Under This Blazing Light (4 page)

I was born in Jerusalem in a pool of shade within (relatively) ancient stone walls, but I can picture to myself how awful Kibbutz Hulda must have been for its children in the early days: a place that had nothing but hope, declarations of intent, and limitless good will. No big trees, only saplings. No old houses, only tents, shacks, and a few whitewashed concrete structures. No old people, just enthusiastic young pioneers. ‘We have left all our yesterdays behind us, / But tomorrow is a long, long way away.’ A world that was all new fencing, new plantations, a new language, which sounded rather artificial as spoken by the settlers from the shtetl (to this day they still cry, laugh, count and quarrel in Yiddish), new buildings, new lawns, new lessons, fresh paint everywhere. There were even new lullabies and new ‘folk-tales’ synthesised by writers from the Jewish National Fund for the new Israeli children. We had folk-songs before we had a folk. Travelling instructors from the competent agencies taught the people how to sing the folk-songs and dance the folk-dances properly.

Yes, I know, we had no choice. Backs to the wall. ‘To conquer the mountain or die.’ A new land and a new chapter. I know all that. I’m just trying to explain, perhaps to apologise, and tell you why it is hard to make a story with depth here, one which, like any good story, works witchcraft and conjures up ghosts and spirits.

Maybe we ought to give up, do our best, and wait a couple of hundred years for a literature to emerge here that will be comparable to the Hebrew literature of the turn of the century, the great generations of Mendele, Berdyczewski, Bialik, Gnessin, Agnon, and the rest of them?

There is story about Avraham Krinitsy, the mayor of Ramat Gan. One day he went to watch the nursery-school children of his town planting trees for Tu Bishvat. All the children were standing there clutching their saplings, the mayor was standing in front of them on a dais holding his own sapling, and he had to say something. It is not easy for a politician to say anything to an audience of toddlers. Suddenly, in his consternation, he burst out with the following sentence delivered in a heavy Russian accent: ‘Moy dzear children: you are the trees, and we are the manure!’

And this may be the right rhythm for the growth of literature in any tribe. We should not expect a new Bialik or Agnon or Dostoevsky to spring up tomorrow or the day after in one of our new towns or suburbs or housing developments. Agnon grew up in Buczacz, Gunther Grass in Danzig, Thomas Mann came from Liibeck, and Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, in the American Deep South. So, let’s wait a couple of hundred years and see what happens.

There is another way that I have been thinking about quite a lot recently. It may be possible to try to catch the time and place, the displaced refugees, as they are, with all their elusiveness and emaciation, with the midday light itself. To write like a camera that takes in too much light, so that the outlines are blurred, the eyes are screwed up, the film is scorched, like photographing straight into the summer sun.

Perhaps I ought to shut up at last. Gradually. Surely the tribe needs its witchdoctor in times of disaster or terror or nightmare, or the opposite, in times of great joy and ecstasy. At other times, only a few need all this. I don’t know. I shan’t define ‘the state of the tribe at the present time’. I shall keep my thoughts to myself.

But if our tribe is having a brief respite between suffering and ecstasy, what need of sorcery and stories? Let it have musicians, entertainers - and let it rest in peace.

(First published in 1972)

(Introduction to a discussion on Berdyczewski)

I can talk about Berdyczewski the way one talks about a distant relation, ‘distant’ in the sense of an uncle whom I never met because he died eighteen years before I was born. I read his stories with curiosity, respect and awe, and as I read a kind of ‘genetic’ pulse within me bears witness to the distant relationship. (Incidentally, ‘distant relation’ is Berdyczewski’s own expression: he employed it to sign many of his essays.)

Berdyczewski as a writer was distant, apparently at least, from the mainstream of Hebrew literature in his day. He did not follow the beaten track. He even lived a long way from the centres, the ‘capital cities’ of Hebrew letters in his generation. He did not live in Odessa or Warsaw, he did not even come to Palestine, he drifted to Berlin and Breslau, where Hebrew writing was an even more solitary business than elsewhere. He communicated with other writers, with editors and publishers, mainly by letter. His letters are often bitter and anguished.

But Berdyczewski was not a solitary writer in the geographical sense alone. All over Europe the great novelists were busy exposing the depths of the human psyche. All the various schools of Hebrew writers too were discovering the complexities of psychology, of the individuals, types, societies. Berdyczewski did not think much of psychology. This was considered by many to be an unpardonable sin: how can there be such a thing as a writer who does not take the trouble to endow his characters with ‘depth’ and ‘complexity’? What about their childhoods? Where are the complexes, the repressions, and so on? Is that how you portray a character, just a couple of sketchy lines and nothing more? How sloppy!

Moreover, at a time when the heroes of Hebrew literature and their creators agonised page after page, chapter after chapter, volume after volume over the great questions of world reform, social justice, the solution to the Jewish problem, the question ‘where to?’ in both general and specific terms, Berdyczewski seemed to relate to these matters as if they were only lines, and rather marginal lines at that, in the depiction of his characters. World reform, as presented by various ideological movements, appears in his books as the outward manifestation, tamed and clothed, of powerful naked urges. It is not that Berdyczewski was ‘anti-ideological’ in the way that it is fashionable to be in our own time. It is not that he was not acquainted with the leaders of the movements in Europe and in the Jewish people in his own day. He knew them, he supported, denounced, and so forth. But when he came to tell a story his attitude was somewhat sceptical. As if to say: OK, chaps have all sorts of opinions, but they are merely restrained, conventional manifestations of primeval forces, rather as a domestic dog is a tame version of a steppe-wolf, and when the restraints are shattered the dog will turn back into a wolf. It is only at that point that a Berdyczewski story takes off. He was not interested in psychology or ideology but in other things, such as the destructive power of repressed love, or the influence of the elements on emotional urges, or the excommunication of Spinoza, or the savagery that lurks under the surface of culture, religion, and society. In a certain sense, with great caution, one could say that Berdyczewski was the first ‘metaphysical poet’ in modem Hebrew literature.

Berdyczewski did not think much of epic detail, of the realistic insistence on capturing small and great particulars: objects, lines, bodies. In fact he rather despised it. He did not possess what my teacher Shimon Halkin called ‘the urge to flesh out reality’. He was a ‘spare’ writer, the opposite of Mendele, Bialik, Peretz and their continuators. He did not attempt to ‘capture the flow of things in words’. He lacked that whole essential quality without which it is hard to tell a proper story. This was a flaw of a kind. His centre of gravity was in another field. Often he shaped his heroes not as people of flesh and blood but as representatives on earth of mysterious powers and natural forces, which seemed to become concrete, to take on human form, to be incarnated in mortal creatures walking onto the stage so as to act out an ancient play whose plot and gestures and action and very ending are as fixed as the planets in their orbits. So Berdyczewski’s books are peopled by demigods, evil spirits, exterminating angels, terrifying demons and mysterious creatures bom not out of a novelist’s observation but out of the magical powers of a cabbalist. (Similar creatures were later to fill the pages of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose relationship to Berdyczewski deserves study.)

All this is not to say that Berdyczewski’s heroes are not ‘human’. They are wonderfully ‘human’, because they almost

always have to confront a difficult choice. Difficult choices are, of course, among the main concerns of life (and literature). Berdyczewski’s heroes are not put in the position where they have a choice between good and evil, between virtuous happiness and criminal disgrace, they generally face a choice between life and death, and let me add, to dispel any simplistic assumptions, that in Berdyczewski this choice is particularly difficult because life resembles death while death resembles a volcanic eruption. Those who choose life are condemned to live in pettiness, in a rut, in mediocrity, in a constricting routine, at the cost of total spiritual and sexual castration, the brutish existence of sheep that graze, are milked, are sheared and killed, whereas those who choose death are choosing a kind of magnificent union with the eternal principles, with the stars in their courses, with chaos for those who long for chaos, with God for those who fell to earth as demigods. This is why the choice confronting B’s [sic] heroes is both difficult and subtly deceptive, and at times the author hints to us - somewhat inconsistently -that in fact everything is predetermined and even the choice is merely a game, a ritual, whose outcome was decided long ago. Hence also Berdyczewski’s grandiloquent language, that is not afraid of monumental words, of raising its voice, of shouting, of archaisms and anachronisms that are occasionally rather crude. Berdyczewski’s language has no time for nuance, for the subtle interplay of light and shade, but there is another kind of precision in his writing, which manifests itself not particularly in the sensitive choice of adjectives and adverbs but rather in a certain gnarled ruggedness such as you find in the bark of an old olive tree.

Or again, the impatience in his writing. Many of his stories 
read like first drafts, with the force of rough, half-chiselled stone.

And Berdyczewski has a passionate, adolescent openness to all the great intellectual currents of his day. He was fascinated by romanticism, but he also liked anti-romanticism. He was fascinated by Nietzsche, by the Scandinavian writers of the turn of the century, by symbolism, by expressionism, by the revival of pagan myths. He wrestled with all these movements like an earnest Talmud student grappling with a text.

Take the young man called Michael in the story called ‘Mahanaim’ (apparently one of the more patiently written stories). This Michael is digging with all his might to reach something that is hidden under the surface of civilisation. Civilisation does not satisfy him. He is searching for some kind of molten lava that he can plunge into. He wants to be swept up in primeval forces. Michael considers himself‘maddened by what he has seen’; he calls himself an ‘accursed Hebrew’ - a typically Berdyczewskian expression: not a ‘passionate Greek’, as Joseph Klausner called Tschemichowsky, not a ‘cursed man’, like the ‘cursed’ fin-de-siecle poets, but an ‘accursed Hebrew’.

Berdyczewski was bom and brought up in the shtetl: he was bom in Miedzyborz (Medzibezh, Medzhibozh) in Podolia, he grew up in Dubova in Ukraine, and married in Taflik in Podolia; it was here that he came under the influence of the Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskalah) movement, his marriage broke up, and he returned to Dubova, before going on to study in the yeshiva of Volozhin; then he moved to Varshad, where he remarried, but he was restless, and published articles and stories until he divorced again and went to Odessa, and finally, at the age of about twenty-five, he left Russia and went to study in Germany, where he lived for the rest of his life. In other words, he hailed from the heart of hearts of that Eastern-European Jewish ‘shadow state’ which led a shadowy half-existence without government, flag, army or stamps, but with eight or nine million inhabitants from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the depths of Ukraine in the east to the gates of Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in the west. But although it lacked the trappings of a state, it was splendidly civilised, with a religion, law and order, systems of education and welfare, a language, civilised manners, lullabies and fairy-stories, music, justice, literature, economics, politics, power struggles, and intellectual movements: everything you could find in more prosperous civilisations also existed in that Eastern-European Jewish shadow state. It was in no way inferior to ‘normal’ nation states, and in some respects it was far superior to them and indeed to the present-day State of Israel. Despite the terrible poverty, no one ever starved to death, and there was not a man who could not at least read and write. There have been few ‘normal’ states, either then or now, that could boast as much. But Berdyczewski does not sing the praises of the rock from which he was hewn, and I do not want to sound an over-sentimental note: for all its intellectual resources, this Jewish shadow state was riddled with contradictions; it was founded on sexual repression, on suppressed emotions, on submissiveness, on benighted fanaticism and dead letters. That is the other side of the coin.

This was the state from which Berdyczewski hailed. There he was married to his first wife without either party being consulted first, and there she was taken away from him by forcible divorce when he ‘went to the bad’ and started reading forbidden books. He never returned to those places to the end of his life. Yet though he did not return, his stories never left. In all his stories he wrote about that Jewish shadow state, with hatred and longing and bitter mockery and compassion and contempt. He wrote with gnashing of teeth, like someone ‘maddened by what he had seen’. This is not an unusual attitude in literature in general or in the Hebrew literature of this period that is known, for some reason, as the ‘period of revival’. So Dante stood on the threshold, in the twilight of the Middle Ages. So stood Cervantes and Shakespeare in the twilight transition from one age to another. So stood Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, the lovers, haters, gravediggers and immortalisers of the ancient, mighty, dying Orthodox Russia. So stood Thomas Mann, the lover, mocker, elegist and immortaliser of the bourgeois age. So too, among our own writers, Mendele, Bialik, Berdyczewski, Brenner and all that crew stood ‘on the threshold of the Talmudic academy’. The writer turns to the world that made him, observes it with terror, hatred and intimacy, digs deep inside it until the digging itself becomes a form of killing, and as soon as the killing is over he starts to mourn and memorialise and preserve in words and raise a monument. Even perhaps to feel nostalgic.