Last week I posted a piece on the Forward's Arty Semite Blog on the previously unseen footage from Claude Lanzmann's Shoah documentary.
Those posts have to be short, about 600 words. For my original full-length posting, this is what I wrote:
Last night (December 6th) I attended a screening of “Shoah, the Unseen Interviews,” sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 epic is more than nine hours long and features interviews with 70 individuals from 220 hours filmed (no images are in the monumental film, only interviews with witnesses and survivors). This was a chance to see outtakes from the 220 hours that did not make the original film, clips which are part of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive.
More than 500 people filled the auditorium at Am Shalom synagogue in Glencoe to see these unseen interviews. (Tonight there will be a sold-out screening in Chicago.) These outtakes, which features footage from interviews with three individuals, two of whom are in the Shoah film, will also be shown in January in the New York Jewish Film Festival, and have already been shown in Cleveland and Detroit.
Rabbi Lowenstein of Am Shalom started the introduction with some fitting words of the Baal Shem Tov and Eli Weisel about the importance to Jews of telling our stories, and suggested that Primo Levi’s words tell us “we should help make the world a little bit better” which is “just what the U.S, Memorial Holocaust Museum is doing”, “remembering the Genocide, the Holocaust, of course, but also Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia, and unfortunately, the list goes on and on...” (Not to pick on a Rabbi, though that was one of the individuals included in this screening does, but must the Jewishness of the Holocaust really be stripped away, I thought, even at a synagogue screening of unseen clips from Shoah, and equated with the atrocities suffered by others, yet which do not equate with the Holocaust?) His words seemed to unwittingly de-Judaize the Holocaust much as is the recent trend in U.S. Holocaust Museums, which are “contextualizing the Holocaust,” mentioning other genocides alongside the Holocaust, as if the Jewish experience in the Shoah is not important enough in itself for a museum to exist.
Raye Farr, Director of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archives, then introduced the footage, explaining that these clips were chosen from the 210 and a half hours of Lanzmann’s footage not included in Shoah because first of all, they are in English, and second, they were an attempt to “bring out the remarkable depth and variety of people that Lanzmann filmed but that didn’t fit into the final construction, or architecture of the film. Lanzmann’s edited film [hews] closely to the killing process, the sweeping up of all the Jews in the Nazi’s process of genocide.” The Archive’s goal was that these excerpts from unseen interviews would bring out other aspects that didn’t fit into this architecture: “victims’ families, the will to survive, women’s experiences, and the attempt to let the world know and rescue remaining Jews.”
The first outtakes are from Lanzmann’s interview with Abraham Boma, a Polish survivor who was the barber in Treblinka, cutting the hair of prisoners before they were led to the gas chambers. Chillingly, Boma speaks in several outtakes, talking about cutting the hair of women before they were gassed while he trims the hair of a man in his barbershop in Israel. He says how it took getting used to once he started working in a new barbershop after the war, getting used to cutting the hair of “ladies” who were wearing clothes, as they were “meant to,” when he was so accustomed to cutting the hair of women who were stark naked. He speaks also of cutting the hair of a 17 year old yougn woman, Sarah Levinson, such a “nice,” “friendly” girl, who told him that she knew she was going to die but that he should escape and then tell everyone he could of what was happening to the Jews in Treblinka. He said he never forgot this girl, that her face was in his mind when he escaped from Treblinka. He tells of how he told the Jews when he returned to the Warsaw Ghetto that all the Jews in Treblinka were being killed but, understandably, they refused to believe him.
The third interview is with Ruth Elias, of whom there is merely a “glimpse” in the film, who talks about her experience in Thiesendat, Auschwitz, where she was pregnant and gave birth, then she and her baby became an experiment with Mengele. Elias, still at the age at which she was interviewed, has a beautiful face, high cheekbones and large brown eyes, and even as she speaks of the horrors she experienced, speaks in such a sweet, palatable voice. She talks of being selected to work in the camp kitchen because of her excellent singing, and then being spotted by an SS singing and asked to organize a variety show. The clip ends with her mentioning finding her second husband in one variety show. To me, her story of romance found in the camps verged on seeming like a recent Hollywood movie about the Holocaust (she tells her full story in her 1988 book, Triumph of Hope) despite her horrible, Sophie’s Choice experience with her baby.
Even more chilling and thought-provoking, indeed, challenging to the audience itself, 500 plus largely well-off, comfortable, assimilated American Jews, is the second interview shown, outtakes from 1.8 hours filmed in 1978 with the fire-brand Peter Bergson (aka Hillel Kook, his birth name), nephew of Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Isaac Kook. (Outtakes from this Bergson interview was used in the 2009 Simon Weisenthal documentary Against the Tide, and in the hour-long documentary by Pierre Sauvage, “Not Idly By,” to be released in 2012,.) Unlike the other two interviews shown, this man is not included at all in Lanzmann’s Shoah film. Bergson has remained a little-known figure, though “Not Idly By”, already had a sold-out preview screening November 16th at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Perhaps the time is now right for his story which questions the reaction of American Jews to the suffering of Jews in Europe. The story Kook has to tell begs to be made into a fascinating film in itself, an account of the American Jewish response that has not been depicted. (Kook died in 2001). Unlike Boma and Elias, Bergson, who is not a survivor, is angry in his interview with Lanzmann; he exudes an anger that probably didn’t fit into the original film. He’s angry about the lives he couldn’t save because of the reluctance of American Jewish leaders to do anything. He led an Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe but this only upset American Jewish leaders. Why? Because of their fear, he says, that “people will say this is a Jewish war.” He said he asked for an agency and President Roosevelt formed the War Refugee Board. Bergson says, “Jews were afraid to say, Jewish Refugee Board, afraid to say it’s a Jewish war. All the Jewish organizations came to give money so that it wouldn’t be said ‘the American government spent money on Jews.’” Bergson doesn’t say it here but these American Jewish leaders were afraid that if they called attention to the plight of the European Jews, that it would disturb their own efforts to assimilate into American society.
Bergson’s mission was “to get as many influential Americans to create an atmosphere so the administration would feel this is more important to them then the British pressure not to do anything because of Palestine.” We wanted to “create a tidal wave of human reaction to sway Washington..” He organized a theatrical pageant, They Shall Never Die, that filled Madison Square Garden twice in one night, selling 22,000 tickets in January 1943, that was shown in several U.S. cities. “Who are we, unknown people,” he says, “If Rabbi Weiss would have called a march on Washington we would’ve had half a million Jews march on Washington. Instead,” he says, “Rabbi Weiss, ‘Pooh bah of the Jews,’” declared that Bergson was “bringing antiSemitism to the Jews.” He points to ads on the wall, part of a “propaganda technique,” he and his committee worked on, creating over 90 individual ads placed in newspapers...”” He says of one ad, “The ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe”, by Ben Hecht, with this ad “we almost got the [American] Jews to act.” The poem ends, “Oh world, be patient it will take / Some time for the murder crews / Are done. By Christmas, you can make / Your peace on earth without the Jews.” He says he was contacted at the time by the President of American Jewish Congress Mr. Shulman, and President of American Jewish Committee, Justice Roskow, to stop this ad because they were afraid it would rouse antisemitism because it mentioned Christmas. Bergson says he said to them, “Forget it, we won’t publish it, we have no illusions one ad will save the Jews. You are influential Jews, let’s talk about what we can do to save the Jews, let’s organize a committee. Roskow started crying, I thought I broke through. After 10 days we had one meeting. After they saw we’d withdraw the ad, we didn’t have another meeting.” Bergson says, looking at the camera with steely gray eyes, “If the Jews would have led the action, the American people would have acted.”
Raye Farr spoke again briefly after the clips were shown, asking, “Where is such inhumanity happening today? What can we respond to today?” Ironically, her brief commentary, while well-meaning, like Rabbi Lowenstein’s seems part of the recent trend, contrary to the tremendous testimonial power of Lanzmann’s original Shoah, to contextualize the Holocaust, which threatens to have the effect of trivializing the Holocaust.
As the night ended, Bergson’s words which I had just heard echoed in my head, his description of American Jews’ reluctance to call attention to the particular Jewishness of the war, to the plight of the European Jews, because they didn’t want others to say America is fighting a Jewish war. It’s as if contemporary U.S. Holocaust Museums are similarly afraid to be criticized as teaching and testifying about solely a Jewish experience, the Shoah, and so they include within their museums and their missions “other genocides” such as in Darfur, Rwanda, etc. in order to justify their own existence. Ironically, this is contrary to the purpose of Landsmann’s Shoah, and Bergson’s unseen footage suggests there is still much Holocaust Museums could probe and teach us about the American Jewish response to the Shoah.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
A Curable Romantic, which I reviewed below, was just nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Review of A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell
I loved the new novel A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell. It is a really fun, enjoyable, yet poignant and meaningful romp through history with an endearing, lovelorn, lustful shlemiel-like hero. It's a very clever book. I've written a review which has not been published, which I thought someone might like to read. Here's my review below; in part, I'm still exploring the question of why shlemiels are still re-appearing as an archetype in Jewish literature, which I asked in a review of Dinner for Schmucks in a piece in the Forward a few months ago:
Joseph Skibell’s new novel “A Curable Romantic” evokes the spirit of Voltaire’s Candide with a postmodern Jewish twist in order to ask the same question as Voltaire: how can we be optimistic, how can we have hope, in the face of evil? Voltaire wrote Candide to revolt against the philosopher Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism after experiencing the devastations of the Seven Years’ War and the Lisbon earthquake. Skibell is responding to the horror of the Holocaust, in which many of his relatives perished. The question for Skibell becomes, how is it possible to hope after the Holocaust?
For such a serious metaphysical question, much of the novel is surprisingly laugh-out-loud humorous, with a shlemiel-like hero, Dr. Sammelsohn, who becomes interwined Zelig-like with a father-figure who is the visionary leader of a movement, first Sigmund Freud, then Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, and finally Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Sammelsohn starts the novel as a Jewish Candide, a shlemiel embodying unbridled, persistent and unwarranted optimism, seeking love at every turn. The novel is invested with irony--we always know more than Sammelsohn--because we know the fate of Freud, Esperanto and sadly, Shapira, who was murdered in the Holocaust, though the book he is valiantly working on in the the novel does get published in the 1960s after a construction worker finds it hidden in a canister. (This book-within-a-book suggests that writing, i.e this epic itself, can be the individual’s greatest weapon against nihilism.)
The novel starts in 1895 when the twenty-one-year old Sammelsohn, an opthamologist living in Vienna, attends the opera and falls in love with Emma Eckstein, Freud’s well-known case study, and meets Freud before the publication of “Studies on Hysteria” made him famous. When we first see Sammelsohn, he has cut off his forelocks, in an effort to shed any traces of his shtetl past. (He escaped his shtetl to flee a forced marriage to the village idiot, Ita.) He shows up at the opera wearing the too-large jacket of another man. Yet despite Sammelsohn’s purposeful donning of “appurtenances”: “the little mustache and goatee I wore in an effort to appear not more masculine, but less feminine; my unruly hair, worn in the Bohemian style; the little trinkets and fobs dangling from my vest. . .”, Freud can immediately infer the very shtetl town of Sammelsohn’s birth. Sammelsohn’s shtetl childhood, his Jewishness, is not so easily discarded. The Jew, try as he might, cannot so easily forsake his past or his Jewishness.
The figure of the dybbuk, which originated in the Hasidic lore of the shtetl, re-appears throughout the book as Ita occupies different bodies, chasing Sammelsohn through the centuries. Trapped between the spiritual and the material world, never at rest, the dybbuk is a metaphor for every wandering Jew. As Sammelsohn reflects: “It’s a peculiarity of us Jews that we tend to drag our history along behind us, clattering and clanking like tin cans tied to the tail of a frightened dog, and the more we attempt to outrun it, the louder and more frightening it becomes. Still, it’s nearly impossible for me to describe the shame of being haunted by a dybbuk at the dawn of the twentieth century, as though I were nothing but a benighted Ostjude!”
Interestingly, here Sammelsohn has internalized this pejorative term that German Jews used against Eastern Jews, and the Nazis later applied to all Jews, a term that draws boundaries-the East and the Jew, ways to exclude, the very opposite of the utopian vision, in which there are no boundaries between people, naively expressed by Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, whom Sammelsohn meets in Book Two.
Like Sammelsohn, Freud tries to resist the influence of his shtetl Jewish past. When he and Sammelsohn are alone in the hospital room, Freud resists believing that Eckstein has actually been inhabited by the lovelorn Ita as a dybbuk. Freud insists that it is not the dybbuk possessing Eckstein but her hysteria, preferring to align himself with the science of psychology rather than Hasidic mysticism, and that the two angels who appear are merely symptoms of his own cocaine use. Yet when the dybbuk predicts the date of his daughter Sophie’s premature death, he is chastened; he hangs a mezuzah on the door. He proceeds to publish a paper he thinks will be revolutionary, stating his new theory that the origins of hysteria lay not in “early sexual traumas,” as he had until then maintained, but in “dybbuk seductions.” Yet his colleagues denounce him, and under their pressure he recants his belief in dybbuks, declaring that God was merely a “symptom of our child-like longing for a father.”
This is the key choice men must make in the novel, between choosing a life of mysticism or what’s deemed “realism”, of envisioning a world better than this one or of turning one’s back on what could be and only seeing what is, the faults of man and not the potential. Freud gives in to his colleagues and denies his belief in God and Jewish mysticism. Zamenhof, the second father-figure in the novel, also seeks to escape his shtetl origins, but he chooses to hold onto Jewish mysticism, to not elude his intrinsic Jewish faith.
Sammelsohn immediately finds a kindred spirit in Zamenhof and tries to help him spread his dream of one language creating one universal brotherhood. Alluding to the last line of Candide, an overly optimistic Sammelsohn imagines that “Esperanto will be endorsed by the committee as the international language. Little by little, the entire world will begin speaking it. . .The dark world of separation and exile--known only too well to me from my childhood in Sziboyta — will disappear, and with a dawning sense of excitement. . .men will begin recognizing one another as brothers. . .No longer forced to live in fear, every man will tend to his garden until the entire world is one rich and thriving garden.” Skibell suggests that Voltaire’s last line about tending gardens is too naive--men are too full of hatred for there ever to be such a garden. The French turn on Zamenhof, wanting him to eliminate his prayer exhorting men of all religions to join hands from his speech before the Congress in France in 1905. (“Esperanto is a scientific endeavor! Let us leave the God of Israel out of it entirely!”) Zamenhof ultimately resists giving in to the pressure to take Jewish mysticism out of his writings, and reforms are enacted which strip Esperanto of its very mystical qualities.
Things only go from bad to worse. (As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes in his new book Future Tense is what happens when Jews choose universalism over particularism). Early in the novel, Freud’s friend Dr. Rosenberg says he had a nightmare that he was Captain Dreyfus, wrongly exiled to Devil’s Island for an act of treason. Freud and his friends made light of Rosenberg’s fears, saying Dreyfus’ fate was singular, and didn’t apply to all Jews. Near the end of the novel, trapped behind walls in the Warsaw Ghetto, being called “Der Jude,” in the singular by Hitler in Mein Kampf (the very opposite of the pluralistic utopia for all, Jew and non-Jew, envisioned by Zamenhof, Sammelsohn realizes that Rosenberg’s nightmare had come true: “here I was, here we all were, a million or so Captain Dreyfuses, trapped inside our own Devil’s Island, our every existence deemed an act of treason.”
Yet Sammelsohn, now a middle-aged man, does not give up hope. Throughout the novel there has been a tension between the dreamers, the luftmensches who believe in utopias and Jewish mysticism and the Jews like Freud, Sammelsohn’s father, and Herr Bernfeld, Sammelsohn’s father-in-law, who choose realism over mysticism, who assimilate and erase their Jewish difference, that leads to monetary success, and thereby achieve wealth and success. At one point, Bernfeld, a businessman who thinks Sammelsohn is not worthy of his daughter, says he sees people for what they are. Therefore he can profit from their inevitable “warring ways” and with that money can “build schools, fund hospitals, endow laboratories, plant a few trees. . .while fools like [Sammelsohn] go rushing off to greet the Messiah.” In another moment, Sammelsohn questions whether Zamenhof’s dream to “refashion the world” is doomed: “How many dictionaries, how many grammars, how many vocabulary lists would it take before the world was reconsecrated in all its pristine glory? Or, I shuddered to think, was my father right to turn his back on the world, seeing it for what it was: irredeemably violent, venal, base?”
Through the fate of his characters, Skibell suggests the answer is no. In the end, the approach of the dreamer, who does not turn his back on the world despite its harsh realities, wins out. Skibell has a special place in his kishkes for the Jewish dreamer, the Romantics like Zamenhof and Rebbe Tzapira who envision a better world and refuse to be “cured” by others of their mysticism or their faith. By imbuing this novel with the beauty and magic of Jewish mysticism, Skibell suggests that mysticism can, indeed, should, live hand-in-hand with realism (just as his description of Sammelsohn walking in heaven includes the smell of urine and freshly baked bread.) In the final lines, Sammelsohn escapes Warsaw and states, “I’d had my fill of myths and dreams. I was walking into a realer world. . .I was heading towards Palestine, towards the Promised Land, and it was only there, I knew, that a man could live as a Jew, and a Jew could live in peace.” While he is forsaking one set of Jewish myths for another, his walking on towards the Promised Land is a testament to the Jewish belief in the value of hope, of dreaming that this is not the “best of all possible worlds,” that there is a better world to come. We, the reader, know that what awaits Sammelsohn (despite his certitude) is not certain peace. (Hopefully, Israel will not be the impossible dream that was Candide’s Eldorado). And yet we are not meant to scoff at him and what’s left of his tempered idealism: It’s optimism, hope, call it delusion or vision, that is intrinsic to shlemiels and to survivors, and it’s what made the establishment of Israel, our history and our future, possible.
Joseph Skibell’s new novel “A Curable Romantic” evokes the spirit of Voltaire’s Candide with a postmodern Jewish twist in order to ask the same question as Voltaire: how can we be optimistic, how can we have hope, in the face of evil? Voltaire wrote Candide to revolt against the philosopher Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism after experiencing the devastations of the Seven Years’ War and the Lisbon earthquake. Skibell is responding to the horror of the Holocaust, in which many of his relatives perished. The question for Skibell becomes, how is it possible to hope after the Holocaust?
For such a serious metaphysical question, much of the novel is surprisingly laugh-out-loud humorous, with a shlemiel-like hero, Dr. Sammelsohn, who becomes interwined Zelig-like with a father-figure who is the visionary leader of a movement, first Sigmund Freud, then Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, and finally Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Sammelsohn starts the novel as a Jewish Candide, a shlemiel embodying unbridled, persistent and unwarranted optimism, seeking love at every turn. The novel is invested with irony--we always know more than Sammelsohn--because we know the fate of Freud, Esperanto and sadly, Shapira, who was murdered in the Holocaust, though the book he is valiantly working on in the the novel does get published in the 1960s after a construction worker finds it hidden in a canister. (This book-within-a-book suggests that writing, i.e this epic itself, can be the individual’s greatest weapon against nihilism.)
The novel starts in 1895 when the twenty-one-year old Sammelsohn, an opthamologist living in Vienna, attends the opera and falls in love with Emma Eckstein, Freud’s well-known case study, and meets Freud before the publication of “Studies on Hysteria” made him famous. When we first see Sammelsohn, he has cut off his forelocks, in an effort to shed any traces of his shtetl past. (He escaped his shtetl to flee a forced marriage to the village idiot, Ita.) He shows up at the opera wearing the too-large jacket of another man. Yet despite Sammelsohn’s purposeful donning of “appurtenances”: “the little mustache and goatee I wore in an effort to appear not more masculine, but less feminine; my unruly hair, worn in the Bohemian style; the little trinkets and fobs dangling from my vest. . .”, Freud can immediately infer the very shtetl town of Sammelsohn’s birth. Sammelsohn’s shtetl childhood, his Jewishness, is not so easily discarded. The Jew, try as he might, cannot so easily forsake his past or his Jewishness.
The figure of the dybbuk, which originated in the Hasidic lore of the shtetl, re-appears throughout the book as Ita occupies different bodies, chasing Sammelsohn through the centuries. Trapped between the spiritual and the material world, never at rest, the dybbuk is a metaphor for every wandering Jew. As Sammelsohn reflects: “It’s a peculiarity of us Jews that we tend to drag our history along behind us, clattering and clanking like tin cans tied to the tail of a frightened dog, and the more we attempt to outrun it, the louder and more frightening it becomes. Still, it’s nearly impossible for me to describe the shame of being haunted by a dybbuk at the dawn of the twentieth century, as though I were nothing but a benighted Ostjude!”
Interestingly, here Sammelsohn has internalized this pejorative term that German Jews used against Eastern Jews, and the Nazis later applied to all Jews, a term that draws boundaries-the East and the Jew, ways to exclude, the very opposite of the utopian vision, in which there are no boundaries between people, naively expressed by Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, whom Sammelsohn meets in Book Two.
Like Sammelsohn, Freud tries to resist the influence of his shtetl Jewish past. When he and Sammelsohn are alone in the hospital room, Freud resists believing that Eckstein has actually been inhabited by the lovelorn Ita as a dybbuk. Freud insists that it is not the dybbuk possessing Eckstein but her hysteria, preferring to align himself with the science of psychology rather than Hasidic mysticism, and that the two angels who appear are merely symptoms of his own cocaine use. Yet when the dybbuk predicts the date of his daughter Sophie’s premature death, he is chastened; he hangs a mezuzah on the door. He proceeds to publish a paper he thinks will be revolutionary, stating his new theory that the origins of hysteria lay not in “early sexual traumas,” as he had until then maintained, but in “dybbuk seductions.” Yet his colleagues denounce him, and under their pressure he recants his belief in dybbuks, declaring that God was merely a “symptom of our child-like longing for a father.”
This is the key choice men must make in the novel, between choosing a life of mysticism or what’s deemed “realism”, of envisioning a world better than this one or of turning one’s back on what could be and only seeing what is, the faults of man and not the potential. Freud gives in to his colleagues and denies his belief in God and Jewish mysticism. Zamenhof, the second father-figure in the novel, also seeks to escape his shtetl origins, but he chooses to hold onto Jewish mysticism, to not elude his intrinsic Jewish faith.
Sammelsohn immediately finds a kindred spirit in Zamenhof and tries to help him spread his dream of one language creating one universal brotherhood. Alluding to the last line of Candide, an overly optimistic Sammelsohn imagines that “Esperanto will be endorsed by the committee as the international language. Little by little, the entire world will begin speaking it. . .The dark world of separation and exile--known only too well to me from my childhood in Sziboyta — will disappear, and with a dawning sense of excitement. . .men will begin recognizing one another as brothers. . .No longer forced to live in fear, every man will tend to his garden until the entire world is one rich and thriving garden.” Skibell suggests that Voltaire’s last line about tending gardens is too naive--men are too full of hatred for there ever to be such a garden. The French turn on Zamenhof, wanting him to eliminate his prayer exhorting men of all religions to join hands from his speech before the Congress in France in 1905. (“Esperanto is a scientific endeavor! Let us leave the God of Israel out of it entirely!”) Zamenhof ultimately resists giving in to the pressure to take Jewish mysticism out of his writings, and reforms are enacted which strip Esperanto of its very mystical qualities.
Things only go from bad to worse. (As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes in his new book Future Tense is what happens when Jews choose universalism over particularism). Early in the novel, Freud’s friend Dr. Rosenberg says he had a nightmare that he was Captain Dreyfus, wrongly exiled to Devil’s Island for an act of treason. Freud and his friends made light of Rosenberg’s fears, saying Dreyfus’ fate was singular, and didn’t apply to all Jews. Near the end of the novel, trapped behind walls in the Warsaw Ghetto, being called “Der Jude,” in the singular by Hitler in Mein Kampf (the very opposite of the pluralistic utopia for all, Jew and non-Jew, envisioned by Zamenhof, Sammelsohn realizes that Rosenberg’s nightmare had come true: “here I was, here we all were, a million or so Captain Dreyfuses, trapped inside our own Devil’s Island, our every existence deemed an act of treason.”
Yet Sammelsohn, now a middle-aged man, does not give up hope. Throughout the novel there has been a tension between the dreamers, the luftmensches who believe in utopias and Jewish mysticism and the Jews like Freud, Sammelsohn’s father, and Herr Bernfeld, Sammelsohn’s father-in-law, who choose realism over mysticism, who assimilate and erase their Jewish difference, that leads to monetary success, and thereby achieve wealth and success. At one point, Bernfeld, a businessman who thinks Sammelsohn is not worthy of his daughter, says he sees people for what they are. Therefore he can profit from their inevitable “warring ways” and with that money can “build schools, fund hospitals, endow laboratories, plant a few trees. . .while fools like [Sammelsohn] go rushing off to greet the Messiah.” In another moment, Sammelsohn questions whether Zamenhof’s dream to “refashion the world” is doomed: “How many dictionaries, how many grammars, how many vocabulary lists would it take before the world was reconsecrated in all its pristine glory? Or, I shuddered to think, was my father right to turn his back on the world, seeing it for what it was: irredeemably violent, venal, base?”
Through the fate of his characters, Skibell suggests the answer is no. In the end, the approach of the dreamer, who does not turn his back on the world despite its harsh realities, wins out. Skibell has a special place in his kishkes for the Jewish dreamer, the Romantics like Zamenhof and Rebbe Tzapira who envision a better world and refuse to be “cured” by others of their mysticism or their faith. By imbuing this novel with the beauty and magic of Jewish mysticism, Skibell suggests that mysticism can, indeed, should, live hand-in-hand with realism (just as his description of Sammelsohn walking in heaven includes the smell of urine and freshly baked bread.) In the final lines, Sammelsohn escapes Warsaw and states, “I’d had my fill of myths and dreams. I was walking into a realer world. . .I was heading towards Palestine, towards the Promised Land, and it was only there, I knew, that a man could live as a Jew, and a Jew could live in peace.” While he is forsaking one set of Jewish myths for another, his walking on towards the Promised Land is a testament to the Jewish belief in the value of hope, of dreaming that this is not the “best of all possible worlds,” that there is a better world to come. We, the reader, know that what awaits Sammelsohn (despite his certitude) is not certain peace. (Hopefully, Israel will not be the impossible dream that was Candide’s Eldorado). And yet we are not meant to scoff at him and what’s left of his tempered idealism: It’s optimism, hope, call it delusion or vision, that is intrinsic to shlemiels and to survivors, and it’s what made the establishment of Israel, our history and our future, possible.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Thin Line between Visionary and Delusional in Jewish Literature and History
I saw the new Woody Allen film, You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, last week and noticed the reoccurrence of a theme I've been noticing: what one might view as delusional behavior, another could view as visionary or genius. The characters in the film that end up being the happiest are the two that to conventional eyes, seem the most delusional: the widow and widower who believe wholeheartedly in fortune-telling and reincarnation.
I just read the fabulous new novel by Joseph Skibell, A Curable Romantic, and throughout its 600 pages one sees this same trope--there is a very thin line between delusion and genius. A Curable Romantic has three sections, or Books, and in each, there is a visionary real-life, historical character, first Freud, then Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, and then the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Great, creative movements are spearheaded by these men who are powered by visions of a new way of doing things, of living life contrary to how it has been lived before. One might have called these luftmensches mad, but perhaps the only thing that separates genius from madness or being a fool/shlemiel is whether the man behind them finds some measure of success.
Here is an excerpt from the end of my review of A Curable Romantic: "Yet though Sammelsohn [the hero, a shlemiel, of the novel) has experienced the worst of all tragedies that have befallen Jews, by the end, he does not remain trapped by others’ restrictions. Throughout the novel there has been a tension between the dreamers, the shlemiels and luftmensches whose visions of utopias and belief in Jewish mysticism conflicts with the dry realism of science (the successful Freud) and business (Herr Bernfeld), of wealthy men of commerce. At one point, Herr Bernfeld, a wealthy businessman who thinks Sammelsohn is not worthy of his daughter, tells him, “Every person is idealistic in his youth. . .just as everyone in his infancy cannot control his bowels.” When Sammelsohn earlier has a moment of doubt about Esperanto conquering the world, he wonders, “was my father right to turn his back on the world, seeing it for what it was: irredeemably violent, venal, base?” There is a counterpoint set up between men who see the world as it is and men who dare to dream of another world.
In the end, the approach of the dreamer, who does not turn his back on the world, wins out. Sammelsohn escapes Warsaw, telling the reader: “I’d had my fill of myths and dreams. I was walking into a realer world. . .I was heading towards Palestine, towards the Promised Land, and it was only there, I knew, that a man could live as a Jew, and a Jew could live in peace.” We know that what awaits Sammelsohn (despite his certitude) is not certain peace. (Hopefully, Israel will not be the impossible dream that was Candide’s Eldorado). And yet we are not meant to scoff at him and what’s left of his tempered idealism: It’s optimism, hope, call it delusion or vision, that is intrinsic to shlemiels and to survivors, and it’s what made the establishment of Israel, our history and our future, possible."
We can see this trope in our Jewish past: witness the illustrious Rashi, who set out boldly in the 11th century to write the first commentary on every single word of the Babylonian Talmud, the commentary that we still use today. Surely many thought this massive undertaking was crazy, mad, but only one who can ignore the naysayers around him can succeed on such a large scale (and this ability to ignore those around you, to only listen to one's own dreams and visions, can be seen by the outside world as some kind of madness). And witness Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz''s monumental new translation of and commentary on the entire Talmud.
I just read the fabulous new novel by Joseph Skibell, A Curable Romantic, and throughout its 600 pages one sees this same trope--there is a very thin line between delusion and genius. A Curable Romantic has three sections, or Books, and in each, there is a visionary real-life, historical character, first Freud, then Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, and then the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Great, creative movements are spearheaded by these men who are powered by visions of a new way of doing things, of living life contrary to how it has been lived before. One might have called these luftmensches mad, but perhaps the only thing that separates genius from madness or being a fool/shlemiel is whether the man behind them finds some measure of success.
Here is an excerpt from the end of my review of A Curable Romantic: "Yet though Sammelsohn [the hero, a shlemiel, of the novel) has experienced the worst of all tragedies that have befallen Jews, by the end, he does not remain trapped by others’ restrictions. Throughout the novel there has been a tension between the dreamers, the shlemiels and luftmensches whose visions of utopias and belief in Jewish mysticism conflicts with the dry realism of science (the successful Freud) and business (Herr Bernfeld), of wealthy men of commerce. At one point, Herr Bernfeld, a wealthy businessman who thinks Sammelsohn is not worthy of his daughter, tells him, “Every person is idealistic in his youth. . .just as everyone in his infancy cannot control his bowels.” When Sammelsohn earlier has a moment of doubt about Esperanto conquering the world, he wonders, “was my father right to turn his back on the world, seeing it for what it was: irredeemably violent, venal, base?” There is a counterpoint set up between men who see the world as it is and men who dare to dream of another world.
In the end, the approach of the dreamer, who does not turn his back on the world, wins out. Sammelsohn escapes Warsaw, telling the reader: “I’d had my fill of myths and dreams. I was walking into a realer world. . .I was heading towards Palestine, towards the Promised Land, and it was only there, I knew, that a man could live as a Jew, and a Jew could live in peace.” We know that what awaits Sammelsohn (despite his certitude) is not certain peace. (Hopefully, Israel will not be the impossible dream that was Candide’s Eldorado). And yet we are not meant to scoff at him and what’s left of his tempered idealism: It’s optimism, hope, call it delusion or vision, that is intrinsic to shlemiels and to survivors, and it’s what made the establishment of Israel, our history and our future, possible."
We can see this trope in our Jewish past: witness the illustrious Rashi, who set out boldly in the 11th century to write the first commentary on every single word of the Babylonian Talmud, the commentary that we still use today. Surely many thought this massive undertaking was crazy, mad, but only one who can ignore the naysayers around him can succeed on such a large scale (and this ability to ignore those around you, to only listen to one's own dreams and visions, can be seen by the outside world as some kind of madness). And witness Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz''s monumental new translation of and commentary on the entire Talmud.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Search for the "Authentic"
I've been noticing a theme lately, in society at large and in my own life, a thirst for finding the the "authentic" (as I've written about recently in terms of a contemporary re-evaluating of shtetl imagery).
I just read the following quote in JTS' new strategic plan, which resonated with me: "In a culture of faddish, throwaway “truths” as disposable as yesterday’s newspaper or today’s flood of emails, the key is guidance and experience that are not only relevant and compelling but unquestionably authentic. We must speak to contemporary dilemmas in a learned and compassionate voice that is firmly anchored in Jewish history and tradition, a voice as alive to what Jews and Judaism have been in the past as it is excited by the possibility of what Jews and Judaism might become."
My review of the new novel "Peep Show," by Joshua Braff, is in the online edition of the Forward today, and will be in the July 16th issue. I mention in the review how the main character, David, has only disdain for Judaism, but I don't explore this observation in detail. The overall tenor of the novel is that Judaism holds no appeal for David, which, I get the sense, is probably how the author feels about his religion. (This spirit is exactly antithetical to the love of Judaism that permeates the novels of Dara Horn, roughly of the same generation as Braff.) But David is clearly searching for authenticity in the novel, as is his mother, through her latching onto Hasidism, and his father, by trying to keep his burlesque business pure, in some sense, rather than adapting to new business models like film which would turn burlesque into a simulacra, at a remove from reality. Judaism holds no appeal for David; he finds the "authentic" in photography.
Braff plays in a postmodern way with the notion of what is "authentic" through his insertion of black and white photographs in the novel in order to play with our sense of what is real--does a photograph really capture the authentic, or the truth of what we see? This was actually the most interesting part of the novel for me. I'm intrigued by how contemporary authors are using photography in novels, particularly in works with Jewish themes.
I just read the following quote in JTS' new strategic plan, which resonated with me: "In a culture of faddish, throwaway “truths” as disposable as yesterday’s newspaper or today’s flood of emails, the key is guidance and experience that are not only relevant and compelling but unquestionably authentic. We must speak to contemporary dilemmas in a learned and compassionate voice that is firmly anchored in Jewish history and tradition, a voice as alive to what Jews and Judaism have been in the past as it is excited by the possibility of what Jews and Judaism might become."
My review of the new novel "Peep Show," by Joshua Braff, is in the online edition of the Forward today, and will be in the July 16th issue. I mention in the review how the main character, David, has only disdain for Judaism, but I don't explore this observation in detail. The overall tenor of the novel is that Judaism holds no appeal for David, which, I get the sense, is probably how the author feels about his religion. (This spirit is exactly antithetical to the love of Judaism that permeates the novels of Dara Horn, roughly of the same generation as Braff.) But David is clearly searching for authenticity in the novel, as is his mother, through her latching onto Hasidism, and his father, by trying to keep his burlesque business pure, in some sense, rather than adapting to new business models like film which would turn burlesque into a simulacra, at a remove from reality. Judaism holds no appeal for David; he finds the "authentic" in photography.
Braff plays in a postmodern way with the notion of what is "authentic" through his insertion of black and white photographs in the novel in order to play with our sense of what is real--does a photograph really capture the authentic, or the truth of what we see? This was actually the most interesting part of the novel for me. I'm intrigued by how contemporary authors are using photography in novels, particularly in works with Jewish themes.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Symbolism Behind Jewish Symbols
Recently I attended a short talk led by Rabbi Sarnoff (formerly of Camp Ramah Wisconsin) on Jewish symbols. He started out by mentioning Chagall's Crucifixion painting (1938) one of a series of paintings in which Chagall shows a Jesus figure on the cross, wearing a tallit. In the White Crucifixion, which hangs at the Art Institute in Chicago, the Christ figure is central, and around the sides Jewish figures mourn for the fate of the Jews, and Nazis march in the upper left. There is also a six-candle menorah at the bottom of the painting.
Chagall was using the symbol of Jesus to try to create empathy in Christian audiences towards the fate of the Jews, by connecting the fate of Jesus, once a Jew, with the plight of the Jews.
Rabbi Sarnoff handed out an excerpt explaining the conflicted background of various Jewish symbols, which one would think have simple provenances. The Magen David is now seen as the universal symbol of Judaism; it's on the Israeli flag, it marks a Jewish grave, a synagogue. But it only became a Jewish national symbol on the 19th century "when Jews of Western Europe were struggling to fend off assimilation into Christianity, that the Magen David was adopted as an answer to the Christian symbol of the cross."
We see that there was much thought put into selecting what would be the symbol of the new State of Israel, a symbol which at the time, was used by nonJews and Jews, and was empty of religious meaning for Jews. In fact, in 14th century Spain the Magen David was expressed as a seven-branched menorah not as a star. In fact, Gershom Scholem wrote an essay attributing the success of the Magen David as a Jewish symbol (rather than the seven-branched menorah) to the Nazis: "Far more than the Zionists have done to provide the Shield of David with the sanctity of a genuine symbol has been done by those who made it for millions into a mark of shame and degradation. The yellow Jewish star, as a sign of exclusion and ultimately of annihilation, has accompanied the Jews on their path of humiliation and horror, of battle and heroic resistance. Under this sign they were murdered; under this sign they came to Israel. . .Some have been of the opinion that the sign, which marked the way to annihilation and to the gas chambers, should be replaced by a sign of life. But it is possible to think quite the opposite: the sign which in our own days has been sanctified by suffering and dread has become worthy of illuminating the path to life and reconstruction." So it is the Nazis who invested the Magen David with power as a symbol of Zionism and Judaism.
Maybe it's the summer weather, and time spent hanging out at the swimming pool, but I've been noticing more religious symbols on people's necks, crosses big and small, lots of hamsas rather than Magen Davids, and I'm wondering why we wear these symbols at all? Are we trying to signal fellowship or solidarity with our fellows of the same faith? Or are we trying to signal something central to our identity to the public at large, ie I am a Jew or a Christian and proud of it? Is it a combination of both? If religion is something we do internally, when we pray to God, or in our homes, when we celebrate holidays and Shabbats with our families, or in our temples or churches, why do we feel the need to externally profess our religion to others at all?
And why does it seem that the hamsa is now a more popular symbol to wear around the Jewish neck than a Magen David?
Chagall was using the symbol of Jesus to try to create empathy in Christian audiences towards the fate of the Jews, by connecting the fate of Jesus, once a Jew, with the plight of the Jews.
Rabbi Sarnoff handed out an excerpt explaining the conflicted background of various Jewish symbols, which one would think have simple provenances. The Magen David is now seen as the universal symbol of Judaism; it's on the Israeli flag, it marks a Jewish grave, a synagogue. But it only became a Jewish national symbol on the 19th century "when Jews of Western Europe were struggling to fend off assimilation into Christianity, that the Magen David was adopted as an answer to the Christian symbol of the cross."
We see that there was much thought put into selecting what would be the symbol of the new State of Israel, a symbol which at the time, was used by nonJews and Jews, and was empty of religious meaning for Jews. In fact, in 14th century Spain the Magen David was expressed as a seven-branched menorah not as a star. In fact, Gershom Scholem wrote an essay attributing the success of the Magen David as a Jewish symbol (rather than the seven-branched menorah) to the Nazis: "Far more than the Zionists have done to provide the Shield of David with the sanctity of a genuine symbol has been done by those who made it for millions into a mark of shame and degradation. The yellow Jewish star, as a sign of exclusion and ultimately of annihilation, has accompanied the Jews on their path of humiliation and horror, of battle and heroic resistance. Under this sign they were murdered; under this sign they came to Israel. . .Some have been of the opinion that the sign, which marked the way to annihilation and to the gas chambers, should be replaced by a sign of life. But it is possible to think quite the opposite: the sign which in our own days has been sanctified by suffering and dread has become worthy of illuminating the path to life and reconstruction." So it is the Nazis who invested the Magen David with power as a symbol of Zionism and Judaism.
Maybe it's the summer weather, and time spent hanging out at the swimming pool, but I've been noticing more religious symbols on people's necks, crosses big and small, lots of hamsas rather than Magen Davids, and I'm wondering why we wear these symbols at all? Are we trying to signal fellowship or solidarity with our fellows of the same faith? Or are we trying to signal something central to our identity to the public at large, ie I am a Jew or a Christian and proud of it? Is it a combination of both? If religion is something we do internally, when we pray to God, or in our homes, when we celebrate holidays and Shabbats with our families, or in our temples or churches, why do we feel the need to externally profess our religion to others at all?
And why does it seem that the hamsa is now a more popular symbol to wear around the Jewish neck than a Magen David?
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
What Kind of Holocaust Novel Would Kakutani like?
I read with interest yesterday Michuko Kakutani's review of Yann Martel's new novel (which I haven't read yet) which she says "has the effect of trivializing the Holocaust, using it as a metaphor to evoke 'the extermination of animal life' and the suffering of “doomed creatures” who 'could not speak for themselves.' The reader is encouraged to see the stuffed animals Beatrice and Virgil — who have endured torture, starvation and humiliation — as stand-ins for the Jews, and to equate the terrible things they’ve witnessed — referred to as “the Horrors” — to the atrocities committed by the Nazis.
Last year I reviewed for "The Forward" Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones," a book about the Holocaust told from the perspective of an SS officer, which depicted the horrors and atrocities of the Shoah with documentary detail. It sounds as if "The Kindly Ones" is the polar opposite of Martel's new novel which sounds like it has the treacly sickingly sweet tone of the fable-like The Boy in Striped Pajamas or "The Book Thief", also novels with the Holocaust as their theme.
And yet Kakutani wrote in her February 24, 2009 review of "The Kindly Ones":
"Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, 'The Kindly Ones' — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies."
Kakutani seemed disgusted with the "endless succession" of depictions of horrors done to the Jews, but Littell was trying to portray in fiction the endless horrors committed by ordinary men to their fellow men, and did so by writing with realistic detail, and juxtaposing those documentary-style passages with the SS-officer's (Maximillian Aue's) descent into fantasy and madness.
Kakutani wrote in her revew, "When Aue isn’t talking dispassionately about the mechanics of rounding up Jews (spreading rumors that they were going to Palestine so they would not panic) or the difficulty of disposing of bodies ('it wasn’t so much the gassing that posed a problem, but the ovens were overloaded'), he’s describing grotesque scenes of degradation and slaughter: Jews being lashed with a horsewhip; a baby being cut out of its dying mother by Caesarean section, then smashed to death against the corner of a stove; hanged men with 'their tongues sticking out,' streams of saliva running 'from their mouths to the sidewalk'; emaciated prisoners covered in excrement, forced to defecate 'as they walked, like horses.'"
It sounded as if Kakutani attributes this grotesqueness to Littell's writing, when actually, what's grotesque and horrifying is the acts committed in the Holocaust against Jews, which Littell writes about from the perspective of Aue. All these things did happen--the smashing of babies against the wall, the emaciated prisoners covered in excrement, etc. I suppose Kakutani never had to watch "The Holocaust" mini-series on video in Hebrew School as I did, or sit through Claude Lanzmann's Shoah documentary with her parents (again, as I did).
One wonders what kind of novel about the Holocaust Kakutani would find to her liking. Indeed, Kakutani is aware of the oft-quoted problem as originally posed by Adorno. As she ends her 2009 review of Littell's book, she writes, "Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust ('through aesthetic principles or stylization,' he contended, 'the unimaginable ordeal' is “transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims'), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that 'in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent,; we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as 'a staggering triumph.'”
(When one understands how the French have dismissed their role in the Holocaust, one can see that the Le Monde's calling a novel like "The Kindly Ones" a "triumph," is a triumph in its own right.)
Littell was trying to capture the horror of the Holocaust within the pages of the novel. Thanks to Kakutani's review, and others like it, few American readers will actually read Littell's book. The librarian at my temple chose not to purchase it for the temple collection based upon its largely bad reviews in the States. Martel's novel is surely more palatable to readers. Perhaps Kakutani regrets her panning of Littell's book after reading Martel's new novel, which sounds as if it is disturbing in an altogether different way, disturbing in the way it trivializes the horrors committed against Jews in the Holocaust.
Last year I reviewed for "The Forward" Jonathan Littell's "The Kindly Ones," a book about the Holocaust told from the perspective of an SS officer, which depicted the horrors and atrocities of the Shoah with documentary detail. It sounds as if "The Kindly Ones" is the polar opposite of Martel's new novel which sounds like it has the treacly sickingly sweet tone of the fable-like The Boy in Striped Pajamas or "The Book Thief", also novels with the Holocaust as their theme.
And yet Kakutani wrote in her February 24, 2009 review of "The Kindly Ones":
"Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, 'The Kindly Ones' — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies."
Kakutani seemed disgusted with the "endless succession" of depictions of horrors done to the Jews, but Littell was trying to portray in fiction the endless horrors committed by ordinary men to their fellow men, and did so by writing with realistic detail, and juxtaposing those documentary-style passages with the SS-officer's (Maximillian Aue's) descent into fantasy and madness.
Kakutani wrote in her revew, "When Aue isn’t talking dispassionately about the mechanics of rounding up Jews (spreading rumors that they were going to Palestine so they would not panic) or the difficulty of disposing of bodies ('it wasn’t so much the gassing that posed a problem, but the ovens were overloaded'), he’s describing grotesque scenes of degradation and slaughter: Jews being lashed with a horsewhip; a baby being cut out of its dying mother by Caesarean section, then smashed to death against the corner of a stove; hanged men with 'their tongues sticking out,' streams of saliva running 'from their mouths to the sidewalk'; emaciated prisoners covered in excrement, forced to defecate 'as they walked, like horses.'"
It sounded as if Kakutani attributes this grotesqueness to Littell's writing, when actually, what's grotesque and horrifying is the acts committed in the Holocaust against Jews, which Littell writes about from the perspective of Aue. All these things did happen--the smashing of babies against the wall, the emaciated prisoners covered in excrement, etc. I suppose Kakutani never had to watch "The Holocaust" mini-series on video in Hebrew School as I did, or sit through Claude Lanzmann's Shoah documentary with her parents (again, as I did).
One wonders what kind of novel about the Holocaust Kakutani would find to her liking. Indeed, Kakutani is aware of the oft-quoted problem as originally posed by Adorno. As she ends her 2009 review of Littell's book, she writes, "Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust ('through aesthetic principles or stylization,' he contended, 'the unimaginable ordeal' is “transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims'), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that 'in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent,; we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as 'a staggering triumph.'”
(When one understands how the French have dismissed their role in the Holocaust, one can see that the Le Monde's calling a novel like "The Kindly Ones" a "triumph," is a triumph in its own right.)
Littell was trying to capture the horror of the Holocaust within the pages of the novel. Thanks to Kakutani's review, and others like it, few American readers will actually read Littell's book. The librarian at my temple chose not to purchase it for the temple collection based upon its largely bad reviews in the States. Martel's novel is surely more palatable to readers. Perhaps Kakutani regrets her panning of Littell's book after reading Martel's new novel, which sounds as if it is disturbing in an altogether different way, disturbing in the way it trivializes the horrors committed against Jews in the Holocaust.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Trend of "Re-imagining the Shtetl" and Finding the Authentic
Two weeks ago I wrote on my blog about a theme I've noticed of "returning to the shtetl" that seems a trend in recent films and novels.
I was referring to the Coen Brother's film "A Serious Man" and to Steve Stern's new novel, Frozen Rabbi (to be published in May) which feature portrayals of life in the shtetl.
I was sensing something in the zeitgeist, a striving amongst Jewish writers and filmmakers (okay, just the Coen Brothers) to find the authentic in imagery of the shtetl. Then on Friday I saw the cover of The Chicago Jewish News, an article titled "The Real 'Fiddler', A Northwestern University Professor says the truth about shtetls is not what we think.'" The piece features an interview with Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, an associate professor of Jewish history, who is working on a book to be called "Shtetl as it Was, 1790-1830" which, according to him, will debunk common wisdom about shtetls. Petrovsky-Shtern says in the article, "Most of us think a shtetl is a small Jewish village in the middle of nowhere that nothing ever happens in but pogroms, a ghettoized habitat of Eastern Europena Jews who speak Yiddish and have no rapport with the surrounding culture--a place that is myopic, depressed, moribund." Instead, he paints a picture of shtetls which "were the most economically advanced urban centers in what was then Eastern Poland," which "brought together Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Armenians, Tartars and Jews in a vibrant market town with a very rapid system of exchange and high revenues, which feeds the local population and capitalizes on the contraband and smuggling."
Then a couple of days ago Tablet Magazine featured on its virtual cover a story by Editor Alana Newhouse on how curator Maya Benton discovered that photographer Roman Vishniac's famous photos of Jews in shtetls were a distortion of reality, expanding upon her piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Newhouse argues that Vishniac and others were part of a post-war "nostalgia industry" and that "the victims of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry deserve to be remembered in the fullness of the life they led." She doesn't go into detail about what this fullness looks like, perhaps because there isn't a lot of information out there about the reality of shtetls, research that Professor Petrovsky-Shtern (and others, surely) is working on, and a fuller exhibit of previously unpublished Vishniac photographs will be exhibited in 2012. In a brief description of some images that have not been shown to the public, Benton suggests that these photographs show how some shtetl inhabitants were well-off and fashionable, not poor and backwards. This corresponds with Professor Petrovsky-Shtern's argument as well. Though surely there was a multitude of types of Jews in the shtetls, just as there is variety of Jews in contemporary America.
Newhouse writes that "[b]y misrepresenting our ancestors as backward and unsophisticated, American Jews have managed to create communities that are less Jewishly diverse—and consequently, in some real ways, less sophisticated—than the fabled shtots and dorfs and shtetls of Eastern Europe." This is a interesting, yet charged statement. Vishniac does portray these shtetl subjects as very poor, but not necessarily as unsophisticated.
Indeed, in an interview with Tablet, novelist Steve Stern talks about his own imagining of the shtetl: "a marriage between the exquisite mysticism Jews from Eastern Europe managed to incorporate into their experience, a world that is timeless, defined by Torah, by the text, almost to the extent of being able to live in that text, a Jewish dream time, while simultaneously suffering incursions of a very cruel history-and you can't separate the history and violence from the transcendence."
It seems that what is captivating to writers/filmmakers today is how we do we, assimilated Jews, reach this transcendence, enter into this magical "Jewish dream time," those of us not well-educated in Torah or Kabbalah. Come to think of it, Noah Baumbach's very much-assimilated Greenberg in the film of that name is also grappling with this: how does Greenberg reach transcendence? Is a pseudo-transcendence (not a Jewish one) only possible through drugs, as in the last frames of the film?
The main character, young Bernie, in Stern's new novel Frozen Rabbi does find a meaningful transcendence, a literal and figurative one, as he buries himself in Jewish texts, self-educating himself, and studying Kabbalah, and experiences another literal transcendence at the end of the novel (as the pub. date is a month away I do not want to ruin the ending).
As I wrote two weeks ago, "It's this quintessential theme in Jewish-American literature and drama of the struggle between remembering and forgetting our past. In 'Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination,' Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes that the appeal of Isaac Bashevis Singer's writing "came not from his refugee stories but from his reinvention of the shtetl....and what is transpiring in this shtetl of the mind, at its most fundamental level, is a creative resolution of the struggle between remembering and forgetting."
This is a struggle that these new works reflect, as do Vishniac's photographs, as well.
As I wrote, perhaps the pendelum has swung and that now as Jews we have reached a certain point of comfort (arguably, too much comfort) on the continuum of assimilation into American society, now we feel the desire to reach back and find a sense of authenticity, to reach back and connect with our shtetl past, and as curator Maya Benton is doing, trying to figure out what is authentic about our shtetl imagery. It's the same reason that the Coen Brothers start "A Serious Man" with a reanimation of the shtetl, to try to forge a creative resolution to this struggle between remembering and forgetting that Jews in America, the Jews of the midcentury on the midwestern prairie as represented by Larry Gopnik in the Coen's film, and Jews today, are grappling with. It's an attempt, as Ezrahi put it in describing Yiddish writers in America in the 1950s, to "'reclaim a lost Jewish place and an interrupted Jewish story.'"
The Coen Brothers, and Steve Stern in A Frozen Rabbi, are also attempting to reclaim a lost Jewish place, the shtetl, but with the darker tones of irony and satire, looking from the disconnected perspective of the postmodern early twentieth century, grappling with the question of what it means today to be an authentic Jew.
How we re-imagine the shtetl, what we deem important, what we deem authentic, in turn acts like a mirror held up to ourselves, and says a lot about us, and how we see ourselves as American Jews.
I was referring to the Coen Brother's film "A Serious Man" and to Steve Stern's new novel, Frozen Rabbi (to be published in May) which feature portrayals of life in the shtetl.
I was sensing something in the zeitgeist, a striving amongst Jewish writers and filmmakers (okay, just the Coen Brothers) to find the authentic in imagery of the shtetl. Then on Friday I saw the cover of The Chicago Jewish News, an article titled "The Real 'Fiddler', A Northwestern University Professor says the truth about shtetls is not what we think.'" The piece features an interview with Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, an associate professor of Jewish history, who is working on a book to be called "Shtetl as it Was, 1790-1830" which, according to him, will debunk common wisdom about shtetls. Petrovsky-Shtern says in the article, "Most of us think a shtetl is a small Jewish village in the middle of nowhere that nothing ever happens in but pogroms, a ghettoized habitat of Eastern Europena Jews who speak Yiddish and have no rapport with the surrounding culture--a place that is myopic, depressed, moribund." Instead, he paints a picture of shtetls which "were the most economically advanced urban centers in what was then Eastern Poland," which "brought together Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Armenians, Tartars and Jews in a vibrant market town with a very rapid system of exchange and high revenues, which feeds the local population and capitalizes on the contraband and smuggling."
Then a couple of days ago Tablet Magazine featured on its virtual cover a story by Editor Alana Newhouse on how curator Maya Benton discovered that photographer Roman Vishniac's famous photos of Jews in shtetls were a distortion of reality, expanding upon her piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Newhouse argues that Vishniac and others were part of a post-war "nostalgia industry" and that "the victims of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry deserve to be remembered in the fullness of the life they led." She doesn't go into detail about what this fullness looks like, perhaps because there isn't a lot of information out there about the reality of shtetls, research that Professor Petrovsky-Shtern (and others, surely) is working on, and a fuller exhibit of previously unpublished Vishniac photographs will be exhibited in 2012. In a brief description of some images that have not been shown to the public, Benton suggests that these photographs show how some shtetl inhabitants were well-off and fashionable, not poor and backwards. This corresponds with Professor Petrovsky-Shtern's argument as well. Though surely there was a multitude of types of Jews in the shtetls, just as there is variety of Jews in contemporary America.
Newhouse writes that "[b]y misrepresenting our ancestors as backward and unsophisticated, American Jews have managed to create communities that are less Jewishly diverse—and consequently, in some real ways, less sophisticated—than the fabled shtots and dorfs and shtetls of Eastern Europe." This is a interesting, yet charged statement. Vishniac does portray these shtetl subjects as very poor, but not necessarily as unsophisticated.
Indeed, in an interview with Tablet, novelist Steve Stern talks about his own imagining of the shtetl: "a marriage between the exquisite mysticism Jews from Eastern Europe managed to incorporate into their experience, a world that is timeless, defined by Torah, by the text, almost to the extent of being able to live in that text, a Jewish dream time, while simultaneously suffering incursions of a very cruel history-and you can't separate the history and violence from the transcendence."
It seems that what is captivating to writers/filmmakers today is how we do we, assimilated Jews, reach this transcendence, enter into this magical "Jewish dream time," those of us not well-educated in Torah or Kabbalah. Come to think of it, Noah Baumbach's very much-assimilated Greenberg in the film of that name is also grappling with this: how does Greenberg reach transcendence? Is a pseudo-transcendence (not a Jewish one) only possible through drugs, as in the last frames of the film?
The main character, young Bernie, in Stern's new novel Frozen Rabbi does find a meaningful transcendence, a literal and figurative one, as he buries himself in Jewish texts, self-educating himself, and studying Kabbalah, and experiences another literal transcendence at the end of the novel (as the pub. date is a month away I do not want to ruin the ending).
As I wrote two weeks ago, "It's this quintessential theme in Jewish-American literature and drama of the struggle between remembering and forgetting our past. In 'Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination,' Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes that the appeal of Isaac Bashevis Singer's writing "came not from his refugee stories but from his reinvention of the shtetl....and what is transpiring in this shtetl of the mind, at its most fundamental level, is a creative resolution of the struggle between remembering and forgetting."
This is a struggle that these new works reflect, as do Vishniac's photographs, as well.
As I wrote, perhaps the pendelum has swung and that now as Jews we have reached a certain point of comfort (arguably, too much comfort) on the continuum of assimilation into American society, now we feel the desire to reach back and find a sense of authenticity, to reach back and connect with our shtetl past, and as curator Maya Benton is doing, trying to figure out what is authentic about our shtetl imagery. It's the same reason that the Coen Brothers start "A Serious Man" with a reanimation of the shtetl, to try to forge a creative resolution to this struggle between remembering and forgetting that Jews in America, the Jews of the midcentury on the midwestern prairie as represented by Larry Gopnik in the Coen's film, and Jews today, are grappling with. It's an attempt, as Ezrahi put it in describing Yiddish writers in America in the 1950s, to "'reclaim a lost Jewish place and an interrupted Jewish story.'"
The Coen Brothers, and Steve Stern in A Frozen Rabbi, are also attempting to reclaim a lost Jewish place, the shtetl, but with the darker tones of irony and satire, looking from the disconnected perspective of the postmodern early twentieth century, grappling with the question of what it means today to be an authentic Jew.
How we re-imagine the shtetl, what we deem important, what we deem authentic, in turn acts like a mirror held up to ourselves, and says a lot about us, and how we see ourselves as American Jews.