The Ritual of New Creation (39 page)

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principles of one's own civilization strikes me as a kind of cultural autolobotomy."
¹¹This type of rhetoric (one hears the same from Ozick's sometime sparring partner, George Steiner) reveals the compatibility of Jewish moral seriousness with the High Modernist program. Aesthetic innovation and individual expression must remain aligned with ethics, judgment, religion. Ozick cannot abide the passage of modernism; in effect she is nostalgic for a cultural moment that was in itself premised upon nostalgia: "For the modernists, the center notoriously did not hold; for us (whatever
we
are) there is no recollection of a center, and nothing to miss, let alone mourn."
¹²So goes Ozick's uncanny new
kaddish
.

"Whatever
we
are": it is a troublesome
we
. Readers of
The New Yorker
? Of
Commentary
? Those who feel they have an ongoing stake in the condition of our culture? Jews who feel this way? No doubt for Ozick the answer is all of the above, and more. In Chapter One, I argued that one of Ozick's constituenciesJewish literary intellectuals, and by extension, cultured, more or less assimilated Jewsresponds with suspicion and distress to the Postmodern disintegration of the "metanarratives" which were born of the crisis of modernity. For this group, the remaking of Judaism under the auspices of modernity must remain a viable project if it is to maintain its intellectual vitality and general cultural relevance. It can neither fully return to traditional Jewish life nor can it renounce its claims to at least some of those traditions, however remade by the forces of modern history. This borderline condition keeps contemporary Jewish writers and intellectuals particularly susceptible to nostalgia.

Perhaps the susceptibility to nostalgia as both mood and strategy which I have been attempting to describe is in itself a minor metanarrative, as peculiarly related to Jewish traditions as its great cousins, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Less systematic, less given to becoming a
Weltanschauung,
this little tale which I hear reciting itself in the books of such a variety of Jewish authors provides a degree of melancholy solace in a world that is defined by the continual shock of change. At the same time, it also provides the motivating force for new work, which always appears as a product of the dialectics of revision which Jewish authors inherit and invent.

If a post-Enlightenment metanarrative of nostalgia is still at work in Jewish writing, then the passage from ethnic literature to an as yet undefined mode of writing based on "Jewish ideas" may not be as significant as the concerned reader would at first suspect. Irving

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Howe, for example, regrets the end of the immigrant experience, believing that the matter of "Jewishness" "does not yield a thick enough sediment of felt life to enable a new burst of writing about American Jews."
¹³It could be, ironically, that Howe's concern is less for Jewish writing than for immigrant American writing, a mode in American literature which is certainly past its primeat least for European immigrants to America. Howe cites Ruth Wisse, who observes that recent Jewish-American writers tend to ship their characters "to other times and other climes, in search of pan-Jewish fictional atmospheres."
¹⁴But then, why should Jewish writing be grounded in the particulars of its local place and culture? After all, the preeminent Jewish experience for thousands of years has been that of dispersal and transformation, of the creation of counterlives, to use Philip Roth's term. Not one immigration but hundreds shape the Jewish consciousness, and Jewish writers with their Aggadic sensibilities operate upon the raw material of their identities in ways which actively upset reified notions of any single, "genuine'' Jewish time and place. In the terms of my argument, the nostalgia of critics like Howe and Wisse is too limited in its scope. It is tied to specific localesthe shtetl, the Lower East SideJewish homes, not Jewish homelessness. The adoption of writing from these milieux as the single high point in modern Jewish literature cannot be anything but sentimental, in a way that the best of this work almost never is. It is nostalgic, but strategically nostalgic, and evokes images of the past not to preserve but to disseminate them. As Howe himself says in one of his more dialectical moments, "Tradition as discontinuitythis is the central fact in the cultural experience of the American Jewish writers."
¹⁵

Consider Saul Bellow's "The Old System," one of the finest Jewish-American tales of post-immigration life. The title presumably refers to the complex system of values, relationships, and social transactions which the Braun family has maintained, not without trial, since coming to America"How It Was Done in Odessa," to compare it to the title of one of Babel's Jewish tales. The emphasis is precisely on the continuity of tradition we have come to regard as an ideological defense. This ostensible continuity is embodied in the figure of Isaac Braun, whose "old-country Jewish dignity was very firm and strong. He had the outlook of ancient generations on the New World. Tents and kine and wives and maidservants and manservants."
¹⁶Isaac, whose "Orthodoxy only increased with his wealth," is challenged by his jealous, stubborn, obese sister Tina, who resents

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her brother and fails to help him in a shady real estate transaction with the "old goy" Ilkington. The ensuing quarrel splits the family for years, and is resolved only at Tina's deathbed, when Isaac, after consulting his
rebbe,
agrees to present his sister with $20,000 in cash, simply for the privilege of seeing her one last time. The old system of tribal debts and responsibilities is restored; the traditional code of behavior is preserved even as its bearers suffer, prosper, and live out their lives in the New World.

Surely this is a story which Bellow premises upon a strategic use of nostalgia, and in doing so he takes a bold aesthetic risk. What saves the narrative from sentimentality is the ambiguity of its values, and its troubling doubts about its own discursive authority. Seeing how the Braun family behaves, one is forced to question the exact meaning of the old system. Does it extend beyond the ethnic and family loyalties, the religious devotion, the wholehearted emotional life? Does it include the obstinacy, the greed, the venality, and the crude desires of the Brauns as well? Isaac's patriarchal world consists of the Psalms, of real estate, and of sexual adventures among the working-class women of Schenectady. His portrait is matched by that of Tina, whose gross, vital appetites, coarse speech, and defiant resolve make her an equally ambiguous character. At the heart of the old system are personalities like Isaac's and Tina's; such profane, disruptive natures are as much a part of the tradition as the continuities of family, language, and religious observance.

"The Old System" is narrated through the consciousness and memories of Dr. Braun, Isaac's and Tina's younger cousin, after the two siblings have died. Dr. Braun, a famous scientist, looks back upon this family history with deep affection, but even as he plunges into his world of memory, he observes that "every civilized man today cultivated an uneasy self-detachment." He regards this self-detachment as the necessary response to what he understands as the defining condition of contemporary life: "It made him sad to feel that the thought, art, belief of great traditions should be so misemployed."
¹⁷Thus a subtle sense of regret and a melancholy lack of confidence informs his otherwise exuberant reminiscence.

Bellow's general cultural conservatism is certainly at work here, and that accounts in part for the nostalgic tenor of the story and its narrator. But in this instance, such gloomy mandarinism is put in the service of what Sontag calls an "analytical way of relating the past." By producing the tale through memory, Dr. Braun challenges himself, even as Bellow challenges his reader, to consider his personal

Page 138

and cultural values: what has been lost, what has been preserved, what will continue to be of worth. Dr. Braun's conclusion, as he thinks of Isaac reunited with Tina at her death, might be called a specimen of skeptical Jewish humanism, full of the rich emotions of the past and peering dubiously into the future:

Oh, these Jewsthese Jews! Their feelings, their hearts! Dr. Braun often wanted nothing more than to stop all this. For what came of it? One after another you gave over your dying. One by one they went. Childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. And these tears! When you wept them from the heart, you felt you justified something, understood something. But what did you understand? Again,
nothing!
It was only an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might
might,
mind youeventually, through its gift which might
might
again!be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death.
¹⁸

The undeniable rhetorical triumph of this passage should not be equated with the endurance of the old system which Dr. Braun so loves and respects, unless the old system is understood to include those doubtsthose italicized
mights
about which the skeptical scientist is so emphatic. The end of Bellow's story is thus a perfect example of what Howe calls "tradition as discontinuity." The old system continually undergoes change, and it consists in part of the disruption and doubt through which it is reinvigorated. In this respect, Bellow's warmly local ethnic writing achieves its ends in much the same way as the expensive pronouncements of Ozick or the artful mirror games of Rothor for that matter, the theorizing of Benjamin and Scholem, the original masters of modern Jewish nostalgia.

Nostalgia as an ensemble of literary strategies or as a psychohistorical metanarrative is closely linked to the wandering meanings and textual homelands I have analyzed throughout this book. The Jews, we are told, are as at home in time as other peoples are in space; the various ideologies of exile have not only eased our worldly burdens, teaching us to accept and even rejoice in our spatial wanderings, but have acclimated us to the irreversible order of time, what Olivier Revault d'Allonnes calls "the sole reality on which one can count." Jewish writers, acutely sensitive to the nuanced movements of time, look back to earlier moments, often encoded in earlier texts; after all, "the flashback

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does not exist in reality: one can return to the past only by narrative or by phantasm."
¹⁹The nostalgic consciousness and the textual homeland are complements for Jewish writers, together forming a basic literary economy: the strategies of nostalgia, when best put to use, achieve a placeno, a timeof fullness, a temporary victory to which later writers will look back in turn. The finest practitioners of this melancholy art seem capable of bridging vast spaces of time, filling empty years with strange presences, phantasms which are and are not, as in these moving lines from John Hollander's recent "Marks and Noises":


Long afterwards, abandoned alphabets Which could not stand for language any more The disused runes, the dark, square Hebrew letters Adrift in Christendom, shriveled to mere Magic, and long since silenced hieroglyphs Faded into pictures of mysteries. O letters! O domestic ghosts! the spectres Of dead speech, they rise up about me now From stillborn sounds laid out on this lined sheet. ²⁰

This new work is as full of diasporic nostalgia as any of the others I have considered here. I find it strange then that Harold Bloom, who naturally sees his friend Hollander as one of the best Jewish-American poets, and who has served as one of the most important guides in my own textual wandering, should now tell us that Jews in America are no longer in exile. For as Bloom observes in "Jewish Culture and Jewish Identity, "The old formulae of
Galut
simply do not work in the diffuse cultural contexts of America."
²¹Nevertheless, Jewish-American writers and intellectuals still must look back to such figures as Freud and Kafka because "The absence of overwhelming cultural achievement compels us to rely upon the cultural identity of the last phases of the
Galut,
yet we, as I have said before, scarcely feel that we are in Exile."
²²

It is an oddly cheerful opinion, but then, Bloom's prophecies have never been consistent; and I, for one, am not yet ready to agree with this one. Sociologically speaking, Jews may well feel as at home as any other American minority (and we are by now a nation of minorities), but sociology, whatever tools it may provide for the literary critic, can never fully account for the vicissitudes of literary creation. If, as Bloom himself notes, a Jewish-American writer like Philip Roth still resorts to the wandering meanings of Kafka and

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