Under This Blazing Light (16 page)

Nowadays I am much less of a hero. And I have a room, and

a desk. And I also write slightly longer, even much longer things than those first short stories. And so often I start off thinking that I know what’s going to happen, and it turns out that I don’t. I decide, I make up my mind that the people in a story will do this or that, and suddenly they want to do something entirely different. I say, for instance, ‘You’re both out of your minds. We arranged that you would meet in a small bar on Mount Carmel: what are you doing suddenly meeting in some olive grove in the Judaean Hills? It’s not right for you, you so obviously belong in bars, not in an olive grove.’ And they reply: ‘Don’t you tell us what’s right for us and what isn’t. Just shut up and keep writing.’ And then I have a quarrel with my ‘characters’, and sometimes we reach some sort of a compromise. That is the moment when I feel a tremendous sense of relief: my story has come alive. I don’t need to stand behind my people any more and push them. They run around of their own accord among my pages, in my notes, on my desk, in my dreams at night, and even in the daytime when I am not writing at all but talking to people about politics or going about my business or reading the newspaper. They have come to life. The difficulty now is how to hold them back, how to stop them running wild and making me do things with them that are beyond my power, how to stop them bursting into hysterics or emotional scenes, how to stop them getting out of control and ruining everything. Sometimes they are stronger than any restraints I can impose on them. Once I was working on a story about two boys and a girl in a kibbutz. In chapter four or five a sort of travelling lecturer from the Labour Council turned up at the kibbutz, an old chatterbox who lectured about Soviet Jewry. I said to him, you can speak for half a page here and then we’ll see, maybe you can appear again at the end of the story once or twice, briefly, and then I’m finished with you.

But he hadn’t finished with me, that old lecturer. He talked and talked and talked. He got completely out of hand. I said, get out of this story. It’s not your story. Stop interfering. But he went on; lecturing, shouting, sighing. Pouring his heart out. Not just on the page, but aloud, all day long, when I was eating, and even at night in my dreams which were his dreams now, he was afraid of a Russian invasion and I dreamed of a Russian invasion, he was trying to write a long letter to Moshe Dayan and I, for my part, on my lap, in a train between London and Oxford, in the margin of some magazine, wrote out for him this letter of his to Dayan. He kept on lecturing me in a strange Russian syntax, and my acquaintances were beginning to laugh at me because suddenly when I spoke my words had a Russian tune to them. Ludicrously Russian, Russian through and through, to the point where eyebrows were beginning to be raised.

And so I let everything drop, the boys and the girl on the kibbutz, my plans and intentions, and I wrote - against my ‘will’ and contrary to my intentions - a story about an old Russian from the Labour Council who travels from place to place and speaks about all kinds of troubles and dangers. Only when this story was finished did I return (for a while) to speaking properly and dreaming the dreams I deserved.

People always ask if a story is written ‘on purpose’, or ‘consciously’. What is ‘consciousness’? There is nothing whatever perhaps that anyone does while ‘being of sound mind’, as they say in the law courts: whatever one is doing, even if it is only mending a dripping tap, one’s sound mind is mixed up with something which is not ‘mind’ and not even exactly ‘sound’. It is obviously the same if one is making a picture or a statue or a masterplan for a new town, or making a story. If a man sits down to write, let us say, music, he has to be, on the one hand, alert and sharp-witted like a gangster on the night of the long knives, when any split second could be vital, and on the other hand he also has to be somewhat in a dream. If he is alert and nothing more, he cannot write music. But if he is entirely in a dream he cannot write music either. Or else he will write rotten music, and the following morning he will be amazed at himself, how on earth could he have written such rubbish.

Hebrew. The Hebrew language is a unique musical instrument. And in any case, a language is never a ‘means’ or a ‘framework’ or a ‘vehicle’ for culture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think, dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, tell lies in Hebrew, you are ‘inside’. Even if you haven’t got the smallest drop of ‘Jewish consciousness’ or Zionism or anything. If you live in Hebrew, you are ‘inside’. If a writer writes in Hebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevsky or writes about a Tartar invasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen in his stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen with us: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, associations, longings, connotations, atavistic attitudes towards the whole of reality and so forth. (Important reservation: provided it really is Hebrew, and not a garbled mish-mash of mistranslations from foreign languages.) In Hebrew even inanimate objects are obliged to relate to each other in a Hebrew way: masculine and feminine, for example, or what the grammarians call the ‘construct state’.

Incidentally, the whole of Hebrew literature has its own set themes. The exceptions only prove the rule. It deals with

Jewish suffering. Jewish suffering in all its various incarnations, settings, reflections, perspectives, rituals. If anyone can write in Hebrew about love for love’s sake, about ‘the human condition in general’, in such a way that no Hebrew echoes intrude on his ‘universality’, good luck to him. I don’t see myself how it can be done. What we are all writing about is Jewish suffering, from Mapu’s ‘Love of Zion’, by way of the agonies of faith and loss of faith and sex and sin and humiliation in Bialik, Berdyczewski, Brenner and Agnon, to the untough tough-guys of the Palmach who grappled with their sensitive Jewish souls and found no way out, right down to the latest writers.

Of course, there is also an American Jewish literature, which is in English and also deals with Jewish suffering. And there used to be a German Jewish literature dealing with Jewish suffering. There was also Jewish suffering in Yiddish. There are even those who say that Kafka, when all is said and done, was concerned with Jewish suffering. There is no inherent conflict between dealing with Jewish suffering in all its various aspects and soaring to the heights of ‘universality’. On the contrary: one can be anything, lyrical, mystical, metaphysical, satirical, symbolic, without departing from the theme of Jewish suffering. After all, Jewish suffering is, in the last analysis, just like any other suffering: the Jews wanted, and still want, something they will never have, and what they do have they despise, and so on. Just like everybody else, only in their own private ‘key’, and, if they live in Hebrew, whatever they say has a Hebrew tune to it.

I have a family relationship to the Jews and their suffering. You love and belong, and sometimes you also hate. There is no contradiction. Whenever I hate the Jews it is inevitably an intimate hatred, which comes from my heart and is part of it, because I am one of them and they are inside me.

How sick we are. Sometimes I try to take comfort in the thought that others are also sick, that the ‘German psyche’ and the ‘Russian soul’ are sick, that the ‘Christian mind’ is surely sick and poisoned, but this is no comfort at all. Perhaps we are slightly sicker than all the others. We have been so much persecuted. So much hatred has been directed against us, at various times, in various places, under various pretexts, that in the natural course of things we have started to scribble and poke around to find out what is wrong with us, what people hate in us, no doubt we have even internalised some of this hatred, we feel warm and cosy inside it.

Anyone who is misled into supposing that the Jewish sickness is merely the result of dispersal among the nations and lack of territory is mistaken. So is anyone who thinks that now that we have obtained a piece of territory we can settle down peacefully and recuperate. So many victims of oppression and persecution, a Hasid from Poland, a businessman from Brooklyn, a goldsmith from Tunis, a ritual slaughterer from the Yemen, an ex-Komsomolnik from Odessa, all packed into one bus under this sweltering summer sun - can the fact that they are all in the same bus transform them into the ‘heroic generation’ that will ‘emerge into the bright light of a new day’? Abracadabra and ‘the Maccabees come back to life’?

We have never been able to settle down. For a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years we have been unable to settle down quietly. Whichever way we have turned, whatever we have put our hands to, we have always caused a mighty stir: sweat, nervousness, fear, aggression, a constant ferment. This is not the place to examine who was responsible: whether we always radiated nervous hysteria because we were persecuted, or whether we were persecuted because of the nervous hysteria we radiated. Or both. The crux of the matter is the restlessness, that irritating, fructifying fever: anxious, eager Jews, always trying to teach everybody else how to live, and how to tell right from wrong. Ideas and ideals. We even have a collection of portraits which we wheel out whenever we have the feeling that we are being slightly undervalued or denigrated: Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, etc. All the Jewish Nobel prizewinners. The proportion of Jewish scientists. The percentage of doctors, of musicians, and so on. Incidentally, most of these geniuses were assimilated Jews who felt burdened by their Jewishness, and some of them we even disowned and excommunicated. But whenever we are ‘on the defensive’ we wear their names like talismans to protect ourselves against libels or pogroms. Just as it is popular here to boast that we are descended from the heroes of Masada. But the heroes of Masada killed themselves and their children, and we are all descended from the ‘defeatist’ Jews who chose surrender, exile and survival. Or take our other boast, that we are the ‘descendants of the prophets’. Surely we are the descendants of the Jews who stoned the prophets. Never mind: every people has its own boasts. We have had our share of sufferings. If we were to mention just a few of them, a kind of catalogue of selected Jewish woes, it would be evident that our sufferings, by and large, have been neither heroic nor romantic: they have been merely humiliating, the repulsive, sweaty dregs of thousands of years of ‘self-discipline’ coupled with sexual repression, turning our backs on all the joys of the world, on nature, on sensual pleasures, on everything which is not ‘Torah’, coupled with fermenting petit-bourgeois hypocracy, and with alternating fits of self-abasement and exaltation in relation to the rest of the world, with its culture and its fatal charms.

Jews can no longer look gentiles straight in the eye: either they kowtow and fawn on them, or they puff themselves up with a kind of solipsistic megalomania.

I hate the Jews as one can only hate one’s own flesh and blood. I hate them with love and with shame. After all, we are not a ‘nation’, like the British, the Poles or the French. We are still a tribe, and if anyone bites our thumb, our ear hurts too. If a member of the tribe gets killed on the other side of the world, we feel panic, outrage, fury and sorrow. If some Jewish confidence-trickster is arrested in Lower Ruritania the whole tribe shudders at what ‘the World’ will think. If a functionary or manager is convicted of embezzlement, I personally cringe with shame and embarrassment, as if it had happened in my own family; what will the neighbours say.

Yes, we are a tribe, an extended family, a clan, and there are times when I feel suffocated and want to escape to the other side of the world to be alone and not to have to bear the perpetual burden of this Israeli intimacy. But there is no escape: even at the other end of the world I am bound to come across some foreign newspaper with a report of dirty business in the Israeli army, or a Jewish fraud, or shooting on the border, or manifestations of antisemitism in northeastern Argentina, and at once I should feel the old constriction in my throat: more trouble. And the feeling of depression inside me: surely I ought to do something about it, at least write a stiff article, sign a petition, startle somebody.

There is a powerful inner truth which must not be concealed: supposing this hysterical Jewish bond were severed, how could I live without it? How could I give up this drug, this addiction to collective excitement, these tribal ties? And if I could kick the habit, what would I have left? Are we really capable of living ordinary, peaceable lives? Could any of us? I couldn’t.

Israel is not a fresh leaf or a new chapter. Perhaps, at best, it is a new paragraph on a very old page. The Jews came here to recover, to recuperate, to forget, but they are unable to recuperate, forget or recover. And in fact, deep down in their heart of hearts, they don’t want to. They didn’t even come here out of choice. Half of them were born here. The other half are mostly refugees who drifted here because there was no other escape. And the rest, a handful, a few tens of thousands out of three million, are the only ones who came out of idealism or from choice. And they brought with them a burning ambition to turn over a fresh leaf, to start a totally new chapter: ‘There, in the land our fathers loved, all our dreams will be fulfilled.’

There was a hope, which was expressed in several different and conflicting versions, that when we arrived here, as soon as our feet touched this good earth, our hearts would be changed. A recovery. And indeed there have been a few signs of a gradual recovery. A relative recovery.

Only the prolonged quarrel with the Arabs is delaying this recovery, even causing the patient to relapse into his former condition. Perhaps, as some people say, a short war can ‘temper’ a people, even grant them their ‘finest hours’. Perhaps. But one thing that is certain is that a prolonged squabble does not ennoble, it degrades. In our case it is pushing us back into our ‘hereditary’ depression, into the neuroses, the atavistic tribal madness from which we were trying to escape, back into the megalomania, the paranoia, the traditional nightmares. A bloody conflict which drags on for decades, a conflict which involves isolation, withdrawal into ourselves, mounting condemnation from the international ‘audience’ which we pretend to despise but which secretly, in the depths of our ‘moaning Jewish hearts’, we have an almost hysterical desire and need to be loved and admired by - such a conflict would have driven even a far more sane and resistant people than we are out of its mind by now. All this is ‘too much for our medical condition’.