Review of Elie Wiesel: The Testament. New York: Summit Books, 1981.

Published November 1981 in Chronicles of Culture.
Republished with permission.

 

Solzhenitsyn speaks for the Russia crushed but could not kill: the Russia of czarism and the Orthodox Church. He does not, cannot, speak for the old Russian underground. Solzhenitsyn’s master, Dostoyevsky, speaks of, if not for, part of that underground, the pat that dreamed of democracy, or socialism. Neither can speak for the other part of the underground, the only international nation: the Jews.

For years some Jews allied themselves with the secular underground. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, they were taught, and enemies were never scarce. Still, an unusually large number of Jews not only allied themselves with socialism particularly communism but–to use apt religious language–converted to it. Why?

Stalin took the precaution of murdering anyone who could have answered. Elie Wiesel, one of the best Jewish writers alive (there are reasons why he will not regard that designation as condescending), undertakes to speak for the dead, to re-member the Russian Jewishness that Stalin tried to dismember.

The Testament begins in Israel. Wiesel, himself a minor character in the novel, watches Soviet Jews arrive at Lod Airport in July, 1972. From “the realm of silence and fear” they enter Israel silently and fearfully. But memory, memory of lovers, family, and (true) comrades fast overcomes silence and fear. Soon they can laugh and weep, toast life, the future, peace–perhaps their first free expression of feeling in a lifetime of enforced guardedness.

Wiesel sees a young man who does not participate. He is a mute, the son of Paltiel Gershonovich Kossover, a poet `liquidated’ by Stalin some twenty years before. Taken back to Wiesel’s apartment, he insists on staying awake all night; it will transpire that he wants to write his father’s memoir, his testament, from memory.

Soviet communism, Judaism travel (or, as is said of Jews, wandering), silence fear, memory, reunion, love, family,, friendship, laughter, life, the future, peace, freedom, poetry: Wiesel presents his themes in the brief prologue. In Paltiel Kossover’s letter to his son, which follows the prologue, we learn the poet’s teachings on some of these themes. “[T]he very essence of the noble tradition of Judaism” consists of a kind of universal memory system, the Book of Creation wherein “all our actions re inscribed.” Memory serves Creation, life (and therefore the future) because without it there is only oblivion. And although Paltiel Kossover does “not know what life is” and will “die without knowing,” he knows that communism, in exacting selective amnesia, does not serve life. “Don’t follow the path I took,” he tells his son, “it doesn’t lead to truth.” “Truth, for a Jew, is to dwell among his brothers. Link your destiny to that of your people, otherwise you will surely reach an impasse.” Although “I lived a Communist… I die a Jew”; having lived, inadvertently, for death, he dies for life–a theme on which Christians have no monopoly.

The novel explore the subtleties of these themes, the gaining of these teachings. Wiesel juxtaposes short chapters concerning Paltiel Kossoer’s son–especially his recovery of his father’s memoir–with sections of the Testament, the story of a Jew wandering from his native city in Russia and the faith he learned there to Romania during the First World War, Berlin in the 20’s, Paris in the 30’s, briefly to Palestine and then to Spain during the civil war, to Moscow during the Second World War and finally back to his native city, the prison there and to Jewishness.

All Jews “were victims of fear” during Paltiel Kossover’s childhood in Russia. There was fear of stern teachers–a fear that led to knowledge something to love–and fear of Christians and their pogroms, which led neither to knowledge nor to love. His mother’s songs (the source of his poetic nature?) soothed the fear of teachers, but the only immediate remedy for the fear of death at Christian hands was silence; the Kossover family hid beneath the door of the barn while murdering toughs shrieked “Death to the Jews!” Throughout The Testament, silence means both the babbling of false prophets and the poetry of true ones.

The move to Romania brought no real uprooting, for “Jews remain Jews wherever they are: united, charitable, hospitable,” part of “a timeless community” without geographical boundaries. Yet these aspects of Judaism led Paltiel Kossover away from Judaism, as he saw the suffering of the poor and wanted to relieve it. Jewish messianism fascinated him; it also prepared him for communism. Fortune intervened in the shape of a fellow student, “a master at the seduction and corruption of the mind,” who introduced him to Marxist political action and thought, not only as an expression of the will to justice but as a vehicle of the friendship Paltiel craved.

Wiesel’s best writing arises from his perception that most human beings, even intelligent ones, enact contradictory ideas and feelings while remaining quite decent and only a bit guilt-ridden. Despite his partial conversion to Marxism, on the eve of his departure for Berlin (he wanted to evade Romanian conscription), Paltiel sincerely and doubtfully promised his father to remain a Jew. And in Berlin, further seduced by a nubile young communist who lectured him in bed, on Darwin and historical materialism, h continued to pray, albeit surreptitiously. Only after intense action–a street fight with Nazis–and his girlfriend’s ensuring care did he forget his observances for the first time. Forgetting: few of the great modern anti-religious philosophers believed they could induce men to reject God, but they knew that a certain kind of life, a life of activity in and for this world, might induce men to forget God.

The triumph of Nazism in 1932, a triumph Berlin’s communist prophets failed to predict, eventually led Paltiel Kossover to Paris. He met two remarkable men: the mysterious David Aboulesia, a wanderer searching for the Messiah, and Paul Hamburger, a brilliant Jewish communist intellectual and organizer. Hamburger saw, as Paltiel did not, that the Moscow trials must involve a grotesque betrayal of the revolution. Before he obeyed Stalin’s order to return to Moscow, he told Paltiel to get out of Paris, to go to Spain.

Describing the brutality of both sides in the civil war, Paltiel reflects that the Jews fighting there did not share in it. “If he Spaniards massacred one another, if they set their country on fire and bled it, it is because, in1492, they burned or drove away their Jews,” leaving no moderating sense of humaneness in Spain. Jews who were engaged in the internecine struggles on the left developed split personalities; when Paltiel inquired after a friend who had disappeared, a Jewish communist who worked for the security forces offered the Party line in French, sympathy in Yiddish.

Despite such incidents, Paltiel Kossover returned not to his family in Romania but to the Soviet Union, which he still believed was the messianic country. Upon his arrival, another security man warned him no to talk too much because “a past is only cumbersome.” Memory, Jewishness, speech: “You’re not at the yeshiva here, young man,” a member of the Jewish Writer’s Club in Moscow told him. “Don’t force us to listen to things that must not be heard.” Hitler invaded before the authorities got around to silencing the annoying poet. During the war, Paltiel revealed himself as one of those persons, uncommon but not rare, whose timidity in ordinary life gives way to courage when it matters. Unfit for military service, he displayed heroism as a stretcher-bearer–typically, he seems not to see his own heroism even as he writes about himself years later.

It is easy to forget in Moscow. Paltiel married the woman who would give him his only son, and he stayed in Stalin’s Russia, ally of the new Israel, after the war. Wiesel depicts neither evil nor stupidity here–simply life, ordinary life with its conveniences and compromises, overcoming memory.

Stalin, however, preferred extraordinary life for his subjects. The Party line changed, and “a new-style pogrom” began, directed against Jewish writers. “I could not accept that the Party could condemn an entire culture, annihilate an entire literature…. Why attack a language? Why would anyone wish to exterminate Yiddish?” Returning to his native city, Paltiel Kossover also returned to Judaism before his inevitable arrest and torture. Sustained by his memory of family (particularly his father and his son) and friends, he overcame the fear that began in childhood in this city with some, if not all, of the faith he learned there and was punished for there, at the beginning and the end of his life. He answered his own question of the Party in words he spoke before his executioner’s bullet could silence him: “You must understand,” he told a jailer, “the language of a people is its memory.” Totalitarianism, as Orwell knew, as Solzhenitsyn knows, finds memory radically inconvenient. It therefore permits only its own constantly manipulated anti-language.

What could Solzhenitsyn say to Paltiel Kossover? For the most part he is silent on the Jews. His Russia mistreated Jews before Stalin did–less systematically, it is true, but the fact remains. The wanderer David Aboulesia tells Paltiel, “if hou believe you must forsake your brothers to save mankind, you will save nobody, you will not even save yourself.” He speaks against the communists, of course. But what of the Christ Solzhenitsyn reveres? Beyond the dialogue between international Judaism and international communism, we hear the dialogue between the Jewish nation and the Christian nations. And beyond it we hear another dialogue: the dialogue between Jesus and his fellow Jews. Is there a writer today who can renew it?

 

2016 NOTE: Although this was not known in the West at the time, Solzhenitsyn–at times unjustly tarred with anti-Jewishness–did not at all remain silent on Jews and Judaism. He wrote a two-volume study of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together, published in 2002. For an excellent account of this book, see Daniel J. Mahoney: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Wrier and Thinker (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014).

Review
Aharon Appelfeld: The Age of Wonders. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.
Cynthia Ozick: Levitation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

Published in Chronicles of Culture, December 1982.
Republished with permission.

 

If God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing; if He is a holy God, separate from His creation; if one part of his creation, mankind, receives the gift of free will and exercises it by disobeying His commands; if as punishment for this rebellion against His regime, He causes mankind to speak multiple languages, thus dividing them from one another; if He chooses one of those peoples as His own, the ones He marks out as citizens of His new regime; then the divisions between God and not-God, and between the godly and the ungodly, must persist, troublingly. Jews (the very name bespeaks separation of one part of the Israelites from another) don’t `fit in.’ Their God does not want them to. Through the centuries, many have hated them for it.

These books suggest that something more than custom or prejudice separates Jews from the rest of us. Jews struggle with Gentiles, with God, with themselves, but the struggle that scars them deepest here started in Eden: the struggle with nature. Nature in it simplest aspects–brutal and seductive, stubborn and malleable–ceaselessly provokes their fascinated distrust.

Aharon Appelfeld lives in Israel and writes his novels in Hebrew; neither his country nor his language fits into the world. He has learned some of his techniques from this century’s virtuoso of fascinated distrust, Franz Kafka. But unlike the writer he depicts in The Age of Wonders, Appelfeld is no simple Kafka devotee; he uses what he’s learned for a purpose. He has discovered that the Kafkaesque captures childhood, when people come and go, including yourself, and you know something of what’s going on but not enough, so you guess part of it and imagine the rest.

The writer here is the father of the book’s narrator. Father’s devotion to art, particularly Kafka’s art, substitutes for his ancestors’ devotion to Judaism. His esthete’s humanism find its echo in liberal politics; “very close to Stefan Zweig” and, like him, an Austrian Jew, Father shares Zweig’s horror of violence, fondness for political and cultural internationalism. `Assimilated’ as he can be, Father curses Jews and Judaism with the `30s intellectual’s blackest word, “petit-bourgeois.”

Like childhood, the 1930s was an age of wonders. Metamorphoses proliferated, as life imitated Kafka. The narrator’s teenaged aunt suffers a nervous breakdown, converts to Christianity, and dies, inspiring Father’s praise of her “true religious feeling.” A lifelong friend of the family, a sculptor, offspring of a mixed marriage, converts to Judaism, sending Father into a drunken rage against the `loss’ of a fine artist. (“Your father, Austrian by birth, left you land, health, hands fit to carve stone, and you want to exchange this health, this freedom, for an old, sick faith. Take pity on your freedom, take pity on your body, which never ad to suffer a senseless mutilation.”)

More metamorphoses occur. A critics attacks Father’s writings because they concern Jews, albeit secularized ones, “parasites living off the health Austrian tradition.” The critics is Jewish, and Father, after months of living-room fulminations, quietly agrees with the riposte. A young peasant woman arrives from Father’s native village; her presence in the household causes Father and his friends to go on a series of binges. The family adopt an orphan who stays with them until the end, perhaps because he had lost something in our house, that animal vitality that makes men brave.” Mother responds to their increasing social ostracism with “a strange self-denying piety… as if she were purposely imposing hardships on herself.”

Sickness and health, decadence and freedom, fear and bravery and guilt: it is the language of fashionable Nietzscheism. Nietzsche despised the despisers of Jews, but he detested the Christianity that emerged from Judaism and, he said, from Platonism. Christianity, Judaism, and Platonism set inhibiting ghosts above life. Only nature and art, merged into `creativity,’ yield strength. “`I deny,’ thundered Father, `the Judaism others attribute to me.'” In the end that won’t do him any good.

Father, too, metamorphoses. He begins as an `Austrian’ writer “drunk with success,” a novelist, playwright, essayist, and editor of the journal of the Jewish-Christian League. He ends as a pariah who leaves his family for Vienna, hoping to co-found, with a sympathetic baroness, a liberal salon aimed at saving Austria from anti-Semitism. By now it is 1939.

Almost all of Appelfeld’s self-denying Jews hunger for nature but fail either to conquer it or to blend into it. They lust after approval from Austrian men and favors from peasant girls. They drink, lurching after Nietzsche’s Dionysus. They fool no one. An Austrian intellectual confides to Father that he “can always tell a Jew because `the Jew’ looks anxious, while `the Austrian’ “never blames himself or anyone else.” In the end, as the Jews are collected in the town synagogue, awaiting the arrival of the cattle train to the camps, businessmen snarl about “decadent artists,” Mother cries, “Shopkeepers!” and everyone blames the rabbi–who, indeed, called them there without saying why.

In the novel’s second part, it is 1965. Bruno, the narrator, returns to his native town from Jerusalem. “For Bruno, everything held a baffling, wondering question.” His father’s life is “the disgrace he had not dared to touch, seething silently all these years like pus inside a wound.” Even in death, Father and sickness go together, and Bruno searches, if not for the cause of that sickness, perhaps for its meaning.

Meaning doesn’t come cheaply for Appelfeld’s characters. An uprooted Japanese student tries unsuccessfully to engage Bruno in a conversation on the subject of life’s meaning. A part-Jewish nightclub singer wonders if there is any place on earth or her; a hack would have Bruno exalt her with a vision of Jerusalem–Appelfeld spares us that.

Instead, we hear of the town, which hasn’t changed, and the people, who have. The Jews are gone, and the people who remain partake of the combined perpetuation and metamorphosis nature imposes. A promiscuous housemaid who had lived with Bruno’s family has stayed, but she has gone to obesity; “of Louise nothing remained and all that sat before him was an old Austrian woman.” Some Jews who had metamorphosed themselves into Christians also survive. Bruno remembers many members of one such family who had the courage to go to the synagogue on that last day; only they, “their strange integrity intact, had chosen death with their eyes open.” “The rest had coveted life, and they had been absorbed by it.”

Life has not entirely absorbed some ex-Jews. In 1939, a Jew named Brum married his housemaid and metamorphosed himself into an imitation Austrian. “H grew taller, his shoulders filled out, and a luxuriant moustache appeared on his face; he sat with his new wife in the cellar of the White Horse drinking beer.” The Jew-haters left him alone. Yet when Bruno finds him, Brum complains about his ex-wife, “a whore.” Woman-as-betrayer: the would-be Austrian relives a story as old as the Book of Genesis.

Whatever they try, Appelfeld’s Jews never quite get inside life, nature. Thinking of the unchanged buildings and trees of this town, Bruno sees that objects survive longer” than people. “They are passive. Otherwise how could they withstand such changes? Could it be said, perhaps, that they lack sensitivity?” Non-Jews, at home with nature, imitate its indifference. They change little, but that change usually amounts to slow degeneration, like natural law of inertia. Austrians, who supposedly never blame themselves or anyone else, gradually started to blame the Jews for everything; decades later, they cannot really face a Jew who returns. Their indifference, itself an imitation of nature’s indifference, is imperfect. They too are sons of Adam.

Irremediably conscious or `sensitive,’ Jews face life with anxiety, but they face death with open eyes. Nietzsche condemns those who exhort men to learn how to die. He commands men to live. Nonetheless, we must notice that the one person in Appelfield’s book who does not change is the one closest to death, Bruno’s step-grandmother Amalia, an observant Jew whose words had a “certainty… forged with steel.” “There was power in her voice: next to her we felt small.” The narrator’s embarrassed parents put her into a sanatorium. Nietzsche’s life ended in a sanatorium, after life had metamorphosed him not into his chosen `Superman’ but into a catatonic–a perfectly indifferent natural object.

Throughout the novel, green is the color Appelfeld associates with nature. Bruno recalls the green light in his wife’s eyes after they quarreled, but he also remembers the violet light in them that he loves. What is that light. If it is sensitivity, sensitivity for what? Ultimately, for God and the God-breathed spirit inside the natural man? After old Brum “hisse[s],” serpent-like, that his hatred for Jews “knows no bounds,” Bruno punches him in the face. The impact of that blow may strike the reader as the divinely-moved punishment of a traitor by a citizen who remains loyal.

Appelfeld’s measured, delicately-shaded style is thoroughly European. Cynthia Ozick’s “five fictions” contain narrative, allegory, history, myth, fantasy, criticism. Exuberant mixing goes well with contemporary America although, notwithstanding this, Jews don’t quite fit in here, either–although here, at least, difference brings down no slaughter. In Appelfeld’s world, sadness overshadows comedy; the death camps beckon. In Ozick’s America, Jews can afford to laugh.

Still, fire burns upward in America as it does in Europe. Nature remains intractably natural, as Ozick’s Jews (and some of her non-Jews) learn. The title story presents the theme.

A husband and wife, novelists, he Jewish and she a convert from Protestantism, throw an unsuccessful literary party (“My God,” he gasps, revealing a kind of religiosity, “do you realize no one came?”). The ambition to host a party to attract “luminaries” (Howe, Sontag, Kazin, Fiedler, Podhoretz, Hardwick–invited, obviously, for the glow of their fame, not for congeniality) mirrors the couple’s obsession: “they were absorbed by power,” Ozick’s narrator tells us, “and were powerless.” They feel “counterfeit pity” for the characters they imagine and, one suspects for the people they encounter. They reserve genuine pity for themselves–he, as a Jew, she, as a woman.

Confronted by failure of their modest power-venture, they return to the surer territory of being victims. For the husband, this means speaking to his guests of “certain historical atrocities” committed by non-Jews against Jews, culminating in the Holocaust. For the wife, it means listening to these stories and seeing her isolation: “It seemed to her that the room was levitating…. She felt herself at the bottom, below the floorboards while the room floated upward carrying Jews” elevated by “the glory of their martyrdom.” She has another vision, a vision of “the goddess.” Giving every evidence of having read Robert Graves, she regards the Madonna, Venus, Aphrodite, and Astarte as successive incarnations of “eternal” nature, of nature’s fertility, eros, and solidity. “Lucy sees how she has abandoned nature, how she has lost true religion on account of the God of the Jews,” who inspires “morbid cud-chewing,” talk of “Death and death and death.”

One need not take Lucy-the-female-Lucifer’s conclusions too seriously. (She resembles a lapsed Catholic more than a lost Protestant, anyway). Ozick has presented comically the same contrast Appelfeld presents sadly. Jews levitate, non-Jews luxuriate (or wallow, depending on their upbringing). the nature that seems to satisfy much of humanity most of the time cannot satisfy Jews.

Ozick explores this in each of her fictions. In “From a Refugee’s Notebook,” we read an essay on Freud, who “lust[ed] to become a god absolute as stone” by imposing his psychoanalytic paradigm on nature. As Moses invented the Sabbath, that interruption of nature, Freud invented “a Sabbath of the Soul,” a rationalistic attempt to capture, to conquer, the irrational. The essayist sees the problem: this conquest, attempted by rational means, owes its origin to a fascination with the irrational; “it may be that the quarry is all the time the pursuer.”

The same “Notebook” also contains an account of life on the planet Acirema, an America turned inside-out by feminism, where “the more sophisticated females” attempt to conquer nature by a novel means of birth control. It doesn’t always work, and the women learn that the resultant children, raised communally in this “community of philosophers,” interfere with adult “self-development.” Children, the future, are discovered to be regrettably “anti-progressive.” Although undeniably “central to the community,” “morally and philosophically, they had no right to exist.” Acirema’s civilization, such as it is, gradually crumbles under the weight of this contradiction, as the neglected children, the only ones who reproduce prolifically, take over.

Nature teaches its most painstaking, and pain-giving, lesson to Ruth Puttermesser, a liberal Jewish lawyer who appears in a short story and a novella. We meet her at age 34, leaving a Wall Street firm to work in city government, and “looking to solve something, she did not know what.” She has a sensible, private vision Paradise, consisting of a tree to sit under (shade of the Book of Micah, perhaps) and an inexhaustible supply of books and chocolate; “if she still does not know what it is she wants to solve, she has only to read on.” She also imagines an uncle who tutors her in Hebrew; “America is a blank, and Uncle Zindel is all her ancestry.”

In the novella, twelve year in the City Hall bureaucracy have induced her to envision a more grandiose Paradise. (One imagines this must have been during the Lindsay Administration). Demoted, then fired during a political shakeup, she dreams of making a golem–a humanoid shaped from clay and brought to life, in mankind’s parody of its own creation by the hands of God–knowing that learned Jews have occasionally resorted to golem-making in times of danger. Her golem, a female, wants to be called Xanthippe, on the grounds that Socrates’ wife criticized even Socrates, the arch-critic who built a Paradise in words, re-forming the corrupt Athens of actuality. (To be a critic, one should note, is not unprecedented among literary golems. I once heard the great scholar Hugh Kenner describe Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster as “the first Romantic critic.” Kenner may have been remembering that the monster, a decidedly goyish golem, forms his taste on Plutarch’s Lives Goethe’s sorrows, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.)

Puttermesser’s golem rids the city of corrupt politicians by installing her maker as mayor. Mayor Puttermesser fulfills the liberal reformer’s dream, replacing the pols and incompetents with idealists. The dreamers finally have power, and New York becomes “a rational daylight place,” orderly and pleasant–Plato’s republic conceived by John Gardner. But nature, driven out by the golem, stubbornly return. The golem lusts after Puttermesser’s former lover; eros “enter[s] Gracie Mansion,” a decidedly ungraceful thing for it to do. The golem tells Puttermesser, “I want a life of my own. My blood is hot.” What the golem did, the golem undoes, and in the end Puttermesser understands that “Too much Paradise is greed. Eden disintegrates from too much Eden. Eden sinks from a surfeit of itself.” She has learned what Ozick’s photographer learns in the book’s most intriguing story, “Shots.” A photographer can save truth by arresting its attacker time. But, possessing truth, she cannot become truth. She remains outside of it, taking pictures. That goes for writers, dreamers, and politicians, too. It puts a limit on any wayward ambitions of self-deification. As for Ozick herself, she aspires someday “to drill through the `post-modern’ and come out on the other side, alive and saved and wise as George Eliot.” With Eliot and Appelfeld, she already understands the separation of Creator from creation and some of the limits that hierarchy imposes.