command words and to convey the instrument for speech-a mouth-to the ground that has absorbed it. The following verse then proceeds to transpose the powers, as the blood itself comes to seem voiceless, while the earth possesses a mouth, through which it gives voice to the spilled blood. It is possible to understand the passage in yet another way. Perhaps neither blood nor earth possess the capacity for speech until the blood falls on the earth for the first time; at that moment, the earth acquires a mouth and the blood a voice, which together articulate the silent message of fratricide. In this reading of the figure, the earth, by absorbing Abel's blood, reverses Eve's birthing in Genesis 4:1-2: Abel's life descends into the earth, as it once emerged from the mother's body. The feminine earth corresponds to the female Eve. Only as the murdered son's blood returns to its maternal source do the accusing words form themselves. As Molodowsky casts this figure, the poet's blood cries in her body like Abel's blood crying from the earth. The allusion shows how radically the modern writer has altered the biblical figure. Unlike Abel's blood crying out to God for retribution, the poet's blood cries inwardly to a self who can only attempt to find a word to represent that cry. In context, the poet's blood corresponds to the injustice of poverty and hunger. Her blood cries in her body like "The march of torn shoes" which "on sheets of white paper / Writes with dark strokes.""' The poem from which these lines come,

13. Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," p. 295. See also pp. 285, 290, 293. 14. The Holy ScripturesAccording to the Masoretic Text, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976), vol. 1, p. 8. 15. Molodowsky, "Marsh" [March], Dzshike gas. lider 2d ed., pp. 10-11.

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER"

53

"Marsh" ("March"), itself points outward toward "objective" social problems, but its figurative language draws it inward to the body of the poet. While the poet intends to express empathy for others, the figures subvert this political gesture, and a struggle ensues. This struggle between outward and inward directives, between the didactic intention and the figurative language of the poem, mirrors the conflict in the woman poet between the traditional female roles and the subversive role of the imagination. In this paper, I will study how gender figures in the language of one sequence, "Froyen-lider," from Kadya Molodowsky's first book, Kheshvendike nekht ("Nights of Heshvan"). The speaker in the twelve poetic sequences of Kheshvandikenekht places herself in difrie mitl-yornfun a froy, "the early-middle years of a woman."'6 She moves through the landscape of Jewish eastern Europe as a modern woman in a variety of roles: a teacher, a traveler, a lover, an empathetic observer of "all impoverished women who scour burnt pots."'7 Throughout the book, this persona contrasts her own modernity with the roles for women decreed by Jewish tradition, either halakhically, that is, legally, or by custom and history. For Molodowsky, however, the conflict between a traditionally defined female identity and creativity is embodied in figurative language and poetic forms that reveal a peculiarly Jewish intertextual struggle. The very title of the sequence "Froyen-lider" exemplifies this problematic.'8 This title consists of two nouns, hyphenated in the original text, with a typographical mark that resembles an equal sign: Froyen=lider, "Women= Poems." In this formulation, one noun seems to modify the other, but the problem arises in how to read the equation between the two nouns. Does the title translate as "Poems of Women," i.e., poems about women, or "Women's Poems," i.e., poems belonging to women? Typographically, the appearance of an equation might even suggest that women are poems, and poems, women. This ambiguity points to the central problem of "Froyenlider": how can the woman writer reconcile her art with the culturally dictated, specifically Jewish precepts of womanhood? Before tracing the ways Molodowsky works out this problem in "Froyen-lider," it is worthwhile to describe the sequence as a whole. Six of 16. Kadya Molodowsky, "S'iz haynt a shtiler tog II," Kheshvandikenekht: Lider, p. 62. All translations in this essay are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 17. Kadya Molodowsky, "Oreme vayber I" [Poor Women], Kheshvandikenekht, p. 90. 18. Kadya Molodowsky, "Froyen-lider I-VIII," Kheshvandikenekht, pp. 11-19. Some of the poems are dated: III, 1924; V, 1926; VIII, 1925. All other quotations from this sequence are identified in the text of the essay.

54

KATHRYN

HELLERSTEIN

the eight poems are spoken by a woman, troubled and alone in the night. Her solitude and nocturnal dreams, thoughts, and visions provide the occasion for her words. At the beginning, she dreams of generations of her female ancestors, while at the end, she has a vision of her deceased mother. In the middle, the speaker reflects upon the consequences of her illicit intimacy with a man, or perhaps with two men. Then follow two poems in which there is no explicit "I," and which address the generalized situations of women who, married or longing to marry, barren or pregnant, find comfort in the order of Jewish belief and the course of nature. In contrast to these women, the speaker herself remains ambivalent, estranged from the familiar comforts and resisting the powerful draw of the tradition. Imagery of the seasons prepares for an uneasy closure: the expected progression of nature is disordered, as the narrative leaps from autumn to summer to spring to autumn. The sequence begins, in "Froyen-lider I," as the speaker narrates her dream of the women in her family.

Y7Y? n)P a• 1'K'T"; "l'3 ~l "•fq'13 'c• l.'.a

,Ii•_"•

The women of our familywill come to me in dreamsat night and say: In virtuewe carrieda pure blood throughthe generations, We broughtit to you, like a guardedwine in koshercellars

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER"

55

Of our hearts. And one will say: I was left an abandonedwife when my cheeks were Two reddishapples still on the tree And I clenchedmy white teeth in the lonely nights of expectation. And I will go to meet the grandmothers,saying: The witheredmelodiesof your lives Chase after me like autumnwinds. And you come to meet me Whereverthe street is dark, And whereverthere'sa shadow. And why shall this blood without impurity Be my conscience,like a silken thread Bound on my brain, And my life a page pluckedfrom a holy book, The first line torn? In the first four lines, the speaker's female forebears announce across the generations the inheritance they have bequeathed to her. This inheritance is "the pure blood" of family lineage, preserved and passed on like kosher wines, appropriate for the commanded ritual blessing of wine, Kiddush. Through the simile of wine, blood itself is likened to the virtue inherent in a ritually correct way of living. Contradictorily, though, this same blood of women also suggests the impure blood of menstruation and childbirth, for which the laws of issue, Niddah,19 provide sexual restrictions and the means of ritual purification. This connotation is developed later in the poem, in the phrase dos blut on a tumah ("this blood without an impurity," line 15), for tumah denotes especially the "Levitical uncleanness"20of the laws of Niddah. The simile of wine, then, indicates two opposing interpretations of blood: the pure blood kept by the ancestresses in tsnies, in chaste modesty or virtue, is also, when conveyed through women's bodies, the blood of menses and procreation that makes a woman impure. As these female progenitors appear in the dream, their words place a burden on the

19. The laws of Niddah are stated in Leviticus 15:19-30 and in the sixth division of Tohoroth in Mishnah, 12th ed., trans. Herbert Danby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 745-757. 20. Comp. Marcus Jastrow, Sefer milim: A Dictionary of the Targum,the TalmudBabli and Yerushalmi,the Midrashic Literature, 2 vols. (Israel: reissued 1970 [no publisher, n.d.]), 1:524.

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KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

speaker of the poem to continue their virtuous ways, for they bring their blood to her. In lines 5-8, one of them, an agunah, speaks. An agunah, an abandoned wife who cannot remarry until her husband either is proven dead or grants her a divorce, epitomizes the woman caught in a bind, or literally "anchored" by law to a husband whose existence is ambiguous.21 The ancestral agunah in this poem represents the obedient woman, a victim of her husband's circumstance, who sacrifices her female ripeness for the sake of conforming to the Law. This sacrifice is figured in the metaphor of cheeks as "reddish apples." Defiantly, the poem's speaker resists this example of virtue. Unlike the agunah, she will not grit her white teeth through lonely nights of expectation. The speaker's defiance is especially clear in a subsequent poem, "Froyen-lider II," which provides the information that she has disobeyed the laws prohibiting adulterous sex by taking lovers. In this first poem, though, a hint of rebellion, albeit less forthright rebellion, is also conveyed, in line 9, as the speaker announces, as if to the agunah, that she will confront those grandmothers of past generations who threaten to restrict her. This confrontation, though, is undermined by what comes next in the poem: the lives of the grandmothers pursue her in all dark places. The figures with which these lives are depicted-withered melodies and autumn winds-are the meager legacy of obedient chastity's restraints. These images take on a peculiar power against the active, sexually seeking, unchaste, modern woman. In lines 9-14, the overall anapestic rhythm, which previously ranged from two to seven stresses per line, becomes insistently uniform. Lines 9-11 scan in four beats, with varying arrangements of iambs and anapests.

In contrast,lines 12-14 scan identically. In contrast, lines 12-14 scan identically.

-I- .

-/

21. The word agunah derives from the Hebrew verb agon meaning "to shut oneself in or off, especially from marriage, to imprison, to anchor." See A Hebrew English Lexicon of the Old

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER"

57

This insistent regularity underscores the persistence of the specter of the grandmothers. The words with which the speaker refers to the generations of women marks a progression. The progression moves from the common Yiddish word froyen in line 1, denoting both woman and wife, to the technical Hebraic term for an abandoned wife, agunah, in line 6, to bobes, grandmothers, in line 9, a word of Slavic origin, which places the speaker at a generational remove from the lives of these women. In contrast to these three names for women, all of which connote relationship to a husband, the speaker names herself as ikh, defined only in terms of her relation to her mothers. With bobes the poet indicates the speaker's increasing impatience with the old-fashioned strains of the nigunim, devotional melodies, which their lives represent to her. Melodic as the nigunimmay be, their music is as dry as dead leaves to the speaker. The speaker concludes the poem with a question that challenges the validity of the past ways of women for the woman in the present: "And why shall this blood without impurity / Be my conscience, like a silken thread / Bound on my brain... ?" The blood, like the winds and melodies, is too insubstantial to bind physically, yet it constricts the speaker's brain (moyekh) like a silken thread, tough and delicate at once. Through the simile likening blood to a thread, the blood itself paradoxically cuts off circulation and yet binds together (farbunden)the speaker's sense of herself as a woman. This self-contradicting simile exemplifies the tension in Molodowsky's "Froyen-lider" between words and woman and offers a gloss for her definition of a poem as "words for my blood." The binding thread also suggests the tfillin which a man binds to his brow and left forearm with leather thongs. If tfillin bind a man to God in his prayer, the silken thread on this woman's brain binds her restrictively to a tradition she no longer believes in.22The last two lines present an image that keeps the speaker caught in this paradox: the speaker sees herself as de-

Testament, reprint based on the Lexicon of William Gesenius, trans. Edward Robinson, ed. Francis Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 723. Also see Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Women's Issues in Halakhic Sources (New York: Schocken, 1984), p. 102. Mishnah, Yebamoth 15 (1-10) and 16. 22. The binding image somewhat enigmatically suggests the Yom Kippur Avodah, where the scarlet thread was bound around the horn of the scapegoat released by the high priest into the wilderness. This thread miraculously turns white when the sins of the community are forgiven.

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scended from the past generations of women, and yet is alienated, literally plucked out from them.

And my life a page pluckedfrom a holy book, The first line torn? This metaphor renders the speaker's life as part and parcel of the Hebrew holy book, sefer, by which the generations of women lived, obedient to the ancient laws and restrictions. Yet her life is torn from the common binding and made impure. We may complete the logic of these figures: if blood is a thread and life is a book, then the cutting of the silken thread looses the page from its binding and lets the blood from the body. This double release should imply deracination and death. Instead, the letting of tsniesdike blut allows for the desires of the body to assert themselves against the text that has restrained them. At once the speaker experiences loss and release. The Hebraic word sefer ("holy book") in the penultimate line of the poem refers the reader back to the other Hebraic words in the poem, kosher, agunah, tsnies, tumah. The sefer itself is the book from which these words of sexual restriction come, the text to which the nigun, or melody, of the women's lives is set. The figure of the sefer page makes the speaker's life a part of the written Hebraic tradition of sexuality that binds women's desires. The speaker's life, still composed of the traditional text, has been ripped from its context, and the first line of holy writing is damaged, farrisn.23The page of her life, inscribed in Hebrew but torn from its binding, needs a new book into which to be set. With this, Molodowsky justifies the Yiddish poems before us. The metaphor of the speaker's life as text submerges in the four central poems of the sequence and resurfaces in the last three poems. The central poems, "Froyen-lider" II, III, IV, and V, advance the narrative of the sequence by chronicling the sexual license of the speaker. And their metaphors link images from traditional Jewish texts to the woman's body. Her 23. The exact meaning offarrisn is ambiguous here. As the past participle offarraysn, it can mean "lifted (with a jerk)" or "torn;" but the verb farrisn means "to smudge with soot." See Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-EnglishDictionary (New York: YIVO and McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 468.

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S

"FROYEN-LIDER"

59

looseness stands in explicit contrast to the bound lives of the bobes in "Froyen-lider II."

I will come to the one Who first broughtme woman'sdelight, And say: Man,

I trustedyet anotherwith my quiet gaze, And one night lay my head near him. Now I bring my sorrow Like bees stingingaroundmy heart, And have no honey to soothe the hurt. And if the man takes me by the braid, I will drop to my knees And remainon the doorsteplike the petrifactionat Sodom, I will raise my hands to my head like my mother blessingthe Sabbathcandles, But my fingerswill stand rigid like ten numberedsins. The imagery of gesture in "Froyen-lider II" reverses expectations or traditional meanings. In the first eight lines, the speaker tells how she will return to her first lover, seeking his "honey" as a salve for the bee-sting hurt caused by the other man. His response will be "to take me by the braid," an ambiguous gesture of sexual possession and punishment. The speaker then narrates her own gesture of contrition in lines 11-14. This gesture is complicated by the twofold simile that refers to a dis-

60

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

obedient woman's punishment in the Torah and to an obedient woman's custom in daily life. In the first instance, the speaker kneels like Lot's wife turned to salt at Sodom (Genesis 19:26); in the second, she raises her hands as her mother used to do when she blessed the Sabbath candles. The first instance recalls the salt pillar-a symbol of divine punishment of a woman who looked back at the destruction of sin; the second recalls the symbolic gesture of a woman who refrains from looking at the illumination of peace. Lighting the Sabbath candles, the mother fulfilled one of the three positive mitsvot required of Jewish women. Yet her obedience extended further, with the significant gesture of covering her eyes. Customarily a benediction is recited before an act is performed, but the blessing over the candles marks the beginning of the Sabbath, during which Jews are forbidden to create light. In order both to satisfy the requirement of reciting the blessing before the act and to avoid transgressing the Sabbath, the mother would first light the candles, but then cover her eyes so as not to see the flames while she recited the blessing. When she finished, she would remove her hands and look upon the light, thus symbolically allowing the benediction to precede the act.24 Like Lot's wife, who dies looking back at what she has left, the speaker in "Froyen-lider II," petrified on the doorstep, is unable to see in the past any consolation for her present sorrows. The language of line 12 replaces the flesh and blood of Lot's wife with her metamorphosis into salt: di farshteynerung fun sdom names not the woman, but what she becomes.25The word farshteynerung is a gerund that denotes both the process of turning to stone (shteyn) and the thing petrified.26Like the process of petrification, where stone replaces organic matter, in the poetic line this word stands in place of the woman who underwent that transformation. Yet the familiar, idiomatic language that conveys the mother's habitual piety brings the image of a living woman back into the poem. Indeed, the speaker fuses both these images in the final line. Unlike

24. Paraphrase of Heschel, The Sabbath (1951; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), p. 66, quoted in Isaac Klein, A Guideto Jewish Religious Practice (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1979), pp. 55-58. See also Paula Hyman, "The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition," in The Jewish Woman.: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken, 1976, pp. 106-107. 25. Nancy E. Henry, in a conference paper at Stanford University, May 18, 1987, discussed the significance of the fact that Lot's wife has no name. 26. I am grateful to David Fishman and David G. Roskies, both of whom pointed out to me the problem of the word farshteynerung.

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S

"FROYEN-LIDER"

61

the mother's pious gesture before the candle flames, which maintains the decreed order of blessing and act, the daughter's raised fingers will attest to her sins. Her living fingers "stand" (shteyn), punning on the word farshteynerung,as if rigid and no longer human, like the bloodless pillar of salt. The ten fingers enumerate her sinful passions, as if she had broken the Ten Commandments one by one. The gesture of the mother's obedience, then, is transformed by the poem into an attestation to the daughter's disobedience. "Froyen-lider III" makes the metaphor of stone literal in the narrative setting. The speaker tells how she, having returned to her former lover, sleeps on the stone doorstep.

Sometimesa stone step is sweet as a pillow, So I stretchout on its coldness When I can't bear up to the third floor My head with its thin dry lips. Then I am a silent, faintinggirl, Who shufflesacross the ground on numb feet And lies down somewhere Alone all night on the sstonestairs. This speaker is the opposite of an agunah, for she is not imprisoned in chastity by the words of the Law, but shut out of the protecting walls of the home through her own chosing, because she has been unchaste. As deprivation transforms cold stone into a pillow's sweetness, her venture into womanly passion, mayn froyen freyd (F.L. II, 1), has reduced her to a motherless meydl, or girl. "Froyen-lider III" suggests that it is not an outer world that punishes her but her own weakness. Her silence compounds this physical weakness, for words impart the power to act.

62

KATHRYN

HELLERSTEIN

"Froyen-lider IV" reconfirms the solitude of the speaker of "Froyenlider III." The speaker is alone with herself in her room. Even her own image in the mirror is too much to bear.

-••7y,,m1 "'•,'• ,3'N "I'31••'5t• 011 ,-m

I must turn the mirroraside, So that now, in the still night, my face Does not look at me with prim lips: I will no longer considerwhat I have not before considered. I will nod my head to the wall, As if to a living personwho is sorry, As if to an old, good friend. In the still of the night it is all the same WhetherI am right or wrong. My brows are heavy and still not unburdened, And my limbs gravitateto the earth In mute trust of her primordialconscience. In this poem, the speaker comes to accept her actions. The walls of her room take on human presence. The earth itself, grammatically feminine in Yiddish as in Hebrew, draws the speaker's physical being and offers her consolation. In fact, the feminine earth, with the connotations of life and death in the image of gravitation, suggests the earth that absorbs Abel's blood and curses Cain in Genesis 4:10. In calling the earth's "conscience" primordial, the speaker acknowledges that it is older than the Laws she has transgressed and summoned forth for her own punishment in the preceding poems. Molodowsky here places in opposition the forces of culture and nature as they act upon a woman.

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S

"FROYEN-LIDER"

63

"Froyen-lider V" ends the narrative section on the speaker's passion and its consequences, that is, her solitude and attempt at self-knowledge. She narrates a scence of her insomnia in the summer dawn.

Long and mild are the dawns of Tammuzand Av, When I hold my wakefulhead on a brown, sunburnedhand: Man, I have kept near me a guardedplace for you, But I have not kept any peace and place for myself. Throughclosed eyes the tears fall slow and warm, And stillnessspreads, Like small drowsy rabbitsaroundthe bed, Soon the day will make its first cry And they will scatter And I will rise to my difficult,long way. Although "Froyen-lider V" is slight, and essentially provides closure for the narrative of the central poems, the language recalls and anticipates the rest of the sequence. Night of the earlier poems has become dawn, and autumn, summer. The previous, densely symbolic gesture of hands raised to the head has evolved into a simple physical posture, as the head rests on a hand. The lovely metaphor of drowsy rabbits around the bed ameliorates the previous metaphor of bees stinging around the heart. As in the second poem, the speaker in "Froyen-lider V" addresses a "Man," her contender and absent lover. In both poems, the very word man dominates a short line, set off from

64

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

the other lines. Whereas in the second poem, the speaker predicts the judgmental actions of this man, in the fifth poem, he is but a listening presence made "other" by his maleness. The speaker seems to have gained power from her confrontation with female specters of the past and her sexual unions in the present. These engagements seem to have taught her the hard necessities of the self. In "Froyen-lider I," the generations of women preserved their blood like "a guarded wine," a vayn a gehitn, for their descendant. In "Froyen-lider V," the speaker keeps "a guarded place," an ort an opgehitn, near herself for the man, at the expense of guarding or cherishing "some peace and place for" herself, far mir hob ikh nit opgehit keyn ru un ort. By repeating the adjectives gehit and ophitn, and the verb ogehit, Molodowsky subtly draws attention to a religious meaning, "to observe holidays," that resonates throughout the sequence. This repetition unearths a metaphor of ritual observance. In the speaker's words, this concept changes, from literally obeying the legal restraints on the female body, to figuratively observing the rituals of a romantic love that stands outside of Jewish law. The speaker discovers, though, that she has only transferred the observance of ritual from one domain to another, each controlled by an authority or power implicitly male. As a result, she must continue on her "difficult, long way," to seek a "place," or to observe a ritual for herself. Molodowsky returns to the question of text and life, word and blood. By modeling "Froyen-lider VI" on a type of devotional text, and replacing the subjective "I" with a narrator, she develops the speaker's predicament in collective terms. The poem alludes to the tkhines, Yiddish prayers composed for (and some, it is thought, by) women. It follows the general form of those tkhines appealing to the matriarchs, such as "Tehinnah of the Matriarchs for Rosh Hodesh Elul," composed by Serel bas Jacob Halevi Segal of Dubno, and published in 1783 in Frankfurt-am-Oder, as quoted by Israel Zinberg.27 In this tkhine, women would appeal to the biblical matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, to provide merit for protecting their "sinful homeless children." Firstwe beg our motherSarahthat she may prayfor us at the hour of judgment, that we may go out free from the judgment.... Have mercy, our 27. Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, trans. Bernard Martin, 12 vols. (New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1974), 7:257-259.

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S

65

"FROYEN-LIDER"

mother,on yourchildren,and especiallyprayfor ourchildrenthat theybe not separated from us. You know well that it is very bitter when a child is taken away from its mother, how it was with you, how grieved you were when they took your Isaac away from you.28

Rather than addressing the matriarchs in a prayer, Molodowsky's poem narrates their compassion for the humbled and ordinary woman. It is significant that the speaker narrates, rather than prays, for by narrating a prayer she calls into question the efficacy of praying.

Y'7i21t ~fDY 'TD;a

,tuna -•b -•1

28. Ibid., 7:257.

u1 YY t7 '•

tp~

m

66

KATHRYN

For poor brides who were servant girls, Mother Sarah draws forth from dim barrels And pitchers sparkling wine. Mother Sarah carries with both hands A full pitcher to whom it is decreed, And mother Sarah's tears fall Into a small goblet for whom it is decreed. And for streetwalkers Dreaming of white wedding shoes, Mother Sarah bears clear honey In small saucers To their tired mouths. For high-born brides now poor, Who blush to bring patched wash Before their mothers-in-law, Mother Rebecca leads camels Laden with white linen. And when darkness spreads before their feet, And all the camels kneel on the ground to rest, Mother Rebecca measures linen ell by ell From the fingers of her hand To her golden bracelet. For those whose eyes are tired From watching the neighborhood children, And whose hands are thin from yearning For a soft small body And for the rocking of a cradle, Mother Rachel brings healing leaves Discovered on distant mountains, And comforts them with a quiet word: At any hour God may open the sealed womb. For those who cry at night in lonely beds,

HELLERSTEIN

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER"

67

And have no one to sharetheir sorrow, Who talk to themselveswith parchedlips, To them, Mother Leah comes quietly, Her eyes coveredwith her pale hands. Molodowsky establishes an ironic parallelism between this, the sixth, and the first poem in the sequence. As her ancestral specters "came" to the speaker, bearing their pure blood "like a guarded wine," so the biblical matriarchs appear to the many unhappy women. Yet her mothers' gift burdened the speaker, restricting and angering her, while the matriarchs' gifts offer genuine comfort to the women. Mother Sarah comes to "poor brides who were servant girls" with either full pitchers of sparkling wine or small goblets of her tears, as God has decreed. Sarah also appears to prostitutes who dream of marriage, bearing honey, as if to sweeten the unlikelihood that their dreams will be fulfilled. Mother Rebecca brings to the "highborn brides," whose ragged dowries humble them before their mothers-in-law, fine linens that will reinstate their standing. The matriarch Rachel, who had trouble conceiving and "bore Jacob no children" (Genesis 30:1) until "God opened her womb and she conceived and bore a son ... Joseph" (Genesis 30:22-24), carries to those who are barren exotic remedies and the hope that God will intervene for them as He did for her. Traditionally, when the tkhines address the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel are summoned, and Leah is usually not.29This fact is significant, for it points us toward the poem's ironic treatment of the so-called "feminine" sentimentality conventionally associated with the tkhines. The first three groups of suppliants to the matriarchs consist of brides, prostitutes, would-be brides, and barren wives. Like the list of women ancestors in "Froyen-lider I," all of these women are defined by their sexual relationship to men, whether legitimized or not. The fourth group of suppliants are unlike the others, and more like the speaker of "Froyen-Lider I." Appealing to the matriarch Leah, they are distinguished from the previously catalogued women by their solitude. In Genesis, Leah, the unfavored, elder sister of Rachel, is the wife given in trickery to Jacob by Laban. Because she

29. Chava Weissler, "The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women," in A History of Jewish Spirituality, ed. Arthur Green, 2 vols. (New York: Crossroads, 1987) 2:[48]. Page numbers and quotations refer to the uncut typescript of the article. I am grateful to Chava Weissler for her generosity.

68

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

is unloved by her husband, God pities Leah and makes her fecund (Genesis 29:31). As a result, Leah bears Jacob seven children before Rachel can produce her first (Genesis 29:31-30:25). In the biblical story, God gives Leah the power of fertility to counterbalance her husband's disdain for her. In Molodowsky's poem, however, the power of Leah is kept in by her silence (lines 35-36). The women Leah comforts, in contrast to the other matriarchs' charges, are characterized by their solitary verbal acts. These women weep alone and talk to themselves with parched lips (lines 32-34). The image of sorrowing women talking to themselves alludes to the barren Hannah, taken for a drunkard by Eli the priest when she petitioned God for a child, silently moving her lips and speaking in her heart (I Samuel 1:1-20). For Leah's charges there is no priest to intervene, and perhaps no God. This matriarch who seems to be their only witness, brings them her ambiguous presence--silence and the gesture of her hands covering her eyes. The weakness of Leah's eyes is implied in Genesis in the initial description of the sisters Rachel and Leah: "Now Laban had two daughters: the name of the older was Leah and the younger was Rachel. And Leah's eyes were weak. But Rachel was of beautiful form and fair to look upon." (Genesis 29:16-17). The Hebrew adjective rakot (translated here as "weak") can also be read as "tender," in the sense of gentle, delicate, soft. The Tse'ena Ure'ena translates rakot into Yiddish as veykh, "soft." Leah believes that as the eldest daughter she will have to marry Isaac's eldest son, Esau. un di oygn fun leye zenengevenveykhvayl zi hot zeyergeveynt[v]endi layt hobngezogtleye iz di eltstetokhterfun lovnvet zi nemeneysovdemeltstnzun fun rivkeun rokhliz di yungstetokhtervet zi nemenyankevdemyungstnzun fun rivkedarumhot leyezeyergeveyntbiz zi hot bakumenshlekhteoygn fun fil veynen...30 In this version, Leah weeps so much at the thought of this badly decreed match that her eyes become veykh and shlekhte, "soft" and "terrible." Molodowsky's Leah covers her eyes in an enigmatic gesture. Whether she shields her eyes in modesy or weeps compassionately, Leah acknowledges the plight of these women by not witnessing it. Leah's gesture recalls

30. Yitskhok Yanov, Tse'ena Ure'ena (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co. and Moses Greenfield, 1969), pp. 131-132.

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S

69

"FROYEN-LIDER"

the end of "Froyen-lider II," where the speaker raised her hands to her face in shame and compared that gesture to her mother blessing the Sabbath candles. There, that gesture connoted the contrast between the mother who obeyed and the speaker who flaunted Jewish law. Here, the matriarch, mother of mothers, covers her eyes in the face of a modern isolation that has no biblical precedent. This polysemous gesture joins the modern woman, the pious mother, and the matriarch. Molodowsky has modeled her poem on the tkhines of the matriarchs to explore how the Jewish texts can comfort women who fulfill no traditional female role. By ending the poem with Leah's mute gesture, Molodowsky indicates the ambiguity of such consolation. Like the preceding poem, "Froyen-lider VII" presents the predicament of the sequence's protagonist in collective terms. Whereas the sixth poem placed women who have no traditional role uneasily within the culture of devotion, the seventh poem puts them at the mercy of nature. The poem depicts the irrepressible procreative urge of the spring season as a force against which the childless woman has no defense.

'When fromupunder a stone, a grass blade pushes forth fromKthe earth,

are the~1 spin nights'n These37 When stne ~from ~unde ~a1~ up~i ~ aYi ~grass ?lbld makes fresh a green cushio AndT moss;

And fresh moss makes a green cushionK

use

othfo

13~YS~IYN 7 heerh

70

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

Under the skull of a dead horse And all of a woman'slimbs beg for the hurt of childbirth. And women come and lie down like sick sheep By wells to heal their bodies, And have dark faces From long years of thirstingfor the cry of a child. These are the springnights When lightningsplits the black earth With silver slaughteringknives. And pregnantwomen approach White tables in the hospitalwith quiet steps And smile at the yet-unbornchild And perhapsat the dead. These are the springnights When up from undera stone, a grass blade pushes forth from the earth. In the first half of this poem (lines 1-9), the season's inevitable arrival corresponds to unstoppable growth, as grass pushes up from beneath a stone, moss covers the vestiges of death, a horse skull, and a woman craves the pain of childbirth. The parallelism in lines 2-5 establishes that this female desire is part of the natural order. Although she indicates that this desire is "natural," the poet attributes to it a paradoxical value. The subsequent simile likens women who "lie down," as if for sex, to sick sheep that approach wells for a cure (lines 6-9). From the ambiguous syntax of these lines, it is hard to tell whether line 7, "By wells to heal their bodies," modifies "women," "sick sheep," or both. In the latter case, if both women in springtime and sheep that are ill literally lie down by wells for a cure, then the simile leads to the conclusion that the spring season incapacitates women as disease does sheep, and that women are as instinctual as sheep in seeking a cure. Why would women lie down by wells? Molodowsky's choice of the word krenitse ("well, spring"), rather than the common brunem("well") or kval ("spring"), alludes to the biblical passages in which marriages are arranged by wells.3 Furthermore, the image of an opening deep into the earth that

31. In Harkavy, Yidish-english-hebreisherverterbukh,pp. 469, 133, the Hebrew translation of krenitse is maeyon ("spring, fountain, source, well"), and the Hebrew translation of brunem is be-ar ("well, pit"). In the biblical story of Abraham's servant Eliezer, who secures Rebecca as Isaac's bride while watering the camels at the city well (Genesis 24:11-20), two

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S "FROYEN-LIDER"

71

reaches to the source of life suggests a metaphor for a vagina. This metaphor eroticizes the lying down of the women. Yet the eroticism is associated with imagery of animal death-the skull of a horse, the sick sheep-that counteracts the forces of birth and growth. The image of the black faces of the women further develops the comparison to ewes and suggests the distortion of severe illness or devouring passion. A woman aching to bear a child, it seems, lies outside the bounds of nature and health. The poem appears to begin once again in the second half (lines 10-18), by repeating the construction of the initial lines. The imagery of spring is violent. The lightning, conveyed in a metaphor of the ritual slaughtering knives, khalofim, connects the women/sheep figure of the first half of the poem with the earth itself. The adjective shvartse ("black"), which refers both to the faces of the women (line 8) and to the earth (line 12), doubles the metaphor by repetition. The metaphor of the ritual slaughtering knives further intensifies this doubled metaphor. Not only are women like sheep with black faces, and they and the sheep like the black, fertile earth, but the earth split by lightning is like a sheep waiting to be slaughtered by khalofim. At the end of "Froyen-lider IV," the earth was personified as a female, with "her primordial conscience," toward which the speaker gravitated. Now, in "Froyen-lider VII," the earth, figured as a sheep at the slaughter, pivots the reader between women by the wells (lines 6-7), and pregnant women about to deliver in the hospital. The alliteration of shvartse ("black") and shvangere("pregnant") develops the idea of childbirth as healing. The symptoms-those black faces of women sick with childlessness-are transformed alliteratively into the cure itself, from shvartse to shvangere, from illness to pregnancy. Moving from the first to the second half of the poem, across the refrain that recurs in lines 1, 10, 17, the patterns of language convey us from a pastoral, biblical world, variants of maeyon are used, eyn ha-mayim and ha-ayenah (Genesis 24:13, 16). These words stand out from the more frequent use of be-ar in the passage, for the first appears at the moment that Eliezer prays that God will send the appointed woman, and the second at the moment he recognizes her. The Tse'ena Ure'ena acknowledges only the second instance by translating ha-ayenah as kval brunen. Yanov, Tse'ena Ure'ena, pp. 101-2. In his modern Yiddish translation, Yehoash renders the two words as kval vaser and kval. Yehoash, Torah neviim uksuvim,2d ed. (New York: Morgen Zshurnal Oysgabe, 1942), 1:35. Molodowsky's use of krenitse alludes to these moments in the biblical text and economizes on the compound words of both the traditional and the modern Yiddish translations with (what I believe is) a slavicism. Whether and when the word krenitse enters any editions of Taytsh-khumashthat Molodowsky may have known could further illuminate her usage in this poem.

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KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

where women are like animals for the slaughter and wells provide cures, to a modern, urban world, where women give birth in hospitals. If we read the poem as a linear narrative, then the childless women of the first half have become pregnant in the second half of the poem; the women of antiquity have become women of modernity. What is strange about this transition is that the poem provides no men to impregnate the women. The only allusion to sexual union is implied in the lightning/khalofim metaphor, in which sex is relegated to an action of nature beyond human desire or will. The implicit violence in this imagery is ritualized in the Hebrew word khalofim, which, like the Hebraic words in "Froyen-lider I," connotes obedience to Jewish law. In the seventh poem, obedience is explicitly the kosher slaughtering of animals. The act of koshering makes the flesh of the sheep as "pure" or proper as the winelike blood of the old mothers in the first poem. Although it results in pregnancies that connect women with human mortality, that is, with the yet-to-be-born and the dead, such purification has only to do with forces of nature and divinity. It has nothing to do with intimate contact between woman and man, with which the central poems (II-V) of "Froyenlider" dealt. Why is there no male presence in this poem? In Molodowsky's scheme, creativity is woman's work, which connects her with the decreed rituals of slaughter, sacrifice, and procreation. The end of the sixth poem-the fecund matriarch's gesture toward isolated, childless women-prepares for the insistence in the seventh poem on the necessity of pregnancy. Together, the poems exclude the dramatic speaker of "Froyen-lider" for whom conventional female fertility seems impossible. Yet the speaker is engaged in a creative act that requires no man, observing and recording the fertility of other women. She acts in words, which are themselves the very form of life, wittily encoded in the poetic form. By placing the eighteen lines of the poem on page 18 of Kheshvandikenekht, Molodowsky makes a numerical pun on the gimatria of khay (hai), the Hebrew word for "life." The struggle between the inevitable urge to create and the forces against which creativity inevitably must struggle-the stone, the skull-takes place within Molodowsky's poem. The poem itself becomes a metaphor for childbearing, and that childbearing a metaphor for creating in general. This exchange between the labor of womanhood, as decreed by nature and culture, and the labor of composition makes the very writing of "Froyen-lider" a revision of woman's work. In Part VII, where the dramatic "I" is subsumed by a narrative voice distanced from the fertility it reports, the poet is at work, making metaphors, finding "a word for my blood."

KADYA MOLODOWSKY'S

73

"FROYEN-LIDER"

The final poem, "Froyen-lider VIII," returns to the speaker of the first five poems.32 This speaker experiences

insomnia

when she regards the

past-her own days and the sum total of her mother's life.

taE311m1O'K 1?VKf3~lK1

,J~57K~'K~X17

Kt33;fl~Kflb

Y"7 ,J'1

P5" mother's tVMy life comes

'TDD'1t

gKpy~j7' flK

J"'~~~ Kt~ N 9K

J 7'OJN 'lbt~V 'K JD"i57DY"?S t

to me.

'T

t~, ,m~cp~ .J~571

Nights~ when I'm5awakeTj1Di)L~~l

~

K 'tL~; ,J1fl~ J 1?~7'OJK

y ~;'

cmestome awake mohe' lif Nights when I'mMy~~~~N And one by one my past days come To place themselvesbefore my eyes, And her emaciatedhands

32. The allusions of one sequence to another in Kheshvandikenekht reveal how carefully Molodowsky selected the poems and structured the book. Compare, for example, the beginning of "Froyen-lider VIII" with the insomnia of "a woman" in the title poem, "Kheshvandike nekht III," who cannot fall asleep without a child to hold, although she is not a mother.

74

KATHRYN HELLERSTEIN

Wrappedin virtuousnightgownsleeves Are like a God's fearsomescripton white parchment[.] And the words of Hamapilare themselvesangry Like fiery coals extinguishedby her quiet plea And they shrivelher mouth Like a witheredplum.33 And her tears come drop by drop like a meagerdrizzle, And now that I am a woman, And walk clad in brown silk With my head bare, With naked throat; And [now that] my own life's misfortunehas huntedme down, And like a crow Falling upon a chick; Often my room is lit up all night, And I throw my hands to my head And my lips recitea quiet, simple Plea to God. And tears come drop by drop like a meagerdrizzle. As her vision begins (lines 1-4), the speaker confronts her own past, day by day (the phrasing teg maynefargangene draws out the process of confrontation), in opposition to her mother's previous life as a whole. From the previous poems in the sequence, we know that the speaker has chosen to act against the ancient precepts of sexual virtue and piety obeyed by the generations of women in her family. In the eighth poem, the speaker stays awake to encounter the vision of her deceased mother, while earlier, the dreams of the ancestresses had haunted her sleep. In the first poem, the repetition of the word zogn, "to say" (in lines 1, 5, and 9) signaled a dialogue between the dead women and the speaker. There is no dialogue in the last poem between mother and daughter. Like the matriarch Leah in the sixth poem, the mother is a mute presence. The mother's silence, though, speaks. Whereas, Molodowsky rewrote a tkhine of the matriarchs in the sixth 33. The Yiddish lines are grammatically ambiguous-it is unclear whether the words shrivel her mouth (there would be an implied auxiliary verb hobn to complete the past tense of oysgetriknt) or whether her mouth shrivels, intransitively (un dos moyl hot ir oysgetriknt). The first case would be more interesting, for the words would have a direct, clear effect on the flesh that utters them. In either case, though, it seems fair to read the drama as follows in the text.

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poem, in "Froyen-lider VIII" she glosses the Shema. The image of the mother's withered hands wrapped in the tsniesdike (or "virtuous") sleeves of a nightgown (lines 5-6) recalls the generations of women who in the first poem brought their blood in tsnies to the speaker. Unlike the previous usage, tsnies is not simply the abstract quality of sexual modesty or restraint, but a tangible property of the sleeves of a nightgown worn by the mother. By locating virtue in the very garment in which a woman sleeps and (presumably) has sex, Molodowsky makes more vivid and terrible the transgression by the speaker in her own sleepless night. The contrast between mother and daughter grows even stronger in the figure of holy script (line 7), which likens the image of the mother's withered hands in the nightgown sleeves to the letters ofa gotsforkhtike shrift in vayse gvilim. In this simile, the mother's hands correspond to the inscribed letters and the modest nightgown sleeves to the parchment of a holy scroll. Given the dramatic setting of the sleepless daughter's apparition of her deceased mother, these must be the words of the Shema, recited before sleeping, which one might envision written upon the parchment of a Sefer Torah or a mezuzah. The poet has likened the flesh and blood of the mother's hands (in Hebrew, yod), cupped darkly against her nightgown, to the actual letters, the two yuds of the God-fearing abbreviation of the Ineffable Name, that appear twice in the most memorable lines of the Shema. The embodiment of the word of God in the mother's flesh aggrandizes the mother's virtue and makes more anguished the strong voice of the daughter. The tension between the God's awesome Hebrew script and the secular Yiddish poem is brought forth in lines 8-12. Hamapil (Hamapl in Yiddish) is the benediction "who maketh bands of sleep to fall"34 in Kri'at shema 'al hamittah (Krishme, in Yiddish), and is recited before the Shema upon going to bed. In Molodowsky's figure, these words grow angry as they emerge from the mouth of the mother.35Since the text of Hamapl requests a peaceful

34. Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried, Code of Jewish Law: Kitzur Shulhan Arukh.:A Compilation of Jewish Laws and Customs, trans. Hyman E. Goldin, annotated rev. ed. (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1961, 1963), 2:60-62. 35. The following Yiddish translation of this prayer is taken from a Korbn Minkhe, YIVO photocopy: exact source not known: "Borukh. gelibt bistu got unzer got der melekh fun der velt der do makht falin shlof af mayne oygn un dremlung af mayn bremen (veyehi ratson) es zol zayn der vilin fun dir mayn got un got fun mayne elterin zolst mikh makhin leygin mit sholom es zolin mikh nit der shrekin keyn beyze kholomes un shlekhte gidankn dos ikh zol nit zindigin far dir es zol fun mir aruskimen agute zerae nit keyn fakhol khas vesholem. du zolst der laykh-

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sleep and good dreams, asks God to maintain the distinction between the sleep of the night and the sleep of the dead, and praises Him from bringing light to the eyes and to the world, the effect of this anger is ironic. The irony forces a reevaluation of what the prayer asks, for God's answer does not appear to be in keeping with the mother's piety. The irony also pivots the speaker to reconsider the effect of piety upon the mother's body. An ambivalent reciprocity ensues, as the mother's recitation of these words extinguishes them like coals, at the same time as it empowers them to grow angry. Line 8 is very odd in Yiddish, for it animates the words of Hamapl with the reflexive, intransitive verb beyzern zikh. From this animation comes a twofold movement, in which the words counteract the way they are uttered, that enacts the speaker's ambivalence toward the mother, toward prayer, and toward obedience. In the paradoxical metaphor and simile of lines 8-9 the act, the manner, the words, and the spirit of praying contradict one another. The speaker concludes from the resulting tension that devotional words shrivel the flesh of the mouth that utters them. The double force of these words-their inherent anger and destructive recitation--exacts from the mother her youth, like the autumn season that withers the plum (line 11). The autumnal allusion is borne out by the simile likening tears to a meager drizzle (line 12). This figure recalls the rains of the month of Kheshvan, which, in the title sequence, "Kheshvandike nekht," make a woman long for a fertility to correspond to the rainy season, ritualized in the Hebrew calendar. Suggesting both the sorrow in tears and the promise in rain, this simile alludes to the second paragraph of the Shema recited in the morning (and the evening), "vehaya im shamoe." This allusion to the part of the Shema not usually included in the nighttime Krishmehints that morning will follow this night. In these lines, God threatens to withhold the rains.

tin mayne oygn nit eyn shlof fun toyt. (Borukh) gelibt bistu got der vos makht laykhtin tsu gor der velt mit zayn sheynhayt." Note that the Yiddish translation quoted here omits one clause of the Hebrew: ki atah hameyir laishon bat-ayin, "for it is thou who givest light to the apple of the eye." For variant versions of the Hebrew and English translations, see Philip Birnbaum, trans., Ha-siddur ha-shalem (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1985), pp. 777-786; Kriat shema al ha-mitah, in Siddur safat emet im targum English (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., n.d.), p. 108; Siddur saylanot korbn-minkhe.kol hateflot kesedern nusakh ashkenaz, Rov Peninim (Jerusalem: Lewin-Epstein Brothers, 1962), pp. 180-184.

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... and I will give the rain of your land in its season,the formerrainand the latterrain, that thou mayestgatherin thy corn .... Takeheed to yourselves, lest your heartbe deceived,and ye turn aside and serveothergods, and worship them;and the angerof the Lord'swrathbe kindledagainstyou and he shut up the heavens that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit.36

While morning will come for the speaker, there is no hope for her mother. These fearsome words of God have been applied literally to the mother's life. Despite her piety and chastity, her obedience and virtue, even torrential tears have been withheld from her; her life yielded only the withered self. The image of the "lips" of women has recurred significantly throughout the sequence, in relation to the metaphor of words and blood. In all the poems, parts of the female body appear detached from the whole. Here is a list of how these parts are characterized: pure blood, kosher or bee-stung heart, reddish cheeks, white teeth, bound brain, heavy head, knees which drop to the stone doorstep, pale or emaciated hands, standing fingers, thin and dry or prim or parched lips, reflected face, heavy brows, gravitating or aching limbs, closed or tired or weeping eyes, sealed womb, shriveled mouth, naked neck, bare head. This fragmentation of the female body is symbolic of the speaker's own conflict with the biological definition of women's lives. Yet the image of "lips" in particular completes Molodowsky's operating metaphor for poetry of words and blood. In poem III, the fainting speaker has "thin, dry lips." In poem IV, she turns away from her reflection with its "prim lips." In poem VI, solitary women "talk to themselves with parched lips." And in poem VIII, the mother's mouth is shrivelled "like a withered plum." The lips of women in "Froyen-lider" are bloodless and, it would seem, utter unembodied words. Yet these closed, drained lips recall their opposites: lips that kiss and suck, admitting love and nourishment; lips of the mouth that energetically emit words; lips of the vagina that issue forth a baby. This brings us back to the figure in Genesis of the earth's mouth through which the blood of Abel cries out to God, reversing birth. As the mother's constricted prayer withers her lips in "Froyenlider VIII," it echoes the double movement of language in the Genesis passage where the blood fell on the earth, endowing the earth with a mouth, and blood with a voice calling for justice. Molodowsky reverses this image with 36. Siddur safat emet, p. 44.

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bitter irony. In the imagery of the Shema, the pious mother of the poet is figured as the arid earth from which rain has been unjustly withheld. In this figure of the earth, the mother's mouth is bloodless from the words of God's commandments and cannot emit her own voice. In the second half of the poem (lines 13-24), the daughter finds herself unable to fall asleep, although her mother has recited Hamapl. According to the traditional guidelines in the Kitzur Shulhan Arukh, which instruct one not to eat, drink, or speak after saying the benediction Hamapl until falling asleep, the cure for insomnia is to reread "the Shema, the Psalms, and the verses referringto God's mercy, and if necessary read it over and over until one falls asleep."37 The sleepless daughter does not take this advice, but rehearses the differences between herself and her mother. In contrast to her mother's modest and "virtuous nightgown sleeves," the daughter dresses immodestly in brown silk, with her head uncovered and her throat revealed. Instead of reciting the prayers for sleeping, as did her mother, the speaker stays up all night in her lighted room. Although the syntax of lines 18-19 is ambiguous, the simile of the crow falling upon a chick appears to modify line 17, with an extra un ("and") added for emphasis, and characterizes the misfortunes that have hunted down the speaker, now that she is a woman. Despite this ambiguity, the simile emphasizes the predatory force of nature in the daughter's life, which contrasts to the order that the culture of obedience imposed on the mother's life. The passive imagery of the mother's life-in-nature-the withered plum of her lips-contrasts violent but dynamic imagery of the daughter's life. The violence of this figure recalls the earlier figure of lightning as ritual slaughtering knives. That metaphor balanced the forces of nature and ritual in the lives of fecund women, and excluded the protagonist of the sequence. In the animal imagery of the eighth poem, the speaker seems to find an uneasy entrance to the natural order. The daughter is unable to follow up the mother's recitation of Hamapl with the decreed act of sleep, just as, in earlier poems, she could not follow the precepts of the ancestresses to be chaste and patient. Rather than repeating the Shema and reciting psalms "over and over until one falls asleep," in the customary way, the insomniac daughter composes her own words. Yet these words turn the poem back on itself and convey the profoundly un-

37. Kitzur Shulhan Arukh, p. 62.

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resolved ambivalence of the speaker toward the traditions and texts her life would negate. This negation culminates in the image of hands thrown to the head (lines 21-24), which repeats the gesture at the close of "Froyen-lider II" that compared the daughter's rigid fingers on her face to the mother's hands blessing the Sabbath candles. This image further echoes the gesture of Mother Leah, who hid her eyes in her hands at the end of "Froyen-lider VI" (lines 34-35). In "Froyen-lider II," the daughter's "ten numbered sins" were ironically juxtaposed with the mother's piety. Mother Leah's gesture in "Froyen-lider VI" both acknowledged and denied the sorrow of a woman alone. With this gesture, Molodowsky has established a correspondence between the endings of these three poems. In the closing lines of the sequence, this gesture reconciles the speaker's conflicts through a further correspondence. She prays. With the repetition of the word gebet (lines 9, 23) the poet likens the daughter's plea to the mother's, but only to contrast them further. The mother's prayer was angry; the daughter's words neither grow angry nor destroy the fruit of her body. Rather, the daughter's prayer is a quiet, simple prayer, an articulation of the tears that follow, in line 24. Described in the same words as the mother's, the tears of the daughter are generalized and not possessed by the pronouns mayne or ire. Like the mother's tears, they meagerly nurture and console. Although by praying, the speaker submits to God, she does not renounce her chosen disobedience to the ways of her mother and her grandmothers. The first half of Part VIII has shown that there is as meager a comfort from God for the woman who follows the laws of virtue and fears the words of God as there is for the woman who shakes herself free of them. The mother bore the speaker, the speaker "bears" the poems. In these poems, Molodowsky has found "a word for my blood," to fashion a new kind of prayer, a tentative revision of women and poems. AnnenbergResearchInstitute Philadelphia,Pa.

My thanks go to Sara Horowitz, Monique Yaari, and especially to David Stern for their helpful comments. Research for this article was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Travel to Collections Grant, Summer 1985. I presented selections from an earlier draft at the Ninth World Congress for Jewish Studies, in Jerusalem, August 1985.

Warding off Chaos: Repetition and Obsession in the Poetry of Glatshteyn, Halpern, and Manger Author(s): Janet Hadda Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 81-102 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486235 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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WARDING OFF CHAOS: REPETITION AND OBSESSION IN THE POETRY OF GLATSHTEYN, HALPERN, AND MANGER by JANET HADDA

-Umetum gevenungevan/ Mit di eygeneoygn altsgezan. -Dzhin dzhin bum bum bum / Dzhin dzhin bum. -Keyner veyst nit vos ikh zog / Keynerveyst nit vos ikh vil. For as long as I have been acquainted with them, the poems in which the above lines occur have held a peculiar fascination for me. With their rhythmic refrains, Glatshteyn's "Der Rayzeman" ("The Travelman"), Halpern's "Der Gasnpoyker" ("The Street Drummer"), and Manger's "Eynzam" ("Lonely") are lodged in my mind,' cropping up periodically in almostand in the case of "Eynzam," literally-musical form.2 Yet it is only recently 1. Please see Appendix for working translations of the poems in their entirety. The translations are my own. 2. I am referringhere to a famous musical setting of"Eynzam." Incidentally, Dr. Jonathan Boyarin has called my attention to the fact that there is also a musical rendition of "Der Gasnpoyker" which he heard in Paris, but this is not part of my personal experience.

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that I have come to see a special connection between these three diverse works. The present article explores this connection. Specifically, I wish to address the function of repetition and show how a much-used poetic device simultaneously points to a psychological realm otherwise easy to ignore.3 "Der Rayzeman," "Der Gasnpoyker," and "Eynzam" have in common a first-person narrative voice that indicates, in each case, a particular persona: a purported world traveler, a rowdy one-man band, a lonely drinker, respectively. As such, the lines that occur and reoccur throughout are the poetic equivalent of a person's speech and, by extension, suggest the verbalization of repeated thoughts. In psychoanalytic-and, by now, commonparlance, the term "obsessive" is often used to refer to thoughts that occur over and over, seemingly unbidden, as distinct from equivalent behaviors, including speech, that are termed "compulsive." I wish to illustrate poetic repetition as an artistic, controlled evocation of obsessive ideas and concomitant compulsive action. It seems to me that the meaningsof obsessional thoughts and compulsive behavior are not as uniform as has been heretofore understood. Thus, Freud viewed the phenomenon as an indication of ambivalence, a compromise whereby unconscious, murderous, impulses towards the oedipally rivalrous parent arise continuously, only to be undone again. The underlying concept of Freud's metapsychology-although not necessarily of his technical interventions-is that development occurs intrapsychically, that is, within a closed system. While Freud's case studies,

3. For a post-Freudian discussion of repetition that makes use of literary examples as well, see Hans A. Thorner, "On Repetition, Its Relationship to the Depressive Position," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 66 (1985): 231-236. As its title implies, this article is based on the theories of Melanie Klein. I cite it as an example of interest in the problem of repetitive behavior, but I cannot recommend its findings as especially useful. In contrast, see John Hollander, "Breaking into Song," in Lyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 73-89. Hollander presents a lively and lucid commentary on some of the deeper meanings and effects of the poetic refrain. Specifically, he seeks to explore the ways in which refrains serve more than a schematic function. I am in agreement with Hollander's formulation that "Poetic refrain . . . starts out by troping the literalness of the repetition, by raising a central parabolic question for all textual refrain: Does repeating something at intervals make it important, or less so?" (p. 75; emphasis Hollander's). My point in this essay is that the repetitions I discuss make what is said more important, rather than less so, but in a particular way. That is, they signal an underlying malaise without explicitly describing it. As the poem progresses, the repetitions cause the reader to focus on the urgency of the malaise and to fill in the meanings that are implied.

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formal and selective though they may be, indicate his understanding of interpersonal relations as essential influences in the growing child's life, his theoretical stance remained remarkably devoid of such insight.4 Since Freud's initial pioneering contributions, there have, understandably, been refinements and alterations of, as well as disagreements with, his ideas. The most profound has been the move away from the notion that the essential issues in development are relatively impervious to outside influence. The British object relations school, with such notable analysts as Guntrip, Fairbairn and-in a class by himself-the brilliantly sensitive Winnicott, did much to inform the psychoanalytic world that the infant is born into a realm of relationships. As Winnicott put it: "There is no such thing as a baby. .. . if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone."5 Recent work involving infant observation has corroborated these theoretical ideas. Over the last twenty or so years, a new theoretical and technical approach has had a profound influence on psychoanalytic thought. Galvanized by the provocative writings of Heinz Kohut, who coined the term "self-psychology," many clinicians have come to question some of Freud's core precepts. Most profound has been the rejection of classical drive theory in favor of one based on the earliest successes or failures of parent/child interaction. A key contribution of Kohut's theory is his notion of the selfobject, a provider of specific functions for the infant.6 Put simply, the growing child needs to feel both admired and acknowledged as a powerful and grand individual and, simultaneously, needs to know that he/she can feel as one with a calm, strong image of infallibility. These qualities, when suitably provided, lead to healthy self-esteem and the development of goals, values, and ideals. If they are not provided, the result will be a core self that is damaged to varying degrees and in a variety of ways, depending on the nature of the selfobject failure.

4. For a clear presentation of the discrepancies between Freud's metapsychological and technical theories, see George S. Klein, "Freud's Two Theories of Sexuality," in Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials (New York: International Universities Press, 1976), pp. 72-120. 5. D. W. Winnicott, "Further Thoughts on Babies as Persons" (1947), in The Child and the Outside World (London: Tavistock, 1957), p. 137. 6. For a concise outline of Kohut's theoretical framework, see Heinz Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf, "The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment: An Outline," InternationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis 59 (1978): 413-425.

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Kohut postulated that if the child is not responded to adequately by his/her earliest caretakers, one consequence may be an understimulated self, another a fragmenting self. In the first case, symptoms include lack of vitality and a sense of pervasive, empty depression. In the second case, the individual typically suffers from a lack of self-cohesion, a feeling that he/she is somehow less than whole. My own perspective in these pages is strongly influenced by the perspectives of object relations and self-psychology. Freud's view of obsession was, of course, rooted in his ideas of aggressive energy and the pre-eminence of sexual drives. In my clinical practice, I have found that obsessive thoughts serve a strikingly different purpose: they fill an empty place for the understimulated or fragmenting self, where an experience of having been loved and accepted as a unique and valued human being has failed to occur. These thoughts, like the structure-producing refrains of poetry, create a measure of order and stability, simultaneously shielding the thinker from the unbearable lack. The following are but a few examples: Ms. A: "Thinking about buying that land is like a sponge, soaking up all my depression and sadness." Dr. B: "When I feel insecure, I read over my reports again and again to reassure myself." (This comment came shortly after the patient had described an empty space in herself which she longed to fill with the attentions of a lover.) And, the following words of Mr. C, after some working through of his intense involvement with thinking: "I enjoy the experience of having feelings in your presence, but I can't think at the same time. I don't know why I'm crying. It's relief... It's OK to feel awful." In each case, the patients I have quoted used certain ideas as a means of self-soothing and of achieving solace. What knowledge had they been hiding from? Mr. C: "For as long as I can remember, I never wanted anything from my mother"; Dr. B: "I don't remember being taken away from my mother. Nothing good goes unpunished"; and Ms. A: "In order to survive, I had to not exist."7 Put somewhat differently, my patients had spent a lifetime protecting themselves against a perception of inner chaos or lack of self-cohesion. This underlying framework of experience is, as I have already suggested, the result of an early failure to receive crucial affirming responses. That is, the child's natural strivings to be recognized as important and therefore valuable, and, at the same time, to enjoy a bond with a strong parental figure, did 7. In order to ensure confidentiality, I have changed certain identifying details in these vignettes.

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not meet with appropriate acceptance and understanding. In such cases, the child cannot proceed to develop within a context of self-reliance and autonomy, on one hand, and a secure sense of interpersonal connection, on the other. He or she is thus prey to feelings of weakness, worthlessness, emptiness, and isolation. While I am concentrating, in this essay, on obsessive thinking as a manifestation of psychological self-protection, there are other forms such safeguarding may take. Some of these-for instance denial, symptom formation, and the ability to remember unpleasant events without recalling the painful affects associated with them-may, like obsessive thinking itself, occur subtly and without arousing much external attention. On the other hand, a mechanism such as noisy grandiosity is most readily observable in the interactive sphere. Moreover, protective devicestraditionally labeled defenses-are not always detrimental to development. Originally adaptations to aid survival in a dangerous or deprived environment, these mental processes and behaviors may be socially rewarded and hence reinforced. Humor, a means of defusing potentially explosive or uncomfortable moments, is perhaps the most common of these. Yet, in all cases, the unconscious purpose is the same: to prevent the emergence of feelings that might, if exposed, prove to be intolerable. Just as my patients needed to protect themselves from their own deepest knowledge and awareness through obsessive thinking and other means, so, too, do the personae of "Der Rayzeman," "Der Gasnpoyker," and "Eynzam." Of the three, I consider Glatshteyn's "Rayzeman" the most enigmatic,8 since his particular tragedy is the most carefully hidden. It is tempting to view this zany fellow as a jokester, an expression of Glatshteyn's unabashed romance with the Yiddish language. This, I think, while undeniably an element in the poem's success, fails to do justice to its underlying poignancy. Furthermore, it is inadequate to explain the-work's despairing conclusion. I have discussed the peculiar tonal shifts of Glatshteyn's 1943 volume, Gedenklider,in which this poem appears, in my book on Glatshteyn. There, I pointed out that Glatshteyn, sensing the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and yielding to despair in some of his poems, simultaneously sought to maintain

8. "Der Rayzeman," in Gedenklider [Memorial poems], (New York: Farlag yidisher kemfer), 1943), pp. 19-20.

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a position of optimism and cheer. The volume as a whole vacillates between these two poles.9 The poem begins with an introduction to the rayzeman; indeed, it is not the traveler himself who sets in motion the series of repetitions that will follow, but rather a third-person narrator: Gekumentsu forn a rayzerfunvayt, Geven in vine, berline,khine, palestine, Umetumgeven un umetumgevan, Alts gezen un alts gezanDer grayzervayzerrayzeman. A travelercame ridingfrom afar, Been in Vina, Berlina,China, Palestina, Everywherebeen and bawn, Everythingseen and sawn, The wizenedwise old travelman. Already, the hint not to take the rayzemanseriously is evident: khine and palestine, appropriate Yiddish place names, rhyme with vine and berline, which are almost, but not quite, right. Furthermore, the varied forms come first, immediately striking the reader, whose awareness may have already been piqued by the mock daytshmerish'0terms rayzeman and rayzer. The impression that something is awry only grows with the pseudo-German past participles gevan and gezan. In the subsequent five strophes, the rayzeman speaks for himself, as he encounters first a yidl ("a little Jew") and then a daytshl ("a little German"), both of whom ask about his travels. The term daytshl stands out because it is not a familiar term, unlike yidl, which is a commonly used diminutive. Moreover, the connection between yidl and daytshl which is created by the similar form suggests that this daytshl is not, in fact, a true German, but rather an assimilated Jew trying to appear sophisticated. His subsequent 9. Janet Hadda, YankevGlatshteyn (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 62-82. 10. Daytshmerishis defined by Uriel Weinreich as "too much like German (said of Modern German words or phrases sporadically used in Yid[dish] but not accepted by cultivated stylists)," in Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-EnglishDictionary (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968), p. 136. Glatshteyn's skill revolves around his ability to createforms that mimic this pompous and questionable style without actually employing its forms.

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utterances confirm this and, at the same time, undercut the rayzeman's own efforts at making a cosmopolitan impression. With the daytshl, the rayzeman engages in more pseudo-German, mixed with standard German and Yiddish as only Glatshteyn can manage: thus frage rhymes with mage, fargenage, and even aderage. Nonetheless, his responses have a ritualized quality, as he repeats words and entire phrases: Avade, voden?/ Avade, voden/ Alts gezan un alts gezen... ("Of course, what else? / Of course, what else? / Everything sawn and everything seen . . ."); reiterated to both the yidl and the daytshl; geyazdet mit vogn, / Un geyazdet mit ban ("Took a short trip by wagon, / And a short trip by train"), and, as a variation on the narrator's introduction in the first strophe: Umetumgeven ungevan, / Mit di eygene oygn alts gezan ("Everywhere been and bawn, / With my own eyes everything sawn.)" The sixth, penultimate, strophe is important to my interpretation, for it is here that the rayzeman reaches a point of almost manic intensity, displaying his sparkling wares, i.e., his fabulous experiences, at a breathless pace, ending with the refrain, by now familiar: Umetumgeven un gevan, / Mit di eygene oygn alts gezan. This, however, occurs only after he has allowed his cover to slip at the end of the fifth strophe: Aleyn gezen di kupernefroy, / Vi ikh bin an alter goy ("With my own eyes seen that copper lady, / Just as sure as I'm no Jew.") Even as he reaches out and bombards his listeners with tales of fascinating exploits, we know he is lying. It is as if he must resuscitate his flagging sense of self by embroidering his existence with redoubled intensity. It is therefore not much of a surprise to encounter the rayzemandeflated, desperate, and all alone in the final strophe of Glatshteyn's poem. Now his repetitions have a different quality: they describe not his fabricated cosmopolitanism, but rather the poverty of both his internal and external lives: Ale ligns oysgeleygt, / Ale dertseylenishn oysdertseylt, / Ale lender oysgetrakht, / Ale rayzn oysgedakht... ("All my lies laid out, / All my tales told up, / All the countries dreamed up, / All the trips thought up..."). These lines reveal the rayzeman's reality, namely, that his wonderful but pumped-up world is oys, "finished," useless in confronting his true loneliness and isolation. The final three lines of the poem are a bitter variation of his earlier pronouncements: A make gezen un a make gezan / Nisht geven un nisht gevan- / Der grayzer, vayzer rayzeman ("Nothing seen and nothing sawn / Nothing been and nothing bawn- / The wizened wise old travelman").

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The final two strophes of "Der Rayzeman" beautifully exemplify the breakdown of a defensive structure. The rayzeman'sability to impress others with a glamorous and animated picture of his condition depends on the extent to which he can convince himself. By filling his hearers' ears, and his own, with a false perception of achievement and activity, he can drown out the fact that he is actually eyner aleyn ("all alone"). But only temporarily. If the form of the rayzeman's consolidating utterances is repetition, the content is bravado and grandiosity, the purpose a crucially needed selfcreation. This veneer protects the rayzemanagainst an underlying belief that he is actually inadequate, incapable of drawing people to him. The conclusion of "Der Rayzeman" emphasizes the miserable plight of what Winnicott has so aptly termed the false self. In Winnicott's words: "Let us say that in the severe case all that is real and all that matters and all that is personal and original is hidden, and gives no sign of its existence."" Although this self may hide the vulnerable true self successfully, any love or warmth that comes towards the individual who is so defended will never seem authentic. Glatshteyn does not provide reasons for the rayzeman's isolation, his need to be the way he is, and this is neither a poetic nor a psychological failure: all too often, the roots of a human being's sense of aloneness remain shrouded in the past. Yet, whatever its source, the gaping void has been revealed, as has the imperfection of the rayzeman's attempt to patch it over with the companionship of falseness. If Glatshteyn's rayzeman wards off his emptiness with repetitions of a humorous nature, Moyshe Leyb Halpern's gasnpoyker shields himself through bombast and rebellious anger.'2 Although the poem begins with the street drummer's assertion that he is as free as a bird, he rapidly confides that all is not well, even as he denies the impact of his malaise: Bin ikh krank un alt un gro, / Vemen art es-ho-ho-ho! ("If I'm sick and old and grey, / Who cares-ha, ha, ha!"). Hard upon this comes his refrain, introduced as a straightforward business come-on, defiantly obliterating the hint of sorrow.

11. D. W. Winnicott, "Creativity and its Origins," in Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 68. 12. "Der Gasnpoyker," In nyu york (New York: Farlag vinkl, 1919; reissued New York: Farlag matones, 1954), pp. 35-36.

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Fara kuper-groshnbloyz Poyk ikh, az di poyk zol platsn, Un ikh dzhindzhein di tatsn, Un ikh drey zikh rund arumDzhin, dzhin, bum-bum-bum. Dzhin dzhin bum! For a mere penny I drum as if to breakthe drum, And I jingle the cymbals, And I spin myself aroundJingle,jingle, boom-boom-boom. Jinglejingle boom!

Halpern's 1919 volume contains many poems devoted to the plight of the recent immigrant who has landed in New York, although this is by no means his only subject of focus. Here, the reader might begin to believe that what follows will be a diatribe against the evils of a harsh, albeit seductive, economic system. However, by the next strophe, the true cause of the drummer's unhappiness emerges with clarity: he has been abandoned by a woman, whom he identifies as a shlang ("a snake"). Now his repetitive exclamations take on the form of direct response to the pain he is experiencing; the drum he beats to the bursting point is explicitly connected to the straining of his own heart, which is exposed as the reason for his illness: Krenkt dos harts un platst far vey- / Poyk ikh az di poyk zol platsn . . . ("If my heart is sick and bursting, / I drum as if to burst the drum..."). Yet, it is one thing to lose a lover and mourn that loss, and quite another to engage in self-destructive, self-demeaning behavior such as that detailed in the third strophe of "Der Gasnpoyker." Here, the drummer urges his youthful bystanders to hurt and humiliate him-hit me, spit on me, he taunts. He is tsugevoynttsu aldosbeyz ("Used to the worst of everything"). It is tempting, perhaps, to view this display aesthetically, to dismiss the drummer's frantic comments, together with his guzzling, as merely part of his act, and thereby an indication of Halpern's need to discomfit his audience. This perspective, while undoubtedly correct as far as it goes, cannot account for the agony apparent in the drummer's articulations, strangled though they may be. Halpern brilliantly describes a man unable to express the full vehe-

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mence of his anguish. To miss the obvious clues would be to misunderstand the gasnpoyker's soul. In this third strophe, the refrain's function as a means of filling a void is not yet clear. Instead, it operates here as a method-albeit a curious one-of self-regulation. The drummer has been degraded, he has escalated himself into a frenzy: Brent dos blut, un rint der shveys "[If] my blood burns and I drip with sweat"). The refrain, a familiar repetition, works to calm him, to ease his agitation. And, indeed, by the next, final strophe, he is quieter, able in fact to articulate the nature of his situation: he is desolate, and destined to remain so. Ibershtegun veg un land Mit di tseynHak dem shteyn! Hak dem shteyn un blayb aleyn! Over hill and dale with your teethChop the stone! Chop the stone and be alone! These lines are important, for they indicate the reason for the street drummer's maltreatment of himself. Not only is he used to bad things, he expects to be abandoned and rejected. The event of being left by one particular woman only corroborates his general sense of futility and failure. The concluding lines of the poem, although they contain the same refrain, manage to convey a very different feeling. I should add, incidentally, that the gasnpoyker's refrain not only consists of words but describes physical activity. Thus, it is a poetic equivalent of behavior as well as thought. Now the lines and movements are a comfort, a way to cope with his forlorn condition, a substitute for the love he is convinced cannot be his. Hob ikh nit keynrok, keynhemd, Hob ikh nit keyn vayb, keyn kind. Poyk ikh az di poyk zol platsn... If I have no jacket, no shirt If I have no wife, no child. I drum as if to burst the drum...

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91

There is more than one kind of chaos, the term I use here to refer to states of psychological fragmentation or lack of cohesion caused by intense feelings of isolation or rejection. The rayzeman and the gasnpoyker both unfold situations in which they have vainly attempted to foster some sort of contact with others. The gasnpoyker, for all his rage, ultimately cries out that, beneath the facade of anger, he is wretchedly neglected, unloved because unlovable. Yet he succeeds in exposing his vulnerability with force, if obliquely. The rayzeman, in contrast, can refer neither to such specific loss nor to a general deficiency. He remains powerless, unable to disclose his unmet wish for admiration, instead wearing a mask of bonhomie and joie de vivre until it falls off and his true self emerges, frightened, convinced that he has nothing worth offering to others. The rayzemanand the gasnpoyker share an ability to engage others on a limited basis. For as long as their protective efforts work, they venture into the interpersonal world and find themselves rewarded with yearned-for response, even if that means humilation or approval for delivering a pack of lies. The case of Manger's "Eynzam" is different."3Even the title of this poem intimates the divergence: rather than introducing us to the narrator, it indicates his emotional state. This is in accordance with Manger's striking capacity for empathy, for vicarious introspection. Moreover, the narrator himself immediately divulges the cause of his forlorn circumstances: Keyner veyst nit, vos ikh zog, / keyner veyst nit, vos ikh vil-("No-one knows what I say / No-one knows what I want-"). He is not rejected per se, nor is he hiding the essential problem from himself or anyone else. Far from being dissatisfied with the quality of his relationships, he lacks contact completely. The poverty of his existence is quickly apparent, as the isolated man counts his sleeping companions: seven baby mice and an adult mouse (which I have always assumed to be the little ones' mother, for reasons that have to do both with the substance of the poem and, I admit, with convention). These are unsuitable evening companions, but they merit a "good-night" as the narrator leaves, only to be faced with a predicament inherent in his position: Vu zhe geyt men shpet baynakht / Eyninker aleyn? ("Where does one go late at night / All by one's lonesome?"). The use of the diminutive to refer to himself illuminates the narrator's problem. He has to provide any endear-

13. "Eynzam," in Lid un balade (New York: Itsik-manger-komitet, 1952), pp. 183-184.

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ments he will receive; especially as he complains of his aloneness, the fond self-appellation emphasizes the cheerless truth and ameliorates it. At least the mice are flesh and blood. The wanderer's next encounter is with the village inn, which beckons him with the promise of wine and, implicitly, conviviality. His reaction is joyous, his hope palpable. Efnshnelikh uf di tir Un ikh fal arayn:"A gut yontev ale aykh ver ir zolt nit zayn!" I rush to open up the door And I tumble in: "Happyholiday to you, whoeveryou may be!" The holiday spirit is short-lived however, for, as the verb araynfaln allusively warns, the narrator finds his hilarity as appropriate as that of a yovn in suke (to barge in, to be as inappropriate as a Russian soldier in a suke). His arrival is met with dismal nonreaction as he once again experiences the extent to which he doesn't matter. Keynerveystnit, vos ikh zog, Keynerveyst nit vos ikh vilTsvey shikurimmit a flash Shlofn afn dil. No-one knows what I say, No-one knows what I wantTwo drunkardsand a bottle Are sleepingon the floor. Now, through juxtaposition, the narrator opens his perceptual world to full view, whereas until this point the truth has been veiled: so empty is his life of human warmth that he cannot even allow himself to distinguish between a person and a bottle. Neither will notice him, let alone come forward to welcome him. The failure to see living beings as separate from inanimate objects bespeaks a profound disturbance, for if there is no distinction, he himself may not-or might as well not-exist as a breathing, impressionable, entity. In this regard, the narrator's particular repetitions,

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which stress his loneliness and isolation, serve a special function. For, even as they fill his emptiness, they remind him that, in fact, he does exist. Put somewhat differently, in the acknowledgment of pain also lies the assertion of vitality and feeling. It is fitting that this concept should appear in a context of drunkenness and perhaps even alcohol abuse: unfortunately, selfdestructive behavior is sometimes the most potent means of achieving a sense of agency and self-regulation. Despite Manger's undeniable charm and whimsy, I consider "Eynzam," with its unresolved emptiness, to be the grimmest of the poems I have discussed, because the picture of vacant longing remains relentlessly in place. Where the rayzeman and the gasnpoyker reach out to others through joking and anger, respectively, the narrator of "Eynzam" is trapped within himself, ignored, uninvolved, purposeless. I have thought about the fact that all three poems I have discussed contain an element of levity, which interacts almost absurdly with the aspects my argument accentuates. Moreover, the repetitions I have analyzed are, after all, a structural aid to the poems, provided for the purpose of enhancing rhythm, musicality, closure. Each poem fits well into its creator's oeuvre. Glatshteyn's "Rayzeman" is a brilliant example of his play with komponentn-visikeyt(awareness of the different components that have fused to create Yiddish), a surreptitious attack on the barbarous Germans who were bent on destroying his beloved language. Halpern's "Gasnpoyker" combines the poet's famous vulgarity and passion with his equally characteristic undercurrent of confession and tenderness. "Eynzam" epitomizes Manger's talent for evoking entire subtle vistas of implication through the construction of dreamy scenes and the use of simple, almost elementary language. These are important considerations. Yet they are certainly not the only ones. The humor, the very talkiness of "Der Rayzeman," "Der Gasnpoyker," and "Eynzam" is the buzz of thought working hard to be sustaining. But when the buzzing stops, underlying truths, so painful as to be intolerable, are free to emerge. The tension between these two strains of meaning is a reminder that in poetry, as in the human psyche, opposites may both be true. Universityof California Los Angeles, Calif.

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Appendix

The Travelman Yankev Glatshteyn A traveler came riding from afar, Been in Vina, Berlina, China, Palestina, Everywhere been and bawn, Everything seen and sawn, The wizened wise old travelman. A little Jew stops him in the street: -Have you seen the magic barrel Of course, what else? Of course, what else? Everything sawn and everything seen With my own eyes seen that magic barrel Filled with golden apple kvass. The travelman says thus: Took a short trip by wagon, And a short trip by train, Everywhere been and bawn, With my own eyes everything sawn. A little German stops him in the street And says: -Mite I ask you a question? Says the travelman: -Certionly With the greatest pleasurely. So the little German says: -Have you seen the copper lady? The travelman strokes his beard And says with a smile: I'll make a bet. Of course, what else? Of course, what else? Everything sawn and seen.

GLATSHTEYN,

HALPERN,

AND MANGER

With my own eyes seen that copper lady, Just as sure as I'm no Jew. The travelman says thus: Rode on a steed, underground, Been in Boondock, Belorussia, in Prussia, In Hungary, Kire, and Shushn-Habire, Everywhere been and bawn, With my own eyes everything sawn. All alone at the inn, The travelman nurses a glass of wine And thinks: What will tomorrow bring? All my lies laid out, All my tales told up, All the countries dreamed up, All the trips thought up, Nothing seen and nothing sawn Nothing been and nothing bawnThe wizened wise old travelman.

The Street Drummer Moyshe Leyb Halpern The bird sings freely and happily While the king trembles on his throne, Trembling is a waste of time So I sing, like the bird, freely, And breathlessly fast, Like the wind, I dance wantonly, blindly, In and out of every street!If I'm sick and old and grey, Who care-ha, ha, ha! For a mere penny I drum as if to burst the drum,

95

96 and I jingle the cymbals, And I spin myself aroundJingle, Jingle, boom-boom-boom. Jingle jingle boom! Along comes a girl, a witch, And a fire lights up in me, I start to spin more wildly still, And I grit my teeth, And I roar: -Come, my girl. Let's hold hands and let's embrace, It's hotter dancing as a pair. A snake like you Left me not too long ago. If my heart is sick and bursting, I drum as if to burst the drum, And I jingle the cymbals, And I spin myself aroundJingle, jingle, boom-boom-boom. Jingle jingle boom! Children laugh, they're full of cheer, But I don't lose my grip, Move it, kids! Faster-hop! Knock me in the head again. Spit on me once more! In any case When I jump, it's all okay. Used to the worst of everything, I pinch off a bite of bread. And I guzzle from the bottle If my blood burns and I drip with sweatI drum as if to burst the drum, And I jingle the cymbals, And I spin myself aroundJingle, jingle, boom-boom-boom Jingle jingle boom!

JANET HADDA

GLATSHTEYN, HALPERN, AND MANGER

That's how I've pushed through life, Pushed through, bitten through With my head as if through a wall Over hill and dale With your teethChop the stone! Chop the stone and be alone! Dog and hobo, windy rascal. Lost, lost through foreign places! If I have no jacket, no shirt If I have no wife, no child. I drum as if to burst the drum, And I jingle the cymbals, And I spin myself aroundJingle, jingle, boom-boom-boom. Jingle jingle boom!

Lonely Itsik Manger No-one knows what I say No-one knows what I wantSeven baby mice and a grown one Are sleeping on the floor. Seven baby mice and a grown one Seems to me make eightI put on my cap And say: "Good-night." I put on my cap And I let myself out. Where does one go late at night All by one's lonesome? An inn stands in the marketplace, Beckons me: "You dope!

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I have a barrel full of wine, A barrel full of gold." A rush to open up the door And I tumble in: "Happy holiday to you, Whoever you may be!" No-one knows what I say, No-one knows what I wantTwo drunkards and a bottle Are sleeping on the floor. Two drunkards and a bottle Seems to me make three. To be a fourth one in this game Is it worth it? -Not at all. I put on my cap And I let myself out. Where does one go late at night All by one's lonesome?

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Binary Oppositions in the Poetry of Amir Gilboa Author(s): Warren Bargad Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 103-127 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486236 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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BINARY OPPOSITIONS IN THE POETRY OF AMIR GILBOA by WARREN BARGAD

The examination of "binary oppositions" (semantic structures of equivalence or opposition) in poetic texts has proved helpful in decoding messages which seem at first to be difficult to comprehend.' Since the text often creates its own semantic system, which may appear to be "ungrammatical" (i.e., not in consonance with generally accepted extratextual meanings), the reader may profit considerably by decoding the text's system of oppositions and interpreting their semantic value.2 Binary semantic structures are found throughout Amir Gilboa's poetry, from his early works (La'ot ["For the Sign"], 1942) to his last, posthumous collection (Hakol holekh, ["Everything is Going"], 1985). In the earlier 1. See Nomi Tamir-Ghez, "Binary Oppositions and Thematic Decoding in E. E. Cummings and Eudora Welty," PTL 3 (1978): 235-248. For a discussion of "equivalence" and "opposition," see Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (Ann Arbor, 1977), pp. 78-93. 2. On "ungrammaticality" see, for example, Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, 1978), chap. 1 et passim.

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works, dualistic images and themes predominate: darkness and light, curse and blessing, sunrise and evening, pain and pleasure, joy and mourning, death and rebirth. Oxymoron-a kind of microstructure of opposition-is a central rhetorical figure; ironic rhyme and other structural and linguistic features (grammar, syntax, neologisms, and archaisms) are also used effectively in creating semantic oppositions. In the works written after Gilboa learned of the Holocaust and his family's murder, probably late in 1942,3the oppositional structure becomes more complex; the glossary is more neutral and less conforming to extratextual meanings. The poet strives to express the inexpressible: a response to the full knowledge of the Holocaust horror. Here an examination of binary oppositions plays a greater role in clarifying the poetry's often ambiguous, unexpectedly dualistic figures. The later poems, from the mid-sixties to the eighties, rely mainly on both structural and linguistic ambiguities. Here, too, thematic decoding is aided considerably by uncovering the system of binary oppositions operative in these works. An overview of Gilboa's poetry shows abundant evidence of an abiding and intensifying system of binary oppositions. Several characteristics distinguish Gilboa's poetry from that of his older contemporaries. In contrast to Natan Alterman (1910-1970) Gilboa focuses tenaciously on the emotional life of the individual, often himself, not on the creation of surrealistic imagery, folkloristic beings, or animated symbolic objects; his is an intimate, emotive lyricism, not a distanced, symbolistic one. Unlike Avraham Shlonsky (1900-1973)-though indebted to him for his lush depictions of nature and his use of traditional religious languageGilboa avoids playful puns, euphemisms and rhymes, ideological themes, and the bombast of futuristic rhetoric; his is a more serious, internalized tone which reflects poignancy and pain far more than playfulness and verbal virtuosity. In comparison with his younger contemporaries, Gilboa opts mostly for abstract tropes and mythological imagery, not for the concrete images and similes that abound in the writings of Yehuda Amichai (b. 1924). There is also little affinity with the Western (i.e., British and American) style of writ-

3. The first poem Gilboa wrote in direct response to the loss of his family seems to have been "Ani yatom" ("I'm an Orphan"), published in the Jewish Brigade's mimeographed

BINARY OPPOSITIONS IN THE POETRY OF AMIR GILBOA

105

ing seen in the works of the late Dan Pagis (1930-1986) and Natan Zach (b. 1930). These poets respectively concern themselves with poetry either as an embodiment of charm, intellect, and clever perceptiveness, in the case of Pagis, or as a vehicle of dramatic immediacy and ironic, antiromantic import, in the case of Zach. Gilboa is occupied mainly with lyrical, ecstatic, and elegiac voices, with the poet as dreamer and rememberer, with emotional immediacy and unabashed romantic expressivity. His is a poetry of inner feelings, private associations, profuse metaphors, and enduring sorrow and wonderment. These and other distinctive elements of his poetry demonstrate Gilboa's artistic affinity to Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), the leading poet in the Hebrew Renaissance at the turn of the century. Most of all, it is Gilboa's language, diction, and tone which are reminiscent of Bialik's poetry. Through the first half of his career (from the early forties to the early sixties) Gilboa, like Bialik, utilized mainly a vocabulary taken from the biblical books of the prophets, Psalms, Job, the Song of Songs, and from classical rabbinic literature, the siddur and the mahzor. The diction is archaized and heightened, the tone lyrical, frustrated, enthralled, or pained. At the center of the works of both poets is an individual, often a moral voice, manifestly the voice of the persona of the poet himself, speaking from the depths of emotion and sensibility about nature, memories, love, the Jewish fate, the place of the poet, transitions, loneliness, and losses. Like Bialik's, too, Gilboa's poetry is energized by a blend of the mythic and the real, by a predominance of personal associations, and by a dedication to the spirit of natural beauty. Most relevant for this analysis of binary oppositions in Gilboa's works are the contrasts and thematic dissonances found throughout Bialik's poetry. In such works as "Biteshuvati" ("Upon my return"), "Eineha" ("Her eyes"), "Al saf beit hamidrash" ("At the threshold of the study house"), "Zohar" ("Splendor"), "Rak kay shemesh elhad"("Only one ray of sun"), and "Ve'im yish'al hamal'akh" ("Should the angel ask"), Bialik's romanticism, the Sturm und Drang of contrasting motifs and feelings, is quite blatant. Gilboa's works, following in this romantic tradition, are simi-

Hebrew journal Lahayal ("For the Soldier") in Italy, May 7, 1943. The poem was later collected in Sheva reshuyot ("Seven Domains," 1949) under the title "Yetom" ("Orphanhood").

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BARGAD

larly dissonant, replete with the contrasting emotions of love and anger, loss and fulfillment, happiness and sorrow. A significant source of Gilboa's use of binary semantic structures undoubtedly is Bialik's impassioned, dissonant, romantic style of composition. In this discussion I focus on three poems, "Shir kemigdalekh hagavoha" ("A poem like your high tower," 1946); "Uvekhen, tafasti et haparpar" ("And so, I caught the butterfly," 1968); and "Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" ("Between this and that. As on a swing," 1973). These particular poems were selected for reasons of both chronology and representativeness. Each was written at a different juncture in Gilboa's career-the mid-forties, the mid-sixties, and the early seventies-and collected in volumes which reflect different thematics. And yet Gilboa's basic poetics, his view of the world and his idiosyncratic way of expressing that view, remain the same. These poems and their use of binary structures represent not only the particular groups of poems of which they are a part but also the abiding poetic impulse Gilboa demonstrates in his artistic compositional form. This stylistic constant, the oppositional structuring of motifs, images, and feelings, identifies Gilboa as a romantic poet, one who often idealizes or mythologizes or rhapsodizes the world, especially the natural world, and who just as often depicts the inadequacies, agonies, and terrors of the world, especially the human world. "Shir kemigdalekh hagavoha" is the lead poem of "Sti hayagon veerev hasimlia" ("The warp of sorrow and the weft of joy"), a section of the volume Sheva reshuyot ("Seven Domains," 1949), which comprises twelve elegies written after the close of World War II. Much of the emphasis in these poems is on recovery: the poet, crushed by the loss of his loved ones, seeks consolation, a way somehow to keep on, to maintain an emotional equilibrium. The poem, therefore, with its open expression of agonized memory, anger, and call to vengeance, is more representative of the poems written during the war, immediately after Gilboa learned of his family's murder. These works include "Kezimrat ma'asav shel avi" ("Like the melody of my father's doings"), "Zikhron devarim" ("Memory of things"), "Nishmat Yossi" ("The soul of Yossi"), and "Shir holekh-sovev" ("A cyclical poem"), which contain motifs of memory, redolent depictions of family members, childhood scenes, and the shock of disbelief. In addition, "Signonot shonim" ("Different styles") features an anaphoric structure using the word ze ("this") which is parallel to the anaphora used in "Shir kemig-

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dalekh hagavoha." Gilboa's placement of "Shir kemigdalekh hagavoha" in the Sheva reshuyot volume, therefore, shows it to be both a summary of all the pain and loss expressed in poems written during 1943-46 and a lead-in to the poems of psychological and emotional reconciliation of 1947-49.4

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A poem like your high tower filling with sounds of a bell and sending their dimness in the fog upon the earth to cover over the heads with a canopy of sky. A poem like a curtain of dreams, transparent, glass-like, spread muzzles the mouth to let forth the scream with A poem like your I kneaded my fingers face which 10 and is screamed. of the abyss over your the mouth ed fingers 10which fae whihIkead with povemik myanp look srwoenit your against overoeynsaes cauldron A poem a boiling of likewavcrting m th treads thawr likete andoe gl-inte andyour the eyels. awareness of the terror which behind your back is sighed. and like the weavings of the threads of my eyes that were interwoven with A poemnd likemy cold and tired reckoning afterwardas you stood the tongues Likeyou that their wordhin the dross thestammered ac of a fire conspirand tr owi were toge ing destruction to beginning. four eye. s 15 one opposite three nera ndthe ugly one oand the readere (All the girls were born to give birth-w 20 the one of the gentle eye and the one with the belted waist. My beloved, I envy you!) This is a poem of the rain on the tin roofs

110

WARRENBARGAD (the sweet excitement of the child). 25 Its drizzle in the open field (sucking the breasts of the world). This is a poem of the embracer of the mossy trunk of a tree in a dense forest like the closing of the hands on the sculptured stomach 30 of the one maiden (in her season!) in the world. Now we knew all the floods of visions sparkling in lusts upon fingernails. 35 And before fear came we loved to tremble like the trembling of Death for its life. And [with] drops of gold we decorated the sky so they'd be high unto death. This is a poem on nights high unto death 40 and at dawn a stillborn [child] screams on earth. (No matter! Another day and he'll roar like a lion toward the rusting of heaven, "barren," "barren" he'll revile in his lie the name of his creating mother.) This is a poem for which all introductions have been prepared, deaths at the terrors of the roads. 45 And leavings without explanation for chaos to dance in a chorus of weepers with the hope that merry musicians soon will come. This is a poem of shepherds who soon will come 50 to the pen to gather and to count the sheep. And a pipe that's been cracked will yet gather its tunes from the bleating of memories of the sheep of gold of blood that was spilled in the fields 55 between the green and the moss and life which will arise and come like the light in the fields.

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Thisis a poemof all the lies thatwe wantedto hear of a full belly and a key in one's pocket. 60 This is a poem of all the sorrowsby a fireplacewhich we desired and our child laughingto his angels from the cradle and the shutterclosed. Butthere'sa God of deed-scorner andcruel!He showed us the lies alive 65 and imaginationturnedto truth and everythingwas sound and firm and strange and terrible with the dead lie at the openingsof the eyelid.5

"Shir kemigdalekh hagavoha" was probably written while Gilboa was still in Europe, after having served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army since 1942. It embodies one of his most poignant and volatile responses to the Holocaust, in which he lost his entire family, his parents, two brothers, and four sisters. The poem is structured on a varying sequence of static and dynamic elements. The static elements consist of a list of definitions which denote-or attempt to denote-the poem's parameters: its genre, contents, motivation, and other aspects of its sources or aims of expressiveness. (The dynamic or more narrative elements are mentioned later in this discussion.) At the outset these definitions are given in the form of similes, as if the speaker is groping toward a cogent delineation of the poem being created. Lines 1-3 seem to refer to an idyllic place, a town perhaps, with a tower whose ringing but muffled bells "cover over heads with a canopy of sky." Kemigdalekh ("like your tower") and hupa shel shamayim ("a canopy of 5. Although written in 1946, as annotated by Gilboa, the poem's publication appears to have been put off more than two years. However, the original publication is unclear. The Genazim Literary Archives' index of Gilboa's works in Tel Aviv shows a publication entitled "Petila lishti hayagon ve'erev hasimla," Al hamishmar, December 17, 1948. "Shir kemigdalekh hagavoha" was first collected in Sheva reshuyotand does appear as the opening poem to the section "Shti hayagon ve'erev hasimhla,"but I have not been able to verify that this poem is indeed the petitha(opening poem) published in Al Hamishmar. The translations herein are done purposely in a rather literal style, so that the reader might refer more easily to the Hebrew and English texts.

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sky") evoke a Song-of-Songs, romantic, pastoral sort of situation; the tone is one of love, quietude, security, with the place personified as a beloved, female auditor. In lines 4-5 the next definition seems to continue the evocative, sentimental tone, as well as the theme of muffledness or dimness: "A poem like a curtain [or membrane] of dreams, transparent, glass-like, spread over eyelids and eyes." The atmosphere of dreaminess or seeing through a curtain adds a nostalgic note of looking backward, remembering the hometown, envisioning it dimly. The poem is denoted here as the instrument of this act of translucent dream-memory. The images are dualistic to a degree: the tower is filled with the ringing of bells, but the canopy created by their ringing consists of a muffledness or darkness (im'um) and fog (arafel). The dream-curtain covers the lids and eyes, yet it is transparent and allows the speaker to see. The dualism strikes the reader with full force in line 6: the curtain not only covers and yet allows for sight, it also "muzzles the mouth to bring forth the scream that's screamed over the mouth of the abyss." The idyll, certainly, is destroyed; the memory-scene turns to abject terror. The reversal is marked by the blatantly ironic juxtaposition of uvolem et hape ("and muzzles the mouth") and lemalet haze'aka ("to let forth the scream"). The immediate effect of this radically dualistic-and impossible-act of a closedmouth scream highlights the speaker's agony at the awareness of the magnitude of the Holocaust horror. The dualism or irony of this image effects at least three reading strategies. First, it forces us to begin to read the poem backwards6and to confront the parallelism in lines 2-3 and 6. The rereading may lead us to perceive the bell tower's "darkness" and the act of covering as less-than-security-or sentimentality-shaping acts. The ringing of bells may even call to mind other familiar poems ("Pa'amonim" ["Bells"] by Saul Tchernichovsky, for example) which link the ringing of bells in church towers with anti-Jewish violence. Second, this initial instance of ironic dualism, the closed-mouth scream, may serve as an imagistic anchor, an abiding reference point, or "matrix,"7

6. The concept seems to have originated with Riffaterre. See his essay, "Stylistic Context," in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel L. Levin (Boston, 1967), pp. 431--444. See also Menakhem Perry, Hamivne hasemanti shel shirei Bialik (Tel Aviv, 1977), pp. 42-51. 7. The term is Riffaterre's. See Semiotics of Poetry.

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continually brought to mind as the reader moves through the poem and discovers situations, images, or tropes which are similarly dualistic and blatantly self-contradictory. Such would be the case in lines 46-47 with the juxtaposed images mikhelet bokhim ("a chorus of weepers") and nognim alizim ("merry musicians"); in lines 37-38 with the apparently paradoxical combination of innocence and accompanying ominousness of unetifot shel zahav anadnulashamayim ("and [with] drops of gold we decorated the sky") followed by sheyihyu gevohim ad mavet ("so they'd be high unto death"); in lines 23-25 with the nostalgic images of "the rain on the tin roofs" and "its drizzle in the open field," which are counterposed with mabulei mar'ot ("floods of visions") in line 33. The contradictoriness persists, too, in other mixed images, such as lines 53-54: the "gold of blood that was spilled in the fields"; line 60: "all the sorrows by a fireplace which we desired"; and line 61: "our child laughing to his angels from the cradle," an image included, ironically, within the framework of harsh truths, stillborn children, barren women, and "deaths at the terrors of the roads." Although these reading options are valid and necessary, a third reading strategy-that of tracing and analyzing the binary oppositions in the poem-is more cogent in helping the reader perceive the work's semantic apparatus. Indeed, the initial contradictory image, uvolem et hape lemalet haze'aka ("and muzzles the mouth to let forth the scream," line 6) leads to the discovery in this poem of an entire structure of binary oppositions. In the repeated listing of poem definitions, for example, shir kedok balomot shakuf ("a poem like a curtain of dreams, transparent," line 4), an image, though fleeting, of somnolent quietude, is counterposed with shir kayora kollha("a poem like a boiling cauldron," line 8), a vision of dire prospects; and shir kefanayikh ("a poem like your face," line 10), which evokes a loving scene, is contrasted by kaleshonot she'il'u devaram besigei esh zomemet kilayon ("like the tongues that stammered their word in the dross of a fire conspiring destruction," line 12), a scene of fiery destructiveness. The various groupings of poem definitions themselves are presented in a structure of opposition: shir kemigalekh ("a poem like your tower"), shir kefanayikh ("a poem like your face") and ukherikmotsivei einay ("and like the woven threads of my eyes")-all love similes-are opposed by shir kayora kolha ("a poem like a boiling cauldron") and shir kaleshonot ("a poem like the tongues")-similes of destruction. In a syntactic vein, all the elliptical phrases in the first two stanzas beginning with the word shir ("a poem") are contrasted with phrases entered later

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in the poem that begin with the words ZE shir ("this is a poem"): ZE shir hageshem ("this is a poem of the rain," line 23), ZE shir ("this is a ha.ovek is a poem on poem of the embracer," line 27), ZE shir beleilot gevohim("this nights high," line 39), and ZE shir shekol hakdamot lo nakhonu ("this is a poem for which all introductions have been prepared," line 43). The change itself, from shir to ZE shir (from "a poem" to "this is a poem"), is dualistic; it either denotes metaphors which are more specifically romantic (such as "This is a poem of the rain on the tin roofs," and the ecstatic "This is a poem of the embracer of the mossy trunk of a tree in a dense forest") or evokes their more specifically dire contrasts: "This is a poem on nights high unto death," and "This is a poem for which all introductions have been prepared." In these contrasting ze ("this is") definitions, their specificity represents the equivalence factor of the metaphors, while their semantic content reflects their opposition. The list nears its end in the third- and second-last stanzas with the ironically rhymed and diametrically opposed final attempts at definition in lines 49 and 58: ze shir haro'im ("this is a poem of the shepherds") and ze shir kol hashekarim ("this is a poem of all the lies"), though it is arguable that the shepherds' role in the gathering and counting of the sheep is in itself a dualistic image of end-of-day security and of end-of-life divine severity.8 At the center of the poem lies the point of non-definition, the point where metaphorical definitions cease, for the moment, where the speaker interjects his explicit response to all these possible responses: Ata yada'nu, "Now we knew all the floods of visions sparkling in lusts upon fingernails," line 33. Just what is now known is not entirely clear. What is clear is that structurally this stanza divides the poem into two nearly equal parts. Semantically, too, the stanza, laden with a purposeful, multilayered ambiguity of images, metaphors, and tenses, dramatizes the poem's sustained structure of binary oppositions. In lines 33-36, the sparkling "visions" that come to mind are qualified by mabulei, uncontrollable "floods" of these visions; and the "lusts upon fingernails," which, after all, may be a memory of passionate loving-a theme continued by ahavnulir'od ("we loved to tremble") in the following line-are qualified by the purposefully ironic, Alterman-like 8. The motif itself is ironic, in that it is reminiscent of the famous High Holy Day liturgical poem "Unetane tokef," in which God counts each individual for judgment as a shepherd counts the sheep in his flock.

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simile kir'od lehayav hamavet("like the trembling of Death for its life"). The image leaves the reader with a fearsome shiver, not a passionate love tremble. The last two lines in the stanza (lines 37-38) seem to describe a childlike, innocent act of decorating the sky with netifot shel zahav, "drops of gold," play-stars, perhaps, which make the sky look pretty and "high." But the metaphor gevohim ad mavet ("high unto death") destroys the innocence and turns the playfulness into a horrible, gothic nightmare. The death image returns the poem to its primary task of seeking self-definition, of searching for purpose and response in the inner and outer worlds, both of which have gone awry. To return to the poem's structure and to the notion of static and dynamic elements, this central stanza (ata yada'nu, "now we knew") is paired with the poem's closing stanza (akh yesh Eloha shel ma'as, "but there's a God of deed," line 63). Both do not begin with an attempt at definition, but evince directly the speaker's voice; both depict the speaker's feelings of loss, anger, terror, and betrayal. Instead of the metaphorical expressions "a poem like" or "this is a poem of," which aim blindly at defining the poem, these stanzas are metonymic passages which describe what the speaker's world feels like after the Holocaust. Another significant binary opposition in the poem, therefore, is this interplay between metaphoric and metonymic passages, between passages of definition and the more narrative passages of the poem. Binary oppositions pervade the poem at all levels of semantic activity: in similarly structured verb phrases: lirkod bemikhelet bokhim ("to dance in a chorus of weepers," line 46) vs. lifkod et hatson ("to count the sheep," line 50); in counterposed construct phrases (featuring an inverted alliteration which accentuates the contrast between the two images): hakarat ha'eima ("awareness of the terror," line 9) vs. rakat ha'ayin ("the one of the gentle eye," line 20); shedei ha'olam ("the breasts of the world," line 26) vs. eimei haderakhim ("the terrors of the roads," line 44); in phrases with one common part: hupa shel shamayim ("a canopy of sky," line 3) vs. baludat shamayim ("the rusting of heaven," line 41), arafel al pnei erets ("fog upon the earth," line 2) vs. nefel al arets ("a stillborn [child] on the earth," line 40). Individual word groupings are also counterposed: zikhronot, rikmot, ne'arot, halomot ("memories," "weavings," "girls," "dreams") vs. ta'avot, mitit, yetsi'ot, ra'ot ("lusts," "deaths," "leavings," "sorrows"). The same may be seen in contrastingthematic motifs: uvolem et hape ("and muzzles the

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mouth," line 6) vs. hu yish'ag ke'arye ("he will roar like a lion," line 41); bitnah hamegulaf shel ha'alma ("the sculptured stomach of the maiden," lines 29-30) vs. keres mele'a ("a full belly," line 59); nakhon veyatsiv("sound and firm," line 66) vs. muzar ve'ayom ("strange and terrible," lines 66-67); tsore'ah nefel ("a stillborn [child] screams," line 40) vs. veyaldenu tsobek ("and our child laughing," line 61); kilayon ("destruction") vs. reshit ("beginning," lines 12-13); dimyon ("imagination") vs. emet ("truth," line 65). As is usually the case in works in which binary oppositions play a significant role, there are several words or images that have a dual semantic function; that is, they embody both meanings of the oppositional structure. For example, sade or sadot ("field," "fields") is the setting of both a soft, gentle rainfall and a stream of blood; einayim (or shemurot, risim, or sivim)"eyes" (or "eyebrows," "eyelids," or "eyelashes")-are the instruments of both unmitigated pleasure and ultimate pain; yeled (or yonek or nefel)"child" (or "infant" or "stillborn")-is the symbol both of innocence and new life, and of betrayal and death; shekarim ("lies") connotes both a blissful state of prior innocence and a devastating reversal of God's trust. And shir ("poem") itself, perhaps the most semantically laden word in the poem, reflects at once the sweet vision of the past and the terrible truth of the present. Shir embodies both a fervid, pathetic celebration of memory, and a bitter, unappeasable exclamation of agony and loss. The larger images and themes in "Shir kemigdalekh hagavoha" loom in their oppositionism. The newborn vs. the stillborn, the young pregnant woman vs. the barren mother, lies vs. the truth, innocence (of children or lovers) vs. betrayal (most disturbingly, by God). In sum, love and death are the two central categories of opposition into which all other aspects of opposition in the poem may be placed: love, with all its ramifications of birth and life, and death, with all the loving and life it precludes. The horrible truth of Holocaust death brings to the poem its counterposed memories of the persons and things most beloved. All the poem's images, tropes, and structures fall into this subsuming love-death dichotomy.

As noted at the outset of this discussion, the structure of binary oppositions is evident as well in Gilboa's later collections. This is especially true of the volumes Ratsiti likhtov siftei yeshenim ("I wanted to write the lips of

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sleepers," 1968) and Ayala eshlah otakh ("Gazelle I'll send you," 1973). In these collections the general style is manifestly different from the poetry in Kehulim va'adumim ("Blues and Reds," 1963), Gilboa's major volume of collected works of the 1942-63 period, though obvious changes had occurred in "Shelosha she'arim ("Three recurring gates [or .hozrim" of that collection. chapters],") the later and last section The basic alteration in these later collections is one of structure. In Ratsiti likhtov siftei yeshenim, the poems take the shape of introspective pens6es; they ponder things beyond human control: life's swift passing, the impersonality of time, the dispensability of poetry, the poet's social and artistic isolation. At the center of these poems is the dream, that ironic moment of insight which cannot be relived or adequately transmitted once the dreamer awakens. The poet himself is the dreamer, the one asleep; he is caught in thought-limbo between knowing and fear, insight and helplessness, affirmation and negation. Many poems have no firm ending; verses are constituted of intermingled phrases that flow into one another without any clarifying punctuation. In Ayala eshlah otakh the structural changes persist: unpunctuated verse, ambiguous phrasing, a measured, pensive voice. Despite these shifts in poetic expression, Gilboa's works still reflect the structure of binary oppositions which pervades the earlier works of the forties and fifties.9 Two poems, "Uvekhen, tafasti et haparpar" ("And so, I caught the butterfly") and "Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" ("Between this and that. As on a swing"), both of which employ the image of the butterfly, elicit a strong sense of dualism and show clearly Gilboa's continued predilection for binary oppositions. The first poem, the more playful of the two-at least at its outsetcounterposes a dualistic situation against a ghostly, tertiary presence; this presence, in turn, stands in opposition to the duality of the butterfly and its would-be captor, the poem's speaker. The second work, more serious, even wearisome in tone, posits an existential dualism which depends for its forcefulness on the close repetition of binary oppositions.

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9. In his review of Ratsiti likhtov siftei yeshenim, Boaz Arpali notes that the volume is filled with "word combinations, phrases, sentences, lines and topics which contradict one another, balance one another, nullify one another, or evade one another." See "Ledovev siftei yeshenim," Davar, December 24, 1971.

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from every side at once with a quicknessalways burningand creating. I don'tknowwhatnameto call him.'0 The poem's opening lines (1-3) describe the experience of catching a butterfly. In the opening sentence, uvekhen, tafasti et haparpar ("and so, I caught the butterfly"), the voice sounds victorious but understated, certainly less than euphoric; the sentence is short and nonexclamatory. The introductory word, uvekhen("and so"), evokes a dramatic sense of being in the middle or at the end-but not at the beginning-of a narrative. In the same vein, the "and so" beginning also reflects an ambiguous reaction to the feat on the part of the speaker: he seems more surprised or ambivalent than triumphant. The ambiguity is confirmed by the sentence that follows, shelerega nishtateti ("for a moment I got silly"), which emphasizes the impromptu nature of the catch: the speaker himself notes, apologetically, the silliness of the act. But then, as the captor begins to describe the catch and his response to it, the butterfly apparently escapes and flies off, despite the catcher's attempt to prevent it from doing so. The reader is confronted with a "live" situation, featuring a caught-but-not-quite-caught butterfly and a speakercatcher who has spoken too soon. The situation itself is thus dualistic. It is somewhat lamely explained by the speaker-catcher in a pair of oppositional sentences in line 4: "I saw the butterfly. Perhaps the butterfly saw me." The battlelines are drawn; the duality of hunter and hunted is reflected in their respective sights, in their mutual awareness of the fray. In line 5, however, a third, rather ambiguous entity joins the scene. This ghostly figure, unseen by both hunter and butterfly, haunts the speaker throughout the poem. Its presence creates less a triangle of forces than a disruptive duality, a force of opposition as against the relatively harmonious unity, as it develops, between the hunter and the butterfly. In his confrontation with the butterfly the speaker knows exactly what he is dealing with: a

10. "Uvekhen, tafasti et haparpar" is one of a group of four poems which appeared as a prepublication selection from Ratsiti likhtov siftei yeshenim in Al Hamishmar, May 5, 1968. In the Ratsiti volume it appears on p. 89.

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butterfly. In complete, simple, paired declarative sentences (lines 6-7), he names it precisely: parpar ("butterfly"); and he wonders, in proper binary fashion, whether the butterfly has a name for him as well. In contrast, both the prior and the following sentences regarding the "something" or "someone" (lines 5 and 8) are elliptical, emphasizing both the confusion on the part of the speaker and the formation of a second binary opposition: the catcher-and-butterfly vis-a-vis the spooky figure, "which both of us do not contain." The syntactic differentiation in itself creates an added dimension of opposition. The remainder of the poem features a number of overlapping images in the catcher-butterfly-specter groupings. In line 9, the established oppositional pattern is continued: the butterfly is "slippery" (i.e., evasive), but the catcher is "quicker." In line 10, the adjective zariz ("quick") is used for the unseen specter, who is "immeasurably quicker than both of us," says the speaker. The overlapping use ofzariz creates a number of different configurations. On the one hand, the catcher-and-specter are now united in quickness vis-a-vis the poor butterfly; the reader may well assume that the butterfly will not have to fend off two prospective hunters, one even faster and therefore more threatening than the other. On the other hand, the catcher-and-butterfly are still united by the specter's surpassing both of them in quickness. Indeed, in line 10 the catcher seems to convey a certain tone of fearfulness; namely, that the unknown, lurking spirit, who is "immeasurably quicker than both of us," may be hunting both of them. The dual ambiguity fortifies the general oppositional structure to this point in the poem. Another elliptical sentence, line 11, replete with repetitions, alliterations, and binary divisions (rifruf/rifruf perai!/perah), returns the reader to the poem's initial-and continual-situation. The hunter, in line 11, is apparently successful in his capture of the butterfly, probably because he has struck with his hand precisely at the halfway point (mahatsit, "middle" or "center," line 12) of the butterfly's fluttering (rifruj)-yet another image of evenly divisible duality. But there lingers still a feeling of inadequate quickness, in comparison with "the one quicker than both of us" (line 13). The butterfly's capture has not succeeded in warding off this stronger, foreboding presence. The catcher and his captive butterfly are now united, figuratively, in the hands of the unknown specter. By repeating line 4 verbatim, line 14 ironically rearrangesthe hunter-vs.hunted dichotomy; and line 15 realigns the binary opposition even further:it

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strikes the speaker that all along (lifnei khen, "before") both catcher and butterfly have been observed-literally, "hunted" (tsada)-by the eye of the spectral observer. In lines 16-18, the only place in the poem which features three consecutive verses comprising one sentence, the tone grows more serious. The casual, playful game of butterfly hunting is not so innocent or "silly" as it seems. The specter-observer-hunter is felt all about; his gaze, inescapable, comes across "with a quickness always burning and creating"-quite a change from line 13, where the quickness of the specter merely stands in opposition to the relative slowness of the catcher and butterfly. The coda line, "I do know what name to call him," not only deepens the mystery of this pervasive spirit, it also counterposes the process of naming (or possible naming) in lines 6-7 with the impossibility of naming the specter. Naming and non-naming, hunter(s) and hunted, seeing and not seeing, seen and unseen, catching and not catching, captured and uncaptured, quick and slow, life and death-these are the thematic dichotomies which reflect the pervasiveness of binary oppositions in the poem. The parallels and differences in syntax, structure, and semantic repetitions and transitions reinforce these thematic oppositions. Of course, one could venture an interpretation of the mystery figure: it is God, perhaps, the nameless or unnamed One (as in the Burning Bush scene, Exodus 3:13-14); the unseen One who constantly watches us in all our frivolity; whose presence is always felt; who constantly invades our thoughts; who has the power of destroying ("burning") and creating; who quickly, in the wink of an eye, can bring to life and cause to die; who is much quicker than a would-be butterflycatcher or a butterfly's escape. The thin line between creation and destruction, life and death, hunter and hunted, freedom and escape, frivolity and significance, is the central subject of"Uvekhen, tafasti et haparpar." The dramatized situation, with its inner, active voice, continually projects a back-and-forth pattern which is fraught with binary oppositions in action, personae, theme, syntax, and structure. The dramatic climax-the turn at the end of the poem from the pairing of butterfly hunter and hunted butterfly to the mystery of the unnamed specter-leaves the reader with an added sense of opposition: the shift from the trivial and playful to the serious and spiritual. Much like those of "Shir kemigdalekh hagavoha," the closing lines also signal a shift from the metaphoric-the triangle of central images-to the metonymic: Gilboa ends the poem with a dualistic vision of the fragility of life, of life as

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an existence controlled by some ineffable force, which has the power, in a flash, to give life and to take it away. To surrender ultimately to this controlling force is the common fate of both butterfly and hunter. Though written in the late sixties, the poem, with its multifaceted binary system of expression, reverberates with echoes of Gilboa's earlier works of the forties. The way the poems are syntactically structured and the modes of experience rendered have changed radically in these twenty years; but, as this synchronic, semantic view demonstrates, Gilboa's poetics, his essential style-especially the evocation of oppositional patterns-still abides.

TTI

IT--

~" --*"

V I

'

5

Between this and that. As in a swing. When there's no longer either strength or any interest to continue to swing. It's also possible still even to fall. To the ground.

But out of this great weakness, 5 but out of this lack of interest, still the reason, like a limb that lives from the strength of its strength,

exists strong as a sea of boiling lime ready to burn and to be burned. To destroy and to cease [be destroyed]. And this, in fact, is [what] the butterfly achieves in the daylong portion of its life 10 it sucks and is sucked till the end."

11. Original publication: Molad 28 nos., 25-26 (August-September 1972). In the Ayala volume it appears on p. 25.

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The Ayala eshlah otakh volume, in which "Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" is included, consists of poems written in the late sixties and early seventies, before the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October, 1973. Some of the poems in this volume reflect aspects of the poet's response to the Six-Day War of 1967 and to the "War of Attrition" which followed. "Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" appears to have a philosophical, existential import, and yet a worldly, political interpretation seems plausible as well. The main theme of this poem is dualism per se: an existential feeling of being between things, an ambivalence toward life, toward moving through it with a humdrum regularity. The speaker is life-weary and weakened; he feels as if he is swinging in a swing, but has neither the strength nor the interest to continue swinging. In line 3, the voice points out a looming possibility: he may fall to earth, probably to die. The tone is apprehensive: the speaker's mouth is full of adverbs (efshar, od, akh), full of the fear of imminent demise. The elliptical, one-word sentence la'arets ("to earth") ominously stresses the inevitability and finality of the fall. It is apparent, suddenly, that death, the abrupt end of the ride, is uncontrollable, unpredictable, deadly. From the very beginning of the poem, therefore, there is a doubling of ambivalence: toward life as an unwanted existence and, in the typical formula of a dichotomous existential dilemma, toward death as an unwilled event. In the central section (lines 4-7) of the poem, however, there appears to be an abiding passion to persevere in living. Out of the speaker's very weakness and indifference there arises a "strong reason" (hata'am . . .harif) to continue one's life. This motivation is as "strong as a sea of boiling lime [or mortar]"; it lives on "like a limb that lives from the strength of its strength." The context seems negative: there is no interest or strength to go on; yet the will-perhaps mainly a physiological persistence-still exists, running on its own power. This will is a force which in and of itself, outside the actual human will, has the power of life and death: "to burn and to be burned. To destroy and to cease." From a different perspective, one might conclude that the simile "as a sea of boiling lime" connotes a negative image, that this kind of recalcitrant, physical persistence represents an unhappy, depressing situation. The existential dilemma possibly is exacerbated by the absolute will of the body to function even when the individual will has stopped functioning. To use a contemporary social and moral parallel: much like a terminally ill patient who wishes to be rid of the suffering through euthanasia, the will to die is

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thwarted by others who point to the persistent heartbeat or still active brain waves. The patient-existentialist in "Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" is indeed in limbo, hovering between a pervasive feeling of discouragement toward life and an impervious inability to abandon it. What complicates the revolving and overlapping dualisms in this poem is the highly ambiguous and allusive nature of the vocabulary used in the poem's middle section. Gilboa is playing on words here: Harif translated here as "strong," also means hot, bitter, or sharp, that is, spicy to the taste. The word ta'am in line 6, manifestly connoting reason or motivation, has as its first meaning "taste." Ta'am therefore, may seem a spicy-hot or .arifhakai in line 6 refers unambiguously to bitter taste. Moreover, the term ever the rabbinic prohibition to eat meat which has been cut from a live animal, or, in the rabbinic interpretation of Leviticus 17:10-14, to eat uncooked or blood-soaked meat.'2 Therefore, ta'am, in this context, could mean actual "taste"; and the phrase hata'am ... .arif might connote the "bitter taste" felt by the speaker at this point in life. The "living limb," by way of its reference to a food and ritual taboo, makes more explicit and unnerving the speaker's disgust with the body's recalcitrance in the face of the mind or feeling.'3 The poem's final image, that of the butterfly-we recognize it from "Uvekhen, tafasti et haparpar"-is, in this context of imposed duality, an image indeed apropos. Following the erroneous but accepted notion that butterflies live only for a day, Gilboa, in the closing lines of the poem, uses the figure of the butterfly to resolve the dilemma. Like the "sea of boiling lime," which has within it the forces of both destruction and selfdestruction, and like the weary person who feels suspended in the limbo of a morbid life, the butterfly exists in a wholly dualistic condition. However, unlike these parallel images, the butterfly "attains" this condition naturally: As it "sucks" the nectar of the flowers upon which it alights, the butterfly, with its limited life span, is at once "sucked till the end." At least two interpretations of the poem seem possible. On the one hand, it may be that the butterfly indeed is a symbol of an existential "achieve12. The rabbinic discussion is found in Pesahim 22b. 13. In the talmudic literature, sid rote'ab (boiling lime or mortar) is also associated with food taboos. In the Yerushalmi(Shabbat 3:3) the rabbis allowed the rolling of a raw egg on a roof of hot mortar on the Sabbath (to warm it before eating) but not the rolling of an egg on hot dirt. The same discussion is recorded in the Tosefta 2:22. (The Babylonian Talmud [Shabbat 39a] uses the phrase gag rote'ah, "a boiling roof.")

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ment": It lives fully and dies fully within one and the same act. This rapid but complete life-death experience happens naturally and simultaneously, without the sense of suspension or dilemma, which is posed by the conscious dissonance between feeling and physical being. The butterfly, therefore, has attained a kind of nirvana, a state of being-dying which may be a consummate wish on the part of this poetic speaker. On the other hand, the butterfly may be a symbol of life itself as a simultaneous state of living-dying. As one lives, in other words, the closer one moves toward death. Life, in this sense-like the butterfly's day-is a combination of these two opposite forces. The possibility of a third interpretation persists: "Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" may have a political or moral message, embodying Gilboa's response to the constant cycle of war in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The poet has composed such "realistic" poems before; for example, "Malkhut demama" ("Kingdom of silence," Ha'aretz, April 3, 1953) was written in response to the first large-scale atomic bomb testing in November, 1952.'4 Another such example is the title poem of the Ayala otakh collection, which has the speaker guiltily sending off the lovely eshla, antelope-a symbol of the beloved in the Song of Songs-to die a violent, bloody death in battle. In this realistic interpretation, "Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" describes a situation of being caught between things, of swinging uncontrollably from one war to another. Even though there is apparently little interest in continuing the cycle, the bloody "limb" seems to have a life of its own. Like "a sea of boiling lime," war creates a situation of being at once the destroyer and the destroyed; no one is the winner. And this is the lesson of the butterfly: it lives dualistically, vibrant in life, yet simultaneously dying. Such is the fate of those who exist in a war-to-war syndrome. Like "Uvekhen, tafasti et haparpar,"."Bein ze laze. Kivenadneda" displays a number of syntactic, structural, and other poetic features which reinforce the binary oppositionism of its semantic and thematic elements. Perhaps most obvious are the dualistic, complementary pairings of verbs: lisrof ulehisaref("to burn and to be burned," line 8), lekhalot velikhlot ("to destroy and to [be destroyed]," line 8), and hamotsets venimtsats("it sucks and is sucked," line 10). Added to these duplicative pairings are word repetitions, which echo, in their very repetition, the oppositions elicited in the

14. Told to me and Stanley E Chyet in a conversation at Gilboa's home in December, 1982.

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poem's semantic units. These include bein ze laze ("between this and that," line 1), which in turn is echoed by veze ("and this," line 10); the former opens the poetic discourse on the existential dilemma, the latter, in a closing echo, introduces the poetic resolution. (Hazot and haze are also placed in the same positions at the ends of lines 4 and 5.) The word ko'ah ("strength") is also repeated: it appears first in line 2 as lo ko'ab ("no strength"), which is reinforced by its equivalent hahulsha ("weakness") in line 4, and it reappears in juxtaposed repetition in the phrase ke'ever hahzaimiko'alh koho ("like a limb that lives from the strength of its strength") in line 6. The first use of ko'ah delineates the speaker's weakness; the later, close repetition accentuates the uncontrolledness of the physical body, the "living limb," as opposed to the speaker's confessed feeling of being emotionally sapped. Syntactic units which reflect the poem's structure of binary oppositions include the repetition of phrases structured in parallel, such as lo ko'ah ... lo inyan ("no strength..,. no interest," line 2), aval mitokh ("but out of," lines 4-5), and habulshahegedola hazot ... ha'inyan haze ("this great weak.oser the repeated use of elliptical senness . .. this lack of interest," lines 4-5); tences, varying from one-word sentences (lines I and 3), to short phrases (lines 1 and 8), to longer, dependent clauses (lines 1-2); and the contrast of the elliptical sentences both with the long, middle sentence (aval ... ulehisaref "but... and to be burned," lines 4-8) and, especially, with the complete, unambiguously declarative and fully structured closing sentence (lines 9-10), in which the speaker states his understanding of the dilemma. Once again, as in both of the other works discussed here, this poem shifts from a metaphoric to a metonymic mode of expression, reflecting Gilboa's view of the nature of life. From the point of view of the reader, this sort of closing plays a dual role: not only does it bring the poem to an end, but it also puts an end to the dissonance, ambiguity, confusion, duality, and mixed emotions caused by the pervasive play of binary oppositions in the body of the poems. It is as if Gilboa, at the ends of these poems, sets aside the oppositional structures, shifts away from the emotional conflict altogether, and ends, decidedly, with "facts" or "truth." Metaphor, the figurative language through which the feelings-in-the-poem are expressed poetically, gives way to metonomy, the concrete language through which the feelings-of-the-poet are expressed directly and passed directly on to the reader."5 15. Particularly relevant here, in reference to Gilboa's closings, are comments by Barbara Herrnstein Smith on the "substantial ... force" of closure and the "sense of truth" and "un-

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More subtle elements of opposition and parallelism are evident in the nearly homophonous, rhymed pairing of kayam ("exists") and keyam ("like a sea") in line 7; the rhyming of ta'am ("reason," line 6) with this pair, though the accent is different (ka-YAM and ke-YAM vs. TA-'am); the doubled consonant in the word "to suck": m-ts-ts (line 10); and perhaps the most important of these secondary dualistic features; the verbal affinity of consonantal doubling found in the roots of the words for "swing" and "butterfly": nd-nd and pr-pr. Embodied in the poem's central images, in other words, is a phonetic duality which, among other structural elements, radiates the binary mode that is so pervasive in this work.

The three works by Amir Gilboa discussed here were written over a span of more than twenty-five years. Despite many changes in Gilboa's general style, each of these poems demonstrates a persistent stylistic trait; namely, the expressive implementation of binary oppositions. Rooted in the romantic tendencies of Bialik's poetry, this equivalent structuring of semantic materials provides the reader with continuous clues to "the basic paradigm of the system"l6 found in many individual works, even in entire cycles and volumes of poetry by Gilboa. In great measure, Gilboa's poetics-his perception of the world around him and the way he shapes his poetic vocabulary to express this perception-relies upon the utilization of this structure of binary oppositions. While it displays an essentially romantic impulse on the part of Gilboa, the use of semantic equivalence structures also provides the reader with a sense of Gilboa's inventiveness, of the beauty and affectivity of his poetic expression. Universityof Florida Gainesville,Fla.

qualified assertion" often brought in the closing lines of poems. See her Poetic Closure:A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, 1968), pp. 96-150 and 182-195. 16. The phrase is from Nomi Tamir-Ghez, "Binary Oppositions and Thematic Decoding," p. 238. See also the chapter "Romanticism Revisited" in Yael Feldman's study, Modernismand Cultural Transfer: Gabriel Preil and the Traditionof Jewish Literary Bilingualism (Cincinnati, 1986), pp. 73-88, and especially pp. 75-77, which contain several comments pertinent to Gilboa's "romantic" free verse poetry.

"Kill Your Ordinary Common Sense and Maybe You'll Begin to Understand": Aharon Appelfeld and the Holocaust Author(s): David C. Jacobson Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 129-152 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486237 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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"KILLYOUR ORDINARY COMMON SENSE AND MAYBE YOU'LL BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND": AHARON APPELFELD AND THE HOLOCAUST by DAVID C. JACOBSON

When Aharon Appelfeld emigrated in his early teens to the Land of Israel on the eve of the establishment of the state, he and other Holocaust survivors his age felt ashamed of their experiences of suffering in the war, which seemed to them to be so meaningless and insignificant in comparison to the constructive tasks of nation building that had been undertaken by the yishuv. We arrivedin the Land [of Israel]in 1946.We wereabout twelveor thirteen yearsold, with the sufferingof the years tied to us like a hardcoil devoid of meaning.... Our sufferingwas not only lackingin meaning,but also shameful. In the Land [of Israel]life hummedwith deeds,purpose,and resourceful129

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ness, while our torturedchildhood was, as it were, bent furtherunder the burdenof all those deeds.' These young survivors were also greatly disturbed by the crude ways that the yishuv ignored their personal suffering and focused instead on discovering a national significance to the Holocaust. The daysof the eve of the Warof Independenceweredaysof greatexcitement. Modestwordsand lofty wordsweremixedtogether.Expressionsand slogans were created without much thought; the expression "Destruction and was festivelyadopted,and connectedwith it were Revival"[hurbanutekumah] notionsof causeandeffect[sibbahvetotsa'ah],rebukeandjustification[tokhehah vetsiddukhadin], mourning followed by celebration ['evel veyom tov]. In

short, it is practicallya law, the slogan proclaimed,that on the ashes of one period will rise anotherperiod.2 To add insult to injury, the historical interpretive scheme of the yishuv reflected negatively on the moral character of the victims and survivors of the war by suggesting that their fate was due to the sin of having made excessively naive assumptions about the future of the Jews in the diaspora that prevented them from emigrating to the Land of Israel before the war. The applicationof the interpretationswoopeddownon us and withoutmercy established parallels:exile-redemption, Zionism versus assimilation,the guiltyas opposedto the blameless,the wiseas opposedto the naive.Therewas a terribletransparencyto these analogies.3 As an adult, Appelfeld continued to struggle with the impulse he discovered in his newly adopted society to retreat from the horror of the Holocaust into the comfort of facile explanations. This impulse was particularly painful for a writer like Appelfeld who sought to be a witness to the suffer-

1. Aharon Appelfeld, Masot beguf rishon (Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1979), pp. 87-88. The translations of passages from this collection of essays by Appelfeld are mine. Appelfeld portrays the difficulties of young Holocaust survivors in adjusting to their first years as immigrants to the Land of Israel in his novel Mikhvat ha'or (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1980). See the analysis of this novel in Gershon Shaked, Gal 'ahar gal basipporetha'ivrit (Jerusalem: Keter, 1985), pp. 27-32. 2. Appelfeld, Masot beguf rishon, p. 88. 3. Ibid., pp. 88-89.

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ing of the Holocaust experience, for it strengthened his own inclination to avoid confronting that experience and revealing the full dimensions of that suffering. His difficulties and those of his society in relating to the Holocaust were the result of the vast difference between the horrors of the war and the realities of everyday experience characteristic of life before the war and life after the war. All thatwas revealedto the Jew in thoseyearswasgreaterthanthe measureof his logic or the measureof his soul. It was, in essence,the spaceof the horror, and whenhe left it, he only soughtto see in it a nightmare,a breachin his life whichmustbe healedveryquickly... . And whilethe survivortells,reveals,at the sametime he conceals.For it is impossiblenot to tell, but it is also impossibleto live in this space.Thisrevealmentandconcealmenthascontinueduntil this very day, and it is that which createsa barrierbetweenthe apocalyptic world and the world of life that is almost impossibleto bridge.4 This tension between the logic of everyday explanations and the reality of the Holocaust encouraged Appelfeld and other survivors to avoid revealing the true nature of the events they felt that neither they nor their society could stand to confront. And just as the [survivor]witnesscould not continueto standin the spaceof this terror,neithercould the Jew who had not experiencedit. A kindof secret covenantwas createdbetweenthe survivorwitnessand the one to whom,as it were,this testimonywas directed,a covenantof silencein the path of which have accumulated.5 many misunderstandings As time went on, the society of the newly founded State of Israel, like the prestate yishuv society, persisted in understanding the Holocaust in a manner that did not at all reflect the reality of the survivors' suffering. When the Holocaust survivors made their first attempts to convey the reality of the Holocaust to those who had not experienced it, the latter, unable to comprehend the suffering experienced by the former, created a system of words that attempted to capture the complexity of the Holocaust experience by labeling it with terms so abstract and overly used that they served the purpose of protecting people from fully confronting that experience. 4. Ibid., p. 19. 5. Ibid., p. 20.

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The apocalypticvisionsweregraduallytranslatedinto a plethoraof wordsand concepts:trauma,horror,Holocaust[sho'ah]-wordsand conceptsthat connote mainly evasion, distancing,and at times in a vulgar sort of way [the notion]:But it happenedthere.It was the conditionsof the exile that created them. We are free of them.6 Those who did not experience the Holocaust were further protected from its reality by the energy focused on historical studies and institutional commemorations of the Holocaust. And sincethe testimonywas not ableto strikerootsin life,it waspushedaside into archives,into memorials,into the sterilespace of scholarship.And the explanationquicklybecamea historicalquestion.What happenedand how did it happen?It would appearthat these are appropriatequestions.Except that we havethe experienceto knowthat such questionsfunctionless as testimony to sufferingand more as a loose bandageon a wound that refusesto heal.7 Furthermore, the survival of the Jewish people after World War II and the creation of the State of Israel provided a false comfort to those who had not experienced the war. And in addition a certain satisfactionwas added: Look, we are still alive despiteeverything;the evil designsdid not prevail.And not only that but the destructionbrought revival and rebirth.The bitter lesson became a clear lesson. Who could not feel that such language,even if it is language,is all an outer layer?He who attemptsto plasterover the terrorin such a mannerand with such a choice of wordsdemonstratesthat he is outsidethe spaceof that terror;and not only that but that he is rootedin his old concepts,the distance of which betweenthem and what happenedis the abyss.8 Appelfeld's sense that the Hebrew language was persistently being used in Israel not to reveal the reality of the Holocaust but to conceal it led him initially to despair of ever finding a way to convey the experiences of those who were in the war to those Israelis who were not. It was only when he read the German writings of the pre-Holocaust Jewish writer Franz Kafka, 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., pp. 20-21. 8. Ibid., p. 21.

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Appelfeld reports, that he found works reflecting the reality of the Holocaust and a literary style that could be a model for a post-Holocaust Hebrew literary expression of the experiences of his own generation of survivors. Help came from a place wherewe did not expectit, froma man who had not been in the Holocaust,but who alreadyforesawthe horrorsin the tranquil days of the decliningHapsburgempire,the Jew FranzKafka.As soon as we touchedthe pages of The Trialthe feelingdid not leave us that he had been with us in all our wanderings.Everyline spokefor us. In Kafka'slanguagewe foundon the one handsuspicionand doubtingandon the otherhandthe sickened longing for an explanation.Kafkasuddenlyreturnedthe wordsto us. If not for Kafkait is doubtfulwhetherwe wouldhavehad the strengthto arouse from the depths even one word. From our point of view he was not only a teacherbut a redeemer.9 Appelfeld turned to the writings of a Hebrew pre-Holocaust author as well: Hayyim Nahman Bialik. It is ironic that Appelfeld came to rely on the works of Bialik as an inspiration for his own writing. When he first attended school in the Land of Israel, Appelfeld writes, Bialik's poems were taught mainly as texts that condemned Jewish passivity in the pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and prophesied the destruction of European Jewry as a result of that passivity. This approach to Bialik's poetry strongly suggested that the victims and survivors of the Holocaust were guilty in their inability to adopt the forceful Zionist stance that the teachers believed Bialik advocated. For a long time Appelfeld was afraid to even open a book of Bialik's poetry for fear of suffering the wrath of the poet's rebuke. It was only after many years that he could see beyond his teachers' superficial readings of Bialik's works. Appelfeld could then appreciate Bialik as an author who effectively expressed a sensitivity to the issues that the suffering of the Holocaust would raise. Bialik'spoetryis a kindof an earlyfeeling,an earlywarning,supplication,and prayerfor the grantingof meaningto sufferingand therebyto life. Therewas no one who felt like him that Jewishlife was being emptiednot only of its metaphysicalcontent, but also of human hope.'? 9. Ibid., p. 15. 10. Ibid., pp. 91-92.

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How could the works of Kafka and Bialik, who both died before the Holocaust, function as literary models for a Holocaust survivor such as Appelfeld in search of a means for self-expression? The answer to this question lies in the realization that Kafka, Bialik, and Appelfeld had in common analogous experiences of the arbitrary eruption of evil which strongly suggested to them that human existence is absurd and that the cosmos is not based on a moral order and is not essentially beneficent to human beings. For all three authors these experiences occurred in the contexts of personal family circumstances and of national fate. For Kafka the experiences involved his difficult relationship with his father and the insecurity of his Jewish identity during the period of the cultural disintegration of assimilated Central European Jewry; for Bialik the experiences included the psychological trauma of his father's death when he was a child and the physical and cultural disintegration of Eastern European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; while for Appelfeld the experiences were those of the Holocaust that caused the death of his mother and the destruction of the world of Central European Jewry in which he had spent the formative years of his childhood." In his discussion of the dilemma of the Holocaust survivor who seeks to bear witness to his suffering, Appelfeld refers to a kind of "revealment and concealment [gilluy vekhissuy] [which] has continued until this very day and ... which creates a barrier between the apocalyptic world and the world of life that is almost impossible to bridge."'2 In the works of Kafka and Bialik, Appelfeld discovered attempts to establish connections between the "apocalyptic world" of experiences that suggest the absurdity of human existence and the more typical everyday experiences of the "world of life" that inspire hope by suggesting that human existence has meaning. He saw in those attempts literary models to aid him in fulfilling his aspiration to convey to postwar Israeli society the suffering of the Holocaust. He also saw in them models of how to convey his personal search for a meaning to that suffering

11. Appelfeld is quoted in an interview as stating, "I don't think that any Holocaust survivor can free himself of the impression that the world is essentially dominated by an arbitrary and merciless force." See Esther Fuchs, Encounters with Israeli Authors (Marblehead, Mass.: Micah Publications, 1982), p. 59. In analyzing Appelfeld's earlier fiction, Gershon Shaked notes that in his writings Appelfeld continues the tradition of pre-Holocaust Jewish writers to convey the horrors of modern Jewish experience. See Gershon Shaked, Gal hadash basipporet ha'ivrit (Merhavia and Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1971), p. 157. 12. Appelfeld, Masot beguf rishon, p. 19.

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which would transcend the prevailing superficial categories imposed on it by Israeli society. In his essay "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka," Albert Camus notes the tendency of Kafka's fiction to juxtapose the characters' everyday experiences with their experiences of the absurd. Although, for example, Joseph K. in the novel The Trial is faced with an absurd accusation of guilt, he is not astonished by the accusation, reacts to it as if it is a natural occurrence, and continues to live his life, "not neglect[ing] to love, to eat, or to read his paper,"'3 as if the absurd has not invaded his life. Much of the meaning of Kafka's fiction, Camus believes, derives from this juxtaposition of what he calls the "two worlds.. . of everyday life on the one hand, and on the other, . . . of supernatural anxiety."'4 Kafka makes this connection between the everyday and the absurd, according to Camus, because it is the most effective way to convey the absurd to those readers who dwell in the world of everyday logic and meaning: "Thus it is that Kafka expresses tragedy by the everyday and the absurd by the logical.""' The absurd and the everyday come together in Kafka's fiction not only as a technique to make the absurd plausible to the reader, but also as a way to convey the human tendency to escape the horrors of the absurd by clinging to the hopefulness of normal experience. As Camus notes, Kafka's characters do not fully surrender to despair despite the absurdity of their condition. In their persistent hope to resolve their predicaments, these characters find a way to escape absurdity at least until the point when it overwhelms them, as it does with the execution of Joseph K. at the end of The Trial. Appelfeld's reference to "revealment and concealment" in his discussion of the relationship between "the apocalyptic world" of the absurd and the everyday "world of life" calls to mind for the Hebrew reader Bialik's wellknown essay, "Gilluy vekhissuy balashon" ("Revealment and Concealment in Language").'6 This essay on language, written by Bialik in 1915 in the midst of the upheavals suffered by European Jewry in the period before and 13. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf and Random House, 1955), p. 93. 14. Ibid., p. 94. 15. Ibid. 16. The essay may be found in H.N. Bialik, Kol Kitvei H.N. Bialik (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1938), pp. 191-193. For an English translation of the essay by Jacob Sloan, see Robert Alter, ed., Modern Hebrew Literature (New York: Behrman House, 1975), pp. 130-137.

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during World War I, contains insights that are strikingly applicable to the experiences of Holocaust survivors and to the process of their coming to terms with the Holocaust and conveying its reality to those who did not experience it. While, to my knowledge, Appelfeld never explicitly refers to this essay as having influenced him, given Appelfeld's stated attraction to Bialik as a literary mentor, it is likely that he found this essay to be meaningful, especially since it conveys Bialik's reflections on the relationship between the absurd and the everyday, as well as the relationship between the absurd and hope.7 The central point of Bailik's essay is that for the most part, language does not play the role of revealing reality, but rather the role of concealing from human beings the void of moral chaos and absurdity that lies at the heart of reality. Bialik does not completely condemn this natural function of language to reveal rather than to conceal, for he believes that it is only the meaning that language provides as an escape from absurdity that allows people to continue living and to experience some degree of happiness and hope in their lives. At the same time, however, Bialik makes clear in the essay that despite the inevitable role of language to conceal the absurd nature of existence, no culture can be truly creative and no literature can adequately reflect the truth without the efforts of writers (in particular of poets) to devise a language that will reveal at least glimpses of the absurd by challenging the commonly accepted language that conceals it. It is clear from Bialik's analysis of the role of language, Camus's remarks on Kafka's fiction, and Appelfeld's report of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor in Israel, that any writer who seeks to engage his readers in a confrontation with the absurd undertakes a task which is far from easy. Such a writer must challenge the ways that the language of a culture tends to confirm the human tendency of the members of that culture to flee the absurd and to interpret reality as more beneficent than a confrontation with the absurd would indicate. Critics have noted that Appelfeld's fiction is characterized by its indirect portrayal of the Holocaust.'8 In his short stories and novels Appelfeld does

17. Leon I. Yudkin has noted an affinity between Bialik's discussion of the language of poetry in his essay "Gilluy vekhissuy balashon" and Appelfeld's fictional style. See Leon I. Yudkin, Escape into Siege: A Survey of Israeli Literature Today (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 118. 18. See Shaked, Gal 'abar gal basipporet he'ivrit, p. 33, and Alan Mintz, Hurban.

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not attempt to depict the actual horror of mass murder that lies at the heart of the Holocaust. Instead, he tends to portray either Jews in Europe on the eve of the Holocaust, Jews in Europe in hiding from the Nazis during the war, or Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Italy or in Israel during the years following the war. Appelfeld's novel Badenheim, 'ir nofesh ("Badenheim, Resort Town," published in English as Badenheim 1939) is a prime example of a work of fiction in which Appelfeld portrays Jews in Europe on the eve of the Holocaust."9 It has, however, a particular significance as one of Appelfeld's most direct attempts to convey the essential nature of the Holocaust experience. It thus serves as an illuminating example of the task Appelfeld has undertaken to convey to Israeli society the reality of suffering in the Holocaust. In his portrayal of the nature of the Holocaust in Badenheim, 'ir nofesh, Appelfeld appears to be concerned primarily with the relationship of two groups living an everyday existence to the absurd evil of the Holocaust: the victims, whose prewar everyday lives were invaded by the Holocaust, and the readers of the novel, who live an everyday postwar existence, to whom he wishes to convey the reality of the Holocaust. He relates the everyday world of the victims before the war and of his readers after the war to the Holocaust in ways that mirror the insights of his literary mentors Kafka and Bialik on the relationship between the absurd and the everyday and the relationship between absurdity and hope. As we have learned from Appelfeld's remarks, Israeli society has strongly resisted the notion that Holocaust suffering was too absurd an eruption of evil into everyday life to be explained by the logic of everyday experience. Israelis have thus anesthetized themselves from the absurd reality of the Holocaust by seeking to explain the Holocaust in a manner which Appelfeld deems to be overly superficial. Appelfeld, therefore, sought in Badenheim, 'ir nofesh to portray the absurdity of the Holocaust in such a

Responses to Catastrophein Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 207-208. 19. An earlier shorter version of Badenheim, 'ir nofesh was published under the title Badenhelm 1939 in Moznayim 36 (1972): 21-35. For an English translation of this version by Betsy Rosenberg, see Ezra Spicehandler and Curtis Arnson, eds., New Writingin Israel (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), pp. 69-100. The later, expanded version, which this paper analyzes, was first published under the title Badenheim, 'ir nofesh in Siman keri'ah 3-4 (1974): 287-334. An English translation of this version by Dalya Bilu was first published under the title Badenheim 1939 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980).

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way as to overcome the resistance of his readers to confronting the Holocaust and to make its reality plausible to them without the aid of the logic of everyday explanations. From Appelfeld's point of view, Israeli society has demonstrated a particularly inaccurate understanding of the reality of the Holocaust when it has labeled the reactions of the Holocaust victims and survivors to their fate as having been overly passive. Appelfeld sought to dispel that misunderstanding by portraying in Badenheim, 'ir nofesh the process whereby the absurd invaded the everyday life of the victims and elicited a natural human tendency toward optimism that interfered with the victims' full understanding of their fate. He makes clear in his portrayal of the response of the victims that their apparent acceptance of the Holocaust evil was due to the calling forth of the very mechanism of distancing oneself from the absurd that his readers who did not experience the Holocaust tend to call forth. What emerges is a curious parallel between the response of those who first viewed the Holocaust as victims and those who continue to view the Holocaust as observers after the fact. Just as those who lived after the war have devised techniques of perception that shield them from the true reality of the Holocaust, so did those who experienced the war. Such a parallel suggests how inappropriate it is for those who live after the war to judge those who were its victims.20 Two types of passages in the novel are particularly effective in linking together the confrontation with the absurdity of arbitraryevil by the victims who are characters in the novel and the novel's readers. In one type of passage, the evil is presented to the victims by the authorities in such a way as to encourage the victims to devise interpretations of reality that will conceal the evil from themselves. Paradoxically, in this same type of passage, the evil is portrayed by the author in such a way as to allow the readers to overcome their tendency to conceal from themselves the true nature of the evil. In the

20. Alan Mintz traces Appelfeld's attempts in his earlier fiction to link the responses of the victims to the Holocaust with that of those who did not experience the Holocaust: "Appelfeld's goal is our knowledge of [the Holocaust] world; he wants us to accept the reality of it against instincts of evasion every bit as strong as his characters'. To the extent to which Appelfeld succeeds in rendering this given and determined world fictionally plausible, to that extent he manages to purchase our acceptance of his characters' humanity." See Mintz, Hurban, p. 214. For recent reflections by Appelfeld on his fiction and on his role as a Holocaust survivor writer, see Philip Roth, "A Talk with Aharon Appelfeld," in New York Times Book Review, 28 February 1988.

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other type of passage, certain victims are portrayed as in touch with the evil that has invaded their lives. These victims detach themselves from the logic of everyday explanations that has tended to conceal the reality of the evil from most of the victims. This detachment involves some experience with hallucinations, suicidal despair, or an obsession. At the same time, such passages convey to the readers a vision of the absurdity of arbitrary evil in a symbolic manner that prevents the readers from fleeing into the logic of everyday explanations, as they might have done if confronted with a more starkly revealed vision of that evil.

The Absurdand the Everyday Badenheim, 'ir nofesh is the story of the gradual transformation of the fictional Austrian resort town of Badenheim, visited mainly by assimilated Jewish vacationers, into a ghetto from which all Jews are deported, presumably to die in concentration camps. One of the most striking features of this novel is that it contains no direct references to such Holocaust terminology as "Nazis," "ghettos," or "concentration camps." Indeed, the manner in which the transformation of Badenheim into a ghetto is described differs significantly from historical accounts of the Nazis' war against the Jews familiar to Appelfeld's readers. Compared to those accounts, the experiences that the Jewish victims of the novel undergo are relatively benign. As in a work of fiction by Kafka, the absurdity of Nazi evil is portrayed by the author and perceived by the victims as a manifestation of everyday reality. The transformation of Badenheim into a ghetto is accomplished by means of the activities of the town's increasingly powerful Sanitation Department. The Sanitation Department begins by conducting investigations, then physically isolates Badenheim from the outside world, and eventually registers all Jews residing in or visiting the town-all in preparation for their deportation. In each passage where the Sanitation Department is mentioned, both the readers and the victims in the novel are introduced to a reality which they need to explain to themselves. The readers are presented with a Holocaust world removed from the "normal" Holocaust world of the Nazis with which they are familiar, while the victims face a government agency that has been granted powers that it had never before possessed. As he portrays the activities of the Sanitation Department and the reactions to those activities by the

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Jews of Badenheim, Appelfeld is able to reveal to his readers a view of the true reality of the Holocaust, since they are freed of the distancing mechanism of the logic of everyday explanations that would normally come in to play for them when they contemplate scenes of Nazi brutality. At the same time, the portrayal of the Sanitation Department's activities conveys the means by which the Nazis presented the evil to the victims in such a way as to cleverly conceal the true reality of that evil from the victims by playing into their natural human urge to understand their situation in terms of the logic of everyday explanations and thus persist in hoping for the best. The first indication of the new role that the Sanitation Department is to play in Badenheim occurs in the second chapter, when Martin, the town pharmacist, is visited in his pharmacy by a representative of the Department. At about ten o'clock an inspectorfromthe SanitationDepartmentappeared with ordersto carryout an inspection.He wantedto know all kindsof peculiar details. The ownershipof the business,if Martinhad inheritedit, when andfromwhomhe had acquiredit, how muchit was worth.Martin,surprised, explainedthat everythinghad been whitewashedand thoroughlydisinfected. The inspectortook out a yardstickand measured.He left abruptlywithout apologizingor thankingMartin.(p. 8)21 Assuming that readers of this passage have some familiarity with the history of the Holocaust, they will recognize that the questions Martin is asked about the ownership of the pharmacy and its worth hint at a plan to confiscate the business from him, as businesses were confiscated by the Nazis from Jews and turned over to Aryans. However, by leaving out some of the most disturbing historically recognizable details, the author presents the readers with a Holocaust experience that appears to be significantly less horrible than they would expect. At the same time, the passage serves to portray the authorities' method of exercising their power over the victims without disclosing their ultimate purpose, and thereby encouraging the victims to keep themselves from perceiving the arbitrary evil that is their fate. While, as the narrator relates, Martin is "surprised" by the visit, it represents a sufficiently innocuous exer-

21. The page numbers of passages referto Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim1939, trans. Dalya Bilu (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980).

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cise of governmental power that he immediately resorts to a plausible interpretation that would allow this strange visit to fit into normal everyday reality. He fails, thereby, to recognize the possible danger that might result from a government agency overstepping the bounds of its normal authority and misreads the situation by answering not the questions he is asked regarding the ownership of the business and its worth, but rather the questions he would normally expect the Sanitation Department to ask him about the sanitary condition of the pharmacy. Following the visit, Martin further conceals the reality of the danger from himself by refraining from getting angry at the arbitrary and inexplicable activity of the government agency. Instead, like a typical character in Kakfa's fiction, he assumes that the authorities were justified in what they did, for perhaps he really had violated the official sanitary regulations of the town. As the Sanitation Department becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the victims, its actions continue to resemble only to a limited extent the brutality of the Nazis as recorded in historical accounts. This method of portraying the growing intensification of Nazi persecution leading ultimately to genocide continues to prevent the readers from viewing the Holocaust through the distancing lenses of the logic of everyday explanations. At the same time, this method continues to convey the means by which the Nazis presented their evil reality to the victims in forms that were close enough to everyday reality to keep the victims from fully appreciating the danger they were in and to allow them to interpret their situation in a hopeful manner. The next official act of the Department is to announce that it will begin an investigation of Badenheim, the purpose of which is not at first made clear. The announcement is conveyed by means of a notice placed on the town bulletin board. The notice is of modest size, thereby muting any suspicion of danger. It is set forth in language typical of governmental bureaucracies, which would suggest that there is nothing out of the ordinary about it: "its jurisdiction ... had been extended .. . it had been authorized to conduct independent investigations" (p. I1). Its manner of investigating is thorough and according to procedures directed from a central authority. Yet, in contrast to the seeming lawfulness and propriety of the Department's actions, there is an ominous quality to the behavior of its inspectors as they "spread out" (in Hebrew: pashtu, which connotes an army maneuver) "without ceremony" (p. 11), thereby suggesting an arbitrary lawless quality to their investigations, of which the reader is gradually becoming aware, but which the victims have difficulty in recognizing.

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The victims tend to respond to this new activity of the Department by attempting to explain it in accordance with normal everyday expectations. Like Martin, the people assume that the government is acting in a moral and lawful manner: either the Sanitation Department is engaged in combating a health hazard, or the Sanitation inspectors are actually "income tax collectors in disguise" (p. 12) seeking to discover tax evaders. They therefore fully cooperate with the Department, not at all suspecting its evil designs. Gradually, the actions of the Sanitation Department appear to be even more (although not overly) ominous to the readers, yet the victims persist in explaining these actions in terms of everyday reality. The inspectorsof the SanitationDepartmentwere now spreadall over the town. They took measurements,put up fences, and planted flags. Porters unloaded rolls of barbedwire, cement pillars, and all kinds of appliances suggestiveof preparationsfor a public celebration. "There'llbe fun and games this year." "How do you know?" "The Festival'sprobablygoing to be a big affair this year;otherwise,why would the SanitationDepartmentbe going to all this trouble?" "You'reright, I didn't realize."(p. 15) The detail of the "barbed wire" is sufficient to suggest the historical reality of the Holocaust to the readers, yet insignificant enough to avoid causing the readers to distance themselves from the overly familiar images of Holocaust horrors. The victims, meanwhile, completely ignore the danger sign that the barbed wire represents, and they interpret what they see in light of their normal experience of the government as just and as seeking the best welfare of the populace. In the discussion of the victims quoted in this passage we see their efforts to assert the logic of everyday explanations to make sense of the danger before their eyes: one speaker seeks to convince the other of his conclusion that the Department's actions can only be signs of a great resort season, which will include a successful arts festival. Even as the Department's activity becomes more intensified, the only explanation that the people can come up with is that this is a sign that Dr. Pappenheim, the impresario of the arts festival, is being honored by the government.

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The Department next undertakes an action which more clearly than any so far suggests signs of danger to be heeded by the victims: it orders all Jews residing in Badenheim to register at the Department. The portrayal of this act of discrimination is sufficiently removed from the full harshness of the early Nazi persecutions of the Jews that it prevents the readers from distancing themselves from the reality represented by the scene. While as an act of discrimination it is very disturbing to the victims, it is presented to them in such a way as to encourage them to conceal from themselves the reality of their true fate. As was the Department's practice when launching the investigation, it informs the townspeople of their new activity by means of "a modest announcement" (p. 20). The Jews of Badenheim who are called upon to register are, more than at any point until then, greatly shaken, for they are forced by the order to register to acknowledge their Jewish identities in a society in which they have been attempting to assimilate. Some react to the forced reconsideration of their Jewish identity with shame and others with pride. Both reactions, however, have in common one characteristic: neither is based on a perception of the truth that the registration is a first step toward their physical annihilation. Both the shame and the pride turn out to be emotions that help to conceal from the victims the reality of what is being done to them. Those characters, like Pappenheim the impresario, Samitzky, one of the musicians who performs in the local band during the resort season, and Frau Zauberblit, one of the vacationers, whose pride in their Jewish identity is aroused by the order, deal with this upheaval in their lives by means of humor. In one passage, Pappenheim and Samitzky joke about the registration order. "Thatmeansme,"saidSamitsky. "And me," said Pappenheim."Surelyyou don't wantto deny me my Jewishness?" "I'd like to," said Samitzky,"butyour nose testifiesto the fact that you'reno Austrian."(p. 20) When Frau Zauberblit approaches Samitzky to ask if he has registered yet, they have the following jocular exchange:

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"Not yet," said Samitzky."I'mwaitingfor the rightopportunity.Do I have the honor of addressingan Austriancitizen of Jewishorigin?" "You do, sir." "In that case we shall soon be able to hold a family celebration." "Did you ever doubt it?" (p. 21) When these three characters go to register they do so in an upbeat mood, noting only the positive aspects of the experience, ignoring the fact that their human approach to the registration is negated by the mechanical, inhuman attitude of the Sanitation Department official who registers them. The official did not bat an eye at Zauberblit'sdeclarations.She praisedthe departmentand said there was nothing like it for order and beauty. No wonder they had been promoted.Samitzkyannouncedthat his parentshad arrivedherefifty yearsago and he had neversince stoppedfeelinghomesick. like a stenoThe officialwrotedownthe requiredinformationexpressionlessly grapher.(p. 24) In contrast to Pappenheim, Samitzky, and Zauberblit, such characters as the vacationers Frau Milbaum and Dr. Langmann feel only the shame of their Jewish identity and refuse to accept that the order to register applies to them. When Frau Milbaum goes to register at the Sanitation Department, she is disturbed to find that the official ignores the fact that both her first and second husbands had been gentile Austrian noblemen, and that "apart from the name of her father, there was nothing at all on the form" (p. 44). She refuses to associate with the other Jews vacationing in Badenheim and declares that they are all "riffraff" (p. 44). Dr. Langmann resists the very idea of registering, declaring to Frau Milbaum that the only Jews who need to be singled out are those whose origins are in Eastern Europe, not Austrian-born Jews like him. As the registration proceeds, the Sanitation Department's actions take on what appears to the reader to be a more threatening quality. A barrier is placed at the entrance of the town, almost completely isolating it from the rest of the world. The Sanitation Department, however, blunts the effect of Badenheim's ghettoization by allowing the residents of the town to continue to enjoy physical and aesthetic pleasures.

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No one came in or went out. But the isolation wasn't total. The milkman broughtmilk in the morningand the fruit truck unloadedits cartonsat the hotel. Both caf6sremainedopen and the bandplayedeverynight.... (p. 38) While it becomes clearer as time goes on that the purpose of the registration is to deport the Jews of Badenheim to Poland, the Department encourages them to see this not as a journey to their destruction, but as the beginning of a new phase of their lives. The SanitationDepartmentnow resembleda travel agency festoonedwith posters:LABORIS OUR LIFE ... THE AIR IN POLAND IS FRESHER ... SAIL ON THE VISTULA... THE DEVELOPMENTAREAS NEED YOU ... GET TO KNOW THE SLAVICCULTURE.Theseand otherslogans adornedthe walls. (pp. 29-30) In another passage the effectiveness of the Department's portrayal of the impending journey is made clear. In the afternoonpeople begandroppingin at the SanitationDepartment.In the souvenirshop a map of Polandwas alreadyon sale.The adventurous,full of enthusiasm,spoke of the Vistulaand the Carpathianmountains.The first shock was alreadyover. (p. 39) The Department's misleading portrayal of reality plays into the natural tendency of several characters to view reality as essentially beneficent. They conclude that the journey they are to take to Poland will be advantageous either because it will return them to their Eastern European Jewish origins from which they had been fleeing, but to which they now really want to return, or because conditions in Poland are really superior to those in Austria. Pappenheim, Samitzky, and Zauberblit all express a nostalgic longing for Eastern Europe that on some level, they believe, will be fulfilled by the journey that the Department is to take them on. Samitzky is portrayed as having never gotten over his emigration from his native Poland to the west as a child. Zauberblit and Pappenheim, who are apparently native Austrians, affectionately recall visits with their Eastern European grandparents. Zauberblit goes so far as to declare "that Poland was the most beautiful country of all, and that Yiddish was a lovely melodious language" (p. 31).

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Pappenheim, in particular, maintains an optimistic view that life will be even better for the Jews of Badenheim in Poland than in Austria. He makes such declarations as: "There are wonderful places in Poland" (p. 49) and "Artistic standards in Poland are high" (p. 54). He portrays the journey to Poland as an experience not to be feared, but rather to be welcomed as a desirable return to the Eastern European origins of the Jews of Badenheim. Throughout the period of the ghettoization of Badenheim, Pappenheim's optimistic projections serve the goal of the Sanitation Department to keep the Jews from facing the reality of their fate. He [Pappenheim]would tell them about Poland.About the wonderfulworld to which they were going. "Herewe have no life left," he would say. "Here everythinghas become empty."(p. 97) Pappenheim maintains his optimistic interpretation of events until the very end of the novel. As the Jews are finally being cruelly shoved into train cars to be taken to the death camps, he remarks, "If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go" (p. 148). Throughout the novel, the victims of Badenheim protect themselves from the reality of their fate not only by seeking logical everyday explanations for what is happening to them and interpreting events optimistically, but also by intensifying their involvement with physical and cultural pleasures and with professional pursuits. The vacationers obsessively indulge in the physical stimulation afforded by food, drink, drugs, and sexual affairs and in the cultural stimulation of Pappenheim's arts festival. In addition, a number of characters in the novel diligently pursue professional interests that they have carried over with them from the everyday world that preceded the time of the novel. Pappenheim runs around Badenheim worrying about the success of the arts festival, a professor spends his vacation correcting the galley proofs of his book, a businessman keeps telling people about the way he will have his company pay for his delay in Badenhein, a great conductor endlessly rehearses with his musicians, and a rabbi berates the people for their lack of commitment to traditional Judaism. These intensive involvements, however, do not provide the victims with a fully effective escape from facing the truth of what is happening to them. They therefore must keep turning to the logic of everyday explanations as a barrier to be desperately reinforced in order to avoid confronting the reality of their fate.

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Visions of the Absurd Not all the characters in the novel, however, succeed in concealing the reality of their evil fate from themselves by means of the logic of everyday explanations. In a conversation between two of the musicians it becomes clear how such logic can break down in the face of the absurdity of arbitrary evil. While Pappenheim and others have become convinced that the deportation to Poland holds out the promise of a new and better life, one of the musicians finds it difficult to find any meaning in the deportation. "Whatwilltheydo withus therein Poland?"askedone of the musicians. "Whatdo you mean?You'll be a musician,just as you've alwaysbeen," said the friendsitting half asleep next to him. "In that case why send us there at all?" The friendsought an impressiveformula."Historicalnecessity,"he said. "Killme, I don'tunderstandit. Ordinarycommonsensecan'tcomprehend it." "In that case, kill your ordinarycommonsense and maybeyou'll beginto understand."(p. 70) A limited number of characters in Badenheim, 'ir nofesh experience a personal crisis when they are incapable of killing "the ordinary common sense" (in the original Hebrew: hasekhel hayashar) that calls forth the logic of everyday explanations once they have begun to perceive to some degree the evil that is their fate. These characters react to this perception by becoming preoccupied with hallucinations, suicidal despair, or an obsession. Their reactions serve not only to suggest what happens when everyday logic ceases to function effectively for the victims as a barrier to reality, but also to give the readers a more direct vision of the arbitrary evil of the Holocaust than they were afforded in the passages in which the victims were constantly protecting themselves from perceiving that evil. The first of the characters who is unable to rely on everyday explanations to protect her from the reality of the evil is Martin's wife, Trude. She is portrayed at the beginning of the novel as sick and delirious with a view of the world as "poisoned and diseased" (p. 3). When she sees the first vacationers arrive in Badenheim, she sees them as "patients in a sanitorium" (p. 3), and she has become obsessed with the notion that the gentile whom her daughter Helena had insisted on marrying is constantly beating her on his

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estate. This preoccupation with disease and suffering becomes intensified in Trude during the period of the increase of the Sanitation Department's power. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear to the reader that it is Trude who perceives the truth: the Jewish vacationers in Badenheim are all in danger of dying like patients in a sanitorium, and her daughter's love of the gentile man is being repaid by physical abuse, just as the assimilated Central European Jews' love of gentile culture is being repaid by mass murder. It is significant that Trude's hallucinations of disease and suffering cease after Martin goes to register the family with the Sanitation Department. When he returns from the registration, Trude is deeply moved. She looked at him with eyes full of affection,as if he had broughther a message from a differentworld. (p. 61) Now that the supposedly healthy everyday world of Badenheim that her husband represents is being invaded by the "different world" of the absurd, Trude is less at odds with her surroundings and need not escape from them into hallucinations. Once this happens, however, she too becomes caught up in the comforting logic of everyday explanations. In the spirit of Pappenheim's optimisim, she begins to view the impending deportation to Poland as a blessed opportunity to return to her homeland, declaring, "If God wills it, a person returns to the land of his birth" (p. 61). Nevertheless, when Helena eventually returns to Badenheim, the truth of Trude's initial view of reality is unequivocally confirmed. Whatever illusions Helena may have had that her marriage to a gentile could succeed have been shattered. She has in fact suffered at the hands of her gentile husband, and now that the Jews are being registered and isolated from the gentile population, she has been forced both to undo her decision to marry him and to return to her family. Some characters, however, find it more difficult than Trude does to fall back on the logic of everyday explanations, and so, in despair, they turn the terrible violence of the evil on themselves. A half-Jewish waitress is acutely attuned to the impending violent conflict between the gentile authorities and the Jewish victims, since she is part-gentile and part-Jewish. Unable to cope with the reality of the imminent doom, she gets drunk and stands up in the hotel restaurant, inviting all the guests to feast on the "Austrian meat" (p. 49) of her flesh. She then begins to act out the violence inherent in the

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Department's activities by cutting herself with a knife. With that act she forces the other victims to view the evil of their fate more clearly without the distancing effects of the explanations they have devised. Therewas an uproar.Theyranto fetchMartin.Bloodsplashedonto the floor. ... The clumsymusiciansstood there helplessly.The terrorcurdledin their eyes. (p. 50) Nevertheless, Pappenheim finds a way to blur the victims' perception of the horror. Just before the waitress wounds herself, she addresses Pappenheim, who responds to the bitter sarcasm of her tone in a light-hearted manner. "Isn'tmy meattasty?"She madea beelinefor Pappenheim. "Certainly,"he said. "So why don't you take this knife and cut yourselfa slice?" "Do I look like a butcher?"(p. 49) When, after she wounds herself, the waitress desperately screams that she does not want to be left behind, but wants to join the Jews on the journey to Poland, Pappenheim in a curiously calm way reassures her without displaying any understanding of the vision of horror which drove her to do what she did: "What did you imagine? Wherever we go you will go too" (p. 50). Another character, a Jew who had been a major in the Austrian army during World War I, commits suicide when he realizes that the registration of the Sanitation Department will destroy his identity as an Austrian patriot and thereby will undermine an important part of his reason for existing. Like the attempted suicide of the half-Jewish waitress, the major's actual suicide reveals the violent reality of their fate to the others living in Badenheim. Neither self-inflicted violent act, however, serves to overcome the others' resistance to seeing the truth for more than a brief moment. Trude's hallucinations and the suicidal despair of the half-Jewish waitress and the major provide visions of the truth of the impending doom that contrast sharply with the commonsense everyday explanations that other characters devise to prevent themselves from perceiving that doom. They also present the reader with symbolic visions of the unleashing of arbitrary evil and destruction that constituted the Holocaust, especially as experienced by the assimilated Central European Jews among whom Appelfeld

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had been raised.22Such visions provide a clearer view of evil than the portrayal of the relatively benign activities of the Sanitation Department, thereby keeping the author's technique of representing Nazism by means of the Department from overly distancing the novel from the realities of the Holocaust. The violent break-up of Helena's marriage to a gentile, the attack of the gentile half of the waitress on her Jewish half, the split in identity forced upon the major that drives him to self-destruction all provide powerful symbolic images of the symbiotic relationship of gentiles and Jews in Central Europe that was senselessly torn asunder by the Nazis. This truth of the absurd evil brought upon the Jews by the Nazis is also perceived on some level by one of the Jewish vacationers, Karl, when he develops a fascination with an aquarium located in the main hotel of Badenhelm. Like Trude's hallucinations and the suicidal despair of the half-Jewish waitress and the major, Karl's obsession with the aquarium indicates not only his awareness of the absurd, but it also portrays the absurd to the reader in an effective symbolic manner. Karl's interest in the aquarium is aroused when the headwaiter of the hotel restaurant tells him about "the terrible catastrophe that had taken place in the aquarium the year before" (p. 51). Some fish of a new species had been placed in the aquarium; a few days later they unexpectedly attacked the species of fish that had originally been alone in the aquarium "and massacred them horribly" (p. 51), leaving in the aquarium "a floor full of corpses" (p. 51). In contrast to the ways that the Sanitation Department presents its evil deeds to the victims as normal bureaucratic procedures with the purpose of benefiting the victims, the story of the massacre of the fish is a relatively direct portrayal of the invasion of arbitrary evil into the world of the victims. Like Trude's hallucinations and the suicidal despair of the halfJewish waitress and the major, the story of the two species of fish whose coexistence is destroyed by the attack of one species on the other portrays symbolically the violent breakdown of the relationship between the assimilated Jews and the gentiles in Central Europe, which from the point of view of the Jews was so unexpected and inexplicable. In the course of their conversation, Karl and the headwaiter discuss the possibility that one of the species of fish currently in the aquarium might 22. Appelfeld writes of the traumatic experience of his parents' generation of assimilated Jews who were forced by the Holocaust to face the Jewish identity from which they had been fleeing. See Appelfeld, Masot beguf rishon, pp. 9-11.

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again suddenly turn on the other species. Karl suggests to the headwaiter that it might be better to separate the two species of fish to prevent a future massacre. Although Karl does not consciously perceive a direct connection between his fate as a victim and the potential evil fate of one of the species of fish, his suggestion conveys an insight into the nature of Jewish-gentile relations that Appelfeld wishes to convey to the reader. This insight consists of the Zionist conclusion that since the attempts of assimilated European Jewry to engage in a symbiotic relationship with the gentiles have failed, the only viable alternative for the Jews is to separate themselves from the gentiles and establish their own cultural and political independence in the Land of Israel. As Appelfeld writes in one essay, the survivor such as himself who chose to emigrate to the Land of Israel rather than continue to live among the gentiles in Europe or other continents, "sought to rehabilitate not only his body [but also his soul]."23 Until the end of the novel, Karl continues to feel a strong connection with the potential fate of the fish, and he becomes obsessively concerned with them. This obsessive concern leads Karl away from the everyday explanations and pursuits that prevent most of the characters from confronting evil. Karl becomes so obsessed by the fate of the fish that he is unable to participate in any of the life of Badenheim. He even makes a futile desperate effort to take the fish along with him in a bottle of water on the final journey away from Badenheim. By the time the Jewish evacuees from Badenheim reach the train that is to take them to their deaths, however, it becomes clear that Karl's desperate attempt to save the fish is as doomed to failure as any attempt by the Jews to save themselves would be at that point. It is the nature of ordinary common sense to seek to interpret reality in terms of the positive benefits it affords people. In his essays and fiction Appelfeld makes clear that this characteristic of human existence was as much reflected in the response of the Holocaust victims to the radical evil of Nazism as it has been reflected in the response of those who live after the war to the historical memory of that evil. Those victims, like Trude at the beginning of the novel, the half-Jewish waitress, the major, and Karl, who did "kill their ordinary common sense" and began to understand the truth of the Holocaust could no longer go on participating in life as they had known it previously, at least as long as they held on to their relatively unmediated vision of the evil. As Bialik declares in "Gilluy vekhisuy ba23. Ibid., p. 18.

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lashon," playing on the biblical notion that human beings cannot see God and live, "for man shall not see the 'void' [of the absurd] face-to-face and live."'24Those victims, like Martin, Pappenheim, Samitzky, and Zauberblit, who resorted to the commonsense impulse to find the good and the moral order in their situation demonstrated a powerful human drive to affirm the worthwhileness and meaning of human existence that allowed them to keep on living until finally overwhelmed by the evil of genocide. Appelfeld's readers, the postwar Israeli public, have been faced with a choice similar to that of the victims: submit to the despair that a confrontation with the absurd evil of the Holocaust would evoke or chose the path of discovering a commonsense meaning to the events of recent Jewish history. For the most part, Israelis have made the latter choice and have devised an interpretive framework that explains the evil of the Holocaust as a destructive period of Jewish history that was inevitably followed by the revival of the Jewish people in the establishment of the State of Israel. It is difficult to judge those who are faced with the choice of either yielding to the natural human urge to believe that there is a meaning to human existence and that the cosmos is essentially beneficent to humanity or killing their ordinary common sense and facing a reality that might destroy them either physically or spiritually. As disturbing as it is to observe the self-delusive characteristic of both the false hopes of the victims and the historical explanations of those who live on after the war, it is important to keep in mind Bialik's acceptance of the role of language to suggest that there is meaning to human existence, thereby preserving human sanity and happiness. In writing Badenheim, 'ir nofesh Appelfeld aspired to reveal enough of the absurd reality of the Holocaust to keep his readers from fully concealing the truth of their historical past from themselves. In so doing he broke the "covenant of silence" that had emerged between the victims and the survivors on the one hand and those who did not experience the war on the other hand. He established between them instead a convenant of anxiously gazing at the absurd that lies beneath the surface of the meaning we so desperately seek to find in human existence. WesleyanUniversity Middletown,Conn. 24. Bialik, "Revealment and Concealment in Language," in Alter, Modern Hebrew Literature, p. 133.

Ghost-Writing: Philip Roth's Portrait of the Artist Author(s): Donald Kartiganer Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 153-169 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486238 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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GHOST-WRITING: PHILIP ROTH'S PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST by DONALD KARTIGANER

In writing a trilogy of novels on the life and times of Nathan Zuckerman, American Jewish Writer, Philip Roth has waded manfully into a tradition even more thickly and brilliantly populated than the one he selected as literary background for The Breast. If the grotesque metamorphosis of David Kepesh into a six-foot, one-hundred-and-fifty-pound female breast compels us to compare Roth's novel with some of the great texts of Kafka and Gogol, in Zuckerman Bound Roth invokes the more formidable context of James, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, and Gide (to mention only a few), several of whose artist-portraits are identified in the trilogy and all implied. Roth has said in an interview that the novelty of this particular portrait is that it describes "the comedy that an artistic vocation can turn out to be in the U.S.A."' The comedy pertains not only to the career of Zuckerman himself, a series of zany encounters with writers, readers, and critics, whose responses to one Zuckerman fiction become the action of the next, but also 1. Reading Myself and Others (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 162. Further references to this collection of essays and interviews will be cited in the text as RM.

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to Roth's typical strategy of challenging and recreating any prior tradition or convention, however sacrosanct. The crux of Rothian comedy is to expose, embarrass, and ridicule, to break bonds and boundaries, pieties and platitudes. The target of Zuckerman Bound, which consists of The Ghost Writer (1979), ZuckermanBound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), is, among other things, the very tradition that authorizes the trilogy's existence. But the aim is by no means simply to dismantle that tradition-the Rothian attack is never so one-sided as that-but rather to situate it within a larger and more tangled arena. Common to the artist-portraits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the sense of a circumscribed Art and Artist, of rigid demarcations cutting them off from the world of their origins and their effects. But demarcations are precisely what Roth's comic sense finds intolerable. Thus the revision of the tradition in Zuckerman Bound takes the form of an interaction with it; not a substitution that merely results in a new set of boundaries-a Post-Modern portrait, for example, displacing a Modern one-but a genuine expansion of our understanding of that world of diverse contexts and relationships in which we all write and read and are read by our fictions. In this essay I will be concerned almost entirely with The Ghost Writer, which sets up the theme of writing that will be explored throughout the trilogy. The plot of this opening novel, appropriately, is a pilgrimage to the place where the supreme art of an older time is still being practiced-but it is a pilgrimage that has the effect of both honoring and contaminating the sanctuary. In 1956 Nathan Zuckerman, a young writer with four published stories to his credit, comes to the home of the master, the short-story writer E. I. Lonoff-the "most famous literary ascetic in America"-now living in a remote farmhouse in the hills of Western Massachusetts.2 Zuckerman, who has quarreled with his own father over the contents of an as yet unpublished story which the latter deems potentially detrimental to the Jews, is in quest of paternal approval from another source: "I had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E. I. Lonoffs spiritual son, to petition for his moral sponsorship and to win, if I could, the magical protection of his advocacy and his love" (p. 9). How much he is and is not the 2. Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), p. 10. All further quotation from the trilogy will be to this edition. Pagination of the original edition of The Ghost Writer is the same as its pagination in Zuckerman Bound.

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son of Lonoff is much of the thrust and humor of this small novel, which concludes with Zuckerman finally receiving the master's blessing: a "confirmation" (p. 180) of his talent and task, and an invitation to head directly for Lonoffs study and begin his work. Looking back on this experience-it is now 1977 or 1978-Zuckerman recalls Lonoff as an artist who on the face of it is utterly different from the one which, as the rest of this novel and the trilogy as a whole make clear, Zuckerman himself has become. Nevertheless, now, as then, Zuckerman idealizes Lonoff into the "Maestro," the measure of whose genius and accomplishment is the immaculateness of a life consumed in forging an immaculate art. Lonoff becomes Zuckerman's High Modernist myth of the isolated, inhumanly disciplined artist: an East European Jewish immigrant (pace the more romantic versions of Mallarm6, James, Yeats, et al.), living with his New England heiress wife in the "goyish wilderness of birds and trees" (p. 4). There, surrounded by Berkshire woods to which he is wholly indifferent, Lonoff spends his days "turning sentences around" until a completed text, itself inhumanly disciplined, finally emerges-like an urn, or perhaps a jar, and, like its maker, like nothing else in Massachusetts. The greatness of Lonoff is that he has divorced himself from the world of turbulence and unruliness and from it fashioned an art of perfection and prohibition. The emptiness of his life is exquisitely refined into emptiness enacted as a fiction. Lonoffs typical fictional character, Zuckerman tells us, is a man "thwarted, secretive, imprisoned . . . a nobody from nowhere," whose surprising willingness to risk some change in his routine only leads to a confirmation of his former caution. He discovers that there is really nothing to be done except to make "everything worse." The climax of Lonoffs work has been a collection of stories in which there is no action at all. Even the most tentative consideration of a move breaks itself against "the ruling triumvirate of Sanity, Responsibility, and Self-Respect, assisted handily by their devoted underlings: the timetable, the rainstorm, the headache, the busy signal, the traffic jam, and, most loyal of all, the last-minute doubt" (pp. 12-15). The perfection of the stories is the perfection of a stillness, an evocation of life so finely wrought it bestows on the absence of action an eloquence, perhaps an agony, that a merely tragic act can never have. Lonoff claims for himself a life as uneventful as the lives of his characters, the difference being that instead of even considering action he painstakingly inscribes the sentences that compose their paralysis. "I've written

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fantasy for thirty years. Nothing happens to me. .... I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch ..." (pp. 16-18). In the evening he reads the sentences that others write. The view from his wife, Hope, violently corroborates Lonoffs account. She is the partner of his severe enterprise, but one who cannot help but erupt occasionally at its constraints. Weary of her own absence from his world of fiction-making, Hope regards Lonoffs "religion of art" as primarily "rejecting life": "Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of!" (p. 174-175). The immaculateness of the fiction is for Hope the sterility of the life. There are, in fact, disturbances that assault Lonoffs extreme detachment: a family, including three children now grown, a wife capable of outcry, even a young woman, Amy Bellette, who may be his mistress. But none of these can penetrate his fiction, except as the sublimated image of that distance from life which the disturbances are designed to bridge. Zuckerman recalls, "I could not think of a single hero who was not a bachelor, a widower, an orphan, a foundling, or a reluctant fiance" (p. 71). Not a single hero, in other words, who weds, fathers, fornicates, or flees for life from the all-pervading deadness. Nor, finally, do these disturbances make any lasting difference to Lonoff. He rejects Amy's plea that they run off together to Florence, undoubtedly will bring back Hope-who ends the novel by rushing out of the house in hysteria-to her place by the side of his "noble calling" (and dies, five years later, along with news of the subsequent decline of his reputation, in a long Zuckerman parenthesis). In short, both the fiction and the life are impregnable, a fortress of Art and Artist against all the entanglements of being. Their strength, and for Zuckerman their glory, lie in their oneness: the artist gathered into his artifice, "a man, his destiny, and his work-all one" (p. 73). Behind this portrait of Lonoff is clearly the High Modernist conception of art and the artist, one that Zuckerman claims to admire, even revere. Derived from German and English romanticism and the French symbolists-and for Zuckerman most memorably articulated in the fiction of James and Joyce-the conception holds that the artist is one who necessarily separates himself from normal human activity, sacrificing what Lonoff dismisses as "Ordinary human pleasures" (p. 40). The fruit of that sacrifice is the privilege of producing a comparably isolated art: autonomous, rid of what we normally mean by reference and relevance, uttering through its

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intricate arrangements what Frank Kermode calls "a radiant truth out of space and time."3 This is an art immaculate in its complete melding of Meaning into Being, and in the absence of any of the signs of its makings or its maker. In the classic passage from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan, Stephen Dedalus describes the personality of the artist at the furthest stage of his development: it "finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak.... The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."4 Although he speaks warmly of Lonoff and his fiction, the bulk of The Ghost Writerconsists of Zuckerman's challenge to Lonoffs standards of art, even as he has had to challenge his father's. Unlike the theory of art as a "radiant truth," remote from the ordinary world, Zuckerman's art is apparently all too full of reference. "Well, Nathan," his father has told him, regarding his unpublished short story based on the disputed inheritance of a great-aunt, Meema Chaya, "you certainly didn't leave anything out, did you? ... I mean ... you didn't leave anything disgusting out" (p. 85-86). The roots of Zuckerman's stories-the story of Meema Chaya, the story of Amy Bellette that he will imagine in this novel, the novel Carnovskythat will become the occasion of Zuckerman Unbound-these roots are destined always to display themselves, however complicated may be their relationship to the fiction itself. The actual details of Zuckerman's life, certainly up to 1956, come to little more than the unexceptional experience of his family and upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, but this is the life he depends on for his art and it is never very far from its surface. Moreover, his shaping of that life into fiction is a process that becomes the virtual center of fiction; the origins and their transformation into new yet vaguely familiar guises become both the essential action and its thematic core. To use a term of Zuckerman's from Zuckerman Unbound(and of Roth's from Reading Myself and Others), we can say that in place of Stephen Dedalus's idea of impersonalizationZuckerman substitutes the idea of impersonation. The writer does not refine himself out of existence or absorb himself totally into his characters; he impersonates his characters, masks himself

3. Romantic Image (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 2. 4. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 215.

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with their identities even as he exposes his own. The key to the deception is both its extravagance, the sheer distance between origin and disguise, and the disclosure of the fraud while it is going on. Roth comments in an interview: Think of the ventriloquist.He speaks so that his voice appearsto proceed from someone at a distancefrom himself.But if he weren'tin your line of vision you'd get no pleasurefrom his art at all. His art consists of being presentand absent;he's most himselfby simultaneouslybeing someoneelse, neitherof whomhe "is" once the curtainis down. You don't necessarily,as a writer,have to abandonyour biographycompletelyto engage in an act of impersonation.It may be more intriguingwhen you don't. You distort it, caricatureit, parodyit, you tortureand subvertit, you exploitit-all to give the biographythat dimensionthat will excite your verballife. (RM, p. 144) Impersonation is the heart of Zuckerman's artistic practice; it is also the fundamental theme not only of the trilogy but of all Roth's fiction. In every text we see acts of character transformation, metamorphoses in which old and new selves collide in a tortuous, often grotesque relationship that is incapable of resolving itself or displacing one self with the other. The greater the gap between selves, and the more insistent a character's refusal either to abandon his disguise or completely assume it, the more compelling and central the character becomes. Commenting on TheAnatomy Lesson, for example, Roth has noted: The thingaboutZuckermanthatinterestsme is thateverybody'ssplit,but few so openly as this. Everybodyis full of cracksand fissures,but usuallywe see people trying very hard to hide the places wherethey'resplit. Most people desperatelywant to heal their lesions, and keep trying to. Hiding them is sometimestaken for healingthem(or for not havingthem). But Zuckerman can't successfullydo either,and by the end of the trilogyhas provedit evento himself.(RM, p. 143) The divisions of Zuckerman are the divisions of Roth's major characters, from the title character of "Eli, the Fanatic" a successful attorney who, torn by fear and guilt, eventually dresses himself in the clothes of an emasculated Hasidic refugee, to the notorious Portnoy, knight of rectitude and lunatic of lust, and David Kepesh, son, lover, and-associate professor of literature, wedded, in fantasy or reality, to a giant female breast. The power of these

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metamorphoses, their madness and the condition of their moral breakthrough, lies in their incompletion: the seemingly irrevocable conflict of warring selves who are yet sustained, and even enlightened, by each other. Impersonation exposes itself as such-it's all an act, the ventriloquist and dummy are equally visible; and thus there is no single identity, no origin or transcendent image that can escape its partner in performance. A new, more complex identity-or meaning, or referent-suspends itself between, enacts itself in the space between selves, "neither of whom he 'is."'5 What Lonoff burns away in a score of drafts Zuckerman dramatizes; Lonoffs tiny parables of silence, of impulse extinguished, become the loud Zuckerman turmoil of identity struggling frantically between disguises. More than anything else, impersonation is a theme and an aesthetic of change--of changing, since no role or guise is to be given up or repressed. For Zuckerman, the most striking quality of Lonoffs art is also its most serious deficiency. It is an art of and about changelessness: stories of action prohibited, echoed as the frozen perfection of an art that carefully conceals the human struggle of its own making.

II The Ghost Writerdescribes the elaborate process of impersonation that produces chapter 3 of the novel, "Femme Fatale"-a piece of fiction created by Zuckerman, the subject and process of which are also impersonation. The plot of Zuckerman's story, which he imagines during the sleepless night he spends in Lonoffs study, is that Amy Bellette, who he has learned is in love with Lonoff, is in actuality, or at least claims to be, Anne Frank. She has managed to survive the Holocaust but has refused to reveal her identity until very recently, and only to Lonoff. The story of Anne Frank's survival is subsumed in the story of Amy's impersonation of Anne: her transformation of herself into an acclaimed writer. The transformation is as fragile or as firm as Amy's shifting explanations of how and why she has continued to

5. For a full discussion of the theme of metamorphosis in Roth's fiction, see my essay, "Fictions of Metamorphosis: From Goodbye Columbusto Portnoy's Complaint," in Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson, eds., Reading Philip Roth (New York: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 82-104.

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conceal her identity--even from her father, who at the time of publication of the diary is still alive. Initially, so Amy claims, even as a young refugee in England, she desired to downplay her Jewish identity so that she might achieve a distinction not based on the fact that she had been in the concentration camps; years later, with the surprising publication of the diary she left behind when she and her family were taken prisoner, she decided that the effect of her book and of the lessons it might teach depended on the grim detail that Anne Frank was murdered by the Nazis-that her story was not merely one of "a young teenager's... trying years in hiding during the German occupation of Holland" (p. 145). Soon realizing, however, that the world would learn nothing from her book, she saw its function as only "to restore in print [the dead] . . . for all the good that would do them" (p. 147); and with that realization, she switched to a rationale of vengeance, which she could exact only "fatherless and all on her own" (p. 147). But then-Amy's imagination is swift and remarkably fertile-she recognized she had become an object of universal empathy and pity, a figure from which the world was begging forgiveness: "It was too late to be alive now. I was a saint" (p. 150). These shifts are at once carefully wrought and wildly improbable. They are the strength of the story and the exposure of its metamorphic existence: the slightly vibrating lips of the ventriloquist, the gap of revealed making that does not so much give the game away as it is the game. Despite the emphasis in "Femme Fatale," however, on Amy's various maneuvers in supporting her unlikely claim of identity, we must recognize that there is a Lonoffstory embedded here as well as a Zuckerman story of impersonation. The self-exposed process of making does not simply displace the finely honed tale, but incorporates it, interacts with it, impersonates it as part of a more inclusive aesthetic and action. "Because," Amy says to Lonoff following her disclosure, "it's like one of your stories . . . you'd know how to tell it in three pages. A homeless girl comes from Europe, sits in the professor's class being clever . . ." (p. 124); and then, with an incredible daring, she reaches out for the impossible, pronounces to her mentor that "of all the Jewish writers, from Franz Kafka to E. I. Lonoff, she was the most famous" (p. 152). The professor, who has now moved from writer of his own tales to actor in Amy's, will not budge from the role of Sanity and Responsibility he has always upheld. He suffers mightily for Amy's history-Westerbork, Auschwitz, Belsen-marvels at, even envies, a story that

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has "left my poor art far behind," (p. 125), and does not believe that a word of it is true. Confined by Lonoff's severe economy, the story would project a characteristic stasis and silence-Amy pretending to a book without having written a word, revealing herself plainly as a Lonovian "nobody from nowhere" whose grasp at glory only makes "everything worse." But told by Zuckerman, who is more concerned with the process of daring-the metamorphic action of Amy-aspiring-to-Anne-than he is with the inevitable defeat of daring, the story puts on a different guise. The Zuckerman story releases Amy from mere silence into an incredibly inventive and expressive silence: the "explanations" piling up like patches of plaster on a dissolving mask; the assertion that Anne Frank is impersonating Amy Bellette!-"So I took the sweet name-to impersonate everything that I wasn't" (p. 153); the combination of madness and cunning as the naively adoring college girl fantasizes herself into an image of terrible suffering transcended by genius. Most Zuckermanian of all-and most challenging to the Lonovian tale, to fictional decorum, and, no small matter as we shall see, the sensibility of Jewish readers-there is the ultimate purpose of Amy's stunning performance and her final explanation of why Anne Frank will remain dead. She wants to seduce her professor. Oh, Manny,I wantto livewithyou! That'swhatI need!... I wantto go home to Europewith you. Listento me, don't say no, not yet. This summerI saw a smallhouse for rent,a stone villa up on a hillside.It was outsideFlorence... Oh, Manny,theirAnne Frankis theirs;I wantto be yourAnne Frank.I'd like at last to be my own. .... And as for who I am-well . .. you've got to be somebody,don't you? (pp. 153-54) Implicit to Amy's resourceful revisions of why it is necessary to keep Anne Frank as a victim of the Holocaust is the revision of the Lonovian story into the Zuckerman story-or, more accurately, into a ZuckermanLonoff story. "Femme Fatale" foregrounds its making, opens to public view the bravura performance of itself; yet it also sustains the jewel-like tale of boldness denied. The fully metamorphic text involves both a deconstruction, an "un-grounding" of the Lonovian tale, and a "regrounding" of it, revising it into part of the dynamic that constitutes such a text. The quality of firm structure and self-sufficiency, of process purified into product, has

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been disturbed, yet the tale survives within the dynamic of impersonation, of meeting: Amy Bellette-as-Anne Frank; Zuckerman-as-Amy Belletteas-Anne Frank; the Lonovian tale-as-Zuckermanian tale. "Femme Fatale" is the scene not only of Amy Bellette's impersonation of Anne Frank, but of Nathan Zuckerman's impersonation of Amy Bellette impersonating Anne Frank. For the story, of course, is really Zuckerman's, and The Ghost Writer is the revelation of how it comes to be written, lifts that act of impersonation to the surface of the text. In the pages preceding "Femme Fatale" we get a full account of the personal experiences, the pressures and desires that Zuckerman will carry into the creation of the story. The metamorphic interaction of Amy and Anne Frank is the refined replica of another metamorphosis, which would be mute in the story were it not for the fact that the condition of Amy-Anne's impersonator has been so graphically divulged beforehand. Virtually everything Zuckerman tells us about himself in chapters 1 and 2 of the novel is grist for the mill of "Femme Fatale." The major details are Zuckerman's instant sexual attraction to Amy, itself immediately complicated by his inference that Amy is Lonoffs mistress (never conclusively confirmed); his deep admiration for Lonoff and his desire to win his approval; and the fact that Zuckerman is presently embroiled in a quarrel with his father over the story of Meema Chaya. In chapter 2, "Nathan Dedalus," when Zuckerman has presumably retired for the night in Lonoffs study, we follow Zuckerman through what appears to be a characteristically incongruous series of actions: reverently sliding his fingers across the keys of Lonoffs typewriter, then masturbating on his daybed; reading (twice) the James story "The Middle Years," a quotation from which is pinned to the study wall, and then standing on the volume on top of Lonoffs desk in order to eavesdrop on the conversation between Lonoff and Amy taking place overhead ("Ah, the unreckoned consequences, the unaccountable uses of art!" [p. 117]). And while all this is going on, Zuckerman is pondering the larger problem of his father's insistence that to the gentiles who read it the story of Meema Chaya "is about one thing and one thing only.... It is about kikes. Kikes and their love of money" (p. 94). Judge Wapter, the family's culture contact, has written Zuckerman, pointing out the pleasure the story will bring the anti-Semites, and has suggested that he see the play The Diary ofAnne Frank as an example of what a Jewish writer can-and should-do for her people. Out of this unwieldy mix of thoughts and emotions-Zuckerman's high

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esteem for James, Lonoff, and Art, his hope of fulfilling Lonoff's expectations for him as a writer, his lust for the mysterious Amy Bellette, his insatiable curiosity as to what is going on between the great writer and his former student in the room above, his fury at Judge Wapter, his anguish at his father's withdrawal of approval and his eagerness to regain it, his affection for the old Sunday family rituals and yet his loud insistence, "I am on my own!" (p. 109)--out of these ingredients Zuckerman imagines "Femme Fatale," inscribing every detail within its simple outline. Although Zuckerman is as invisible as Stephen Dedalus's God in the words of the story itself, the novel as a whole allows us to recognize everywhere a ghostly Zuckerman enacting each of his discordant desires through an imagined Amy Bellette (who is also a real Amy Bellette) enacting her emotions through an imagined and real Anne Frank, who has already enacted hers. The achievement and complexity of the story is that it encompasses this series of transferences even as it maintains their contradictions. Zuckerman makes the central character in his story that Jewish writer whose credentials are indeed impeccable-what could please his father, or Judge Wapter, more?-but he has chosen to impersonate her through the medium of another impersonator who is either crazy or wholly unscrupulous (perhaps what the gentiles will call a "kike" after all). Zuckerman's reverence-for Lonoff, for his father-masks itself as rebellion, his desire for approval as a quest for independence. Zuckerman's Anne Frank is at once the author of a diary over which the gentiles weep in horror and shame and the egomaniacal artist who will hide her identity from the father she loves in order to secure the power of a "masterpiece" (p. 146). These contradictions, and the exhaustive account of how Zuckerman's inner turmoil has given voice to them within the actions and motives of the fiction, bring the theory and style of impersonation to the climax of its richness. The contradictions are the metamorphic tensions of the story-and of The Ghost Writer. The meanings of writing and living are embodied in the impersonations we see everywhere in the text: the engagement of each of Zuckerman's desires with its opposite, of Amy Bellette with Anne Frank, of Zuckerman with nearly every character in the novel. The effect of these impersonations is to ironize and illuminate both terms of the engagement. Zuckerman's incredible behavior in Lonoff's study debases and empowers "Femme Fatale," exposes motives that complicate even as they contaminate. The story seeks to transcend its origins, transmuting indecency into tragedy, only to find itself constantly sliding back into its all-too-mundane

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beginnings. It is merely another story about a writer, Zuckerman-asAmy-as-Anne Frank, exploiting every available scrap of material in hopes of producing-or at least being given credit for-a supreme fiction.6

III My focus on metamorphosis and impersonation in The Ghost Writerparticularly as a mode of writing that incorporates and subverts a Lonovian or High Modernist art-suggests similarities with two distinct and in certain ways opposing aspects of Post-Modern literary theory, one of which addresses the question of the origins of texts, the other the question of how-and whether-texts can ever arrive at coherent meaning. The first of these insists on the necessary reflection within a text of the socioeconomicpolitical-cultural moment of its making, and regards the High Modernist description of the immaculate work of art transcending that moment as both illusory and reactionary. The second aspect, while acknowledging the entanglement of the text within the various pressures that have produced it, also rejects the High Modernist claim that the literary work comprises a complex but completely harmonious system of interlocking elements, whose meaning may no longer be reducible to "paraphrase"-that is to say, what passes for meaning in the workaday world--but nevertheless speaks an intelligible, universal truth. Making use of the deconstructionist critical method, this approach exposes all texts as webs of contradiction, the strands of which are ultimately traceable to an impasse of undecidability. Linking both of these approaches is the common enemy of what they regard as High Modernist mystification-whether it be a mystification of making or of meaning. A text is nothing more than the articulated stuff of "space and time"; and its meaning is less a "radiant truth" than, at best, a stay against confusion, and, at worst, a network of irreconcilable attitudes. Clearly The Ghost Writer, with its elaborate disclosure of the disparate and at times vulgar origins of "Femme Fatale," demystifies the High Modernist notion of the immaculate text whose origins have been con6. For a somewhat different version of the relationship between Amy's and Zuckerman's use of Anne Frank as a way of gaining acceptance in the Jewish community, see Hana WirthNesher, "The Artist Tales of Philip Roth," Prooftexts 3 (September 1983): 263-272.

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sumed, leaving behind a kind of pure, sourceless utterance. Moreover, the novel challenges the possibility of coherent meaning, primarily through its demonstrations of character as a dynamic of clashing identities. Irresolution of character, not only in The Ghost Writer but in Roth's fiction generally, becomes the measure of one's authenticity and even one's courage, as opposed to those who engage in self-deception or repression. The contradictions of The Ghost Writer, as I have tried to demonstrate, are most completely realized in the character of Zuckerman, whose desires constantly turn over into their opposites-his ambition and self-deprecation, reverence and defiance, affection and resentment, modesty and aggressiveness, translating themselves into a fiction as apparently duplicitous as he. But The Ghost Writer, and Roth's fiction generally, goes beyond the Post-Modern inclination to undecidability, to textuality as a perpetual process of its own unraveling. Crucial to Roth's fiction is a version of center or ground, but one that is complicated by the fact that each text carries out a deconstruction of ground through its action of metamorphosis. The burden of the text becomes its effort to divest itself of a secure center-to challenge the conventions of character consistency, of clear, coherent action (not to mention the conventions of social decorum and good taste)-and yet to reground itself, to regain a less substantial center that does not retract the metamorphic disruption. This re-grounding resides in the dramatization of new meaning in the space between conflicting identities-meaning as the very meeting of which impersonations are made. Roth's central characters all experience the recognition of themselves as at once Origin and Other, as ventriloquist and dummy, as given and imagined selves whose "real" identity lies in the experience of that recognition. In The Ghost WriterZuckerman re-grounds his disparate desires, and all their metamorphic versions, in a complex central image of Zuckerman as the Jewish Writer of Silence-that is, as the Jew whose essential identity is to write in and of his silence. This is a "center" which opens into countless contradictions, yet it asserts a genuine control over the entire trilogy, transforming it into a vehicle of meaning-however multilayered-rather than a vast exercise in aimless role-playing, or even nihilism.7 This image of the Jew begins, significantly enough, as the center of 7. Jonathan Brent, in "Philip Roth: Imagination and the Self," in Milbauer and Watson, Reading Philip Roth, makes a strong argument for Zuckerman as in fact a nihilistic character: "a character with no centre at all, a vortex of energy producing a vacuum within" (p. 184).

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Lonoffs High Modernist parables, and becomes "impersonated" by Zuckerman into the center of the entire trilogy. Lonoffs stories, according to Zuckerman, are free of every element of Lonoffs life except one, which exists everywhere in the canon: "I think of you as the Jew who got away," Zuckerman says, "Away from all the Jews, and a story by you without a Jew in it is unthinkable" (p. 51). This is the single ounce of personal self that the immaculate artist Lonoff can allow into his fiction. Each of those "nobod[ies] from nowhere" is a Jew, whose condition epitomizes the paralysis, the "Not living" of which Lonoff has made his eloquent art. Lonoffs spare parables of frustration are the kernel of the Jewish Writer of Silence from which the trilogy emerges. In his revision of the Lonovian aesthetic, Zuckerman borrows that image of the Jew, revising it to his own need. His fictional act in The Ghost Writer is to impersonate the Jewish writer Anne Frank, the writer whose silencing by the Nazis is a crucial part of the eloquence of her art-as Zuckerman claims through his fictionalized Amy Bellette, herself a Jewish writer trying to write her silence through The Diary ofa YoungGirl. The figure of Anne Frank becomes the means by which Zuckerman breaks through the writing block-the threat of silence-which he experiences in the chapter "Nathan Dedalus." He is unable to complete a letter to his father-who has urged him not to publish his latest story-refuses to write a letter to Judge Wapter, and finds himself imaginatively frustrated by the extraordinary scene between Lonoff and Amy Bellette that has just occurred in the room above him: "My astonishment at what I'd overheard, my shame at the unpardonable breach of his trust, my relief at having escaped undiscovered-all that turned out to be nothing, really, beside the frustration I soon began to feel over the thinness of my imagination and what that promised for the future" (p. 121). Having just been toasted at dinner by E. I. Lonoff-"To a wonderful new writer" (p. 29)-Zuckerman suddenly finds himself overwhelmed by life itself into an awareness of the poverty of his talent-and turns immediately, in a burst of bizarre impersonation, to Anne Frank, the murdered writer who made a book about incarceration, who became the most famous Jewish ghost writer of them all. The Jew silenced is what writers make words of in The Ghost Writer, whether the writer be Lonoff, Zuckerman, Amy Bellette, or Anne Frank. And this situation of the writing of silence-this metamorphic tension-is the center of each of the fictions that make up the trilogy and its epilogue.

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The second novel, Zuckerman Unbound, is the silencing of Zuckerman through his very eloquence: his inability to get beyond the consequences of his own stunning success, the novel Carnovsky.No longer writing, he spends all his time running from, sleeping with, or being verbally assaulted by his readers, who range from Alvin Pepler to members of Zuckerman's own family. Pepler is himself a silenced Jew. Champion for three weeks on a rigged quiz show, he was compelled to lose to another contestant, Hewlett Lincoln, because "they couldn't afford to let a Jew be a big winner too long. ... To break the bank you had to be a goy like Hewlett. The bigger the goy, the bigger the haul" (p. 214-215). Now he showers on Zuckerman the words of his victimization by the media and, as it turns out, by Zuckerman himself. In The Anatomy Lesson Zuckerman is silenced by a mysterious pain in his shoulders and back that prevents him from writing, as well as by a literary critic, Milton Appel, who has not only condemned Carnovskybut has rescinded his praise for Zuckerman's earlier work. Following his decision to remain silent by halting his writing career for good and going to medical school, Zuckerman begins to create again, at least vocally, this time by impersonating his critical silencer, Milton Appel-but not before altering Appel's identity from literary critic to editor of a pornographic magazine, Lickety-Split. At the end, however, having shattered his jaw falling on a gravestone, Zuckerman is in a hospital, his "mouth clamped shut" (p. 683). "The Prague Orgy" expands Jewish silence into the national experience of Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, yet for Zuckerman the condition of the Czechs solidifies around another image of Jews silenced. The Prague he visits reminds him of what as a boy he imagined as a Jewish homeland, a city like this, dark, deteriorating, filled with stories, "the national industry of the Jewish homeland .... What you smell are centuries and what you hear are voices and what you see are Jews, wild with lament and rippling with amusement, their voices tremulous with rancor and vibrating with pain.... That such things can happen-there's the moral of the stories-that such things happen to me, to him, to her, to you, to us. That is the national anthem of the Jewish homeland" (pp. 761-762). Zuckerman's quest in Prague, which is to retrieve a collection of unpublished Yiddish stories by a dead Czech Jew, culminates in failure. The police confiscate the manuscripts, which Zuckerman, lacking Yiddish, has been unable to read. The outcome of his quest is nothing more than that

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"Another Jewish writer who might have been is not going to be" (p. 782). The writer with whom the ghost writer disguises himself is himself another ghost. This image of the Jewish writer silenced operates in the trilogy as a regrounding of the deconstruction of a more stable Modernist ground. And yet the image is replete with ironies which threaten to dissipate its power as any kind of center. Nathan Zuckerman is the image at its most complex point of contradiction, for he impersonates the Jewish writer silenced into a trilogy of words; ties himself to the victimized, the frustrated, the muted, the dead as the vehicle for his voice; writes on and on, of and as the nightmare of his own potential silence. The ultimate re-grounding here, however indirect or oblique the reference, is the Jewish writer imagining the Holocaust-the ultimate Silence. This is the fragile center of the trilogy, always imperiled by its position in the context of destabilized utterance that the very fact of the Holocaust has created. The event is not only the silencing of the Jews; it is the event that silences itself, that does not speak, that throws into doubt the validity of all effort at articulation. Imagining-"impersonating"-the Holocaust is Zuckerman's act of re-centering as his only means of understanding that event which is itself the de-centering moment of our time. "The difficulties of telling a Jewish story," Roth has commented, "was finally to become The Ghost Writer'stheme" (RM, p. 166). The Jewish story here is the Holocaust, the "difficulties" are the processes of Zuckerman, who projects himself into the Holocaust through the image of the writer of silence. As remote as anyone can be from the event itself, Zuckerman nevertheless knows first-hand the writing and silence that are the twin terms, the metamorphic dynamic, of his profession. He writes a trilogy of novels about that tension, establishing it as the condition of every writer, of all writing, seizing it as his only possible entrance into what he cannot and must understand. The Jewish writer born and raised in New Jersey impersonates the Jewish writer born in Frankfurt, raised in Amsterdam, and dead at sixteen in Belsen-herself metamorphosed into the voice of six million. That the various silences of Zuckerman should become a metaphor for the Holocaust, or even for the silence of Anne Frank, whose voice survived her death, must appear as unseemly a fictional tactic as anything else in this writer who has never hesitated to shock his readers, particularly the Jews. And yet this is the underlying thrust of Zuckerman Bound, a fact suggested by Roth in an interview shortly before the publication of the trilogy as a

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single volume. Commenting on the incident in The Anatomy Lesson in which Zuckerman's mother, just before her death, writes on a piece of paper the word "Holocaust" instead of her name, Roth identifies the Holocaust as an unstated yet indispensable theme of the trilogy. "Without this word there would be no Nathan Zuckerman, not in Zuckerman's fix" (RM, p. 136). Roth quickly qualifies the statement, as if reinstating a decorum that even he will not violate: "No, no, of course not"-the subject of Zuckerman Bound is not the Holocaust. And yet, in much the same way that Rothian characters are themselves and others, live their lives on the dual planes of surface and shadow, the subject is the Holocaust. This is the powerful yet ghostly force that darkens and deepens this trilogy of novels about writing: "it is simply there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten." Universityof Washington Seattle, Wash.

Reinventing Bruno Schulz: Cynthia Ozick's "The Messiah of Stockholm" and David Grossman's "See Under: Love" Author(s): Naomi Sokoloff Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 171-199 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486239 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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REINVENTING BRUNO SCHULZ: CYNTHIA OZICK'S THE MESSIAH OF STOCKHOLM

AND DAVID GROSSMAN'S SEE UNDER: LOVE by NAOMI SOKOLOFF

Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jewish author of brilliant phantasmagoria, was gunned down by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. He left behind a small corpus of narrative work, published in English under the titles The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.' Another manuscript to which he had devoted several years, The Messiah, remained unfinished. Presumably it perished in the Holocaust, for it has never been recovered. Two recent novels, David Grossman's See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh 'ahavah)2and Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of

1. Both works have been translated by Celina Wieniewska. The Street of Crocodiles (New York: Penguin, 1977) was originally published in Poland in 1934. Sanatorium (New York: Walker, 1978) first appeared in Polish in 1937. 2. Jerusalem: Hakibbutz hameuhad, 1986. All English translations in this essay are my own.

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Stockholm),3 both turn the influence of Bruno Schulz and an evaluation of the events of his life to explicit thematic focus as they engage, too, in an imaginative reconstruction of the lost work, The Messiah. Though they have written very different books in different languages, Ozick and Grossman both take the same constellation of tensions as the raw material of their texts, and they elaborate on this fundamental similarity of concerns as part of a meditation on the power of the imagination, the possibilities of artistic expression, and Jewish identity in the second generation after the Holocaust.

"The Messiah of Stockholm" Ozick's novel is profoundly concerned with writing and fiction, all manners of telling and tales that serve as ways of ordering events, imposing meaning on the world, and arriving at self-definition. The Messiah ofStockholm brings these matters to the fore by amassing a series of plots. The sheer proliferation of fictions suggests that the world portrayed is one dominated by an impulse to invent. The various narrative lines, moreover, all deal with art, invention, or story. Preoccupied as they are with the valuation and, especially, the devaluation of art, the numerous plots privilege themes familiar from Ozick's earlier work and result in a contradictory text engaged in a struggle against itself as a piece of fiction. Ozick takes as her point of departure a pattern familiar from many classics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel: the hero's construction of his own life plot as a way of exploring questions of legitimacy, usurpation, paternity, and the transmission of tradition. This is a process by which, from Stendhal's The Red and the Black to Joyce's Ulysses, a young protagonist discovers possible paths of action open to him under the tutelage of older figures attributed with wisdom and authority. The role models are rarely biological fathers; many novels present their protagonists as orphans or otherwise remove the natural father and so allow the son to choose options. In this way, while undergoing initiation into society, the character creates his own story and comes to define his own authority.4 Ozick's prota3. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. 4. For an account of this concept of plot in the Bildungsroman, see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).

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gonist, too, is an orphan. Having lost his parents in Poland during World War II, he was brought to safety and then brought up by a foster family in Sweden. Therefore, like many of his predecessors in the Bildungsroman tradition, this protagonist as well experiences a metamorphosis of cultural adaptation. His, however, is a peculiarly elective patrimony. Lars Andemening has picked his name out of a dictionary and, in addition, he contrives for himself a spiritual inheritance by conjuring the belief that he is the son of Bruno Schulz. While he spends much of his time seeking out evidence for his theory, his conviction is based not on fact but on a sense of affinity and admiration for Schulz's writing. In other words, Lars chooses as a life story an identification with art, and the art he values is a brand of fantasia. In this connection Schulz functions as an apt inspiration for father invention. At the center of his own work is the fantastic, highly imagined paterfamilias who becomes by turns a cockroach, a crab, a tyrant, and an unkillable generative principle. Ozick early on presents an indication that Lars's brand of fanciful selfinvention is not entirely admirable. Unlike his prototypes from the European novel, Andemening is not a youngster, but a middle-aged man already twice divorced. The fact that he retains a notable quality of youthfulness"unripeness, a tentativeness, an unfinished tone"-is unbecoming and inappropriate, if not downright ludicrous. It brings him contempt from those about him, who often treat him "as if he were just starting out, heaving his greening masculine forces against life" (p. 4). He is mocked especially at the Morgenturn, the newspaper where he works reviewing books. While the other columnists deal with thrillers, cookbooks, and bestsellers, Lars has a penchant for the surreal and the existential. His enthusiasms for such writers as Kafka, Canetti, and Kundera seem to his colleagues misguided, overly serious, too imbued with a childish naivet&.Even more tellingly, the cultivation of literary interests for not just metier, but vocation Larsomeans and mission-defined by the narrator as worship at the "altar of literature" (p. 7). This expression, a loaded phrase in the context of Ozick's previous work, indicates that something is fundamentally wrong. In her essays the author has outspokenly rejected just such overestimation of literature as youthful folly.5 5. See Art and Ardor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), for example: "The Lesson of the Master," pp. 291-297; "The Riddle of the Ordinary," pp. 200-209; and "Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom," pp. 178-199.

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The simple if preposterous plot of the life Lars forges for himself (as son of Schulz cum priest of art) is subsequently challenged by another plot, in two senses. A counterpointed action unfolds which complicates Andemening's initiatives, and that action consists of a conspiracy, a scheme or plot led by someone he has formerly considered an ally. The only one to whom he has confided the secret of his imagined identity is Heidi Eklund, owner of a small bookstore. She provides him with obscure titles in foreign languages and helps him seek out assorted Schulziana in the form of book reviews, photographs, and old letters. One day Heidi brings him a woman who, claiming to be Schulz's daughter, announces that she possesses the original manuscript of The Messiah. Torn between believing and disbelieving, Lars longs for the Messiah but resents the intruder and her usurpation of his filial claim. A kind of detective story ensues as Lars seeks to uncover the connection between Adela (the purported daughter), Heidi, and her husband. Gradually it becomes clear that the entire manuscript episode represents an intrigue engineered by Heidi and her two cohorts. Adela's father is not Bruno Schulz but Dr. Eklund, nC Eckstein, a forger of passports and trafficker in illegal refugees. The three Eklunds have provided a sham account of their lives in order to impress Andemening and so engage his support in the literary establishment for their Messiah. The upshot of this plot is a disillusionment on Lars's part with the pursuit of art. The authenticity of the manuscript is never entirely disproved, but, convinced that the document is a fake, Lars in a fury burns the pages. Subsequently, no longer in thrall to Bruno nor trying to pattern himself after a mentor, the protagonist takes responsibility for his own life. In the process the binary opposition of values with which he once viewed the world-excellence/vulgarity, highbrow art/ pragmatic realities-goes through a transformation; anguished over the elusiveness of cherished ideals, Andemening opts for palpable, outstanding success as a mediocrity rather than uncertainty in the realm of hopeful dreams. Devotion to art, cast in a dubious light from the start, here dissipates and falls into disregard as Lars grinds out trivial reviews with astonishing alacrity, soon surpassing his surprised rivals at the paper in popularity and professional status. Even as this main plot charts the protagonist's changing relation to and estimation of art, a multiplicity of subsidiary plots in the novel also provide a forum for pondering questions of referentiality, authenticity in art, and the nature of illusion. Subplots and stories within the story explore a cluster of semantically related ideas bearing a range of connotations and values:

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invention, artifice, illusion, fabrication, falseness, imitation, plagiarism, sham, fraud, lies, deceit, betrayal. Invention on a small scale, in its most trivial and even degraded form, takes place in what the text terms "this little pond" (p. 13) of the Swedish literary scene: the "stewpot" world of translators, critics, editors, and writers. On one occasion, for example, a reviewer exposes a well-known poet as a plagiarist. Doing so, he exposes his own weaknesses as well. Previously he had praised the poet too highly, and now, by acknowledging the literary theft, he reveals himself to have been a careless, unprofessional reader. As one fraud surfaces along with another, gossipers add to the sum of dishonesties by proceeding to invent without regard for fact. To explain the poet's attempted ruse they wildly postulate all sorts of motivations; his, they say, was a case of "rage, malice, revenge, despair," or perhaps "puckishness, camp, comedy, dada. A postmodernist plot" (p. 63). By using the word "plot," the implied narrator advertently or inadvertently reinforces the emphasis of the entire novel on the making of tales as a way of conceiving the world-but one which is intimately associated with falseness. Such gossip sessions also become an opportunity for self-castigation and mocking excoriation of others about the inauthenticity of Swedish culture. Significantly, Lars's colleague Gunnar fills his articles with American expressions. These terms, artificial because borrowed and alien, are referred to as "velveetisms" (p. 68): not a natural product but a processed, manufactured one. In a world fraught with the phony and the fake, writing depends on imitation. When Lars finally makes an accommodation to that world by composing ordinary reviews of popular fiction, there arise comparable concerns with originality and fakery. He begins his first piece, the one that sends him to the top of the professional heap, with remarks on a title called Illusion. In this bestseller about deceit and ambition, an elderly spinster falls in love with a younger man. She is a talented artist too modest to exhibit her paintings, and the man marries her on the condition that she let him claim the paintings as his own. She does; he presents her art to the public with great success, then abandons her for another woman. This embedded narrative, like the main plot of the novel, associates illusion both with art or mimetic pretension and with fraud or betrayal, inextricably linking the two phenomena. The most important embedded narrative in this text is, of course, the alleged Messiah. Presumably the pinnacle of serious art, for Lars the potentially redemptive moment, this fiction, too, reveals deep misgivings about

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the imagination and its creative powers. First the pseudo-text envisions a Drohobycz populated solely by idols: all human beings who remain alive have been scattered about the globe. The idols are given to self-aggrandizement, competition, and the exaltation of their own false values by the worship they demand from one another. Reminiscent of the tailor's dummies that come to life in The Street of Crocodiles,these creatures combine inspiration from Schulz with Ozick's own recurring interest in golems and idolsspecifically, her moral abhorrence of idolatry and of the contemporary tendency to adore creativity and creation in a way that eclipses worship of the Creator.6 Arriving on this scene, the Messiah turns out to be a strange contrivance which consists of ordinary inanimate material (cotton or cardboard perhaps), but more closely resembles a body organ. Neither he, she, nor it, the Messiah is "alive, organic, palpitating with wild motion and disturbanceyet not like a robot, not like a machine." The text tells us that "it was as if a fundamental internal member had set out to live on its own in the great world-a spleen say, or a pancreas, or a bowel, or a brain" (p. 109). The Messiah also resembles a book (the book in Sanatoriumthat Schulz likens to a cabbage rose), has numerous flippers which may be pages impressed with a kind of cuneiform ("the letters of an unknown alphabet" such as Schulz had always sought; p. 110), and emerges out of a synagogue basement. Finally the Messiah self-destructs and then gives rise to the flight of a single bird. (See Appendix A.) What is the reader to make of these bizarre passages? To begin with, the clumsy, heaving assortment of mismatched parts which is "dimly frightening but also somewhat hobbled and limited" surely serves more as a comic parody of Schulz's irrepressible inventiveness than as a serious emblem of redemption. At the same time, the scene is more motivated by idea, by the conceptual dictates of a thesis, than by enthrallment, like Schulz's own, to transmogrifications, metamorphoses, and febrile imaginings. Here there is a clear architecture of renewal; one kind of imaginary construction follows another, producing succeeding layers of organicism (idol, quasi-biological contraption, then bird). A sequential rejection of the man-made results finally in a simple instance of living vitality. No doubt there is also here 6. Ozick's own essay on Bruno Schulz in Art and Ardor (pp. 224-228) is informative in this regard. Identifying in his art a "religion of animism" through which things come alive "with spiteful spirit force," this essay directly associates Schulz's fiction with idolatrous qualities.

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some suggestion of post-Holocaust Poland in which many have died and many have been exiled, where a true, living, organic Jewish culture is a thing of the past. This passage therefore presents a product of the imagination as correction to a prevailing situation or human order, and art is envisioned as an antidote to spiritual and moral bankruptcy. Emerging out of a synagogue, the Messiah is associated furthermore with Jewishness, and this is ostensibly one of its virtues. Like the golem of Prague, though, the Messiah is not purely a source of solace and comfort but in part a menacing and ill-fated invention. As the narrative remarks, the creature/contraption is only erroneously connected to a character named "Moses the Righteous." Furthermore, upon close inspection the writing on the flippers proves to consist of images, pictures of those very same idols described before. Reconfirming suspicions about this Messiah's credentials, the entire vision later turns out to be intimately associated with a lie-it is part of the Eklunds' scheme, and so it, too, like the earlier stages of the revelation, is undermined and in good measure invalidated. In Schulz's narratives there always comes a moment when, after indulging in unfettered flights of imagination, the narrator repudiates the ficitional world just devised. Magnifying this principle in her own text, Ozick consistently leaves open the possibility of undercutting illusion. While the outcome at the level of narrated events (the lie in the main plot) suggests that this Messiah is indeed a false one, the deliberately distortive purposes of parody at the level of narration (in the framed tale) leave little room for doubt. Poking fun as it does at Messiah invention, Ozick's lampoon contributes to a scene which reconfirms her familiar opinions on art as something inimical to Jewish values. Portraying art as an ineffective cure for social ills, this scene constitutes a key to the novel and prevents The Messiah of Stockholm from becoming simply another text about textuality which playfully calls attention to the making of fictions such as itself. Not purely a meditation on art, the book reinscribes questions about writing in debate about social circumstanceparticularly, Jewish self-definition and the ways in which the second generation from the Holocaust relates to that tragic past. Lars, for example, identifies with his Jewish roots through love of Bruno Schulz, but his seeking of spiritual fulfillment through an embrace of art represents false salvation; Andemening believes Bruno's creations to be of more importance than the fact of Schulz's murder, and so this character seems incapable of keeping priorities straight, of acknowledging the importance of the collective history

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of destruction the Jewish people has suffered. Consequently he arrives at troublingly insubstantial identity. Putting into relief the error of confusing art or artifice with life, other refugees who populate this novel also confound make-believe with reality, invention with identity. Individuals who must forge a new life for themselves, these characters sometimes go further and concoct their own life stories. Not the protagonist alone, but also Heidi, her family, and all the figures who walk into her shop search for predecessors or make them up. Some, like Lars, do so naively, and others, like Adela, cynically. The blatant imposters fabricate their origins to inflate their social status, and this modus vivendihas become common practice since authenticity of identity is impossible after the Holocaust. Too much social past has been destroyed and the stories cannot be verified. For these reasons contemporary Sweden, with its influx of Polish Jews since 1968, provides a setting which allows Ozick to muse conveniently not just on Nobel prizes and literary greatness, but also on counterfeit transfigurations of identity and dubious self-conceptions as a collective phenomenon. Troublingly insubstantial identity is a problem Ozick has frequently discussed and so ties The Messiah of Stockholm in with the author's earlier work. As the novel puts into relief a series of questionable tales which take on currency and prominence due to a lack of legitimating, authoritative context, it recalls her belief that, in an absence of religious commitment and firm ties to the past, many contemporary Jews have turned to a series of unsatisfactory substitute expressions of Jewishness-including the celebration of fiction and contemporary Jewish writers. Offering a view of art as just such a form of ersatz community, a weak substitute for shared social values and customs, the novel expresses dissatisfaction with a Jewishness that, after the Holocaust, depends on imagined or adopted affinities with Jewish ancestors rather than on a natural process of succession, the inheriting of traditions and a sense of self from previous generations.' The Messiah of Stockholm ends with a renunciation of art: partly because of the hateful petty treacheries of the literary world, and partly because art is an inappropriate alternative to religion, but above all because in a cultural void self7. To be sure, Ozick has discussed these matters mainly in connection with what she perceives as the parochialism, superficiality, and inauthenticity of much American Jewish life. Her treatment of the Swedish locale in this novel should be understood as an echo of such concerns with assimilation. Not only is the protagonist a highly assimilated Jew; in addition, Sweden as a whole here represents a small nation or people torn between its own genuine traditions and the allure of a larger, cosmopolitan culture.

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invention cannot take the place of a more substantial common heritage. Though a tale of multiple plots, thoroughly concerned with fiction, this is a novel that disallows the validity of plot and invention in a context devoid of referential certainty. These major thematic concerns are bound up with two prominent artistic qualities of the novel: a move away from verisimilitude in characterizaion and a pronounced, though uneasy treatment of metaphor. At least one critic has found the protagonist here to be more concept than character: lacking psychological density or vividness, Lars functions as an abstraction while the novel remains devoid of the resonance of real experience. Ozick, the argument goes, seeks "to compensate for the thinness of novelistic imagination by sheer force of stylistic razzle-dazzle."8 Similar kinds of comments constitute a familiar criticism of Ozick's work. Others, too, have remarked that her prose is often mannered or overwritten and that her fiction, veering away from lived and shared experience into fantasy, is not grounded in a sociologically recognizable Jewish community. Nonetheless, whether or not the reader welcomes the whimsical quality and artifice of Ozick's various pieces, both her methods of characterization and her prose in The Messiah of Stockholm can be accounted for as an integral part of the text and an expression of the basic motivations at work in this novel. While the text presents its main character clearly as idea, it employs a proliferation of wild metaphors and a language sometimes abruptly divorced from the objects of representation. Both features emerge out of the underlying concern of the text with invention and with fiction as spurious make-believe. To argue this point it is incumbent to keep in mind first that the novel is not without cognizance of its characters' cerebral qualities. On the contrary, the text flaunts their inner emptiness and inverisimilitude as related phenomena, twin mainfestations of inauthentic identity. The choice of Lars's name testifies deliberately to this effect. "Andemening" signifies spirit, both in the sense of intellect or imagination and also in the sense of ghost or specter. This is a character who conceives himself as idea: he has made himself up and dubbed himself a phantom. The remnant of a destroyed culture who disguises his own Jewishness through assimilation and then seeks a specious reconnection with the Jewish past, Lars is a specter of his true identity. Leading to similar implications, a conversation late in the narrative reminds

8. Robert Alter, "Defenders of the Faith," Commentary 84, no. 1 (July 1987): 52-55.

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Lars of the fictive nature of his own experience. When, after the burning of the manuscript, Adela comes back to see him, he speaks to her of his daughter and she disbelieves his stories. As he himself acknowledges, his word is not trustworthy, for a "father inventor can just as easily invent a child." Adela therefore chides him, "Isn't anything of yours stuck in the here and now? You should ask yourself if you exist. Maybe you're only someone's theory?" (p. 141). Recalling the protagonist's ghostly, insubstantial quality which derives from his deracination, this passage also reminds the reader that Andemening is but a character in a novel and his life, in more ways than one, a fiction. In a comparable episode Lars calls attention to the fictive status of other characters. He notes that Heidi is named after a character from a book and the name Adela is taken from the tales of Bruno Schulz. Andemening reflects that there is something inappropriate in dignifying figments of the imagination by calling people after them, and through such remarks the narrative airs the conviction that fiction should remain clearly subordinate to a greater, more compelling reality. All of these developments demonstrate that the text directs effort away from achieving persuasive representations of complex personality and so reinforces attention to lack of authenticity. (Significantly, at the end Adela calls herself "Olga"; her discarding of the earlier name attests to the flimsiness and superficiality of that first persona.) In parallel to the abstract characterization, Ozick emphasizes another kind of abstraction: she deliberately refrains from a bold engagement with fictional constructs in the reproduction of The Messiah; reticent to endorse the legitimacy of that most important fiction within her fiction, Ozick does not create the actual words of a messianic text or unleash her own powers of invention without qualification or disclaimer. Instead, she summarizes and analyzes, providing an abstract of the work in question. The implication is that a messianic text per se is (or should be) beyond the reach of her artistry. In addition, when trying to vivify the Messiah through comparisons, the narrative hastens to qualify its assertions. Ozick notes that the creature/ thing resembles an "internal member," but immediately adds,"this is only by way of hint and suggestiveness, not analogy or example" (p. 109). Unwilling to breathe life into the metaphor, Ozick at once produces the trope and repudiates or withdraws it. Similarly, she describes the Messiah as having sails "like the arms of a windmill" (p. 110) and then quickly interjects, "But these numerous 'arms' were, rather, more nearly flippers." The quotation marks around the word arms underscore the point made by the

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retraction itself: that the verbal description is inadequate to the circumstance. By the same token, the label "cuneiform" for the markings on the flippers is at once ventured and canceled out by the assertion that this script was "unreadable" and indeed not writing at all but pictures. The entire passage, in effect, presents a series of equivocations about the referential power of its own words and the efficacy of metaphor or simile to describe the Messiah. While the opening of the paragraph recalls Schulz's own dependence on metaphor, his comparison of the "holy original Book" to a petal rose, Ozick's ensuing remarks are all set up to undermine the means of such an aesthetic. In a related move, Ozick reinforces similar points by providing a lengthy description of The Messiah's compositional qualities. Dwelling on a comparison with the ocean, she notes that Lars reads The Messiah and thinks of mountain ranges along the bottom of the sea. He imagines a sea so platonicallydark and deep that even the cuttling blindfishswim away, toward higher water-but within this overturnedspittoon of an abyss are crisscrossingrivers,whirlpoolstwistingtheirfoamingnecks,multiplestreams braiding upwards,cascades sproutingrivulets like hairs, and a thousand shoots and spraysbombardingthe oceanscape'speaks. (p. 106)

Having provided this conceit, Ozick undercuts its worth: "But this understanding applied only to a consciousness of system. The Messiah was a waterless tract." Emphasizing a troubling dissociation of form and content in the manuscript (and so implying that the oceanic capaciousness may be just so much stylistic razzle-dazzle), the author also commits herself to metaphor only in the restricted context of formalistic analysis. In her discussion of substance, as demonstrated above, she is much more hesitant. It should be noted, too, that in the passage just cited the use of metaphor is ambivalent; the trope sabotages itself from within. To liken the manuscript's organization to "a spittoon of an abyss" is to deflate any sense of awesome grandeur, any attribution of magnificence to the text's expansive, oceanic dimensions. Metaphor here seems at once to beckon, to prove duplicitous or unsatisfactory, and to erode its own value. This kind of ambivalence expressed toward metaphor-as a tool at once effective and ineffective-carries over into many aspects of The Messiah of Stockholm as a whole, especially characterization. Given to hyperbole, the

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prose of this novel functions both as a reflection of Lars's excessive admiration for Bruno and as a parody of Schulz's own writing. Take, for example, the following scene in which Lars is composing a review: He wroteit straightoff, a furnaceburningfat. It was as if his pen, sputtering alongthe line of rapidlettersit ignited,flungout haloesof hot grease[. . .] He was a dervish,he penetratedeverything.Whenhe waswithinsightof conquest he beganto fuzz over with vertigo;he was a little frightenedof all he knew.A greasedbeak tore him off his accustomedledge and broughthim to a high place beyond his control. Somethinghappenedin him while he slept. It was not the sleep of refreshmentor restoration.He had no dreams.Afterwardhis lids clickedopen like marionette'sand he saw:whathe saw, beforehe hadformulatedeven a wordof it, was his finishedwork.He saw it as a kindof vessel, curved,polished,hollowedout. In its cup lay an alabasteregg with a single glitteringspot, no, not an egg;a globe, marvelouslyround.An eye. A human eye, his own; and then not his own. His father'smurderedeye. (p. 8) Lars experiences his hallucination as visionary truth and a sign that he, like Schulz, is a broker of extraordinary insights. The reader must view his illusions in quite another way; the exaggeration with which Ozick describes his intensity suggests that Lars takes himself entirely too seriously. However, while effective in this way, the description also proves problematic. The sheer proliferation of mixed metaphors grates on the ear (Lars is at turns dervish, furnace, conqueror, marionette), and erodes the coherence of the passage as psychological portrait. Since the choice of imagery and the diction here are not clearly ascribed to Lars's own discourse-that is, since it is not necessarily Lars who sees himself here in inflated, contradictory terms-the disjointed incongruities and the excess threaten to function less as an expos6 of Lars's shortcomings than as a recreation of those same discordant, overstated qualities in the authorial voice. A metaphor offered at the end of the novel seems to provide a response to this scene and to indicate some of the generative aesthetic tensions of the narrative. In the final paragraphs of the novel Ozick's protagonist explicitly reveals a propensity for metaphor-making that recalls the author's own extravagant imagery. In this way the novel lays bare and addresses the question of its narrative technique. During the course of events Lars has been haunted by a burning smell; he offers various possible explanations to account for the odor, but is unable to pin down its origins. Perhaps it emanates from his own sweat, perhaps from the factories of Stockholm. The

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smell intensifies, and finally the following explanation invites interpretation as metanarrative commentary: It was as if Stockholm,burningwas slowly turninginto Africa:the smell, winteror summerof bakingzebra. He knew this was a hallucination-it was a sort of hallucination-Heidi would have insistedit was a hallucination-it was a fancy. (p. 143) In other words, the smell, which is something pervasive, deeply resistant to rationalization, leaves Lars with a displaced, unmotivated image that fails in its referential force. His metaphor is finally less enigmatic than simply inappropriate, and the text recognizes it as such. This dynamic suggests a failure of mentation to capture and account for reality and so directs an accusation at the writer or intellectual who assigns too much worth to the imagination or the capacity of words to conjure a novel reality. That the allpervasive smell of ashes in the air cannot but recall for the reader the chimneys of Hitler's death camps reconfirms this reading (Nazi brutality has been mentioned recurrently throughout the text). In Lars's world, what remains ultimately significant is something more trenchant, more mundane and palpable, than whimsy. The last lines of the novel underscore such a conclusion: Lars grieves as he envisions a man with a metal box, the one in which the Messiah had been stored, "hurrying and hurrying toward the chimneys" (p. 117). The human being falling victim to the Holocaust-this alone is undeniable and not literature, fantasy, or a self-proclaimed heritage of artistic merit. Ozick's relationship to metaphor in this novel, then, remains uneasy. As it retreats from engagement with mimetic persuasiveness and debunks the making of metaphors, The Messiah of Stockholm conveys skepticism about the capacities of fiction. As such it circumvents any possible attack arising out of its author's own misgivings about the confusing of art and life. At the same time the novel runs the risk of enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy. At once giving rein to whimsical metaphor and announcing the dangers of just such a move, the text constructs itself out of cross-purposes and at times divests itself of referential force. To be sure, these matters represent aesthetic questions and so, arguably, a brand of criticism not suitably applied to a book that insists on the insubstantial significance and worth of aestheticism. Moreover, as a fiction that decries amoral literature, the text opens the pos-

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sibility of asserting its own worth as fiction with a moral.9 Yet there remains a nagging contradiction as the novel flirts with self-subversion: this is a novel which undercuts the value of imaginative writing as a way to recover the past or define oneself, even as the text grapples in its own right as a piece of fiction with questions of self-definition. Ozick therefore poses a dilemma: by which criteria, aesthetic or moral, should this narrative be judged?

"See Under:Love" David Grossman has created a fiction about Bruno Schulz which, like The Messiah of Stockholm, is centrally concerned with narratives and the telling of stories as a way characters define their lives and negotiate personal interactions. Grossman, though, has written a text in many ways opposed to Ozick's. Creating multiple plots that revolve overtly about art, the imagination, and their power or powerlessness against horror, his story entails a struggle with mimetic limitations and the inadequacies of language. Finally, however, he endorses fiction as a genuine expression of the self and a way to come to terms with the Shoah. By contrast with The Messiah of Stockholm, Grossman's work engages less in parody than in reverent imitation of Schulz and so reveals, on the part of its author, a very different relationship to the literary predecessor along with a different perspective on love, writing, and the role of the artist. These issues work themselves out in "Bruno," the second chapter of See Under: Love. This text can be read effectively as a self-contained narrative, but depends in part for its intelligibility on its relation to chapter 1. The first section of the novel presents an account of a child growing up in Israel who is the son of Holocaust survivors. Preoccupied from a young age with his parents' traumatic past, he dreams of one day becoming a writer. The remaining three segments of the novel, which grapple in diverse ways with attempts to approach the Holocaust in art, can be understood as an outgrowth of the protagonist's early experience and as an example of his forays into writing.

9. In a paperpresentedat the 1987 MLA Conventionin San Francisco("BrunoSchulz and CynthiaOzick'sTheMessiahof Stockholm"),SarahBlacherCohendealtwiththe novelas fictionprotestingthe amoralityof fiction.However,she saw Lars'srelationto Schulzless as an evasionof the Holocaustthan as an attemptto claim a pedigreeof suffering.

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From the start of chapter 2 Grossman's approach diverges from that of Ozick. While The Messiah of Stockholm opens by focusing on the ghost of Bruno Schulz (the writer's influence on a ghostly second generation and a search for a phantom father), Grossman begins by introducing Schulz directly into his story as an active agent of the plot. "Bruno" takes as its point of departure the Polish writer himself taking his own departure from the world of the everyday. Pursued by the SS, this character dives from the end of a pier into the ocean near Danzig. Schulz claims he is fleeing not primarily from fear of the Nazis but from disillusionment with a life of conformity and anonymity. Brutality is but one more aspect of this depersonalized world he shuns, which the pen, his own writing, cannot redeem. Reflecting on the manuscript he has abandoned, Bruno realizes belatedly that "the Messiah will not come in writing [. . .] in the letters of this language stricken by elephantiasis" (p. 79). Consequently he searches out "a new alphabet" in a realm of perception never before experienced. Even as Grossman takes the plunge into fictional imagination and a reinvention of Schulz's life, his character plunges into the sea, and gradually becomes a fish. For Ozick the ocean serves in the capacity of an "as if," a half-heartedly endorsed metaphor for the abundance, depth, complexities, and fluidity of Schulzian writing. Grossman actualizes the metaphor as he actualizes Bruno Schulz, turning him into a dramatic character. The dissociation from experience, the cerebral quality manifest in The Messiah of Stockholm, here accedes to a wealth of visual imagery and dramatic actions which constitute an overt attempt to capture with immediacy the extraordinary richness of an imagined reality. While Ozick looks askance at "fishy" stories (p. 58), Grossman revels in portraying fishly existence. For Bruno, being a fish is like being born again. The sea offers vast new panoramas and is teeming with novel possibilities of sensation. o p oimaruru 1K r'n,• ...

"I

i vI

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i

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t rm7 S rn?y, T~ T~ )31?~13~ 7~ ~xi~l 51V1

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there'sa smellto the watersuddenlyyou senseit not the smellyou get standing on the bank or the shore there'sa smell to the waterdistinctfrom all others like the soundsof the sea differentinsideit like colorslike thoughtswhichare differentinside it stolen by peddlersagile slaves of the sea those murmuring

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waves and they come back as an echo tempestuousbillowingto breakon the foaming roar of the tide bubblingin the waterymarketslike a fair fragrant crowdsthere'sa smell to the water... Here, as in Ozick's Stockholm, smell is part of those dimensions of life which defy verbal description. However, while her novel indicated referential inadequacies of language by proffering disjoint, unmotivated metaphor, this text attempts to stretch the mimetic capacities of narrative convention. Developing lengthy, unpunctuated, rhythmically repetitive sentences, Grossman engages in formal experiment to convey the fluidity, monotony, rich dreaminess, and generally unbroken peace of oceanic life. In short, he creates a stream of consciousness designed to represent Bruno's consciousness in the stream. To be sure, this is a realm of being which defies ordinary expression. Bruno in fact meditates openly on a fundamental premise of the entire episode: that language is an impoverished medium not commensurate with the world of experience he lives.'0

:m'tm .n,•nn1; 53 n•: n133i• ;3nLnt3 o'mn-n ",m,,n,,",n~n:,, ",n,''lO,,,",re'm,,",O';n•:,,

(p. 120) ?nmann nVlK

Lord,said Bruno(who was neverreligious)why do you sendall thesemillions of salmon around the world in endless circles?Couldn'tyou suffice with a singlefish?a pair of salmon?Why,even people,the cruelestof animals,have learned the wisdom of using symbols:we say "God," "man," "sorrows," "love,""life,"and so put the wholeexperiencein a littlecompartment.How is it we areable to do this and notyou?Whycan'tyou preventthingsfrombeing created fullblown, from the moment they pass through your teeming thoughts?Why are your symbols so detailed,why such profligate,painful

10. Grossman pursues similar themes-the distance between words and actions; the search for a secret, highly personal and intimate language; and the difficulties of narrating one's lifealso in his earlier novel, Hiyukh ha-gedi [The smile of the lamb] (Tel Aviv, 1983).

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abundance?Is it becausewe are morecapablethan you of guessingat the sufferingand pain containedin that little box, and so preferto leave it sealed? At work here, then, are both a bold engagement with fictional constructs and a simultaneous retreat back to consider the limitations of art and language. Later this ambivalence intensifies in a number of ways. First the text introduces another protagonist-Shlomo, the child of Part I now grown up and become a young writer. He discusses with his wife the difficulties he has had in writing about Bruno. By naturalizing the Schulz section as a product of Shlomo's imagination, 'Ayen 'erekh deliberately undermines the suspension of disbelief called for by the episode portraying Bruno in the sea. Subsequently, complicating the picture further and disallowing any simple legitimation of Shlomo's context as the determinative one, the narrative also presents the young man in extended conversation with the sea. More than simply an imaginative space for plot development or an arena for Bruno's reflections on language, the ocean is personified as a woman at turns coy, coquettish, capricious, passionate, domineering, beautiful, and powerful. She has fallen in love with Schulz and takes Shlomo as a confidant because he, too, is profoundly drawn to Bruno. (Having read everything that author wrote and having copied long passages word for word, Shlomo has sought to confuse his identity with Schulz's no less than does Lars Andemening.) This man later reciprocates the ocean's confidences by sharing with her accounts of his domestic troubles: his alienation from his wife and from the lover he passionately desires who has left him. As an active partner in dialogue, the ocean creates a narrative frame that incorporates, absorbs, or swallows the writer and so functions as an in-between reality, mediating between Bruno's plot and the plot of Shlomo's life. By providing the sea with a voice of her own, both in her talks with Shlomo and in extended monologues addressed to Bruno, Grossman once again makes a demonstratively fictional move that imbues the imaginary realm with verbal immediacy. Here, for example, is the ocean speaking to Bruno:

; v ?'Irnnv:

n pni

v rrii ,rnn ,,n

KrDv ?p v3i nn ,n?,vn n'nn (p. 102)

' nl ,V1K",

I haven'tforgotten,Bruno,I'll neverforgetthe momentyou enteredme, the tremorI feltthe momentyou dove fromthe wharf,andyourbodyexudedthat

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NAOMISOKOLOFF warmthand therewas also somethingelse that I didn'tknow then, at first I thoughtit was the smellof littlecreatureslikeyou in heat,andonly afterthat I found it was simply the smell of despair...

The attitude reflected by this approach is quite different from that of Ozick's narrative; while her text undermines or devalues the powers of the imagination, Grossman grants the realm of the fictive striking vitality and bodymost keenly and literally by means of personification. This move is one that claims for fictive creations a legitimacy and integrity of their own. Consequently, while See Under:Love self-consciously plays on the issue of artistic convention, it never invokes a distrust of fiction comparable to that demonstrated in The Messiah of Stockholm. The dialogic exchanges Grossman devises (Shlomo-sea, Shlomo-wife, sea-Bruno) indicate the most salient differences between the two novels, as they define for the entire "Bruno" segment the properties, purposes, and values of narration. For Ozick's characters writing is something done to acquire status. It is a transaction, at best a transmission assuring continuity between generations, but more often a hypocritical posturing for the sake of garnering power and celebrity. In Grossman there prevails a confessional mode: writing and telling are avenues to intimacy and self-expression. This distinction informs the formal structure of each work. The Messiah of Stockholm depends on varieties of plot, layers of narrative lines, and fiction that bring to the fore increasing expos6s of inauthenticity; See Under. Love, by contrast, features interrupted plots which accentuate ever-renewed, sometimes anguished attempts to delve deeper into the self and the emotions. The text offers shifting narration that starts and stops as it introduces varying speech situations and speakers who endeavor to arrive at insight via introspection and highly charged exchanges of views. Significantly, one account does not discount any other. Switches from obtrusively fictional portions of the text to sober memoirs and authorial self-awareness alternate with the intermediary zone of the oceanic conversations. The latter feature plausible meditations (entertained by the main character) and also entirely implausible responses (from beyond the world of familiar possibility, i.e., from the sea). There is no ending to this process, no moment of closure from which one can place a framework around any other passage and so determine what is more real or meaningful, what is less. The final paragraphs find Shlomo refusing to tell the sea any more tales about Bruno, while she successfully cajoles him, against his will, to enter

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once again into the cycle of narrating. Not without self-conscious cuteness Shlomo remarks at one point that the story of encounter between him and the sea is one of hat~hala,'emza ve-hof (p. 88), "beginning, middle, and shore." A pun on the Hebrew word for "end," this formulation suggests that there is no definitive version of plot in this narrative, but rather ongoing interaction; a space of interminable ebb and flow, approach and retreat, rather than decisive start and finish. What matters is personal truths, not verification, sincerity and not authoritative stances. Altogether, while both texts are obsessed with the telling of tales, one is concerned with public discourse and the other with private, one with deception and the other with pursuit of candor. The separate emphases of the novels develop importantly in the treatment of the erotic. In Ozick's novel Lars, Heidi, and Adela research Bruno's liaisons with women in the hope of establishing the legitimacy of his (albeit illegitimate) offspring. Who is the usurper and who entitled to claim Schulz as a father?-these are the urgent questions. The characters of See Under. Love, though, trade accounts of their inner lives as a way of reassessing their past, bringing to expression the inmost recesses of their being, and seeking mutual understanding. The quest for intimacy becomes so central to this novel because it is part of an overall celebration of the irreducible value of each unique human being. The desire to know someone else, the search for understanding, is presented as a response to the Shoah, which was terrible above all, in Shlomo's estimation, for its flagrant disregard of individual human lives. Whereas in Ozick's world story usually means evasion, retreat, or denial of painful truths about the Holocaust, here art, telling, and loving are all aspects of a single, more constructive preoccupation: a need to appreciate one's self and others in all their particularity, as a way of reckoning with the indiscriminate, mass destruction the Holocaust wrought on incomprehensibly large numbers of people. It is for this reason that Shlomo, for example, pursues his career as a writer. For him, to experience the vividness of the imagination is to counteract the forces of annihilation by reclaiming the power of personal thought. In addition, writing provides him a kind of therapy as it allows him to think through problems of deindividualization. Joining Bruno up with a school of salmon, the writer can ruminate on relations between the weak and the strong, the loner and the crowd, the value of remaining true to oneself (pp. 129-135, for example). In his daily life Shlomo is less successful at dealing with these same issues. As the son of survivors, keenly aware of his own heri-

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tage of persecution, he constantly questions how it is possible to go on living after the terrible knowledge of what happened to the Jews in Europe, how it is possible to have faith in human life and not to be paralyzed by fear or hatred. The intensity of art offers him some relief, but is only a partial solution to his quandaries. While it beckons him, he also retreats from it, for he fears his own vulnerability and sensitivity. Bracing himself for the next catastrophe, he steels himself not to love too much, not to feel so much, and so not have so much to lose (p. 95). This is why he declares he must fight against Bruno's influence and turn away from the world of imagination. Explaining this outlook in some detail, he confesses to his wife that at times his awareness of life's intensity overwhelms him, especially when he is caught in a crowd.

I walk in the streetand feel that the enormousstreamof life is drowningme. The tears, for example. "Excuseme?" I look at the faces, and know that behindthat tenthof a millimeterof thin humanskin arethe tears,in the ducts. "Peopledon't cry so easily."Butthe tearsarethere.Sometimes,whenthe bus stops suddenlyin the street,I imaginethe soundof thosetears,all the weeping that staysinside.Not just the tears.Also the pain.And the terriblefragilityof everylimb of the body. Also the pleasure,of course.The pleasuresthat want to be realized.So much dangerouscargo loaded in one small body. The relation of potential to actuality here parallels the problem of mimesis and artistic realization. Shlomo welcomes but also fears all the hidden richness, the wealth of experience and perceptions inside people that are most often trammeled by conventional behavior as by ordinary language and narrative convention. Part of the reason for Shlomo's retreat from sensitivity is the broken love affair with Ayala. He is still smarting from her rejection, for she made him feel alive, filled with the energy of that other dimension of living which Bruno represents, and she brought him the mixture of mystery, intimacy, and creativity he so desired. Ayala understood his obsession with the Holo-

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caust better than anyone else and, in addition, the erotic attraction she held for him brought out in Shlomo a kind of creative power; his love, like his writing, allowed him to conjure things into being, materialize ideas with a touch. "Despite my many shortcomings," he remarks, "I was gifted with the surprising talent of being able to turn Ayala into a vase" (p. 113). In his hands she sprouts handles and her lips become oval, the mouth of a jug saying "drink me, drink me" like Alice's magic bottle in Wonderland. As her lover he can work marvelous transfigurations, converting her at turns into a strawberry or cotton candy. In effect, with her he produces sweetness, a fluidity of interaction, and metamorphoses akin in their vitality to Schulz's transformative inventions. Shlomo's wife in less tempestuous ways also tries to infuse her life with creativity and intimacy. She, too, demonstrates that inventiveness and imagination are invoked in this novel less as ruse or evasion than as commitment to actuality. Ruth explains to Shlomo, for example, that the same forces which impel him to art impel her to preserve her marriage despite her husband's infidelity. At stake is not living for art, but the art of living, of leading one's life as a creative and sensitive engagement with the individuals whose lives she touches. While Shlomo immerses Bruno in the ocean, seeking for both of them a new kind of fulfillment and rebirth in the imagination, Ruth talks about the stream of life and attempts to integrate beauty into her daily routine. Further drawing a parallel between fiction and life, she compares her marriage to a novel; playing on the notion of roman in Hebrew as both romantic love and textual object, she notes that matrimony differs from a sippur-a love story or affair. Like a novel, marriage stays with the characters for a long time after the initial rush of feeling is over. It is this kind of compromise, this coming to terms with more modest possibilities, that ultimately constitutes a precarious resolution to the narrative. Ayala disappears while the wife provides more solid, permanent support for Shlomo, and he in turn must learn to make his peace with this situation. In art too he must resign himself to compromises, and this issue comes to a head in the presentation of the "Messiah." Building toward a climactic moment of confrontation with the sea and with Bruno, Shlomo presses the ocean to produce the text which he feels must be hidden in her depths. Just as Schulz thematized the pursuit of a "holy original Book," the one text which might be entirely his own, so Shlomo searches for the one wholly original sentence that encapsulates the essence of Bruno's art. As Shlomo pushes very hard to achieve a revelation

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via art, Grossman's prose most exhibits a Schulzian quality thanks to hyperbolic description, the hallucinatory intensity which animates the inanimate realm, and thematic emphasis on phantasmagorical journeying to a realm of imagination which finally discloses a book.

nn,5X

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n,•:•yn~p,•m,.'r•b :,'rnnm :,m:• ;~has ,nna:,t~mp:,,o

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,nin:• •w;

n,%:p~m, ms,,a~l; ,,na)n t:,'av~mtu:•mmL~ nmi;l;7 pn nsY73n ms ,;1nK;-ns nIiomn~

t:,mn vL~m ,1%:ns• ~a Immmn; T,:• n~tvlm.;nrm,:•nnn nlY1zt3n nllz,; nmn:• ns nDmnn3n

,:•I: D~n,:a73 "'l: Int'7'?::• n,:•'1 nm b •' 1~Y1::,n'r1"71:,l (p. 156) ni n:•n,'l"s L) Intn Itam"I::::n'51:•'3 ,nizF, ".nv, ,,'s nfl7IV n3 ns=so MftSX: ,,ts in She groans a ndspits, making a face as if to cast me out and plants fear meo me in the wrinkles with the silhouettes of sharkms up around ,ofnnn nshehas :•:spring t~La,•,r,•am: •,t?m,,',• ,';manan tono 7lan-r~n t:n mipn• Yfl, ,:,s ,:sa ,a,•:• m:•n-'a~n makes she the or with up rudely all along by swelling skin, nln ,noises frightnu pher nlia'a,myts (p. 156) -.n~W73n,, with my hands and legs, "The book!" I shout at her over the pounding surf,n , shem howls and hits m"thefinal conclusion, the very essence of our being," and her head on the rocks and cracks them open like egg shells, scrap,m ,ingher bodyn the Strait of Gibraltar, but I no longer have anything else to lose, and I hit her and vospits, making he gthroans meboats cast me out and plants fear in aves if deto a face and hits howls of our being," and she essence the veryshe "the final conclusion, one upof puwrinkles in th has spring up around allme with the silhouettes ofshaftearks her wateskin, orwith the frightful noises she makes by swelling up rudely astong in a long of lontinger wrecked ribs the skeletal watery stickingelser, ships, of painfully I hit herof and finger to lose, anyeathing have I no but tishe Strait on Gibraltar, nets, a moment for crabs, we air-fish, of boats the wreckage and the dead fish and waves of on me and vomiting her throat overin at herpoudry I shoverut allbook!" pewith my hands half rusted out, and afterward she gathers herself in and all at once pulls up ancient ruins, pirates, coded letters sent submarines, bot-dy herastonthe and allshells, hersailboats, head on the their thousand undergarments, exposing toing skirts her watery andaftinger who died long ago on desert islands, by in shipsailors wrecked of ribs skeletal on the painfulles ished sun the nakedness of sunken continents beneath her, the barren plains of petrified silt, and for a moment we all hover in the dry air--fish, crabs, nets, sailboats, submarines, shells, ancient ruins, pirates, coded letters sent in bottles by shipwrecked sailors who died long ago on desert islands, and after a moment the water bursts forth coming back in a mighty roar, covering the sunken continents mixing ancient memories into the dust and raising before me slowly a green page of tremendous proportions which hovers forsaken,

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lonely, barrenin deep layersbeneathme, is lit by isolated rays of light that shine as if from underit, splendorflashes,reflectedin the thousandsof small air bubblesgatheringon the marginsof a meditative,monastictext, castinga vague depressionin the heartof schools of fish who scurryfromit, and I am beside myself,floatingabout it, laughingand crying,readingwith effort the lettersof the title madefroman intricateweb of greenalgae-"The Messiah." The stylistic pyrotechnics prepare the way for presentation of the messianic text; in contradistinction to Ozick's novel, water here is not a metaphor for system, but, rather, vividly presented as the genuine article, the very realization of the "Messiah" itself. Subsequently, again at odds with Ozick, Grossman quotes the actual discourse of the imagined text. (See Appendix B.) Playfully extending the notion of approaching Schulz on his own termshere not just stylistically, but dramatically-Grossman brings his character face to face with Bruno. It happens this way: in the "Messiah," that is, within the embedded narrative itself, Shlomo notes that Bruno's books "speak" to him like no others ever have before (p. 157); then, reading a passage from Sanatorium, feeling himself immersed in Schulz's reality, Shlomo suddenly realizes that Bruno in person has appeared before him, and the two enter into a conversation. The outcome of this story within a story is that Shlomo, finding himself inside the text of The Messiah, finally finds himself and, like Grossman, the author, eventually eschews simple imitation of the precursor he once sought out. This process of discovery unfolds in the Drohobycz square at Passovertime, as Shlomo talks with a Bruno Schulz who moves backward and forward in time. Appearing alternately as a grown-up and a child, this Schulz resembles Shlomo: earlier on the young man, too, had been singled out as a creature part-child and part-adult. Too wise for his years as a youngster, he grew into adulthood not entirely consonant with maturity. This is a state of being which Grossman presents as typifying the artistic personality; though it represents a social maladjustment or difficulty, it is also characterized by a highly esteemed creativity. Unlike Ozick, who creates a peculiar child/man determined to outgrow incongruous youthfulness, Grossman reveals a continued devotion to childhood as a symbol of wonder and maintains faith in the possibility of art and the imagination." Accordingly, the underwater

11. The association of the child with the artist is one well entrenched in Western tradition. George Boas presents a history of this concept in The Cult of Childhood (London, 1966).

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Bruno who oscillates back and forth from one age to another serves as a genuinely redemptive figure. The introductory moment when Shlomo joins him in the text ushers in the arrival of the Messiah. Minimally described as riding on a donkey, the Messiah quickly disappears, but his impact is clearly felt. The donkey remains and, working spiritual upheavals with a whisk of its tail, makes those present in the square forget everything they have previously known. Experiencing the world anew in a perpetual present governed solely by the value of creation itself, they continually construct their languages, their loves, even the coming moment. In short, they have become "artists of life," making the musicians, painters, and writers of the past look like poor imitations, and the art works of the past-a miserable plagiarism. This scene of life as artistic creativity is cast as a genuine ideal and a vision of true originality. All the people are happier than before. They enjoy heightened consciousness of their own vitality, the immediacy of existence, and the miracle of creation. Furthermore, no violence or brutality can exist here, being contrary to the entire spirit of the place. And yet, the outcome of this episode is that Shlomo finally cannot accept such a paradise for himself. The writer decides he must fall back on the world of conventions and consensus. It is not, as was the case in Ozick's novel, that art is false, but that the character cannot tolerate the intensity of pure art. The very particularity and abundance he has yearned for too closely approximate psychosis. The lesson Shlomo has learned-to opt for compromise in art-applies most importantly with regard to the Shoah. At the heart of the Schulzian paradise, this character gets to the heart of all his concerns by asking about Anshel Wasserman. An elderly survivor disabled by his suffering, and the catalyst for Shlomo's early childhood curiosity about the Holocaust, Anshel always mumbled to himself as if telling a story.'2 The adult Shlomo wishes Ozick's other works do not always proffer the same stance on the child as artist. In The Cannibal Galaxy, for instance, a young girl served as a triumphant if somewhat ambivalent symbol of artistic expression, nonconformity, and undefined potential. For discussion of that character and two different views of her function in the novel, see my essay "Interpretation: Cynthia Ozick's Cannibal Galaxy," in Prooftexts 6 (January 1986): 239-257, and Janet Handler Burstein's article "Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art," in American Literature 59, no. 1 (March 1987): 85-101. 12. Wasserman's name indicates that he, too, is a man of the water and the depths. Early in chapter 1, perhaps foreshadowing Shlomo's sense of identification with both Anshel and Bruno in the sea, Wasserman is described as gesticulating his arms wildly, swimming like a fish in the air (p. 9).

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to write Anshel's story, and so, as it were, restore his life. Penetrating into the ceaseless, hallucinogenic doings and undoings of the messianic realm, the young writer gains a clue about how to tackle such a difficult task. Bruno tells him that Anshel's is a story everyone repeatedly learns and forgets. It is the most intimate, elusive of tales, recalcitrant to narrative formulation because it unravels itself as quickly as it can be intuited. Approaching the writing of this tale is where madness begins. In other words, to confront the Holocaust through art, to imagine the unimaginable, is impossible. Nevertheless, finding a way both to grasp and to cope with the horror is something each individual must discover for himself. Consequently, no longer attempting to copy Bruno Schulz, Shlomo decides he must return to his own depth and struggle in his own art-both within and against the narrative conventions available to him-in order to begin understanding and telling the story his own way. The result, presented in Part III, offers drastic differences both stylistically and conceptually from the text of Part II. In this manner not only the character but the novel as a whole moves beyond the search for a precursor.'" Schulz therefore fulfills a different function and has been reinvented in a very different way in this novel than in The Messiah of Stockholm. Ozick draws on both his phantasmagoria and his inclination to deflate illusions, but she mainly pursues imitation of Schulz to produce parody and to foreground her theme of plagiarism. Perceiving the status of the intertext as something both troubling and potentially dishonest, her novel presents the impetus to seek out predecessors as willed inauthenticity-both artistic and personal. Grossman, on the other hand, esteems Schulz's imaginings and incorporates his predecessor's aesthetic of fantasy into his own creative domain, making it a point of departure for himself even as it provides a kind of apprenticeship for his main character. Notably absent from the entire pursuit of Schulz in Grossman's "Bruno" is any direct consideration of Jewishness. In Ozick's novel the lack of Jewish context corresponded to a concern over absence of cultural authenticity in a second generation to the Holocaust divorced from its own tradition. Here, instead, the question is how a Jew, after the massive catastrophe, can go on being a human being, accepting ordinary human con13. In a review of 'Ayen 'erekh: 'ahavah after the novel first appeared, Gershon Shaked succinctly analyzed the relationship of each narrative segment with the central thematic tensions between imagination, innocence, and horror. Yedi'ot 'ahronot, July 3, 1986.

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straints, vicissitudes, and creative impulses. The deemphasis on Jewishness and the attention to generalities about reclaiming a measure of humanity in an inhuman world do not suggest a naive or indiscriminate universalism on Grossman's part. Rather, the author is free to pursue the question of art in chapter 2 of his novel because the question of identity has already been dealt with extensively in chapter 1. There the portrait of Shlomo's childhood was centrally concerned with milieu and the particulars of the character's background.'4 Through his gradual discovery of his parents' past the boy confronted head-on, within the limits of his own childish perspective, the question, "who is a Jew?" Knowing that his parents were persecuted for being Jews, and realizing that their lives deviate sharply from the conception of the strong, fearless sabra touted by his own Israeli culture, he sets out to methodically gather information on the Shoah, to decode the mystery of his mother's and father's identity, and so to figure out what his own heritage entails. (The boy addresses the question of Jewish identity pointedly and concretely; he keeps a notebook with the data he has researched "so he'll remember what a Jew looks like, how a Jew looks at soldiers, how a Jew fears, how a Jew digs a grave"; p. 62). By the time Shlomo gets to chapter 2 he has already struggled with his sense of self, situated as he is between diaspora experience and Israeli expectations. The adult Shlomo therefore can turn to philosophical discussion and generalities about art without feeling that such concerns are a duplicitous camouflage obscuring his true identity. This freedom to engage in meditations on art and artistic experiment accounts not just for differences of thematic emphasis between See Under: Love and The Messiah of Stockholm, but also for the pleasure of invention that marks Grossman's novel. Though there emerge many moments of reservation, a frequent undercutting of fictional illusion, Grossman like Schulz takes joy in producing gargantuan dimensions of spectacular inverisimilitude. To be sure, the Schulzian wildness appropriated into his own narrative has led, as with Ozick, to complications in the critical reception of the novel. "Bruno," among all the parts of 'Ayen 'erekh 'ahavah, has been perceived most by its public as rough going. (More than one reviewer admitted publicly to not finishing this portion of the novel.) The idiosyncratically dense descriptions, the intricacies of at first seemingly disparate threads of 14. For a discussion of chapter 1, "Momik," see my essay "The Holocaust and the Discourse of Childhood: David Grossman's See Under: Love." Hebrew Annual Review, in press.

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plot, the long-winded speeches of the sea are all techniques that rely on excess. This is a text about private imagination which relies on innovative, fanciful, highly personal artifice. (Perhaps it is for this reason that the author has singled this section out as a personal favorite of his own.) It is a narrative, however, that finally yields a satisfying coherence and which maintains a lively exuberance and thematic richness. And, while it attempts a very ambitious task of infusing fantasia with substance, of creating a realm of imagination more vibrant than everyday life, it also soberly recognizes and warns the reader that art, of necessity, accomplishes only more modest goals than salvation. The Messiah of Stockholm and "Bruno," then, are finally two texts divided by common themes. Reflecting divergent degrees of faith in the imagination and different estimations of Bruno Schulz, both novels attempt to move beyond commonplace formulation of the relationship between art and the Holocaust-that inexpressible horror defies expression. Both Ozick and Grossman consider how a second generation after the Holocaust can view the expressive potential of art to help them deal with the grisly past which constitutes their inheritance. Ozick, though, does so disillusioned, bringing recriminations against her craft; Grossman's burden of doubt is mitigated by hope and affirmation of his role as an artist. Universityof Washington Seattle,Wash.

Appendix A The idols believed that Moses the Righteous One's hay was somehow stuffed into the inmost composition of (he Messiah, like a scarecrow. This was false. More than anything else, the Messiah (Lars noted) resembled a book-The Book, in fact, that in one of the tales in Sanitoriumpod Klepsydra had been likened to a huge cabbage rose; the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety,and dreamy. This book had also been set forth as a postulate; and again as the authentic Book, the holy original, however degraded and humiliated at present. In appearance it seemed to be fabricated of various commonplace inanimate materials, none of them costly or in any way precious-cotton, cardboard, glue, thread, and not a whisp of hay any-

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where. Its locomotion was dimly frightening, but also somewhat hobbled and limited: it had several hundred winglike sails that tossed themselves either clockwise or counterclockwise, like the arms of a windmill. But these numerous "arms" were, rather, more nearly flippers-altogether flat, freckled all over with inky markings, and reminiscent, surely, of turning pages. The flippers did indeed have the moist texture of petals, however, and their peculiar tattoos certainly put one in mind of some postulate recorded in an archaic signification-a type of cuneiform, perhaps, though it was impossible to say what this unreadable text might be proposing as thesis or axiom. When examined with extreme attention-better yet, when scrutinized through a magnifying glass (the author's assertion; there were no human eyes on the scene to do this)-the inky markings showed themselves to be infinitely tiny and brilliantly worked drawings of these same idols that had taken hold of the town of Drohobycz. It was now clear that Drohobycz had been invaded by the characters of an unknown alphabet.

Appendix B hv Prrr•rtv~r~ •'• 7"•' '• • ,n,'• ,p3 yl'm,, n-r•u .N•; la ,n-'nnn•~ "m•y•-•

;rn ,n ~nK nuata• ,nT'•a "•n'nx• :t•IY; "•tJao

;h13; ;,it~;r ax ",;r'•l~ ,nan'• naaagn• "tN

(pp. 157-158) "!'ij'? ,n,': V','K

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etV

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m

For a moment I felt liberated from the prison [of routine] and I stood, "clean, freshly washed and fragrant at the edge of Holy Trinity Square in Drohowicz, alone entirely by the empty seashell of a square in which there flowed the blue of a sunless sky. The square, big, clean, rested in the afternoon hours like a glass vessel, like a new year not yet begun. I stopped, gray

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and extinguished, and I didn't dare to shatter through any decision of my own the perfect sphere of a day, not yet used." Yoram Brunowski translated this into Hebrew. From one of the windows I sighted a small boy, thin and slender with a slightly triangular head, a high wide forehead and sharp chin. At first it seemed to me that I was he, reflected back to myself in the glass panes, but then I recognized Bruno, that marvelous young lad always afire with ideas beyond his years. He called me and said, "We're alone now in the square, you and I." And he smiled a melancholy smile, saying, "How empty the world is. We could divide it up, and name everything anew. Come up for a moment, I'll show you my drawings. No one's at home, Mumik."

Collected Studies Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 201-203 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486240 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge University Press and Association for Jewish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AJS Review.

http://www.jstor.org

COLLECTEDSTUDIES Jack Wertheimer, ed. The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed. Centennial Publication of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 433 pp. CONTENTS:Abraham J. Karp, "Overview: The Synagogue in America:-A

Historical Typology." Jeffrey S. Gurock, "The Orthodox Synagogue." Leon A. Jick, "The Reform Synagogue." Jack Wertheimer, "The Conservative Synagogue." Marc D. Angel, "The American Experience of a Sephardic Synagogue." Barry Chazan, "Education in the Synagogue: The Transformation of the Supplementary School." Paula E. Hyman, "From City to Suburb: Temple Mishkan Tefila of Boston." Jenna Weissman Joselit, "The Special Sphere of the Middle-Class American Jewish Woman: The Synagogue Sisterhood, 1890-1940." Benny Kraut, "Ethnic-Religious Ambiguities in an Immigrant Synagogue: The Case of New Hope Congregation." Robert Liberles, "Conflict over Reforms: The Case of Congregation Beth Elohim, Charleston, South Carolina." Deborah Dash Moore, "A Synagogue Center Grows in Brooklyn." Marsha L. Rozenblit, "Choosing a Synagogue: The Social Composition of Two German Congregations in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore." Jonathan D. Sarna, "The Debate over Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue." Kay Kaufman Shelemay, "Music in the American Synagogue: A Case Study from Houston." Norbert M. Samuelson, ed. Studies in Jewish Philosophy: Collected Essays of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy, 1980-1985. Studies in Judaism. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987. 591 pp. 201

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CONTENTS: Menachem Kellner, "Is Contemporary Jewish Philosophy Possible?-No." Barry S. Kogan, "A Response to Professor Kellner." Norbert M. Samuelson, "Issues for Jewish Philosophy: Jewish Philosophy in the 1980's." Steven T. Katz, "Jewish Philosophy in the 1980's: A Diagnosis and Prescription." Steven S. Schwarzschild, "An Agenda for Jewish Philosophy in the 1980's." Norbert M. Samuelson, "Possible and Preferred Relations Between Reason and Revelation as Authority in Judaism." Barry S. Kogan, "Reason, Revelation, and Authority in Judaism: A Reconstruction." Steven S. Schwarzschild, "Authority and Reason Contra Gadamer." Menachem Kellner, "What Is Heresy?" Kenneth Seeskin, "Judaism and the Linguistic Interpretation of Faith." Norbert M. Samuelson, "Reflections on the Logic of Interreligious Dialogue." Norbert M. Samuelson, "Judaism and History: A Mathematical Model for a Pluralistic Universe." Kenneth Seeskin, "History and the Supernatural." Jacob B. Agus, "Remarks on the Meaning of Jewish History." Alfred L. Ivry, "Revelation, Reason and Authority in Maimonides' Guide of the -Perplexed." Arthur Hyman, "Maimonides on Religious Language." Joseph P. Cohen, "Figurative Language, Philosophy, Religious Belief in Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed." David Novak, "Does Maimonides Have a Philosophy of History?" Martin P. Golding, "Reasoning and the Authoritative Expansion of the Law: A Study in Jewish Legal Theory." J. David Bleich, "'Lo Ba-Shamayim Hi': A Philosophical Pilpul." Eugene B. Borowitz, "The Authority of the Ethical Impulse in 'Halakhah'." Eugene B. Borowitz, "Hillul Hashem-A Universalistic Rubric in Halakhic Ethics." J. David Bleich, "Is There an Ethic Beyond Halakhah?" Todd M. Endelman, ed. Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World. New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1987. 344 pp. CONTENTS:Jeremy Cohen, "The Mentality of the Medieval Jewish Apos-

tate: Peter Alfonsi, Hermann of Cologne, and Pablo Christiani." Deborah Hertz, "Seductive Conversion in Berlin, 1770-1809." Todd M. Endelman, "The Social and Political Context of Conversion in Germany and England, 1870-1914." Benjamin Braude, "The Heine-Disraeli Syndrome among the Palgraves of Victorian England." William O. McCagg, Jr. "Jewish Conversion in Hungary in Modern Times." David Ellenson, "The Orthodox Rabbinate and Apostasy in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Hungary." Michael Stanislawski, "Jewish Apostasy in Russia: A Tentative Typology."

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203

Steven J. Zipperstein, "Heresy, Apostasy, and the Transformation of Joseph Rabinovich." Jonathan D. Sarna, "The Impact of Nineteenth-Century Christian Missions on American Jews." Jeffrey S. Gurock, "Jewish Communal Divisiveness in Response to Christian Influences on the Lower East Side, 1900-1910." Benny Kraut, "A Unitarian Rabbi? The Case of Solomon H. Sonneschein." William Toll, "Intermarriage in the American West: A Historical Perspective." Sanford Pinsker and Jack Fischel, eds. Literature, the Arts, and the Holocaust. Holocaust Studies Annual, Vol. 3. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill Publishing Co., 1985. 270 pp. CONTENTS: Alan L. Berger, "The Holocaust 40 Years After: Too Much or Not Enough Attention." Ilan Avisar, "Christian Ideology and Jewish Genocide in American Holocaust Movies." Sanford Pinsker, "Marrying Anne Frank: Modernist Art, the Holocaust, and Mr. Philip Roth." S. Lilian Kremer, "From Buchenwald to Harlem The Holocaust Universe of The Pawnbroker." Eric D. Kohler, "Hollywood and Holocaust: A Discourse on the Politics of Rescue." Tanya Gardiner-Scott, "Belsen Recast: An Exploration of Holocaust Themes and Images in Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone." Charles Krantz, "Alain Resnais' Nuit et Brouillard: A Historical and Cultural Analysis." Ellen S. Fine, "New Kinds of Witnesses: French PostHolocaust Writers." Reynold S. Koppel, "Coming to Terms with History." Paul Bookbinder, "The Holocaust as a Living Phenomenon in Germany Today." Sidney H. Kessler, "Goebbels' American Proxy: Facts in Review." Robert Edwin Herzstein, "The Jew in Wartime Nazi Film: An Interpretation of Goebbels' Role in the Holocaust." Madeline G. Levine, "Polish Literature and the Holocaust." Ilan Avisar, "The Holocaust in the Israeli Theatre in the Fifties and Sixties." Joseph Bodziock, "The Makers of History." Kenneth Harper, "The Literature of Witness: The Telling 'I'." Christopher Fritsch, "Literature, the Arts, and the Holocaust: a Selected Bibliography."

Books Received Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988), pp. 205-208 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486241 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Cambridge University Press and Association for Jewish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AJS Review.

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BOOKSRECEIVED Batkin, Stanley I. The Batkin Family Genealogy. Hoboken: Ktav, 1987. viii, 116 pp., charts. Biale, David. Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History. New York: Schocken, 1987. 244 pp. Blum, Yehuda Z. For Zion's Sake. New York: Herzl Press and Cornwall Books, 1987. 242 pp. Brinner, William M., and Moses Rischlin, eds. Like all Nations? The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes. Albany: State Universy of New York Press, 1987. 241 pp. Brisman, Shimeon. A History and Guide to Judaic Encyclopedias and Lexicons. Jewish Research Literature, vol. 2. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1987. 502 pp. Busi, Giulio. Edizioni ebraiche del XVI secolo nelle biblioteche dell 'Emilia Romagna. Preface by Giuliano Ta Bologna: Edizioni Analisi, 1987. 208 Pp. Chazan, Robert. EuropeanJewry and the First Crusade.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ix, 380 pp. Chyet, Stanley F. Style and Situation: The Emergence of American Jewish Fiction. Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1987. 37 pp. Cotic, Meyer. The Prague Trial: The First Anti-Zionist Show Trial in the Communist Bloc. New York: Herzl Press and Cornwall Books, 1987. 281 pp.

205

206

BOOKS RECEIVED

Damrosch, David. The Narrative Covenant: Transformationsof Genre in the Growthof Biblical Literature. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. 352 PP. Dan, Joseph. Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Dimension of Jewish History. New York: New York University Press, 1987. 334 pp. Davidson, Herbert A. Proofsfor Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. 422 pp. Eckardt, A. Roy. For Righteousness' Sake: ContemporaryMoral Philosophies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 365 pp. Engel David. In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. 338 pp. Fishman, Joshua A. Ideology, Society and Language: The Odyssey of Nathan Birnbaum,LeadingAdvocate of Yiddishkayt, Coiner of the Term "Zionism," Prototype of the Modern Jewish Intellectual. Includes 15 articles by N. Birnbaum. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1987. 284 pp. Fuchs, Esther. Israeli Mythogynies: Women in ContemporaryHebrew Fiction. SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. 147 pp. Green, Arthur, ed. Jewish Spiritualityfrom the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present. World Spirituality, vol. 2. New York: Crossroad, 1987. xxv, 446 pp. Gutwirth, Israel. The Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism. Prefaces by Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef of Israel and Israeli Interior Minister Dr. Yosef Burg. New York: Philosophical Library, 1987. 288 pp. Herzl, Theodor. Old New Land. Translated from the German by Latta Levinson. Introduced by Jacques Kornberg. Masterworks of Modern Jewish Writing. New York: Herzl Press, 1987. 295 pp. Hoffman, Lawrence. Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 213 pp. Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. 355 pp. Jacobson, David C. Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth Century Hebrew Writers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. 220 pp. Kerner Furman, Frida. Beyond Yiddishkeit:The Struggle for Jewish Identity in a Reform Synagogue. SUNY Series in Anthropology and Judaic

BOOKS RECEIVED

207

Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. 157 pp. Kleeblatt, Norman A., ed. The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 315 pp. Korwin, Yala. To Tell the Story: Poems of the Holocaust. New York: Holocaust Library, 1987. 112 pp. Lachs, Samuel Tobias. A Rabbinic Commentaryon the New Testament: The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Hoboken: Ktav, 1987. 468 pp. Lazarus, Emma. An Epistle to the Hebrews: CentennialEdition. Introduction and Notes by Morris U. Schappes. New York: Jewish Historical Society of New York, 1987. 111 pp. Levenson, Jon D. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. Levine, Aaron. Economics and Jewish Law: Halakhic Perspectives. Hoboken: Ktav, 1987. 264 pp. Libowitz, Richard, ed. Faith and Freedom: A Tributeto Franklin H. Littell. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987. Mirsky, David. The Life and Work of Ephraim Luzzatto. New York: Ktav, 1987. vii, 98 pp. Eng., 93 pp. Heb. Moreen, Vera Basch. IranianJewry's Hour of Peril and Heroism. New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1987. 247 pp. Neusner, Jacob. Scriptures of the Orah Torah:Sanctification and Salvation in the Sacred Books of Judaism Including the Mishnah, the Yerushalmi, Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, the Bavli. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, 1987. 396 pp. Niditch, Susan. Underdogs and Tricksters: A Prelude to Biblical Folklore. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. 186 pp. Rosenberg, David, ed. Congregation:ContemporaryWritersRead the Jewish Bible. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. 526 pp. Rotenberg, Mordechai. Re-Biographing and Deviance: Psychotherapeutic Narrativism and the Midrash. New York: Praeger Press, 1987. 221 pp. Rubinstein, Shimon. GermanAtrocity or British Propaganda?The Seventieth Anniversary of a Scandal: German Corpse Utilization Establishments in the First World War. Jerusalem, 1987. 49 pp. Sabel, Martin H. Holocaust Studies: A Directory and Bibliographyof Bibliographies. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill Publishing Co., 1987. 115 pp. Sagarin, James L. Hebrew Noun Patterns: Mishqalim, Morphology, Semantics, Lexicon. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1987. 149 pp. Shepherd, Naomi. The Zealous Intruders: From Napoleon to the Dawn of

208

BOOKS RECEIVED

Zionism-the Explorers, Archaeologists, Artists, Tourists, Pilgrims, and Visionaries Who Opened Palestine to the West. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. 282 pp. Sholem Aleichem. Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories. Translated and with an introduction by Hillel Halkin. Library of Yiddish Classics. New York: Schocken, 1987. 309 pp. Sorkin, David. The Transformationof GermanJewry 1780-1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sosland, Henry Adler. A Guidefor Preachers on Composingand Delivering Sermons: The "Or Ha-Darshanim" of Jacob Zahalon, a Seventeenth Century Italian Preacher's Manual. Midreshet, no. 11. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1987. xiv, 194 pp. Eng., 54 pp. Heb. Taubler, Eugen. Ausgewahlte Schriften zur alten Geschichte. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1987. 343 pp. Trahtenberg-Seiderer, Leon. La Inmigracion Judia al Peru 1848-1948. Lima, 1987. 322 pp. Trevisan Semi, Emanuela. Allo Specchio Dei Falascia: Ebrei ed Etnologi Durante il Colonialismo Fascista. Florence: Giuntina, 1987. xii, 166 pp. Weiss Halivni, David. Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara: The Jewish Predilection for Justified Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 164 pp. Wertheimer, Jack. Unwelcome Strangers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 275 pp. Zipperstein, Steven J. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985. 211 pp. Zohar, Naomi. Oleloth Mi-batsir: Haskala, Hassidism, and Mitnaggedim in Neglected Literary Works. Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1987. 246 pp. (Hebrew)

Back Matter Source: AJS Review, Vol. 13, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 1988) Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Jewish Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1486242 . Accessed: 01/07/2011 10:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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