I Need a Hero

Mel Gibson’s Planned Judah Maccabee Blockbuster Shows He Still Doesn’t Get it.

All good heroes have to change. So all the storytelling gurus and literary theorists, from Aristotle onwards, agree. If you get to Act III and there’s been no transformation, you’ve lost your audience. There are, of course, exceptions: sit-com protagonists rarely change; there are a few great ‘stuck’ characters, like Peter Pan, whose very inability to grow is the hallmark of their identity; and high literature sometimes throws up a clever-dick like Ovid, who wrote an epic, Metamorphoses, in which the hero was Change itself. But, in Hollywood at least, the Rule of Change is a hurdle few heroes can vault.

The tricky bit, for writers, is that their heroes must also stay the same. It’s no good having Han Solo slough off his vanity and cynicism and embrace the Light Side, if it turns him into another earnest Luke Skywalker. Elizabeth I’s transformation from woman of passion to ivory-skinned Virgin Queen only moves us if we know her passion is still seething beneath her leaden foundation.

Seen in this context,  Mel Gibson’s decision to make a film about Judah Maccabee comes straight out of the screenwriting primer. Right now, Gibson is at the nadir of the Act II crisis — what script-doctors call ‘Descent to the Deepest Cave.’ Already consumed by alcoholism and battered by domestic strife, Gibson has branded himself a pariah with his rants about Jews. He has to change. But his redemptive transformation will be entirely in character. For, as with Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, the story of Judah Maccabee offers the opportunity for a rich historical drama, with lovingly evoked scenes of sadistic torture and a hero prevailing against numerically superior but spiritually impoverished foes. Only this time, it will be a Jewish hero. Presto, change-o, Mel is kosher again — and yet somehow he’s still Mel. But what exactly is a Jewish hero? And does Judah Maccabee count as one, anyway? Read more

Creative Genius in Central Europe

With the collapse of Empire and the transformation of political interaction, the shift of boundaries and the realignment of nations, the ideological and political tremor came to a climax in the late nineteenth century. Then there came the great war, and  the writer emerging from all these circumstances had a responsibility to articulate both a personal position and a position within the public domain. Nothing better illustrates this situation than what took place in the heart of the failing Austro-Hungarian Empire, and specifically in Bohemia. And our focus here is on that province and what became the independent State of Czechoslovakia at the end of that huge conflict, with Prague as its capital. Read more

A Sense of Mission

German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex

The University of Sussex, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in autumn 2011, has always been a cosmopolitan institution. When I joined the staff as an assistant lecturer in German in autumn 1963 it was a surprise to discover how few of those teaching literature courses were of English origin. David Daiches was the son of an Edinburgh rabbi whose mother tongue was Yiddish, while other colleagues included Larry Lerner from South Africa, Gabriel Josipovici from Egypt, and Gamini Salgado from Ceylon.

Daiches was the most inspirational figure. Literature, he argued, explores the human condition, but under circumstances that are continuously changing – hence the importance of an interdisciplinary approach within clearly defined historical contexts. The most remarkable innovation was the Modern European Mind, a course originated by Daiches to which colleagues contributed across a plurality of subjects: literature, philosophy and the history of ideas, psychology and even theology. The course was to inspire successive generations of students for over forty years. Read more

Ukraine Without Jews

Edited, translated and with an introduction by Polly Zavadivker. The translator would like to thank Robert Chandler for sharing the original version of this essay, and for his beneficial comments on an early draft of the translation.

Written soon after the Soviet Army liberated eastern Ukraine from German occupation in mid-1943, the original manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was thought to have been lost after the Second World War. It first appeared in 1990 in the short-lived journal Vek, and is translated here into English for the first time. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ is a powerful and historically significant essay: one of the earliest public statements about the mass murder of Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls the ‘greatest crime ever committed in history.’ ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was initially rejected for publication in 1943 by the military newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), where Grossman had earned a huge following from his reports of the Soviet Army’s harrowing defense and stunning victory at Stalingrad. The essay was then translated into Yiddish and published in the weekly paper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Unity (Einikayt). It was published in two abridged sections and then discontinued. The Yiddish translation remained the only extant version of the essay after 1943, and was back-translated into Russian in 1985. In 1990, the original Russian manuscript (near three times the length of the back-translation) surfaced from Grossman’s estate and was published in Vek. The recovery of ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ in its original form allows us to trace the origins and development of Grossman’s historical, commemorative and literary writing about the ‘catastrophe’ (as the Shoah was known in Russian). Grossman expanded upon and modified many of the ideas in this essay in later writings, including ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ (used as documentary evidence of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremburg Trials in 1945), as well as his editorial work on the monumental anthology The Black Book, and his two greatest novels, For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ also provides unique insight into Grossman’s initial reaction to the genocide as a Soviet Jew; in it he expresses both his pride in socialist principles and Soviet military power, and his desire to publicize and explain the exceptional nature of Jewish victimization at the hands of the Nazis, whose genocide had claimed the life of his own mother in the western Ukrainian city of his birth, Berdichev.

Polly Zavadivker Read more

Dreams of Utopia

On the inter-war Jewish choice between Zionism and Communism

Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, two great Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth century and lifelong friends, took opposing sides on one of the great Jewish debates of modernity: was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or did the world have to be changed first?

Scholem believed in the utopian collective—a partial redemption in the here and now—while Benjamin saw any solution other than global revolution as usurping the prerogative of the Messiah. In 1923, Scholem emigrated to Palestine to help build a utopian community. A series of letters between the two men, covering religion, politics, Marx and Kafka, illustrate the passion of the debate between Communism and Zionism, the two philosophical positions warring for the heart of the interwar, vulnerably assimilated, European Jew.

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The Broom and the Kettle: Satire in the Cabarets of Tel Aviv

In a newspaper editorial celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tel Aviv’s most beloved satiric cabaret, Hametateh, poet Leah Goldberg begins by quoting the following saying: ‘The wounds which a lover inflicts are full of loyalty.’ She then explains: ‘this phrase applies perfectly to our self- directed satire which is created here, inside our country.’ Goldberg, a lyricist and comedic sketch writer for Hametateh, writes:

‘As Jews, we know… just how much a desire to harm is an essential part of all the criticism coming at us from the outside.And perhaps this is precisely why we need to criticise ourselves, to drum up laughter which comes from the inside, and which emerges from a love for our people, written in our own language and executed in our own style.’

Avigdor Ha’meiri and Arthur Koestler, two penniless arrivals from Hungary, decided that ‘Tel Aviv is a city without humour, particularly political humour and social commentary. It is clear that we must quickly alter this situation.’ Both Koestler and Ha’meiri were both strongly influenced by the satiric cabarets of their birth city, Budapest. When they decided to found a cabaret in Palestine they soon rallied several Hungarian actors around them to the cause. Read more

Bearing Witness: The War, the Shoah and the Legacy of Vasily Grossman

And once again, a feeling of superstitious terror took hold of the enemy: Were the ones attacking them people, could they be mortal?’ In a slightly modified form, these and other words from Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘The Direction of the Main Strike’ (1942) are engraved on Mamaev Kurgan memorial on a hill overlooking Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. Grossman’s words refer to the shock of Nazi forces as they faced the heroism of Soviet soldiers fighting under Stalin’s order: ‘Not a step back’.The Soviet victory at Stalingrad turned the tide of World War II, but it could not stop the Shoah. When the Soviet troops, Grossman embedded with them, came to the death camps in Poland in the summer of 1944, most of the Jews of Europe had been annihilated.

The Jewish-Russian writer and political thinker Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is not identified as the source of the seething words carved out on the Stalingrad memorial. Grossman’s deletion—words ‘popular’ author ‘unknown’,— constitutes much more than a double twist of black Soviet humour. According to John and Carol Garrard, Grossman’s dedicated biographers, the absence of Grossman’s name on the Stalingrad memorial is an ‘open wound’ on the writer’s legacy. Fifty-nine year old Vasily Grossman died in Moscow of stomach cancer, devastated by the Soviet efforts to erase him from history. His novel Life and Fate, a comparative indictment of Stalinism and Hitlerism, had been ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961, leaving him free to die of illness and grief during the headiest years of the Thaw. ‘They strangled me in the back alley’, Grossman had said to Boris Yampolsky, author of the novel Country Fair (1940), a lament for Jewish life in the former Pale. Ironically, some of Grossman’s loyal official supporters were the ageing generals he had interviewed at Stalingrad, who understood his love for the ‘holy Red Army’ and the extent to which it had bolstered the war effort. In orchestrating Grossman’s literary death, the regime was symbolically murdering the legacy of the people’s war against Hitler while also pogromising the Soviet memory of the Shoah.

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Sadie was a Lady: Prostitution in Yiddish Song

Der feter iz geshtanen in di rogn
Un di bobe a hendlerke in gas
Eyn brider zitst in ostrogn
Un di shvester tra-la-la-la-la

My uncle stands on street corners
My grandmother does business on the street
One brother sits in prison
And my sister tra-la-la-la-la

Sung by the Barry Sisters, and to audience guffaws at the mention of prostitution, ‘Ketzele Baroiges’ is a popular song from Eastern Europe. But I am English, a Yiddish folk singer recently turned London Yiddish song detective, and in scouring for Yiddish songs that make mention of London people, places and experiences, the subject of prostitution has come up repeatedly. Sometimes, as in ‘Ketzele Baroiges’, it is a comic aside but in other cases it describes a social reality, reflecting Jewish history in London.

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History, Memory, Longing, Delight

Objects as antidotes to loss in the work of Maira Kalman and Edmund de Waal

Empty boxes, some child-made, some commercial.  Sponges from around the world. Postcards from the Hotel Celeste in Tunisia. A suitcase that belonged to a man who fled Danzig in 1939. Whistles.  A figurine of a stag scratching his ear with a hind leg. A snake curled on a lotus leaf, in ivory.  Three sweet chestnuts. A hare with amber eyes.  These are items in the respective collections of Maira Kalman and Edmund de Waal, two very different artists and writers who turn traditional Holocaust memoir-writing on its head by telling the stories of their Jewish families through objects like the ones above.

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Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Jewish Paradox of Russian Music

In his 1931 short story, ‘Awakening,’ the writer Isaac Babel recalls one of the great cultural spectacles of his childhood in fin-de-siecle Odessa. ‘[In] the course of ten years or so,’ he writes, ‘our town supplied the concert platforms of the world with infant prodigies. From Odessa came Mischa Elman, Zimbalist, Gabrilowitsch. Odessa witnessed the first step of Jascha Heifetz.’ Babel contrasts these Jewish prodigies with his own alter ego’s musical efforts: ‘The sounds dripped from my fiddle like iron filings, causing even me excruciating agony, but father wouldn’t give in. At home there was no talk save of Mischa Elman, exempted by the Tsar himself from military service. Zimbalist, father would have us know, had been presented to the King of England and had played at Buckingham Palace. The parents of Gabrilowitsch had bought two houses in St. Petersburg. Infant prodigies brought wealth to their parents, but though my father could have reconciled himself to poverty, fame he must have.’
‘Fame’ is not a word usually associated with the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. The traditional images—pious yeshiva students, enraptured Hasidim, defiant young socialists, pathetic pogrom victims—leave little room for Jewish violinists charming the Tsars and Russian public alike with their dazzling talents. But Babel’s portrait of the writer as a young, suffering fiddle-player derives from a startling fact of Russian Jewish life: year after year, across both the Tsarist and Soviet eras, a constant stream of musical virtuosi emerged from the Russian conservatories to parade across the stages of Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, conductor Serge Koussevitzky, pianist Vladimir Horowitz, violinist David Oistrakh, pianist Evgeny Kissin—the extraordinary list goes on and on. To be sure, not every Russian Jew was a musical genius, as Babel’s self-mockery suggests. But the Jewish presence in Russian classical music ran as wide as it did deep.

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100 years of Kibbutzim

Twelve young Romanian Jews, ten men and two women, marooned on a barren plot overlooking the Sea of Galilee. The year was 1910 and the place, named Degania A, neighboured the remote Arab village Umm Juni in a Palestine still under Ottoman rule. As the dawn of a new way of life that many later regarded as epitomising Israel, the state-to-be, it was an inauspicious beginning yet also the stuff of legend. The founders of Degania A could almost be seen as twelve latter-day children of Jacob, progenitors of future tribes. Determined to ‘redeem the land’, smash the class system and radically transform the Jewish condition through the dignity of manual labour, they went where others feared to tread. Degania in Hebrew and Umm Juni in Arabic both mean ‘cornflower’ but conditions were harsh, the soil was stubborn and malaria was rife. Their experiment was virtually snuffed out later that year, only to be refreshed by a new garin (seed or unit) of Russian pioneers in 1911. Read more

The Snow Globe

I.

I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little formed to be so radically changed; or a year later, when I was already well into my solidification — it’s unlikely that I’d be writing about him now. Or writing at all.
I was traveling across Israel that summer, on a program intended to foster a generation of young Jewish leaders. We saw sights, smoked a fair amount of pot, played a fair amount of the Jewish version of basketball (characterized by a lot of arguing over esoteric rules), and endeavored to couple.
In the course of the summer, we met with an eclectic cast of Israeli figures: politicians, artists, activists, archeologists, soldiers, kibbutzniks and theologians. Our summer’s final meeting was with Amichai. It’s hard to imagine why he agreed to spend time with us. Perhaps the fellowship was paying him. Perhaps it was a personal debt he owed to one of the organizers. Perhaps he actually bought into the premise of the thing, and genuinely believed — as we never could, thank God — that we were Future Jewish Leaders, that his words might redirect us, if only by a few thousandths of a degree, toward some version of Jewish Leadership that he found palatable or even inspiring. Read more

The Outrage: a true story

‘Some people have ingrown toenails. This guy has an ingrown soul,’ Thomas grumbled. It was 1960, and he had just returned from an interview about his final-year project with a professor he wholeheartedly disliked. ‘He talked to me as if I was subhuman,’ he fumed.

Thomas was an English-speaking European, born in Sri Lanka. His parents had a penchant for Eastern meditation. His mother was a Spanish artist, who had a disconcerting habit of  leaving the table in the middle of a meal to stand on her head in a corner. His father was a Swedish architect, who would go out for a short walk and forget to return for several days. Unsurprisingly, Thomas too was an unconventional character. From the mid-1950s he was studying civil engineering at the Federal Institute of  Technology in Zurich. When he decided to apply for permanent residence in Switzerland he began his CV with the words: ‘My father and mother met on an adventurous journey to India.’ I warned him that this would not predispose the Swiss authorities in his favour, but he insisted and was duly turned down. Read more

Berlin My Hero

I can sum it up simply by calling myself a wannabe Jew.

From my earliest days I have had the sense that Jews embody the distillation of what it is to be human. As if being Jewish were somehow a more extreme version of being human. Perhaps this sense I have is heightened by Jewish history with its unmatched defiance of the dual imperatives of time and place. For me, being Jewish embodies the triumph of ideas over events and the persistence of hope against overwhelming odds. As a student in South Africa I came across Two Concepts of Liberty by Isaiah Berlin. When I saw and heard him in Oxford later, I believed, and I still believe, that he was the greatest exponent of a broadly liberal, pluralist politics there has ever been. What he saw, and I think this must be inseparable from his Jewishness, is that fixed credos and closed systems of belief invariably lead to disaster. No one is the sole proprietor of knowledge. In his words ‘there is no incorrigible proposition.’ He understood that freedom is not an absolute: it cannot be guaranteed by subscribing to one political system. To my immense relief he confirmed that there are essentially only two freedoms; the first he called ‘freedom from’ which is the freedom to be left alone as far as possible to do what your inclinations tell you — essentially liberalism — and the other, very dangerous kind of freedom, is ‘freedom to’ which means that you achieve freedom only by total surrender to a state or closed system of belief. In South Africa we who were opposed to the apartheid state were supposed to want the alternative of Marxism, the path chosen by the ANC. It seemed madness to reject apartheid in favour of another absurd belief system, which had all the characteristics of a secular religion. Berlin’s simple distinction of freedoms shone a cool light of hope and truth upon the dark chaos of apartheid. Read more

Resisting the Demonic Forces of Nationalism

According to Robert Weltsch, the Zionist intellectual and politician, the most important question was whether the Jews would be ‘capable of defending the spiritual values that form the basis of its existence against the tide of nihilism’ and of contrasting the Nazi ideology with a humanist Jewish version of nationalism based on justice and coexistence with other nations. Read more

Kristallnacht and its aftermath within the German Protestant Church

The horrors of Kristallnacht were a moment of rejoicing for Bishop Martin Sasse, head of the Protestant church of Thuringia. A night that brought riots, looting, beatings and widespread destruction of synagogues and Jewish property seemed to fulfill Sasse’s hopes: the Nazi regime was finally ridding the Reich of Jews. Read more

Hey: So Hard to Define

The letter Hey is made up of a Dalet and a Yud. The Yud is rotated and hovers inside the Dalet.

There are many interpretations as to what the Hey alludes to. Some suggest that it is a diagram of detachment: the experience that action is detatched from thought, others see it as a symbol of speech, with the left leg representing words or breath leaving the mouth. But it does seem that the beauty of the Hey is somehow related to the mysterious hovering of the left leg.

According to the laws of Hebrew Calligraphy, the letters do not sit on the line as we find with English lettering, but rather hang down from it. A line is scored into the  parchment beneath which the letters  are written. Some scribes prefer to use a rose thorn so as not to use any steel in their work,  steel being a material associated with war. Read more

On the frontlines of identity

Sarah Sackman asseses the experiences of the Jewish volunteers who fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War

Ever since Joseph served in Pharoah’s court, Jews have struggled to balance the desire to belong against maintaining a central kernel of Jewishness that keeps them separate. The particular difficulty facing the volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War when the particular battle was to reconcile an ideological universalism with an identity that was specifically Jewish.  Between 1936 and 1939, over 7,000 Jews from 45 countries went to join the International Brigades to defend the democratically-elected Republic against Franco’s fascist uprising. Their struggle is one that continues to resonate with contemporary significance.

Many Jews joined ‘the good fight’ in response to the Popular Front ideal that workers of the world should transcend differences of nationality and creed to unite against the common fascist enemy. They also hoped that their involvement in such action would enable them to assimilate more easily into wider society. Paradoxically, such universalism was also the product of a particularly Jewish imagination, the shared mindset of those involved a reflection of ideas and experiences that were specifically Jewish. Read more