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    France’s Mitterrand

    by

    Review of Denis MacShane: François Mitterrand: A Political Odyssey. New York: Universe Books, 1983.

    Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, January 1984. Republished with permission.

     

    Years before many Americans noticed him, France’s socialist president made a career while provoking contrary sentiments. He evidently prefers not to be understood. The conservative Reagan Administration must nonetheless decide what to think of a ruler who supports the United States and opposes the Soviets in Europe while opposing the United States and supporting Soviet allies in Latin America. This biography can contribute to that effort, albeit modestly.

    Denis MacShane accurately describes his book as “accessible,” not “exhaustive or definitive.” It is also frequently polemical. “In most capitalist democracies,” he laments, “ideas of the Left are restricted either by not being published or by attaining only a limited distribution in book form.” A few pages later, he claims to have watched the 1981 French presidential election reports on a television “in a small apartment in a working class district of Paris.” As in most such writing, the allegedly matter-of-fact statement is absurd while the patently theatrical one is believable.

    Mitterrand too can brush facts aside as he strains to realize the fictive. He came to politics after studying literature and music in ‘Thirties Paris. He still “disdains the technical detail of economics” (as MacShane puts it), telling the French, simply: “You are either for the exploiters or the exploited.” He sees capitalism as a vast appetite; he ignores its productivity. One might describe this as a literary point of view. Were MacShane and Mitterrand capable only of rhetorical posing this book could pass unremarked. But MacShane to some extent and Mitterrand to a further extent offer more than that.

    After Hitler’s conquest of Paris, Mitterrand escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp; he worked for the collaborationist government at Vichy while aiding the Resistance. (He managed to earn decorations for both activities, thereby displaying a precocious aptitude for a certain sort of politicking). He entered parliamentary politics after the war, involving himself with a succession of small parties, really “political grouplets,” which satisfied “his taste for leadership and position.” He won his first election by campaigning against the Communist Party, nationalization, and bureaucracy. “Even with the most charitable interpretation,” MacShane intones, “it was a campaign of undiluted opportunism. But it worked….” In his first ministerial position, he won the respect of Maurice Thorez, the cynical boss of the French Communist Party, by breaking a strike. (Thorez elicits MacShane’s most bizarre description: “a close personal friend of Stalin.”)

    Throughout the 1950s, Mitterrand remained a firm if reformist supporter of French colonialism. As the minister responsible for Overseas Territories, he wooed African nationalists away from the Communist Party, then advocated a similar policy toward Ho Chi Minh and even Mao—who were probably not so susceptible to Gallic pleasantries. About Algerian nationalists he said, “There can only be one form of negotiation: war.”

    All of this politique, real and surreal, came from a man who insisted on his leftist credentials. It undercuts his claim that he opposed Charles de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 simply because too many of the General’s supporters “wanted vengeance on the poor,” for some unspecified reason. MacShane describes this dissent as “an act of political courage for a man who up to that moment had been considered to be most obsessed with his career.” He quickly and sensibly adds that “At the age of forty-one, perhaps Mitterrand thought that he could wait a few years until the sixty-eight-year-old de Gaulle vanished and the traditional political forces re-emerged.” Indeed, Mitterrand lost his seat in the National Assembly but soon reappeared, running as de Gaulle’s main opponent in the 1965 presidential election. A year later, Le Monde‘s editor wrote, “One does not believe in his sincerity so much as his agility.”

    The same writer nonetheless added that “François Mitterrand, unlike most politicians, is worth more than he appears.” The actual Mitterrand excels the fictional one Mitterrand celebrates but prudently fails to embody. His dealings with Marxism and the Communist Party illustrate this. In a 1969 book, Mitterrand (in MacShane’s words) “openly embraced Marxist concepts, though he admitted that he had never made a detailed study of Marx.” That aversion of the eyes undoubtedly made the embracing less repugnant. He accepted Marx’s social/economic determinism but rejected ‘proletarian’ dictatorship. “We are here to conquer power, but only after we have won over the minds of our fellow citizens.” Marx and Lenin scorn such ‘bourgeois formalism,’ and neither address the unconvinced as “fellow citizens.” Marxism au Mitterrand retains a place for civility; he is a Social Democrat, not a Bolshevik.

    His Marxism also cares for individuality. MacShane quotes his comment on the prison camp: “Being obliged to live with a mass of people one gets to know solitude.” Politically, this inclines him to liberty more than equality, “the great problem on the road to Socialism.” In a passage from his edited diary/notebook, The Wheat and the Chaff (New York: Seaver Books, 1982), Mitterrand insists that socialism must “prove… it has returned to the sources, its own sources, that it is the daughter of the revolutions where one swore ‘freedom or death’ and kept one’s word.” This sounds a good deal more like Victor Hugo than V. I. Lenin; a Marxist would complain that these were bourgeois revolutions. To his lasting credit and discredit, Mitterrand is not listening. Credit, because no Marxist could write that “the worst tyranny is that of the spirit,” which will “lie in wait for its prey until the end of time.” Discredit, because he prefers to ignore, or pretends to ignore that the Communists’ willingness to temporize aims at a dictatorship presented lyingly (‘dialectically’) as the agent of the ‘withering away’ of the State. Moreover, after deploring the solitude of mass-life and spiritual tyranny, he can stumble into this enumeration of the kinds of “dignity and responsibility” freedom should serve: “abolition of the death penalty; giving women control of their personal destiny, i.e., contraception and abortion; divorce by mutual consent; the right to vote at age 18, and so on.” ‘Bourgeois’ in the best sense, he is also ‘bourgeois’ in the worst sense.

    ‘Bourgeois’ socialism can more easily anger Marxists than it does conservatives. MacShane plausibly suggests that after Mitterrand took over direction of the Socialist Party in 1971 the ensuing alliance with George Marchais’s Communist Party was a marriage of convenience, understood as such by both partners. The dissolution of this “Union of the Left” came in September of 1977; Mitterrand has suggested that Marchais acted in response to the Soviet position taken that January condemning such alliances. The conservative argument that a Socialist government would be a Trojan horse lost some of its plausibility. This, along with President Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s blunders, France’s high unemployment, and Mitterrand’s appeal to the Gaullist tradition yielded a victory by three-and-one-half percentage points in the 1981 election.

    MacShane surveys the first months of the Mitterrand presidency, citing a 27% increase in public spending, 39 banks nationalized (95% of French bank funds are now under state control, up from 70%), and an additional 14% of industry nationalized, totaling 32%. He wrote the book too early to mention the subsequent violent disorders in Paris as unemployment remained high and inflation got worse. MacShane loses the chance to predict trouble by misunderstanding a conversation Mitterrand had with U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger late in 1975. Kissinger, MacShane sputters, indulged in an “anti-Communist tirade” that was “circular” and “pointless.” As Mitterrand himself recounts it in The Wheat and the Chaff, what Kissinger had to say was quite pointed indeed. Why nationalize industry, he asked when nationalizing would only cause your head of state to be blamed for every economic problem? The socialist program would make the French less governable than ever.

    Mitterrand replied that he sincerely wanted the state to wither away, not by dictatorship but by ever-increasing decentralization and autogestion—literally self-direction or self rule, both political and economic. He concludes his book by claiming that technology, far from requiring increased hierarchy, can constitute “the decisive instrument of liberation” if a genuinely socialist ethos guides it. “Data processing, biology, nuclear physics: The great fields of knowledge are open to conquistadors setting out in the name of democracy.” It makes one think that the “political odyssey” MacShane describes has been undertaken by a Ulysses who rides a horse named Rocinante.

    Unlike MacShane, Mitterrand sees Kissinger’s point and wishes he had more time to consider it. He is a man with a taste for thinking but without the leisure for sustained thought. This injures him more than it would injure a conservative or moderate politician because, as a democratic socialist, he cannot refer to a well-established social and political tradition that has, so to speak, done a measure of thinking for him. (Democratic socialism has an established intellectual tradition, of course; it is recent but voluminously recorded. However, one needs time to read the many volumes.)  The French word moeurs means both morals and customs; Mitterrand’s socialism has moral sentiments but no customs to make them habitual. This yields precisely to what Kissinger foresaw: political overextension.

    It also yields lifelong improvisation, and the mistakes that inevitably follow. Mitterrand first opposed the Gaullist constitution’s strong presidency, and now supports it; he opposed relinquishing any colonies, then bowed to their loss; he opposed French nuclear weapons before changing his mind after the Soviets overran Czechoslovakia; he opposed de Gaulle, then ran for office as the inheritor of Gaullism; he attacked Giscard for intervening militarily in Chad, then sent in troops himself. He eventually learns the right lessons, which is more than any ideologue can say. But he must learn the hard way. Now that he wields presidential power his countrymen share the hard knocks.

    Americans will not suffer as much as the French. Mitterrand learned his basic lessons in foreign policy during the 1930s. “The righteous must be stronger than the strong if they want to be involved in world affairs,” he wrote in 1938, at the age of twenty-one, criticizing French and British weakness after Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Some forty years later he told Marchais, “I will not go down in history as the person responsible for leaving France unarmed in a world [that] is not.”  And to the Soviet ruler, Brezhnev, in 1975: “Why these troops and arms massed on the soil of Europe? And those rockets pointing toward our cities? Our specialists have never located so many nor such powerful ones. The state of NATO forces in that sector does not justify such excessive armaments.” MacShane, a much younger man who finds Soviet viciousness harder to believe, suggests that Mitterrand has another motive to avoid breaking with the United States: he fears Allende’s fate. A CIA plot against the life of a French president strikes me as unlikely. Serious fear of same by a French president strikes me as unlikely, too.

    Mitterrand will remain anti-Soviet in Europe, anti-U.S. in Latin America. Because he counts for more in Europe than in Latin America he will help more than he hurts, at least in the short run. His party is another matter. It may drift toward neutralism after Mitterrand if Mitterrand does not educate its younger members as he educated himself. Idealist or opportunist, François Mitterrand will not betray the West. But to help save it he will have to become a statesman.

    Reply to Garcia Marquez

    by

    Published in Cogitations, Summer 1984.

     

    Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the exiled Colombian novelist, won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature and delivered the customary acceptance speech in December of that year. In it, he quoted “my master, William Faulkner,” who told the Stockholm audience in his 1950 Nobel address, “I decline to accept the end of man.” “I would feel unworthy of standing in his place that was his,”Garcia Marquez said, “if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize 32 years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility” the power “to annihilate, a hundred times over… the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.” In the face of mass death Garcia Marquez nonetheless “feel[s] entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of…a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible.” In this, he probably intends to echo Faulkner’s celebrated avowal, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”

    The echo is a faint one, a distortion of the original voice. In 1950, William Faulkner already understood what Garcia Marquez understands about nuclear weapons. He said, “Our tragedy today is a general and physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” But Faulkner did not feel entitled to oppose the nightmare of nuclear war with the dream of utopia. He did not reply to a mass dilemma with a mass-answer.

    Instead, he addressed an individual “the young man or woman writing today.” He urged this writer to remember one thing and forget another. Do not forget, he said, “the human heart in conflict with itself”; it “alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” But do forget something else: the writer “Must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Man will not only endure but prevail “because he has a soul,” a soul capable of apprehending these universal truths. He has that soul now. Human beings do not have to wait for some future utopia for love to “prove true” and “happiness to [be] possible.”

    But Garcia Marquez did not want his audience to think that. For an ideological passion rules him, not so much old verities and truths of the heart. It emerges slowly and incompletely from his baroque chambers of oratory. But it does emerge.

    Garcia Marquez titled his speech “The Solitude of Latin America.” This solitude arose, he said, because, to the European mind, and perhaps to anyone’s, the reality of Latin America “resembles a venture into fantasy,” even “madness.” In years past, for example, a Mexican dictator “held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War.” Today, the region has seen thousands of deaths and over a million exiles caused by Rightist governments. “[W]e have had to ask little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

    Garcia Marquez lists the criminal governments: Paraguay, Argentina, Somozist Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay. Not Cuba, however, which has produced more than its share of the dead and the exiled in the last 25 years. Not Sandinist Nicaragua. Not leftist terrorism. Garcia Marquez–shall we say?–forgot them.

    But not entirely. To end Latin American solitude, Europeans should “see us in [their] own past,” which is no less bloody and bizarre. “Why not think,” Garcia Marquez asked, “that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions?” He was not so crude as to describe those methods, asking only that Europeans not forget “the fruitful excesses of their youth.”

    Surely they should not. Nor should we forget that we shall know a tree by its fruits. Garcia Marquez evidently prefers that we not look too hard at the fruits of the Latin American Left’s fruitful excesses. Judge our Rightist past and present according to its mad reality, he advises; understand our Leftist present and future according to its utopian promises.

    In speaking propaganda to the mass of Europeans, Garcia Marquez ‘forgot’ what Faulkner wanted individuals to remember: the human soul, here and now, permanently. The soul would be inconvenient for Garcia Marquez to remember. It would dim his pretentious vision of utopias built by “by different methods for different conditions.” It would muffle his appeal to the fear of violent death, which he hopes will make his audience go along with the scam. Garcia Marquez will deceive only those who cannot forget the baseness of fear because they never learned that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

    Jewish Interrogations of Modernity

    by

    Bernard Malamud: The Stories of Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.
    Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Penitent. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1983.

    This review was first published in Chronicles of Culture, September 1984. Republished with permission.

     

    Morality is religion’s province. Contemporary secularists do not see this, averting their eyes from the religious sources of their own moralities. Such aversion makes a kind of sense; deprived of any metaphysical foundation, secular morality can only rest on a physical one, and modern physics, chemistry, and biology are morally unpromising. Looked at hard, modern secular moralities dissolve into more or less appealing immoralisms, though many people prefer not to notice. Even ancient philosophers, celebrated or condemned for their teleological understanding of nature—which does support morality—do not claim that nature issues directly in morality. They have too much respect for the moral importance of prudence and custom for that; and both prudence and custom pay their respect to the moral importance of circumstances, and therefore to some extent accident.

    Moral commandments animate Judaism. Hebrew has no word for ‘nature.’ Judaism rejects accident for Providence and abhors the misuse of art to produce graven images. Today’s Jews confront men animated by the ambitions of modern science, the art of using nature to conquer nature—a form of human providence. The non-Jews Jews confront are therefore more profoundly un-Jewish than any other non-Jews in history. Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer write very differently, but each responds to the confrontation of Jews with modern non-Jews by upholding the Jewish tradition of moral seriousness.

    Malamud has collected 25 of his short stories, all but two of which appeared in previous books. In his preface Malamud writes that literature “values man by describing him”—a remark that smoothly mediates between literary realism and concern for morality. The men and women described here inhabit life’s margins. Retired, poor, grieving, they “suffer from [their] health,” as one of them puts it, a phrase that makes “health” synonymous with being sick. Their vulnerability allows Malamud to illustrate the moral theme that fascinate him: charity, guilt, love, and faith. Mindful that Judaism understands man as created in God’s image, Malamud makes the relationship between man and his Creator an undercurrent in story after story.

    In “The Bill,” a married couple who own a store extend credit to a neighbor because “if yo were a human being you gave credit to somebody else and he gave credit to you.” But the man who gets the credit resents them for it, feels guilty, and never pays back his debt. The protagonist of “Black Is My Favorite Color” tries to extend charity and love to blacks, who reject it or fail to return it. “[T]he language of the heart is either a dead language or else no one understands it the way you speak it,” he laments. Nor are non-Jews the only proud ingrates, Jews faultlessly charitable. “The Jewbird” is a parable about Jewish resentment of victimized Jews; in “Man in the Drawer” an American Jewish writer resents the gift of a manuscript from a desperate Jewish colleague in the Soviet Union. Human ingratitude to the Creator of humanity pulses through every book of the Hebrew Bible.

    The relation between giver and recipient obtains in the relation between an artist and those who care for art or believe they care. “Rembrandt’s Hat,” one of Malamud’s best stories, features an art historian who thinks of a sculptor, “All I have is good will toward him.” Just so—but good will is not enough. After unintentionally offending the sculptor by comparing the artist’s hat to one in a Rembrandt self-portrait, the historian feels “surges of hatred.” Months of feuding pass before the historian takes another look at the Rembrandt painting: “In his self-created mirror [as distinguished from mirrors held up by historians and critics] the painter beheld distance, objectivity painted to stare out of his right eye; but the left looked out of bedrock, beyond quality. Yet the expression of each of the portraits seemed magisterially sad; or was this what life was if when Rembrandt painted he did not paint the sadness?” The historian also notices a simple fact. He had misremembered Rembrandt’s hat, which does not closely resemble the hat the sculptor wears. Those who would partake of what artists give us must learn empathy, not only judgment; without empathy attention fails, causing inaccurate perceptions and false judgments. The historian reconciles with the sculptor, who wears his hat “like a crown of failure and hope”—failure, because he is no Rembrandt, hope, because he nonetheless aspires to achieve something fine.

    But why art, especially from a writer whose religious tradition frowns upon l’art pour l’art, let alone art for other gods than God? “Art celebrates life and gives us our measure,” Malamud writes. The celebration is no more direct in his stories than in Rembrandt’s paintings. Guilt can literally bring death, as in “The Jewish Refugee,” the story of a German-Jewish critic and journalist who believes that his German wife, left behind, was secretly antisemitic. He commits suicide after learning that she had converted to Judaism and was murdered by the Nazis. But Malamud does not join with Nietzsche and his epigones in celebrating life without guilt. “The Death of Me” shows non-Jews who quarrel and who come to hate each other, bringing death to a Jew. “Life Is Better Than Death” ironically portrays a young widow whose love affair ends in pregnancy and desertion. Malamud’s most revealing title plays on a stock expression, “The Cost of Living.” By describing the slow impoverishment and bankruptcy of an old-fashioned grocer, Malamud insists on life’s physical and spiritual costliness. At the same time, precisely by defending Judaism as a defense of God’s gift of life, Malamud answers Nietzsche’s anti-Biblical vitalism, with its charge that belief in God betrays life.

    Only a few of his people see what makes life worth its cost: fidelity, that combination of faith and love. “The First Seven Years” depicts the reciprocal fidelity of a man and a woman by echoing the story of Jacob and Rachel. Fidelity between human beings mirrors the even more difficult fidelity between a human being and God. The theme of giving receiving is here, too, as God gives life and the moral standards governing it, forcing men to choose between gratitude and resentment.

    Malamud sees both the humor and the seriousness in this. “Talking Horse” concerns Abramowitz, a circus performer who doesn’t know if he’s a talking horse or a man trapped inside the horse, and his owner, Goldberg, who “doesn’t like interference with his thoughts or plans, or the way he lives, and no surprises except those he invents.” “The true pain,” Abramowitz says, “is when you don’t know what you have to know.” He comes to suspect that “Goldberg is afraid of questions because a question could show he’s afraid people will find out who he is”: “Somebody who all he does is repeat his fate.” The exceedingly human Abramowitz demands his freedom and gets it. He struggles part of the way out of his horse-body and becomes “a free centaur,” neither beast nor Goldberg.

    One of the few characters whose profession Malamud declines to tell us is Mendel, the loving father of an idiot son. Dying, Mendel wants to get his son on a train to California, where he can live with a relative. Ginzburg the ticket collector blocks them; his faze terrifies Mendel, who dares to struggle for his son. “Ginzburg, staring at himself in Mendel’s eyes, saw mirrored in them the extent of his own awful wrath. He beheld a shimmering, starry blinding light that produced darkness. Ginzburg looked astounded. ‘Who, me?'” God recognizes his own cruelty because he can see it reflected in the eyes of a human being, His most notable creation. Only then he shows mercy, lets the son be saved. A Bible commentator or critic would attempt to explain the story of Abraham and Isaac and God, but Malamud responds by telling another story—the same story with an explanation coded in.

    Salvation and freedom obsess Singer’s protagonist as well But whereas Malamud’s stories express opinion indirectly, requiring interpretation, Singer allows the protagonist of his novel to speak almost directly for Singer. The opinions expressed contradict, even denigrate, the opinions of the dominant ‘culture’ of our time. This may account for the book’s unusual publishing history.

    The Penitent appeared in serial form in 1973, then as a book one year later. Farrar, Straus & Giroux published it in English in 1983, surely an unusual delay in view of the author’s prestige. According to the dust jacket copy, although “the novel was immediately recognized by its readers as one of Singer’s most serious, and perhaps finest, works,” some critics “predicted that it would never be translated” from the original Yiddish “because of its inwardness.” “Inwardness” is a euphemism for Jewishness, which was the real offense. And this was not the Jewishness that accommodates itself to the world and meets with toleration from all but the worst antisemites. Singer presents us with a Jew who speaks for the Judaism that spurns the ways of this world, the ways of the goyim, and he insists that we listen to this Jews respectfully. Singer is right to insist. With his protagonist, Joseph Shapiro he shows a contemporary man rediscovering lost faith in God and writing a Jeremiad in the aftermath of that rediscovery.

    Shapiro briefly recalls his early life as a young ‘progressive’ from a Polish rabbinical family. In Hebrew shapir means attractive—handsome, lovely. Shapiro is both attractive and attracted to the attractive. After surviving World War II, he married, came to America, and made his fortune in real estate. “When a person makes a good deal of money but lacks faith, he begins to concern himself with one thing: how to squeeze in all the pleasure possible.” Adultery follows; “the loose female has become the deity of America.” In an indirect way, so does tolerance for the violent crimes of those who want quick gratification: “In America, as in Sodom, the perpetrator went free and the witness rotted in jail. And all this was done in the name of liberalism…. Everyone knows this, but try talking about it and you’re called the worst names.” His life eventually causes Shapiro to suffer spiritual and physical nausea. His nausea resembles the ‘existential’ kind Sartre described, borrowing from Nietzsche, but with it leads Shapiro to a conclusion very far from the Parisian Left Bank: “All modern philosophy has a single theme: we don’t know anything and cannot know anything…. But to what did this lead? Their ethics weren’t worth a fig and committed no one to anything. You could be versed in all their philosophies and still be a Nazi [recall Heidegger] or a member of the KGB [perhaps Kojève?].” The likes of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty would object to this, but with how much justification?

    Shapiro left wife, mistress, and business, flying to Israel. “The Jew in me suddenly gained the courage to spit at all the idolatries.” He saw many of the same idolatries in Israel. Looking at books and posters in Tel Aviv, he thought, “Yes, the Enlightened have attained their goals. We [Jews] are a people like all other peoples. We feed ourselves on the same dung as they do.” Communism offers no better ‘culture’ than capitalism does, and it adds tyranny. At a leftist kibbutz portraits of Lenin and the antisemite Stalin hung in the “Culture House.”

    Shapiro contrasts modern ‘culture’ with the learning attained in a Hasidic study house in Jerusalem. He goes so far as to charge that “All the heroes in worldly literature have been whoremongers and evildoers,” citing Anna Karenina, Raskolnikov, and Taras Bulba. “Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Geothe’s Faust, right down to the trash aimed at pleasing the street louts and wenches, are full of cruelty and abandon.” To those who would reply that the Old Testament contains its share of vice, Shapiro agrees. “The Scriptures were a great beginning, an enormous foundation, but the Jews of the Scriptures were, with ew exceptions, still half Gentiles.” The Talmud offers a more refined spirituality. “The Jew has attained his highest degree of spirituality only in the time of the Diaspora,” and today’s genuinely religious Jews are “Jewry’s greatest achievement.”

    Shapiro sets his new way of life against that of a young woman he met on the plane to Israel. Priscilla, “ashamed of [her] Jewishness since childhood,” engaged to be married to another secularized Jew, quickly seduces Shapiro. They meet again after several months in Israel. The last two chapters consist of a dialogue between them. Priscilla argues for atheism. As with all such arguments, hers logically justifies no more than agnosticism. Shapiro replies that morality requires choice, and that her choices imply humanism, which “doesn’t serve one idol but many idols,” all of them eventually destructive of the very pleasures they promise. Even if the Jewish God is an idol, the morality He commands brings no such self-destruction to those who obey it. Morality leads to faith, not the other way around.

    In the “Author’s Note,” written for this edition, Singer writes that he “cannot agree with [Shapiro] that there is a final escape from the human dilemma” because “a total solution would void the greatest gift that God has bestowed upon mankind—freedom of choice.” But Shapiro never claims that his solution is total, that he has escaped from the human dilemma, as distinguished from the modern one. He explicitly insists on the Evil Spirit’s power and doggedness. A more telling criticism begins with noticing that morality finds support in non-Jewish religious practices also. If the quest for moral strength leads us to more than one path, we are not by any means ‘back where we started,’ but we are given pause, reason to think.

    There is also a practical difficulty. When it comes to faith, Shapiro insists, “the deeds must come first.” To put it in Aristotelian terms, a soul that has not been habituated to perform decent actions (by performing such actions, usually in obedience with parental command) will never think its way toward first principles; even in Christianity, which teaches that God in His power may knock even the most ardent sinner off his high horse, there are souls that resist unto death. Shapiro’s highly spiritualized Judaism rejects the political and military aspects of Judaism seen in ancient and modern Israel. He praises the Diaspora because it removed Jews from the responsibilities and temptations of ruling, saying that “when it suits the Evil Spirit, he can become a fervent Zionist, a burning patriot.” Thus Shapiro speaks in the accents of martyrdom. Pacifist Judaism resembles pacifist Christianity in this way. Here Singer’s charge of escapism would hit with force. Shapiro could reply, with other pacifists, that ‘God will fight for us,’ if not in this world then in the next world, or in this world on the day of the Messiah. Paradoxically, this faith that begins with practice, with morality not faith or theory, ends by dismissing the practical. Singer might reply, again with all serious pacifists, that radical dependence upon God is the supremely practical thing, and that he has not dismissed ‘the practical’ but only what is practical in the eyes of a world that despises Jews and Judaism.  Having overcome that world spiritually, he will rest in the belief that the right kind of spirituality overcomes the world.

    Singer concludes: “The agonies and the disenchantment of Joseph Shapiro may to a degree stir a self-evaluation in both believers and skeptics. The remedies that he recommends may not heal everybody’s wounds, but the nature of the sickness will, I hope, be recognized.”  Throughout their careers, Singer and Malamud have served as careful diagnosticians, not merely as makers of refined entertainments.